The Opposite of Everyday: Wim Botha's Acts of Translation

THE OPPOSITE OF EVERYDAY Wim Botha's Acts of Translation Liese van der Watt O ne could be forgiven for assuming a toocasual familiarity with Wim Botha's work: his is a lexicon of common symbols and icons, of traditional myth and narrative, of typical passions and popular culture. And yet one would be wrong. Despite the seeming accessibility of his vocabulary, interpretation is challenged by a radical act of translation and displacement that typically removes content from context and renders his work strange, ambiguous, and only vaguely familiar. The assumption of transparency invites readings that may imprison Botha's work in a mire of identity politics; indeed, that staple triad of race, class, and sex offers a lens that only partly illuminates . Of course, the fact that Botha is white, middle -class, male, and Afrikaans-speaking plays some role in his art, but his work is perhaps better described in terms of post-identity—a term I use to describe the way in which many contemporary South African artists' work is informed, but no longer governed, by their identity positions.1 1 2 2 - N k a Journal of Cont em porary African Art Spring/ Sum m er 2008 N k a »1 2 3 Leda and the Swan, 2 0 0 5 . Bon e m eal, m arble, epox y resin, w eb b i n g . 7 8 x 150 x 108 cm . Copyright t h e artist, court esy of Mi chael St evenson, Cape To w n . 124* N k a Jour nal of Cont em p or ar y Af r ican Ar t Botha's production is best characterized by what postmodernists would call hostility toward grand narratives. Central to his work stands a concern with power and the crude binaries that it spawns: good/evil, friend/foe, sacred/profane, sanctioned/rejected, order/chaos, purity/taboo, canon/exclusion. And while this seems like a timely theme, polarized as the world is especially in the aftermath of 9/11, Botha explores it not only in relation to the here and now but also in relation to the tradition of art-making and art history, as well as in those insidious rituals that govern everything from personal decorum to religion and nationalism. Take for instance his first solo exhibition at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK) in 2001, which really propelled Botha onto the agenda of the local art circuit. Titled commune: suspension of disbelief, the work comprises a larger than life-size crucified figure suspended from the ceiling within a surveillance environment of CCTV cameras. The figure is carved out of Gideon Bibles, with the red sides of the pages positioned in such a way that they become wounds, Christ's stigmata. The work is a kind of art-historical tautology in which form and content seamlessly join: Christ, key figure of the Bible, here figured in Bibles. But alerting us to the fact that this is more than simple visual punning, Botha's title wryly invokes the realm of power and politics. It exposes the power of religion to convince its followers to willingly accept irrationalities in the name of faith, while the CCTV cameras position all of this as spectacle and make it part of popular culture. Suggestive of yet another transmission of violence and victimhood that we hungrily consume, it implicates us all in this suffering. Exhibited at the KKNK—a festival of Afrikaans and Afrikaner culture—this work tapped into the religious sentiments of a captive audience eager to read it as a statement bolstering their Christian faith. Yet meaning is ambiguous: is this work not more clearly a cynical act of iconoclasm? And as such, can this work not also be read as an act of cultural insurrection that exposes the power of a belief system to entrap? Ever sensitive to context, Botha returned to the KKNK as featured artist in 2003 with an installation seemingly geared for that audience. Entitled commune: onomatopoeia, the work—with minor variations—has since been exhibited at various shows, but always resurrects a middle-class interior expressive of a rather desperate respectability that was fashionable in many Afrikaner homes in the early...