Die Afrikaners is plesierig

5 - 26 June 2010

Opening Saturday 5 June

Solo performance by Stompie Selibe on bamboo saxophone at the opening

Exhibition brochure available

The way in which knowledge is generated and circulated has always been at the heart of the art of Elza Botha. Her famous and controversial Butterfly Boxes of the late-1970s and early-1980s attest to that. Cut-out linocut butterflies fill numerous display boxes fashioned from discarded old wooden school desks and drawers, purportedly to resemble a collection of various rare and common Lepidoptera species. But the knowledge these boxes contains, suggests a much deeper understanding of the South African socio-political context of that time. She ‘labels’ her butterflies with the names of political prisoners who died in detention – knowledge not commonly circulated at the time. Such men as Steve Biko and Neil Aggett were well-known leaders in the resistance movement, but most prisoners went unnoticed, unacknowledged and uncelebrated, except to their immediate families and close circle of friends. Botha’s boxes indexed alternative forms of resistance and simultaneously captured the spirit of the time and commemorated the personal sacrifices that were made.

Presently, Botha generates another kind of knowledge altogether: that of the complexity of the human mind and spirit and of the way in which humans react to and defy any form of adversity. The symbols she uses to generate a new body of work are no less complex and subtle than those of her butterflies. The bull, the cow, the owl seem to constitute a fresh iconographic framework; they dance and they fly in order to untangle their own constraints. 

The dancing bulls and cows in Botha’s new work are of the Afrikaner cattle breed – Botha’s wry visual response to those who always broker an Afrikaner-identity for her in their discourse. Her preferred but totally irreverent response in her mind’s eye to such a label is that the interlocutor is referring to cattle, not the linguistic or ethnic group of people in South Africa. And she expands on this paradoxical joke in her work by conflating these beastly creatures with stereotypical folk assumptions of the Afrikaner people. Her Afrikaner bulls and cows engage in folk dances and songs, dressed in what appears to be Voortrekker garb, with bonnets and skirts for the cows and waistcoats for the bulls. She does not flinch from imbuing her dancing Afrikaner cattle with the mentality of the ‘takhaar’, the backvelder, the country bumpkin who was supposed to have enjoyed, among other things, frequent barn dances. Oral history has it that these barns often had hardened cow dung floors, that is, until the dancers pulverized the surface, and literally kicked up dust in their enthusiastic dances. At this point there would be a call, “Balke toe” with the implication that the dancers would reach for the rafters and hang onto them while the floor was sprinkled with water in order to settle the dust.

The dance, however, is a corporeal image of a given process, or of becoming, or of a passage of time. It is a rhythmical art form, a symbol of the art of creation, an ancient form of magic. As such, every dance is a pantomime of metamorphosis (and so calls for a mask to facilitate and conceal the transformation), which seeks to change the dancer into a god, a demon or some other creature. In addition, dances with linked arms symbolize cosmic matrimony, the union of heaven and earth, the union of man and wife.

Husband and wife, bull and cow, but also the musician playing a long Khoisan flute is present in Botha’s depiction of the dance. Although her musician appears to be an innocuous shepherd, referencing the many shepherds by Maggie Laubser, (a painter whom Botha reveres and whom she has studied in depth), this musician is Time itself, judging from the two attributes next to him: to the left, a sickle, and to the right, an hour glass, in the shape of a calabash. The dance becomes a dance with death. The death dance is a well-known subject in Western art, including a good example of variations on this theme in the four panels of a cupboard in Irma Stern’s studio that she painted early on in her life when she moved into The Firs, her house in Rosebank, Cape Town. According to Jung, such a figure as Dancing Death represents the male in the female psyche, or the animus that can assume such shapes as abductor, robber, tormentor and murderer, taking possession of one’s mind, and luring women away from human relationships, especially from all contact with men. Jung countered this type of brutality, sadism, recklessness, empty talk, silent, obstinate and evil ideas with the creative, meaningful activity of a positive animus, taking such shapes in the female psyche as that of the physical power of an athlete, or a muscle man, or of that as a romantic man or a man of action, of that as the lover of the word, such as a professor or a clergyman, and of that as the wise guide to spiritual truth.

Botha, however, repudiates such stereotypical gender constructs because she does not need any male to give her spiritual firmness, or of such a man who would give her inner support that compensates for her outer softness. She adopts the image and the symbolism of the owl, and many of the self-portraits on exhibition feature this bird. The owl seems to be the harbinger of good tidings, as was evident one New Year’s Day on her farm outside Bela-Bela in the Limpopo province. It was a common barn owl circling the family so as to wish them well. Many years later she encountered another owl on one of her sojourns in the Karoo. This time it was a Southern Cape owl seemingly injured and struggling to fly onto a pole. On closer inspection Botha found that the owl was a fledgling and the struggle indicative of its first attempt to fly. James Frazer equates such protective behavior with the roots of religion and folklore in the well-known The Golden Bough in which he relates the Aboriginal custom of women taking care of owls. According to him, males align themselves with bats and women with owls, the belief being that by protecting the owl she is in fact protecting not only herself but all her female family members as well.

The symbol of the owl features at regular intervals in Western art history. For example, a multitude of both native and migratory birds, including the owl, inhabited the Nile Valley, many of which became the personifications of gods and goddesses and part of the hieroglyphic ‘alphabet’. Botha names her barn owl after the Egyptian goddess Neith of which there are numerous statues. In one of the most famous images of Goya’s etching series, Los Caprichios, the artist shows himself haunted by owls and bats and other symbols of witchcraft. Frans Hals painted Malle Babbe, a village idiot insulting guests in a tavern with an owl on her shoulder. Botha even invokes the modernist  Spanish artist, Antoni Tàpies in one of her linocuts when she titles the work, Karoo-ontmoeting en Tàpies se 2 me. She references her first encounter with the owl in the Karoo and the importance the letter ‘m’ had for Tàpies, who signaled it, along with the letter ‘x’, as the most significant in his art, characterizing the x as symbol of erasure and the m as the mark of creativity in the palm of a human hand. The two m’s evident in Botha’s work are the m-shape of the mountain range in the background and the m-shape of the outstretched wing span of the owl. There is, however, a third ‘m’ to be detected in this work: the owl represents the pictogram of the letter ‘m’ in the ancient Egyptian alphabet!

It is Neith, however, who demands closer inspection. She was both goddess of war and organizer of the water ways of the Nile Delta, donning a scarab harness as the former, and adopting the attribute of the cow as the latter. The many cows at Botha’s barn dances could well have been called Neith; not only her barn owl. In her capacity as goddess of war, Neith, significantly, prefigures Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess that emanated later in history. Small wonder Martin Bernal calls her ”Black Athena” invoking her African origins and representing his central thesis about the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Camille Paglia adds yet another dimension to the understanding of Athena/Neith: she maintains that although this goddess, in her suit of armour, adopts a cross-gendered identity, her power resides in the fact that Athena originates from the mind of Zeus, that she sprang from his head, and thus symbolizes the resourceful, adaptive mind, the ability to invent, plan, conspire, cope and survive. “She is techne (‘art, skill’) rather than nous ('mind). Thus her patronage of the crafts.” 

In two of Botha’s most recent works, portrayals of an Anglo-South African Boer War soldier, the armour, any armour, seems to have fallen off: in the one Botha depicts Commandant Gideon Scheepers in a farmhouse near the small Karoo town of Prince Albert, gravely ill and having to abdicate his leadership, and about to be arrested and put to death. In the other work, she depicts Scheepers in Graaff-Reinet, being woken up out of a recuperative sleep for his execution. This Boer-war soldier is ‘being prepared for another death’, as the poet Dirk Opperman had it.

Elza Botha combines cultural and art history, folklore and psychoanalytical insight in order to reveal the astonishing myths and magic that inform daily life and the admirable way in which humans overcome their fears and harness their energy in creative and innovative ways. Her work is distinguished by its ferocious intelligence, a slyly subversive feminism and a deftly handled visual language. Her new knowledge is infectious.

Wilhelm van Rensburg