Towers
Andries Botha, Towers
Andries Botha, Towers
Andries Botha, Towers
Andries Botha, Towers
Towers
It has been some time since I last worked with ceramics. The medium suggested a range of metaphorical possibilities; earth subjected to intense heat, the alchemy of metamorphosis, rigidity, vulnerability and fragility.
September the 11th has changed our world, fractured our organizational systems and social logic. I wanted to make a work that positioned me/us/them/you as complicit elements within the implosion of a system of reason. This extreme social act or assault on a dominant social order challenges the organization of our philosophical systems. I tried to position the work as a metaphor of fractured or injured logic, expressed as a unit of measurement repeated in space as a modular, repetitive structure. A modular unit is defined as a square, expanded into a cube and then extrapolated into space as a tower, a visible ordering or organizational principle.
Deconstructing a specific formal understanding or conceptual tradition of ceramics and beauty suggested additional possibilities for engaging this logic as an ideological or cultural construct. Collapsing my manufactured tower and then methodically reconstructing the broken pieces into another tower, raises for me the interesting intersection of reality and virtuality. The obsessive and meticulous nature of the reconstruction process allowed me to indulge my own interests in labour (craft) as a physical construct for time that is made visible in a universe of individual ordering.
Toying with the ideas of reality and virtuality (or illusion) is more than likely a reflection of how my own embattled ideas of truth that are informed by popular electronic media images. Televised images of reality that persistently assault the passive space of our individual domestic interiors, conflates reality with entertainment. Re-representing the reconstruction of two towers as reality or subject (one reconstructed tower and one electronically projected tower), allows me to toy with the idea of tragedy as inherent within our accepted notion of order embodied within our logic, that which our rational sciences affirm and which formulates our definition of physical and emotional security.
Andries Botha
Towers by Andries Botha was made in Albisola in 2003 during the 2nd Biennial of Ceramics in Contemporary Art.
