Power and emptiness
by Paul Edmunds
Underlying Wim Botha's rigorous and complex explorations is a deft hand. A graphic and sculptural sensibility provides a stable platform for the artist to explore his chosen subject with line, form and material. As such, the show's title is multi-layered. 'Speculum' refers to an optical device either inserted into a bodily passage or equipped with a mirror for the purpose of inspection. In a similar way, Botha's use of materials coupled with a technical and formal capability allow him to probe and scrutinize issues inaccessible to those with less ability. Here, in one fell swoop, Botha engages in painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation describing an arc that might attract the label of 'conceptual'.
Where Botha has previously addressed specifically South African issues, here, taking as his starting point heraldic symbols and conventions, he explores status, power and authority and their heraldic depiction. Coats of arms and statuary conventions are subject to Botha's relentless analysis and his gaze takes in corporate as well as state heraldry.
Mnemonic Reconstruction (from memory) presents the viewer with a coat of arms, exploded in such a way that dismembered elements separate out into layers, allowing close inspection of each. Beautifully carved and modelled, the surfaces range from the deep red of African hardwoods to a blackened charcoal and pristine gold. The title suggests that the piece is both created from memory and useful in aiding memory. The foremost element, the right half of a blackened scroll suggests partial recollection, while the large gilded fleur de lys is absurdly ornate.
Behind this last element are a series of hyenas, contained in a shield-like form described by ornate gilded foliage. In an earlier work by Botha hyenas stood for the predatory, mocking systems of state. Here they behave terribly - fornicating, defecating and cannibalising. The scorched lion and blackened half scroll suggest that this symbol of authority and virtue is not as stable as it would have us believe. Despite the weighty nature of Botha's chosen subject matter, he is not without humour.
This is clear from works like Motherland and Fatherland, a pair of pre-1994 South African coats of arms with their shields sporting only simple negative and positive vortex-like forms respectively. Propped up between rearing antelope, the shield is nearly a tabula rasa. Even the scroll is wordless. Botha finds both the emptiness and the power of such symbolic devices. The material in which he works shifts its shape similarly; artificial or reconstituted marble is a material made from marble dust and resin, a poorer country cousin to the stone traditionally used in state and religious sculpture.
In the show's major installation piece, Mirage, Botha reveals a similar interest. Crossing the depth of the central gallery space is a cluster of fine horizontal, parallel cords fixed to the walls on both sides in the outline of a German coat of arms. The bilateral symmetry of a coat of arms also functions on another axis with opposing walls home to reverse images. Declaring its presence as much as its evanescence, this symbol is both threatening and flimsy - as much electric fence as cat's cradle. Ghost coats of arms shimmer in the space between the walls where light crosses the construction. The span of the work suggests a movement through time as well, but at the same time, its beautiful shimmer intimates an imminent vaporisation.
In a series of works on paper Watermark/ Oilslick 1 - 7 Botha turns his attention to two-dimensional representation. A watermark is traditionally a near invisible staining of a document (such as currency) to assert its authenticity. On slightly off-white paper, Botha paints in oils of the same colour, a series of partial and whole coats of arms. The linseed oil from the paint has leached onto the surrounding paper, creating a greasy aureole. These faux documents that the artist has created, depictions of depictions, are fast becoming a liability and will soon enough require some sort of archival treatment, much like the original documents to which they allude.
On the opposite wall is a series of etchings, Dispute 1- 3, where Botha has isolated the animals found flanking shields on coats of arms. Freed from their traditional structure, their 'dispute' seems futile. The British lion rampant is faced off against a unicorn, and in the South African version, a gemsbok faces a springbok across a hollow chasm supported only by a blank scroll.
Botha's trademark paper carving is to be found in Self Portrait as a Common Ancestor. From a skewered block of English and Afrikaans dictionaries, suspended from the ceiling, Botha hews a 'self portrait' of an early hominoid. Just as the complexities of Botha's genetic history cannot be portrayed by an 'artist's impression' of an extinct species, nor can the foibles of his character and cultural inheritance hope to be contained by dictionaries of the two languages he speaks.
The traditional formal portrait is similarly only able to depict a single aspect of a complex being and even this is threatened by Botha's irreverent interpretation and display. It is nevertheless a fascinating and beautiful object, beautifully and sensitively rendered.
Botha's first one-person gallery show marks a significant step in this young artist's career, and this body of work has all the weight and authority of the conventions and myths whose implosion he choreographs. It is balanced, thorough and substantial, and leaves a viewer eagerly anticipating his next showing.
November 4 - 26
