LIBBY HOFFENBERG: HYPERCULTURE

Artists

Libby Jennifer Hoffenberg

“We are all more or less tourists in Hawaiian shirts,” writes Byung-chul Han in Hyperculture, quoting anthropologist Nigel Barley. After globalization, the boundaries between here and there have all but dissolved; everything is available for hyperlinked connection with everything else. Driven by technological change and the accelerated mobility of media, hyperculture is organized not by boundaries but by network connections. Spatial continuity gives way to the sampling of cultural forms; site and identity are no longer coupled. Uprootedness becomes the fundamental atmosphere of contemporary existence: a planetary condition that both destabilizes fixed forms of identity and frees identity to become multiple and relational.

As Adorno writes in Minima Moralia, “dwelling in the proper sense is now impossible.” Yet within this impossibility lies a new prospect: exile and displacement as a shared human heritage. If the root is lost, so too is the enclosure of national, cultural, or aesthetic determinism. Shared estrangement becomes a condition of freedom. Within the crisis of instability emerges the liberatory possibility of existing in relation: of being located without being fixed.

The icon of the exhibition is the beach chair. A banal artefact of mass-production, the beach chair represents the ambivalence of hyperculture as both a liberatory promise of movement across geographic and cultural forms, and a flattening of perception that turns each of us into a tourist. The chair is a nomadic device that both embodies the desire to escape and allows for the transformation of anywhere into a site. Folding and portable, it articulates a mundane spiritualism, the desire to be with the formlessness of the ocean.

From the beach chair, the exhibition extrapolates to other vernaculars of global leisure, kitsch idioms of paradise. Objects in the show dwell on the material and visual languages of the tropical island as the long imagined “outside” of civilisation – a geography unscathed by the moral compromises of modernity. The island, through histories of colonial trade, tourism, and the global circulation of images, becomes a global elsewhere.

Hyperculture does not simply critique this mass-produced exoticism but recognizes in hypercultural semiotics modes of solidarity and imagination that arise from shared uprootedness. By playfully engaging with the eclectic aesthetic languages of the tiki bar, beach house, and other dreams of paradise, the exhibition centres the genuine ambivalences at the heart of industrialisation and the pathos embedded in longing to be somewhere else.

Libby Hoffenberg (b.1996, Honolulu, Hawaii) makes paintings as machines for the disorganisation and reassembly of thought. She investigates the logics of pseudo-rational systems, immersing herself in the mania of belief and cognition to articulate the ways knowledge is constructed, embodied, undone. Adopting visual codes of scientific diagrams, she collapses boundaries between art and knowledge images to query the structuring of sense through the visual organisation of information. She recently obtained her M.A. in Painting from the Royal College of Art.