Wopko Jensma: Between Myth, Madness, and the Making of a South African Avant‑Garde
Wopko Pieter Jensma (born 26 July 1939 in Ventersdorp, South Africa) remains one of the most enigmatic artistic figures of twentieth‑century South Africa: equally known for his avant‑garde poetry and his explorative visual art. His life trajectory from a promising hybrid of printmaker, poet, and social critic to a mysterious disappearance in August 1993 reflects both the brilliance and the tragedy of an artist shaped by apartheid’s pressures and his struggles with schizophrenia.
Jensma’s visual and textual work operated at the intersection of fantasy and political resistance. His artistic identity was not easily pinned down into neat art‑historical categories. In both his poetry and his prints, he drew from African mythic visual vocabularies, European avant‑garde experiments (e.g., Dada and Surrealism), and a distinctly South African confrontation with racialized structures of power.
His impact on South African art history, though often under‑acknowledged in mainstream archival narratives until recent scholarly rediscovery, is now being re-evaluated as pivotal in the quest for new South African identities in art and language.
Formative Years and Academic Background
Jensma grew up in Middelburg in the Eastern Cape, the eldest son of Dutch immigrant Pieter Duurt Jensma and Anna Coetzee. He pursued a BA in Fine Arts (sculpture) at the University of Pretoria from 1961 to 1964 and later enrolled for a Teacher’s Diploma at the University of Potchefstroom in 1965, which he abandoned after a motorcycle accident.
This formal training provided him with foundational skills but never confined his oeuvre to academic conventions. Instead, Jensma’s education manifested in a body of work that was technically assured yet conceptually restless, blending linocuts, monotypes, woodcuts, and painting with languages and idioms drawn from both African folklore and avant‑garde poetics. His artistic trajectory was nonlinear—embedded in poetry, print, and social critique, making him difficult for institutions and critics of his time to classify.
Poetry and Linguistic Innovation
Parallel to his visual art, Jensma produced three notable poetry collections in the 1960s and 70s: Sing for Our Execution (1973), Where White is the Colour/Where Black is the Number (1974), and I Must Show You My Clippings(1977). These works were known for their linguistic hybridity, mixing English, Afrikaans, and African languages, as well as mnemonic rhythms that invoke jazz-like spontaneity.
His poetry often broke apart conventional syntax, collapsing linguistic hierarchies and defying easy translation. This formal experimentation was political in itself: it resisted apartheid’s linguistic segregation, foregrounding a creative blending of voices that challenged dominant cultural norms. Critics have described his work as exhibiting qualities of “mineur letterkunde” (minor literature)—a concept wherein language itself becomes a vehicle for collective political expression and deterritorialization.
This blending is also tied to his political consciousness, pushing back against stratified social categories. Jensma’s unfinished poems often took on a collective voice, avoiding the individual ‘I’ to emphasize shared human experience and suffering under systemic oppression.
Visual Art: Mythic Forms, Print Politics, and Abstract Syntax
Jensma’s visual art is striking for its hybrid morphology: figures that are at once human, animal, and spirit‑like, often rendered in stark contrasts or processing forms reminiscent of African iconography fused with surreal or expressionist gestures. Art historian Wilhelm van Rensburg notes that although Jensma is usually remembered as a poet, his graphic print work, woodcuts, linocuts, and silkscreens were central to his multidisciplinary practice, with motifs that oscillate between the monstrous, mythical, and symbolic.
Many works on the market today, such as Abstract Composition (dated 1973), attest to his formal command of composition and abstraction. These monoprints and abstract figures still command significant interest among collectors, with some lots fetching several thousand South African Rands at auction. For example, Bone of Contentionsold for nearly ZAR 17,588, while Abstract Composition has been valued between ZAR 50,000–70,000 in contemporary sales.
Art auction records show a steady interest in Jensma’s output over the last decade, with estimates for works on paper spanning from ZAR 4,000 to ZAR 18,000 depending on rarity and condition. The steady turnover of nearly 100 lots with an over 68% sell‑through rate suggests a robust and sustained market presence, albeit still niche compared to more canonical South African artists.
His prints often incorporate biomorphic shapes, abstracted masks, and figure‑like outlines. These forms evoke the spiritual cosmologies of African traditions, yet remain firmly modernist in their arrangement and compositional logic. Jensma was influenced by African mythic themes and the avant‑garde’s embrace of the irrational (e.g., Dada), producing hybrid symbols that visualize psychological as well as social conflict.
Exhibitions, Reach, and Institutional Presence
During the late 1960s and 1970s, Jensma exhibited actively across South Africa. His work was shown at the South African Association of Art (SAAA), Lidchi Art Gallery, Natal Society of Art (NSA), and Gallery Y in Hillbrow, among others. Notably, he displayed work abroad in New York and Oxford as early as 1970, a rare international presence for a South African artist engaged in politically charged forms at that time.
By 1979, Jensma’s prints were included in the South African Printmakers exhibition at the South African National Gallery, an institutional recognition that positioned him alongside prominent contemporaries. Today, his work is part of permanent collections in national institutions like the South African National Gallery (Cape Town), Durban Art Gallery, and the University of the Witwatersrand Gallery.
This institutional presence is vital to understanding Jensma’s reach: while rarely celebrated as a household name, his inclusion in significant collections has now ensured that his visual legacy endures beyond sporadic auction listings.
Identity, Politics, and Artistic Resistance
Jensma’s art cannot be separated from the political turbulence of apartheid South Africa. His interracial marriage (illegal under apartheid) led to expatriation for a period, and his work expressed acute discomfort with racial divisions. His poetry and art fuse critique with a metaphysical call for unity, transcending socially imposed categories, a bold stance in a system that enforced rigid binaries like “white” and “black” through law and violence.
Scholars argue that his work contributed to an early imagining of a new South African identity—one that was not beholden to apartheid’s linguistic, racial, and cultural divisions. His fluid and hybrid artistic languages symbolized the possibility of alternative narratives.
Mental Health, Isolation, and Disappearance
Jensma’s later years were overshadowed by his diagnosis of schizophrenia, a factor that both complicated how contemporaries understood his surreal outputs and contributed to his marginalization. In the late 1980s, he lived in the Salvation Army Men’s Home in Johannesburg, and in 1993, he vanished from care, never to be seen again. Attempts to trace himthrough pension records and hospital follow‑upsyielded no results; his last recorded pension was drawn in August 1993.
Mental health has thus become almost mythologically entangled with readings of his work. Rather than diminishing the seriousness of his art, recent scholarship reframes his psychiatric experience as a lens that shaped his sensitivity to marginal states and rhythms of consciousness, arguably deepening his expression of psychological and social ambiguity.
Legacy and Contemporary Relevance
Scholars and curators argue that his relative obscurity in mainstream South African art historiography must be rectified, positioning him as a figure whose work both prefigured and critiqued movements toward post‑apartheid expression and identity.
In sum, Jensma’s life and art defy easy closure; his prints and poems remain provocative sites of inquiry, compelling scholars and audiences to confront the charged intersections of art, politics, identity, and the human psyche.
Comments
Post a Comment