Willem Boshoff’s substantial beard has always been a talking point with Johannesburg’s effete art community. A dark brown burst of facial hair, with slight wisps of grey interjecting; it is a singularly confrontational thing.
Evoking the chiselled old men forever guarding the four corners of the Voortrekker Monument, the pariah status of Afrikaner men sporting this optional embellishment was unwittingly revealed in the recent and rather messy unwinding of the Geo Cronjé affair, the rugby player reductively prejudged a racist for his unfashionable whiskers.
A self-described “peripheral shit-stirrer”, Boshoff cannot but be aware of the neurosis invoked by his defining physical feature. But then Boshoff, arguably the country’s foremost conceptual artist, has always pursued his own anonymity as ruthlessly as he has courted controversy.
He once defined his ambition as “to vanish and just to be in a position of understanding”. Certainly his rather ascetic image hints at a measure of this transcendence, even though his luxurious beard does sometimes still get in the way — quite literally.
Standing talking with the artist inside Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery, where his exhibition Nonplussed is currently showing, his beard concealed the messaging printed on the chest of his black T-shirt. In deference to a curious onlooker who was also inquisitively trying to read it, the artist eventually lifted his tuft.
“I am not who you think I am,” Boshoff — a tall, portly man — read from his shirt, his words spoken with a rich Afrikaans inflection.
The conundrum of language has always intrigued Willem Boshoff. It is evidenced in the numerous dictionaries he has compiled, detailed taxonomies devoted to obscure financial terms, winds, even places mother [sic] might not approve of.
By his own admission, the Vereeniging-born artist is as much a writer as he is an artist; his artworks often simply process-based outcomes of his engagement with the bricks and mortar of language.
There is, of course, nothing new in words forming the literal subject of art. Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 work One and Eight: A Description was simply made up of eight words in neon. It gave words a revered place on gallery walls.
Sol LeWitt, another early American conceptualist, once beautifully described the process by which words became art.
“If words are used,” LeWitt wrote in his seminal tract Sentences on Conceptual Art, first published in 1969, “and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature, numbers are not mathematics.”
Having skimmed LeWitt’s statements prior to meeting with Boshoff, I was intrigued to know what this former secretary of the Dendrological Society thought of another of LeWitt’s propositions.
“Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”
“I like the word mystic,” Boshoff responds good-humouredly, “but it is too fancy for me. I prefer the word gnostic to mystic. The word gnostic implies understanding without paranormal things happening.”
Already on the opening day, certain visitors expressed grave doubts about Boshoff’s understanding of things, particularly his take on the culpability of George W Bush, Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon in bringing about the world’s current political malaise.
Boshoff, however, is unrepentant.
“There are bad things happening on CNN, BBC and Sky every night,” he says. “I don’t see much joy on television, I see people doing terrible things.”
At times overly didactic, then again subtly allusive, Boshoff’s new work evidences a highly idiosyncratic and diligently conceptual mind attempting to understand the events dominating the news headlines. “There is a lot of work here that I wish I did not make,” he admits pointing his hand to nothing in particular “because it might spell artistic suicide for me.”
He immediately qualifies this statement, declaring that he doesn’t mean the work Serial Killer.
Made up of 12 small granite blocks, each containing one letter from the title, the blocks have been so rearranged that the word Serial now reads Israel.
It has prompted angry responses. One anxious viewer even invited Boshoff to visit Israel and “see what it is really like”.
Boshoff simply shrugs of these critics.
“I make what I make and people must take it or leave it.”
Much of the vigour of this attitude derives from the long years he spent during the 1970s and 1980s collecting and collating experiences and objects, largely without recognition.
“What I have learnt from back then is not to apologise for what I am making,” he maintains. “I cannot cheat on my conscience or censor myself.”
Pointing to his Serial Killer alphabet blocks, he says: “That is the one work that when I saw it in my head I knew what it would look like. I remember telling myself there is no choice, you have to fucking well make this work or else you will be a false person for the rest of your life.”
None of this says much of the painstaking execution underlying this and other works. Unlike most conceptual artists, Boshoff is an assiduous craftsman, his work often rooted in the vernacular textures and tones of the South African experience.
“His concepts translate into wonderful visual objects where the ‘product’ is as significant as the idea,” states Jack Ginsberg, well-known art collector and long-time confidant of Boshoff.
This observation is particularly true of Boshoff’s great magnum opus to language and the senses, his Blind Alphabet project. Reliant on blind viewers to interpret the work for sighted audiences, the C alphabet component is currently on view at Cape Town’s National Gallery.
According to the artist the project had its genesis in his vast Dictionary of Perplexing English, parts of which make up his new work Sdrow of nwodkaerb (breakdown of words written backwards).
“I had a problem with English speaking colleagues and the way they used language to belittle and make fun of me,” he says. He matched their insult with a ferocious, acquisitive drive to learn all the English language’s more ornate and decorative words.
The effect was singularly liberating, and not without its humorous discoveries.
Contained in Boshoff’s vast document of words is “booboisie”. Pronounced in the fashion of bourgeoisie, this chauvinist word made up by the American critic HC Mencken groups all ladies with big, attractive breasts as a special social class.
Sensing the lexicographer’s smile at work here, I ask what pleasure the artist derives from preserving words? Rather than speak his answer he simply writes it down.
On the title page of my copy of Boshoff’s gallery catalogue is written: “We save the word, thereafter the word saves us.”
The details:
Nonplussed runs at the Goodman Gallery on Jan Smuts Avenue until June 19. A catalogue containing texts by Willem Boshoff, Anél Boshoff and Katja Gentric and published by Goodman Gallery Additions, is available. Tel: (011) 788 1113