Whisks bought from passing sellers are arranged as a ‘reminder’ of the act of sweeping. ‘The nobility of street sweepers should be kept in mind. Plato welcomed street sweepers, plumbers and carpenters into his ideal Republic. Not anarchic poets or artists.’
Right now, the artist Willem Boshoff is preparing for two new exhibitions. The Standard Bank Gallery is to show his world-famous Garden of Words 1, a labyrinthine garden of the mind which consists of more than 4000 labels, arranged in lists on clipboards along the wall, and in rectangular wooden blocks, with the Latin names inscribed, along the floor. The floor pieces are arranged in a number of rectangular sections, bound together by coverings of glass sheets. It resembles a desiccated herbarium, a last bastion of plant defence. One in eight of the world’s vascular plant species is threatened by extinction. Boshoff’s concern is with ‘remembering’ the plight of plants: he hopes to have recorded around 30,000 plant names by the end of his life. He feels this is significant as there are just short of 25,000 plants on the world’s endangered plants Red Data List. He would like to get beyond this figure.
The other, a new multimedia exhibition, Oh My Word!, also arises out of a radical ecology aesthetic. Boshoff speaks of his approach as ‘deliberate and poetic’, not didactic, but intended to disturb the onlooker. He is preoccupied with making another three-dimensional dictionary entitled Oh No! Words, and is pondering the creation of a giant ‘No!’ made from bits of broken wood in camouflage, splinters amid floating deconstructed six-sided stars of triangles.
Boshoff, considered to be South Africa’s leading practitioner of theoretical conceptual art, is internationally acclaimed and respected. He is both a wordsmith and a maker of images and objects. A self-taught dendrologist, his interests range widely across the fields of botany, literature and geography. He has made Concrete poetry, he reads and makes dictionaries, he is a sculptor and makes installations, and he is an inveterate seeker of words, names, plants and objects (both natural and synthetic), from which he constructs his art. His erudition is daunting, but in conversation he is deceptively mild and aimiable.
He lives in post-apartheid, post-colonial Kensington where roads are named after the builders of Empire: King Edward Street, Kitchener Avenue, Roberts Avenue, Milner Crescent and Rhodes Park. A spatial conundrum for Boshoff, the radical Afrikaner rebel who survived English educational institutions by outwitting English-speakers who thought they knew their own language.
His artist persona of the Big Druid in his Cubicle is understood by Boshoff as a ‘Man of Trees’ who does quite ordinary things. The Latin etymology of the word ‘cubicle’ refers to ‘a place to lie down’ and as a druid in his performance art exhibitions, he sleeps and lounges about, much as he does at home. The recognition that he might have a vocation as a druid came after a long debilitating illness caused by lead poisoning. He discovered that shamans often undergo near-death experiences before taking on their healing or prophetic identity. After the arduous treatments that cured him of lead toxicity, Boshoff saw colours as brighter, renewed. He began to walk every day and to photograph flowers and objects on the street. It was a form of rebirth. His walking took on an awareness of the ‘tensions of place’ and speculative engagement with psychogeography. Now he leads walks around urban Johannesburg and in the Karoo, questing after a spirit of place.
In his home, Boshoff prizes functionality; his workshop is neat and orderly, no sawdust, no wood shavings, no waste. He set himself a rule that there would be no ornaments, only sculptures and wornout tools or objects: ‘Knives, once used to slaughter sheep and now worn thin; old keys and padlocks.’ Most of the artworks on the walls are gifts from friends or ‘swaps’.
His reference library includes over 200 dictionaries. Key to his work is the writing and making of dictionaries as works of art: lexicons of touch, lexicons for the blind, lexicons that reveal the power play between language groups. The dictionaries often form the basis for his artworks: ‘When I read a text and see a word I have not yet encountered, I get thoroughly excited.’
Boshoff creates complex installations and sculptures as social statements that subvert and shock, producing art that trips up the unwary, addressing issues of linguistic marginalisation, ecology and aesthetics of touch. Boshoff is nothing if not the master of discomfiture, his fanatical attention to detail and the ironies of life in South Africa extends into every corner of his life, public or private. He is the artist you ‘read’ rather than observe. Even slumped on a sofa with his dog, he keeps grappling with arcane definitions and the shape of living dictionaries: ‘My passion is to give obscure words a face.’
Described as ‘part-messiah, part bergie’, the artist in bed at home. Above the bed, a triptych given to Boshoff by former student and friend, Russell Scott, featuring a rhinoceros and gaudy striped snake. The bedstead was made by Boshoff himself in 1976, using a stack of his carpenter father’s tamboti wood.
The outsized hammer was made by Boshoff’s son Martin, an industrial designer and woodworker. The Victorian wooden cabinet is a gift from Cornelius Guyt; the small mbira on the right comes from Zimbabwe, where mbiras were outlawed by the mission churches.
The door of his study was sanded down by Boshoff himself; as elsewhere, the artworks are gifts or were ‘swapped’ with fellow artists.
Two skulls, one a plastic replica. The donkey skull points to Boshoff’s interest in divinatory practices, both here in Africa and in rituals going back to the ancient Greeks: ‘Cephalomancy is the art of interpreting the skull or head of a donkey or goat. In southern Germany, skulls were burned in a fire and the resulting cracks and fissures read for prognostication.’
A display of scissors: the golden ‘stork’ scissors are a 19th-century antique pair used to cut the umbilical cord after birth.
On an upper landing, there are benches restored by Boshoff and, at the back, a cage holding between 60 and 70 walking sticks, symbolic of Boshoff’s interest in walking. The walking sticks are often displayed in his performance exhibitions.
Bookshelves house about 200 dictionaries. Boshoff composes ‘dictionaries as works of art’. His Dictionary of Divination includes the Index of Preachings. Others include a Dictionary of Perplexing English, Beyond the Epiglottis, What Every Druid Should Know, Dictionary of Manias and Phobias, Dictionary of Morphology, Dictionary of –ologies and –isms, Dictionary of Beasts and Demons, Dictionary of Winds, and a Dictionary of Obscure Financial Terms.
Drawers open to disclose collections of toys and sea shells. Boshoff allows his grandson to play with the toys under supervision. He himself likes antique ducks, thinking of the duck as a personal symbol: ‘The term “duck” from cricket means zero and that suits me.’
In the living room, the extensive collection of CDs indicates Boshoff’s interest in contemporary classical music. Favourites include Philip Glass, Elliott Carter and John Cage of the New York School, Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti. Recently, Boshoff’s own Early Concrete poetry of the 1970s has been recorded and set to music.
A collection of much-used antique typewriters on a Victorian specimen-drawer cabinet. In front, Boshoff’s grandson’s bicycle.
Boshoff in his kitchen, surrounded by art – a functional collection of ceramic tagines and vintage industrial weighing scales.