Strauss & co - 8 - 11 November 2020

91 621 Willem Boshoff SOUTH AFRICAN 1951– Self-portrait (Right-hand Side of the Brain) signed and dated 2011 on the reverse mixed media on board 101 by 101 cm R150 000 – 250 000 PROVENANCE Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. Private Collection, Johannesburg. EXHIBITED Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Willem Boshoff/SWAT , 18 August to 24 September 2011. The present lot is an assemblage of alphabet beads, smashed computer plastic, stones, bougainvillea twigs and glue in a meranti frame. ‘I am a Dadaist at heart and I have worked with casting things all my life … I do this in the firm belief that that particular accidental/incidental act will lead me to find a great pearl of wisdom… I give myself only one chance, one stab of the finger at an all-encompassing universal truth. In the early seventies, as a student I learnt about Jean Arp and his experiments with the ‘Laws of Chance’. All my life I have experimented with these. Levi Strauss speaks of the contingency of incidence and co-incidence. Cage speaks of aleatoric (throwing the dice) work when he ventures more into the coincidental and Xenakis uses the term stochasitic (guessing/ aiming) for his rationalising of irrational happenstance. I have devoted my life to live in a stochastic/aleatority manner and I have made rather large installations in which I study how randomly deployed objects and experiences may hold the truth. The correct word for such endeavours is ‘divination’and the practice of divination is older than any record of human existence. [In my book] ‘What every Druid Should Know’, I devote considerable time to how we might manage to decipher our Hamlet from chicken bones, bird droppings and a monkey playing with a typewriter.’ Willem Boshoff, 2011