The possibility that Hulk Hogan is the protagonist of history is perhaps troubling to contemplate, but it is one of the many troubling possibilities raised by Michael Stevenson’s exhibition, Disproof Does not Equal Disbelief at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The professional wrestling champion, famous for entering the ring to a theme tune titled Real American, is a somewhat curiously preeminent presence in an exhibition otherwise infused with New Zealand’s recent cultural and political history. Stevenson is known for his conceptual works that resituate audiences through recontextualising ostensibly familiar images and figures. The presence of Hogan, therefore, is not simply about his status as a wrestler, but more about his status as a cultural ‘object’ of a kind handled by media, and the way his image has been constructed and selectively deployed to fit the needs of other, less charismatic cultural movers. Stevenson is a wary observer of the ways media are constructed and manifested and of the ways in which audiences consume media. Contemporary art discourse, notionally a vector for investigating the properties of media, is often, Stevenson argues, deceived by its own positioning. Speaking about the role of ‘new’ media in his work, he said the following:  

“I think one of the ‘deceits’ of this digital media period we live in, which you could call ‘post-internet’, is simply that it’s new and doesn’t have a history. In terms of what’s emerged from artists in this time, much of note has mapped back closely onto what’s come out of Silicon Valley, including the worst, myopic engineering point of view: ‘Out of our way, we’re building the future!’ I don’t believe that. My work walks backward into the subprime attention mediascape in which we now live.”^[01] 01. In conversation with the author, 23 August 2021.

From the lofty heights of contemporary art, media could hardly seem to get more subprime than the world of professional wrestling, with its outrageous characters and costumes, and even more outrageous storylines. But it is this very property, wrestling’s demotic character, that makes it such a powerful window into contemporary cultures. Stevenson’s installations are explicit about embracing the pageantry of wrestling heroes like Hogan, with the signature red and yellow colour scheme of Hogan’s ring attire appearing in several installations—but Stevenson is not simply concerned with wrestling as spectacle. Walking backward into the biography of Hogan through the entanglements in which he has found himself since he left the ring leaves one stunned at how consequential a figure like Hogan is, largely in spite of himself, to 21st century reality. 

Wrestling fans are an interesting case study in the psychology of belief—one of Stevenson’s enduring artistic themes. A decade before anyone had heard of Hulk Hogan, the French philosopher and pioneer of semiotic theory, Roland Barthes, was already writing about the ways in which audiences interpreted professional wrestling (“all-in wrestling” was Barthes’ term for the theatre-sport).^[02] 02. Roland Barthes,  ”World of Wrestling” in Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Barthes argued that audiences did not really believe in the literal truth of the spectacle taking place in the ‘squared circle’ of the wrestling ring. It was not a specific punch or drop-kick that mattered, but how the match served as an engine of catharsis. To ‘believe in’ wrestling was not to believe in the material events that constituted it, but in the ritual that it served. The political activist and writer Chris Hedges would make a similar point about the post-Hogan World Wrestling Entertainment (“WWE”), suggesting the ring was a kind of social theatre in which the struggles of people were written into the scripted conflicts of wrestling heroes, or ‘faces’, and villains, or ‘heels’.^[03] 03. Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusions: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of the Spectacle, Knopf, 2009. Thus, wrestling fans were never deluded about the facticity of the fighting on show—the fighting served a different purpose: in many cases, an expiation of social and personal anxiety. Consider the great post-Hogan ‘face’ of 2000s WWE wrestling, Shawn Michaels, the subject of Hedges’ exploration of wrestling, whom, Hedges argues, acts as a kind of avatar through which viewers could attempt to make sense of their own suffering. The audience’s belief is less about empirical knowledge and more about emotional truth, and meaning: the struggles of faces are the struggles the audiences face. Hogan, the ultimate face of 1980s wrestling, became a global figure, a ‘Real American’ hero whose appeal stretched far beyond the borders of ‘real’ America.

In another of Stevenson’s assemblages at the KW, Hogan again appears for a cameo in the unfolding of another spectacle of structured belief: the charity telethon. Having grown up myself deliberately avoiding the—to a child—incomprehensible spectacle of the Jerry Lewis telethons run in the service of helping children with muscular dystrophy, I was surprised to see how big a phenomenon telethons were in Stevenson’s New Zealand. The event featured in Stevenson’s work, simply known as The Telethon and aired in 1977, commanded audiences unimaginable by today’s standards of boutique media consumption; perhaps up to 70% of the population of New Zealand tuned into the inaugural extravaganza. Stevenson’s fascination (and morbid horror of) telethons are evident in the assemblage of ephemera in the work ‘The Cheap Heat’, which collects electronic and written media relating to The Telethon and its audience. The lurid spectacle familiar from wrestling is present in telethons, but the ritual is not merely vicarious, as with scripted programming like wrestling: “If you look back to the 20th century model [of the telethon],” Stevenson told me during our interview, “it had to be framed up within a carnivalesque moment that had an entry and exit: it lasted a single weekend; but non-stop over more than 24hrs. It had to also be framed up around charity giving, which is super weird, and once you’d accepted all this, then you could immerse yourself in some weird form of participation, and weird form of breaking the fourth wall.”

This line of thinking led Stevenson to an understanding of live broadcast as a kind of distinct area of media production, one which creates “particular behaviours”.^[04] 04. In conversation with the author, 23 August 2021. One may think of the Academy Awards, or the Super Bowl half-time extravaganza as possible examples of telethon media practice, a site where disruptions, irregularities and risk are fundamental to the experience. Where telethon logic sits in broader media ecology is, no pun intended, a live issue in a culture where telethons are positioned as passion plays to do ‘good’. Stevenson’s analysis and media archeology are part of a practice that examines not merely the products of culture, or even the structures that disseminate that culture, but how those structures and products relate to each other through their own logics. The exhibition’s curator, Anna Gritz, told me that it is this encompassing analytical dimension that first spoke to her in Stevenson’s work:

“I first encountered Michael’s work in 2006 when I was a student in San Francisco at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, where he presented the work c/o the Central Bank of Guatemala, which consists of a MONIAC, a large hydraulic sculpture that visualizes the working of an economy. The tactic to work with visualisations and sculptural interpretations of large and complex processes struck a note with me…doing so his work allows us to compare distinctive systems side by side and to reveal parallels in the infrastructures that enable them. Obscure anecdotes and material choices narrate the work in tandem allowing for parallel routes of access and navigation.”

The question of how an individual consciousness can reckon with structures so large and intertwined as those that govern the post-World War II world is daunting indeed. Perhaps the most high profile means of exploring the way systems and humans relate to each other can be found in the ‘system novels’ of the post-War period by writers including Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, works that attempt to reckon with the vast, intricate structures (e.g. political, ideological, technological) that facilitate and circumscribe societies and cultures. The lineage of the systems novel substantially precedes the twentieth century, however, dating back, at least to the archetypal ‘great American novel’, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (first published in 1851). Melville uses the eponymous whale as a symbol of organisation and chaos. The whaling journey is entirely predicated on the presence of the whale as the object of Captain Ahab’s obsession, an obsession which ends up destroying him, along with his ship and his men, leaving the narrator, Ishmael, bobbing in the sea on top of his best friend’s coffin. 

Moby Dick may offer a starting point for the modern systems novel, but the figure of the whale, the ‘great fish’ that is a mammal, is also central to Stevenson’s exhibition. The organising concept of the exhibition’s layout positions the different rooms of the exhibition as chambers within the stomach of a whale. Indeed, Stevenson would seem to be drawing a direct line to Moby Dick with the title of the work that greets the viewer upon entry, a series of screen prints on paper lining the lower walls of the first room of the KW’s ground floor gallery entitled Call Me Immendorff (2000-2002). Surely, Stevenson is gesturing to the famous opening line of Moby Dick, “Call me Ishmael”. Ishmael leads the reader on a mysterious journey into the heart of obsession, and it would seem that in drawing this parallel, Stevenson is inviting the viewer to consider the ways in which belief and obsession flow into each other. Call Me Immendorff has a real world antecedent: it references a visit by the German painting superstar, Jorg Immendorff, to New Zealand in the late 1980s. Immendorff, for Stevenson, seems to represent the capitulation of contemporary art to capital. The ‘radical’ stance of Immendorff’s aesthetic is belied by the headlines on the prints that reference the painter’s embrace of the blinged-out lifestyle a certain kind of acceptable ‘radicalism’ could offer to fortunate artists. Several headlines in the work relate directly to Immendorff: “NZ Draws Leading Painter”, and “I hate cheap champagne”^[05] 05. Stevenson quoted in Linda Herrick's 'Michael Makes Headlines', NZ Herald, 1 June 2002: “He drank incredibly expensive champagne after the crash. He was the only person left in town who could shout at the bar just as everyone else was feeling the pain.” , in particular, but Call Me Immendorf is about much more than one painter who developed a taste for the high life. The works all bear the mastheads of New Zealand newspapers. In the age of digital media consumption, the newspaper is increasingly seen as a technology of the past—but the immediacy of news headlines to create what the infamous Cambridge Analytica founder Alexander Nix called “information dominance” in a culture remains: a situation in which a favoured topic of an empowered media mogul can be forced onto a political agenda even for those who don’t read the mogul in question’s publications—by sheer overwhelming presence and repetition of material objects, e.g. newspapers. Stevenson’s screaming, untethered headlines are reminders of a medium that has changed, but a deeper message that has not.

Call Me Immendorff modulates between skepticism and elegy. Stevenson is clearly suspicious of a corporate news media culture that thrives on scandal, outrage and paranoia, but as newspapers disappear, particularly regional newspapers, a certain kind of media culture is also dying, and with it the balance of terror^[06] 06. In reference to the Cold War mutually assured destruction, used here as a metaphor for the balance between the depiction of reality (often horrific but uncontrollable) and the media construction of reality which allows for the modulation/manipulation of fear in ways that are controllable (e.g in the Chomskyan propaganda model of media or Baudrillard's Simulation and the Simulacrum). between facts and narrative these ‘authoritative’ media forms established. Coincidentally—or perhaps not—Hulk Hogan also played a crucial role in the demise of a major media publication, the celebrity ‘news’ website Gawker, itself guilty of the kind of sensationalist journalism that Call Me Immendorf challenges. Hogan, secretly bankrolled in his lawsuit by the venture capitalist and New Zealand property enthusiast Peter Thiel, was able to bankrupt the website for revealing facts about a sordid affair between Hogan’s wife and the charmingly named radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge. The case set a chilling precedent for other media outlets concerned about the risk of libel suits. Though Call Me Immendorf was made more than a decade before the demise of Gawker, when I spoke to Stevenson about the exhibition the Gawker case had been present in his mind more recently, particularly the real time tweets documenting the trial’s jury selection^[07] 07. www.tampabay.com/news/bizarre/hulk-hogan-vs-gawker-jury-selection-as-told-in-tweets/2267807/&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1631698479328000&usg=AOvVaw19suvqMcJa8LY0ZO-cJeKN , a new form of media documenting the demise of another. 

Thiel looms large at the KW. One of Stevenson’s assembled ‘campus’ of ‘classrooms’ populating the spacious main gallery of the KW is dedicated to Thiel’s business philosophy. The work sits beside other ‘classrooms’—chaotic spaces formed by modular walls in which various objects ranging from TV screens to airplane wheels are strewn. The Thiel classroom is paired with one dedicated to the Christian entrepreneur John Wimber. In our discussion, Stevenson noted that Thiel’s business model of “starting with the endgame” replicates the logic of evangelical eschatology: “Thiel’s business model centres on what I see as a discontinuous time model. I see that partly because it overlaps with an evangelical temporal model, which is also discontinuous.” Thiel, Stevenson notes, is a firm believer that “the future has to be different from now”, a mirroring of Christian millenarianism with venture capitalist culture— “suggesting that time is fragmented, and that you must proceed from one piece of time to another and in between there are gaps. That is the evangelical model. And he’s turned it into a business plan. And that’s terrifying but it’s also fascinating.”^[08] 08. Michael Stevenson in conversation with the author, 23 August 2021.

Thiel isn’t the only titan of the new economy to come under scrutiny in Stevenson’s work. The spectral presence of Amazon’s overlord, Jeff Bezos, permeates the second section of the exhibition, which uses as a touchstone the ‘door desk’: a construction of performative parsimony Bezos used for employee work stations early in the development of Amazon in which ‘desks’ were made from doors sourced from a hardware and lumber supply shop. At the KW, Stevenson’s doors are displayed in various ways, most elaborately, ensnared in steel frames; in the artist’s conceptual geography, they are less ‘doors’ or ‘desks’ than they are something else entirely: they signify ‘doorness’ without performing ‘doorness’ in any conventional way. They can be thought of both as trap doors and trapped doors. They are not free, but neither do they conform to the roles anyone, not even Jeff Bezos, assigns them. In the exhibition catalogue, writer Anna Parlane notes in her essay Kayfabe Logic,^[09] 09. The title of which is a reference to “Kayfabe”, the performative code that underpins wrestling matches, portraying staged events as “real” or “true”. - that despite positioning the ‘door desks’ as a signifier of the scrappy, no-frills character of Amazon’s early days as an industry upstart, it is unlikely the company actually saved much money using makeshift  ‘door desks’ for employees instead of simply sourcing cheap desks (perhaps using some online retailer). As with Call Me Immendorff, however, the story demonstrates how narrative is often more important than mere fact. Amazon’s ‘disruptor’ mythology is what endeared it to the tech journalists who enabled its growth, far more than the less romantic reality of the company’s byzantine approach to tax efficiency would have, had it been covered in similar detail.

The narrative, be it of a wrestler’s story arc, a newspaper article, or an exhibition is in large part a matter of perspective, what one sees and what one doesn’t see. Stevenson consciously sought to include limited visual perspectives in the laying out of his retrospective: “I wanted to work into those rooms discretely, room by room, and in a way so that you have no sense of what will happen next or where you’re going next. You have only the information directly in front of you and the knowledge of what you’ve seen in the room before”.^[10] 10. Michael Stevenson in conversation with the author, 23 August 2021. One cannot see the exhibition as a whole until going up onto the next floor of the KW and looking down. God’s eye view is only on offer after one has been through the exhibition as a human being. One can only observe after having been themselves observable. We may believe what we see, but when our perspective on what we see changes, do our beliefs change accordingly? Stevenson seems to suggest the answer is something like ‘Yes and no’.

Disproof Does Not Equal Disbelief is less of a show about answers than about the unanswerable. The figures who haunt Stevenson’s works, Thiel, Bezos, Immendorff, and, of course, the Hulkster, in their own ways represent faces of a kind of aggressive certainty, be it about business, aesthetics, or performance. This survey of Stevenson’s works diagnoses an enduring but always novel malady of the human condition: the desire for narrative, for answers that we like rather than answers in themselves. As I left the exhibition at the KW, I couldn’t help but think of the lyrics of a song by John Maus, a now largely forgotten singer from the early 2010s who was most recently in the news for appearing on the outskirts of the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. Maus sings, “Jackie Chan flashing all over the world/Hulk Hogan flashing all over the world / Baby let’s go fly all across the world.”^[11] 11. John Maus, “The Believer” from the album We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, released 28 June 2011, Ribbon Music/Upset the Rhythm. This paean to the ubiquity of media figures like Hogan resolves into the following chorus: “They call me the believer/And I’m not coming back.” Disproof Does Not Equal Disbelief suggests that sooner or later, we are all The Believer; where we place our faith can be as important, or more important, than the underlying facts upon which our beliefs rest. Once, like Maus, we exult in this knowledge, the hardest question of all remains: how many of us are prepared to come back?