Seven Pillars of Justice II: Willem Boshoff

by Pamela Allara and Mark Auslander

Day 14 of South Africa's The Lockdown Collection presents conceptual artist Willem Boshoff's "Seven Pillars of Justice II" (2019), a kind of wooden puzzle box composed out of seven standing wooden pieces. When the fully assembled work is viewed from above one sees two squares, an inner one of dark red and an outer one of dark hardwood. The outer, side face of each of the seven pillars has an inscription in braille, each articulating a different principle of jurisprudence. The work's title is inspired by a passage from the Book of Proverbs: "Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars" (Proverbs 9:1, King James Version) and T.E Lawrence's memoir of his World War One campaigns, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom."
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Willem Boshoff. Seven Pillars of Justice  II (2019)

Willem Boshoff's artist statement on "Seven Pillars of Justice II (2019):

The sculpture SEVEN PILLARS OF JUSTICE II (2019), is numbered 5 out of an edition of 7. It was created after the original SEVEN PILLARS OF JUSTICE I, which was commissioned by the Law Faculty of the Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg) to be presented as a parting gift to Professor Frans Malan after 27 years of service and in celebration of his appointment to the bench of the South African Supreme Court of Appeal. The work currently on auction is signed W. Boshoff 2019, with the edition number on the side of its base-tray.

Willem Boshoff. Seven Pillars of Justice II (2019)

In conceiving the original work of 1997, Justice Malan and Willem Boshoff conceptualised  together. He remembers: “Frans Malan wanted to illustrate the interaction between the hard
and fast legal rules (ius strictum) and the more yielding adaptability of our common law (ius honorarium). The balance between these two aspects of the law is of cardinal importance, with the one always substantiating the other. The two realities present two unique entanglements – a labyrinth within a labyrinth. Each of the seven pillars in the construct is thus composed of a soft nucleus tempered by a hard exterior. The judicial concern with the ‘flesh and blood’ of human nature is portrayed by a small, central puzzle made in a reddish wood. 

For the 2019 edition of the work I used red ivory wood for the inner section of the work. In both the 1997 and 2019 versions of the work the rigid, concrete structure of the law was created as the enclosing puzzle in a black, granite-like leadwood, one of South Africa’s heaviest woods. The ‘puzzle’ of the 2019 work is reversed – its configuration is a mirror image of the 1997 work.

Willem Boshoff. Seven Pillars of Justice II (2019)

The administration of justice and a contemplation of the facts of a problematic court case governed by legal rules are linked to a sensibility attained by testing and fitting, much like the piecing together of the segments of a broken puzzle. The well-known Seven Pillars of Wisdom of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) served as a point of departure. Proverbs 9:1 mentions seven such pillars without naming them specifically. Frans Malan gave judicial names to these previously unidentified pillars. For the work, seven pillars that fit together into a single solid block were made with each pillar indicating a specific maxim: 




 ARS BONI ET AEQUI                  The art of goodness and equity.
SUUM CUIQUE TRIBUERE        To render to every one his own.
PACTA SUNT SERVANDA            Agreements must be kept.
BONA FIDES                                Honesty and sincerity of intention.
AUDI ALTERAM PARTEM           Let the other side be heard as well.
SUMMUM IUS SUMMA INIURIA    Supreme justice is often out of supreme malice
NEMO IUDEX IN SUA CAUSA    No-one should be a judge in his own case.

The Latin maxims were written in Braille to play on the idea that justice is ‘blind’. The blindfolded
Justitia judges the facts of a case without being misled by the social standing, race or personal
attributes of the parties. To put the Latin maxims in Braille is to keep the work in line with the
enigmatic seven pillars of wisdom. This deepens the conundrum of the law: ignotum per ignotius,
the unknown explained by the even less known.

Willem Boshoff's comment about the current world crisis and subsequent lockdown:

The Corona virus (Covid 19) virus does not distinguish between people in society, regardless of
social standing. The current pandemic sees us desperately seeking scientific answers in response
to a great unknown. Discovering that great change is upon us, lost in a labyrinth of unimagined
consequences, we are called upon to re-examine values and institutions we have taken for
granted. We need to rethink our future selves. 

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I. Pam Allara:  The recent sculpture by Willem Boshoff,  Seven Pillars of Justice II (2019), is based on an earlier, somewhat smaller work, Seven Pillars of Justice I (1997). The date of the earlier work is important for several reasons. He was in the midst of completing one of his most well-known works, Blind Alphabet (1991-2000), which premiered at the first Johannesburg  Biennial in 1995. This monumental work consists of boxes containing ‘readable wood,’ sculptures that refer to now obscure terms for morphology taken from an English dictionary. However, the lids, which describe the meaning and derivation of each word, are in Braille. Thus, Boshoff plays with the differences between the types of knowledge available through sight and touch.

By 2006, he would install his monumental sculpture, Prison Hacks,(2003) at the entrance to the Constitutional court in Johannesburg.. Prison Hacks represents the prison sentences of eight of the Rivonia Trialists, including, of course, Nelson Mandela. As Bronwyn Law-Viljoen has written, “Boshoff represents each prison sentence as a series of six vertical lines crossed out by a diagonal. The lines, marching relentlessly across the surface of the black granite, convey the hopelessness of time marked and measured. Taken collectively, they suggest the enormity of the injustice committed by the apartheid regime…” (quoted in Art and Justice: The Art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, ed. Johannesburg, 2006, 130).  It is also important to note that when the judges of the newly established Constitutional Court assembled in 1994, they decided to be addressed as ‘Justice’. (Justice Albie Sachs, “Art and Freedom,” Art and Justice…, 17.). Seven Pillars of Justice I can be seen to be ‘bookended,’ as it were by Blind Alphabet and Prison Hacks. (The works can be seen on Boshoff’s website.)

In both versions, Seven Pillars of Justice is a solid block, a closed book. Because the names of seven pillars of knowledge given by Justice Frans Malan are in Braille, sighted viewers would have no idea what the topic of the book-sculpture was. (In a museum, it would at least have a label). On the exterior, then, the rule of law is rigid, confining. According to my correspondence with Helene Smuts, “The artist concluded that books are prisons of knowledge, whereas the mind has the power to liberate knowledge.” Books have been central to Boshoff’s practice since the 1970s, and so has his practice of literally opening up his book sculptures, inviting, indeed requiring, the viewer’s imaginative and intellectual engagement.

When viewed from above, Seven Pillars I and II, mirror images of each other, are clearly puzzles made from different elements fitted together, urging us to take them apart. Separated, each pillar is revealed as a different shape; no one legal case will ever be exactly like another. Hence the need for the ‘softening’ or coloring of binding laws through an empathetic reading. The single viewer can get to that point just on the basis of the sculptures’ structures. But the viewer is still ‘blind’ to the nature of the pillars unless accompanied by someone who reads braille. In a democracy, knowledge must be created and acknowledged collectively, as Boshoff suggests in the two sculptures, first in relation to the establishment of a new order of laws after 1994, and more recently in a time of anxiety and uncertainty. Both works are ars boni et aequi, an art of goodness and equity
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II. Mark Auslander: 


Law as Puzzle Box

As Pamela notes, "Seven Pillars of Justice" resembles a massive judicial tome, which can be taken apart and put back together. In addition, Boshoff's compressed, miniature wooden assemblage is presumably inspired by Japanese wooden puzzle boxes, the "himitsu-bako", which emerged during the late Edo period.  Only the owner of a puzzle box knew the intricate sequence of wooden planes and mechanisms to release, in order to disclose hidden valuables within. Properly disassembling and reassembling these boxes was never a matter simply of following a formal script but of embodying, through sensitive muscle memory, a tactile sensibility of proper alignment, attuned to tensions and pressure points within the box. 

Negotiating the challenges of reconciling formal legal doctrine with common law--a conundrum at the heart, Justice Malan notes, of lived jurisprudence--involves a comparable process, integrating rigorous intellectual pursuit with felt, intuitive empathic response.  As demonstrated in Comaroff and Roberts' (1981) study of Southern Tswana legal practice, this dialectic between "rules and processes" also characterizes indigenous southern African dispute resolution systems, which continuously navigate contradictions between the world as it ideally should be (as encoded in the "traditional" principles of customary law) and the unfolding, fluid dramas of on-the-ground lived experience.

As Boshoff notes, the work's title also invokes The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the wartime memoir of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). Lawrence's book can in part be conceived of as a pilgrimage narrative, through the vast, transformative emptiness of the desert and through the seven great cities of the Middle East: Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus, and Medina. Seeking justice in post-Apartheid South Africa can be conceived of as a comparable kind of pilgrimage, through the diverse facets of written precedent, legislation, and customary law. The required discipline of taking apart and reconstructing the seven pillars of Boshoff's puzzle box presents in miniature form the necessary journey taken by jurists and legal advocates, of plunging into the mystery of the nation's heart and re-aligning its varied components so that Law at last "fits" harmoniously in a way that was so long denied the nation's long-oppressed majority

A Sacred Grove

I also read Boshoff's "Seven Pillars of Justice II," made of vertically standing precious southern African hardwoods, as partly inspired by the sacred groves of Antiquity, which functioned as dynamic portals or switch-points between the visible domain of mortals and the invisible, mysterious precincts of the gods. These groves, each dedicated to a specific god, enabled humans to access through ritual sacrifice and other ceremonial action the creative chaos and uncontrollable vitality of the divinities (Barnett 2007).

In this miniature memorial to the power of Law and Justice, Boshoff may specifically be invoking sacred groves dedicated to the goddess Pallas Athena, the sacred lawgiver, who replaced earlier cycles of blood violence with enduring principles of legal authority.  In Book Six of Homer's Odyssey, Nausicaa sends Odysseus, so long denied justice, to Athena's sacred grove, where the hero successfully implores the goddess' assistance in guiding him home to Ithaka. In classical mythology, the experience of wandering through the labyrinth of the dense, nearly impenetrable grove is a physical manifestation of the quest for truth, revelation, and enlightenment. (This ancient motif is echoed in the prologue of Dante's Divine Comedy, Canto 1, as the protagonist wanders, confused and disoriented, through the dark forest--selva oscura--until he encounters the poet Virgil, who will guide him through the mysteries of the underworld Inferno.)

Boshoff's use of South African hardwoods may also reference the sacred groves that dot indigenous southern African landscapes. In my field research area, the Mpezeni Ngoni communities of eastern Zambia, boys and young male herders may not retrieve cattle that have wandered into dense copses of trees, which are understood as privileged sanctuaries of the ancestral shades, who will bless the bovines, repositories of spirit, before they return, of their own accord, into the human world (cf. Sheridan 2009)

In the House of Wisdom and Justice

In the age of the novel coronavirus and the Lockdown, Boshoff's microcosmic assemblage takes on a set of meanings that were unanticipated in 1997, when the original iteration of the work was produced for Justice Malan. We now see before us in miniature a house, the very form in which the national populace is now confined for the duration of the emergency. It is worth recalling, in this light, that the original phrasing of Proverbs 9:1 emphasizes a dwelling place: ""Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars,"  Each day of the Lockdown, we find ourselves compressed into a single house, a miniature social universe, and must carefully navigate how to treat our fellow "inmates" with fairness, compassion, and wisdom.

It is no easy thing to unlock the puzzles of justice in the domestic or public realms. For that, we may once again seek inspiration in Scripture. James 3:17 articulates the seven pillars of wisdom that are left unspoken in Proverbs 9:1: "But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy." (King James Version).  May these principles, which infused Justice Malan's seven principles of law--and which are now made manifest in Willem Boshoff's exquisite puzzle box--serve as our guiding stars through the difficult days ahead, within our houses and beyond them.



References

Comaroff, John and Simon Roberts. 1981. Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context.  Chicago: Universlty of Chicago Press.


Barnett R.2007 SACRED GROVES: SACRIFICE AND ORDER IN THE LANDSCAPES OF ANCIENT GREECE Landscape Journal, 26:2. pp. 252-269.

Law-Viljoen, Bronwyn, ed. 2006. Art and Justice: The Art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing.

Sheridan,Michael J. 2009. The Environmental and Social History of African Sacred Groves: A Tanzanian Case Study. African Studies Review. Vol. 52, No. 1 (Apr., 2009), pp. 73-98

Smuts, Helene, email correspondence with Pamela Allara, April 8 and 9, 2020

Vladislavić, Ivan 2004. Willem Boshoff. David Krut Publishing.