Willem Boshoff and materiality according to Adorno

Abstract

This article presents a reading of South African artist Willem Boshoff’s installation Writing that fell off the wall (1997) to illustrate how he used his material to expose colonialism and apartheid as inhuman ideologies. Adorno’s views on materiality serves as a theoretical framework. According to Adorno history is sedimented in the artist’s material and form elements. He distinguished between the Inhalt (material content) and Gehalt (social truth content) in artworks. Adorno claims that works of art do not explicitly need to have a historical content because they exercise their critique through the way in which they configure material that already contains history. The artwork’s meaning is revealed through the dialectical relation between the Inhalt and the Gehalt. I argue that Boshoff exposed the bankrupt ideologies of colonialism and apartheid by conceptually scattering ideologically laden concepts in eight different and previously “superior” languages during colonialism and apartheid, on the floor