Brenda Atkinson fine art Jonathan Dollimore said of Georges Bataille that “it is through eroticism that we are seduced by the pull of annihilation; we really do want death to ‘wreak its havoc at our expense’… death is experienced most intensely as desire.” In Memorials without Facts, Clive van den Berg’s exhibition of new works at the Goodman Gallery, death and desire hold hands like lovers at the end of the world, looking back at havoc with a contemplative eye.
Van den Berg has made numerous works under the Memorials title to date – paintings, videos and public works that poetically explore the memorialisation of trauma, sexuality, and marginal histories, often within the framework of fictional love stories, the small but potent histories of men loving. While these works have inevitably carried political weight, their core has been a moving, often melancholic meditation on homosexual love and loss. In the new works, it is this core that Van den Berg picks up and carries, this time with a sombre perspective that invites death to life’s dinner tables, bedrooms, and beds. Childhood memories of loss (the artist’s father died when he was a teenager) are claimed and owned by the adult man as inevitably implicated in the stuff of desire: where love blooms, death shrouds its intimacy with ghostly sighs. The direction of the works is at first surprising: the show’s invasive sculptural centrepiece is a colossal wooden hand, articulated with bolts and strewn with an entanglement of cords and bulbs. To stand near it is to be seared by its heat and temporarily blinded by its brilliance – one’s instinct is to move away. Hanging on the walls on either side of the hand are two perspectivally ambiguous “installations” of beds, made of the same pine material as the hand. The beds are visual negatives of each other: one is charred almost entirely black and is embedded, almost buried, in charcoal foam, framed and covered by glass. At the top right of the frame, a white wooden eye maintains an unblinking vigilance alongside the headboard. Reflected in its dark, glassy surface, the lights that festoon the hand seem to twinkle in absurdly cheerful juxtaposition.
The other bed is clean plain wood, exposed and bare. Above it, against the wall, a small mound of stones rests on a plinth, like a torch flame extinguished by wind. To the right, also hanging on the wall, a slim wooden structure supports lights that look like pale fried eggs, or again, bulging, unblinking eyes. In the same central space, small abstract sculptures suggest the embodiment of memory’s intangible forms, made of elemental materials – wood, stone, felt, lights – that would quickly ignite and burn. Directly opposite the oversized hand hangs a work called Comfort, a large, soft creamy “painting” made of strips of felt. Embedded into the material are two pebbled indents, inverse cones or stony torches, sexual orifices, the memorial protrusion from the inside. The work’s contradictory elements – soft horizontal planes and sudden solid interruptions – beautifully articulate the thematic concerns of the show, in which comfort is every now and then unexpectedly cold.
Even the “soft” and relatively familiar works on the show – a series of new prints and paintings which at first seem blessedly continuous with Van den Berg’s earlier production – contain unfamiliar edges. In one exquisitely delicate oil painting, an obscenely determined skeleton climbs a string of coloured lights above an empty bed; in another, it shrouds a lover in its ghostly, hungry embrace. In all of these scenes, the lover/protagonist commits, in Malcolm Mclaren’s words, “the ultimate erotic suicide”.
Eros and Thanatos merge again, although less explicitly, in a video work that powerfully condenses the baggage of history and the impetus of longing. In the video, a “film” is projected on to the forehead of a man (just discernible as the artist) who faces us, a naked silhouette visible to the torso. The small cinematic narrative we see is projected on to this human screen, allowing us to “see” inside his head. His broad shoulders bent with an invisible weight, Atlas thinks. A tiny homunculus falls and falls through his brain, breaking and reconstituting. The materiality of this body – asserted outside in the gigantic physicality of the wooden hand – is at the same time a figment, fragile and evanescent. Behind the silhouette, the human screen, the black sea swells and then rushes into epic turmoil: the tension of the man who sits so very still is almost tangible. Van den Berg describes this last, exquisitely heavy incarnation of Memorials as a kind of closure to the series, a freely explored psychic process that worked its way into the material world as “a homage to ghosts, a material assertion of a fact [death] that also prompts and speaks to the fugitive”. It is, he says, “an exploration of the interconnectedness of death and desire, and of how an aesthetic process makes for a healing experience – despite their subject matter, the works on the show are, I think, beautiful.” Clive van den Berg’s Memorials without Facts is being exhibited at the Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, until October 28. For more info contact Tel: (011) 788E1113