Peter Clarke's Fanfare
by Lloyd Pollak
Fanfare was published last year by Michael Stevenson Contemporary to accompany Peter Clarke�s eponymous exhibition, and to commemorate his 75th birthday. The book is a glossy coffee table production entirely devoid of scholarly pretensions. With its superb large-scale colour reproductions of Clarke's 100 fan paintings, Fanfare is a handsome tribute to Clarke, and the perfect Yuletide stocking-filler for any art-lover.
The term 'fan painting' is a misnomer. Clarke's 'Fanfare' exhibition comprised two-dimensional drafts for fan decorations. They are thus designs, rather than functional masterpieces of applied art, such as Charles Conder's Art-for-Art's-sake fans. While antique fans are eagerly collected, Clarke's lack such physical magic, and prompt the feelings that you might experience were you to receive a drawing of a Fabergé Easter egg instead of the real thing.
Each fan painting consists of two elements, which, it is claimed, share the same source of inspiration. Firstly there are decorations in the fan shape, and secondly there are brief narratives inspired by the grand personalities of myth, fairy-tale, religion, history, literature and art. The latter, in the form of pencilled texts, are integrated with the framed image, and are placed just beneath it. In this way Clarke's writings become part of the artwork.
Peter Clarke has had a long innings as an artist and poet, and in the brief interview that introduces the book, the artist's dealer, Michael Stevenson, reverentially observes: 'These works bring together two strands of your career: text and image, poet and painter, which are integral to each other. How do you see this seamless integration of these two facets of your creativity?'
Stevenson's deferential question implies that 'Fanfare' corresponds to some mellow autumnal flowering, some belated breakthrough in which the poet/painter unites his literary and artistic gifts, thus achieving some higher form of artistic utterance. Sadly there is no evidence of any such thrilling renewal of the artist's talents. Clarke, the poet, regales us with garrulous septuagenarian whimsy. Clarke, the painter, purveys ornamental fiddle-faddle, and no 'seamless integration' of the visual and the literary takes place.
Obviously as a dealer, it is in Stevenson's interests to present Clarke as an amazingly gifted and multi-facetted creative spirit. Is it entirely ethical for the gallerist to interview the artists he exhibits? Is there not inevitably some conflict of interests between scholarly impartiality and advertising puff? Or are such moral niceties irrelevant in an art world where practicing artists regularly review the work of their peers, and the only significant print-based art magazine is published by a commercial art gallery?
What Clarke has written are fanciful imagined scenarios that reverse conventional expectations. Thus in Miss Haversham, Dicken's spooky jilted spinster enjoys a second spring as an exuberant dowager dispensing Rooibos tea to youthful admirers, while in Queen Victoria,, this paragon of respectability, evinces a hitherto unpublicised interest in contraception and family planning. Although this sounds like a delightful satirical romp, page after page of such waggishness becomes tedious, particularly as Clarke's flights of fancy often culminate in punch lines that fall flat. His satirical verve rarely possesses much import, and the flimsiness of inspiration inevitably becomes glaringly apparent in a book of this length.
The presentation accentuates this sense of bathos. Framing Clarke's words and placing them under glass, implies they possess a scriptural authority, and suggests that the artist is some snowy haired sage distilling pearls of wisdom rather than an indefatigable prattler ventilating tomfooleries.
Layout too emphasises, rather than disguises the triviality of the writing. Frequently Clarke breaks up his lines, so that flat-footed prose masquerades as vers libre, or presents itself as poetry, as in the following example taken from For Those No Longer with Us.
'A festival of phantoms,
family, friends, acquaintances
no longer there,
memories of good times,
laughter,
lively conversations
dangling unheard in the air'
I dwell on Clarke's writing simply because few fan-paintings make an intelligible statement in isolation, and usually their raison d�etre is supplied by the text. Thus the fan decoration that accompanies the 'poem' above, consists merely of jagged white shards of cut-out paper arranged in a fan shape to suggest, one supposes, ghosts, fading memories and the lacerations of bereavement. The fan-paintings are thus mere illustrations of the text which lends them whatever extra-aesthetic meaning they may possess.
Collage provides the inspiration for many of the fans, and, in the interview, Clarke asserts that Hannah Hoch first aroused his interest in the medium. This is ironic as Hoch's photomontages formulated a biting critique of German society, and functioned as a tool in the anti-fascist struggle, whereas Clarke's merely aspire to bland decorative goals.
The painted mixed-media decorations clearly prove this point. The artist draws on a whole variety of 20th century abstract and semi-abstract idioms. These have been so widely imitated over the years, that they have become conventionalised and stock. They thus possess as much expressive vigour and novelty as the gift-wrap they so often resemble. The least successful fans are those inspired by artists such as Franz Kline, Picasso and Pollock, partly because their sweeping gestural broadness becomes risible when miniaturised, and partly because Clarke is such an inexpert pasticheur ( his Mondrian, Gauguin, Miro and Christo Coetzee fans are particularly crude and insensitive impersonations).
In the interview Stevenson alludes to 'the Victorian tradition of decorating fans, which was mostly an upper middle class pastime of the leisured woman'. Something of this ethos of lady-like dabble and potter permeates Clarke's fan paintings which frequently look just like the greeting cards hobbyists fashion from handmade paper, pressed flowers, feathers and bits of porcupine quill and ribbon. Like such handicraft, Fanfare strikes one as arty rather than art; prosy rather than profound.
Peter Clarke
Fanfare
Cape Town: Michael Stevenson, 2004
112 p. Hardcover. R350
ISBN 0 620 33210 7
