The Phaidon guide to art speak - Super-Hybridity

When it comes to launching a fresh art term on the world, it’s death or glory. The critic Jörg Heiser is the latest to join the fray, proposing ‘super-hybridity’ as a possible catch-all for the aesthetic output of our digitally sped-up moment, where artists mine the explosion of cultural contexts, available at the click of a mouse, fast. Thrashed around by Heiser and a panel of five artists, writers and academics in an email dialogue published in Frieze magazine’s 2010 September issue, ‘super-hybridity’ emerges as a contentious neologism.

To focus on just two artists involved in the dense, tangled discussion that ensues, Seth Price and Hito Steyerl, both make work plugged into the present moment’s changing pace and shifting imagery. Price’s output has included a digital print of cave drawings on a PVC cylinder and DVDs carrying internet footage of the beheading of an American hostage by Islamic extremists. Meanwhile one of Steyerl’s recent films spun a rise and fall tale of a pre-internet icon of speed, an aeroplane, touching on Hollywood, the Israeli military and economic decline, and told through various digitalmedia. A term such as super-hybridity seems of obvious interest for them, yet both have problems with it for differing reasons.

Heiser distinguishes his concept of super-hybridity from the ‘hybridity’ put forward by Homi K Bhaba and other 1990s post-colonialist theorists, affirming cultures to be inherently mixed, not pure. Where this previous generation saw hybridity as an antidote to homogenising globalisation, Heiser points out that artists now approach hybridity with eyes opened to its role in capitalism’s rapid global takeover, both thriving on individualism and selling better thanks to the expanded cultural references we all share. Steyerl seconds this, but she also objects to ‘super-hybridity’ as being both about the “desire to... create and merge” while “keeping existing property relations”.

Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall (2010)

To understand what they’re getting at, it’s worth considering a recurring example batted to and fro by the panel: M.I.A.’s fusion pop, sampling world music, hip hop, electronica and dance music, and her troubling Born Free (2010) video which references film maker Peter Watkins’ loaded political imagery, lightly conjuring the fascist oppression he explores at length in the nightmarish Punishment Park (1971). On the one hand M.I.A. blends marginalised references and puts them centre-stage, while drawing attention to the people and places written out of mainstream news. Yet she’s the one making money out of it. She’s the pop star. Ultimately, it’s all about her.

Hito Steyerl, November (2009)

Price asks what really distinguishes ‘super-hybridity’ from artists’ previous responses to modernity. Is it simply “more and faster”? Going back to M.I.A., how is her easy way with cultural references essentially so different from the ahistorical free-for-all of popsters in the 1980s? Is ‘super-hybridity’ post-modernism plus the internet? Heiser says the emphasis has shifted, from styles or looks, to the method they’re dealt with. Yet for Price, a ‘super-hybrid’ tendency like artists crossing disciplines might actually be the result of the digital technology they use, rather than a decisive change in methodology.

So is ‘super-hybridity’ a non-starter or the beginning of a new quest for definitions? As Heiser so rightly points out, our moment is different from previous generations, and we need “better concepts” with which to address it.