POROUS Clive Van Den Berg’s retrospective exhibition at Wits Art Art Museum until 28th October
Artist as Social Activist
Evocative, provocative, declarative, intimate, sometimes speaking of material substance, sometimes figurative, always labour intensive, and oh so moving and poignant – four decades of Clive Van Den Berg’s works, beautifully curated by the artist and Julia Charlton in the wonderful spaces of WAM. It is difficult to know where to start with responses to this exhibition without resorting to cliches, platitudes and over-used celebratory words. I have known Clive for many years going back to when I was in the Wits Art History Department and he taught in the Fine Arts Department. I have always been in awe of his ability to engage with complex ideas and issues with subtley, sensitivity, a sense of respect, and an acute intellectual rigour. But Clive does not take these talents lightly – he is very much a social activist around gay rights, aware of his agency as an artist. And an artist, who in addition to being verbally articulate, is aware that he has a sophisticated visual syntax to mobilize. As a founding member of Trace, a team of professionals working in the field of heritage and curating, he has worked on many public projects such as the Workers’ Museum in Newtown, Section 4 at Constitution Hill, Freedom Park in Pretoria and the Holocaust and Genocide Centre, amongst others. These are documented on a wall on the lower space of the gallery.
“Wordess understanding”
Clive asks his viewers to be agile, to engage with his works actively. “Looking is work”. But he also emphasizes that there are sometimes no words for how you read an image. He talks about the different capacities of painting – sometimes it is descriptive of something and sometimes it’s “just the material …. it’s coagulated and not a cleanly negotiated surface”. Sometimes it’s the colour – think red or burnt orange. Clive says: ‘Some of it we can verbalize quickly and some of it we can’t. And that is the fabulous capacity of the visual and the material” – what he calls “Worldless Understanding”. And it is in this slippery interplay between the enigmatic, the elusive, the incohate, the visceral, the empathic on the one hand and the figurative, the descriptive, the conceptual, the iconographic, and historical references on the other. Clive’s works are taut, rigourous, critically informed and always beautifully made. He believes in physical work, that the process of making is an act of care and we too, as viewers, have a responsibility to read with care, both the substance of the material and the act of the maker’s touch.
Themes of the exhibition introduced in the foyer
When you see the exhibition, and visit you MUST, go early and spend a little time in the entrance space of the foyer where many of the themes are introduced. The curatorial statement below signals the themes of land and love. Landscape for Clive includes not only the traditional idea of what we can see around us (albeit represented in often non-figurative ways) but also what happens beneath, if we drill down below the surface. It is no coincidence that his father was a minor in Zambia and he has long been fascinated by Johannesburg’s history built on the underground resources of gold.
The other theme: love, takes a particular direction with the AIDS epidemic in the 80s for Clive as a gay man. As indicated in the curatorial statement below, he began to “re-imagine his body as a porous thing” where the protective membrane of skin no longer protected the private body from the social space.
Landscape: above and below, the seen and the invisible
Two large-scale landscape paintings speak to each other across the foyer space: Bluff, Again (2019) oil pastel on paper and Excavations V 1993 pastel on paper. South Africa’s colonial history means a complex relationship to land – both in terms of land ownership and in terms of exploitation of resources. In Bluff, Again building structures teeter precariously on the landmass looming vertically across the format. Traditional scale relationships and receding space are abandoned, creating a disconcerting dislocation. Excavations V refers to what is below the surface. Although what is undergound is not ordinarily visible, Van den Berg speaks about somehow having a somatic knowledge of it through events like earth tremors and blasting – what he refers to as “geological stutterings”. Works like African Landscape XII Gold Below 2020 and Under Sightline III 2023 combine “above” and “below” in one format.
Empathetic imagination
Do not ignore the glass cases which back onto Jorrisen St on the left of the foyer space as you enter. There are many glorious smaller objects. Maria Stein-Lessing joined the Wits Fine art Department post-war in 1946 but died tragically in 1961. When her husband Leopold Spiegel died in 2009 a bequest was made to Wits Art Museum on the condition that whatever exhibition was on show, there would always to be some African art works on display. For Fiona Rankin-Smith, who has been a curator of Wits’ art collection for 4o years, having the ‘enforced’ inclusion of these African art works in all exhibitions, has been a challenging and fun puzzle to work with.
And so to the African art objects in this exhibition (with visual responses made by Clive). Be sure to look at them all carefully. Jackson Hlungwane’s God’s Leg with Eggs formed part of his Altar to God originally stood in Mbhokota in Limpopo but was bought by Wits in 1989. In 2004, a range of intellectuals with Wits association, were asked to choose a work from the Standard Bank African Art Collection at Wits and comment on why they chose this work. This publication was called Voice-Overs. Clive Van den Berg chose Jackson Hlungwane’s God’s Leg with Eggs. While clarifying that he is sure Hlungwane was not making any reference to the HIV virus, for Clive in the post-HIV epidemic fall-out, any swelling, lesion, abrasion or lump became a signifier for the virus. He writes:
A body altered by lumps is a way of speaking the infected but, at the same time, it is a way of taking the infected and making it a something that is beautiful. The aesthetic becomes the conduit for knowing, and to some extent embracing the feared. … Take that which is the mark of the feared and make it the other: make it a new sign and in so doing open up new possibilities for new grammars. We do this for what? For me it is a way of making compassion possible. Beauty besides “taking our breath away”, can also disturb that complex of filters that we use to block or facilitate empathy. Voice-Overs 2004 p 126
Beauty as “the aesthetic embracing the fears” is seen in the two images below (amongst other works on show).
Vocabularies of lamentation
In 2014 and 2015 horrific brutal killings of gay men at the hands of ISIS took place in Syria and Iraq. Those accused of being gay were blindfolded and then bound and thrown from rooftops onto the street below. In the street were men and young boys waiting to stone them. Photographs taken by the killers from the tops of the buildings remain the only record of these men – they could never be named and so could not be mourned. In creating a memorial column (a structure that goes back to Roman times as a site to record events) and referring to the horrific Isis photos, Clive carves lovingly and with care, memorial images of some of these men. In doing so he speaks of these deaths being remembered with “a caring eye”, his own initially and then those of viewers who see the work. And indeed my throat closed, tears welled and my chest tightened, just as before when I saw this work at Van den Berg’s 2017 exhibition Pile of Stones at the Goodman Gallery. This empathic response is the exact inversion of what ISIS intended and so in some small way the horror of these events has not only been spread more widely but the deaths of these unnamed men have also been memorialized.
Repossessing the medium: Watercolour as signifier the erotic
Journeying up the ramp to the gallery upstairs, one passes the huge wall-papered section showing images from Clive’s sketchbook, blown up to a very large scale. In the glass cases in the upstairs gallery is a series of small watercolours depicting the personal, the erotic. The medium of watercolour has traditionally been “feminized by art historians” (not quite sure I agree with Clive that it is only art historians ‘to blame’). As opposed to that most “macho of mediums”, oil paint, watercolour is delicate, sensitive and requires a lightness of touch. Clive talks about repossessing the medium and using its delicacy as a mark of respect for the erotic history of the love between men. These images are small, they are intimate, you have to lean close to see them.
Seeking and enacting pleasure – a political and artistic goal
In the second image of this post, I referred to Clive’s love of joy, sensuality, beauty. Libidinous Ghost epitomizes this.
WAM is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 – 16:00 and Porous until 28th October. Phone 011 717 1365