Clifford Charles Exhibition Catalogue

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A selection of work from the Umwelt exhibition by Clifford Charles at NIROXprojects space from

17 January - 1 July 2012.

Installation view | Clifford Charles | Umwelt | 2012

Installation view | Clifford Charles | Umwelt | 2012

(l-r) Obfuscate | One Day | Maybe | Chinese calligraphy ink on 425gsm Arches paper | 160 x 121cm | 2012

Johnny Hangman

OrnithologyThe Fiscal is a small black and white bird, of about 23 cm long. Black on the back with a prominent white V; a white chest and a powerful bill, with a hooked tip and a tooth just under the hook, so it can inflict a vicious bite. The name Johnny Hangman for the Fiscal is derived from the habit of impaling prey such as large insects, small snakes, lizards and even small rodents, on thorns or barbed-wire fences. There will be more on judicial birds later, in the meantime we will focus on water, and ink; paint and skin, just as important in this text.

Drawing Through PerceptionSouth Africa is loaded with meaning, so much of it, that it becomes difficult to articulate the various feelings that emanate from those interested in the country beyond what it can provide them. Statistics say one thing, lived realities another. And the measure-ments of State apparati have never been in alignment with the estimations artists make, at least those artist that matter.Back in 1983 when Clifford Charles started at the Wits School of Arts he had a discussion with the palaeoanthropologist and political activist, Philip. V. Tobias (who died earlier this year) about a set of drawings he made called “metamorphosis”. This was a series of figurative drawings that dealt with the flattening of surface and notions of ‘flow’ which has proven very important in the work that he has been made since then. ‘Flow’ in relationship to works being produced were his statement on, and resistance to the situation that he found himself in within the country. Unequal societies always force the need to complicate perception and meaning so that the artist does not fall into mechanistic, dualistic, or even Manichaean ideas of the society they inhabit. When one is engaged in representing their own society, it is far too easy to fall into self-serving subjectivities, Charles’s manipulation of ‘flow’ meant that he had to engage with what he produced, rather than prescribe a fixed idea of what his production was going to be.

Leaving the country gave Charles a particular perspective on his homeland, and while this is not one of those descriptions of the émigré’s return, the opportunity to engage with his own practice within the NIROX Residency Program has allowed him to engage and show parts of his practice that did not receive much attention outside this country. There were lots of other aspects of Charles’ practice that excited an audience able to engage with the formal and aesthetic concerns of the work, and even placed him as a po-litical artist, nonetheless the nuances, and subtleties within the work were lost on an audience who required constant explanation to understand what they were engaging with. To be able to speak back to the original voices that generated the discussion in the first place allows for an innate immediacy between representation and content.

Freedom, in the country, while bringing to an end a particular type of oppression, did however allow new forms of repression to merge: black-and-white, black on white, white on black, and varying permutations outside this simplicity.

Water and ink combinations on paper allow for particular discussions to occur before us. Water first, ink as memory, inscribing his-tory, narrative, and the law onto the surface, telling what it knows to be true (allowing the complications of truth to emerge), akin to Kafka’s judicial machine so gruesomely described in his short story In the Penal Colony where the judicial device deliberately and calmly writes the accusation, judgement and sentence onto the body of the accused leaving no option but terminating punishment.

Installation view | Clifford Charles | Umwelt | 2012

Self-Observation

In Susan Sontag’s 1966 ‘Against Interpretation‘ she notes that she writes and watches herself write. In the same way Clifford Charles draws and watches himself draw. This is drawing through perception, sensing, attempting to represent, and then letting everything flow, allowing himself to die as a creator so that his audience can engage, actively, with their own meaning and new understanding.

Drawing like this allows a form of anonymity, where the mark and marked is coded through accident, where the drawing pro-duces itself almost as if Clifford were not there. This manifest confidence that allows meaning to form itself on the page as water and ink flows, is similar to the way that monochromes capture more of lived experience through absence of definable content within the picture plane as against attempts at depicting complicated experiences outside the capabilities of the singular object.

Installation view | Clifford Charles | Umwelt | 2012

Skin PaintingsWithin the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) by Haruki Murakami there is a description of a man being skinned alive, with such skill and finesse that not a drop of blood is supposed to fall. The Skinners, if this is what one calls those who skin people alive, pride themselves in the sharpness of their knives and the dexterity represented in and by their actions. The depiction within the novel is so clear that one can feel the skin being removed from the body, leaving musculature and tendons in sight. There is much in this image that makes one become rather precious about one’s own skin, and this leads me to the essence of painting that Clifford Charles presents to us.

Finally there is colour, after all that black-and-white. In this instance colours used in such a way to address the implicit harshness represented by one hue placed next to another. The use of colour allows Charles to breathe, suddenly it is possible to declare inten-tion. Black-and-white, within this exhibition, speaks of time, anonymity, the self. Colour on the other hand allows an opportunity to bring all the spontaneity of making, into object status. As Clifford said, and I quote “colour allows the warmth of the sun on skin”. The return to the visceral from the cerebral, the exploration of lived experience over observation, tells us that the colours in the paintings represent moments of personal elevation. There is always the need for escape within the creation of artworks, and this is one of those moments.

There is always chaos in colour and the emergent relationships between colours. These paintings are attempts, are ways of bringing harmony into this chaos, peace into conflict, a type of silence. This is a desire to reclaim colour, to take it back both to the picture plane, to celebrate the body, and life.

Skin is everywhere, you are all breathing it in as you stand in this gallery. Skin of the painting, skin of the body, all is about skin in this country suffused with meaning. It is almost impossible to speak of the skin of the painting without engaging with the violence made legitimate through skin.

So back to Murakami, and I see visions of flayed skin, attempts at dexterity that belies the constant representations of passion skin allows. One is forced to raise a set of speculative questions: How do we position ourselves in relationship to these epidermal configurations? How do we render it aesthetic, so that we can consume it without conscience? How do we take stances that allows us to point fingers? How do we deal with what is such a fundamental yet contradictory part of our constructed selves?

It is however pleasing to see a painting stripped of its skin. It helps to problematize our acceptance of what the painting is and can do. What and where is the painting? Where does the painting and an image begin? And like Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, much more work will need to be done on unpacking this conundrum.

Artist and Skin painting | Acrylic paint | 240 x 200cm | 2012

The Bushes

Like tumbleweed, acacia bushes make their way through the gallery space. The branches become the marks not present in the drawing. Linked to NIROX, they pull us back to the sense of tension between the artist and place. Bushes, have such reli-gious connotations, especially within the Judaeo-Christian imagination. They are either burning, or babies are being caught in them, or meetings are held around them. The thorns remind us of penitence, of martyrs, of self-flagellation, of remorse, of self-invention. so when one meets them staking their claim outside their natural habitat, attention needs to be paid. Yet I digress.

I did promise a return to Johnny Hangman, or the fiscal, if you prefer its proper name. It is assumed that the fiscal returns to eat worms out of the rotting corpses it has strategically placed on thorns, there are also those that say they do not return to the site of their gruesome act, rendering the capture and hanging a complete waste of time. Such are the ways of nature.

Whatever it may be, these acacia bushes, when combined with a fiscal’s activities, become quite an indictment of South Af-rican society. The impalement of the collective unconscious is one that represents judgement meted out on the self when it recognises that the enduring violence handed out onto each other without state obligation is much more scar-ring to the soul. Thankfully this is tempered by the optimism represented by Charles’ ‘flow’, the celebration of skin, the delight of colour, and his pulling us back to the joys of everyday living, his reminding us that the sun shines on us all.

© Raimi Gbadamosi 2012 Johannesburg.© RGb 2012 Johannesburg.

Installation view | Clifford Charles | Umwelt | 2012

Acquiescence series | Chinese calligraphy ink on 300gsm handmade paper | 30 x 30cm | 2012

Installation view | Clifford Charles | Umwelt | 2012

Deformation Professionelle | Ink on 600gsm Hahnemuhle paper | 51 x 62cm | 2012

Installation view | Clifford Charles | Umwelt | 2012

(l-r) Zeitgeist II | Zeitgeist III | Ink on 600gsm Hahnemuhle paper | 37,5 x 55cm | 2012

THE ARTISTClifford Charles spent his formative years within the ‘Engaged Art’ practice of Southern AfricaInitially he started out with South Africa’s first Black Theatre company, The Dhlomo Theatre organization. He historically graduated from Witwatersrand University in Fine Arts and subsequently worked with the Afrika Cultural Centre, an art activist group working during the struggle against Apartheid.Subsequently he has researched, written and exhibited locally and internationally. He was invited to take part in ‘Faultlines’ as part of the 50th Venice Biennale’03 and completed his first solo exhibition for (Iniva) London as part of the BBC Africa’05. Clifford’s ‘Terror-firmer’ Exhibition explored similar social issues in Rwanda and South Africa and it toured France in 2005 and 2006.He designed an innovative multi-media dance performance hosted by Vuyani Dance in Amsterdam to celebrate South Africa’s De-cade of Democracy and completed an exhibition “Memory & Modernism” at a conference for Durban & Malmo University Sweden.In addition to an Art residency at Monash University Charles ran children’s workshops at “Art Play” in Melbourne, Australia. He served as the South African convener of the “South” conference for artists and crafters from a selection of countries of the Southern Hemisphere exploring the theme of artmaking in post colonial worlds.After completing a ‘multi-lingual’ art book on Soweto Charles went on to partake in an art residency at Atelier d’ Estienne, in Brit-tany. He exhibited in Amsterdam at the Thami Mynele Foundation and also at Nante in Brittany.In 2011 Royal Academician Frank Bowling hosted a group exhibition in London, with Charles as part of the “Bowlings Cru”.

www.cliffordcharles.co.uk

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View Prof. Raimi Gadamosi’s opening speech here: http://youtu.be/Jw78d5uOoVc

Design and layout: Neil Nieuwoudt