Words as things Susanna Laaksonen - Willem Boshoff

shapes of things
A blog about things.
15 JANUARY 2007
Words as things
Full article: http://shapes-of-things.blogspot.com/
Things matter to me -
quiet, humble things,
routinely first-rate:
a sharply-honed chisel,
a faithful old kitchen table,
a pale plaster carving on the windowsill.
Things I look long at,
trying to fix their image in my mind,
things I live with this ordinary morning.
In their company I've been at home in my life,
and I still am.
Every morning there they are, waiting,
receiving me as an equal.
Quite something, that, isn't it
-Viljo Kajava
About me: My name is Susanna Laaksonen. I am a Finnish writer with credits in film, TV, theatre, video
art, and other media. You can read more about my work on my website.
Approximately 400 000 pages of different kinds of literature are printed in
the world every minute. I heard this on NPR but have forgotten who said it.
Words are like organisms, they are born, they give birth to new words, they
merge, blend, evolve, die. They fill the earth, in myriad languages, dialects,
pidgins and slangs. They are printed on paper, they fill the air, spoken, sung,
blasted through loudspeakers. They make forays into the deep sea and into
space. Perhaps the language crawling out of me, out of my brain, onto these
electronic pages, and onwards into your brain as you read, is a parasitical
life form, for the time being using us to be born and to live, all the while
fooling us into thinking we are its masters and creators. Or perhaps It is God
itself, taking form in human words as well as insects, rocks and wind. In the
beginning was The Word. Perhaps everything else is shadow.
Concrete poetry is a term coined in the fifties and sixties, when people
started using typography as a form of expression. Or perhaps when
language the organism, language the monster, language the Great
Consciousness incarnate, found a clever way to play a little, to express its
independence of us and its ability to reshape our concept of "meaning".
Ubuweb has a great collection of conceptual writing, which takes a further
leap into language-for-itself, away from expressive writing altogether,
revealing language as a narcissist, gazing lovingly at itself in the mirror of
the page.
The South African artist Willem Boshoff has a gorgeous body of work which

often takes concrete poetry as its starting point. Through Boshoff, language
steps into the concrete world as shapes, objects, codes and secrets.
Language is an animal of prey, stalking us in what we thought was our safely
structured and manicured garden of meaning. In the late nineties Boshoff
created a trilogy of works called Tree of Knowledge. One part in the series,
Letters to God, celebrates the tree in its sacrificial form - the book. The work
studies the fibrous nature and structure of wood, recreating a model of
paper under the microscope. The deconstructed wood pieces conceal letters
of the Greek alphabet, the forbidden fruits of the tree of knowlegde. The
other parts of Tree of Knowledge are Druid's Keyboard and Broken Garden.
In all of these works, language lurks dangerously, as a threat to trees and to
us.
In Abamfusa Lawula - the purple shall govern, Boshoff gave a concrete form
to slogans and chants shouted in African languages in anti-apartheid rallies.
Here he celebrates spoken language, its power to transform and question. In
Kykafrikaans, he uses a typewriter as a writing instrument, "a crochet needle"
and a paintbrush, creating visually ravishing concrete poems. Some of them
act as maps that the viewer can only get lost in, glimpsing the occasional
sliver of meaning. Accompanying the works, created in the seventies, was
originally a recital of words in a church. A startled audience was asked to
repeat loudly words such as "church" or "sand" or to assert "peel" as a
swearword. Did God hear the question behind what was spoken Was "peel"
"peel" to God, or was the intention of the speaker what was being said If I
ask you to say "peel" as a swearword, and you do, are you swearing or am I
Is the church a church because of its name, or because of the intentions of
its builders Can the real intentions be known Is God brought into the
church with the words that are spoken in it
In the eighties, Boshoff worked for 370 consecutive days, seven hours every
day, carving a wooden calendar detailing his goals and achievements for
each day. The intricate blocks are carved out of different types of wood, and
were exhibited in giant panels, alphabetized according to the type of wood.
After the initial, brief exhibition they were stored in a specially made set of
drawers. Part of the key to the secret symbols on the blocks is in two red
notebooks, buried within all the wood chips from carving the blocks, in the
base of the storage system.
The 370 Days Project seems to me a gorgeous poem about the universe,
about the secrets at its root, and about what we can know. A language
known only to itself can only reveal itself to us in glimpses, in segments of
code, in shapes which we may or may not misinterpret. Finally uninterested
in stalking us, having discovered enough entertaining ways to manifest itself
through us, language retreats from the garden. We hear only a slight rustle
as it, like a jaguar, softly leaps into the great jungle. The story is not
something that we can even begin to know. We are left to prune our bushes,
plant our flowers in rows and harvest our fruit trees, creating order instead

of meaning.
(Information for this post was harvested from Willem Boshoff's website, and
the photograph of Letters to God is his copyrighted material.)