Peripheral Thinking

A Lecture by William Kentridge

Peripheral Thinking PE R I PH E R A L T H I N K I NG

BE S T F RU I T WOR S T F RU I T

What happens at the edges? Today I am meant to be talking about the importance of the margins - but I can’t stop thinking about mangoes. (Let it be said that it is their season as I write this. The kitchen in filled with the overripe sweet smell.)

The correct way to eat a mango, I was told in my childhood, was in the bath. A facecloth to wipe your face, and fingernails cut not too short, to ease the fibres from between your teeth.

In our family we make lists. Best film, worst film, best author worst author, best fruit worst fruit. Mango my daughter’s best fruit, mango my father’s worst. (I am aware this is of no interest at all, but I am trying to follow the thoughts wherever they go.

Clearly here resisting the attempt to construct an argument.)

To offer an explanation of the themes of the lecture. These notes were written in my studio in Johannesburg, in anticipation of this lecture and of the exhibition in which this project will be shown.

I was trying to keep track of life in the studio. There are other ideas hovering in the wings, apart from the mango.

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M A N E T AT T H E BA R R ICA DE S E U R ASI A N T R E E SPA R ROW

A bowl of peonies; an image of an ink drawing of a small bird, a sparrow. The drawing of the peonies is on the wall of the studio, the birds still hover as an idea. A sense of a vague image, an image that feels specific but isn’t yet fixed – an image, a smudge of ink on paper becoming a bird.

Let it be said I am bad at focusing on a single thought. But somehow have to rescue this failure. I will latch onto any stray image and thought that lets me off the hook, or prolongs the moment when I have to start pushing a thought.

T H E USE S OF A T R E E A P OROUS F O CUS

And parallel to this peripheral vision there is a peripheral thinking. Ideas pushed aside by thoughts, connected to, but not central to them. The visual intrusions (vital in every studio) are both a prompt to, and a way of describing, the thinking they provoke.

I try to fix on one thought, one argument, and am filled with other images.

The tree in the garden A white stinkwood, not indigenous The roughness of the bark, a memory of the rough bark of a mulberry tree In the corner of the garden of my first childhood home A memory of hanging by my legs from the smooth bark of the branch of a walnut tree

Mangoes, swallows, sparrows, the peonies; an enamel jug

The branches of the tree like the brachi of a lung.

the expulsion of Pope Clementine in 1440; a drawing of the movement of a horse

The sunlight on a leaf.

The suicide of Virginia Woolf.

(Virginia Woolf wrote that the brightest thing in nature was sunlight on a leaf)

portraits of the composer Alban Berg, his wife, his mistress; three Highveld landscapes

The tree as gibbet. The uses of a tree: pencil, table, plain planks of a coffin.

pages of a Chinese dictionary; photos of a political rally in Dar es Salaam

West Park Cemetery (The Johannesburg cemetery)

pages from a newspaper from the Paris Commune of 1871.

These are all images up on the walls of the studio.

One extract from the newspaper reads:

4 Private Thoughts (Private)

obituary We announce the death in Paris, of Monsieur Baroilhet, a baritone in the National Opera. Monsieur Baroilhet possessed a very curious collection of paintings, ancient and modern, well-appreciated by connoisseurs. Monsieur Baroilhet died playing dominoes.

The Trees in the Treason Trial Shrapnel in the wood A Swedish carpenter and ship-builder complained of using German timber, as it was so full of fragments from WWII ordinance. Seventy years on, a natural history.

The beech forest in Buchenwald.

The same newspaper reports, from the Grahamstown Journal in 1871, that a diamond of 119 carats of the clearest colour has been found in South Africa. We could easily spend the next while just with these entries in the newspaper.

Circling the studio there is a persistent peripheral vision of the images on the walls of the studio. You can stop walking and study them, but they can also float at the edges of vision as you pass.

Reminders of that which you are not focused on.

The polladed trees of WWI Botanic xenophobia The tree just stands, a prisoner in the garden. 53 years.

The tree, the white stinkwood planted when my parents moved into this house in 1964.

The tree just stands but the future is decided for it.

The list could go on. We would each have different sets of association. Every encounter with the world is a mixture of that which the world brings to us and what we project on to it. The tree is never just itself. Our biography is part of the understanding.

190 Notes Towards a Model Opera

A tree. I fix on it for five minutes to try to record the thoughts that arise. I am interested in the porousness of the focus.

Ethnic botanical cleansing A barrel bomb in Aleppo An internal tree, growing one’s own death.

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G OOD BRUSH BA D BRUSH

To be schematic, we could say that the tree is the centre, and all these other associations circle it, land on it, bend or break the branches. That which seems extraneous cannot be kept out of the centre. In the studio this is even more obvious. Not just the ideas released by the tree, but how it is seen, how it is represented, how it is made. The paper, the ink, the good and bad brush meet the tree in the act of making it in the studio. A good brush gives a controlled line and the uncontrolled bristle of the bad brush that has lost its point, demands the randomness of foliage. From the bad brush and its possibilities, a forest of trees can grow.

There is a Zen mindfulness that will try to exclude extraneous thoughts but I would suggest that to do that is to remove the tree itself.

T H E PE R I PH E RY DE SCR I BI NG A CI RCL E

Put a pin in a sheet of paper, pull on a string against the pin. The line that defines the outside edge of the blank circle is the periphery. Made as a pressure, a force against the centre. In Paris the Périphérique, the motorway that circles the 20 arrondissements of the historic centre inside, also delineates the banlieue outside.

Here in South Africa the periphery is even more obvious. The city centre surrounded by townships, informal settlements. The truth of the centre is only comprehensible in relation to that outside of it. More than that, the meaning of the centre is made by the periphery, however much financiers may wish to believe they are the makers of wealth and those beyond the glass towers are extraneous.

Any reflection will show the dependence of a centre on its periphery. Our gold mining history has always been subsidised by the rural areas. The formal economy always depends on the informal economy. In the studio it is not only elements at the edge of images that structure it, but what is outside the frame: there is often a migration of images and ideas from one project to another.

The art is to not defend the centre, to be open to that which is apparently extraneous. The tree is never its own tree. The painting of peonies leads to ideas beyond that of flowers. We have to acknowledge that the act of seeing (and thinking) is always a negotiation between what comes towards us and what we project onto it. Our understanding of history – imperfect, idiosyncratic, is always shaped by our biography. Not even our whole biography, sometimes incidents or memories from it. Knowing how unstable it really is, we all try to prop up the common ground we have, and wish for it to be reliable and stable.

The periphery and its migration into the centre is what I am interested in, in this investigation.

T H E GR E AT PROL E TA R I A N CU LT U R A L R E VOLU T ION

I want to look at these questions in relation a project I am currently working on in the studio, a series of projections and drawings being made for an exhibition in Beijing.

China certainly hovers over us like a huge zeppelin. The scale of it, the scale of its hunger for resources, the scale of everything.

China in Africa today, a sense of a series of questions rather than any answers. Are we here the tethered goat waiting for the tiger?

Easy pickings?

The project began with an invitation to show a selection of my work in a museum in Beijing. Curiosity, flattery are part of the equation. What is it in my work that would interest people there?

I wanted both to find a link to it and to make a work that would refer to this question. Drawing, film, performance, posters, sculptures - all was possible, everything was open. The project began as many do with a distracted reading and looking. I read the books of Lu Xun, a modernist whose sensibility placed him with Japanese writer Aktagawa and European writers in the tradition of the absurd modern like Gogol and Kafka. Books of revolutionary posters. Here the language pulled me in, the exhortations, the instructions, the clamour of incredible and unstoppable enthusiasm.

Here is one starting point.

PE R F OR M A NCE OF SL O G A NS

proletarians of the world unite work hard for the electrification of agriculture

crush the 4 olds never stop fighting

cast out fear guard the mother(land)

build a great wall of steel struggle for a good heart

burn the enslaving contract sharpen your philosophy

contribute more typewriters struggle against the crooked valleys and rivers

eat bitterness study hard by coal oil lamp

study carefully radiate vigour

smash all ox devils glow with health

less brocade on the jacket make the great mother(land) proud

more fuel in winter warmly support the mother’s arm

the greater the hardship work hard for the open heart

the greater the hardship expedite the budding of the rose

don’t depend on the heavens privatise the hereafter

resist the attempt to construct an argument resist the attempt to construct an argument

And then some videos of the model operas performed during the period of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 (from when I was eleven to when I was twenty-one).

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I T IS R IGH T T O R E BE L

The model operas were theatre pieces exemplary in revolutionary content, the form of the Peking operas re-worked with revolutionary stories: through passionate song, speech or dance, a peasant, a young soldier, a young communist, roused their fellows to fight the Kuomintang or the Japanese. There is singing, ballet or martial arts with its precise percussion. Many red flags are waved, the enemy is defeated, and then there is a singing of the Internationale. Seeing these films of the opera started the project.

To remind ourselves of the Cultural Revolution itself. We remember it was huge upheaval in China from 1966 to 1976 in which the youth of China, following the slogan it is right to rebel, turned against authority figures who were seen to have abandoned the revolutionary path and become enmeshed in the world of bourgeois aspiration and comfort. The students were encouraged in their rebellion by Mao himself A F IGH T I N T H E K I T CH E N

But the project can also be described as an upheaval in China, provoked by a power struggle in the top ranks of the party, in which first students and scholars and then workers in the army were used both to bolster political careers and to contest opposing viewpoints as to the direction that the socialist revolution should take.

Already there is a gap in the centre. Which is the correct description of the Cultural Revolution? This is not only a question of interpretation by commentators and historians. At its centre, it is constructed through interpretation by its actors. It is not as if outside there is interpretation, and inside raw truth. Events are always constructed by the meeting of the interpretation or understanding of the protagonists, and the world around them: a provisional truth.

These political battles are the centre of the upheaval, but it was movements at the edges, images caught in the peripheral vision of the turmoil that held me.

There was the paraphernalia, the ephemera of the action. The huge hand-drawn, large character broadsheets pasted onto walls at night, in which members of the party or other authority figures were accused of corruption But it was the model operas that held me. A notebook was begun with the inscription NOTES TOWARDS A MODEL OPERA. The work on the project itself began with a morning’s improvisation with Dada Masilo, a South African dancer with whom I had worked before.

We watched some of the films of the model operas. In the first hour on the dance floor, there were strangenesses, unexpected connections and collisions in the dance, and the dance in relation to the music from the model operas, of music from the 1950’s, African colonial dance bands.

It was already clear the project could not be abandoned - even though it was unclear (as it is still unclear now) what the final piece would be.

To walk around the edges of the project: a few of the peripheral thoughts.

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PE R I PH E R A L T HOUGH T 1 E N P OI N T E / ON P OI N T

Here is a photograph taken by David Goldblatt in 1978 in Boksburg, a small town to the east of Johannesburg. A young ballet dancer on the veranda of her house under a pergola. What is it that holds us, that held me, when I first saw it in 1981? Of course the tutu and the point shoes, but also the beatific expression of the girl, an ecstatic dream – ‘even as I dance I dream of dancing’ - the dream of being a prima ballerina assoluta, of Rudolph Nureyev on the other side of the stage, of Swan Lake and Giselle.

How the dreams crash. It is not so much the pergola that crashes down on the dancer; it’s the harsh sunlight of the Highveld winter. I would describe this photograph as merciless; there is no place to protect this dream of Europe. We are at the end of an enormously long string stretching from the ballet centres of Paris and Moscow, swung in an arc that reaches Johannesburg, Adelaide, Shanghai: a longing for this other world.

While this does not go back to the bathtub and mango, it does go back to our house, to my sister’s ballet lessons, to her hopes, the practice barre in the playroom. So when I see the Chinese dance en pointe, all this is there: the fighting of the Japanese en pointe, learning to throw a hand grenade en pointe, charging through the enemy machine guns, waving the red banners en pointe. It is absurd, but there is also a strange beauty in the dancing: the perfect unity of the ensemble work; and a sadness of impossible hopes in Boksburg, in our house, and a sense of gap.

There is surprise at the connections, a French art form perfected in Russia, winning out in the cultural battles of the Soviet Union, the Bolshoi Ballet rather than the modernism of Akarova or even Diaghalev. A conservative victory, and here in the Chinese Model Operas, used to proclaim the revolutionary new. An unbridgeable gap between what was being made on stage and what was happening outside the theatres and cinemas. The specifics of dancing en pointe can’t be avoided: the violence done to the feet, their binding into these point shoes. Here I remember the tears, blood, cotton wool and methylated spirits of my sister’s attempt to wear the Cinderella ballet shoes.

I think it goes one step further. The great model revolutionary ballet is called The Red Detachment of Women, with a cast almost entirely of women, and a pleasure reported by many from China at the time at the rare opportunity of looking at all those naked thighs with a clear revolutionary conscience. The libido is seldom referred to in revolutionary or other political theory, but the edges show it is there. Desire is never far from the studio, the theatre, the politburo. Mao’s priapism, his lovers, are not part of the official discourse, but it is there. The connection between the biographical and the grand statement.

(Further peripheral thoughts: political leaders and their entitled libidos, not just Mao of course, but Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro. I am sure I have left one president out – of course – Kennedy.)

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All of these float at the edge of the big question: the great proletarian Cultural Revolution; the biographical - Mao’s, mine; the periphery longing for the center; the line of connection, Johannesburg to Shanghai; and the balance between the edges, ironic or not, and the great swell of pride that also came over audiences watching the defeat of the Japanese or the Kuomintang by the communist cadres and their red flags. To hold the hope and disillusion together.

hope and the teargas and bullets of the authorities.

(NOTE TO SELF: copper, cast iron, aluminum, wooden spoon, rubber spatula, soup ladle. Side-to-side with the image of my eighteen month-old grandson sitting on the floor beating an upturned saucepan with a wooden spoon.))

We are off the wall and into the centre of the studio: an insistence in the face of the big idea: We are here, and will be heard.

PE R I PH E R A L T HOUGH T NO. 7 A DE AT H OF SPA R ROWS

PE R I PH E R A L T HOUGH T NO. 8 T H E G OL DE N M A NG OE S

This is peripheral thought number 7. Peripheral thoughts no.

5 and 6 are absent. This peripheral thought precedes the main event.

In 1952, as part of The Great Leap Forward, China’s project of modernisation, Mao declared war on The Four Bads: flies, mosquitos, rats and sparrows - specifically the Eurasian Tree Sparrow, that ate seeds planted for the harvest. Killing the sparrows would boost food production. Tens of millions of sparrows were killed.

But the sparrows had fed not only on seeds, but also on immature locusts, and there was a plague of locusts. Crops were devastated.

Through this and other equally ill-advised decisions, between twenty and thirty million Chinese died of starvation.

The technique that Mao chose for the extermination of the sparrows was mass mobilisation of the peasants. They were instructed to rise before dawn and bang on their pots and pans to frighten the birds out of the trees, and then keep beating their pots and pans whenever the birds tried to land - so that in the end the birds would fall out of the sky with exhaustion. The efficacy of this method of species extermination is disputed, but the death of the sparrows, the flourishing of the locusts, and the famine, is not. The disasters of The Great Leap Forward lowered Mao’s standing and power in China, and the great proletarian Cultural Revolution can be described as Mao’s attempt – successful - to regain supreme position in the country.

But what holds me here in this story of the Eurasian Tree Sparrow are the pots and pans, a line that jumps forward to the Arab Spring of recent years and back to China. Particularly to the protests of Ghezi Park and Taksim Square in Istanbul where beating of pots and pans became a symbol of ungovernability and revolt, a bringing of the domestic to the larger political (To return into the studio, everything has to happen twice, to have two resonances: a provocation in the studio and an echo in the world outside. Here an invitation to work with pots and pans, percussion, rhythms of protest, a raw material waiting to be used; and an outside sense in the link of the domestic to the political, of private biography meeting large histories. The copper or aluminum base of the pots becomes the membrane between the hopes, desires, fears, of those whose pots they are, and the world beyond them. A membrane between the personal and political, between

In August of 1968 Mao was given a gift of six mangoes from the president of Pakistan (this event is so peripheral that many histories of the Cultural Revolution ignore it altogether). Mao did not eat the mangoes; he gave them to the ‘Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams’ who were deployed to bring the students under control. This was a small gesture with huge implications.

This was at the height of the student uprisings in Chinese schools and universities. The Red Guards, the students, were Mao’s storm troopers, embodiments of the dictum that it is right to rebel. But Mao gave the mangoes not to the students, but to the workers. It marked the end of student power and the handing over of control of the Cultural Revolution to the workers, which meant in effect to the army.

This political shift was celebrated as an act of altruistic generosity. The mangoes were preserved in formaldehyde; copies were made out of wax and kept in glass domes, like the relic of a saint. They were distributed around the country. They appeared on posters, tray cloths, and enamel mugs. They were represented on huge floats in processions. The wax copies were kept in shrines in factories or schools. A feature film was made, The Song of the Mango. We have the absurd, the apotheosis of a common fruit, the transformation of an immaterial quality - the generosity of the great helmsman and his wisdom - into a material object.

A political shift with huge consequences. Tens of thousands of students’ studies and lives were disrupted, often irrevocably, as they were sent for years to a form of penal servitude in distant corners of the country. The students had served their purpose, resurrecting the unquestioned political supremacy of Mao. Now not only could they be dispensed with, but they could be crushed.

Mao could be both the force behind the students and the force stopping them, agitator and policeman together. We spin out in two directions: sideways to the politics of fruit and vegetables; and staying around the edges of the periphery to the year 1968, to echoes of students in revolt elsewhere in the world.

We should entertain both trajectories at the same time.

196 Notes Towards a Model Opera

1968

BL ACK PA I N T I NG

1968. The student revolts in Paris of May ’68. The student revolts in Paris and elsewhere were not the same as the student-led Cultural Revolutionary actions, but there were points of connection. Both tried to harness the energy of revolt among students and scholars, rather than relying on the organisation of the party. How could one find a revolutionary activity in Europe that escaped the moribund straightjacket of the old Stalinist communist parties? In China, how could Mao use this energy to re-assert a continuing revolutionary role for the party (and let us not forget this - for himself).

The opposition to the Vietnam War, which reached us even in South Africa. Why do I remember this? Not just from an abstract or inherent interest in history. In 1968 I was thirteen years old. I was in Johannesburg. I had such a strong feeling of being born five years too late, and in the wrong country. If only I had been eighteen and in Paris or Berlin, I could have been part of these student protests. Students at the local university then and later did hold protests on the road at the edge of the university grounds. But it felt like the ballet dancer in Boksburg, a statement of longing to be in a different centre. I thought at the time, in five years time when I am eighteen, the Vietnam War will be over; students will be back at their studies; I will have missed it all. I was right. But then of course in the mid-nineteen seventies things in South Africa did change dramatically.

I know I should be talking about the politics of the mango at the same time. We will get to it and then you have retrospectively to place them one on top of the other.

Further edges here. From mangoes to 1968 to Paris to Johannesburg, and the thirteen year-old looking at newspaper photographs. The image of Jan Palach burning himself in Prague after the Russian invasion, in the Prague Spring. Another image of a Buddhist monk burning himself in protest in Saigon. I had remembered this also as 1968 or 1969. Looking it up, I see it was 1963 - but I wouldn’t have seen the photograph until 1968 or 1969.

This is Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk protesting over the policies of the South Vietnamese government. He sat in the road, four other monks doused him with petrol, and he set himself alight. I put the images together. A shocking statement of belief and commitment: how could you believe in something so much as to do that to yourself?

What pulled me so much closer into the photo was a detail, the motorcar behind the monk. It was our motorcar, an Austin Westminster A95 which we used to drive through the night to Plettenberg Bay on holidays. I was taken to school in it. This most respectable British car, an Austin Westminster, driven all the way to Johannesburg and all the way to Saigon.

To return from the sideways look at 1968 to the Chinese politics of vegetables and their representation.

In China, there is a long history of politics in vegetables and flowers and their representation. As early as the 13th century, a painting of a stem lettuce (upright and tall) stood for an educated man. Bitter bamboo shoots represented good government (a good government will accept difficult and bitter advice).

Chinese court painters who had displeased the emperor and been sent into exile expressed their protest in their painting. That which was white was painted black - black blossoms on a branch.

They were known as the Black Painters. Other paintings of fruit and vegetables made subtle political commentaries. If the weeds in the painting were too close to the bok choi, the emperor was paying insufficient attention to his territories and subjects.

At the time of the Cultural Revolution, painters whose work was described as being too formal or not revolutionary in subject matter were castigated as ‘Black Painters’. Their careers and those of their supporters amongst the nomenclatura were ended. Of course in many cases the clashes were between people in power, and the artists were merely acceptable casualties in their battles.

But there were real arguments. It comes back to the studio.

What should an artist paint? Revolutionary narrative in a familiar form? The Peking Opera? The ballet en pointe? Or a new way of making art in which the ostensible subject matter was never the real subject of the art?

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A PASQU I NA DE AG A I NS T M YSE L F

For some years now I have been drawing flowers, partly for the pleasure of the activity, transforming the petal into ink and paper; and partly as a resistance to the pressure to work on big themes, and often in reference to the great French painter Edouard Manet, most sublime painter of peonies and lilacs; but also painter of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, a painting that places him in the company of Goya and his 3rd of May, and later of course of Picasso and his Guernica. This is a link from the studio, a private link, as it were. How Manet painted the bunch of asparagus, how he showed the sheen on the foil of a bottle of champagne, are the concern and envy of someone in a studio. But the echoes are wider.

Further peripheral thought. Manet painted The Execution of Emperor Maximilian in 1868 or ‘69. The emperor, abandoned by his Austrian family, was captured by Mexican revolutionaries and shot in 1867. His last act before his overthrow was to order from Trieste, his previous home, one thousand nightingales to fill the gardens of the palace with song by night.

The central tenet of the great proletarian Cultural Revolution was the transformation of the consciousness of the people. Partly this was to be achieved by exemplary model: the perfect model peasant, the model worker, the model soldier - these as shown in the Model Operas.

But part was done through criticism and destruction of the old. The world was divided into the good, the comparatively good, and the bad. The bad to be rooted out. Self-criticism struggle sessions. There are grotesque images of people who are accused of either rightist views, or of having the wrong class position. An image of them wearing long, pointed dunce caps and sandwich boards proclaiming their faults. These echo several of Goya’s etchings from the early nineteenth century. The image of victims of the Inquisition, chained in dunce’s caps, wearing sandwich-boards on which their crimes are written: an orthodoxy and authority with no place for uncertainty or criticism.

This dance of the dunces is the backstage dance of the Model Operas. We bring it into the studio. The fool’s cap and the sandwich board become some of the props for the project. A megaphone inverted to become a dunce cap becomes its own mute.

The Paris Commune was crushed. After weeks of the barricade, there followed the semaine sanglante, the week of blood: the repression and execution of the communards. Maximilian could have been replaced by hundreds of others in Manet’s paintings.

Karl Marx, whose writings had been the inspiration for many in the Commune, wrote at the time of the ‘necessary failure of their revolution’ (the proletariat was insufficiently aware of itself and its class position to make a revolution).

We are gathering around us pots and pans, Manet’s flowers, the bok choy of Chinese vegetables, childhood memories, ballet shoes and the sparrows.

In China, even during the Cultural Revolution, some of its leaders wrote of the ‘probable defeat’ of it, and of ‘the probable imminent failure’. So the idea of failure, probable, impending or necessary - take one’s choice - sits on the walls of the studio, an element in the mix; but also inevitably the question of hope behind the failure.

Where does that leave us? China, Paris, old French colonialism, new colonialism. We set all in motion. An incoherent hullabaloo. What are the operas that could be made? Do we call up Patrice Lumumba? Nyerere’s ujamaa theory of African Socialism?

The hullabaloo is in the centre. Cohesion temporary. Defeat certain, but temporary. Success certain, but temporary.

Hope and failure: two sparrows flying through the din of the pots and pans of the edicts and the theories and private histories. �

PA R IS 1871

So there is a double link to the painter, to fruit and flowers and vegetables in China and in Paris, but of course the great link is to the Paris Commune of 1871. This was a spontaneous peoples’ uprising, and was an inspiration during the Cultural Revolution and particularly during the student protests. On the same streets in 1968, the students pried some of the cobbles from the streets used in the 1871 Paris Commune. The red flag of the Model Opera makes a semaphore to the red flags of the Place de la Republique a hundred years before.

Now citizens, we remind you that more than ever we must rally around our red flag to preserve the Republic. Long Live the Commune. Long Live the Republic. statement in the newspaper of The Paris Commune, the 16th of May, 1871.

This flag is shattered into fragments. Four hundred thousand students in Tiananmen Square, each waving their own red book on the thoughts of Chairman Mao. Their own red flag.

And the Internationale of course, the anthem of the socialist movement around the world, all spreading out from Paris. There are echoes of clear differences. Paris in 1871 is not totalizing. There is space in the official Commune newspaper for other events: news of the death of the baritone while playing dominoes, the diamond found in the Cape. Even under the siege, artists are invited to apply for the Rome Prize. Three days later they are invited to appear at the Theatre Châtelet for military training to defend the city. The Louvre museum sends out a communiqué vehemently denying that it is planning to sell its collection of antiquities in London.

We are spinning in time: 1871, 1968, 1963, 2015; and in space: Shanghai, Paris, Czechoslovakia, Johannesburg. Nightingales and sparrows buffeted across the world.

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Lecture endnote? / credits?

Paragraph about where the lecture was hold?

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