On Ivan Vladislavic on Willem Boshoff on conceptual art.

Murray, Sally-Ann

Abstract

This paper uses Ivan Vladislavic's monograph Willem Boshoff, published by David Krut in the TAXI Art Series, as a means to explore the idea of art in relation to Vladislavic's prose. I attend to the representation of art 'in' a number of his works, and refer to his increasing body of critical work 'on' art, but the emphasis is on investigating his writing 'as' art. To this end, I acknowledge existing critical observations concerning Vladislavic's fiction and essays, among them his efforts to re-spatialise and expand forms of English in the local context, and his treatment of words as if they possess all the materiality of sculptural 'ready-mades'. However, my proposal is more dramatic: extrapolating from Vladislavic's claims for Boshoff as a visual artist who is fundamentally a writer, and reading in Vladislavic's critical commentary on a major South African artist the traces of his own artistic interests as a writer, I suggest that Ivan Vladislavic, working in prose, is himself a conceptual artist.

**********

Number 11 in the TAXI art series is Willem Boshoff, a monograph by South African writer Ivan Vladislavic in which he represents this artist as one who experiments with the relationship between the visual and the verbal. Vladislavic proposes, indeed, that

 the viewer of Boshoff's art is better understood as a reader.
 Boshoff is a writer. Not only is much of his sculpture and
 installation centrally concerned with language and books, but he
 has also written concrete poetry and dictionaries, and extended
 commentaries on his own work and processes. [...] All of them might
 be regarded as passages in a discontinuous text. For three decades,
 he has been researching, writing and annotating a long shelf of
 books. (2005:6)

As I read Willem Boshoff, pausing and flipping through pages of object and image turned into words and words imagined as objects re-presented as passages of text, the blur set me thinking about Vladislavic's writing ... as a form of art, linguistic and otherwise; about Vladislavic as a writer who has commented analytically on art; about art as represented in Vladislavic's fiction and urban essays. Vladislavic writes of Boshoff as one fascinated by "[n]otions of revealing and concealing; wounding and healing; breaking and restoring to wholeness. Puzzles and puns", and Vladislavic's Boshoff began to suggest an intriguing point of access into the work of a writer whose preoccupation with the varied arts of writing--as narrative craft, criticism, editing, and translating--further extends into an interest in art as visual and sculptural expression.

Vladislavic acknowledges in interview that he is conscious of moving in both "the literary world and the art world" (Miller 2006: 123), and that art has "evolved into what I would say was my major interest, outside books" (120). The implication is that Vladislavic's writing career has developed in relation to a mobile disciplinary affiliation, and that this has enabled his imagination to write across visual and verbal 'worlds'. And yet books, the product of the world of 'writings', continue to constitute the pre-eminent focus of his professional and creative attention. He makes a living in books, even lives to an extent inside books, although perhaps not by the book, and his interest in art is conveyed to his readers through the art of the book.

These convolutions characterise Vladislavic's response to Boshoff's art: amongst Boshoff's wood work and odd work, it is his word work, his working with words, which exerts a particular charm for Vladislavic. Carrol Clarkson remarks that Boshoff and Vladislavic share an "intellectual troposphere" (2006:107) in that both have a longstanding creative fascination with the workings of the dictionary--dictionaries--and the conventions associated with books as cultural authority. In his engagement with Boshoff's art, this 'bookish' quality, understood as both invocation and subversion, constitutes an important node of interest for Vladislavic. However, he is also drawn to the irrepressible fluidity of the artist's expression, to the range of genres, materials and ideas from which Boshoff has sculpted a "form-defying output" in "wood, paint, sand, stone, cement, plastic, paper and--crucially--words", working words up into books, and ripping them out again, reconfiguring pages as larger, more perplexingly-orientated surfaces such as floors, walls, tables ... (O'Toole 2003).

The Boshoff-Vladislavic pairing for the TAXI volume led me to speculate about Vladislavic's prose as a form of conceptual art similar to Boshoff's sculpture and installation. This claim--provocative, preposterous?--is however not implausible, and is embedded in several scholarly articles. Stefan Helgesson, for example, argues that Vladislavic's prose "underscores that writing is fashioned out of a determinate material, not unlike fictile objects" (2003: 8), while Jack Kearney, in a review of The Folly, observes that Vladislavic indirectly seems to perceive a "resemblance between his own fictional enterprise and that of Nieuwenhuizen" who busies himself in planning and pacing out a puzzling, fanciful subterranean new South African self-build bunker palace (1994:93) with all the dedicated enterprise of an author wistfully conceptualising a madcap monument to the language he loves, and fears losing.

More recently, in a review of Willem Boshoff Clarkson remarks that Vladislavic, like the subject of his monograph, shows "himself a virtuoso when it comes to the vicissitudes of abstract meanings and material signs" (2006:107), such that where "Boshoff's sculptures and installations often appear as three-dimensional texts, the letters and words in Vladislavic's books have all the materiality of Duchamp's ready-mades" (2006:106). The implication is that even for the writer words are treated as objects which have spatial properties, qualities such as mass and volume, and variously intimate and monumental densities, and that Vladislavic, like Boshoff, is alert to the potentials of ostensibly ordinary matters and materials reconfigured through artistic intention and effect.

My purpose in drawing analogies between the two imaginations is not to fabricate a facile, exact correlation (indeed, Clarkson finds Vladislavic less than responsive to the ecological imperatives of Boshoff's later art [2006: 110]). Nor is this a comprehensive account of either Boshoff's oeuvre, or Vladislavic's partial critical treatment of the artist's output. Instead, the paper goes a little way towards exploring the place of Ivan Vladislavic--or perhaps the persona 'Ivan Vladislavic'--in his representation of Willem Boshoff in Willem Boshoff, in order to begin thinking about this writer as an artist of ideas.

Vladislavic's Boshoff is a book of shifting presences, a constant movement between subjects, between figure and ground, an almost disappearing act and a subtle filling of absences. Willem Boshoff shows Vladislavic trying to untangle Boshoff as a circuitous conundrum, an incongruity sometimes almost congruous with himself, even while this semblance of the self in an/other is marked by both resemblances and dissemblings. As Michael Gardiner puts it, Vladislavic's critical commentary on Boshoff's artworks "quietly disappears" the commentator, although this "effacement" does "not mean a diminished presence. We feel the degree to which [Vladislavic] is intrigued, we sense a number of his idiosyncrasies as well as the location of some of his secret joys. The encounter between Boshoff and Vladislavic is therefore between two palpable and powerful personae" (2006:113) with a significant degree of shared intellectual-artistic interest. Writing on Willem Boshoff, Vladislavic simultaneously creates another space; not a blank, but a betwixt and between in which his own prose becomes the ghosted, evanescently anterior subject of his essay. It is in this elusive space, albeit not yet clearly mapped in my own mind, that I hope to animate Vladislavic's work, for his customary readers, as the output of an artist who 'sculpts' ideas, experimenting with new ways, in South African writing, of 'installing' language in the conventionalised preserve of local narrative fiction.

Here's a strategic list: The Writing that Fell off the Wall; The Omniscope (Pat. Pending); Alphabets for Surplus People; Journal of a Wall; A Science of Fragments; The Blind Alphabet; Street Addresses; Propaganda by Monuments; Garden of Words. Which works are attributed to Boshoff, and which to Vladislavic? A person familiar with the fiction of the one and the art of the other will manage the separation without difficulty, but as a conceptual device, however playful, the collocation gives pause. (Bear in mind that Vladislavic approvingly quotes Boshoff's claim that "'What's important is to look for someone to play with'" [2005: 15].) The list highlights evident correspondences between the interests of the two imaginations, forming a suggestive summary, an image even, of important areas of creative overlap which emerge in the TAXI volume.

A similar form of listing occurs in the contents page of Willem Boshoff, a slyly slantwise itemising in which Vladislavic has generated chapter headings as alluring as the titles of his short stories. Examples are "Being Dr Johnson"; "A Tactile Literature"; "The Collector". Each is formatted using a mirroring technique which pairs the conventionally legible with its supposed reflection as if in a badly foxed looking glass. This ironic, asymmetrical duplicity, a playful backwards writing and reading, hints at the figures of both Boshoff and Vladislavic in the pages of this doubled 'monograph', and also prefigures Vladislavic's take on Boshoff. His will be no straightforward interpretation, nor even a thorough scholarly exegesis. Instead, playing off the artist's own sardonic views of art, language and the establishment, the angle will be unusual, the conclusions contingent and enigmatic. This tactic, I maintain, is attributable as much to Vladislavic's own labyrinthine predilections as a writer of fiction, and his penchant for fragmented narrative takes, as to Boshoff's having developed, over the years, an elaborate, even cryptic, artistic symbolism.

Vladislavic has become well known as a creator of clever, artful fiction, and he is internationally recognised as "one of South Africa's most interesting writers to emerge from the transitional period" (Graham 2007: 72). Since his debut with Missing Persons (1989), his work has become synonymous with genre-blowing short stories, nearly not-novels, and all manner of witty and wily quasi-autobiographical 'what-what' that he's picked up off the streets, snatched off billboards, cadged from friends and plucked from the pages of old books. He is also an influential translator and "South Africa's most sought-after editor" (Bloom 2007: 58) who has given his close eye to texts by authors such as Antjie Krog, Achmat Dangor, Jonny Steinberg, and Tim Couzens.

Moreover, Vladislavic has acquired a reputation as an influential contributor to public debates around South African art and art criticism (O'Toole 2003). He's written prose to accompany Joachim Schonfeldt's exhibition The Model Men, later extending the pieces into The Exploded View; he has substantial commentaries on the photographs of David Goldblatt and Roger Palmer, and the tapestries of multi-media artist William Kentridge, and an introduction to T'Kama-Adamastor, a large-format collection of essays which he edited on the massive allegorical narrative painting by Cyril Coetzee. Art also gets a significant showing in his creative writing. Not only are there stories on the making of art ("Courage" and "Curiouser" come immediately to mind), but as Vladislavic points out in the notes to Portrait with Keys (2006), a number of these cycles were originally published in art-related contexts such as catalogues for various biennale and design exhibitions (210), and the 'portrait' of Johannesburg includes a detailed "Artists' book". Between the covers of a book, this is a version of art in the city/the city in art/the art of the city, and a reader is invited to become a member of another kind of audience, an active participant in making narratives through art by electing to follow the writer's inventive, and as it turns out, cunningly plotted artists' itinerary through the city of words.

Similarly, if Willem Boshoff is an introductory guide to the artist, the book takes no direct, straight and narrow route. It grants a reader the handhold of a loosely chronological approach to the art, but also picks up and drops off Vladislavic's interests as they overlay the combination of optelgoed and fastidious artistic shaping which define much of Boshoff's work. This brought to mind Portrait with Keys, where Vladislavic writes of eschewing the distantiating omniscience "of De Certeau's voyeur gods" (108), opting instead for a more streetwise footslog, allowing en route that even the pedestrian may be marvellous. I also recalled that since as far back as "Street Addresses, Johannesburg" (1998), in which Vladislavic first revealed his mobile predilection, he has held the opinion, learnt from his father, that "getting lost is not always a bad thing. One might even consider misdirecting a stranger for his own good" (306). Indeed one might. And indeed Vladislavic does.

Thus, in tracking through the writer's comments on Boshoff, I might--might I?--anticipate that his words will be signing an indirect route to the writer's own imaginative territory. In this, the book came to resemble Boshoff's "Map Errant", part of the visual, concrete poetry in KykAfrikaans, many of which are word pictures, lists, linked vocabularies, described by Vladislavic as "a map for getting lost by" (2005:28).

Vladislavic was certainly well-placed to write the first full-scale, single subject volume on Willem Boshoff, an artist who had been creating unusual art since the Seventies, although he came to widespread public attention with his installation The Blind Alphabet at the Johannesburg Biennale, Africus 95. A nice irony. This was "the art he had been making all along", yet Boshoff was suddenly seen to fit the post-democratic fervour for varieties of South African identity that went "beyond political rhetoric" and were neither "provincial" nor "one-dimensional" (Vladislavic 2006: 52). Here was a spectacularly unconventional art that originated within apartheid's conservative Afrikaner heartland of Vanderbiljpark, "in those grim years after the Sharpeville massacre" (Vladislavic 2005:10), and Vladislavic's delight at the surprising finds that emerge from unlikely contexts is exactly as we might expect from his surreal treatment of history in stories such as "The Prime Minister is Dead" (1989), or "Propaganda by Monuments" (1996).

The very questions that Vladislavic asks of Boshoff's sculptures echo those which critics have posed of Vladislavic's prose, each oeuvre an elliptical form of artistic engagement beyond established parameters: "What are these puzzling things?" Vladislavic ponders, studying Boshoff's Tafelboek: "table ... archaic machine ... jungle gym"? And Kasboek, another example of intricate wooden sculpture whose components fold up or open out ...? Both are also "Two large books masquerading as furniture, as useful objects, concealing their bewildering or menacing contents between smoothly innocuous covers. Opening up to be read ... but speaking in a broken, jumbled language" (Vladislavic 2005:12). I recollect a similar apprehension in my encounters with Vladislavic's own elaborate prose, where in a single work it is not unusual for a reader to be expected to participate in experimental writerly forays that cross from short story into critical discourse, from realism into parallel improbables, from rich images into discursive account, from sophisticated cultural reference into relaxed, colloquial first person ramble. (And all of this, too, is complicated by the masked figure of the author amongst his characters and narrative personae.)

In the Boshoff book, the role of the writer in relation to the representation of the artist is addressed by Vladislavic through characteristic sleight-of-hand. Immediately following the contents list Vladislavic places the artist's definition of 'bonsense' from his Dictionary of Perplexing English. The word is reproduced in simple white font splashed on a red page. Bonsense, in Boshoff's explanation, is a noun denoting "good, excellent stuff"; it "is a kind of opposite to nonsense. A person who has had no training in writing might, with the best will in the world, write only nonsense and not a word of bonsense" (Vladislavic 2005:4). Positioned at the beginning of Vladislavic's commentary, the word functions as a starting point which is simultaneously an inside joke, a 'red-letter' clue to the reader. It flags Boshoff's idiosyncratic artistic interest in the relationship between visual and verbal signs, art and writing, the art of writing, the artist writing about art. And it is also a jesting reminder of the hidden but crucial presence, in the essay, of Ivan Vladislavic, the writer of multiple imaginative talents, with a facetious elan and an encyclopedic riot of conceptual fascinations to match Boshoff's own.

In positioning the work of Willem Boshoff as part of a lineage, Vladislavic, generally suspicious of categories, has to fall back on the contested term 'conceptual art', as there seems no other to encompass the artist's range of concrete poetry, sculptures, and installations. For the readers of the monograph, this is perhaps to situate Boshoff's art in contentious company, among works which seem motivated primarily by theoretical precepts which snub art as a superseded category, yet in the 'artists' tautological process of doing anti-art there is the residual possibility that the machinery of galleries and criticism might yet accord their work the status of meaningful artwork. There are the dead animals preserved in formalin; there's the dishevelled post-coital bed, or the room of lights switching off and on, all kinds of "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit" which in contemporary times has been awarded the prestigious Turner Prize. Often, among traditionalists, the assumption is that such "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat" ("Damien Hirst" 2007) is produced by those who lack the traditional fine art skills of drawing, painting, and sculpting, substituting for these hard-won disciplinary achievements and sensory pleasures a calculated idea, a tritely 'illustrative' iconoclastic concept.

Willem Boshoff shows both Vladislavic and Boshoff to be conversant with the serious conceptual game-players, including those who have crossed language with art (2005: 35, 64, and 72), from the pioneering Dadaists to Yves Klein, on to more contemporary conceptual artists. Among these, Vladislavic mentions Laib (fragile, ephemeral, labour-intensive works constructed in highly original materials, including pollen and milk ...). On Kawara (monochromatic, meticulously constrained date paintings, plus postcards and telegrams), and Joseph Beuys (process sculptures decaying with time; social sculptures insisting on art as part of the world; glass vitrines of found collections drawing attention to surprising connections and suggesting a recursive play against both Marcel Duchamp's own boxed pieces and those of Joseph Cornell).

As Vladislavic's responses to Boshoff make clear, if it's well-known that conceptual art developed, in the late 1960s, out of Duchamp's surrealist legacy, allowing artists to address contemporary issues in startling, even shocking ways, without regard for the niceties of received boundaries, it is not a given that conceptualists favour abstraction over the sensory nuances of the 'applied arts', or empty idea over accomplished aesthetic execution. Some examples of conceptual art may originate in an analytical proposition, but it need not follow that this art is intellectual at the expense of either the artist's or the audience's sensory immersion. As Vladislavic represents them, for instance, Boshoff's Tafelboek and Kasboek are fearsomely tactile, and Boshoff's best known sculpture series, The Blind Alphabet, is a confounding "work of 'readable wood'" (Vladislavic 2005:54) at least touchable for the visually impaired, but noli me tangere for the sighted.

Yet Vladislavic remains ambivalent about both the idea and the practice of conceptual art; it at once perplexes and intrigues. It is enticing, liberating in its potential to move from the gallery into the world, or to bring the world in all its strange and numbing simultaneity into conventionally austere, precious spaces. However, he is chary of the dangers of relying for creative expression on the trendy gimmick, and must discipline his imagination to find affinities with some of Boshoff's later pieces, among them Jerusalem Jerusalem in the 2004 Nonplussed exhibition. Oh, the writer comes around, eventually, accepting that this piece is part of Boshoff's extraordinarily sustained "artistic vision" (107) rather than what it had initially seemed--"typical of an unappealing new strain of blunt political commentary" (106), but this work, and perhaps even those examples more monumental and corporate in scale, seem to be less appealing to Vladislavic than complexly figured and fragmented oddities like Tafelboek, the concrete poetry of KykAfrikaans, and Bangboek, a work of demented, regimentedly minuscule 'spywriting' which struggles to contain Boshoff's fears and angers concerning military service. I found myself remembering an interview with Vladislavic entitled "Inside the Toolbox", where he speaks about discovering "that often when I talk about writing, the language I use is appropriate to building or engineering, the construction of the text, as if it was an object. The text feels like a construct" (Miller 2006:117). Aptly enough, one of the elements that Vladislavic values in Willem Boshoff's early sculptures is the artist's fine attention to "workings revealed and [...] processing functions [made] apparent" (2005:26), especially revelling in the artist's ability to turn the machineries of clerical accuracy and routinised life to "expressive improvisation"(Vladislavic 2005:26).

Readers familiar with examples of Vladislavic's prose beyond the Boshoff essay are well placed to gauge the writer's attitude to conceptual art. Most obviously, there is the story "Curiouser" in The Exploded View, in which the protagonist, the black artist Simeon Majara, reconfigures container loads of cheap African curios into attention-getting installations. As Gerald Gaylard writes, Vladislavic is here "lampooning [...] the pretentiousness and snobbery that attaches to much 'installation art' and the art world which pays xorbitant prices for flimsy gimmicks" (2006:71). Whatever his reservations, however, Vladislavic cannot completely jettison the category of conceptual art, for as I am proposing, such conceptualism underwrites the written art which he himself creates. His fiction and essays repeatedly attest to the writer's creative interest in the conceptual distinctions which inform the imaginative, expressive arts--what makes something a novel, as opposed to a collection of short stories?; is copy editing necessarily the obverse of inventive narrative?; what differentiates noteworthy artistic making from the undistinguished parameters of the everyday?; what makes a monument, a tomason, a map? It is concepts which inspire and pattern Vladislavic's writing, enabling him to explore the possibilities of creating a conceptual art for the page.

Pertinent here is Vladislavic's discussion of Boshoff's art as it developed during the 1970s, a body of conceptually playful objects with highly complicated structural forms, tangential meanings and extremely indirect forms of usefulness. It existed beyond an "emerging resistance tradition [that] rested on [...] figurative drawing" (Vladislavic 2005:44), in a prevailing creative climate that demanded declarative ethical allegiance. In these "unfunny historical circumstances", it was difficult "to claim a place for [...] seriously imaginative play"(46). The same might be said of Vladislavic's fiction, for similar currents were at work in literary-critical spheres. Think of J M Coetzee's remarks on the misguided categorisation of South African novels into those which are imagined to supplement history and those which ostensibly rival it, the missing person here being Nadine Gordimer, whose novels, Vladislavic agrees, have tended to be unproblematically understood as 'realist' (Warnes 2000:276). Even in 1989, Vladislavic's debut collection of short stories, Missing Persons, met with a perplexedly intrigued reception: what was this local curiosity, a form of meta- or perhaps postmodern fiction, and was it allowed? His fiction stood conspicuously outside the traditions of literary realism which were the assumed dominant of South African fiction in English; nor did it derive from emergent forms of radicalised social realist materialism. Like Boshoff, Vladislavic has developed as "a stubborn, evasive conceptualist" (Vladislavic 2005:44), and perhaps through the experience of writing his own startlingly new kind of South African English fiction, he is inclined to interpret Boshoff's unusual art of ideas as an apt tactical tool for reworking the "grotesque conceptual game" of Grand Apartheid's absurd "Big Idea" (44).

Vladislavic's writing, it has come to be understood, tackles tough issues in unpredictable, inventive ways, and it's worth thinking about how the writer arrived at this unusual angle of representation. He is sceptical about 'influences' upon his writing (Warnes 2000:274), yet recalls during his undergraduate language studies the excitement of reading the Afrikaans writers of the 1970s--Breytenbach, for instance--locally-experimental figures beyond the pale of much contemporary fiction in English. In comparison, he found the work of the Afrikaans novelists in some regards analogous to the writing coming out of America ... Barthelme, Barth, Brautigan, Vonnegut, writers producing a body of alluring fictions "that turned in on themselves, that named themselves to you, told you that you were reading them, played these funny games, but there was no family or school to fit them into" (276). Here, Vladislavic clears the ground for readers to understand his own "peculiar fictions", even as he will subsequently go on to acknowledge the impact upon his professional development of his collaborative years with Staffrider, the innovative post-1976 Johannesburg-based cultural magazine which published stories, poems, drawings, photographs, profiles, life writing and position papers from writing groups around the country. Through even this sketchy account of Vladislavic's imaginative lineage--post-Soweto South African writing, modern Afrikaans fiction, emergent strains of internationalised post-modernism--a reader may appreciate that the conceptual turn in a creative intelligence such as Vladislavic's can be prompted by a lived context of experience rather than some dematerialised aesthetic abstract. Similarly, in order to be felt as 'influential' a climate of creative opinion need not be consistent with one's lived experience; it needn't be nurturing or "utterly congruent" (277); even agonism and cultural isolation can be productive constituents of a creative imagination. The development of a writer's conceptual repertoire is never a simple matter. Consider how Vladislavic handles Christopher Warnes's question about whether "a conscious encoding of theoretical ideas" has developed in his work. The writer concurs, but explains that his "writing interests flowed as much from processes afoot in the world as from my reading of fiction or theory" such that "the elements in my work that may be postmodern come as much out of the world, and out of my reading of other fiction, as out of theoretical concepts" (276). It is tricky, in this enmeshed 'explanation', to fix the places occupied by world, fiction and theory in the writer's world, fiction and theory.

I wish now to address more explicitly the notion of a creative 'doubling' in relation to Vladislavic and Boshoff, as this is a concept that Vladislavic invokes to describe the ambiguity of Boshoff's art, and that might usefully be extended to my attempt to position Vladislavic's writing as a form of conceptual art. In his use of the term doubling, Vladislavic resorts to reversed conceptual categories; he speaks (writes) of KykAfrikaans as "typewriting straining to become brushstrokes" while Bangboek, so anxiously minute and self-disciplined, is understood to be "handwriting straining to be typewriting" (2005:40). Each artistic expression is a version of the other, and indeed a subversion of conventional expectation. Further, he ventures that Boshoff's artistic presence in his art is part of a provocative "double process" (2005:26) in which the reciprocal drive of making or authoring a work is also intended to "disqualify it" (26). Thus, while Boshoff uses forms of written word, Vladislavic explains that he also wants to challenge the written word by means of text forms which approximate to images. And if Vladislavic describes Willem Boshoff as an artist so fascinated with visual and verbal effects that he may be imagined as a writer, he also maintains that Boshoff is "lobbying on behalf of the image in the face of the word" (26).

This prompts me to argue for a reciprocal conception in which Vladislavic is a writer who makes an inventive case for words as invested with more prolific conceptual potential than is usually characteristic of the writer of fiction. He writes far beyond any of the established prose categories, and even in the few brief 'poetic' stories--for example "My hands burst into flames"--the familiar notion of 'image' expands beyond a compressed, sensorily-embodied idea. Here, in the condensed time-space of a short story, we are witness to Vladislavic writing 'image' large in multiple, intriguing forms, beyond conventions of 'image' as either a feature of poetry, or the pictorial and photographic saturation of an image-based media, whether on screen or in print. Moreover, his stories often strike me as cunning assemblages of words representing objets trouves, familiar, found constituents, things we might ordinarily consider aesthetically inexpressive --a wall, an ATM, a wheelbarrow, a bench, a television, a road sign--yet in the fiction these are imaginatively configured so as to foreground the bizarre, thereby startling readers towards new understandings, aesthetic as well as ethical, of the contexts in which they live.

Language is another aspect of doubling in Vladislavic's treatment of Boshoff. He considers that the artist approaches the medium of Afrikaans "with a double gesture of rejection and recovery" (Vladislavic 2005:46), calling the language into being even as it is the mother-tongue through which he has been 'called up' to serve in the military, and in his linguistic habitus. Thus Vladislavic appreciates that Boshoff "seeks to [...] obliterate, to smash the monolithic fantasy of the language and its lyrical tradition into so many splinters" just as he simultaneously "celebrates amid the ruins, showing just what intricate wonders can be reassembled from the fragments" (46).

Such an appraisal leads me to redouble onto Vladislavic's treatment of English in the context of South African change, his creative determination to bring into his fiction extravagantly varied repertoires of English vocabulary and register, low and high, popular and academic. As has been remarked by Helgesson, he draws on an exceptionally creative linguistic repertoire --picked from billboards and advertising posters; dictionaries, novels, package inserts, maps, instruction manuals--offering in his fiction a wide ranging re-spatialising of language beyond a conventional South African English literary discourse (2003 and 2006). As I am arguing, in fact, this 're-spatialising' aligns prose with art, resituating forms of book as made object within the unsettled parameters of conceptual art.

Some extended discussion of examples of Vladislavic's creative prose is probably called for at this point, and I will begin with his participation in blank, the "catalogue for an exhibition" (Feireiss 1998:5), which Vladislavic co-edited with Hilton Judin. As is explained in Directions, part of the preliminary matter, the book "had its origins in a conceptual map" (6) designed to structure the selection of written and photographic essays so as to "[tell] a story about the architecture of South Africa" as "the built manifestation of [apartheid's ...] political programme" (5). This 'mapping' subverts the tradition of the scholarly tome with ludic panache; blank 'blanks out' a reader's received expectations (gesturing towards blacks and blankes, blind spots and lapses of memory) by forgoing the authoritative apparatuses of bibliopoesy (see Murray 2005). In blank, there is nothing so obvious as a well-placed page number to help a reader to find her way (look), and the pros$aic contents page has disappeared, replaced by a "Map of contents", in both bound and loose-leaf versions. The map is a convoluted grid of co-ordinates and lines borrowing inspiration from surveying, planning, archaeology and scientific quadrants, and on account of its unfamiliarity as a format in the edited volume of essays, contrives to produce the disconcertingly vertiginous, frustrating experience of being 'lost in a book' (Clarkson 2006). Further, blank gives only half a mind to expectations of habituated academic style, accommodating a number of informal, comparatively 'undisciplined' personalised voices within the critical space. Vladislavic's own contribution, "Street Addresses, Johannesburg", is a startling generic hybrid of autobiographical anecdote, fictional reference, documented regional history and philosophical musing, and he admits that this is where Portrait with Keys originated.

blank is confounding; a tactile-conceptual rebus of the expedient spatial dogmatisms shaping South Africa's built environment--and consequentially South Africans' imaginations--under apartheid. Thus blank embodies the truth that reading is an art of complex conventional complicities, and 'the book' an uneasy form of authority. Indeed, blank may perhaps be considered an early experiment, for Vladislavic, in the possibilities of writing and editing as conceptual and collaborative art.

Another Vladislavic text that seems fair conceptual game is The Restless Supermarket, a novel distinguished by much complicated "writing-thinking" on the part of the author as he writes while he "think[s] when I'm writing, through writing" and then moves through the same for his language-obsessed protagonist (Warnes 2000:277). Aubrey Tearle collects corrigenda--"Safe in God's cave" or "Pissed away after a long illness" (Vladislavic 2001: 65), and he is developing a complicated "System of Records" for a "Proofreader's Derby" (59). Yet this fictional environment, saturated with attention to language, has the effect of precipitous linguistic unsettling for a reader (Helgesson 2003): words themselves constitute the novel's action and character, and a reader becomes unable to treat words as if their primary purpose in fiction were primarily to carry a plot, or evoke atmosphere, or delineate nuanced interiority. Instead, the onerous demand is that one read as an editor, a labour in which even Vladislavic envisages himself as starting to "fall through the language" into an awareness that is at once "a sense of the mechanics of it all" and an apprehension "analogous perhaps to a painter's perception of negative space" (Warnes 2000:277). Thus, The Restless Supermarket shapes and positions its readers in much the same way that Boshoff's artwork "profiles and processes its own viewers" (Vladislavic 2005:6).

Consider Vladislavic's account of how this linguistic tour de force was compiled over "five or six years" during which he "collected typos and wordplays, cobbling them together" as Tearle claims to have done. "It was full of errors" and then "there was this absurd process (which was, finally, very satisfying): I had to correct it. [...] Part of the strangeness of it is that it was written in this back-to-front way" (Marais and Backstrom 2002:1234). Isn't this a creative analogue of Boshoff's methodologies, marked by the forms of dedicated accumulation, arrangement and protracted artistic discipline, an imaginative undertaking characterised by the contradictory combinations of marvellous, serendipitous chance and terrifyingly obsessive cataloguing? The Restless Supermarket may appeal as "inscribed with idiosyncratic private meanings". And yet the chosen artistic language simultaneously becomes a densely cryptic personal mythology which seals off meaning from others (Vladislavic 2005:78).

The prodigious undertaking and obsessive making of much Boshoff art is characterised by Sean O'Toole as monomania (2007). Perhaps. But I cannot read Vladislavic's account of how Boshoff conceived and crafted a work such as the 370-Day Project, for example, without imagining the writer's shared delight in the artist's mad endeavour. For Vladislavic, who acknowledges that "[m]any conceptual artists put themselves through trials of endurance" (2005:35), the pleasures must have been prolific. The chance to situate Boshoff's artistic efforts within an arcane lineage by drawing on fascinating historical curiosities such as those discussed by Simon Schama--for instance, the "xylotheque or 'wooden library' of books about trees" in the art collection of Peter the Great (35). The satisfaction of addressing a piece of conceptual art that could be constructed only through dedicated combinations of manual and intellectual knowledges as Boshoff gathered different species of wood, and each day carved and shelved a piece according to the restrictions of a complex personal code of activities, along with the shavings in another drawer. I imagine how Vladislavic may have found pleasing correlations between the 370-Day Project and the tortuously-engaging writing experiments of the French OuLiPo, the Workshop for Potential Literature, a range of experimental verbal exercises such as extended lipograms (a text from which specific letters are banned) and palindromes. And how could Vladislavic not have thought of his own day job in professional editing, and the subjects, styles, and methods of his after-hours, late-night, fictionalising?

Phenomenal feats of thoughtful making are a recognised feature of Vladislavic's fictional landscape even as he dismantles the concept of 'propaganda by monuments'. Remember "The Great Wall of Jeff", first discussed in "Street Addresses, Johannesburg" (1998), with a reprise in Portrait with Keys (2006)? This is a putative public sculpture, a piece of tipsy tomfoolery probably proposed around the kitchen table by Vladislavic and friends. Originally, the wall was planned in an historical context where walls and monuments were being toppled; it would be constructed from resinous bricks, inside each of which would have been cast an item that someone in the Greater Johannesburg area had been "induced to part with", since "everyone has something they could live without" (see Vladislavic 1998: 311).

The wall, like Nieuwenhuizen's folly, is never actually built. Yet it is made material in words, twice; it exists as a definite, conceptual construct to which a reader may turn and return when following her Vladislavic reading itineraries. The reappearance in Portrait with Keys (2006) is surely more than mere chance, attesting to the purchase of the idea on the writer's imagination as a lasting, if necessarily unfinished idea. Unlike many of the walls which feature in Vladislavic's prose, this one is partly a joke. But jokes aside, the wall is also an elusive "large-scale mnemonic" (Vladislavic 2005:78) of those commonplace South Africanisms, the celebratory public monument, and the privately-enclosing wall. It's possible that this wall, this monument, ought not to be built. However, it also becomes a melancholy image of absence, emblematic of the changing social and political situations of the ageing white writer, looking to find a place to live, to inhabit, that allows him the nuances of memory while not reducing his life to fake memorialisation and deadening isolation. There "arose in my mind's eye", writes Vladislavic,

 a building that owed something to the Crystal Palace, and something
 else to the Transvaal Museum ... and something more to the Hyperama
 in Eastgate Mall. And I was walking along its shiny corridors,
 surrounded on all sides by a peculiarly impenetrable transparency,
 where objects hung suspended, attached by nothing but space to the
 names of the people who once loved them. (Vladislavic 1998: 311)

The non-existent though imaginatively vivid 'inside' of a wall is thus an enduring idea, a structure rather like some of those developed by the conceptual artist Robert Barry, who has described a number of his works, indeed given detailed instructions for their making ... but stopped short of producing them. As Vladislavic surely knows, for the conceptual artist, the realisation of a piece may exist as an option, a possibility to be implemented; it is not a requirement of artistic merit.

The fact that The Great Wall of Jeff exists but as idea, realised only as and in language, might be said to re-turn attention to the emptiness and futility of the original idea, implicitly substantiating the claim that conceptual art is empty abstraction, devoid of meaningful traditional artistic craft. Yet Vladislavic's detailed discussion around the planned instructions for making, coupled with the careful attention to parts in relation to wholes, speculation relative to hardware, ensures that ideas as a means towards achieving ends are once again connected to a range of creative human skills, the way in which we live through longing, as much as through life. This is a subjunctive kind of art; if it is possible to imagine it, someone, somewhere, some day, might make it. Far stranger things have happened in this place we call the real world, where ideas, indeed, have become a valuable resource. At the same time, the unrealised nature of the work becomes a comment on the relationships amongst art and idea, art and language, art and the economic-historical spaces in which a proliferation of products ensures the uneasy, provisional place of artistic undertakings.

My final turn is to Vladislavic's recent chronicle of Johannesburg, Portrait with Keys. This volume developed out of and in parts reprises "Street Addresses, Johannesburg" (1998) so that Portrait could be considered a mini-retrospective of Vladislavic's lasting preoccupation with words and the spaces they occupy; their evident scripts and the invisible traverses of meaning they accumulate in their association with reading and related forms of movement.

As already remarked, Portrait with Keys includes an unusual index organised under the heading "Itineraries", suggesting various routes or "thematic pathways through the book" (2006:205). Among them is a dedicated "Artists' Book". Vladislavic does not name himself among the artistic company, but much of the volume traces the odd ways in which Vladislavic and many of those he meets around and about his neighbourhood are envisaged by the author-narrator as a version of the "true artist" who makes art and "very fine trade" (171) through living, packing, building, planning, walking, writing and signwriting. The prominent unnamed figure of the "Artists' Book", then, is Ivan Vladislavic. His jangling "portrait with keys" forms a restlessly contextualised personal space in which writing, desk, books, library--like art itself--are but lived possibilities among many as he heads for Jumbo Liquors, or a party, or Woods' Self-storage on the outskirts of town. Often, Vladislavic appears in Portrait with Keys as an unassuming bloke, an ordinary guy, just a chap on his way to buy this or that, to see someone or other. But a reader should not be guyed, for any and everywhere the narrator might be cranking up his artful artistic camera eye, seeing random things which those dulled to art might miss. In this, like many of the artists he names, he is an habitual and urbane trickster, a skilled scavenger of language, anecdote, observation and voice. A reader may simply read Portrait with Keys. But the invitation is also to become similarly deft, learning to pick up and connect the pieces that Vladislavic plants in writing his portrait of a city and his city self, and it is through her conceptual processes, her mind's actions, that she might be persuaded to understand this book, "[n]either novel in any conventional sense nor a collection of stories, this chain of lyrical texts [which] brings together memoir, history, snapshots, meditations, asides on the arts" (front flap), as an oddly engaging form of conceptual art.

Much of the energy of Portrait with Keys, as in Vladislavic's writing more generally, is invested in demonstrating the rampant creativity that informs the everyday, a space not conventionally considered 'art', but which is yet a source, for the imagination, of all the perverse possibilities of the artistic, the artful, and the artless. Thus in Portrait with Keys Vladislavic goes far beyond the representation of conceptual art offered in "Curiouser". Gaylard sees Majara as a means of "deflating pretension and of relativising the importance of art" while "art or creativity is conspicuously absent from the characters of the other stories" (2006:71). I disagree with the second claim. In The Exploded View, the stories experiment with the idea of 'art' as a diverse form of making, where the limits and opportunities of individual imagination are contextualised within the paradoxically limiting and liberating parameters of South African sociopolitical change. Thus Budlender, the census official, might respond to television as a nauseating slew of disordered fragments, an "endless jumble of body parts amid ruins, a gyrating hip, an enigmatic navel, a fossicking hand, a pointing finger, sign language from a secret alphabet, fragments of street signs, images flaring and fading, dissolving, detaching" (Vladislavic 2004:24); but it is also from among just such outlandish mess that Vladislavic, the writer, finds the words and ideas he needs to create his bizarrely engaging narratives.

This kind of quotidian incongruity is a familiar, even customary, feature of Vladislavic's conceptual universe. In it, the everyday is sometimes envisaged as an art--in which art, conventionally understood, occupies an uncertain place, variously narrowed to the fragile space of the personal, or more bombastically aggrandised to public presence. Then again, sometimes art is artlessly happened on as so much discarded matter, or art is misplaced in the ordinary. Vladislavic writes out of a situation in which imaginative people find themselves struggling beyond the art of living in circumstances which keep them nervously on the lookout for the violence that threatens to overwhelm the impulse to be creative even as they keep looking out for all manner of 'poetential' materials, both lyrical and more prosaic.

In his latest volume, despite not according himself a place in his designated "Artists' Book", Vladislavic also inclines towards art, proper. For instance, he describes Genpei Akasegawa's eccentrically minute but "most beautiful sculpture", A Collection of End Bits of Lead from a Mechanical Pencil. Here, he treats Akasegawa's collection of millimetric leads as representative of "the accumulated labour of years [...T]ime spent, work done, measured against an insignificant deficit" (Vladislavic 2006:123). This phrasing recalls Vladislavic's discussion of Boshoff's onerous 370-Day Project, where the detritus drawers of "shavings and chips" represent "the vast mass of waste time from which time spent meaningfully emerges" (Vladislavic 2005:35).

Akasegawa's piece is already a challenge to audience assumptions about sculpture as a pre-eminently monumental, public form of art, and Vladislavic further provokes by claiming this delicate sculpture as "a companion to my own Autobiography" (2006:123). This piece--not of writing, but of art--he describes as "a shallow wooden box resembling a picture frame, containing 392 pencil stubs (at the last count.) [...] None of the stubs is more than two and a half centimeters long. If you look through the glass front of the box, the stubs form a layer ten centimeters deep" (2006:123-4).

The very italicised act of giving a name, Autobiography, to otherwise nondescript waste materials places the rubbish collection in a new category, namely, art, not rubbish. Or, to express this slantwise, and as some have claimed of conceptual art, art can be rubbish. Clearly, Vladislavic, after years of playful ducking and diving through the realms of fiction and life-writing, now wants a reader to examine, to toy, with the possibilities of this strange piece of work as the writer in another guise. Even the framing in words invites a reader--viewer?--to see the collection as poetically meaningful, symbolically-dense: the stubs are "like the leaves and twigs fallen beneath a tree in the woods. The years of tinder" (2006:123-4). Fragments slowly accumulated, shored against one's ruin. In the case of Autobiography, the naming gives artistic significance and credibility to a broken miscellany; however it's difficult for a reader not to read into the action something of the writer's archness as he draws a person's attention to a motley of insignificance that warrants such a conventionalised label. The blurb on the flyleaf of Portrait with Keys happily claims that the book "is both an oblique self-portrait of the author and a vivid recovery of where we have been all along", but after reading Portrait with Keys I wondered, as I believe I was meant to, Who are we?, and What is our collective story? Where on earth, if not in Johannesburg, can I be?

Vladislavic's little Autobiography may be art, and the collection of stubs is pointedly framed under glass, separated from the utilitarian world in which the pencils have served their purpose, but have not been discarded. They are trash, treasured. But Autobiography is neither gallery-accredited work nor commissioned public sculpture; it is small and intimate, and were it not remarked, in the book, as part of the artist's meaningful personal habitus, it would remain unknown, passing even sooner into the nothing of the self, as Vladislavic is poignantly aware. Again, this art work doesn't aggrandise either egotistical genius or artistic action; it pares the artist's 'lifetime's achievement' down to the merest of "fritterings", the dusty traces of ten years correspondent to a life lived between the pages of books. Thus there is also something in the sculptural Autobiography, as in much of Vladislavic's fiction, of the very elusive doubling through which Vladislavic has rendered Boshoff's art. It may be "[h]igh-flown" and "conceptually-laden", but it is also the grand idea "reduced to the domestic scale by a humorous pragmatism" (Vladislavic 2005:15), and in Vladislavic's case is perhaps a conscious tactic intended to keep the artist from lapsing into sentimental nostalgia in the face of urban change.

Concepts, whether 'autobiography' or 'art' or 'writing', enable Vladislavic to manage his uncertainty about the place of art, the arts, and artistic practice in a dramatically altered South Africa, and his own art of writing in this swirl. Both his essay on Boshoff and his own creative prose show that if Vladislavic has moments at which he cannot completely credit conceptual art with all the intellectual weight that artists and theorists would have it bear, unless he were willing to dismiss himself and his own odd arts of making, he must reconcile himself to the paradoxical processes and products of conceptual art as a form. And then again, on occasions, the question of dismissal does not even arise, as the writer is so caught up in the intriguing possibilities which conceptual art offers his imagination.

Indeed, as he has admitted in relation to finding Akasegawa's sculpture an apt companion to his own Autobiography, it is precisely in this perceived similarity that there may lie "a good part" of the work's "appeal, for nothing is more pleasing than the echo of one's own voice, even if it is no longer clear which is the voice and which the echo" (2006:123). Strangely enough, then, it is in meeting with and matching himself against Boshoff in the camouflaged TAXI 'monograph' that Vladislavic really comes into his own as more than a writer, as an artist. Willem Boshoff, some might argue, characterised at once by conceptually clear expository prose and conceptually playful imaginative encounters, is among the best of Vladislavic's creative work. Is Boshoff, perhaps, Vladislavic's best book?

References

Andersson, Muff. 2004. "Writing's on the Wall." Mail & Guardian Online 20 August. http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2004/2004aug/040820-wall.html (Accessed 4 June 2007.)

Backstrom, Carita and Mike Marais. 2002. "An Interview with Ivan Vladislavic". English in Africa 29(2) October: 119-28.

Bloom, Kevin. 2007. "Writing the Divide". Maverick 1(2) 3 December: 58-64.

Clarkson, Carrol. 2006. "Verbal and Visual: The Restless View". scrutiny2 11(2):106-12.

"Damien Hirst." 2007. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Hirst#Work_philosophy (Accessed 2 July 2007.)

"Exhibitions". 2005. Bag Factory News. http://www.bagfactoryart.org.za/html/NEWS/aug05.htm (Accessed 1 June 2007.)

Feireiss, Kristin. 1998. "Foreword". In: Judin, Hilton & Ivan Vladislavic (eds). blank --: Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam/ Cape Town: Netherlands Architecture Institute/David Philip:5.

Gaylard, Gerald. 2006. "The Death of the Subject? Subjectivity in Post-apartheid Literature". scrutiny2 11(2):62-74.

Gaylard, Gerald and Michael Titlestad. 2006. "Introduction: Controversial Interpretations of Ivan Vladislavic". scrutiny2 11(2):5-10.

Graham, Shane. 2007. "Memory, Memorialization, and the Transformation of Johannesburg: Ivan Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket and Propaganda by Monuments". Modern Fiction Studies 53(1): 70-97.

Helgesson, Stefan. 2006. "Johannesburg as Africa: A Postcolonial Reading of The Exploded View". scrutiny2 11(2):27-35.

--. 2003. "'Minor Disorders': Ivan Vladislavic and the Devolution of South African English". Seminar Series document: 1-12. (Subsequently published in Journal of Southern African Studies 30(4):777-87.)

Judin, Hilton and Ivan Vladislavic (eds). 1998. blank --: Architecture, Apartheid and After. Cape Town/Rotterdam: David Philip/NAI Publishers.

Kearney, Jack. 1994. "Four Recent South African Novels". Current Writing 6(1):91-6.

Marais, Mike. 2002. "Visions of Excess: Closure, Irony and the Thought of Community in Ivan Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket". English in Africa 29(2):101-17.

Miller, Andie. 2006. "Inside the Toolbox". scrutiny2 11(2):117-24.

Murray, Sally-Ann. 2005. "En Fuite, on Foot, in Thought: Making the Metropolis Elusive". Current Writing 17(2):102-24.

O'Toole, Sean. 2003. "A Community of Many?" Artthrob "News". www.artthrob.co.za/03aug/news/otoole.html (Accessed 2 July 2007.)

--. 2007. "Willem Boshoff." Frieze Magazine 8 September. http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/willem_boshoff/ (Accessed 20 January 2008.)

Vladislavic, Ivan. 1989. Missing Persons. Cape Town: David Philip.

--. 1993. The Folly. Cape Town: David Philip.

--. 1996. Propaganda by Monuments & Other Stories. Cape Town: David Philip.

--. 1998. "Street Addresses, Johannesburg". In: Judin, Hilton & Ivan Vladislavic (eds). blank --: Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam/Cape Town: Netherlands Architecture Institute/David Philip: 305-13.

--. 2001. The Restless Supermarket. Cape Town: David Philip.

--. 2004. The Exploded View. Johannesburg: Random House.

--. 2005. Willem Boshoff. Houghton: David Krut Publishing.

--. 2006. Portrait with Keys: Joburg & What-what. Houghton: Umuzi.

Vladislavic, Ivan (ed). 2000. T'kama-Adamastor: Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting. Wits University Press: Johannesburg.

Warnes, Christopher. 2000. "An Interview with Ivan Vladislavic". Modern Fiction Studies 46(1):273-81.

"Willem Boshoff." n.d. David Krut Publishing. http://davidkrutpublishing.com/artbase/abf-artist.php?artist=19 (Accessed 1 June 2007.)