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“PROUD TO BE LABELLED RACIST”
By Sean O’Toole / 08.09.2011
Seven years ago, the Druid of Kensington, a big bearded man with unkempt hair, kindly
smile and encyclopedic knowledge of language, exhibited his stuff – stones, bread rolls, old
tools, 96 full bibles, 18 maps, two “manipulated” puzzles – at a Parkwood gallery. His mood
at the time was unsettled and confused, but not immune to surprise, possibly even delight.
Which is why he entitled his exhibition of stuff Nonplussed.
As part of his showing at the yacht permanently dry-docked on the corner of Jan Smuts
Avenue and Chester Road, the big druid installed a wire mesh cage (or gabion) filled with
stones. Some of the stones he painted black and arranged in such a way that they spelt out the
name “JERUSALEM”. The kicker was his use of red stones to fill out the fourth, fifth and
sixth letters of the holy city, “USA”. Israel and America. Geddit? The creepers surrounding
the sculptural statement sure did: they were trampled flat during the intensive installation
period. For weeks, the bearded magician’s over-determined labour was visible in the path of
dead creepers.
Willem Boshoff, Crusade, 2011, wood
Willem Boshoff, the Kensington resident who last year installed himself in a cubicle at Arts
on Main and led daily Druid Walks along Main Reef Road, has a knack for making heavyhanded opening statements that cloud the enquiring sophistication and humour of his work.
Take his current Parkwood exhibition, SWAT, which charts the artist’s shift from discomfit
and nonplussed-ness to something else, a kind of action-orientated gatvol-ness.
Like Martin Luther, the German cleric and theologian who long ago heralded the protestant
reform movement in northern Europe with his 95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of
Indulgences, Boshoff recently spent some time doing an agitated stock take of his grievances.
Etched onto a shiny metal surface, his complaints are affixed to a wall next to the ladies bog
at the entrance to the Goodman Gallery. Where Luther came up with 95 things that pissed
him off about the Catholic Church’s “ignorant and wicked” doings, the Boshoff only
managed 24 sentences on why he is “proud to be labelled racist in South Africa”.
Willem Boshoff, I am proud to be labelled racist in South Africa if it means that, 2011, metal
The brevity may have something to do with the fact that his list was compiled at night. It is
not all that far-fetched to speculate that the avuncular mystic of Kitchener and Roberts
avenues was either interrupted by the shrill wail of a burglar alarm, or a work-stopping
Eskom-sponsored dark. After all, as Boshoff empathically declares in his text panel, “I find
the severe, prolonged power failures unacceptable”, and “I appreciate security walls,
electrical fences, alarms and guard dogs”.
There is a kind of stuck poetry to Boshoff’s disquisition on his current disquiet, which dully
introduces his current solo exhibition. “I am revolted by ineffective, dim-witted 4 x 4
politicians,” reads the first of his twenty-four sentences, which are stacked like bricks. “I am
shocked…” “I am dismayed…” “My temper rises…” “I fly into a rage…” “My blood
boils…” The bearded magician’s anxious prose poem argues its case with solipsistic gusto.
In channelling his own furies, one presumes that Boshoff is also aiming to express a larger
zeitgeist. Again, it is not a far-fetched a speculation. Through the doors, on your left, there is
a rectangular piece of woodwork – it looks like a modernist skyscraper – that quotes
Muhammad Ali’s magisterial two-word poem, “Me, we.” But who is this supposed we?
Willem Boshoff, Me, we, 2011, wood
There are moments when the Druid of Kensington’s riposte to daily life in this land shaped
by men with first names like Jan, Cecil, Paul, Louis, Nelson, Jacob and Julius reads like an
angelic transcript of conversations happening around braais in Sunward Park, Birchleigh,
Glenvista, Witkoppen, Rooihuiskraal, Moreleatpark, Akasia, Bothasig, Skoongesig,
Langenhoven Park, Bayswater and Winklespruit. The absence of metaphor in Boshoff’s
introductory work is patent. “I totally detest corruption by government officials,” reads his
final sentence. Perhaps this will be the tenor of the new struggle poetry.
Then again, artists have long been railing against corrupt government officials. Here is
Nikolai Gogol, the proto-modernist Russian writer, from the opening of his 1842 short story,
The Overcoat: “In one of our government departments… but perhaps I had better not say
exactly which one. For no one’s more touchy than people in government departments,
regiments, chancelleries or, in short, any kind of official body.” Sound familiar?
Gogol’s next sentence abruptly shifts the focus, his statement offering one possible way to
read the baroque plaque that introduces (and mars) Boshoff’s new exhibition of intriguing
stuff, including rulers, plastic flies, branches of thorn and fragments of the alphabet.
“Nowadays every private citizen thinks the whole of society is insulted when he himself is.”
Willem Boshoff, Swat, 2011, paper, wood, plastic
Willem Boshoff, Swat (detail), 2011, paper, wood, plastic
Willem Boshoff, Bull, 2011, wood, sand