Wim Botha: Solipsis

WIM BOTHA

Solipsis i – v

WIM BOTHA

Solipsis i – v

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DRAWING IN THREE DIMENSIONS WIM BOTHA INTERVIEWED BY LIZE VAN ROBBROECK

LVR: The Solipsis installations seem to be substantively different to your previous work, although I recognise your distinctive signature in them. How did you arrive at this series?

WB: It began with a crisis. I felt I had produced a trajectory of work that arrived at a point where the logical destination was a place I did not want to be – a kind of pastiche, a quasi-postmodern gamesmanship.

I recognised a concern with clever ideas and I did not like where that road ended.

So you felt that you had become too appropriated by concept?

At the bottom of it all was the desire to get away from planned works that are conceptually sound and dense but that put me in this sort of downward spiral – an over-conceptualised deadlock. I could generate any number of workable concepts, but there was nothing I could get excited about anymore.

The iconographical density of your work to date is an art historian’s dream, but I can imagine it would be possible to end up feeling as though one was mainly a manufacturer of ideas. For an artist who likes to engage with process and material, it could become rather frustrating and sterile. How did you break out of that deadlock?

I did charcoal drawings that were really just renderings of sculptures, mainly portrait busts that I’d made. I enjoyed making them and they led to other drawings that were rougher and looser and eventually just became silhouettes – really dark, dense mark-making – hardly recognisable as figurative. What is interesting is the way that two adjacent lines interact – that really becomes something that sings. You can’t imagine the magic that can exist between two forms.

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So perhaps you wanted to rediscover that energy and joy of spontaneous art-making.

I don’t think I was ever engaged in just art-making before. By the time my works were made, nothing had been left to chance. There was this stalemate, the point where I could see through to the conclusion of each concept even before I could start thinking how to execute it. The possibility of unforeseen events, of play, of just having fun, was limited because, before I even started, I already had to know how it would end. Also, being a sculptor, the materiality forces you to consider the end product. What I was looking for was sculpture I could do spontaneously – in the same free and unplanned way I did charcoal drawings. I wanted to just think a line and it’s there. The subtractive process of working with polystyrene lends itself to this. It’s a bit of a dance – you do a certain move with your body but you can’t see the results until it’s done and a piece falls away.

The Solipsis installations do indeed read as drawings in three dimensions.

Drawing is the core of it all, a return to basics – it’s a scratch in a rock.

Would you say that unpremeditated art-making is for you a way of allowing form and process to generate content, rather than the other way round – concept/content generating form and process?

Content gets generated gradually through both form and process, yes, but it was a conceptual decision to create a method that allows for that to happen. Or put differently, concept created a process that allows for form to generate content. It is really quite hard not to plan and conceive in advance, to trust and allow the work to flow and develop organically.

An unexpected and to me very welcome side effect is the rediscovery of the beauty in form and line and composition, the real basics. I feel that I had lost that, and am now gradually relearning these things.

How important is aesthetics to you?

The visual appearance of things has always been very important to me. I have always lived and thought and worked in a visual way. What is different for me

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now is that formal or visual considerations can take priority over concept and shift the content in unexpected new ways. It is not so much about beauty or its opposite, but rather standing back and letting it unfold, facilitating the process. It also means that embracing ugliness is easier for me now.

Solipsis constitutes a break from your previous work, but are there also continuities?

Underneath it all is still the same particular mind shaped by particular circumstance. I still see an interest in western classical and baroque form, dynamic juxtapositions and dramatic moment. Perhaps these are things I felt before but am only now able to let out. Solipsis is still concerned with the various different truths behind things. I have always tried to make the works conceptually as open to manifold interpretation as possible, and now the process takes that a step further to the actual form as well, completely letting go of the need to shape meaning. Maybe this new material and process allows for works to come forward without being subjected to a conceptual criticalhistorical filter first. It allows me to indulge in figurative work without needing a justification for it.

Your earlier work was often engaged with the theme of power: the machinations and abuse and discursive rationalisations of the human quest for power. Would you say that Solipsis is also concerned with power in some form or another?

It is as if it zooms out a bit, and no longer really cares about specifics and causes and effects, rather being content with the realisation that everything is in constant motion, and playing with that. Maybe it speculates about the underlying structures in the zoomed-out bigger picture, but it doesn’t really hold on to that either. That is where some rigour comes in, the discipline not to make value judgments automatically. These installations really become immersed in image-making for its own sake, and that can be very powerful in a different way.

Solipsis is a series of installations – did you conceive of them as elaborations on a central theme?

No. I started with a single figure, which probably embodied my state of mind at the time: one standing body, the most basic

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core impulse of representing the human form, leaning forward, head down. Then I started thinking, maybe it’s not standing but levitating on a fluorescent tube. From this impulse all of Solipsis came – the figure had to be lightweight to rest on a fluorescent tube, hence polystyrene. I kept exploring the medium and the studio was getting full of objects that generated the idea of creating an image, almost like a three-dimensional tableau of a classical painting. I even thought of having a frame that you view it through, so that it appears to exist in three-dimensional space as a white ghost-like world, so that it feels as though you can somehow pass through the surface of a painting into a different realm.

Can you tell me a bit more about the title, Solipsis?

The core of the theory of solipsism holds that only the self can be known to exist. From Descartes we know that cognition or consciousness proves the existence of the self, of one’s own mind. But that does not prove that any other minds or selves necessarily exist. We have no way of knowing if anything outside the mind exists, because everything we see or experience may be just a mental product. I am fundamentally alone, from Latin solus alone + ipse self. It is a fantastically rich idea and it opens up a labyrinth of possibilities regarding what is real and not real, regarding the self in relation to other things, and the nature and location of the true self, the entity doing the perceiving. If the world comes into being as you perceive it, it raises the question: what are you, and where are you, each moment, a nanosecond before you perceive the next part of your unfolding reality.

Where does this reality come from, what is outside, before or after it? It conjures ideas of the void, the vast unknown and a glimpse of what it may mean to be truly alone.

The process of creating relatively unplanned elements that are arranged in relatively spontaneous compositions, the way the hot wire cuts an invisible form inside a block which is revealed only after it is done – these feel like a close fit with the idea that things develop gradually as you progress.

The brightness and whiteness of the final form of the installation has an otherworldly quality that is equally dreamlike, melancholy, dispassionate and complex. And this is the nature and sentiment that the making of these worlds has for me too.

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Is your work in any way concerned with physics or metaphysics?

I am interested in the principles of energy as described by physics and metaphysics; by what is real yet unseen, and what is seen but not real, by the possibility of duplicate or parallel worlds, adjacent but invisible mirrors of our own. These works pick up on ideas that have been occupying me for a while – the conception of time in particular; not just the usual linear conception of time, but the idea of time as a circular or spiral process, with return but never to the same point – the old symbol of the ouroboros, with time eating itself in a perpetual cycle, a kind of infinity symbol flow. It creates a kind of separate world that sits next to you on the chair that you can’t see – a constant alternative reality.

You are known for your use of unconventional materials such as maize meal, bibles and other books, anthracite, etc. What motivated your use of polystyrene and fluorescent lights in these installations?

I like the particulate nature of things – grains of maize meal simulating grains of mineral compressed into marble, or in this case millions of tiny polystyrene balls expanded and compressed, grown under heat and pressure into semi-solid form, but still entirely separable into ‘molecular’ component parts. It wasn’t conceived this way, but the fluorescent tubes as energy or plasma principle and the polystyrene as cellular body create an interesting and entirely artificial parallel to real life. Fluorescent tubes and polystyrene come a long way together – chronologically, visually and conceptually they complement each other, and the emotional and tactile qualities they evoke are perfectly suited.

One final question: the Solipsis installations are immensely powerful works, very dynamic and visually compelling – do you make them in a kind of frenzy, an adrenalin rush?

Absolutely not. I feel very calm making them. You try and let go, to the extent that you do not really care what it is that you are making. You trust that it will end up somewhere where it has some kind of value, whatever measure you use to determine that. I can’t judge art anymore as good or bad, it is as though I have had to let go of that concern.

What valid measures can you use to judge art? It is all there, it exists.

Lize van Robbroeck lectures in the Department of Visual Arts at Stellenbosch University.

This interview took place in Stellenbosch in February during the installation of Solipsis v.

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Solipsis i ALL THIS STEVENSON, CAPE TOWN 20 JANUARY – 26 FEBRUARY 2011

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Solipsis ii ALL AROUND GALERIE JETTE RUDOLPH, BERLIN 29 APRIL – 4 JUNE 2011

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Solipsis iii PANDEMONIUM: ART IN A TIME OF CREATIVITY FEVER GÖTEBORG INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL FOR CONTEMPORARY ART 10 SEPTEMBER – 13 NOVEMBER 2011

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Solipsis iv A THOUSAND THINGS STEVENSON, JOHANNESBURG 27 SEPTEMBER – 2 NOVEMBER 2012

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Solipsis v WORDFEST ARTIST 2013 SASOL ART MUSEUM, STELLENBOSCH 1 MARCH – 27 APRIL 2013

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WIM BOTHA Botha was born in Pretoria in 1974, graduated from the University of Pretoria with a BA (Visual Art) in 1996, and lives in Cape Town. He has received a number of prestigious awards, including the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2005, accompanied by a national touring exhibition, and the first Tollman Award in 2003.

He has held seven solo shows at Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg, between 2003 and 2012, and two at Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin (2008 and 2011). His work has featured on international group exhibitions including The Rainbow Nation, Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2012); the Göteborg Biennial, Sweden (2011); Memories of the Future: The Olbricht Collection, La Maison Rouge, Paris (2011); the 11th Triennale für Kleinplastik, Fellbach, Germany (2010); Peekaboo: Current South Africa, Tennis Palace Art Museum, Helsinki (2010); Olvida Quien Soy – Erase me from who I am, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2006); the seventh edition of Dak’Art, the Dakar Biennale (2006); and the touring exhibition Africa Remix (2004-2007). Botha’s work is in the collections of the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Port Elizabeth; Unisa, Pretoria; University of Johannesburg; South African Reserve Bank; Absa Bank; Sanlam; Sasol; BHP Billiton; Spier; Gordon Schachat Collection; Sammlung Stahlberg; Olbricht Collection; and the Jochen Zeitz Collection; among others.

CAPE TOWN Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road Woodstock 7925 PO Box 616 Green Point 8051 T +27 (0)21 462 1500 F +27 (0)21 462 1501 JOHANNESBURG 62 Juta Street Braamfontein 2001 Postnet Suite 281 Private Bag x9 Melville 2109 T +27 (0)11 403 1055/1908 F +27 (0)86 275 1918 info@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info Catalogue 69 | February 2013 © 2013 for works by Wim Botha: the artist © 2013 for text: the authors All works polystyrene, wood, fluorescent tubes, dimensions variable Photographers p9, 13, 15, 16, 43-50, 52, 54 (right), 55-57 Mario Todeschini; p10-12, 14, 21, 25, 29-30, 33, 51, 54 (left) Wim Botha; p19-20, 22 Lepkowski Studios Berlin; p27-28, 31-32 Dorota Lukianska; p35-41 Anthea Pokroy; p58 Gabrielle Guy Editor Sophie Perryer Design Gabrielle Guy Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town – Published on the occasion of Wim Botha’s SU Wordfest Artist 2013 exhibition at the Sasol Art Museum, Stellenbosch, 1 March – 27 April 2013 –