Scope and Contents

The reviewer writes, " What the show conveys most decisively, though, is a poetic side of Mr. Camnizer's art. Various writers have compared his text-driven pieces to concrete poetry - a genre based on how words function visually, rather that verbally, and that takes the instability of language as a given. The artist himself rejects this reading, insisisting that he has no interest in poetry, even dislikes what he sees as its artificiality and penchant for ego-centered sentimentality." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents In an introductory essay, Stephen Bann writes that "artists like Willem Boshoff and Frederic Bruly Bouabre clearly demonstrate the fertility of language-based investigations on African soil: Boshoff prepared for his work with dictionaries by lengthy exercises in concrete poetry." Okwui Enwezor contributes an essay "Where, What, Who, When: A Few Notes on "African" Conceptualism." Bann adds that "Willem Boshoff's conceptual practice is an elaborate effort dedicated to the study of ignorance, that is, pushing to the point of dissolution the idea that the world is knowable. Imprisoned by South African authorities for his refusal to serve in the military (the micrographic work, Kleinpen I, was produced in prison as a way to maintain mental equilibrium)... Boshoff finds in obscure and obsolete words a way to construct a map that denies sight but empowers knowledge...His study of linguistics and Wittgensteinian philosophy led him to explore other ways of rendering words into pulsating...