Notes on Analogies: Peter Clarke and Robert Hodgins at Vela Projects

A review by Vusumzi Nkomo on the 18th of June 2024. This should take you 7 minutes to read.

Vela Projects
17.05 - 06.07.2024

Africa remains a territory of the Western imagination, often crudely constructed as an aberrant human domain or as a comical screen upon which the visuals of such imagination can be projected.

– Okwui Enwezor & Octavio Zaya, Colonial Imaginary, Tropes of Disruption: History, Culture, and Representation in the Works of African Photographers¹

In a modest gesture, Vela Projects recently staged a revisionist encounter between the two late artists Peter Clarke (1929-2014) and Robert Hodgins (1920-2010), framed as distant co-travellers whose lives, one Black South African, the other a White English man, are said to be continuous in multiple ways. In this posthumous gathering, titled Heroes and Villains, the two artists are placed in a dialogue we could call, in all fairness, belated. Such is the tragedy of (art) historiography².

Peter Clarke, Boys being Boys, 1976. Photo © Vela Projects (Matt Slater)

The problem of (art) history is a problem of language; the latter conditions the former’s retrospective self-understanding. In stricter, and no less abstract, terms, history is nothing but language. We could say that it is, at a certain level of abstraction, a type of language; fiction. How ‘we³’ ‘see’, or ‘look⁴’ at (art) history is fundamentally a problem of language. History is a problem of language as much as perception⁵ (of that history) is too. We could, with enough mischief, substitute perception with representation and consider how the latter impacts history (and perhaps subject formation) in the context of the exhibition currently under scrutiny.

The ethical demands of Black art

In this show, Vela Projects makes no pretensions to deliver a ‘historical’ show (if we understand a historical show to mean a show doing art historical labour, a retrospective reconstruction of art history, that usually has, as art historian Lize Van Robbroeck instructs in a brief text titled Listening to distant thunder: The art of Peter Clarke⁶, certain detail and paraphernalia of the artist’s life). But the question is, isn’t the pairing of such two artists already art historical? Doesn’t this refusal (to make explicit that this [is] an art historical show) constitute a certain dishonesty, if not conceit on the part of Vela? Between the accompanying catalogue text and press release, we hear of a “shared commitment” by two artists who “shared a deep connection”, and no more detail, a la Van Robbroeck, that could grant us a window into this connection. Let’s take for instance Clarke’s work Boys being Boys (1976), a painting in which two Black boys play on a tree, one resting carelessly against a branch while the other swings facing the viewer; who else can look at this work, knowing what we know of 1976 in South Africa and not think of the state’s necropolitical reproduction and White civil society’s psychic investment in Black death? The same could be said about the triptych Haunted Landscape⁷ (1975) painted by Clarke while spending time in the United States; the painting, composed of three panels of desolate landscapes and petrified figures, populated by dogs, clashing doves, prams and a broken bicycle, is described by Donvé Lee in a South African Art Times issue as a “haunting prophecy⁸” that foresaw the death and destruction of Black life during 1976.

Peter Clarke, The Goatherd, Cape Flats, 1960. Photo © Vela Projects (Matt Slater)

Furthermore, in the paper cited above, Van Robbroeck writes of a “spate of retrospectives of artists who had been written out of the dominant canon of White art history during the apartheid years” (1). Writing in the context of a major late-career retrospective at the South African National Gallery (Cape Town), Listening to distant thunder, curated by art historians Elizabeth Rankin and Philippa Hobbs, Van Robbroeck reflects on the manner in which early Clarke paintings and prints “mostly avoid overt political messaging” (1) and instead preoccupied themselves with the emotive dimension of picture-making. It is, for Van Robbroeck, the formal qualities that are “restless, almost violent”, in contradistinction to the unthreatening themes that make up most of his work at the time. Van Robbroeck tells us that “it is regrettable, on so many levels” that Clarke sacrificed the formal development of his practice in favour of a “strong identification with the political struggle” (2). The ‘political struggle’ must here be understood as the organized commitments by Black people to end the apartheid regime by any means necessary. “[Clarke’s] strength”, Van Robbroeck reminds us, “always resided in his treatment of the human form” (2) where suffering was hinted at rather than explicitly exposed⁹. What follows is a rather striking claim which I quote in full:

If only Peter Clarke had had a big studio, big canvasses to work on, good quality oil paints, fine materials and access to formal training, imagine what we would be seeing here? No wonder he spent so much of his time and talents opposing those very strictures…¹⁰

I wonder if Van Robbroeck meant ‘structures’ instead (and what that slippage would mean, that is, what are its political, and perhaps [art] historical, implications); structures produce strictures but not all strictures are structural. But still, the problems of this passage are profound, that is, deep, albeit beyond the scope of this present text to exhaust; however, we should ask what they mean for how we may remember Clarke but more precisely (that is, more relevant to our discussion here) how we may go about doing the necessary, ethically permissible and intellectually rigorous (art) historical work of assessing and evaluating Clarke’s work as a problem for South African (art) history. To put it otherwise, Clarke’s work as a problem for South Africa “as a violent symbolic and political construct”, to borrow critic Athi Mongezeleli Joja’s phrasing¹¹, and “the ethical tenability of the South African polity and its pretensions to include those it ‘previously’ excluded in its establishment¹²”. Therefore, what does the (curatorial) comparison of Clarke with Hodgins mean right now?

Perhaps we might want to (re)frame the question as less a problem of the possibility, if not tenability, of an ethical comparison between the two artists (and the diegetic worlds they conjure) but simply as follows: what does Clarke do to Hodgins? (Perhaps this line of inquiry could be extended to include a recent George Pemba and Robert Hodgins comparison¹³). Again, what do the ethical demands of a painting such as The Goatherd (1960) do to a work (as well as the perceptions of the viewer) such as Harry in his Armchair (1990) by Robert Hodgins? Hodgins’ Harry, the notorious Harry Oppenheimer, a painting of a figure executed in bright yellow seated in a red chair against a grey ground, stands in an asymmetrical relation of domination to every single figure portrayed by Clarke in The Goatherd, where we see a Black man walking away from us, facing houses and figures spread across the landscape, with goats next and in front of him; we can of course raise the stakes of this problem by connecting the sheer horror and desperation in The Goatherd (the haunting black doors and windows, the dry arid landscape that seems to be sinking in on itself) and the Oppenheimer opulence and red arrogance, considering the latter industrialist traded in the mineral riches of South Africa, a trade that wouldn’t be possible were it not for the wanton destruction of the Black body and dispossession of the land from the very Black to build Harry’s unethical dynasty.

What I’ve been after is how we could go about remember-ing without risking careless analogising modalities that obfuscate rather than clarify structures of violence and not only differing but antagonistic structural positions in relation to art history (and the world).