Wim Botha at Brodie/Stevenson
by Cara Snyman
On opening night I heard someone comment that Wim Botha's 'New Work' was 'a difficult show', which may be another way of saying that lots of skulls and the odd cut-up bible will make most people feel a tad uncomfortable.
Botha's first solo exhibition in Johannesburg simply titled 'New Work', served to launch Brodie/Stevenson (formerly Art Extra), and as one by now expects from Botha, it is the kind of show that would launch a gallery - if not a thousand ships. Monumental, imposing and iconic, the work draws heavily on the canon of art history, natural history and Classical mythology.
Continually reworking 'over-determined' subject matter and images, Botha here highlights and disrupts conventions. In 'New Work' the famous Roman marble Laocoön and sons is appropriated, as is Saturn devouring his son (not Goya's but a lesser-known rendition housed in the Vatican), with Botha exposing both to the ravages of time. Artworks' seeming immortality is questioned, and in both Dead Laocoön and Saturn (Working Title), his subjects turn to skeletons.
As if the sheer visual force of the imagery is not imposing enough, Botha's themes too are larger than life, and 'New Work' manages to consider time and evolution, question the eventuality of death, all while contemplating a kind of material immortality.
The central installation, Time Machine (Working Title), in all its pseudo-scientific glory, follows on from Botha's interest in 'fantastic' science ('cold fusion' preoccupied him in the past), and seems to offer the possibility of bypassing the issue of death entirely. The installation is composed of three distinct suspended parts: a god figure with Janus-like head in Botha's signature carved bibles; a pair of roughly hewn wooden wings, and an air conditioning duct in a broken infinity symbol with the ends marked by smaller ducts, one forking. The pyramidal composition refers to religious iconography, and the work offers multiple possible 'ends', referring to time travel, parallel universes, but also a rupture in cyclical inevitability.
Mortality or death is strongly implied by the substantial amount of skeletal matter on display, but here it is a measure of time, rather than vanitas, memento mori or the more concrete abject reality. The image of a skeletal Saturn preparing to devour his equally skeletal offspring refers not to a biological eventuality, or even a disintegration of sorts: rather, death is understood as an impermanent material state. In works such as Saturn (Working Title), Dead Laocoön and Gyps Africanus, an out-of-time reanimation takes place with skeletons in a lone danse macabre - an interpretation of 'life post-death' that has little to do with any spiritual concerns.
One of Botha's leitmotifs, the hyena, again makes an appearance in this body of work, not surprisingly as a skull. Proposed new quadrate bone for Crocuta crocuta may just be one of the most arresting works on show. Botha's teak rendering of a spotted hyena skull is housed in a glass display case and secured with steel rods - one side is perfectly polished, the other roughly carved and untreated. The skull is given an additional quadrate bone, gold-leafed in some bizarre twist of evolution (and an exceptional moment of Botha frivolity). The bone extends the 'bite' of the animal, allowing the jaw to open much wider, but here the bark is indeed bigger: the jaw no longer functions. Of course the irony of the addition is that this particular hyena is merely a boxed, wooden skull posing no danger, with or without the quadrate bone. It is three times removed from any danger it may represent: first it is a lifeless skull, secondly it is contained within a glass box, and finally, it is an artwork, a fabrication.
The snake or serpent is a new addition to Botha's vocabulary and features prominently here. It is, amongst other things, associated with knowledge in both African and Biblical traditions, and the snake's ability to shed its skin and so continually renew itself makes it an apt motif. The ancient symbol of the Ouroboros (a serpent swallowing its own tail) can be related to the broken infinity figure in Time Machine (Working Title) and in the lines tracing the now absent pythons in Dead Laocoön. The hyena and snake also share a host of negative associations. In the drawing Python reticulatus, the snake receives a mirror treatment of the hyena, with its quadrate bone, essential for jaw movement, removed.
Botha is an exceptional draughtsman and the materiality - seductive surfaces and slick execution - would be unfair to ignore in any reading. Though much of his work sets out to deconstruct, it serves equally to illustrate the undeniable attraction of the meta-narrative and the monumental. The commanding presences of individual works and the ambitiousness of the project also demand a lot of space, which in the current Brodie/Stevenson venue is limited.
Always thorough and serious, though not humourless, Botha again asserts himself through this body of work as an artist well worth watching.
Opens: November 6
Closes: December13
Brodie/Stevenson
373 Jan Smuts Avenue, Craighall, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 326 0034
Email: info@artextra.co.za
www.artextra.co.za
Hours: Tue - Fri 10.30am - 5.30pm, Sat 9.30am - 3pm
