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12
January 1998Meneer
Boshoof, hoe gaan dit met jou? | |
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Ja, dit gaan baie
goed, dankie. | |
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It is an
absolute pleasure to meet you. I 've spent a number of days looking at your work
and would love to talk about your background here in South Africa. What was it
like growing up here? | |
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So you
want some reasons . . . the earliest that I can think of is school because we
have a very low emphasis on art at school . . . because it's a drudgery. Art is
supposed to be for sissies. It is a particularly macho environment in the school
that I went to and I think that [this type of environment] still prevails today.
When I was in standard seven in the middle of the 1960's, we had at the school
a teacher, who was the art teacher, but he was not allowed to teach art as a subject.
He taught art more as a pastime for the kids in the lower standards. He wanted
to try and set up extra- curricular [activities in] art . . . in standard seven
I decided to be an artist [laughter]. I think it is something that I carried on
wanting to do mainly because it wasn't something we were supposed to be doing
at school. There is a bit of a rebellious streak, deep down in my subconscious
and . . . from time to time, I still find myself calling the speedcops and giving
them hell because I don't like the way they're setting up roadblocks. And I still
find myself calling the SABC [South African Broadcasting Corporation] to complain
about programs -- so I do have a tendency to object. Maybe sensibly, maybe not
so sensibly. At school, my one way of objecting was doing what they denied us.
But it was a good thing because I fell in love more. It became a big thing for
me in standard seven . . . how old is one in standard seven?. . . about fourteen
. . . I decided I wanted to be an artist, a sculptor. My parents were distraught
because it was not a typical Afrikaans thing to do. A good thing for an Afrikaner
to do would be to become a minister, or to become a teacher, or someone respectable
like doctor or a politician. I didn't want to be any one of those at that time.
In the end I decided to become an art teacher so that the teaching aspect of it
would help me to make money. The people at school were very well educated in the
politics of the country and taught us in a very Calvinistic, Christian sort of
way. I didn't object maliciously, but with this mean streak that I have, I tried
to outsmart the teachers, . . to show them up -- just like a kind of game. I started
writing crib notes, as a game in class to try and show the teacher up. I would
invent the most ingenious ways to cheat on the tests -- not that I didn't know
what they were teaching, but more to break the shackles of authority. So sometimes
we would put crib notes with drawing pins under the table and flip them over -
they knew of course. I was not alone -- I was probably the instigator for a whole
group of us. What it taught me was there was a way to outsmart authority. That's
one important thing that I learned through the crib notes. The other thing that
I learnt was to write very small. To dwarf my writing, to be invisible, not to
be detected, to be private. Later on I became very religious. I had a sort of
religious spell as a very young student in my second year. These crib notes came
in very handy because the Bible would be where I would write notes in the margin.
Later on I used smaller writing as a technique to try and learn about meditation
-- a kind of meditation where one could become anonymous, were non-existent to
other people, because anonymity became a very important factor for me. Especially
through the late 1970's and '80's. There was no way that Conceptual Art was going
be tolerated by the art establishment. You had more of a chance of getting novices
to like your work than artists, because artists wanted to see colour and image
and representation. Even in a sophisticated sense or an Abstract-Expressionist
sense, but at least that was colour and texture like chocolate that you can enjoy.
But Conceptual Art was not that much tolerated and I had no hope of selling much
of my work. I had to forget about becoming famous [for my] Conceptual Art and
about getting rich because of Conceptual Art. My reasons had to be different and
I've been making Conceptual Art since the early 1970's because I've used it as
a kind of meditational tool -- as a way of enriching myself. So I've done various
projects through the years in which I have set up systems to try and be more patient.
At first [the art] was more religious, so patience was of the essence. I sat down
every single morning for two years, writing as small as I could for ten minutes
. . . until my eyes got sore. [I did] not use a magnifying glass, just a really
small pen. I would see the relevance of my crib notes in being able to write as
small as that. What I learnt was how to be pensive, introspective, to be meditative.
I didn't like that way of prayer [where one] just stands up and speaks words .
. . it was like praying to a ghost or making God into a kind of spook. So I cut
out all of the nonsense and tried various schemes and ways of educating myself
through my work and I became quite a bit of a recluse. A kind of monk in various
practising forms of meditation. For one project, the 370 Day Project, I invented
coded writing because I wanted to learn what creativity was about. You see, I
[was not concerned] with selling work at the end of it it, in fact, I didn't sell
these works for years and years and years. I just made them to make myself try
to understand. It was like study at University. You
first have to build up strengths and certain awareness's for yourself before you
can become a doctor. You first have to learn things. I wanted to learn and that
was basically the beginning of why I did these funny things . . . funny because
they were uncommon in this country. The 370 Day Project consisted of 370 blocks
of wood . . . each block of wood was a little plaque, and it was carved early
in the morning. It took a couple of hours to work out what to carve . . . I needed
to use a different species of wood to carve with for each day, so I would look
for 370 different kinds on woods. I carried around notebooks and I recorded what
I wanted to do that day. I set myself six tasks to learn what creativity was all
about. I had to do things that I'd never done before or do things in a way in
which I'd not done them before. Some of these things that I did would be to carry
strange things in my pocket from 6am to 6 pm in a strange kind of sacrifice, or
to get on a ladder and draw lines on the ceiling from east to west, ten lines
so long . . . So I would decide early in the morning on these six tasks. It was
like the creation -- six days and I had to do these various things everyday. I
once gave flowers to a Nun . . . I had to find a nun and find the flowers. She
[asked] me why I was giving her flowers so I had to explain about the project.
I learnt social skills through this, as well. If I needed wood, for example Querkus
Polestars -- the pin oak, I had to get permission from somebody because I saw
a dead branch high up in a tree in their back yard. I had to explain to these
people that I needed that branch. 'Please let me cut that branch from that tree'
. . . [the phone rings, a plane flies overhead] We take some time out to talk
about a tree in Willem's garden. . . . This 370 Day Project is like a diary. It's
like a notebook carved in wood. I did keep notebooks, as well. I'd get up early
in the morning and I'd make drawings of the little blocks. There were many symbols
-- a symbol for eating, talking, drinking, looking and listening, and there were
three groups of symbols -- one was pleasure, one for sacrifice, and then one for
beauty in between pleasure and sacrifice. For each wood block [carved with symbols]
there were many tasks that I would perform . . . 'so I decided today I was going
to eat something I'd not eaten before, or prepared in a way in which I'd not eaten
it, or eat it in a special place'. I thought I'd learn about creativity in that
way. I tried for a whole year just to be a work of art. The average kind of wood
say with the density of about 36 pounds per cubic foot that would carve in maybe
three to five hours. but the hardest woods with the density of 72 pounds per cubic
foot, black woods and wild olive, would take nine hours to carve because it was
so hard to get into the wood with the little knife that I was using. The project
started in Venice {September 12, 1981}, because I'd worked out the program for
the work and it just so happened that I had to go overseas. While I was in Venice
I decided to begin the work on my birthday . . . I was with other people and so
as not to disturb them, I went to sit on the loo -- the toilet, and spent some
time carving the first block. I think it was Yellowwood, if I remember correctly
. . . We travelled through Europe and I had to get up at four every morning, so
as not to inconvenience anyone. I designed a little pilgrim toolbox, and in this
toolbox I had a cloth that I would put across my knees, so that the wood-chippings
would not fall on the floor. Then I would take out the blocks and the books and
I would start drawing. I remember coming back from Europe on the aeroplane with
everyone looking at me. Fairly late at night I would start doing it while people
were still having drinks and messing around. Everyone would come by and ask what
the hell I was doing and I had to explain, and it became a big conversational
hassle sometimes. It was like a portable workshop . . . I worked with it on planes
and trains. Martin was born in 1981 on the 22nd of December and I had to do a
piece at the maternity home waiting for him to be born. It needed to be done.
In 1981 I also ran the Comrades Marathon and had to get up very early that morning
[to work, as well]. I think it took some minutes off my time, I was already tired
when I arrived at 7 am that morning to Durban. But I got the silver medal . .
. I think one's marriage suffers a lot from activities like having to do the Comrades
and the training for the Comrades . . . a lot of the tasks you set for yourself
have to do with running, so it was like preparing for something more than art.
It was art, but I didn't see it as that. I needed certain things. I needed to
do something . . . I didn't know what it was. Maybe it had to do with what people
called art. I was a bit confused because I did not know what art was for much
of that time because I did not like the art that I saw. I knew that it had to
do with conceptual reality but I didn't understand. In order to understand, I
tried setting up structures which would manifest as art works themselves. The
370 Day Project consisted 379 species of wood. Because I couldn't get many different
pieces of wood I joined the Dendralogical Society. Eventually I landed up being
the Secretary for the Southern Transvaal Region. [I would] take people into the
bush and discuss ecology with them . . . that was good . . . I started learning
the names of the plants in 1981-81. I believe that whatever I am doing at the
time is part of the art that I must make, or the life I must live. I do not want
to separate things out too much. I cannot drive a car while I am reading but I
can drive a car when I am listening to a tape . . . the idea is to cut out the
boundaries. I've read a lot of philosophy now since those years, the early seventies.
I went through the seventies reading a lot, writing a lot of funny things, and
doing concrete poetry. I went through the 1980's doing more conceptual work than
physical work. The work has to do with language, dictionaries, a collection of
names. PJ: Lets talk about these symbols, were they part of an existing language?
WB: I've worked with disqualifying the text a great deal. To try to dislocate
the text, to show how expectations of text and scripture are unrealistic. I have
performed circus tricks with cryptic texts, even before this 370 Day Project.
For example, my first conceptual piece would be the annotations that I wrote in
the margins of the the Bible. I tried to memorize the New Testament in 1972 to
help me understand the text. I tried incessently to write what I thought [the
text] meant in the margins. I tried to clarify issues. I used a lot of little
lines [drawn] from the verse to where I had written a little piece, so you'd find
a lot of criss-crossing. xIt actually became a very organic sheet with this fixed
text in the centre, and around it was clouded with all the thoughts I had about
[the text] and . . . to myself the thoughts I had about the text were far more
important to me than the text. Unfortunately the text is retired. The text is
something that gets people to stop growing, to stop thinking. It sets a paradigm
that is impossible to move away from. If you believe it and you adhere to it and
you never grow beyond that, then the text is a dictator. It dictates to us. At
first [the text] was supposedly the clouded peripheral vision of people who thought
that it was important, but no one sees that. They think it's a be all and end
all. In the same way that I tried to uproot the sense of authority of people at
school . . . the text became something of a challenge to be uprooted rather than
to be enslaved to. The worst thing that could have happened was the invention
of the book. I love books, it's a paradox because the inconubula, the cradle,
the books of Gutenberg, started something very bad. It was necessary
and very bad. It was necessary to preserve knowledge, but it was very bad because
it left no alternative, no deviation. It was written and what was written was
the law and that enslaved people. So in my concrete poetry I dealt specifically
with the Bible -- that it's words are not supposed to be upheld as tenants. You
will find that the concrete poetry I wrote in the seventies mostly deals with
biblical text, but for example, they would be a subversion of the text. [Attempts]
to get the text monomaically one on one, the dual, a fight . . . the text becomes
that. It's
much more important for the text to be an opponent sometimes than to be a friend.
You don't learn anything from it if it's passive. If it's only supposed to teach
you something, it dies on you, it betrays you, you betray it. So I would take
the Gospel according to St. John and in Afrikaans, because I was dealing with
Afrikaans text . . . I deal with things that often go extinct. . . This thing
of extinction is very important to me because Afrikaans is on the brink of becoming
the world's youngest extinct language. It used to be the world's youngest language.
I want to come back to that after I explain this thing with the text. In the Gospel
according to John, I would take what was written in Afrikaans and I would try
to use it as an instigator to foster reactions, so where it would say, "Die Heilige
eve van gee die Volgenes Johannes", I would write in my concrete poem, sss sssssss
sss sss sss sss sssssss sssssss -- the sound of the snake. I actually called it
SS, the name of the Gestapo, because I felt that was the text was that. Then it
says "Een, In die beginning was die woord", in the beginning the word was God,
and I would write," Sss ss sss sssssssss sss sss sssss". Now when you go to church,
you will sit down and read the Gospel According to John as part of the normal
liturgy of the church. After a few minutes you sing a song and five minutes [later]
. . . you can ask the whole church what they just read, but you will rarely find
someone who knows or remembers what they sang or read, unless it has some significant
reason for remembering. I wanted to write [The SS] in that spirit. This is as
people may very often hear it, it's just like the sound of the wind. There is
a philosophical spirit. I don't like the way the word spirit is portrayed by the
church. I think it's completely different. I've written many dictionaries now
and I think I know what it is through having done this research. It is quite a
bold statement to make . . . Spirit has to do with language, with intent, with
consciousness, but not to do with the 'spoek' [ghost]. It's not a person although
it is personified. There's a verse in the Gospels that tells us that the spirit
is like the wind. It blows where it wants to go and I think that's what the text
should do . . . be left to be, do it's thing, come and go like the waves in the
sea, it's a current, an energy. So I have many other concrete poetry that dealt
with the way the wind would blow the text, the way that the text changes all the
time in conversation, in the house. Completely unpredictable. I wanted that disqualification
of the text. For example, we have the ÔApocalypseÕ, it's right at the back of
the Bible. It is sometimes referred to the book of Revelations. It was for me
a big paradox, I learnt all of these things of by heart. You have to understand
I actually knew. Somebody could say 'what does it say in Revelations 5 verse 20
? Won't you read it out?', and I would think to myself, 'why should I open up
the book? Let me show off'! I used it to show off a few times. Eventually I went
through the charade of looking it up because I could recite it but when I finished
reciting it, it sounded funny to them because I had recited the King James Bible
which [is written in] High English. They'd all say 'aggg . . . don't you want
to look it up?', but I'd say, 'That's what it says!' I'd just be a nuisance. One
mustn't do that. To come back to the Book of Revelations-- it is a revelation
when you say something is revealed. It means people are more clear afterwards
than before. It is an exposition, things are explained. Revelations is not like
that. Revelations makes you more confused afterwards, it uses the principle of
Ignotum Peri noiot uus, which means the unknown by the even less known. It tells
us all sorts of stories of horses and a cataclysmic events, and numbers, and when
you are finished reading it . . . the language is so anarchical . . . you sit
here with this puzzle [that] I don't think can be solved. I thought I would write
it the way that it came across to me. I took the book of Revelations and started
on my typewriter to type the first chapter. I put my paper in and typed the first
sentences about John on the Island of Pathos. When I came to the end of line one,
I went back to the beginning and typed over what was written, right on top of
line one, and I did this for a third time, so you have three times cryptic. It's
more because now it has it's own sense of cryptic. It's written to mess us around.
I don't think that you are supposed to interpret it in one specific sense, rather
I think that you are supposed to mess around with it as well -- as much as it
messes around with you. You must do to the scripture what it is doing to you.
St. Augustine said you must read it in the spirit in which it was written and
if it was written in the spirit to mess with you, you should mess with it. The
word, Apocolypse . . . the Greek word apo -- it means away from. Like an apostle
meant away from, apothiosius means to fall away from grace or fall away from God,
literally. There are many words with apo in front of them. Apo-calypso, something
is going to go away. Caliptos , in Greek, is the thing that monks had over their
heads. It's like a cowl that comes right down over their faces. They can see where
they walk but you will not see their faces. Portalilia caliptrata, the little
blow lily that has a caliptrate flower. The flower looks like a monk's cowl. The
botanical name will tell you. The word Apocalypse is formed out of a word that
means cowl. And literally, it means is to pull away the veil - to separate the
cowl so that you can see who is behind the cowl or what is behind the veil. So
it means to take a look at the face of something, but it doesn't do that - the
face it shows you is of complete obscurity. I have written . . . this sheet that
consists of rather blackish writing. And if you look at it, it is rather uniform.
. . Look at line one, here and there is a white spot with three spaces between
three words overlapping . . . and every now and then you can see a letter because
sometimes only two letters overlap and then there is a white spot on the third
one . . . So it looked like a starry sky. And I thought, "That is how the text
should be. If they want to confuse people, this is how to confuse people". So
I have done a lot of things to confuse, but not in order to condemn. I believe
that you can sometimes make more sense to people in obscurity than . . . by being
patronising, which is why I have done the 'Blind Alphabet' project. I wanted to
use some difficult text so that eventually some sense could come out of it. That
people start PLAYING with the text, I think that the text is meant to be played
with, not meant to enslave. | |
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Just to wrap up
the 370 Day Project, was this project upon completion exhibited for an audience? | |
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In 1982,
there was an exhibition of wooden sculpture at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and
I showed the work as part of that . . . the first time I showed this in public.
It is a very large three dimensional book. Now normally, a book consists of an
encryptic aspect or secret when it is closed on the shelf. And when you open it,
it becomes available - it is unlocked.So
this closedness and penness I have used it in much of my work because I work with
books as a kind of reference material. For the 370 Day Project I had built a kind
of cabinet into which all of the blocks fit like a tryptic of a church, where
no one can actually read, they had pictures painted or pictures carved in wood,
and it was two doors on the side that closed over the centre panel and you opened
this thing and it was a tryptic. This tryptic would be very big. This
tryptic would be very big. If you looked at the congregation in the church, which
I think were
sometimes better off in being illiterate and fantasizing about the text rather
than being literate and dogmatised into becoming square - framed - stuck.
If you looked at the congregation in the church, which I think were sometimes
better off in being illiterate and fantasizing about the text rather than being
literate and dogmatised into becoming square - framed - stuck.So
they had a head space that superceded much of the headspace that we have that
is so enslaved by the text. So anyway, they would stand in front of this book
- this tryptic and they would be able to see the pictures simultaneously. Not
we like we have, each our own little book and each can make his own little reading
from, they read all togetr. They all saw the same things at the same time. When
the occasion is rght you can take out the whole work (37 Day
Project) and lay it out on the floor like a garden. It was one of te very early
things that I did on the floor . . . I wanted my work to be abject, expurgated,
like seeds to be sown, soIwould throw it on the floor. It would be very neatly
packed out, five very large pages with the 370 blocks, ther would be 37 in a row,
times ten rows, two rows per page. The layout was very important. You could walk
through it like a burial, a graveyard. | |
PJ: |
Was it possible
for the audience to understand the complexity of the work? | |
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I don't
want people to understand. I want to confuse them. I want to mess with them. I
want to get blind people worried about helping me, and then after a while become
indulged in the thing. Maybe they'll enjoy it. I'm not preaching a specific message.
I want people to be creative in their heads, to free themselves from singular
points of view, to break the boundaries between different words in the direction.WILLEM
BOSHOFF INTERVIEW | |
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Moving onto the
Blind Alphabet, what inspired this project? | |
WB: |
I have my own head
and I have to answer to that. Not having the safety of belonging, I belong to
a church but I'm a peripheral shit-stirrer. I don't like what they are doing.
I try to find ways of making visual statements to object. I had a run in with
the authorities towards the end of the seventies because I changed my mind about
the military service, I became a pacifist. At school I was put in the cadets and
told to march -- you had to join the army, there was no choice. If you didn't
do it, you went to jail. Towards the end of the seventies I got very frustrated
and I was prepared to go to jail . . . I refused to carry a rifle and I refused
to wear a uniform . . . to prepare myself for this I developed a spy writing,
very similar to the early crib notes that I'd made years before. It consisted
of dots, very small dots, and they'd looked like rain. It 's called type rain,
it's very organic, letters that go across the page. Apollinaire was the first
one who tried to write about the rain. Not by explaining about what it looks like,
but by the way that he typed. There is a very famous poem by Apollinaire where
he types lines across the sheet of the paper so it looks like rain coming down.
Now I wanted this to feel like raindrops so you wouldn't know which one to see.
I wrote a book about pacifism during one of my camps in which I'd objected. They
put me away from the other soldiers so that I wouldn't become an instigator of
trouble. I sat behind a desk, no one noticed me. They thought that I was doing
army work but I was actually writing a book on pacifism. I still have the book
and [it] is the book that I translated in my spy writing so that I would be prepared,
because when I went up to object I suspected that they would throw me in jail.
I then had a way of writing down my thoughts and of remaining private so that
no one could get to me. I carried on writing -- it would be in my spy writing
-- and it helped me to retain my sanity, as well as being practical method of
remaining anonymous. Anonymity
has always been an important thing to me - to vanish and just to be in a position
of understanding. Rather than to make art to sell, to make art to cure . . . illness
. . . to do something to change my headspace. That is why a lot of my writing
looks like braille - it looks almost exactly like braille if you don't know what
braille looks like - [laughs]. But that is something I have worked with a long
time. From Cuneiform of the ancient Phoenicians . . . cuneiform is three dimensional
writing, it has texture. The word texture and the word text were originally the
same word . . . and that is how I like writing to be. Something you can touch
and it is cryptic. You have it. The less you understand, the more you build into
it. It is good for us to be stupid not stupid but people who are, in a certain
sense, and in trouble. Because if you are in trouble you begin to use the weird
. . . your own subjective weirdness of interpretation to overcome that trouble,
and then I think you begin to use your head. You begin to develop a headspace
- not like believing certain things that lead you nowhere. So that was why eventually
it was a natural thing for me to just accept braille as part of my work. And the
other thing that is important about the blind project is the boxes. I've made
many boxes since the early seventies. In the middle of the seventies, I made a
box that looked like a bundle of twigs . . . I work with the idea of secrecy a
lot. . . you don't know what's inside. When you see the bundle of twigs, you look
and it doesn't look like much. But I made it in such a way that it has a lid which
can be taken off. I had to glue the twigs very cunningly. Inside there was a glass
box which was the size of a ten Rand note. Now that box, I wanted to use that
box to help me give money to poor people. So it was like a piggy bank. In the
scriptures, I found a principle of living a life in secrecy. For example, your
right hand is not supposed to know what your left hand is doing when you give
money to poor people. I tried very often to be charitable and I failed miserably,
I must add. This little box I used to help myself. It is big enough inside to
contain ten Rand notes - well it was, they changed the [currency] size. I
was really glad because I never had any money to put into this box - it was more
of a joke than anything else. But I did it because I had good intentions - at
first I thought that I would use this thing. It is like a safe. No one knows what
you are doing in secret - that you are storing up ten Rand notes, and when no
one looks you are going to distribute them to people who need them. It was such
a stupid thing because . . . when I gave money to certain people they told me
that I was doing it for myself and it was more an act of selfishness. And they
were right. They were absolutely right. So I abandoned all that nonsense. One
can't actually do good for people by just giving them money. It actually goes
a lot wider and deeper and further . . . I am actually really scared of doing
good to anyone. I think I am doing damage more than good. Because if you patronise
people in a simplistic way, you destroy them . . . Who the hell are you to think
that you can do anything at all to help people in any case? One needs to learn
- you may have to shut up and see if there's not some way which you can get help
from other people, too. Unless you understand what it means to be helped, you
can't help someone. I still don't really understand how to help people and I am
still a bit scared of being altruistic . . . So if you are really merciful and
compassionate to someone who is in need, the easiest thing to do would be to just
put some money in their hand. That's not what you should do. You should do more
than that - but I don't know how. With the blind people, I do not want to help
blind people, I do not want to be nice to them. I think we have helped them enough.
I want them to help us. That is the basis for the Blind Alphabet. . . . In the
Blind Alphabet, I used braille and I used boxes, because of what I'd done a long
time ago, it was a build-up of my own work. It is based on the idea that in order
for sighted people to get help from blind people, sighted people had to be crippled,
had to be made blind. There was this story once, there were people in this bus
and a man with a white stick walking in the middle of the road, middle of the
night, everything was dark, and they felt very sorry for him. They shouldn't feel
sorry for him, because he is more than capable of walking in the middle of the
night than any one who has eyesight. I tried to find a way a few ways to show
this work. I needed to [make] sighted people blind. I could put my work in a darkroom
and they could come have a look at it. . . what I did in the end was use the idea
of boxes. I covered the work because I saw this sign once at an art gallery --
a nice big sign that said 'Do Not Touch'. I [could] put the work in a box and
all the sighted people would see the sign. In the Sao Paolo Biennale I saw this
sign . . . the people looked at the work and looked at the lids, shaking their
heads. They felt cheated. We did them a favour in the beginning by getting blind
people there, because blind people don't see the sign that says 'Do Not Touch'.
For them it's the same as being in a room with the lights off. They actually cope
with the work, they are on familiar territory with the work being up there. Their
natural instinct would be to go to the work, and when they stand in front of the
boxes, they don't feel daunted by it . . . In the very beginning there were 350
sculptures in 350 boxes. It was the length of half a rugby field. You see all
of this stuff and you are not allowed to touch . . . you only see a labyrinth,
like an extended cemetery. You see that there is something to look at but you
become very frustrated. If there is a blind person [present] they come to the
first box and they feel something. At that point they don't know that there are
350 other boxes in front of them so they don't feel as if they are in a labyrinth
or in a graveyard. This work is like an an anathema to sighted people. It trips
us up, frustrates us and it makes us mad. But for blind people, it's completely
the opposite because they take the lid off of the first box and they can feel
to the side, 'Ah there's a next box'. They immediately know that next to this
box is another box. After they take off the lid, they put the lid on top of the
next box and they begin to feel what is inside. At this time they start to discover
that the lid has ] braille on it so they read the braille . . . It takes them
less than five minutes to figure out how to work this thing.
It is a work that explains itself. They can take as much time as they like going
from box to box. Now usually, if they go to the art gallery . . . there is no
one to help them, you'll take them to the first sculpture and say, 'you can look
at the sculptures by touching them'. They will only see one sculpture because
then they are in a maze again of disorientation. They do not know where the second
sculpture is and they don't know what to do. So they will need a sighted person.
But in my work, they will need no one. They just need to be there. And you need
them to help you because then they can show you and explain things to you. Like
I said, I did not try to patronise them. My texts are written in a scholarly,
art gallery style . . . the words that I use are very difficult English. I had
to find words that are blind or dead. If you'll look in my book you'll see that
you won't know any of the words. If you're lucky you'll know some of them, maybe.
I wanted to perplex clever sighted people. Sighted people who go to art galleries
have had some visual training they are supposedly more able to see than the average
man on the street. Because they look with discernment they are supposed to be
able to admire the things they look at. They are supposed to be able to speak
about it intelligently. So you have the art critic who sees themselves as somebody
. . . who is a cut above the rest - in terms of their vision and the way they
look. And here you have exactly those people tripped up because they can't see
a damn thing and the words are far out of reach for them. Stuff that they have
never heard of. And it is written in academics. Blind people have to make sense,
they have to interpret the text and explain it to the sighted people. What usually
happens is one blind person will arrive on the scene and start figuring out and
start opening the boxes. And suddenly you'll see several people from different
parts of the exhibition - this rugby field of shapes with people aimlessly running
around shaking their heads in disgust and disbelief that they are not allowed
to participate in the work. 'And who the hell are these people to tell them not
to do it?' - and suddenly they see a blind person and what I have seen happen
a few times . . . at the Johannesburg Art Gallery opening, there was a blind person
. . . suddenly this blind person started reading and I saw the people on the side
of him start crying. They literally started crying when they saw him do this and
you can get somebody the one moment so angry when they're not allowed and then
the next moment they suddenly understand the work. Suddenly, the work makes itself.
I always say that the work makes itself. I didn't put somebody there with blindfolds
and hand them out as people came in . . . I used exactly the way that the gallery
functions with the sign age of 'Don't Touch'; the floor space; what people expect.
I put all of these things together and like a machine, if a blind person arrives,
the machine does this for them, if a sighted person, arrives the machine does
something particular for them, and if the two of them arrive together the machine
works 100%, the way it is supposed to, the machinery is a bridge building thing,
a community thing. | |
|
Could you discuss
the sculptures of the Blind Alphabet? | |
|
Many of the boxes
have more than one sculpture. For instance, the word bycipitous and bicordal have
the meaning of two-headed and two-tailed. There is this South African sculptor
named Jochaim Schoenveld who has made these wonderful cattle like images out of
wood -- the African bull with two heads . . . sometimes they have more than one
tail . . . so I wanted blind people to see that this is a word that you can use
for mythical beings, for a two headed monster. Jochum Schoenvelt has actually
used the African tradition and this is his two headed bull. So for the front sculpture
I carved a two headed block, and for the back sculpture I carved a two tailed
thing on a block, and if you put them together you'll get the idea of a two headed
bull or an ox, and in the braille you'll read Jochum's name, where he [carved
his sculptures]; where [the words are] used in botany, what plants may be two
headed. This opens up the world to the blind people. There were about 345 sculptures,
350 boxes. Some of the boxes had books in them. If you work with a blind person
and you try [to help] them see something nice, you can't take them to a circus,
you can't show them pictures in a book, you can't show them the ceiling -- you
have to show them something which is within arms reach. They speak of something
which is beyond arms reach as a teloramic task. A teloramic task is a visual task
that you undertake beyond the reach of your hand. Shortsighted people can't very
often undertake teloramic tasks. In dealing with blind people, this teloramic
thing is actually as far as you can reach out to touch , not see. They can only
see as far as their arms will go . . . so you have to find a way to share visual
experiences. One way is like we are [now] sitting out here in the garden listening
to the birds. They can do that, they can listen to the birds, but they don't know
that [the garden is] green, they don't know that there's a tree over there. They
have no sense of distant space. You want to share this with them. [We are baking
out in the sun now and start to rearrange things to accommodate the heat] Why
I'm making such a fuss about this is because language is the only thing that will
help them to see. If you take them to a park you'll talk a lot. They like to listen
and they don't mind being touched. Sighted people don't like being touched because
if I come closer to you and touch you, you might think funny of me. Blind people
depend on us to grab them by the hand and take them out and talk to them. The
problem is when you get to the park and speak to blind, people begin to patronise
them. I've seen many people meaning to do well, trying to do good for them, who
begin to treat [blind people] like children. Such a simple thing as all this stuff
around us and this poor man cannot see anything, so you begin to think he must
be stupid. So you tell them about the beautiful grass, and your voice is galloping
as if you're a nursery school teacher. You talk to them like little kids and eventually
they become fed up with you because they can't stand the tone of your voice .
. . They don't say anything because they need you to say things, even though you
say them like that. What I'm saying is that language is the most important thing
to help them understand external form by means of language. We make sculpture
in their minds, we use language as a plastic medium to sculpt the world around
them so that they can get an idea of what it looks like. They are used to the
idea that speech is form, speech is plastic, and they depend on it. WILLEM
BOSHOFF INTERVIEW
cont.. So
in this work, the Blind Alphabet Project, language is the vehicle of sculpture
but in this case, it is reversed. The blind people have to do the talking now.
I don't want them to patronise us so I gave them this academic text . . . they
come to us with an informed text and they are their own person. They have to share
something which is difficult so that they don't also fall into a trap of patronising
us. . . treating us like kids. They make the sculpture in our minds, and they
must also get an idea of what it feels like to be pestered, to be hassled all
the time - 'agh, won't you show me this . . . agh won't you show me that' . .
. when they stand around to look at the work, there are lots of people who will
come hassle them because they are the saving grace, the only refuge. People tend
to do a lot of nice things for blind people. It's nice, but that's not what it's
all about. What I wanted was for blind people to be guides, to be the instructors,
to be in charge of an experience in an art gallery from which sighted people can
benefit. I wanted to create a tribe, like Witgenstein said once, "A tribe of blind
people in which sighted people occurred as exceptions". PJ: The conceptual art
that you create is not immediate - it evolves over a long period of time. Can
you discuss your working methods? WB: The projects that I do are for myself. They're
liberating for me. The project that I started in 1982 was a dendralogical society
[in order] to learn the names of all plants. I worked that into an artwork that
was finished last year -- well it's not finished yet, but I showed the work, I
was able to put something out. I don't think I'll ever finish anything, properly,
I'm still working on it. This year I'll go to Edinburgh Botanical Gardens and
also to New York Botanical Gardens. I want to go to Pretoria Botanical Gardens,
to carry on with my botanical work so it will grow. It is a very large work, but
at least I know what it will look like, what it looks like now. It has been put
out onto the floor and I 've sewn all of these weird names, the botanical names
of all the plants because I wanted to do what Adam in Genesis did. Most people
think that to do what Adam did, would be to refrain from eating the apple again
. . . to develop a conscience . . . but it means more than that. It means having
an intimate relationship with everything around you. So in order to have that
intimate relationship you have to learn the names . . . because he was told to
'learn the names', that 's the way to start. So basically, I have this Garden
of Words which holds close to 4000 plants. They've been recorded into the computer
and printed out on labels that I put out on the ground. Like when one sows seeds
for a flower bed, I sowed my words, all the things that I know. I have many other
names that I have never actually seen before, but I can't use something that I
am not actually engaged with. So what I want, is to look at a plant and examine
it, try to memorize the name of it, and find characteristics in it that I can
remember. Then I put it in my head. My garden is in my head. I have a garden at
the house here but it's very unkempt. It is full of plants for me to study rather
than plants to . . . I like it very much like. I don't want a garden that is regimented
like in books. It must just grow by itself. It must be full of different lifes.
I do not want just a lawn that can grow with a few wild trees. I have many many
hundreds of trees in many places here around the house which I am studying, trying
to memorize, trying to form relationships with. So it has to do with an intimate
association with somebody, something. I am still doing things for myself, to help
myself understand, rather than making art for other people. This Blind Project
is a spin-off of a bigger project which I'm starting at the end of April -- in
an attempt to defend myself against supercilious academic arrogance. I have had
lots of people who have tried to put me down because I am Afrikaans and I speak
English with an accent. Many English speaking academics have a suspicion that
because you have an accent you must be stupid. It's the same thing I eventually
discovered with blind people. Just because they're blind doesn't mean that they
are stupid It
might mean [that], I mean there are certain blindnesses that are the result of
cerebral imbalances. But just because you see doesn't mean that you are not blind.
There is no guarantee. It's the same thing with having an accent. I . . could
never get rid of my accent. I married an English wife, we have English children,
I taught in English schools, I studied in English and I still have this nagging
thing which betrays the fact that I might be stupid. So there were these people
who would try and use mime and portray a typical Afrikaans speaking bloke as stupid,
but they are actually these academic bright people and everyone would laugh themselves
to death, so it was fine. They started structuring a game, a social game. These
people would use very intelligent words all of the time so that you would have
to guess at what the words mean. There are other words that mean the same thing
but of coarse, those intelligent words exist. I like the intelligent words, and
I knew a few of them, but I thought there was something wrong or imbalanced. I
felt the way to defend oneself would be to learn these words . . . and then use
a similar tactic on them. I started writing dictionaries to learn difficult words.
Towards the end of the 1980's . . . I went through the Oxford English Dictionary,
starting on page one looking at the first word. Every time I came across a word
I didn't know, I would write it on the computer and explain it to myself. I wrote
a little dictionary with about 10 000 words. Every night, very religiously, I
would sit and work for a few hours. At first it was just to defend myself. I said
to myself, 'there is no monopoly on language'. After I went through the Oxford
English dictionary, I went through the shorter Oxford dictionary, the two volumes
of the Webster dictionary, the dictionary of Visual Science, the dictionaries
of Art and Architecture and then finally, one with very difficult words. Then
I stopped, and said to myself 'I'm not the only one with this dilemma, all the
black people are in the same dilemma'. Everybody suspects that because they have
this strange accent they must be stupid . . . so at least they share this common
thing. It is not the right to think of a person as being stupid because of their
accent. I started using these words on people -- at this time I knew a lot of
funny words. It was like having a new car, you had to try it out. Every time these
people would talk about using complex words, I would just respond accordingly.
Their mouths would drop. I want to share this experience of exhilaration, of being
in power of knowledge, will all our black people. We have eleven official languages.
We have English and Afrikaans and then nine other black languages. Nine other
languages that are disenfranchised. I want black people to also put down the supercilious,
condescending academics that speak English, because English is in a privileged
position that all official documents are automatically written in English. You
have a problem if you are somewhat educated in English. You can read it and speak
it, but you have a big problem because nobody thinks you are worth anything because
you don't speak it flawlessly. It doesn't mean you don't know what's going on.
What I am doing [now] is building ten walls. I will call them the 'Wailing Walls'.
I might change the title, they're wailing walls because I want the academics to
come to these walls and cry I want them to be perplexed and discombobulated, so
you will have on these walls , words like cataglotism, written out on this right
next to it will be the explanation , but written in Zulu. You will have a situation
of all the academics will come to the wall to show how much they know but leave
knowing nothing. Thinking
, hell the Zulus can help me, cataglotism,.. in Zulu the explanation will be put
there. It means a lascivious kissing -- a kissing in which the tongues are intertwined,
it's funny, parrots kiss like that. In the old days it used to be considered lascivious,
French Kissing. I want the Zulu to explain that to he professor in English at
Wits. I want the Zulu to only have his standard six, to be able to read and write,
of course, and speak English. The professor at Wits cannot speak Zulu, if the
Zulu could tell him how stupid he thinks he is because he can't speak Zulu , and
the professor could tell him he's stupid because he can't speak English. It's
my opinion that the Professor would be the most stupid though.There is one thing
I have learnt is that the English Language is a lot larger than I could have ever
thought, you know it was formed through many, many years of hassle. By 1066 the
English were run over by the Danish, the French have been there, the Romans have
been there, every time the poor English have been taken over by a foreign force,
just as much as the Zulu have been and the Afrikaans have been, they have survived
that. They have survived travelling to all the other ports of the world. They
not only survived that they have plundered their language in all of the ports
of the world, they have become like the bully at school. I want to show the greatness
of English, I also want to show that the Zulu speaking, can understand things
and speak with authority, to speak with dignity, you can be poetic, as sophisticated
as the best speaking English. In the end I will build this bridge. PJ: What do
you thing the social or moral responsibility is of the Artist here? WB: I don't
think one cannot have a moral conscience if you don't have a personal conviction.
I look at myself when I make things, I go through many years of not sharing, of
not even knowing if I will share, of just trying to find stability. I have made
stupid mistakes in the past, in the general course of things I think we all have
made stupid mistakes. In many cases art is just a commodity, even sophisticated
art can just,.even made by people in an oppression, in an ethnic sense, just so
that they can have a turnover, money does corrupt,. people have a large turnover,
why shouldn't they, built then they mustn't call themselves artists, they are
craftsman, they are just making things so that they can survive, it doesn't serve
a social function. Your question has to do with social responsibility, and I do
think an artist has a social responsibility. Does an impressionist have a social
responsibility In conceptual art, what has happened in the second half of this
century, at first conceptual art was a kind of formal subversion of the elements
of art. Creating art in a space where art has not existed before. At first is
was heavily relied on language, for example you take the work of an artist, the
work exists but it exists as a qualification of aesthetics. Take this work for
example, made by one artist. he would take one sheet of white paper, A4, he would
then put it in a computer, and make a photocopy of this and then he would take
the white sheet out of the copier and put it as page one, then he would take the
photocopy of page one and put it in the computer , and make a photocopy of the
blank sheet, this is page 2, a photocopy of a photocopy, he would repeat this
and create a 100 page book . What do you have , he calls it a work of art. I respect
that work of art, in terms of it's positioning , it has positioned itself where
no one else has dared to go before, it sets a certain tendency, people have to
now consider this impossible kind of situation and what I like about this conceptual
art in that sense is that it has a lot to with uncertainty, than with the certainty
with beautiful colour and expressive notions. It deals with chaos, they're trying
to find out what's going on, and who we are. I think it was investigative and
it was apparently futile and I think those are the things that teach us about
life in the end. Now what came out of that in the seventies was the work was used
in a sense of developing a social conscience and a social consciousness, Let's
take for example the work of Hans Haak, in the middle of the seventies he was
already protesting against Apartheid, In 81 and 82 when I was making my 370 day
project, I saw a Dokumenta exibition where he had these British Leyland Pieces,
you'd see British Leyland invested in South Africa, they brought Land Rover, there
slogan was "A Breed ApartÓ. You
could see the vocabulary of Apartheid is typically colonial English, think that
is where it started, I don't think it starts with the Afrikaans people,it has
just been pinned on the Afrikaans people but he of course picked up on the British
Leyland, he took photographs of the Soweto riots in 76, and the Soweto riots show
a lot of people being hammered with sjamboks, lots of dust, and in the middle
of this you saw the Land rovers, because they were their police vehicles. And
then he put the slogan under it. "British Leyland, A Breed A Part". and right
next to it he showed a jaguar which is also made by British Leyland with this
lush white woman on it and everybody saw this work. It was a complete disaster
for British Leyland. that stuff, will today be recognised as some of the greatest
works of this century, because it was effective. I think that one thing can lead
to another, the way that we get there is through conceptual art, now you have
this conceptual art of the conscience. With a social responsibility. My work has
gone that route, I don't know of many artists here in the seventies here who was
making stuff even remotely related to that, certainly for myself. This morning
before you came I wrote ten new words that I didn't know,I must still do five
more today, by the end of this year I will 5000, the exercise of a Monk, I need
discipline. Other artists can answer for themselves. One learns so much so often,
by people who are always put down by critics. PJ: Let's talk a little bit about
the fundings in this country, especially the possible growth in the last thirty
years? WB: Art has had a raw deal from the government, critics, teachers, from
everybody, except those who love it and are passionate about it. Modern Art,...
this thing that we had in the sixties, called the 'sestigers', artist here in
the sixties who thought they were the up front artists in the world, of course
nobody saw there work because they were ostracised. They were hardly tolerated
by art critics who wanted to see beautiful landscapes and still life, very typically
British, it had it's peak in Grahamstown. Very serious up front artists even though
they were pale in comparison to the rest of the abstract expressionist in the
rest of the world. they never really received much recognition, there names were
mentioned, I have a few of catalogs, here and there you'd find a grand scheme
proposed to the government, and then the government finds out that they've been
suckered into this art thing. Arts had a raw deal, people have had to battle through
it. The people who did make a living out of it were making pretty flowers for
interior decorating. There was no money for black art. People thought that it
was inferior just to be blunt. Black art and good academic cutting edge art shared
the same fate, were on the same boat and never received any recognition. Now all
of that has changed, it has changes a lot for black art and are now recieving
a lot of recognition.WILLEM
BOSHOFF INTERVIEW
cont..
There is a lot of sympathy, there is a bit of spin-off for good contemporary art
as well, we joined the rest of the world where it has been made and been funded.
The raw deal side of it is still a little bit on the good academic art. Weak black
art is still favoured over the good academic art, you have the lost generation
being indicated, or designated as black artists, but the lost generation is as
much up front good academic art as much as it is black art. We spoke about Hans
Hark and the way he used art to fight for a social cause this could not have been
done in this country because there's never been any money for it. Now my way of
dealing with the problem is to just cut out the system and just do it for myself.
And to spend all my money on it. And to work as a teacher, to earn a living and
to put that money straight into books and straight into art every single month.
To do my own travelling and to fund it all. Occasionally one receives a small
grant . . . or more recently, as has been the case, I have received a little bit
of money here and a little bit of money there. But with the Blind Alphabet project,
for example, I didn't know how to ask either. I think artists also have a problem
they don't know how to ask for money. See? small pause checking tape in camera
WB: [cont..] I used to not asking for money. We are used to not getting money
when we ask . . so . . . we don't always ask. We should now learn because money
has been made available. I have been helped a little bit already. When I started
off with the Blin Alphabet project for all of those 350 boxes, I believed in the
work. And I wanted to do this thing where what I had done always with myself could
be put out there. The boxes are loaned . . . they are bit more than 100 Rand per
box. They are steel and powder coated and properly baked, you must do it right.
You must never pull your punches. You must do the best work and then the cost
will eventually justify itself. If you do inferior work . . . one must find the
money so I mortgaged the house. And I came up with the forty thousand Rand, or
whatever it was, and we suffered a hell of a lot. I had to borrow from the bank
and the bank looked at me and I nearly went to another bank because they would
not give it at first. Trouble you see? Luckily I had nearly paid off the house.
So I have been paying off on this house for nearly 20 years. But I got the money.
Eventually I had the exhibition and then nothing happened. No one approached me.
And then slowly, only many months later, people began to approach me to buy from
the project. I had to recover all of that money. It was a lot more, like 60, 000
Rands. I did not want to break up the project because I like the idea of keeping
people perplexed the number and being a library of shapes. I wanted to keep that
in tact. So we have been very careful to sell them off in large blocks. It has
begun to slowly help. The work has been recognised internationally, it's been
to quite a few countries now. . . If they can help with those initial costs then
it's easy for me to make a living. I don't want to mortgage the house, I don't
want to go back to that situation. The government, also has helped me because
I was chosen as this artist for Sao Paolo to represent this country and there
was funding for it. So I think there is funding. One has to learn to ask for it
and how to ask for it. I don't think it's biased, I think it is fair. I think
anyone has a chance . . . to address the process,, to speak out against it or
for it or to say what they think should be done. It is much more transparent than
in the past. In the past, you just very seldom got any money unless if you knew
someone who knew someone . . . it always difficult. But with this new system things
have changed a lot. Not there is now a lot of money for art, but still I think
that academic art is part of the neglected tradition much as traditional black
art is part of the neglected tradition. I still think that the critics and writers
for the newspapers and many of the academics in the country don't know what good
art is. I don't think that they are reaching out, I don't think they are going
overseas, I don't think they are tending things, I don't think they are buying
books. I think they teach what they've been taught. They've got certain trusted
abilities because they know how to draw . . so I think that they've fallen into
a lackadaisical trap in many places. I know of many people who put everything
on the line. I think I've put a lot on the line. I think there are some young
people . . .I think that there are wonderful things being produced in other ways.
I think people are finding a new sense of hope. Maybe that's the best way of putting
it. PJ: What are your thoughts about the technologies and their role in the artists
work? WB: The internet, e-mail , the computer, this is all various ways of disseminating
and coming to grips with knowledge. Some of the work that I have done I have dealt
with text and specifically with the way writing will become obsolete, I have dealt
with the book, and the way that the book will be replaced by the computer ultimately,
it won't happen soon, but eventually. With the typewriter, the 'kyk' Afrikaans
concrete poetry was a kind of attempt to celebrate the end of the typewriter. Last
year I made three very big works to celebrate the demise of paper and the book,
and the three works are entitled the 'Tree of Knowledge' , because a tree of knowledge
is a system with dealing with information in order to propagate and to utilise
knowledge, if you call it a tree you are talking about a book, paper is a processed
tree. A tree of knowledge is simply a book. The tree of life as an archaic symbol
will eventually replace the tree of knowledge, the tree of knowledge as a book,
paper, newspapers, minutes of meetings, handouts, leaflets, . . . goodness knows
what else. In that capacity has become a burden because it is depleting natural
forests, not that you shouldn't utilise natural forests, I just think it has gone
to far, even with all of the recycling of paper. Now I deal with social issues
in my work, I think the 20th century is the century where social issues have come
to the forefront, more than ever before. We've dealt with the political correctness,
we've dealt the small group problems, we've dealt with female with feminist politics.
The 20th century.. people have taken a look at itself and been ashamed of what
they have done to each other and have tried to sort it out, colonialism has come
to an end, different people in different parts of the world have found different
solutions, communism has come and gone. think that it's a century that is characterised
by an attempt to find a political solutions. In the 21st century the emphasis
is going to shift away from denominational politics, group or national politics
and focus on natural resources, the greatest threat is not whether we hate or
kill each other but whether we have enough food to eat or natural resources, fossil
fuels and solar energy is all the 21st century. Right now I see the next century
focusing on that and not so much on whether we deserve to get a job whether we
are white or black. That is a problem and it has terrible repercussions if it
is attacked in the wrong way. I'm not saying those problems don't exist but then
I deal with them in some of my works. To try to answer your question about the
internet,I think that it will replace the way we teach art school , the way we
order things, the way we live, it will take over much of life so we will have
more free time to devote to other pursuits. In terms of the book of Revelations,
they have a tree there, it's called the tree of life, the New Jerusal;em, the
streets are made of gold, gold that looks like glass it is a kind of city that
is futuristic because it comes from the sky.
That's how it's written, and I mess around with the text, I interpret things very
freely unlike what the book dictates that I should do. I think it has to do with
the computer, the silicon valley was the precursor of what we would see in the
future, I think it will depend on solar energy, everything will come down to solar
energy rather than fossil fuel or atomic sun. I think we will learn, just as much
as the plants have learned, those are also trees of knowledge in their own right,
they have learned to absorb and transform solar energy so that they could become
life sustaining, The tree of life that we are looking at will come from above,
and I think it is going to come from that part beyond our satellites, now that
they are sending new things to the moon to look for water , that is the beginning
of it. The next century is looking at the independency of what happens in outer
space and that outer space, they're hoping to find a way to tap solar energy because
most countries in the northern hemisphere are clouded over for most of the year,
they are going to find a way to tap into this. All of this fantastic futuristic
stuff is in the book of Revelations is moving in that direction rather than in
the airy fairy sort of way. The computer is going to be the thing more than anything
else to help us resolve problems we have. In the past, our dependency on the text,
the book, and on - the way books are able to can knowledge, to make knowledge
permanent. . . That is all very well, but the computer will take over that function,
it's not only going to preserve or save knowledge, it's going to teach us how
to manipulate knowledge, we will become the beginning of that, it's put us in
a frame of mind, not unlike the frame of mind of the ancient druids, the shamans.
They understood that the world was round, their world view was based on the circle,
round reality, but paper and books have given us the rectangle as a symbol for
the world we've not been able to break out of it. It's fenced us in. The computer
brings back the stone as a kind of symbol of the calculus, as something that can
be manipulated in a very simplistic way, the beginning of the binary system, and
that proceeds the making of paper, so I think we are going back to that system,
the silicon chip, the binary system or the manipulation of simple elements, that
is going to give us a new meditative frame of mind. The internet, the information
highway, that is all a part of the new Jerusalem , not that I like much of what
I read there because it is confusing,from this confusion, this is what I see,
this whole world in Marshall McLean terms , we're going to become the global village,
because everybody is going to know everyone else through the internet, be one
big happy family, nations are beginning to vanish, already in Europe it's beginning
to obscure the boundaries between the countries, one needs to find a way of links,
rather than putting up fences, the computer is a link, not a fence. Politics tend
to put up boundaries, irridentism, there you have the boundary determined by language
restrictions, now Italian is not restricted to Italy anymore, German is not restricted
to Germany. Everything is exploding everywhere, it becomes totally stupid, in
the northern part of Italy most of them speak German. They say that fences make
good neighbours, but not in the international sense of the word. The role and
function of the internet, you have to go across international boundaries, how
can you put up a fence in outer space? The internet doesn't respect boundaries.
I like that. WILLEM
BOSHOFF INTERVIEW
cont... | |
PJ: | What
message do you have that you'd like people to get with your work? | |
WB: |
I'm not
into trying to set a trend, I have looked at myself and tried to improved myself,
it was very difficult, it took a long time, I used work to try to make it easier
for me to learn patience to learn new words to try to respect things. I think
one needs to set up systems where people can help themselves to overcome their
fears, I have big problems which I've tried to overcome, at high school I froze
up, I used to never be able to say a word, I 've had to overcome that fear and
my other fear is other people think that I am stupid because I have an accent,
I haven't found a way around it. One must try and do one thing at a time, it doesn't
happen overnight, I spend every night, many hours, I do one thing well, understand
it, and then move onto the next thing. After a while things become obscured, you
don't know where you are, you're only doing this one thing ,later on you can see
what was going on earlier. To try to make sense of life e is not an easy thing,
and it comes in little chunks and other times big bits and you have to figure
out how it fits together.
Another thing I have learned in life is not to be condescending to things that
, at first look stupid to me. If I taught a class I would pick the ugliest kids
and the most obnoxious ones and try to become there friends, I don't want teachers
pets, I find it difficult to teach people who are obnoxious, so I would try to
make them feel responsible , by going out of my way to share responsibility with
them, eventually those are the ones that surprise me. Very often in art you find
it is the oddball is the one that comes out top, people do art because they are
not accepted in society, very often it is the loner, somebody who can't cope with
problems at home, now they become an artist, they let their hair down. I often
tell people with long hair that they think they look ugly because their hair is
long, they're trying to look different. One must team up with them, and try to
accept and understand them. I think it is very often, because of one's prejudice's
that one discriminates against, those are the people that will confound you .
It's also from the Bible, I don't really want to make it into this be all end
all, and I play outrageously with it, I'm on a romantic adventure with it, and
I swear I do all the things one is not supposed to do. I take it and make some
stupid sense out of it. It becomes more meaningful to me like that, rather than
being a slave to the text. It is hard for people in this country, from the past
of the country, the politics we've had for people to think that stuff I was making
was art ,they've rejected me, I wear a funny badge of long hair, it's typical
South African prejudices, I 've had to find my friends amongst people that are
not normally socially acceptable, and I like that. I find that those people are
wonderful. I live this very controversial life , mainly from where I stand, I've
made some very time consuming and hard labour intensive work, that's not what
is important. What's important is too look for someone to play with. | |
| |