Hart insists that his work has a conceptual base insofar as he thinks of it as philosophical rather than as ideological. For Hart, there is no interest in (art)work that tries to teach lessons. However there are, for a reader of his cultural texts, a variety of hybrid modalities that can be teased from contemporary theories and Hart's production of a cultural (art) narrative.

James Moss observes that much of the current focus on hybridity is theorised primarily around identity and is extrapolated from post-structural theories that have liberated the subject from racial, ethnic, and gendered notions of purity and fixity.¹ Historically, for Moss, the hybrid condition has been premised on a problematics of transgression. By this he means the transgression of boundaries between, say, coloniser and colonised. Hybridity has traditionally served as a metaphor for the apparently negative consequences of such transgressions. There is a sense in which hydridity might indicate a sense of otherness or oppression, a practice of forced assimilation and political co-option.

Nikos Papastergiadis extends the metaphor when he writes that "the language of hybridity becomes a means of critique and resistance to the monological language of authority. The hybrid text always undoes the priorities and disrupts the singular order by which the dominant code categorises the other . . . the doubleness of the hybrid voices is composed not through the integration of differences but via a series of ideological counterpoints, each set against the other, allowing the language to be both the same and different."²

Hybridity in this sense is not a solvent of differences, but the interaction/interface of differences. For the hybrid to exist it must defy any complete assimilation. While ethnography is the basis for discursive hybrid voices in current cultural practice, linking the concept of 'hybrid' to the politics of representation can isolate hybrid moments within art history. This is not an attempt to locate contemporary western interdisciplinary art practices as central to the current meaning of hybridity, but rather to situate contemporary art practices within wider cultural theories and practices. Hart's hybrid practice is marked not through the assimilation of one style of representation into another but more by the processes of negotiation between (apparently) different stylistic characteristics. In the end he pushes the metaphor to the point where the text speaks of diversity but also emphasises/reinforces sameness. The experience of North Star becomes a microcosm of a globalism within which difference has ceased to be a matter of negotiating the doubleness of hybridity and can be seen/read as a multi-layered and diverse text. Hart himself reiterates this when he says that the whole show is a kind of monochrome, an abundance of layers, a plateaux of tonal equivalences where everything and nothing can exist.

The generative conversation between photographic representation, filmic movement, and painting remains most evident in Clump, Humidity, and Track. The idea of "tonal equivalences" is played out literally and figuratively in Humidity, a set of five panels of equal size, painted in equivalent tones of various shades of an almost forgotten colour. In any event the original "colour" is always already a hybrid of various colours. These "new" colours are all given the same tonal weight.

However tempting it might be to read Humidity as a repurification of high abstract aesthetics or the reification of painting as the supreme expression of art, this moment is undone by Clump and Track. Clump, a series of three figurative paintings reactivates the really big hybrid historical problem of visual representation by introducing photography. As a code, photography was never quite assimilated by high art. And while it was also not a synthesis of art and life, it certainly violated the ideal with the dross of the real. The photograph, as Moss might argue, gate-crashed the domain of representation of which art, specifically painting, was the dominant (ideal) form.

Hart rehearses the hybrid moments between modern painting movements, say Minimalism (Humidity) and Abstract Expressionism (Track) without necessarily reinvesting in the authority of either. After all Track is a neco (laser) print which represent new photographic technology, but still deploys black-and-white filmic codes and the stylistic characteristics of abstract expressionism. To use a language (painting) is to some extent to be complicit with the very operation that one would like to hold up for examination. North Star gains analytic distance to feel out the limitations of painting by employing other languages (text for instance, or photography) as critical strategies. This shift in practice entails a shift in position: the artist becomes a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, and the viewer more an active reader of cultural texts than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer of the spectacular (photography).

Mass advertising manipulates by disguising it's directorial mode. Its complicity with photography is to make our lives availaible for social use. In terms of popular culture, photography represents our complete exposure to society, our fraudulent openness to its authoritarian ministrations, and our lack of critical relationship or resistance to its necessity. It is not so much that North Star represents the will to deconstruct (where photography is used to decode the visual ideology of mass media, including photography) the aesthetic authority of painting, but something akin to a postmodern poetics. Here the decoding produces no fixed message: there are intersected moments rather when meanings.

Track is a series of two identical black-and-white neco laser enlargements of a blurred black-and-white photograph which quotes equally from abstract expressionism and Goddardian film codes. Like a badly filmed (but static) landscape it nevertheless evokes childhood memories of travelling at high speeds as much as the codes of a style of painting. In Clump the ubiquitous authority of mass photographic representation and the aesthetic of painting is humorously undone in the recombination of painting and photography. In one of part of the trilogy, the viewer is suddenly confronted by a large close-up painted nature shot of copulating slugs.

In this complex hybridising and non-linear narrativising way Hart, challenges not painting (or photography) itself, but a series of assumptions, categories, and terms by painting as (Derridaen) textuality. At issue are the rules which governed the history and interaction of painting with itself, other artforms, and the specific context in which cultural objects and texts are produced and consumed. Hart's dialogic interplay encompasses not only the narratives of desire and violence enacted between modern painting styles, but produces a critical strategy with other, ex-oppositional forms - the photographic, the architectural, the filmic, and the linguistic.

Hart's logic is Duchampian and is underscored in North Star by the work that bears the show's title. A pair of door handles simply appear inexplicably on the wall of the gallery. These are placed, and lit, with the same precision as the (other) 'art' works. This strategy too tends to crystalise a hybrid (Duchampian) historical moment in western art history when the relationship between viewer and object(s) shifted.

In North Star, Hart's discursive practice expands to include non-painterly codes like the structural language of installation practices, without relinquishing the ability to condense complex narrative histories and meanings of differing forms into a kind of haiku. It is as though the history and cultural meaning of each form is condensed into an iconic "word under pressure, into an idea or an "appearance" of that form. The isolated drops are almost unbearable, small complete beads clinging together, telescoping the history and memory of each (art) form through a poetics of condensation. Hart calls these 'memory-works', and in Track, a Barthesian sense of the photographic, history and memory is sustained in the sense that the photograph rushes back from the present.

Accompanying Hart's show is an unpublished extract from Linda Marie Walker's novel of the same name. Together the writing and objects produce a strange narrative, sometimes opaque in meaning, but curiously and eloquently poetic. Painting is not so much lost as integrated within an enriched and enriching dialogue. Figuratively the North Star - Polaris, the polestar - might connote something less akin to polarisation, and something more like polymorphism.

Endnotes
1. Moss, J., 'Heuristically Seeking Hybridity', Broadsheet 25/3 (Spring), 1996, p.20
2. Papastergiadis, N., 'Restless Hybrids', Eyeline 27 (Autumn/Winter), 1995, p.13