Willem Boshoff's Panifice: Between Africa and Europe: The Language(s) of Civilization(s)
Johan Snyman was the case with Marcel Duchamp, art ias an institution is unsettled by Willem Boshoff s work. Whereas Duchamp disenfranchised the work of art as masterpiece, Boshoff disenfranchises the art public as connoisseurs of the finest things in life. The kind of art public that the institution of art presupposes— an art historically informed, educated, and relatively well-to-do group of people (enough to have leisure time and space available for themselves) and who, ironically, are the first to meet Boshoff's works—realizes immediately that they are at a disadvantage. Encountering Boshoff's Blind Alphabet, the normally sighted art going public finds itself dependent on those people for whom an art gallery is usually not accessible. The visually challenged part of the public, completely marginalized by the world of the art gallery, is called upon to disclose the meaning of the collection of objects. The same strategy is deployed in Writing in the Sand and Circle of Knowledge. "Marginalized" or abstruse words in English, recognizable as part of the vocabulary of global English by the suffixes of -ology or -ism by any user of English, are explained in indigenous (South African) languages. The effect of double alienation (marginalized English words explained in a "foreign" language) is strengthened by the medium. Writing in the Sand is executed with silicone and grounded, oxidized ore—silicone conjuring the notion of the fleetingness of computer generated writing and of a shared meaning agreed and understood between two languages. Circle of Knowledge consists of eleven granite blocks on which a mini-dictionary of twenty of these unfamiliar -ology and -ism words are explained in the eleven official languages of South Africa. Although the indigenous languages of South Africa have the floor, even literally in the case of Writing in the Sand, and although they are engraved in stone in Circle of Knowledge, they remain unheard and unspoken, stumbling blocks for the international intellectual world traveler. In these works the artist says that he "wish[es] to reverse the dominance and power of privileged tongues [and positions]" and to frustrate them. He explains: