The weight of wonders
by Sean O'Toole
I must admit to being stumped (initially) by Clive van den Berg's recent show 'Love Ballast', at the Goodman Gallery. Intellectually disabled. Which was probably an appropriate condition to be in given the emotional terrain charted by the show: love. Not that van den Berg's show was about the maudlin slop of the romance novel, or empty like the one-liners contained in a Valentine's Day card.
Indeed, the gallery interior was quite full, van den Berg choosing to showcase a large selection of prints, paintings, sculptural wall pieces and light installations. The latter light constructions demonstrated the most obvious visual connection to van den Berg's previous works, particularly the work featured in 'Memorials without facts', from 2000. A closer look at the prints, paintings and wall pieces, however, suggested that even these works were loaded with hints and traces of what went before.
Love Ballast I - IV presented the viewer with four glass-framed wall pieces. Inside these the ordered symmetry of the vertically or horizontally aligned cotton cloth was interrupted by shards of stone, pieces of the body: two heads, two hands, a leg, a foot. Everything was rendered in an unnerving white; even the wash of blood had been dispersed from the dismembered bodies.
Images of stones and incomplete bodies were again repeated in the prints, for example, in a small drypoint depicting a leg attached to a collection of clustered stones, as well as an image of a figure subsumed by a mound of stones. Elsewhere these stones were depicted accumulated in hillocks; were shown being conveyed on stretchers; they even created suggestive outlines of human forms buried in the earth. If love, an enduring human ideal, formed the subject of this show, this ideal was counterbalanced by the weight of inanimate things: stones, earth.
Commenting on van den Berg's artistic output, the visual anthropologist Rosalind Morris once wrote: "For nearly twenty years, van den Berg has been making works which dedicate themselves to the radical refiguring of landscape tradition and the reimagination of what constitutes the evidence of, and possible objects for, history and its attendant structures of remembrance."
If memory seeks to challenge the ephemeral quality of being, van den Berg's work seems to suggest a continuity between his dissimilar motifs: the stone and the body. If we are destined to become earth one day, then in a sense the stone relic is a suitable memorial - an accurate representation of our being.
As Morris herself has commented on van den Berg's use of memorial stones: "The mounds materialise a truth about all memorials, which function as signs with an interior dimension and an elsewhere to which they point." In an interview with the artist, van den Berg told me: "The stones stem from a need to find a language of memorialization that could be comprehended by a range of viewers. My own first encounters with them was on battlefields, piled up in simple cairns, usually white washed."
Van den Berg's huge light installations interjected themselves in the centre of all this, Underneath an imposing geometrical form of linear dimensions. A strange sense of confusion attended its viewing. Despite the intensity of the light emitted by the large number of 40W bulbs, one's overriding sense of the works was not visual - particularly as one drew closer to it. Rather it was the heat that got you, the odd intensity of it. "Heat, like the light is an attempt to make a grammar of the in-between, or knowing in different registers," commented van den Berg.
The geometrical clarity of this work had a two-dimensional correlative in van den Berg's Love Ballast paintings, particularly the striking numbers VIII through XII. Featuring delicate daubs of paint that created elegant dotted lines, the geometrical discipline of these lines imposed themselves on near evanescent landscapes. The stylish minimalist hand at work certainly charmed me, in spite of the fact that these acrylic paintings were unyielding, resistant of communicating anything obvious.
This quality, of an obstinate mystery (and beauty I might add), probably best summarises my experience of van den Berg's show, 'Love Ballast'. In all honesty it was an experience that perturbed me. This was a show that wilfully defied my rationalist impulses, even after a second visit to the gallery. I have, however, taken solace in something Rosalind Morris said about van den Berg's work: "Through the experience of unexpected beauty, [the viewer] is given a fleeting encounter with that fugitive impulse that the symbolic world eschews." I would venture to add that the experience of being unhinged also allows a brief glimpse of a joyous freedom that is all to often suppressed by the wearisome ballast of rationality.
September 25 - October 18
Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood
Tel: 011 788 1113
Fax: 011 788 9887
Email:
goodman@iafrica.com
Hours: Tues - Fri 9.30am - 5.30pm, Sat 9.30am - 4pm