On Ivan Vladislavić on Willem Boshoff on Conceptual Art

Abstract

This paper uses Ivan Vladislavić’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 Vladislavić’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 Vladislavić’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 Vladislavić’s claims for Boshoff as a visual artist who is fundamentally a writer, and reading in Vladislavić’s critical commentary on a major South African artist the traces of his own artistic interests as a writer, I suggest that Ivan Vladislavić, working in prose, is himself a conceptual artist.