'Dear all! Having a marvellous time, though language is a problem. Phrasebook useless and they do gabble on. Stomach's cleared up and so has the weather. Breathtaking views, wonderful sights and strange customs. Too many tourists! The food's weird but at least there's a Starbucks ..." I could have written this postcard from almost anywhere. Almost.
It's true, though, that there is almost always a Starbucks, even at the Hayward Gallery, where Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist's Eye, opened last week. As curator Francesco Bonami writes in the catalogue: "Actually, we are all tourists" - even here, Bonami believes. He describes the exhibition as: "an experience dressed as an exhibition, a museum dressed as an entertainment park, art dressed as a tourist attraction, and a tourist attraction dressed as [a] work of art". Amusing as all this may sound, Bonami's show, which itself has travelled from Chicago, isn't nearly so upbeat as his essay. Like being abroad, it is all a bit confusing.
The collision of Egyptian tourist tat, unbelievable dildos, cardboard pyramids and sarcophagi, crack pipes and pornography in Thomas Hirschhorn's Chalet Lost History is as engrossing as it is unpleasant. This multi-room environment is a sort of sculptural equivalent to Michel Houellebecq's novel Platform, with its themes of sex tourism, terrorism and the tourist's obliviousness to the social realities of some of the places they go to, and the impact their visits have.
Hirschhorn's work is intentionally nihilistic, sardonic and creepy; it makes an artist like Paul McCarthy look, by comparison, pale and staid. In the last room of the chalet, four adjacent monitors show, in order, a man in ancient Egyptian costume walking along a canal, an archeological documentary, a relentless porno film featuring close-ups of anal sex, and real footage of mutilated bodies, destroyed buildings and murder by firing squad. The tackiness of the rooms, the grotesque fake-wood grain walls, the repetitive screeds of fragmentary text ("the monkeys were totally bursting apart ..."; "Rommel screamed so loudly that Adolf ...") make this feel like the end of the world. No wonder there are so many whisky bottles littering the place.
The Hayward's big, sprawling, interesting show lurches from silliness - Jeff Koons's carved bear and English bobby, and Zhan Wang's model of London, made from stainless steel pots, assorted cutlery and kitchen utensils - to violence and horror. Somehow, the exhibition's useless little information guide glosses this. It is now impossible to travel without thinking of terrorism, or of the more urgent journeys of the asylum-seeker, the refugee, the economic migrant and the exile. Turn away from the insufferable, buoyant tone of the average holiday missive, and one might find a postcard with a colourful image of Vietnamese cyclists, bearing the printed legend: "Come back to Saigon! We promised [sic] we will not spit on you." Or another that reads: "Come Back to My Lai." These are two of a number of works by Dinh Q Le, witty reminders of a war that wasn't funny at all. Several real postcards, produced commercially by the John Hinde Studio, depict Butlin's holiday camps in the 1960s and 70s, in very peculiar and unpleasant colour. These pictures would be funny, too, were it not for their dispiriting vision of an almost Stalinist, regimented Hi-De-Hi utopia.
I don't think Universal Experience is about tourism so much as the lostness in the world that tourism reveals. One might say that there's no such thing as universal experience, except in the sense that we are all alive, we come into the world by roughly the same route and leave it by the one exit. What we share is arrival and departure. Tourists might hunger to get off the beaten track (and in doing so beat a new one) and also to get lost, but not too lost. Rarely do they wish, like Walter Benjamin in Marseille, Roland Barthes in Tokyo, and WG Sebald just about anywhere, to sabotage their sense of security and orientation. They can never lose their way entirely, not with a return ticket in their pocket. This is itself a kind of tragedy.
It is a truism that when we travel, we take ourselves with us, whatever we seek to escape from, whatever we are rushing towards. Perhaps we want to lean against the flow of time. Or to take pleasure in our own displacement and anonymity. Or to live out a fantasy, whether it is on a photo-shoot safari, a package tour of the Dutch tulip fields, or on a sleazy quest for illicit sex. The western tourists in Dennis O'Rourke's 1988 documentary Cannibal Tours go on organised tours of Papua New Guinea, in search of the dangerously exotic. The tourists appear crass and arrogant, while the local tribesmen, whose forebears spent their time "killing, stealing women and fighting", as one man has it, are well aware of the tourists' objectification and exoticisation of them, and play the part accordingly.
If we are all tourists, or visitors, we are all natives, too; we all come from somewhere, even the former head-hunters of Papua. They may now accept the church and the state, but one should be careful of the illusions of globalisation as well as of its undoubted realities. One of the themes of this show is the tourist's frustrated search for real experiences, the brochure promise of "authentic" encounters. Tourists are constantly thwarted by the presence of their fellows, and the industries set up specifically to serve them.
A helicopter-borne camera hovers over Rome, in a strange film by Olivo Barbieri. Drifting over the city, the camera gives long views of Rome's rail networks and arteries, Mussolini's De Chirico-like modernist developments at EUR, the dome of St Peter's and the Vatican. Somehow, the focus of the lens, the clarity of light and the quality of detail makes the Eternal City look more like a model than a real place. One is left doubting what one sees - a doubt the tourist often feels.
Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, Mount Fuji, Machu Picchu. Sight after sight, airport after airport, everywhere blurring into everywhere else, sliding over the latitudes and longitudes, the seasons and the borders. For years, Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss have photographed the world's tourist destinations. This compendium of over 1,000 large colour transparencies, displayed on a 28-metre long table, is as stultifying as it is captivating. People are largely absent from these images of must-see destinations and fabulous views. There is no poverty, violence or ugliness; there are no bomb craters or scenes of natural disasters; the ruins are all ancient and picturesque. Lose yourself in these images for long enough, however, and they become a sort of pornography.
Some don't travel, but stay home and pretend - like the Germans in Andrea Robbins and Max Becher's photographs, who dress up as Native Americans to spend a week play-acting round the campfire and the wigwam. They smile for the camera in their head-dresses and fake buck-skins, oblivious to the somewhat nauseating spectacle they are making of themselves.
Others travel, but find themselves in the wrong place anyway. A photograph by Maurizio Cattelan gives us an aerial view of the famous Hollywood sign - not in southern California, but a vast duplicate sign Cattelan had erected over a landfill rubbish tip on the outskirts of Palermo in Sicily. The artist flew VIPs from the opening of the 2001 Venice Biennale to dine al fresco, with liveried waiters and silver service, in its shadow. On the way back, these privileged art tourists might have asked themselves whether the Venice they were returning to truly was Venice, or some back-lot mock-up, cunningly substituted during their absence.
A camera pans across a verdant valley, in Marine Hugonnier's film Ariana. The reeds sigh, and all appears idyllic and peaceful, until one realises that this is Afghanistan. At night, tracer flares crackle against the mountain backdrop. "In the light of coming battles," Hugonnier says, in her beautifully reserved commentary, "the landscape took on a strategic aspect." The film records her failed attempt to look at the valley from a high vantage point, to get an overview. Inexplicably, the film's longueurs and her mundane delays become extremely moving, even when all one is looking at is a thin curtain breathing at a window in the afternoon light. The film is largely about failure, her inability to arrive. "For a couple of days," she says, when the film crew had reached a hiatus with the local authorities, "we became nothing more than tourists." For some reason, this is a painful and dispiriting thought
·Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist's Eye is at the Hayward Gallery, London SE1, until December 11. Details: 0870 169 1000.
