Willem Boshoff and the Authority He Critiques: A Reassessment

Sometime in the late 1970s, Willem Boshoff began compiling a dictionary that no publisher had commissioned, no authority had sanctioned, and almost no reader would be able to navigate without years of dedicated effort. The BWB Dictionary, named for his own initials, grew over decades into one of the most eccentric and genuinely original projects in South African art: an idiosyncratic archive of rare, obsolete, and invented words that functions simultaneously as artwork, autobiography, and quiet act of cultural defiance.

 

That defiance carries a question embedded in its structure that critical writing on Boshoff has circled for forty years without quite landing on. Who builds their own dictionary and names it after themselves? Lexicographers build dictionaries. Authorities build dictionaries. The same impulse that drives official language control, the desire to define and thereby own meaning, operates inside Boshoff's most celebrated project. He critiques the politics of definition while constructing a monument to his own definitional authority. This contradiction is not a reason to dismiss the work. It is the most interesting thing about it.

The Exclusion Paradox Runs Deeper Than His Critics Admit

Boshoff's Braille works, in which panels of embossed text remain illegible to sighted viewers without mediation, are routinely described as inversions of exclusion: the majority becomes unable to read, experiencing what marginalized communities experience through inaccessible official language. The reading is correct as far as it goes, and it does not go far enough.

 

The Braille works function, in practice, by generating discourse among sighted, educated, institutionally connected viewers about what it feels like to be excluded. The person who actually experiences daily exclusion through South Africa's language hierarchies, who could not read government documents in their own language, who attended schools where instruction arrived in a language imposed by administrative fiat, is not typically the viewer standing in the Johannesburg Art Gallery reading the explanatory wall text alongside Boshoff's embossed panels. The work produces empathy for exclusion in precisely the demographic that has historically administered it. Whether this is the work's failure or its most precise insight depends on what you think art is supposed to do.

 

Sean O'Toole, one of South Africa's most rigorous art writers, has observed that South African conceptual art of the 1980s and 1990s often found itself trapped between political urgency and institutional address, making work about oppression for galleries that served the non-oppressed. Boshoff's Braille works inhabit this trap more completely than almost any other South African work of comparable ambition, and they inhabit it knowingly. The knowingness does not resolve the problem. It clarifies it.

His Afrikaner Position Is the Work's Central Unaddressed Subject

Boshoff is Afrikaner. He comes from the linguistic and cultural community whose imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in Black schools produced the 1976 Soweto Uprising, whose language policies constituted some of apartheid's most intimate daily violences. He makes work whose central subject is the violence of language exclusion.

 

South African criticism has acknowledged this biographical fact and then moved past it with notable speed. It deserves considerably more time. Boshoff is not simply an Afrikaner who opposes what his community did with language. He is an Afrikaner who builds exhaustive personal linguistic monuments, who carves words obsessively into wood over years and decades, whose entire practice treats language as a sacred and inexhaustible subject. He loves language with an intensity that only someone raised in a culture that weaponized it could sustain. The work is not simply a critique of Afrikaner language politics. It is a deeply complicated love letter to language from a man whose community used that love as a cudgel.

 

This reading changes the BWB Dictionary from an eccentric conceptual artwork into something considerably stranger: an act of reparation conducted entirely within the terms of the thing being repaired. Whether reparation of this kind is adequate, whether it is even reparation at all, is a question Boshoff's work raises and does not answer.

Awards and Institutional Recognition: What They Actually Mean

Boshoff received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, placing him within the cohort of formally recognized major South African artists alongside William Kentridge, Kendell Geers, Jane Alexander, and Penny Siopis. His work entered the permanent collections of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the South African National Gallery. He taught for decades at what is now the University of Johannesburg, shaping successive generations of South African artists who studied under him.

 

These facts carry weight that criticism rarely examines directly. Every institution that collected Boshoff, every award body that recognized him, was itself a participant in the cultural economy his work critiques. The Standard Bank, which administered the Young Artist Award bearing its name, is a commercial financial institution operating in the same South African economy that language policies helped construct. The Johannesburg Art Gallery collected work about exclusion while itself remaining, through much of Boshoff's career, a space that excluded or marginalized Black South African artists and audiences.

 

Boshoff did not refuse these institutions. He worked with them, exhibited in them, and accepted their recognition. This is not a moral criticism. Every artist who exhibits publicly works within institutional structures they did not design. It is, however, a critical observation: the work's radicalism exists in permanent negotiation with its institutional embrace, and the embrace has been thorough.

The Local/Global Problem Is More Interesting Than It Appears

The standard comparative frame positions Boshoff against William Kentridge as the less internationally successful artist of comparable seriousness. Kentridge's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, his opera productions across European stages, his global auction market prices: these mark a level of international penetration Boshoff never approached. Critical writing treats this gap as a fact to be explained, usually by pointing to Kentridge's narrative accessibility relative to Boshoff's opacity.

 

The more interesting observation is that Boshoff's work may be untranslatable in a specific and productive sense. A Word Column, one of his carved wooden towers accumulating obscure vocabulary, does not carry the same meaning in Basel or New York that it carries in Johannesburg. The specific South African linguistic politics, the Afrikaner relation to Afrikaans, the violence of imposed language in a specific historical context: these are not portable in the way that Kentridge's animated charcoal drawings, with their universal visual language of grief and memory, are portable. Boshoff stayed in South Africa and did work that did not travel easily. Kentridge made work that traveled extraordinarily well. Whether traveling well is the same as communicating honestly is a question neither artist's critics presses hard enough.

 

Kendell Geers left South Africa for Brussels in the 1990s and built an international reputation through provocations that translated cleanly across cultural contexts precisely because they targeted universal taboos rather than specifically South African ones. Jane Alexander's Butcher Boys, perhaps the single most powerful sculptural work produced in apartheid South Africa, achieves its terrifying force without requiring explanatory apparatus. A viewer who knows nothing about South Africa, who has never heard of apartheid, experiences those grey figures as a statement about human monstrousness. Boshoff's work does not function this way. Remove the context, and what remains is beautifully crafted wood.

What the Work Actually Does, and Why It Matters

The strongest case for Boshoff's importance rests not on resolving these tensions but on recognizing that he has sustained them consciously across five decades. His practice does not offer answers to the questions it raises about language, authority, exclusion, and power. It maintains those questions at a pitch of intensity that most artists cannot sustain for five years, let alone fifty. The BWB Dictionary is still growing. The Braille works still exclude. The contradiction of an Afrikaner artist building language monuments as a critique of language monuments still has not been resolved.

 

This is, depending on your theory of what art should do, either a profound achievement or an elaborate evasion. Boshoff has made it impossible to determine which with certainty, and in a South African context where easy answers about language and power have been weaponized repeatedly by everyone who has controlled the country's political apparatus, that impossibility may be exactly the right artistic position to occupy.

 

He is not South Africa's greatest living artist. He may be its most honest one.