gouache on paper

Artwork date: 1976
Signature details: signed and dated; inscribed with the title and medium on the reverse

(1)

48 x 68 cm

Acquired from the artist's estate.

Notes:

Like a good vintage wine, the further we go back to Peter Clarke’s earlier works – treated with ambivalence when they were produced – the more we learn to appreciate their impact.The more we look, the more we realise that Clarke’s work wasn’t just prescient, it was insightful about the time of its making. It is upon discovering this spatio-temporal
acumen, expressed in the simplest non-posturing and yet most contemplative expressionism, that we realise that it is us who have been playing catch up to Clarke’s oeuvre. This sensitivity and insight is brilliantly expressed in these two works, Their shadow hangs over us (1974) (Lot 53), and Dinge kannie so aangaan nie (1976) (Lot 51). Their concerns and visual prose, slightly anachronistic, invoke a variation of the typical township-outdoor themes, albeit without their street buzz. It’s such, that from the perspective of the reigning
approaches in the 1970s, they appear subdued in comparison to the more confrontational aesthetic of the time. In the 1970s, committed anti-apartheid or ‘protest’ art developed in response to the political provocations of the regime. This type of art took precedence over the largely reflective demeanour of the previous decades, but upon closer examination, Clarke’s work, despite being more subdued, exposes the blind spots of protest culture, subtly questioning adopted superficial distinctions between reflection and confrontation. Clarke was evicted from Simon’s Town in 1972, and dumped in a newly established coloured township called Ocean View, ironically situated away from the sea. In the wake of the Group
Areas Act, as art historians Phillippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin have noted, Clarke’s work reflects the spread of the social dislocation these forced removals caused, by way of
documenting and capturing the subsequent uncertainty.1 Both works depict communities of seemingly bewildered and secluded people in an environment threatened by disappearance.

This is an impression immediately suggested by the ambivalent titles that register a sense of testimony and refusal. Documenting this tragedy of perpetual loss of self and place, is another way of refusing to forget and refusing to accept the status quo. Are these representations of the same place and reality taken from different angles and times? Consider how in both images, the warm washes of yellow and orange spread from the foreground to the outer edges of the picture, connecting the sand dunes (a running motif in Clarke’s work from the 1960s) with the cabins, and are only broken at the horizon by mournful washes of blue and black skies. Patches and scribbles of cold and warmer colours punctuate the frame in ways that intensify the feelings of dejection and confusion that sculpt the facial expressions of the figures. From palette to the composition, there’s a pictorial continuity or relation that perhaps can only be understood through a shared collective affect that communities afflicted by similar situations know. Time, here, seems inconsequential. The injury is etched in the memory like a scar, or a wound, that when the mind remembers, pictures of displacement, unfolding like a blanket of despair. These truths have not, as some have asserted,been particular convictions of his later years. Instead, one can pick them up in the reticent expressions of his much earlier works, subtly expressed through those quotidian moments and definitive palette. So it’s not only a matter of Clarke’s work growing on you, but how the artist stimulates our growing in how we read him.

Athi Mongezeleli Joja