Recuperating the archive: Clive van den Berg 'New Work' at the Goodman Gallery Cape
by Joe Palmer
In 'Archive Fever', Jacques Derrida recalls that arkhé the Greek word for 'government', and the etymological root of 'archive' simultaneously names the commencement and the commandment. Archives are necessarily innovative; but this innovation always constrains and is constrained by law.
Both institutive and conservative, the archive is revolutionary and traditional at once. This paradox, to the archive, appears to be the conceptual impetus for Clive van den Berg's latest body of work.
That the exhibition is itself an archive complicates this exploration by ostensibly constraining it to the very limits that it seems to place in question. However, the visual rather than written language of these sculptures and monotypes (of books, figures and abstract landscapes) imposes other limits on its record.
In the leaflet prepared for the exhibition, Rosalind Morris regards its departure from convention as fundamental to its project of 'inscrib[ing] the possibilities of being other'. (The absence of title is the most obvious example of the exhibition's unconventionality.) However, what Morris fails to note is the necessary failure of its 'departure'.
Meaningful language, both written and visual, is constrained by convention. The ineluctability of conventional language is ostensibly suggested in the invitation to the exhibition. Here the vacuum created by the absence of title was apparently unacceptable; the term 'New Work' appears, rather ironically, below the artist's name, inadvertently conferring a title on the exhibition. Presumably, this was not van den Berg's intention; nevertheless, it is indicative of the way in which his exhibition is bound to certain laws of presentation. As an archive itself, the commencement of its content was also always a commandment constraining how and what the content contains.
Although van den Berg attempts to transgress the limits imposed by a title, the obviousness and intra-reference of the works' individual titles nonetheless have an equivalent effect. The thematization implied by, for example, Underneath, Notes Against Amnesia, Generations, Retrospect, and Clutter of the Past appears at odds with the aforementioned gesture against subsumption.
Indeed, the specificities of some individual titles short-circuit the works' apparent pursuits of other archival limits. Such reductive titles as Notes Against Amnesia, Clutter of the Past, and Sleepers with Room for Ghost constrain interpretation of the sculptures they name so that the written, somewhat problematically, usurps the primacy of the visual.
However, such constrained works perhaps serve a necessary function in the exhibition by providing a limiting framework through which to decipher the more enigmatic, more interesting, and most other pieces.
The carved cover of the tome entitled Frail Geography resembles both crumpled paper and, directed by the title, a relief map. The same textual pun appears in Maps, Receiving and Expelling I and II. This ambiguity not only links the provisionality of the written with (visual) geographic representation, but also relates the arbitrary demarcation of geographic boundaries to the dismembering effect of language.
Scaffold consists of five levels of precarious miniature scaffolding; it is a literal framework. The title is ambiguous: it designates both a temporary and contingent structure, and a site for executions; that is, it suggests potential for change and/or violence.
On each of its levels rest logs carved out of wood, which appear to have been logged: flags, similar to those in Event, are stuck into them. The pun on 'log', both a part of a tree, and an official record of events, links the archive with its conventional substrate: wood, or more precisely, paper.
The relationship of wood to paper, and thus to books, history, the archive, perhaps accounts for the curiously unspecified wood of the sculptures: paper is made from wood, not oak, teak or beech. Thus, far from inattentiveness, this non-specificity suggests a nuanced consideration of the relationship between the medium and its mediation.
Monotypes are single prints taken from a painted design. The monotypes thus register with the sculptures through their singularities, as well as through their respective paper and wood substrates.
More significantly, however, the monotypes reference printing, the technology that sustains the archive, while denying its reproducibility. This denial accords with this archive's singular record of contingency: if this archive is repeated, is reproduced, it will necessarily be repeated with difference.
Gland Tree, a sculpture of an open book, appears to supplement the thesis of this archive's irreproducibility. On the book's recto, carved in relief, is a thin tree trunk with branches, rooted into a foot; the branches bear buds, which the title declares to be glands.
In her essay, Morris links glands with the unconscious. What is interesting about this link is that awareness of either generally heightens when ill; but even then their invisibilities qualify this 'awareness', inscribing it with mystery.
Perhaps this is the significance of the reduction of the human body to nothing but its glands. It is an archive of illnesses otherwise impossible to record; and, as such, a recording of events conventionally excluded from the archive, exclusions that are acts of violence on bodies, the 'glands' of which will consequently swell.
The inexorable enmeshment of the body and the archive appears further articulated in the exhibition's centerpiece, the full-figure sculpture Wounds Graced by Flowers. It deceitfully appears to be pieced together with individually carved bits of wood, secured with wooden plugs, and from which carved flowers delicately hang; the title declares the plugs to be wounds.
Wounds not only hold the figure together, they are also generative. If every act of language is a violent act, if articulation requires excision and exclusion, then creation, this piece suggests, is inseparable from violence.
That to remember is also always to dismember suggests that the archive is inexorably amnesic. Nevertheless, what van den Berg's visual archive suggests is the possibility of recuperating this forgetfulness.
Opens: October 11
Closes: November 1
Goodman Gallery Cape
3rd Floor Fairweather House, 176 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock
Tel: (021) 462 7573
Fax: (021) 462 7579
Email: info@goodmangallerycape.com
Hours: Tue - Fri 9.30am - 5.30pm, Sat 10am - 4pm
