carved continuous data paper and fluorescent lights life-size, installation dimensions variable

Artwork date: 2001
Exhibited: Millenium Gallery, Johannesburg; Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town, Clean/Grime: An exhibition of desaturated art, 2001; 26 June to 27 July 2002.
Literature: Perryer, S. ed. (2005). Wim Botha: Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year for Visual Art 2005. Catalogue. Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, colour illustration on p.25.

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life-size, installation dimensions variable

Notes:

With a successful career both in South Africa and internationally, Wim Botha needs little introduction as a deeply thoughtful artist and an exceptionally gifted sculptor. Probably best known for his Mieliepap Pietà – a mirror copy of Michelangelo’s Pietà that Botha sculpted out of maize meal in 2004 – he has developed a reputation for works that converse with the history of art, but in strikingly original ways. This initial interest in re-telling classic works in unusual and symbolic media, was soon developed into more distinctive interpretations of original works and myths.Botha’s interest in historical forms extends to his immediate context, appropriating iconic visual symbols familiar to a particular segment of his South African audience. Pierneef-like trees in Blastwave (2005), wild animals like hyenas, antelopes, wildebeest, ball-and-claw furniture, trophy heads mounted on walls, all get absorbed into his lexicon suggesting perhaps a personal history, but more importantly, tapping into a much broader store of memories and universal experiences.The Sable Antelope head, on offer here, forms part of a three-piece artwork consisting of this head, carved from books, a series of fluorescent lights and an analogue TV set displaying a test signal. The full work was made for an exhibition in 2001 entitled Clean / Grime: An exhibition of de-saturated art with an intentional focus on the formal qualities of monochromatic colour amid a political context over-determined by racial (read: colour) difference. Botha, always interested in subtleties rather than simplicities, used the glaring lights, the black-and-white striped test signal and the albino trophy head to invoke the random binaries of DNA sequencing, of human patterning and contrast. In South Africa’s political landscape, the work was invariably interpreted in terms of racial binaries and in that context the paper trophy head, de-saturated to white, becomes a provocative comment on whiteness, masculinity, and power.

Liese Van Der Watt