Lest we forget

A man angles his body to throw a stone at you. The choreography of stone-throwing offers a strange take on beauty. You need to hold the stone aloft and turn your body appropriately to give it force. It's elegant yet dangerous, captured with dignity, yet it is a gesture of hate. Stones have been flung at people for centuries. And they encapsulate an understanding of a relationship with fear, distrust and broken bits of the land itself.

This paradox is central to Porous, Clive van den Berg’s retrospective exhibition, curated by van den Berg and Julia Charlton. It’s a complex body of work, displayed with a strong sense of the space itself, and the wisdom of how images speak to one another.

The exhibition is hung with a chronology that you can avert as you engage with the individual pieces, but it takes you through Van den Berg’s thinking, and it begins with what he terms, in one of his muted wall texts, “the medieval moment of the 1980s”. It was a time when HIV/Aids was at its peak and the notions of “gay” and “the plague” were synonymous. But Van den Berg’s identity is not only about sexual preferences or discrimination. It’s also about a deep relationship with the land.

Born in 1956 in a town called Luansha in Zambia, he was the child of a woman who was a so-called lady tracer — women weren’t able to be architects at the time — and van den Berg’s mother, present in a portrait here, was the professional in the middle, between the man who drew up the plans and the man who implemented the building. As a toddler, Van den Berg literally learnt to draw at her elbow.

The show doesn’t take you step by step through van den Berg’s life story in a slavish manner; rather, it offers a reflection on the central premises of his thinking, which have developed into a lexicon of images. This is displayed in a grand work hung alongside the museum’s ramp. The lines are globby and elegant, gentle and direct, but the work is contained by its freshness and its embrace of white space around each element.

Raised in a context where the copper mines fed society, Van den Berg’s love for Africa is as much about the surface as the “underscape”. After all, what is Johannesburg but a mining town, where all its riches are beneath what you stand on. Many metaphors feed the vestigial mutterings of geography, both on the land under our feet and within the very body we inhabit.

Much of this work is in tribute to people loved and lost. People hung and quartered, proverbially or literally in the wave of religious fanaticism and murderous homophobia that has possessed parts of the world.

Van den Berg’s engagement with the notion of scale is rich and alive, but electric in how he applies it. The large-scale, almost abstract, paintings of the African landscape engulf you with their presence, their redness and their mark-making; but more potent possibly, is the scale in the small works.

Van den Berg doesn’t limit himself to two- or even three-dimensions in his oeuvre. Known as much for his public work and museum design, his is an art of a guttural sense of empathy that holds the spirit of his narrative from the inside out. There’s a small image in wood Lovers, with Room for a Ghost. It speaks of a lover and all the previous ghosts of lovers that hover, in a context of warmth but also fear: during the HIV/Aids peak in this world, the act of love was dangerous, possibly lethal.

As you peruse this space, works grab you by their anguish and their beauty. There’s a shadow of Frida Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital of 1932 in Van den Berg’s wall installation For the Unlamented 2001-2004, which describe the framing device of a hospital bed.

Van den Berg’s installation Pile of Stones is a pillar to stones that have been thrown, and there is a sense of unbearable violence dovetailed with unutterable beauty that recalls the work of Renaissance artist Lorenzo Ghiberti in the relief detail of his Gates of Paradise.

Indeed, the Renaissance trope in Van den Berg’s oeuvre is rich and deep. In Gland: Beautiful II, a simple sculptural work on the show’s upstairs level, the mystery and the horror of a bubo, a growth, reveals itself in the armpit of a disembodied limb. This relatively quiet work is an astounding essay of depth and complexity into the secrets that the body can hold, that only reveal themselves in times of urgency.

The show touches the bases of the traditions of artist’s books and exploratory drawings. Small texts in Van den Berg’s handwriting give him a presence as you work through the drawing books and the erotic images, and there’s a constant dance between inside and outside that is at once sacred and profane, deeply intelligent and yet playful.

Porous is on show at the Wits Art Museum until October 26.