Sacred fragments: looking back at the art of Paul Stopforth.

Even today, Paul Stopforth is best known in South Africa for his graphic anti-apartheid art of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1999, this aspect of his work was also brought to the attention of an American audience through the Liberated Voices exhibition held at the Museum of African Art in New York. The exhibition included a 1979 triptych (Fig. 1) in which Stopforth depicted the three security policemen who had interrogated Black Consciousness Leader, Steve Biko, in 1977 I see D'Amato 1999:42). Stopforth said some years later that his intention in depicting Biko's interrogators in this work had been to "show how terribly ordinary these men looked except perhaps the one with dark glasses (Colonel Harold Snyman)." Referring to the shadow of a chair in the background of his triptych, the artist added that "it is a reference to the "struggle' that was supposed to have taken place while Steve was in their custody. The most mundane objects can take on frightening connotations in prisons and interrogation spaces" (Williamson 1989:112). (1)

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When Paul Stopforth, then in his early 40s, left South Africa in 1988--shortly before the unexpected release of Nelson Mandela and others from prison in February 1990--he did so with a heavy heart. He believed that nothing would ever change the realities of racism and human rights abuses that had increased steadily following the rise to power of the Nationalist regime in 1948. (2) Having escaped the insanity of the deeply divided society in which he had grown up, he assumed that he would never be able to return to the land of his birth. For Stopforth, South Africa's first democratic election of 1994 was therefore all the more breathtaking, in fact, nothing short of miraculous. But he also regards this miracle as a powerful lesson in the impermanence of all things. This is a notion he has come to embrace through his interest in Buddhism, which began to grow following his decision to leave South Africa.

Although voluntary, Stopforth's exile has never been easy. Longing to go home, he considered returning to South Africa after the release of Mandela and the unbanning of political organizations like the African National Congress (ANC). For complicated personal and other reasons, his contact with the country was restricted to brief family visits until 2003, almost ten years after the momentous election of 1994. In 2003, he undertook the boat trip to the former prison Robben Island that has become a major tourist attraction since these trips were first introduced in January 2001. This visit inspired Stopforth to produce a series of works depicting objects, or fragments of objects, from Nelson Mandela's cell and from the surrounding environment in which Mandela and other political prisoners had lived for over two decades. Carefully observed and transcribed, these traces from a tragically inhuman past are all remarkably mundane: simple items like dustbins (Fig. 2), the hinge of a wall cupboard (Fig. 3), a neatly folded prison blanket (Fig. 4) and a mounted siren (Fig. 5). The things Stopforth recorded in these works are in fact so commonplace that they could easily have been taken from the everyday surroundings of anyone anywhere in the world. As Stopforth points out, however, since 1994 Robben Island has become a quasireligious space, a place of pilgrimage for those seeking to honor the apartheid era saints and martyrs who dedicated their lives to a political cause that to him seemed increasingly hopeless by the late 1980s. Viewed from this perspective, it is the ordinariness of Stopforth's Robben Island works that makes them so extraordinary, for although they are all secular objects, with time these items have acquired the status of relics.

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In some respects, these drawings seem far removed from Stopforth's earlier images of apartheid interrogators and their victims, which record the devastating dehumanization of not only political prisoners, but also the violent perpetrators who routinely maimed and killed men, women, and children. These earlier works bore witness to the harsh realities of a society in which detentions without trial and the deaths of political detainees had become everyday occurrences, but already, some of his graphite drawings focused on seemingly mundane details (Fig. 6). Notable in this regard was his treatment of hands and feet, many of which evoked the posthumous forensic photographs of Steve Biko. in these drawings, Stopforth's attention to the specific effectively anchored the deaths of political detainees in the ordinary world of everyday experience. Yet it also afforded him an opportunity to reflect on the timelessness reality of human suffering. Ultimately, therefore, these images transcend the political moment to which they owe their existence.

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With hindsight, Stopforth also feels that the works he produced at this dark moment in the history of South Africa are probably as much a reflection of the damage inflicted by the apartheid regime on privileged white South Africans like himself, as they are a document of the tragic death of some of its most courageous black activists. When he first made these works, the artist's own sense of guilt at receiving the economic and other benefits bestowed on white South Africans by the apartheid regime actively prevented him from confronting his own suffering. It was only after Stopforth had left South Africa that he allowed himself the space to do so. Although, at the time, Stopforth was completely oblivious to the fact that his own suffering may have been the main catalyst for his decision to leave the country, according to him it gradually dawned on him after he went into voluntary exile that his psychological survival hinged on his decision to leave his beloved birthplace.

Several interesting issues are raised by Stopforth's retrospective conviction that his politically charged images of the 1980s are more resonant than they may seem at first sight. Most obviously, it now seems that the apparently radical break between the works he produced before and after leaving South Africa should probably not be taken at face value. Unlike his comparatively simple, monotone images of the 1980s, the works Stopforth produced in the course of the 1990s are generally very colorful; in addition, many are characterized by a tendency to overlay seemingly unrelated themes and forms. But in both his earlier, overtly political works, and in some of those dating to the 1990s and later, Stopforth repeatedly revisits the motif of the hand that he first introduced as part of the series of drawings (Fig. 6) associated with Steve Biko's death (Deliss 1995:146-7). (3) Thus, in paintings such as Bodhisattva (1991; Fig. 7), one of the works Stopforth made soon after he settled in the US, an image of cupped hands floats above a mountainous landscape. More than ten years later, this motif is still evident in works such as Unfurl (2002; Fig. 8), in which a series of overlaid hands float on a ground that intentionally alludes to some of the designs commonly found on African textiles.

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By his own account, Stopforth's decision to leave South Africa was a completely life-transforming experience, mainly because it induced in him an initially alarming sense of total dislocation. Largely through his growing interest in Buddhist philosophy and practice, the artist managed slowly to come to terms with the conviction, born from this sense of dislocation, that all life experiences are characterized by the inevitability of change and flux. Works such as Bodhisattva obviously attest to this burgeoning interest, in part because the title evokes association with the notion of Buddhahood. Here and elsewhere, Stopforth's primary concern is to explore the idea of compassionate altruism that is said to have encouraged the Buddha--and all later bodhisattvas--to seek enlightenment not only for themselves but also for others, in many cases postponing their own entry into Nirvana in order to assist those around them to achieve this goal. More specifically, this and other works, such as Unfurl, refer to mudras, the signs and gestures made with hands and fingers that are said to symbolize the enlightenment and vows of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. In esoteric Buddhism, these mudras are regarded as a way of achieving union with Mahavairochana Buddha, the source from which all Buddhas and bodhisattvas spring (see English Buddhist Dictionary Committee 2002).

Although, in one sense, these later works bear witness to Stopforth's conviction that it was pointless to produce work alluding to the political situation in South Africa once he had settled in the US, at another fairly obvious level, the artist continued to grapple with the notion of human suffering--his own as well as that of others. This comparison between his early and later works clearly extends beyond the theme of suffering, however, for it would seem that Stopforth has always been concerned to explore the selflessness of those who were and are prepared to defend the rights of oppressed and marginalized groups regardless of the cost to themselves. In the artist's politically inspired drawings of the 1980s, his comment on this selflessness is bleakly pessimistic, since at that stage Stopforth was convinced that there was no hope for a better future in South Africa. In the works he produced after he settled in the US, the selflessness of Bodhisattva--a deeply comforting promise of compassion and protection--is suggested by the motif of cupped hands, while the increasingly joyous play of crossed hands over an extended surface, as in Unfurl, seems positively celebratory, more a reflection on the potential for attaining enlightenment than a comment on the inevitability of human suffering fuelled by an inability to accept and embrace impermanence.

In works such as these, and in the Robben Island series (2003), Stopforth explores the idea of a transcendent dimension in the physical world by suggesting a new relationship between object and ground. In the earlier "political" works dating to the 1970s and 1980s, his forms relate to their backgrounds in physical terms, whether concrete or atmospheric. In these later works, the two elements are physically disjunctive. Their relationship is therefore thematic rather than spatial. Here, Stopforth welcomes the tension between object and ground above all because it introduces uncertainty both in the reading of the image and in the creative process. His sense that the disparate elements of his images take on a life of their own appeals to the artist in part because he has long been suspicious of his facility as a draughtsman; more importantly, though, it seems to confirm for him the presence of the transcendent within the material world.

This concern to suggest a transcendent reality is captured, very eloquently, in the work Stopforth donated to South Africa's Constitutional Court in 2003. The relief sculpture, which the artist calls Freedom Dancer: The South African (Fig. 9), depicts a man in workers' clothes jumping into the air against a background of four large hands that frame but thereby also enfold the worker's animated body. According to Stopforth, the large hands serve to hold the dancer, who is consequently free to express himself in the secure knowledge that he is protected from all possible dangers. In this sense, the work symbolizes South Africa's release from the bondage of apartheid and the promise of legally entrenched rights to all its citizens, but it also suggests comparison with the idea commonly upheld in South Africa's so-called independent churches that dancing is a joyous affirmation of the power vested in God and in the ancestors, who seek to protect the living from the material realities of pain and suffering.

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Having realized that most of his works map the journey through life of both himself and others, Stopforth has finally let go of the sense he had before he left South Africa that it is possible to separate the experiences of the Self from that of the Other. By doing so, he has gained a constantly expanding understanding of what it means to be human. Instead of viewing the search for our humanness as an essentially material project, he now believes that freedom from suffering must also be seen as a spiritual endeavor. Fuelled by this conviction, Stopforth has begun to recognize that many of his works--both past and present--affirm the idea not only of the extraordinary in the ordinary and the sacred in the secular, but also of the necessity to acknowledge and embrace the power of guides, saints, and martyrs.

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2004.]

(1.) Biko was assaulted by state security officers before dying of a massive brain hemorrhage after being transported--naked but shackled--over 1000km (621 miles) from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria in the back of a police van in September 1977.

(2.) My sincere thanks to Paul Stopforth for sharing his insights, ideas, and memories with me when I saw him in Boston in April 2004. It confirmed my warm recollections of him when I--then a graduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand--first met him in the late 1970s. At that stage, Paul Stopforth was a lecturer in the Wits Fine Arts Department.

(3.) The Johannesburg Art Gallery has several of these untitled graphite drawings dating to 1980.

References cited

D'Amato, M. 1999. "Beyond the Trauma: The Transition of the Resistance Aesthetic in Contemporary South African Art." In Liberated Voices. Contemporary Art from South Africa, edited by F. Herreman. New York: Museum of African Art.

Deliss, C., ed. 1995. Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa. Paris and New York: Flammation.

English Buddhist Dictionary Committee, The. 2002. The Soka Gakkai Dictionaey Of Buddhism. Tokyo: Soka Gakkai.

Williamson, S. 1989. Resistance Art. Art in South Africa. Cape Town and London: David Philip and Catholic Institute of International Relations.