Peter Clarke: For those absent (triptych), 1987

  • Peter Clarke, For those absent (triptych), 1987
  • In 1985 the United States South Africa Leadership Exchange Program (USSALEP) developed a two-week art workshop which came to be known as the Thupelo Workshops. The intention was to encourage black artists to develop their work along more international and cosmopolitan lines, and away from the narrative works, and the "township" genre, that had been imposed on them under apartheid. Peter Clarke was invited to the inaugural iteration and this is generally regarded as the starting point of his foray into abstraction, a direction into which some of his larger works had been slowly evolving, moving away from the illustrative style for which he was known.
  • While the co-ordinators of the workshop – Bill Ainslie and the America sculptor and critic, Peter Bradley – encouraged participants,...

    Peter Clarke, For those absent (triptych), 1987 (detail panel 1, left side)

    While the co-ordinators of the workshop – Bill Ainslie and the America sculptor and critic, Peter Bradley – encouraged participants, and Clarke in particular, to “throw off the shackles of his ‘usual’ approach to work”, and to embrace freedom of expression, gestural mark-making and experimentation, this was at first a challenge for Clarke. The convictions and value-system of the Abstract-Expressionists was the dominant purview in the field of contemporary art at the time, and the paintings of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock would have been lauded as the pinnacle of achievement. And while this movement was ubiquitous, even present in South Africa, its following was stronger in Westernised centres where its philosophies resonated more acutely. While the values, principles and fundaments of Abstract Expressionism did not truly align to many contemporary artists in Africa, certainly not African contemporary artists, Clarke observed how their value, to him, lay primarily in the large proportions which he understood to be a prerequisite of the genre.
  • The Thupelo Workshop was the first time Clarke ever had the opportunity to work on a large scale. Limited space...

    Peter Clarke, For those absent (triptych), 1987 (detail panel 2, centre)

    The Thupelo Workshop was the first time Clarke ever had the opportunity to work on a large scale. Limited space for a black person in South Africa was standard and had consequently become an unavoidable hallmark of his work. It was also not just the space in which to make these works that was a challenge, but equally difficult was the problem of where to store them afterwards. Clarke lived in a Group Areas apartment in Ocean View which, by the mid-1980s he still shared with his mother and sister who occupied the two upstairs rooms, while he slept downstairs in the living room. The scale of the artworks produced by Clarke, and most of his black contemporaries during this time, was a matter of real practical and physical consideration, more than a lofty conceptual reflection on gesture, materiality, and spontaneity, as was the dominant thrust in the art of the time in the West.

  • Clarke later conceded that working on a large scale did ultimately find a place in his artistic consciousness and would...
    Peter Clarke, For those absent (triptych), 1987 (detail panel 3, right side)

    Clarke later conceded that working on a large scale did ultimately find a place in his artistic consciousness and would have built on his prior encounter with the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. He realised that working on multiple sheets of paper as components of a diptych or triptych format allowed him to make large works even despite a small workspace and floor space. The format of his abstracts of the mid-1980s to late 1990s, featuring flat, monolithic, nondescript walls with diminishing foreground, enclosing on the viewer, and impinging on real space, formed an apt reference to the experience of confinement in the working spaces Clarke was accustomed to. Having been moved from his home in Simonstown to the township misleadingly called Ocean View through the Group Areas Act, Clarke's memory of the place was of the fences that surrounded the suburb.

  • The format of this work was to become the standard framework and composition in the production of most of his...

    Peter Clarke, Lazy Day, 1975

    Image credit: Aspire Art

    The format of this work was to become the standard framework and composition in the production of most of his abstracts, and what he started to refer to as the Ghetto Fence series which spanned the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s. Initially, he often situated figures within spatial settings that were hedged by monolithic walls with plastered moulding and capping and buttresses that were distinctively Cape in origin, such as this example, titled Lazy Day, 1975, which sold for R1,479,400 in June 2018, setting a record at the time.

  • As he progressed deeper into the production of the abstracts, the mid-ground wall and identifiable, domestic details and specific spaces of the foreground gave way to simplified, flat, continuous masonry planes that functioned as support for the content, references and meaning that were to be placed on its surface - compilations of graffiti, quotes, poems, writings, and images. These works are the combination of apparently disparate elements including text, photocopies, found objects and scraps of other thin, pliable materials that Clarke adhered to the surface through a process of building up of paint, then sticking the objects onto the wet painted surface - "paint, collage, paint, collage" as he described it. This was to become the convention for the Ghetto Fence series - the title derived from a 1972 pop song and album by American band War. In 1977 Clarke titled his solo exhibition at the South African Association of Arts in Cape Town: Our world is a ghetto.
     
    The following excerpt about For those absent (1987) is quoted directly from Listening to Distant Thunder and aptly captures the essence of this painting, which features prominently in the book:
  • …Clarke conceived of a ‘ghetto’ theme in more epic terms: as a cruel history of human displacement on the subcontinent....

    Peter Clarke, For those absent (triptych), 1987 (detail)

    …Clarke conceived of a ‘ghetto’ theme in more epic terms: as a cruel history of human displacement on the subcontinent. The triptych For those absent (1987) is inundated with poems, texts, and graffiti, including Clarke’s poem ’Spirit-world: Koi-san’, which was to be repeated as a hand written inscription in a work in his Fan series…
  • …The triptych fuses brutal histories that have laid waste to human freedom: that of the Khoisan, all but exterminated by...

    Peter Clarke, For those absent (triptych), 1987 (detail)

    …The triptych fuses brutal histories that have laid waste to human freedom: that of the Khoisan, all but exterminated by European expansion; the subjugation of the Xhosa and their national suicide prompted by the prophetess Nonquase [sic];…

  • …the 615 soldiers of the South African Native Labour Corps drowned in 1917 with the sinking of the Mendi and denied recognition by the colonial government for their sacrifice;…

    …victimisation of people through apartheid pass laws; the death of Hector Pieterson and other schoolchildren during the Soweto Uprising; and the plight of frail and disabled people everywhere. Below a list of townships bulldozed or destroyed during forced removals Clarke wrote: 'Bless this home, O Lord, we pray (because tomorrow the Group Areas Act might scatter us to hell and gone)'...

  • Peter Clarke, For those absent (triptych), 1987 (detail)
  • …In this entanglement of historical trauma is another text relating to Clarke's own family experiences, a prose piece on his...
    Peter Clarke, For those absent (triptych), 1987 (detail)

    …In this entanglement of historical trauma is another text relating to Clarke's own family experiences, a prose piece on his slave ancestry, which he had read on Heritage Day 1998 at the Slave Lodge in Cape Town, at Dis Nag, an exhibition exploring the 'shaded heritage' of slavery at the Cape. Clarke observed that people in South Africa were becoming readier to acknowledge 'skeletons in the cupboard'; in the case of his own forebears, he commented with a shrug: 'You have to come from somewhere. And you can't change your ancestry'.

  • Clarke's biographers, Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin, note how this process of creating non-representational, abstract artworks, and the concept of Modernist Abstraction, per se, in the context of South African apartheid, was in itself an ideologically loaded act and a statement of resistance as the process emphasised the artist-as-maker - an assertion of the artistic self through the act of making. Reflecting on the process of making abstract collages and the vigour it created in him, Clarke commented: "it's amazing what happens when you are possessed".

  • Sources:

    Koloane, D. (1999). 'Postapartheid expression and a new voice'. In F. Herreman (ed.), Liberated voices: Contemporary art from South Africa. New York: Museum for African Art, pp.21-22.

    Hobbs, P. and Rankin, E. (2011). Listening to Distant Thunder: The Art of Peter Clarke. Cape Town: Fernwood Press. pp.167-185.
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