In Clive van den Berg’s sculpture Love’s Ballast (2004), the weight of history seems to lie in a smooth round object on the neck of the powerfully built man lying on his back on a plinth, lower arms stretched upward. Echoing the carved effigies of slain knights in mausoleums in medieval European churches during the Black Plague, the figure memorializes those men who have lost their lives in a modern day pandemic, the twenty-first-century plague of AIDS.
The smooth object is not a rounded stone but an inflamed gland, the feared reality of the specter that haunts every embrace between men, love’s ballast. The arrested action of the upturned arms suggests the cradling of a figure that is no longer there.
Made especially for an exhibition entitled Personal Affects staged in the Cathedral St. John the Divine in New York in 2004, the robustness of Clive van den Berg’s lying man portrays an ideal of male beauty. Says the artist, “I am fascinated by the illusionistic language of Renaissance art, which expresses itself as a belief that bodily grace and a beautiful surface belies and perhaps can stave off confronting the frailty of the interior body.
“This shift from out to inside is also a shift from a confident modern vanity to an imaginative language more medieval in structure: medieval in the sense that since the identification of the HIV virus we have been subject to irrational fear. Developing technologies for coping with these fears and languages for their expression and rationalization is the framework for this and much of my other work.”
A series of elegantly spare monoprints entitled Skin and Ghosts (2006) developed the artist’s theme of the body as porous, permeable, and vulnerable, a battlefield marked by encounters of the past. The splotches marking the bodies might be read as microscopic blowups of pores, emphasizing their accessibility as a point of entry into the body, or perhaps as traces of past memories. The stones recall cairns built to mark a final resting place.
Van den Berg’s recognition that art can provide a space for the memorialization of the past and the direct address of fears has been a hallmark of his multifaceted art production for the past several decades, a practice that has embraced not only painting, sculpture, public art projects, video, and installation, but a stellar curatorial practice.
His work has always celebrated love between men, and in mining the history of homophobia and prejudice in this country and its relationship to apartheid, and in trying to provide a space to confront the reality of AIDS, van den Berg has made a lyrical and elegiac contribution to a difficult discourse.
Skin and Ghosts # V 2006
Monoprint
122 x 55 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
© Clive van den Berg
Love’s Ballast 2004
Wood, blankets
160 x 60 x 60 cm
Collection: South African Broadcasting Corporation
Image courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: John Hodgkiss
© Clive van den Berg
Love’s Ballast 2004
Wood, blankets
160 x 60 x 60 cm
Installation view: Cathedral of
St. John the Divine, New York
Collection: South African Broadcasting Corporation
Image courtesy the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Mario Todeschini
© Clive van den Berg