Tree of Knowledge (1997): die ontketening van kennissamehange by Willem Boshoff

[摘要] English: Since the beginning of the twentieth century there has been a growing interest in archival projects and practises as well as artists' collections. Various artists and cultural theorists are propelled/driven by 'archive fever (Derrida 1995) and the 'archival impulse (Foster 2004). In contemporary art historical discourses there still exists a variety of discussions centred on archives, collections, archival practises and the combination thereof with artistic practises. It is within this field that the following study can be contextualised because I investigate the archival projects of Willem Boshoff. In this study I am interested in the ways in which Boshoff's archival projects organise knowledge and how they undermine historical disciplinary divisions by combining scientific and non-scientific knowledge and portraying this in aesthetic ways (sometimes in artworks) and thereby unlocking or opening up knowledge as wisdom. The study thus serves as the first study of Boshoff's Archive and its coherence with or relation to his artworks. The selected artworks for this study, Tree of Knowledge (1997), which consists of three artworks: Broken Garden, Druid's Keyboard and Letters to God, have also not been interpreted before and this study serves as a first exploration. In order to enrich my interpretation of Letters to God I refer to a relatively unfamiliar religious and philosophical text written by Boshoff, Genesis (1974-1976). The study therefore also serves as the first interpretation of this text.Through my interpretation of the artworks I attempt to answer the following: In which aesthetic ways do the artworks from Boshoff's Archive act as instruments or imaginary projections that identify, collect, exhibit, organise, connect, question or disseminate knowledge? And how do these artistic agents, instruments or fictions unravel existing orders of knowledge, thereby unleashing new clusters of knowledge? In this study the figure or image of the tree is central because all three artworks refer to the tree as a metaphor of knowledge. I approach the tree as an organisational metaphor and as a poetic fiction or device which contains various religious connotations. Thus I attempt to discover the figurative role the tree plays in these artworks. In this study I investigate the relationship between Tree of Knowledge (1997) and Boshoff's Archive and I attempt to answer the following: how do the artworks and Boshoff's Archive reflect aspects of each other? What are the similarities and differences in the ways in which they collect, organise, exhibit and undermine existing categories of knowledge? I approach these artworks and his Archive as explorative instruments which discover new knowledge clusters, as a result of their ability to compare, recombine, rearrange, restructure and deconstruct items from various fields of knowledge and to discover and create links between various fields. This entails a re-evaluation of and enrichment of the organisation of knowledge.I make, with caution, specific comparisons between Boshoff and artists and cultural theorists like Aby Warburg, Joseph Beuys, Walter Benjamin and Damien Hirst in order to highlight the playful, innovative and alternative ways in which they ruminate on, revisit and unfold categories of knowledge. Through these comparisons I discover a variety of associations which provide a vocabulary with which I can better define Boshoff's project and differentiate its special niche. I also employ this vocabulary in order to highlight the coherences among various fields of knowledge, and the work of artists and cultural theorists. The comparisons also serve to situate and contextualise Boshoff and his project within art history where fictionalisation mediates knowledge. It illuminates how Boshoff's project unravels knowledge, how it complicates the boundaries between disciplines, how his work and Archive encourage debates on interdisciplinary research and open up various interdisciplinary research possibilities.

[发布机构] University of the Free State