Jamie Shovlin - Hiker Meat

Jamie Shovlin
MACRO
October 26 2010 - February 06 2011
http://www.macro.roma.museum/

By Nicole Minatel


Jamie Shovlin, Hiker Meat (US one-sheet), 2010.

Due to the presence of a large explanatory wall label just before the entrance, almost every visitor walking into Jamie Shovlin’s Hiker Meat exhibition at the MACRO is aware that everything about the homonymous movie and its memorabilia is false, imagined by the artist and made for the purpose of the show. However, it is easy to forget this (major) detail and accept the trailers, script, costumes, props and posters of Hiker Meat as real objects belonging to yet another low-budget horror film of the 1970’s-80’s.
Located in the very first room of the MACRO in Rome, the exhibition that will run until the 6th of February 2011 is housed in a large opening that merges with the bookstore, setting itself apart from the entrance lobby only in its white walls that remain fully uncovered for the most part. Most of the visual information can instead be found on the continuous partition formed by 20 blackboards that divide the room in two and summarize the structure of the film, as the colorful scribbles and photo collages all refer back to the different groups of objects, documents, videos and images that are spread throughout the space but work together as one agglomeration of data.
Such an uncanny mode of presentation is no surprise if one looks back at the repertoire of Jamie Shovlin. Born in Britain in 1978, the Conceptual (Post-Young British Artist) gained notoriety in 2004, after tricking Charles Saatchi into purchasing an entire collection of works by Naomi V. Jelish, a non-existent prodigy child with a strange disappearance story. The diaries and well-executed drawings turned out to be by Shovlin himself, and gained the Royal College of Art in London graduate a rare chance to shine in the usually difficult to penetrate barrier of art world’s spotlight. Shovlin used this instant fame to create even more works that played with the boundaries of fact and fiction, as an exhibition on the imaginary Lustfaust German glam rock band and Hiker Meat itself demonstrate.
This desire to reshape how audiences accept information without truly stopping to consider inconsistencies and trickeries is the essence of Shovlin’s production, as he presents flawed systems in such perfection that overlooking the most important aspect – veracity – is no challenge. However, his desire is not to make fools out of his spectators, but rather to awaken all to the fact that nobody has supreme authority over the truth and it can and will always be bent and meddled with, something we should be conscious of. In Hiker Meat, Shovlin does this in a form that is straightforward, clean and appealing as every facet of his (somewhat spartan) exhibition space is linked back to a film that is nonexistent. With the use of a multiplicity of languages (movie trailers in German and Italian; a Script and Audio in English; VHS boxes and promotional material in Spanish, French and Norwegian) and the insertion of common-day materials that would have been found on set (such as a coffee cup and script), Shovlin creates an aura of reality and mass worship, as it is easy to imagine a cult following for Hiker Meat similar to those of Star Wars and Kill Bill. But the difference is that Hiker Meat does not exist beyond the imagination of the artist and the few items that are displayed, whether this seems right or not.
It is clear that Shovlin’s formulaic tricks serve their purpose, or his concept, very well. However, the preconditioned awareness that nothing in the Hiker Meat exhibition is real takes away from the basic viewing experience as a whole, as one begins to seek flaws in the presentation just to make sure that we would have known the hoax all along. This search for elements of amateurism easily becomes an obsession, which once again enhances Shovlin’s point: that perfection in execution cannot and should not always automatically be equated with ‘truth’. Therefore, it is difficult not to concede that because Hiker Meat is somewhat frustrating for the viewer, it is perfect in its mission of exposing the extremely tenuous line between what is real and what is not.