Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture
21.09 - 02.11.2024
The celebrated conceptual artist, Willem Boshoff, chose not to discuss ideas at the opening of his show at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture, located north of Johannesburg at NIROX, an artist’s residency and sculpture park. It was a bitterly cold and overcast day, better suited to broth or hot chocolate than canapes and wine, tales told about a fire than to any speechifying. So, with his right hand at rest on his great belly, his eyes lost in some inscrutable thicket, Boshoff chose to speak of the fate of the Blue Crane; of the world-renowned sheep shearers of Richmond in the northern Karoo, also afflicted by the tik pandemic and alcohol fetal syndrome; of trees – ash, elm (now extinct in Europe) and oak. Reflecting briefly on the asymmetrical relationship of the vast scale of the trees to the brevity of their names, each made up of three letters, Boshoff chose not to venture deeper or further. For his warmly swaddled audience, which included students and teachers from the University of the Free State, all of whom were creating work at NIROX under Boshoff’s guidance, the artist’s aleatory asides were satisfaction enough on a winter’s day. And, by the by, there was also talk that Boshoff had to get home for the rugby.
Nevertheless, the exhibition’s curator, Sven Christian, was adamant that I discuss assemblage and collage, the meticulous processes involved in the making of Boshoff’s works, for they were by no means happenstance, virtuoso, or makeshift worlds. Thought and planning were key. While assemblage and collage suppose the ingenious re-composition of seemingly arbitrary materials on a plane intrinsically unsuitable – this is Max Ernst’s view of collage – then, for Boshoff, it is the serendipitous relationship of ground and figure, the integrity of selected materials, their sacramental honouring that mattered far more. For Boshoff, after Jorge Luis Borges, it is the ‘undivided divinity’ located in things, their auratic ordinariness and splendour, that accounted for the quiet gasps and exquisite sighs that his artworks have consistently generated.
No South African artist is, in my view, more significant on the global stage. By this, I mean that no South African artist signifies as profoundly. This has much to do with Boshoff’s love for language – its marvellous duplicity and yet its canny precision. For Boshoff, it is not simply the arbitrariness of the meanings of words that matter – an insight first posed by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, and recklessly championed by lesser deconstructive thinkers – but the pathos built into the vacillation of meaning. Despite the dissonant ground of life and art, it nevertheless also allows for coherence. Therein lies the beauty of Boshoff’s insight, and its global significance in this fraught historical moment.
In his relief sculpture, ‘Pointless’, we see a congestion of retro sheep shears – sourced between 2013 and 2018, in a second-hand shop in Richmond or from friends willing to collect – that float above a granular surface made of assorted Karoo grit. Subtle patterns are sliced into the ground which, in turn, is overlaid by shears and their shadows. Matter is paramount – the aggregation of a specific thing, a sheep shear, which, between circular finger-hold and pointed thrust, conjures the letter X. For some this reading may be fanciful, nonetheless all forms amount to language, all things become words, the anthropomorphic desire to find the human in-and-through things an involuntary fact of narcissism. Language, we imagine, is our creation, and not vice-versa. As for the sheep-shears in a relief sculpture? They may be inutile, but they are by no means passive. Their mouths gape, their finger-holds are ajar, their affect portentous, for something is always possible given their ravenous gesture. Then why title the work ‘Pointless’? Is nullification the point? Because the x-formation signals a centred point then cancels it? Because futility conspires against the density of the work? Because its obtuse beauty – the quaintness of an object of beauty from a past era – remains, against the blinding advance of technology?
‘Pointless’ is a seminal and lovable work because of the rudimentary allure of things, and their imaginative recombination. It is an inelegant work, and all the better for it. If one requires a tradition in which to understand its making, then; surely; Boshoff is indebted to the Italian 1960s movement, Arte Povera. A minimalist conceptual movement, Arte Povera chose, after Marcel Duchamp, to focus on non-descript or commonplace materials, to subvert the commercialisation of art. Needless to say, this principle has failed, because the business of art, its capitalistic force, is insatiable and carnivorous – the art market absorbs each and every contradiction and challenge. Indeed, objects of all kinds are an integral dimension of art-making. The difference between art and design, rarefaction and the everyday, non-existent. Objects – whether brand new or old – define art’s desiring machine. It is we who have become an extension of objects and not the other way around. As Jean Baudrillard witheringly observes in his book The Consumer Society, ‘the humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they are in all previous ages, but by objects … We live by object time: by this, I mean that we live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession’.
What Boshoff does is make us reappraise our relationships, be it to things, each other, nature. He never tells us what to think or feel. Rather, we are inserted into an enigmatic complex. This was magisterially achieved in his breathtaking retrospective at Javett UP (guest curated by Helène Smuts), perhaps the most important exhibition held in South Africa in honour of a single artist. This, I think, has everything to do with the graphic potency of the work, combined with its immense subtlety. Here, at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture, this impact is especially evident in the work titled ‘BLUE’, a dense compress of meticulously shaved pieces of cardboard – cereal boxes, Christmas cards, invitations – which, in its congestion, and in relation to the raised letters, produces a softly shimmering shiver of blues. While by no means veiled, it carries the same seductive and suggestive power. The work’s low-lit sepulchral quality adds to its nocturnal charm. There is nothing ‘shouty’ here. Instead, one embraces the understated immensity of the labour involved in the making, as well as the monumentality of a pure idea. Blue, after all, is a sacred colour. Divinity is lodged in the word as it is in its elemental source – sky and sea – and its divine connotation, Madonna blue, sourced from a rare pigment ground in the Afghan mountains. Here, however, it is the ordinariness of the material used and its transmogrification that matters most. However, while one may sink into ‘Blue’ as though into a portal, the exhibition also reminds us that the making is both obsessive-compulsive and pedestrian – a matter of repetition, which, contrary to the popular saying, does afford a very different result. For wonder lies at the frontier of Boshoff’s intensive labour. Then again, ‘counterintuitively’, Sven Christian reminds me that ‘the work was made during lockdown’, a time of deep soul-searching, despair, and physical pain.
‘ASH’, ‘ELM’, and ‘OAK’, have neither the suggestive depth of ‘BLUE’ nor the raw genius of ‘Pointless’. Rather, the idea is more graphically foregrounded, the impact flatly illustrative. This is not a criticism but an observation. A threefold study in plywood – an exquisite recycled material, which is combined with the off-cuts of the respectively named trees – the series, as noted at the outset, honours the fact and threat of extinction – species die. If they do so ecologically, they also do so culturally, for as John Fowles reminds us in The Tree, ‘It is far less nature itself that is yet in danger than our attitude to it’. ‘ASH’ is a direct allusion to cremation – ‘ashes to ashes’; a memorialized and concrete record of an absence, created using the machine-seared offcuts gathered in his workshop. This loss also applies to the ‘ELM’, ravaged by disease. As for ‘OAK’, perhaps the more stately, most durably subject to human use? It too may come to pass. Its components made from the discards of an old wine barrel; the frame from an old Oak that fell at NIROX in 2013. Death, however, is not the point of Boshoff’s work. It is a fact, true, but it is also a state akin to the divine, for there is always grace in loss, pathos in expired beauty, wonder inside of despair, some sentient magic inside of the inexorably ‘pointless’ – an undivided divinity.
At the Villa-Legodi exhibition – in the room where people come and go, where art lingers and life quavers – there was also an unfinished work. It is titled ‘GREY’. Only the armature of the work is evident, the raised embossed word – grey – made of hardboard. In trays there are Guineafowl feathers, scissors, glue. The feathers, originally gathered on a smallholding and B&B in Bloemfontein, from birds thought to have either been eaten or shot by the neighbour, will be supplemented by others found at NIROX. The work, as such, is subject to time, to migration, molting, and the heavens. But for now, like this moment, it remains unfinished. Now, ‘GREY’ must stand as marker for the ongoing power of Willem Boshoff’s life work, for the enormity of the labour, endurance of the spirit, sonority of the impact, and sublimity of the artist’s divine oeuvre.