William Kentridge: That Which we do not Remember

William Kentridge: THat which we do not remember

Prepared on the occasion of the exhibition William Kentridge: That Which We Do Not Remember at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, September 2018 – February 2019 and at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, March 2019 – June 2019. The book and exhibition are supported by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: THAT WHICH WE DO NOT REMEMBER

with Jane Taylor

contents

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Aide-MÉmoire A Conversation between Jane Taylor and William Kentridge

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Guide Brief notes on the exhibits by William Kentridge and Jane Taylor

141 143 147

About the Naomi Milgrom Foundation A Note from the Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales List of works

AIDE-MÉMOIRE A Conversation between Jane Taylor and William Kentridge

Preamble

It is an overcast day in the studio in Houghton. The conversation begins as if there are some proprieties, and there are semblances of the familiar calm of conversation, but within a sentence or two there is the thinking aloud of a mind racing against itself, as Kentridge wrestles with those things yet to be drawn, whether because neglected, or repressed, or overlooked. Many of the exchanges that follow concern the undrawn as abiding preoccupation for the artist.

This exhibition (of That Which We Do Not Remember) seems to bear, for Kentridge, a mirroring relation to ‘that which is not drawn’.

Much of what has engaged Kentridge aesthetically over the past several decades might be characterised as ‘the fugitive’. The title of this exhibition, That Which We Do Not Remember, bears an enigmatic relation to several bodies of Kentridge’s work that seek to probe the fleeting trace, or the illusory glimpse in the mind’s eye, or the evasions of the self.

To the Conversation, then.

WK:

JT: WK:

Let’s begin with a list of possible phrases, subtitles for sections of the conversation. We can put this as a putative table of contents that never gets . . . . . . activated.

These are promises of things that are never fulfilled.

Self-portrait of abSence the project of objectS a table-top Self-portrait tell them about tell them about a pneumatic Sigh Wild inexplicable avarice took hold of everything, of everyone. Wild inexplicable avarice took hold of everyone

JT: WK:

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So let’s stop again there and start with a couple of these.

The list is nearly done. (He urges.)

JT: WK:

*

Okay.

So then we’ve done it, we’ve finished these pages, and we either come back to these or not.* Kentridge is keenly aware that he is to leave the next day for a workshop on The Head & the Load, and he feels the obligation inside himself that he must at least gesture toward those things which he knows he has not yet drawn, things he has not remembered.

God: his trees and flowers turned out much better than his people Freedom – we missed the boat again The paper’s desire to be the tree Forgetting to ignore her thighs A saving sorrow (and the Latin for that is tristitia salutifera) Forgetting to detest the old Seven corpses in three minutes A hero with no place to show his prowess The sofa understands the situation Recreational danger Defensive sleeping Both . . . and . . . (that’s a double figure filmed twice)¹

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William adds: These phrases come from a notebook I had simply labelled ‘WORDS’ on the cover, a commonplace of phrases from different projects, some from The Head & the Load (a work currently underway which finds various languages to explore the role of Africans during the First World War), some from Notes Towards a Model Opera (a project about the Chinese Cultural Revolution) and many which I forget both where they came from and even what they refer to.

There could be a paragraph for each one, but then we go down a rabbit hole and the guidebook disappears.

WK:

JT:

(Continues) That ‘both . . . and . . . ’ has the dramatic structure of farce, it seems to me. We witness the consequence of the two narrative choices simultaneously launched into the world.

It makes me think of both terror and the absurd.

Farce enters in, but so does menace. This is something of a familiar strategy for you. You free yourself from the anxiety of trying to represent contradictions, through celebrating ambiguity. Somehow you know inside your practice to give yourself the licence to

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take a break from the burden of representation, through deploying laughter.

Rather distinctively, you link the words ‘both . . . and . . .’ with multiple doors, because of your reference to farce. This is also a kind of Beckettian very short play. Maybe you should make a series of short plays with only two words.

Thinking of farce, I remember that marvellous Dada dance piece [with Dada Masilo] which combines drawn and actual spaces. It recreates the scenes of French farce, with the lover coming in through a virtual door that is drawn on the wall.

Can you meditate on that at all productively?

WK:

About all these doors that go nowhere?

JT:

And there you’re thinking about theatre as both two-dimensional and three-dimensional drawing. This conjunction of two and three dimensions is part of your evolving enquiry. Yes, great, off you go! I can see your pleasure. This is one of your impossible drawings.

WK:

On the stage, there is the ‘fake reality’ of the set. In a theatre production, one explores the artifice of that stage door, a real door in a fake wall, tests its limits. That is the illusionism of a painted theatre flat with a working door inserted into it.

Because our experiment balanced between theatre and film, our door is even more fake than a stage door. It is a drawn version of a stage door ( just a sheet of cardboard against a solid wall). That kind of entrance is just fine for filming, and is part of the joke. If the door was actually for use on stage, rather than for film, you’d have to have a hole in the wall, and then it would be easy to make a real door. But here, where there is no hole in the wall and we are working on film, you can just stand your character concealed behind the sheet of board with a door drawn on it, switch the camera on and then swivel the piece of board and have the character appear to come in through the door.

JT:

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A small piece of oneself, as viewer, registers that one is being duped – that one is in a ‘Looney Tunes moment’.

WK:

In this world of illusions, there needs to be a material that one can think in quickly. This is something that I have learned through working across media, and it has informed my sculptural work. Even if a sculpture will end up in bronze, it needs to start in a material that allows for flexible, fast work. In some cases the material would be cardboard, paper, wax and then it goes through a very careful process of further transformation into a mould and a cast and a wax cast and burning out the wax and pouring in the bronze and correcting the piece.

JT:

To go back to the fake wall briefly, in order to consider what you learn by working across different materials: here we have film-making and theatre-work disrupting each other, changing the limits of the possible. I like your formulation, “fine for filming”. You understand the kind of burden inside of the threedimensional obligations, on one hand, and the two-dimensional obligations, as well as the difference between theatre and film – that the illusionism of film allows you to create fluidity, and a rapidity of engagement that standard theatre practice resists in a way. So it’s interesting that you actually are trying to bring both of those media together, because you’re trying to delimit yourself at the same time as you’re trying to give yourself maximal licence. And I suspect in some ways that is the Méliès endeavour.²

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There have been two postulated distinct lineages of film’s complex and multiple origins. One, leading to the realist tradition, originated in the work of the Lumière brothers, a kind of film en plein air tradition that becomes associated with documentary and with the naturalist traditions that lead to the faux reality of Hollywood drama. The other leads to the so-called ‘studio’ tradition which evolved out of the artistry and illusionism of Georges Méliès. His idea arising from ‘that which is not drawn’ is a testing of the threshold of the actual in relation to the liberties of the possible.

WK:

Yes, and with regard to the question, ‘What is a performance in the studio?’, there are some performances which exist as live performances, like my performance of Schwitters’s Ursonate.

For me the Ursonate was an interesting project. Kurt Schwitters and the Dada poetry inaugurated a resistance to an understanding that language makes sense of the world. Dada deliberately

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explores elements that could not be forced into an interpretation or a reasonable meaning. And I’m interested in – as it were – putting the Ursonate back into the world, not as incoherent, but rather performing it as if it were a lecture, as if it made sense, as if every line had a sense.

JT:

WK: JT: WK:

JT: WK:

*

So here’s a sort of jocular comment. You’ve always made the assertion that you didn’t end up as a lecturer precisely because you couldn’t hold detailed information in your mind accurately and what becomes more and more inaccurate . . .

(Interrupts) No, more than . . . Much worse than that.

Why? Not just that I couldn’t hold detailed information in my head, but that I felt that if I couldn’t find the right argument in an authoritative book . . . . . . you’d make it up.

I’d make it up, as one does in debating. And there are certain fields, in ethical activities like the law or in academe, where you would correctly be rusticated or struck off the roll if you invented evidence, if you invented authorities, invented cases, invented an academic genealogy of information that didn’t exist.* Kentridge has sought to reconcile the demands of a representational burden located in historical time on the Highveld landscape (the obligations of Soviet Realism) with the exuberant experimentalism of theatre. Because he so often works with antirealist languages, such as drawing, puppetry and manipulated objects, his films resist collapsing into ‘the real’. In an early shot from What Will Come (has already come) we can just detect Kentridge’s hand as the artefacturer; he stirs the cosmos, precipitating creative time, as if he is some kind of potentate. The same jest about the artist’s self as a god is evident in his drawings and animations for The Magic Flute, though there he is, also, the buffo-ish figure of Papageno, the birdcatcher. The work does manifest what seems both empathy and irony between Kentridge and Mozart as the former tests the limits of his creative vainglory against the composer.

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JT:

This is an important qualifier. You use the phrasing, “You would correctly be rusticated.” We will come back later to think about the place of the law in your art.

WK:

As a creator, you need to be in a safe space. So the space within the artistic sphere is where it is understood that everything is a possible construction, and construction of the world rather than a revelation of the world.

JT:

WK:

Yes, the term that you used was ‘invented’. That was the lawless act – an act of invention.

What we are saying is that this can be a conversation and the notes about a conversation.

Lists, too, could be there. At one stage we talked about a list of things which have been drawn and, by contrast, a list of things I’ve never drawn, and you were going to throw me challenges: “Have you . . . or haven’t you?”

JT:

Okay, so then the question is, going back to your comment, how many of these have you actually executed, even though asserting that these are impossible projects?

WK:

Well, a lot of them did come out of projects, or the phrases associated with projects. The paper’s desire to be the tree is from thinking about the nature of books, of a tree being turned into paper pulp, the paper pulp being turned into a book, and the book holding the writing about the tree in it (and that’s sort of linked back, and it is transformed back into the tree). I am also very much aware of the tree as that moment of transition between acorn, table, book, fire and ash.

JT:

*

And here you are invoking your much-loved phrase, from the Latin? Smoke, ash . . . * That phrase is one Kentridge uses in the opera we worked on together, Confessions of Zeno. The Zeno character is tormented because he cannot give up smoking, a symptom of his failed relationships, familial and erotic. In the production Kentridge used smoke as a strong visual trace, and at one point,

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as Zeno’s known world is consumed by smoke from the explosions of WWI, the phrase ‘Smoke, Ashes, Fable’ is a wraith on the projection screen behind the action. The actor Dawid Minnaar had just given up smoking and so was using herbal cigarettes on stage.

WK:

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Yes, that’s ‘smoke, ashes, fable’.³ This is specifically about a transformation of material. The alchemy of the tree into a book, a tree into thinking.

In 2017 Kentridge opened an exhibition in Bruges, Smoke, Ashes, Fable, curated

by Margaret Koerner. The phrase ‘smoke, ashes, fable’ is from the historian Herodotus, and is reprised by Marcus Aurelius in the late second-century CE: “Where is it all now? Smoke, ashes, fable. Or perhaps it is no longer even fable.”

JT:

WK:

I think also of Teitelbaum, Felix Teitelbaum, your sentimental traveller in the early Soho films, who wanders naked around the city of Johannesburg. He is a ‘title tree’, like this drawing.

I hadn’t thought of the title tree. I know that ‘title tree’ is a kind of literal translation, but if I think of him as anything it is as an entitled tree. The Teitelbaum is the tree, Soho Eckstein is the stone.

‘The tree and the stone’ is another phrase we could have had.

‘The comfort of a stone’. Several drawings were made of Soho with his head on a stone.

(I think the phrases work both as a marker of an idea and also as a protective barrier. If the phrase is there, I don’t have to go behind and interrogate too closely the thoughts behind the idea.)

My trees are important. If one wants to talk about trees, one goes off in four different directions. What is it, for a person to be a tree?

JT: WK: JT: WK:

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And what is that?

No, we just put that as a question. “What is it . . .?”

I know, but I am intrigued. What is that for you?

We’ve got history on trees. And trees have history on us.

In Germany trees are difficult and dangerous to fell, because they

are full of shrapnel. Just this week in Norway they found trees which you can date through the presence of chemicals that were used by the Germans to make the artificial fog that was pumped into the air around their battleships to hide them in the fjords from the British navy. The chemicals of the artificial fog are recorded in the trees for the year 1941. And the trees carry the history because their existence is so much longer than a human being’s.

JT:

WK:

You have not done with trees, and certainly you have not done with war.

The two are, in time, bound up in one another because both a book and a tree become a clock. Rather as the tree becomes a book, so the chemical fog is caught inside the rings of the tree (persisting through a changing form) and the shrapnel is caught in the trunk.

The turning of the pages of the book marks the passage of time.

One can think of making a book without end, a circular book which has a spine that is a cylinder. And a thousand pages radiate from a central core, as if there is no back cover and no front, no necessary beginning or end.

JT:

WK:

It is an endless Scheherazade. So that too is a project not yet made?

The thought arises as a note both for What Will Come (has already come) and for Second-hand Reading, although they are separate works, made at distinct times.

These works both respond in part to the perception that the artwork is a window on the world. Any window has a frame.

When you are working with anamorphic projection, you don’t have an edge, no frame.⠴ What I like about the anamorphic portraits is the fact that there are two figures conjoined at the back, if you look at them from a particular perspective. Seen from one particular angle, they seem to be staring away from one another, into the remote distance; while from the other side (the front?) the two are

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staring directly at one another. It’s marvellous, because it shows that the Janus-faced figures are, from one perspective, locked together in a mutual gaze.

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Anamorphic arts became very popular during the Renaissance in Europe, as artists were exploring new techniques for figuring perspectival drawing.

The anamorphic image is distorted in such a way as to be legible only when viewed via some kind of warped mirror. The curved image is elongated, or foreshortened in curious measure, casting before the eye an enigmatic scene.

In such terms it does not have a stable frame, because the image almost ‘leers’ from out of its fixed place.

JT:

These then are images as seen, alternately, from a closed and an open universe. From the perspective of history, and the perspective of myth?

WK:

The anamorph is a technical viewing device for distorting the image.

JT:

It destabilises our sense of what it is we see, and how we see it.

WK:

A cylindrical mirror stands end-on upon a drawing. We only see fifty percent of the surface of the curved mirror when we look at it. Because of the curve of the surface, what we see reflected is very compacted at the edges, and very expansive at the centre. Our ‘frame’, the mirror, is reflecting seventy percent of the drawing into our viewing plane. It is not that the mirror stops reflecting behind the tube. As soon as you circle around, you will find the world of the image there waiting for you. You can have both the faces looking out on one surface but in fact the faces go almost all the way around to the back, and so you join the two heads at the back.

If you had one head on one side and another head on the other, you’d see one very thin head at one end and another thin head on the other, not a continuous form. In the drawing, the heads have to be just a tiny bit adjoined at the back. What the mirror sees is not what the eye sees. Not at all.

JT:

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And that’s marvellous, because the absolute assumption is that the mirror is the truth of what you are seeing.

WK:

Yes, there are many things about the virtues of lies. Here the images don’t correspond to the world but they reveal a kind of truth.

JT:

That’s an important principle. Can you elaborate a bit more about it? It’s often so integral to your work.

WK:

The primary lie of all art is that you know it is an illusion even while you fool yourself. If you take a black piece of paper and tear it into a shape, you know the truth of it is that it’s a roughly torn piece of paper and the lie that you tell yourself is – look! – that is a coffee pot.

If the outline of it corresponds to certain shapes which are there in one’s head, you can’t stop yourself from recognising it. I think that this reveals an unstoppable desire for things to make sense to us. It’s not that we don’t know that there are lies, but we can’t resist the lie.⁵

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In 2012 Kentridge was invited to give the Norton lectures at Harvard University. The series of talks was titled ‘Drawing Lessons’ though it was not, as is conventional under such a title, a class on how to draw but rather a consideration of what one learns through the activity of drawing: the process of ‘seeing in’, in which the individual effectively makes something in the world not because they have the capacity to craft it, but rather because they have the capacity to recognise it once it is visible.

JT:

WK:

The easiest instance for explaining this is to remember that we actually see, with the natural eye, an inverted image of the world; the eye actually flips everything by a hundred and eighty degrees, and our brains have to cope with a world standing on its head . . .

Yes, and the second great thing that we live by, is the threedimensionality of vision – although we know that it’s a construction in our head, that our eyes are seeing in twodimensional images that we combine in order to create a threedimensional scene.

This we experience when we look through a stereoscope. At first, nothing is resolved, but suddenly, as the two images bracket together and we instantly see in three dimensions, the viewer groans, or grunts – “Ah, now I have it!”

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JT: WK:

JT:

WK: JT:

A gasp . . . . . . when the brain suddenly does the work of pushing the two images into one another, which thrusts them into depth at the same time. The moment you lose the two distinct focused images, they merge and jump out at you in three-dimensional depth, and you attain a single three-dimensional image.

I think of the child who wrestles to make proper use and sense of the stereoscope, pushing it back and forth without success, and then – suddenly – it coheres, the world flips into focus, and the child feels a sudden surge of potency, because . . . . . . they realise – “Oh, I can. I’ve done it.”

“I have made sense of the world.”

And here I am going to lead us to consider Second-hand Reading, a much more recent work (2013), because the conjunction between the two is so instructive.

WK:

Okay, Second-hand Reading is also The Prisoner in the Book.

This is the story of a work on the show that both was and was not drawn. Some years ago I was invited to make a work for a specific museum in France. I did not make that work, but the questions which it provoked in me gave rise to another piece, which is on the show here.

Outside Bourganeuf in France there is a ruined castle, which in the thirteenth or fourteenth century held a political prisoner from the Middle East who was captured during the Crusades and held ransom for thirty years in the castle.* He was never ransomed, because his brother had taken over as grand vizier, and would rather keep that position than liberate his brother.⁶

*

This narrative thread was placed between us in the conversation, hovering somewhere between smoke, ashes, and fable. In pursuit of some anchoring supplementary history, Kentridge wrote to the museum curator who had originally suggested the possible project and asked for additional historical detail, while I pursued what I could of the narrative thread, and came up, first,

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with the name of Bodrum Castle, which is how I learned the bare bones of the story. The mortal rivalry between the brothers clung to me, and I reported back to Kentridge the statement I recollected as associated with the two men: “Sovereignty knows no siblings.” However, on returning to the source I discovered that I had wholly reworked the sentence that was attributed to the older brother. His tough-minded observation had actually been “Between rulers there is no kinship.”

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In my research, the captive was revealed to be Sultan Cem, who, we became aware, is also known to the historical record as Djem or Zizim, and had been captured by the Knights of Rhodes during a conflict with his half-brother Bayezid II during the fifteenth century, as Moorish and Christian interests sought to consolidate their interests in the region. Cem (the younger) in several accounts is described as a ‘Pretender’ to the Ottoman empire. The two brothers battled in several regions across the following years, until Cem sought the protection of the French captain of Bodrum Castle, who was grand master of the Knights of St John on Rhodes. In July 1482, Cem arrived on the island and was received with honour. Ostensibly seeking a perpetual peace between the Ottoman Empire and Christendom, the Knights’ captain, Pierre d’Abrusson, accepted 40,000 ducats, in exchange for protection for Cem. After some consideration, the captain subsequently decided that conflict with Bayezid would have dire consequences, so he covertly agreed to imprison Cem. The church at Rome at one point intervened, seeking actively to deploy Cem to engage in battle with the Ottoman empire; but Bayezid paid Pope Innocent VIII 120,000 crowns (at the time, equal to all other annual sources of papal revenue combined), one hundred Moorish slaves, a relic of the Holy Lance and an annual fee of 4,000 ducats. Apparently much of the fee for the building of the Sistine Chapel was paid through these Ottoman ransoms, and such a sum was presumably sufficient to secure the Pope’s indulgence. It is small wonder that the history and fable of Cem have found expression in various literary and aesthetic treatments, though few are as enigmatic and desolate as Kentridge’s pacing man, trapped inside the Book. The records suggest that Cem died after just more than a decade in captivity, having spent his last years plotting his revenge and return to power.

WK:

I was asked whether I wanted to do a project for a museum at this castle, and thought, ‘How does one show a prisoner held captive for all that time?’ I thought of the pages of a book being the equivalent of the days of one’s life, and so I initially had the idea of a person walking back and forth inside the pages of the book, never escaping from the printed page into the empty margins.

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How to do this? It is a trick based on the flip books that I had explored for years as an early animation technology.

JT:

Here is where this work reminds me of the anamorphic drawings which, as you say, have no frame, no edge. You described, too, the book with no back and no front cover, but with a spine which could turn and turn and turn without ending.

WK:

We have the sense of the passage of time, as the man runs on the pages, because of the variation in the shape of the text that provides the ground behind the figure, on the pages of the dictionary. At times, the eye sees only the figure drawn pacing back and forth . . .

JT:

. . . and never becomes aware of the page that is the support of the drawing . . .

WK:

Yes, and at times, abruptly, you are made aware of that physical typed page, when a sudden block of short lines appears visible on the paper, instead of the regularly spaced text, and one realises that the ground has changed. It looks suddenly as if both time and space are being covered.

JT:

The caged figure alludes also to Rilke’s panther, which you have drawn pacing back and forth. For Rilke, the panther is ever aware of the bars: “till his gaze, from weariness, lets all things go”, although there are moments when “[a]n image enters in” and plunges into the animal’s heart.

One of the questions that persists in this saga of the undrawn arises from a consideration of the relation between image and language. I think of your title tree. What are those words, and what world do they point us to, outside of the realm of the branches, as wood is turned into paper and writings emerge?*

*

Kentridge retains a perpetual fascination with thought and abstraction, while insisting on following technique and practice. This ambivalence has given rise to several enigmatic experiments that rely on play to do his thinking. Several recent productions have sought to institute unrealisable projects in order, as it were, to realise them. This, it seems to me, is not wholly unrelated to the project of ‘undrawable’ drawings.

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JT:

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Can we return to your ongoing investigation of the eye?

There seems to me a kind of breakthrough when you were making The Magic Flute, which, for all its sumptuous lavish beauty, was really a philosophical treatise of a kind, and a meditation on Optics.⁷ In the group of undrawable but drawn experiments, I would identify 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès as well as The Nose, and thus it is that these result in artworks that, in principle, are well-nigh impossible. This cluster of works both undrawable and drawn expands exponentially. The three-dimensional/twodimensional experimentalism of the theatre/film interface is part of this enquiry.

WK:

JT:

WK: JT:

WK:

This happens as an accident. I was making a series of experimental short films in various forms, loosely as a tribute to Georges Méliès, the early cinema pioneer. I was using illusionism, with films that were screened reversed in order to invert time, for example. While I was working away there, a small community of ants moved into the studio. I became fascinated by their activity, and realised that with a sugar trail I could manipulate them to move in formation. I became an ant wrangler. And they dashed about, following invisible lines, making waves and paisley motifs, trailing after one another.

If I filmed them, I understood that I had a live animation line.

What was a real discovery was when I then treated the film as ‘day for night’, flipping over the values, so that I ended up with a field of white ants on a black ground. Filmed at a certain remove, these became an organic and mobile cluster of constellations, blinking in the night sky. This showed me a whole visual language for working with the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, while thinking about the Enlightenment.

I remember being struck by your discovery that you can project something on to a black wall . . . . . . in black and white . . . . . . and we will read it for the difference; we will find the black and white in the projection on the black wall.

Yes, if you are projecting in a space with ambient light, it works best with a dark screen and a strong projector.

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So that if you have a medium dark room with a medium grey piece of paper and you switch off the lights and there’s a very dim light, an ambient light, you see it as a grey sheet of paper.

As soon as you put the image with the white lines on the black background, the medium grey becomes both a bright white and an intense black. One has a relative pitch of colour rather than an absolute pitch.

It was a kind of magic, watching black turn into white. Having grown up with movie projectors and the principle of the luminous movie-screen, I was startled to discover that I could, with a data-projector, use a blackboard as a projection screen.

The projected images appear crisp, as white on black.

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JT:

So then what comes to mind is your discovery that the dark arts in The Magic Flute provide an allegory for the underground of the Enlightenment.

WK:

It’s an organisational principle because it shows the relationship between the negative and the positive. Literally, I am drawing with black on white, but I can invert it so that we are watching white on black. Initially that was done by using the film negative rather than making a positive print of it, so that there is inversion of white and black. Now it is done digitally. This has all sorts of practical advantages. It is easier to draw a fine line with black than with white, because charcoal is softer and more friable than chalk, so it makes a clean and soft, consistent line. Chalk tends to splinter and is more brittle. It’s also easier to erase charcoal on white paper than white chalk on a black background, although I have done both and sometimes in one film I have used both because of the difference in effect – the rough and jagged line in a work like Ubu Tells the Truth is made with chalk on black paper.

JT:

So this makes me think about the question of the law in your life. It seems to me that there is something in your constitution, as well as your aesthetic, that is fundamentally postcolonial, or anticolonial. It relates back to GIVE US BACK OUR SUN from Refuse the Hour, which you had anticipated in The Magic Flute in the way that you stage the Enlightenment as an inherently contradictory project rather than a necessary beneficence. ⁸

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Refuse the Hour was first performed in 2012 and has been described as a ‘multimedia chamber opera’ which arose in part out of a series of conversations with science historian Peter Galison. It is a ‘brief history of time’ to which Kentridge brings both mythology and postcolonial history.

WK:

I think now of the ambivalent relationship that is in so many of my projects: I refer here to the ambivalent relationship I have with the Enlightenment. Completely dependent on it, growing up through it, in belief of it – and still in belief of it – but understanding that within it (not as an aberration or a mistake, or at the side but at the heart of it) are a lot of the disasters of colonialism.

Not in the sense that there were good people and there were bad people but that often within the very best of intentions the most disastrous results come about.

One has to try to find a multitude of less bad solutions. One can’t say, “Well, we only want the good education that missionaries might have brought without any of the other destructive things that came in their wake.” We understand that those have been inextricably linked and the current questions of decolonisation are still stuck in that paradox. So it’s beyond psychology, and ultimately, because of the history, there seems to be no good solution.

In The Head & the Load, which is my current project about the First World War in Africa, a central question concerns the paradox of colonialism. Some of the educated African elite fought for the right to fight in the war (in the misguided hope that after the war they would be seen as equal citizens and be given equal rights).

Others moved away, saying, why should we die for a cause which is not ours?

JT:

WK:

There is a complete entanglement, then, of the technological enquiry inside the philosophical enquiry. This has led to the fugitive escape for you through laughter and through playfulness, and desire . . .

There is an exploration through technology, yes. The representation of technology – fake machines, a big semaphore machine, a little pumping of air that is done. There is this faux technology, but

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I am also interested in the real technologies of seeing: the stereoscope, the anamorphic projections, phenakistiscopes, zoetropes, which – though real – are also things through which you know you are deluding your brain.

Is this the way in which language is unreliable? We always hope that language is tied to the world: a tree outside has a line between the word ‘tree’ and the tree trunk – and this applies to abstract concepts too: say, with ‘anger’, there is the word ‘anger’ and the emotion that’s boiling inside someone. We hope that they are somehow tied.

Or is language a floating cloud that moves over the world making some connections to it, but always allowing itself to float free of it? There is not so much a list of nouns or verbs, but larger constructions: a range of things in addition to the letters in words, that tie those words to the world. These supplements can include intangibles such as vocal or visual emphasis, or the gesture, the sigh, the pause, the repetition, the flowery language, the use, say, of Anglo-Saxon short grunts rather than Latinate words in English. A whole series of invisible things.

JT: WK:

JT:

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Now described as ‘rhetoric’, basically.

Yes, rhetoric. We tend to think, okay, there’s rhetoric that heightens and swells language, and then there’s rhetoric that is debasing it or devaluing it until we associate it with lies. But within the deep structure, we reach what we think of as falsehood very quickly: we suspect that there is not false language and true, but rather that language is inherently treacherous. I think it is impossible to separate language from rhetoric.

You prompt me here. I must send you a link to the opening address of the Royal Society in 1645. Their statement focuses precisely on linguistic choices between rhetoric and plain style.* There was an attempt to advocate an English that was free of flourishes, tropes and figures, in order to have a language that was adequate to science or to truth. ⁹

*

The word ‘gloss’ has a complex etymology that points to the conjunction of some of these ideas. A gloss, it seems, originates in the Icelandic glossi, a spark, a flame. But the word is also associated with notions of ornamentation, a sheen, something alluring. Further, a gloss on a word is a brief notation on the meaning of that word, often giving synonyms or etymologies, and in this sense the meaning of a word is indistinguishable from its supplements. A glossary, by contrast, is a list of precise definitions of terms that might be considered technical or specialist.

9

The Royal Society began to emerge in the 1640s but got its Royal Charter in 1660. Early advocates included Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, John Wallis, John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and William Petty. They were largely natural scientists defending their enquiries against the impact of the Civil War in England. Some grouped together in London, where they met at Gresham College, and others gathered in Oxford under the presumption that the remote university would be detached from the war. Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667) is a plea to rid the language of specious “Tropes and Figures”, in order to return to the simple truth. These sentiments may be understood to have something in common with the antitheatrical prejudice of the times, which had led to the closing of the theatres in England; there is more than a shadowy resemblance to Plato’s hostility to art.

WK:

JT:

And I’m sure that as you read it now, every instance of rhetoric is there. All of it.

Of course, it’s marvellous.

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels there is a satire based on some of these principles. (And here, perhaps is a drawing not yet drawn.) Gulliver visits the ‘Grand Academy of Lagado’ where he learns that there are several vast experiments underway: one is a reversal of time that will extract food from excrement and sunlight from plants and another is an attempt to substitute language with things. Everyone has to have an object that can stand in for any word they wish to speak, so in order to mention, say, a cucumber, the speaker would have to carry a cucumber in their pocket.

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WK:

A drawing of a cucumber would be very dull. It would have to be a drawing of a pineapple – so you would have to want to talk about pineapples.

At the end of The Head & The Load there’s a piece of text that has its origin in Svetlana Alexievich writing about the war in Afghanistan. The line is about a young boy who took a long time to die, and as he was dying he looked around him and just said the words of the objects he could see, like a young child learning to speak. Tree, mountain, bird, haversack. And in the production we expand this into a list of words that are . . . endless; he is in extremis. What has his language become? At the very end, he is still trying to make that connection of word to world and to object. So it’s a hopeful or utopian moment at the end of the piece, which has been so much about the impossibility of language or communication.

JT: WK:

That’s devastating.

What does that mean? I ask myself. And then my next question is, How do we stage it? What does it mean to see it, to hear it?

You’ve got someone speaking the chain of words, and you have those words hanging in the air like projections. How long can these continue? Is it infinitely hopeful, or infinitely despairing?

That gives rise to a question about the staging of language.

I think that perhaps, in the staging, we will put those words much earlier on as well. At first the audience don’t understand what those words in the sky are, and then, eventually, you understand them right at the end of the piece. (After the workshop, these words are spoken in counterpoint to the list of the dead read out at the same time.)

JT:

WK:

And so sense enters the world with death. Artifice ends.

When the words come back to you.

When they come back.

It is a matter of staging and performance. We have one very small performer who’s quiet, in his gas mask and his white uniform. I am asking myself, Do we have him slowly walking across the stage while these words arrive? Do I allow this as

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a slow silent moment? What is the way that it could be made eloquent, where does it overinflate and collapse under its own weight? We add strains of the violin underneath the scene, and test that. The boy takes a long time to die. It’s about the words, because there are some words which would be in siSwati or Swahili, which for most people in the audience would not be understood. There are some which are still recognisable to English-speakers, such as ‘haversack’. But other ones, like ‘sweet honey’, would be spoken either in both English and an African language or only in an African language, with some understood, some not understood.

But I think it is about trying to ask, Is there a mutually comprehensible language after the slaughter? That’s both the historic question and obviously a completely contemporary question.

JT:

WK:

Your recent work is deeply attentive to the burdens of colonialism. Still, it is with an extraordinary exuberance that you are extending into new spaces. In the past several years you have expanded your studio from out of your historical home into the city. You’ve also created performance spaces there, in Maboneng, where you have instituted several stage spaces . . . And I suspect in some way you’ve displaced your father out of his home, and taken over the house so that that can also become a place in which the endeavour of legitimate lying can flourish. That may seem facetious, but I say that in all seriousness, because that is the way in which you defend yourself against external authorities in order to defend internal authority.

It’s always an ongoing question.

The Centre For The Less Good Idea ¹⁰ houses the question of how we collectively take responsibility for constructing the world.

Who takes responsibility, and for which functions? Who does that work? Is that a collective responsibility?

And how does imagination defend itself?

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The Centre for the Less Good Idea is an arts incubator launched by Kentridge in 2017. Kentridge’s studio spaces and several adjacent venues in inner-city Johannesburg have been equipped with the basic workings of several theatre 27

spaces, with lighting rigs, seating and temporary stages, as well as the infrastructure for digital projection and sound. Bronwyn Lace, herself an artist, is the animateur of the riotous assembly, working with Kentridge to knock these events into a robust coherence. It is interesting that here Kentridge’s primary commitment is to performance and live arts.

JT:

This is the politics of ‘that which is not drawn’ – every moment of every unit of time and space is in the emergent. Here we are again exploring the intersection of two-dimensional and three-dimensional representations. And we are inside your preoccupation with time, generation, re-generation.

WK:

Several parallel projects are ongoing, and there is a negotiation about how we make sense of it all, the whole time, and that it’s always a construction and that a picture is always caught somewhere between the world that it comes out of and what we project on to it as a viewer. These are all propositions that I am trying to explore in the inner-city project in Maboneng.

I’m trying to. But each time something doesn’t work, each time there’s a performance at the Centre that falls flat, that constitutes a kind of a counterargument which says, Work it out clearly in advance. Make sure you have a good plan.

Each time something goes wrong, I don’t just think, It’s not just that that was not a beautiful piece of theatre, but I ask, Does this show that this way of thinking about the world is fundamentally wrong?

JT:

WK: JT:

So you’ve got the law in contest with improvisation at the same time and always.

I’ve got the law?

It gives you the right to just mess about in a kind of economy – a moral economy inside the recklessness of the enquiry.

And for some reason in all of that deliberation, my mind flashed back to a scene from several years ago on the hillside in Hamakuya village in Limpopo, with everybody looking up at the total eclipse of the sun through strange hand-made blackpaper glasses. I’m thinking of how many different idiosyncratic

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experiments have arisen in some kind of way out of that cosmic moment, an eclipse, in which the verities and the certainties of the world were proven to be completely illusory. Standing there on the hillside, the wall of blackness rushes towards one.

That event was completely unanticipated by me. I had no idea that that was how the eclipse presents itself.

WK:

It’s like this general anaesthetic coming over the world; there’s a sudden rush and it’s unlike anything else. And obviously that’s the difference between a ninety-nine point nine percent eclipse, and a total eclipse. It cannot be anticipated, in a way.

It’s not a black hole, but it’s almost like suddenly you’re in the black hole, not knowing what will emerge, and things that otherwise are invisible are seen: the stars that you can suddenly see in the middle of the day, which are there the whole time.

It’s not like they suddenly appear. They’re there the whole time, but you can now perceive them because of the contrast against the sky.

JT:

WK:

As there’s that projection on the black wall that is there all the time.

Yes, and it is an illusion when one says, Oh, the stars are fading, as daylight comes. It’s our sight that is failing to see them.

They haven’t disappeared. They’re still holding on to their same brightness, which is obviously obliterated by the brightness of the sun.

The eclipse is a good reference here because it takes us to the black square, in That Which We Do Not Remember, the black woodcut which alludes to a section of the Triumphs and Laments frieze at the Tiber. The frieze is a length of events, full of historical figures, but it has one section of blankness in the middle of the historical record. This section is called quello che non ricordo, ‘that which we do not remember’. It gestures toward that section of history that we should know, but don’t.

The blank section of the frieze in fact arises from an accident.

I suddenly realised that we had an extra twelve metres on the bank of the Tiber, and I’d run out of figures. It was too late to cut any new stencils, so we needed to put in . . . something.

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JT:

You scam artist!

WK:

But of course it also relates to the black square of Malevich, something that can be simply this black shape. And what I love is that Malevich’s black square doesn’t arise as some transcendental signifier in the world, but it comes out of second-hand use, because Malevich used a fragment of cloth plundered from a whimsical theatre costume which had a black square on it, and somebody happened to comment to him afterwards, “We love that black square.” So he said, “Okay, well, why don’t we make a painting just of a black square and change the direction of art?” So the inauthentic origins are to be celebrated.

JT:

And you justify the story in order to divert our thinking away from the blank in the wall-drawings on the Tiber. It is just as well, after all, that you never became a history lecturer. And so your son avenges himself on you by teaching history!

WK:

JT:

WK:

Lying has to do with inauthentic origins, and the difference, and I suppose the big difference, between the way one talks about a work when it’s finished and the mess that happens before in the preamble. Some of the work I do is trying to show the preamble to the work.

And in a way that’s the tension in the dialectic between the voices that are going to be on the edges of the conversation, with one voice constituting the coherence of the interpretation and the other defending the incoherence of the found image or feigned idea.

Yes, and it’s not to say that the work is only constituted by all the inauthenticities in its origin – and those would include the technique. I’ve got a good and a bad brush to work with, to paint a tree. Where a good brush will give you a controlled line, the bad brush gives you a speckle which suggests the randomness of foliage. So the bad brush suggests the markings of a tree.

The bad brush makes the good tree. This can relate back to the drawing of the tree.

The power of the black square also comes out of the blackness of Indian ink and the way that ink sits on the paper. It’s a much

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blacker thing than a black charcoal block, for example. It’s much more obliterating. So we go back to Malevich with his black, but when we think of the Soviets we also go in a different direction, back to the blacking out of . . .

JT: WK:

JT:

Censorship. . . . of photographs. Soviet censorship was done with thick, black, printer’s ink.

And what is that called? What was that called? I remember a distinctive name.

WK:

Caviar.

JT:

Caviar.

WK:

JT: WK:

JT: WK:

It was known as caviar. So we’re back to the thick black printer’s ink, which I use for the woodcut. It is different from the liquid ink – the Chinese ink or Indian ink. That’s the same thing.

In English we call it Chinese ink and the French call it Indian ink.

No, the English call it Indian ink and the French call it Chinese ink and the Chinese just call it ink.

The English call it Indian ink?

And the French call it Chinese ink and the Chinese just call it ink. The woodblock print in fact is closer to the caviar, this thick sticky printer’s ink that is rolled on, that would have been rolled on the photos. So I’m saying that, yes, in the meaning of That Which We Do Not Remember the black has all these different moments of (you could say) inauthenticity. It is not simply negative; it is also experienced as a free block – the open space, the pleasures of the ink.

And in a way that’s where the authenticity is.

Well, in acknowledging those origins and the way that those things all are visible, are showing.

It’s not just acknowledging, or showing them in the work. So that it’s not just that the artist uses a series of devices to trick 31

the audience, but that the audience is completely complicit in understanding the lie.

JT:

WK: JT:

WK: JT: WK:

JT: WK:

JT: WK: JT: WK:

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And I mentioned yesterday the Louvre experiment. What I’m thinking about particularly has to do with your Méliès works also.

There is a celebration of a kind of double temporality. You find an image and then you black it out, and then you fake and film the recovery of the image.

Which Louvre one do you mean?

In the Louvre show, you’ve got those black squares that you had painted over previous drawings . . .

Oh, okay. Okay, so that was to excavate . . . . . . and then you end up with a black square, yes.

But it starts here, with a drawing. Which I film. Then I paint over it. Then in order to excavate . . .

Yes, you’re excavating. So you play the film backwards.

So this is about archaeological excavation in which one starts with a black square, like That Which We Do Not Remember, and then bit by bit, by playing the film backwards, you find what you have forgotten. You rub out the black, you peel it away slowly, and underneath are fragments of memory or shards of pottery or bits of sculpture.

This is the aide-mémoire. But in fact . . .

What you’ve done is made by proceeding in the opposite direction.

Exactly.

You start with the drawing, and film while bit by bit you obliterate it with black printer’s ink, or in this case the black Chinese ink.

This the audience can understand. Listen, you don’t have to be bright to understand that stuff; you’re simply running the film backwards, so that it seems as if you start with the black square

and clear it to reveal the painting. But nonetheless, something in our experience of unidirectional time becomes evident.

The film is successful even to me, having made the film. For example, I really like the drawing that you see at the end of the film, and I went to look for it in all the drawers of the studio and could not find it and thought it had disappeared. And only afterwards, I realised – that messy dirty black sheet of paper, that is the drawing. I had forgotten that I had blackened over it.

It survives only in the film. That’s the final piece.

JT: WK:

That’s what remains.

And that’s what you always end up with. Your habitual body of work exists as the kind of drawing that you desire for a moment, but then you obliterate the things you want. What is that will to destroy these things? But really, look, I’m not nearly as selfdestructive or as careless as that. With a lot of the drawings, there are sometimes two versions, or I’m also aware of the possibility of another drawing as I am drawing. I observe myself making the drawing so I can go back and remake it, slightly differently, from out of what had been revealed the first time, and . . .

JT:

And then instead of obliterating the original, you demolish the copy?

WK:

No, sometimes I demolish the original but I would have remembered what it was, or I wouldn’t have arrived at it otherwise. Sometimes I make a copy that is made to be destroyed and it turns out a better drawing than the careful original I had made, because it is made less deliberately, with greater instinct for seeing and a less arch art.

The demands can arise from something outside of the drawing.

Say, when you’re drawing for film, or drawing for theatre, using your drawing as if it is applied drawing (like applied maths), using the drawing skill in the service of a different vision: this often has revelations that arise out of the debased form.

JT:

That’s a lovely formulation: “in the service of a different vision”.

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WK: JT:

WK:

Something else. Yes. And this is the multimodal, multitechnology exploration that believes that you find a different answer with each of those journeys.

But also there are accidents . . .

For example, there’s a drawing that I need for a section on arithmetic in The Head & The Load. It shows us the bureaucracy of a war.

How many carriers are needed?

How many people will die?

What will they have died of?

All the equipment you need to take.

And so it’s a drawing really like a blackboard, just with these different texts on it, of these different objects and numbers.

And in a strange way as a drawing, as a final drawing, it’s a good history-lesson drawing. But I would never have arrived there, and there would never have been a logic driving me to make it, simply as a drawing. Why would I draw a list of numbers, some random texts? The drawing emerged as a need out of the theatre work, but it says everything that a drawing might say about people, work, the war, numbers and bureaucracies.

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JT:

You could not know that it would be a good drawing until you got there.

WK:

No, and I wouldn’t have thought to do it because all the logic and the pressure behind it had to do with the nature of the filming, how quickly it had to be done and how dense it would be. It is not shaped by the properly artistic questions. Not by, What does this sheet of paper need? but, rather, What is the length of time? What are the words that are being said on stage? How do these relate to the drawing? So I’m not sure that’s a side benefit of inauthentic origins but it’s part of it.

That’s a strategy, then. The work gets made while I am solving something else.

Finding these demands outside of the form is a strategy for arriving at things inside of the form.

What will it become, and what will that say when it has become?

I was working with a letter of John Chilembwe from the First World War. I began by thinking, Is there just someone reading it on stage? We tried it with the letter just being read straight on stage. We tried reading it with loud music underneath it, with quiet music underneath it. We tried it with a choir repeating the lines of the text.

JT: WK:

What is that letter? What is the substance of the letter?

The substance of the letter is: ‘The Voice of the African Native in the Present War’, written by the Reverend John Chilembwe to the Nyasaland Times in late 1914. That is what it is called. In it he states the key paradox – the colonial paradox. It is the history of colonialism in one letter. He says, “We understand that we have been invited to shed our innocent blood in this world’s war which is now in progress throughout the wide world . . . We ask the Honourable government of our country which is known as Nyasaland, will there be any good prospects for the natives after the end of the war?”

He is saying, “In time of peace everything is for Europeans only.

But in time of war . . . we are needed to . . . shed our blood in equality.”

And he’s asking, Will there be anything for us?

It’s not a pre-colonial revolt. It’s not an indigenous uprising.

He’s educated, trained at a Baptist seminary in the United States.

It’s an African elite, a modernised elite seeing that they can still not participate – even when they’ve done everything, jumped through the hoops. Even then there’s no end to the hoops to jump through, they will never be welcomed.

So it’s that. But how do we stage that letter to get its meaning?

We’ve tried many, many different things and I think we’ve found a solution. There’s a shift between a piece of music and the

35

words, and the music stops and the words are audible, and the music returns and is cut again—and a beautiful strange piece of archival sound gets repeated in different ways.

JT:

You were still telling us how you proceed, and that raises considerations about what does and does not get drawn.

But we were thinking about black squares.

WK: JT:

WK:

JT:

WK: JT:

WK:

36

Oh, ink and black squares.

Which is a metaphor for several activities: on the one hand the obliterating of knowledge, and on the other hand excavating; and identifying the perfect moment where both are possible, as if time both can and cannot move in two directions.

Okay. But also of course the question of what is there and not there in the excavation – what is and is not beneath the black square – is an idea in the Méliès films, with the self-portrait that is drawn, then is torn up. Somehow the artwork reconstitutes itself, remakes me, in an act of invisible mending, so that the drawn figure of me walks away from the picture. This can be repeated endlessly.

I wanted you to comment further on what you were saying, that the viewer always knows what’s going on.

Yes. And then the viewer somehow fools herself. But it is remarkable in the Méliès, how mystifying it is, even though one could (hypothetically) work it out. There’s something in the kind of comic idiom of the Méliès pieces that completely beguiles your audience. Your audience does not know what’s happening: how you manage to pluck pages drifting through the air, and reconstitute them as a book, and things like that. There’s something inside the Chaplinesque idiom that takes us for a ride.

Okay, so that’s not pure luck. It is not accident. What is inside that illusion is a long rehearsal, as it were, in which we are trying to investigate the grammar of timing and action in each case, learning to read what happens with the camera running backwards.

In the first film, Invisible Mending, I am a self-portrait that gets drawn and torn up and I then reconstitute myself. It had to do with learning how to reverse the way in which you tear a sheet of paper. That was the hardest thing, and that had to be learned.

I had to not normally just tear a sheet of paper, but to tear it in a slightly unnatural way, so that when it is reversed it seems as if the hands are mending the paper. It becomes invisible, but only through artifice does it appear natural.

JT:

I don’t even begin to understand what you’re saying.

WK:

Normally you would just tear a sheet – so. But then if you run that backwards, that just looks wrong; it doesn’t look like mending.

So, yes, we reverse the film, but the action of tearing itself actually had to be deliberate, not natural, so that it would read naturally as mending when reversed.

JT:

It’s not an act of ripping, but is a thousand little incremental tears.

So that when you run it in reverse it looks like you are repairing it diligently, properly, the way you would repair something. It is the pace of the activity, of the repair.

WK:

JT:

Gosh, how fascinating. This is an event as unseen that becomes seen.

WK:

And then with the book, when you throw it . . . and you are catching the sheets of paper, it’s how you throw the piece of paper. If you throw the piece of paper carelessly, easily, then when you reverse it the piece of paper comes up and your hand runs to meet it. That is not plausible. But if you throw the piece of paper, and pause with the hand in the air for a moment, and then you take the hand down, when you reverse the film, your hand goes up, it waits arrested, and then the piece of paper comes up to enter your hand.

JT:

Ah, gosh, that’s completely marvellous. So it is actually a grammar.

You’re anticipating the flying page.

WK:

These are artifices. They are the kind of skills that one practises in preparation for that particular piece. In the same way that when you’ve got a bad paintbrush for the painting of the leaves of the tree, there’s a whole practising of how much ink goes on it, 37

how hard do you press, what movements, in order to take advantage of that bad brush. It is not just a bad brush. There is a little wrist twist in order to give the swirl of the leaves, or the brush tip is at times just dropped on the page. How dry is the brush? All of those actions, which are, you know, the normal activities of an artist mastering whatever particular little technique they are working with. Not particularly difficult, but it’s not automatic.

JT: WK:

The idea is not enough.

JT:

The idea is not enough.

WK: JT:

WK:

The insight is not enough. The revelation is not enough.

So what’s great about this is that you’ve always been fairly dismissive of what you learned from Lecoq. It is without limit . . .

No, I’ve never been . . .

JT:

Yes, I know. That was carelessly articulated, because you ironise your poor skills as a would-be actor.

WK:

I’m not dismissive of Lecoq at all. I’m dismissive of my skill at using it.

JT:

WK:

JT: WK: JT: WK:

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No, but the interesting thing is . . .

I know, but what you are articulating here is how deeply embedded you are in a Lecoqian tradition.

In a Lecoqian tradition and in a tradition of practice, in such a way that musicians are expected to practise and . . .

Right, practice makes perfect.

Well, you know . . .

Endeavour, attention, regard.

And learning what it is you’re doing. P

ENDNOTe

Kentridge’s meditations and his aesthetic experiments hover between past and future, anticipation and recollection. The self looks contradictorily in both temporal directions, while attempting to locate itself in a hypothesised present – with a measure of accusation as part of the mix. This becomes an aesthetic as well as a moral enquiry: ‘What have I done? What have I not done?’ is akin to, ‘What have I drawn, or not drawn?’ Sins of commission and sins of omission.

The lie and the line.

Kentridge’s philosophical work is produced through his aesthetic choices, in particular his use of the fugitive mark. His ‘signature’ film-making style is based on the filming of drawings in a constant state of flux as they are perpetually being erased, redrawn, supplemented.

Every presence is both a being and an event. Subjects are verbs, as objects are animated, and drawn marks appear and disappear, leaving jet trails in charcoal dust on his paper, signifying where characters and consciousnesses have shifted.

As a printmaker, too, Kentridge is constantly experimenting with the various ‘states’ of his prints. Contrary to popular conception, the print can be a fluid rather than a fixed and stable form. Kentridge reworks plates and manipulates the prints, overlaying brushstrokes on etched images, reworking and testing solutions as they become one of several possibilities. The ambiguities around the series and the singularity destabilise attempts to fix and authenticate uniqueness.

This engagement with printmaking and the multiple image is in part an impulse arising from Kentridge’s decades-long engagement with political art in the apartheid era, where the linocut print was integral to the agitprop image.

Yet Kentridge’s art production has also sought to test the limits of a private vocabulary, with opaque references and puns, one-offs.

This exhibition allows the viewer to explore some of these textures of Kentridge’s mind’s eye, as he consumes the field that he has produced, commenting on what is yet to be drawn while attempting to hold on to that which has not been remembered.

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GUIDE Brief notes on the exhibits by William Kentridge and Jane Taylor

Caviar That Which We Do Not Remember, 2017 Woodcut print

William kentridge

Let me describe the process briefly. On one table you have the wooden block, carved with all its indentations and raised surfaces.

On another table you have a slab of glass and a square of black ink rolled in different directions by the heavy rubber roller which is used to transfer the ink on to the block of wood. The block of wood usually has many light areas; only certain raised sections are inked and then impressed when you print the image. You’re not so much aware of the thickness, the stickiness, of the ink, the mess and weight of the ink, as of the image that is represented in the print: the tree, the man, the people in the boat, the widows walking across the landscape.

But: Nonetheless there’s something miraculous about the solidness and stickiness, the desire of the roller for the ink and the glass. That closeness. And the black square of That Which We Do Not Remember was made as a way of recording that pleasure of the stickiness of the ink, of the plain blackness. Yes, there are elements cut out and a trolley put underneath and some highlights that show the different grains of the wood, but essentially it’s the blackness of a rolled-up piece of ink.

The black square itself obviously has different histories, from the costume designs that Malevich made, as well as the famous painting Black Square that happened to come out of Malevich plundering bits of cloth from old costumes, one of which had a black square on it.

It’s interesting to note the inauthentic origin even of that iconic image. And also to recall the use of printer’s ink to obliterate images, to force a disremembering of people, to cover over people who were no longer personae gratae in the Soviet Union and whose very names and memories needed to be destroyed. The blackness of the ink arose from the instruction that individual people should become part of that which we do not remember.

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And: those people, that process, the putting over the thick printer’s ink, which was known as ‘caviar’ in the Soviet times; the Black Square of Malevich; the costume designed for the theatre performances he was involved with – all, all sit somewhere inside the black ink. And those are the parts that we do remember. All the other parts, like the information that’s dropped into a black hole, we can only regret and know what we do not know.

The process is a compound one, in so many ways. The image arises from a double collage.

There’s a collage of the wood blocks, because there is an arrangement of the wood blocks that make the image, situating the different kinds of wood grains. There are seven or eight different woods used in the wood blocks. This is the first collage.

And the second collage is the collage of the sheets of paper that have been printed with the wood blocks, and their collage is not the same as the shapes and collage of the wood blocks underneath.

The whole piece is edited with bits of the print being pulled out further, fragments from other prints being dropped in, and this then being traced on to a sheet of acetate to make a masterplan that I use to print the edition in the same pattern as the original improvised collage. P Jane Taylor

The memory archive is much on our minds, caught as we are in a reiteration of our crimes and misdemeanours, both unaware and aware of That Which We Do Not Remember.

There is a pivotal work of memory, often understated, and that is the work of forgetting. We often misrepresent what it is that memory does. It holds, and it lets go.

Kentridge describes in the conversation section of this catalogue how the image of That Which We Do Not Remember comes to be one of the motifs drawn by him on the bank of the Tiber in Rome. P

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LINE, HOLD STILL! What Will Come (has already come), 2007 Anamorphic film

William kentridge

A drawing reflected in a cylindrical mirror is inherently unstable.

A straight line drawn on a sheet of paper is turned into a parabola in the reflection. But it is an unreliable one. As your viewing distance to the cylindrical mirror changes, the parabola changes, getting a deeper or shallower curve. In order to draw what appears as a straight line on the mirror, a corresponding curve must be drawn on the sheet of paper. But the line cannot hold its rigidity.

Move your head, and the straight line bends.

There is only one point from which the reflection is straight.

Lift or lower your head and the line bends either at its edge or in the centre. Viewing becomes a balancing act. It gets worse, or better. The drawing on the paper sits firmly in its two dimensions.

The reflection gets a quality of depth. The reflection is not on the surface of the mirror, but inside of its surface, varying in its apparent depth according to the focal distance. Marks closer to the bottom of the mirror are closer to the surface of the mirror (appear in the foreground), those at the edge of the paper appear further away, somewhere in the centre of the cylinder. A drawing of a landscape presents its own depth.

The mirror condenses the marks. A bean-shaped extended head on the paper becomes a conventionally proportioned head in the reflection: the marks in the extended drawing are condensed in the reflection. Midtones become richer. A whole new way of drawing has to be learned. Or rather it presents itself, inviting the artist to learn and revel in its grammar. P

JANE TAYLOR

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Always, the Kentridge line is on the move. P

Self-Portrait in the Third Person Ubu drawing (Cartographer), 1997 Drawing

William kentridge

The Ubu projects, Ubu Tells the Truth and Ubu & the Truth Commission, arose out of a collision between two projects, one of which had to do with a live dancer and animated projections, and a separate project with Handspring Puppet Company about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which used the recorded archival evidence of witnesses from that commission. The two projects overlapped and I ran out of time and so the two were smashed together in the hope that the burlesque of Ubu and the archival images and texts from the Truth Commission would magnify rather than reduce each other.

For the series of eight Ubu etchings I needed a double image which used the convention of Jarry’s original drawings of Ubu (the pointed head, the round belly with a spiral on it); but I also needed something more fleshy and visceral. For that visceral element, the ball of my hand, my thumb or fingerprint served as a mark on the soft ground of the etching plate. The crinkles and marks of my thumbprint became the crinkles of an aged and damaged flesh in the Ubu character. P

JANE TAYLOR

It is worth noting that at roughly this moment of Kentridge’s creative output, in his Soho films the figure of the worldly Soho Eckstein becomes increasingly identified with the artist, and the blithe young man, Felix Teitelbaum, with whom the artist had been identified in the early films, exits the scene.

In the Ubu project Kentridge inserts himself into the frame of forensic investigation, implicating himself through the fingerprint which is also the mark with which he undertakes these ironised ‘self-portraits in the third person’. As artist and image he is both accuser and accused.

The cartographer is aligned with the project of empire, but also with Mercator’s projections, with perspectival arts, with modes of figuration. P

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Self-Portrait in the Fourth Person Ubu drawing (Drawing Man), 1997 Drawing

William kentridge

For the actual positions and drawings of the fleshy Ubu in these double prints, I needed a reference. I used photographs of myself doing the most ridiculous series of acts. These were not acts made by me, but as made by Ubu: riding a bicycle naked, doing a large gestural drawing while standing naked in the studio. These were things that were impossible for me to do, but very easy for that idiot who was performing Ubu. These photographs became the references for the fleshy fingerprint drawings of the character Ubu. Long after the etchings were made, a series of large-scale quick drawings were made with ink, with bitumen, with turpentine, with charcoal dust, with pastel, with a bicycle riding over the surface of the paper – in order to produce a kind of enlarged finger-print of marks across the flesh of Ubu. In others there was sometimes literally a beating of the paper with a rope dipped in either ink or charcoal dust to make the body of Ubu out of the history of damage done to the piece of paper.

So essentially the piece of paper is damaged with these series of marks and abrasions and acts, and then the figure is outlined in black paint, giving rise to the figure of Ubu as a shape filled with these markings. P

JANE TAYLOR

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The art historian Joseph Leo Koerner has recently written about Kentridge’s art. One of Koerner’s celebrated studies is of Dürer and the moment of self-portraiture in German art. It is worth considering the Kentridge moments of self-portraiture in relation to Dürer’s great portrait of himself as Christ. Here we have, as it were, Kentridge as fallen man, if not anti-Christ. P

Sometimes, Sometimes Not Four Paper Heads, 2007 Three-dimensional lithographs

William kentridge

What is evident here is the shift between drawing and sculpture, between a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional object.

The Four Heads were dull portraits. Each one is made of two heads slotted into each other and the portrait is primarily drawn. It’s a two-dimensional form; two drawings interlinked and crossed into each other, so it’s somewhere between paper sculpture and sculpture and a series of lithographs. In fact, they were drawn on lithographic stone or lithographic plates and printed and stuck on to cardboard and stuck together.

And they’re a mixture. They’re play between sculpture and drawing, but they’re also play between a portrait – given in the drawings of the features of a face, the eye, the ear, the hair, the mouth – and texts which are printed and part of the lithographic image of the head. “Could anyone be so much like me? Awful”, was one of the texts which was made at the time of my production of Shostakovich’s Nose. In fact, what we had done was use leftover texts made for The Nose.

In some ways they arise out of the transformer figures in Confessions of Zeno, an image that shifts. You shift a shadow ninety degrees and your hand (which is the shape of a hand), when turned by ninety degrees, becomes a rather fat bubbly single line. Just that action of twisting your wrist changes something from a fat line to a clear hand. This is also the case if you have two shadows pasted to one stick at ninety degrees to one another. Revolve the stick, and you can get two different images; one shadow puppet that makes two very different figures. P

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JANE TAYLOR

Kentridge had worked in these idioms in the opera we had developed (Confessions of Zeno). Kentridge notes that his early sculptural experiments were informed by his admiration for Giacometti. What has always intrigued me is that when Kentridge began to make sculptures, his early experiments were in the form of shadows, figures that are fundamentally two-dimensional.

In such terms he was setting himself an impossible task, to make three-dimensional works out of two-dimensional images. I ask him about the quandary.

This is his instructive response: I’m not a sculptor. I’m really not a sculptor. I’ve made a lot of sculpture, but it’s made as a drawing. Sometimes extruding something into space, sometimes working with the flatness of it, sometimes with the illusion of coherence of an image and allowing it to find itself. But I am not carving and not ‘finding something inside’ the material. I am not using a chisel the way I would use an eraser, where you can cut something off and repair it. The tact of a sculptor is always to be approaching the figure, and to stop when he reaches it. P

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Long-term drawing Self-portrait, 1998 Diptych drawing

William kentridge

You can’t escape who you are. Whatever the subject, in the end it is a reflection of yourself, your desires and fears.

The ostensible self-portrait is only the most obvious exemplar.

The geography of the head, the relation of nose to eyes and ears, the geometries of facial recognition are what we think of when we imagine a portrait. (And I am really not good at this. I always am drawn to watching the pavement portraitists making their quick – and often accurate – likenesses, trying to see how they get the proportions right.) My drawings often correspond to the description of a portrait as “a drawing of a face in which there is something wrong with the mouth”.¹ But the self-portrait is there also in the tentativeness of the drawing, or its decisive certainty, its arrogance, its beautiful marks. To paraphrase Graham Greene, “love of mark is love of self”.

Looking more widely, the self-portrait is also there in the subjects the artist chooses over the decades – and the negative self-portrait in the subjects avoided. A self-portrait of coffee pots and rhinoceroses. And the open space of that which is not drawn. P

1

John Singer Sargent is quoted as having said, “A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth,” and also, “Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend.”

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Jane Taylor

In the collection of drawings published as Everyone Their Own Projector, Kentridge includes a profile self-portrait, which is bounded by the two statements: “YOU WILL FIND NO NEW LANDS / YOU WILL FIND NO OTHER SEAS”. This double concession situates the hubristic being (in Freud’s terms, the bolstered ego of “His Majesty the Baby”) in relation to the reality principle. It simultaneously locates Kentridge as an heir to a colonial tradition, whether accepted or not, in which the grand imperative to voyage and conquer is at least in part constitutive of the self. Here ambition wrestles with an innate self of inevitable limitations, potential failure.

In recent works Kentridge has taken himself as his subject matter. However, here he is generally making antiheroic figures, crossed by ambiguity, very often expressed through multiples or doubles. P

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You Will Find No New Lands Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008 Artist’s book

William kentridge

Jane Taylor

All I could remember were seven things I had forgotten.

As if thoughts could spin a barbed-wire cocoon of calm.

It had to do with . . .

It had to do with Reliable anti-futurists.

Refuse the three-point perspective.

Follow the minutes of a long hour.

A biography becomes a series of dots.

Here it ended further. P

In an early experiment Kentridge generated a cycle of drawings, many of which were deployed on the recto and verso pages of a book to suggest the double-sided figure of a man and his nose, as two aspects of one being. This inaugurated a particular mode of inventiveness within the book form for Kentridge, and his exuberant embrace of the double image (as explored in the stereoscopic experiments) continued to flourish.

The dialogue between left- and right-hand pages has a contrapuntal playfulness.

Kentridge provides me with the following notes on the book: This was one of the first books I made where I tried to find the balance between something you read and something you look at. There are drawings and there is a text that floats across the book, not as a coherent argument, but at the edges of being a coherent argument. The book was published

by Captures, an imprint of Éditions Valérie Cudel, a French publisher of artists’ books. They do about two books a year.

I also did the Cyclopedia of Drawing with Captures, which is the second flip book that I had made. P

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Preamble Parcours d’atelier, 2007 Drawing

William kentridge

You have the drawing, the fact of the drawing, and you have the making of the drawing. And the drawing itself is a record of the history of its making. All the damage, marks, destructions, whatever is done to the sheet of paper is more or less visible and present in the final image of the drawing, but can be reconstructed as the history of the making of the drawing.

But there is also a preamble to the making of the drawing, which is invisible on the drawing. This has to do with the gathering of the energy for the beginning of the mark of the drawing.

With me, that’s circling the studio. Many laps walking around the studio trying to gather the energy in the muscles, in the impulse before the paper is touched. It’s the circling and the gathering of energy interrupted by procrastinations – by looking at the e-mail, by choosing which piece of music to listen to, by making a cup of tea, by putting the cat out, by changing the music, by checking the e-mail once more – until there is a circling and a gathering and an energy arrives for the first impulse to be made. And from that first impulse, the drawing becomes visible.

With Parcours d’atelier, what I wanted to show was all the invisible drawing that is there before the first mark is made, the thought before the first word is spoken. No, more than that. The incoherent darting around to different fragments of thought that leap from one idea to another before they are stilled into the practice of the words in your head, before the word is spoken. P

JANE TAYLOR

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This process is not knowable from outside, except by its traces, the works of art. P

The New Era Telegrams from the Nose, 2007 Nine drawings

William kentridge

JANE TAYLOR

A man wakes up to find that he has lost his nose. Nikolai Gogol writes a short story about the man’s attempts to find the missing proboscis and to reattach it to his face. Gogol considers the story that he has just recounted, concluding that it is a strange and improbable tale. Not only is it very odd for a nose to disappear from a man’s face, only to reappear baked inside a loaf of bread, but it’s even more absurd to imagine that he could persuade the newspaper to let him take out an advertisement looking for his nose. This is not about money. It is about the impropriety of the newspaper and advertisements for lost noses. “Why do authors write stories like this?” Gogol asks.

“It’s no good for the country, although in truth it does no harm either. But why write about it? Such things may happen, but they do not happen often.” P In working toward his 2010 production of Shostakovich’s The Nose (for the New York Met), Kentridge engaged in an almost endless exploration of visual languages, seeking to find a way to represent the human nose as a character on what is physically one of the world’s largest stages.

The drawings find ways of exploring various modernist text forms, figure the visual field of censorship and comment on modernity and Soviet media idioms. P

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The Over–determined Branch The Over–determined Branch, 2013 Drawing

William kentridge

The book demands its meaning.

Burying earth in earth.

Flavouring water with water.

Ink over ink.

Even as I read the poem, I miss the poem.

The gathering together of a dictionary. A page of the dictionary comes towards you, but what comes is not only the words and the meaning of the words, but the image of the Victorians in the garden shed and their index cards upon which they are gathering their meanings.

People around the world, readers around the world, send in the etymologies on the index cards to become part of the vast project of making the dictionary.² Specific entries reach you, but there is also a flowering and enleafing of the trunks and branches that flow through the brain, of associations, phrases, thoughts, memories that were neither there in the pages, nor present in your head before the pages.

A dictionary is not the same size as a head, although it is quite close, and the thousands of pages in the dictionary do not even begin to match the uncountable number of thoughts, associations, flashes of ideas that zoom around inside the head. But nonetheless there is something of the weight and pages enclosed within the covers of a dictionary that has an association with the memories, the thoughts, the knowledges of different kinds, that we have inside our heads.

And the drawings on the different pages of the book do not try to give a map of the way they think, but rather put a marker for the processes, unpredictability and marvels of association that we produce in our heads all the time. P

2

Simon Winchester’s book The Surgeon of Crowthorne recounts the making of the Oxford English Dictionary by means of countless Victorian voluntary public contributions.

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Jane Taylor

Kentridge mails me a note: “‘Even as I read the poem, I miss the poem’ was sparked by a fabulous haiku by Basho which maybe you could find, about while walking in Kyoto, I miss Kyoto.”

Even in Kyoto – Hearing the cuckoo’s cry – I long for Kyoto P

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The Same But Different The Hope in the Charcoal Cloud, 2014 Drawing

William kentridge

The pages of a book are like the frames of a film: four hundred pages for a good book, a thousand pages for a long book.

Not quite the same as the hundred and fifty thousand frames for a hundred-minute film, but nonetheless dividing a large project into a discrete number of individual images or frames that can be looked at by themselves.

When one is looking at a film, the frames themselves disappear, and if one does an animation on a clear sheet of paper, the support of the film also disappears and what you see is the subject moving: the person lifting his arm, walking across a field. But if one is drawing on the pages of a book like a dictionary, or any book which has pages each of which is slightly different even though their form is the same, you become aware of the flickering of the frame in the background. You’re made aware that the movement is constructed by these fragments, which signal the passage of time.

The different flickering changes of the pages as each frame goes past (and in fact each page is held for two frames – that is to say for a twelfth of a second, and not a twenty-fifth of a second as it would be if one turned a page on every frame) also have within them an anxiety for what we have missed.

What was that last page?

What was that last page?

What was that last page? – Even as the next one has come, and gone, and passed.

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The anxiety is not dissimilar from the panic of hours, days, minutes, months disappearing so irrevocably. One walks through the world but walking with you are all those invisible things around you: anxieties, desires, thoughts, wishes for what one would be or who one is, like the texts flickering behind the figures on the pages of the book.

Yes, I know that is there, but really it’s also about the shape, the font, the columns of text, the tooth of the paper, being held by the odd words of the dictionary that jump out at you while you’re in the process of drawing: ogee, obloid, omphalos, ovoid . . . P Jane Taylor

Kentridge invites me to add words to the potentially infinite list, but I conjure up only three: odiferous, obfuscating, oink. P

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Growing A Tree 2nd Hand Reading, 2013 Ink drawing

William kentridge

To live with a tree for fifty years is a sign of privilege and surplus.

To not need the tree for either wood or fire is a luxury. When I was nine years old we planted some white stinkwoods in the garden, two white stinkwood trees in the garden. All my childhood I waited for the trees to grow, to be strong enough to hold a hammock. They refused.

Twenty years later I returned to live in the house with my family and the tree was mature. Fifteen years later, the trees were magnificent.

And then one of them was struck by lightning and died. The shock, not just the hole in the shade canopy, the gap in the garden, but rather the shaking of the belief that a tree is a gift for future generations or – if not for future generations – then at least for other people . . . Its lifespan should be so much longer. How could the tree die before me?

No. If the tree could die, how vulnerable are we or am I? I’d really meant to write about the making of the tree page by page, growing it from the trunk up, filling the branches with paper leaves and with the marks of the bad brush, the ink in the bark: a tree you could disassemble into its pages and hide in a library, like hiding a book in a forest. P

Jane Taylor

Kentridge has a deep sense of the matter of his artistic practice, and so the paper and the charcoal are both in a substantial way (literally so) present for him in TREE. It is thus rather striking to observe the teasing out of thought, as Kentridge considers his material resources.

Johannesburg is by repute the largest human-made forest in the world, with over ten million trees. This reputation serves to register the massive asymmetries of wealth and ease within a city built on mine labour, with sprawling townships that are marked for their treelessness. It is striking that the tree (as paper, as charcoal, as wood, as organic presence) is so powerful in Kentridge’s sensibility, and integral to his creative endeavour. P

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Poems I Used to Know I Receiver, 2005 Book of Wislawa Szymborska poems and William Kentridge etchings

Four A.M. The hour between night and day.

The hour between toss and turn.

The hour of thirty-year-olds.

The hour swept clean for roosters’ crowing.

The hour when the earth takes back its warm embrace.

The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars.

The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace.

Empty hour.

Hollow. Vain.

Rock bottom of all the other hours.

No one feels fine at four a.m.

If ants feel fine at four a.m., we’re happy for the ants. And let five a.m. come if we’ve got to go on living.

—Wislawa Szymborska³ P

3

Szymborska, Wislawa. Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997: translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. New York, 1998: p 9.

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Poems I Used to Know II Seven additional unbound prints for Receiver, 2005 Etchings

William kentridge

A book is often understood to be a support for its content, whether image or text, or both. It is in these terms both material and immaterial.

And: materially, books classically arise as the embedding of ideas in the matter of paper and ink. Many books, particularly artists’ books, have particular emphases on some or other of these elements. With the standard press, the starting point is the typeface and, more than that, the metal typeface hitting the paper, the letterpress printing, the hot lead casting of the typefaces, the rooms and rooms of rows and drawers of letters waiting to be used.

Dieu Donné, the publisher and collaborator on Receiver, is a paper mill – and it is from the idea of the paper that the book was to develop. What kind of paper, what thickness, what kind of images can be on it? This then became a question of considering what thought, what series of images or texts, might relate to that paper, might in fact arise from that paper.

With Receiver we were working with the wonderful printer Randy Hemminghaus and the impossible paper of abaca, which in some ways is the enemy of etching. It’s hard, it’s unabsorbent, all the things that you don’t want a sheet of paper to have if it’s going to record all the finest details of the plate. In this case, the book is a battle between the printmaker and the paper in forcing the paper to accept the fineness of the line without destroying it. And in fact many, many copies of each print did destroy the paper. And it’s a testament to the tact of the papermaker and of the printer who enabled us to print etchings on these hard but semi-transparent abaca sheets of paper.

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And then of course comes the question of what the book will be about, what images will be there, what the meaning of them together will be. But with Receiver, Szymborska’s poems are vital. The etchings that I’ve made have their place there, but when handling the book it becomes about the question of the nature of these objects we have been so tied to for so many centuries. It is about the nature of the book itself.

What is the difference between reading and looking? Does one read an image in the same way one reads a poem? There is some evidence that these habits are culturally specific and the way a picture is read in the West is informed by the ways in which we read text, but that this is not universal. When one reads a poem, does one also allow one’s eye to jump back to different lines and phrases within the poem as a secondary reading?

All of the images in the catalogue are deeply mediated, translated (as it were) because of changes in context, scale, media. In this instance the particular shift arises because of the difference in paper, an often invisible support. P Jane Taylor

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Kentridge notes that the book was made as a gift to his wife, Anne, as Szymborska is her favourite poet. The images were made especially for the book, but not the poems. So it was not a collaboration as such, but rather “both of us bringing work to it”. P

Panic Picnic Walking Man, 2000 Linocut print

William kentridge

A man takes the only job he can find: that of a watchdog. In the end he becomes that dog, with his speech finally giving way to barking. This nightmare/dream is from an agitprop piece of theatre in which I performed, back in the 1980s. (I played the boss in a pinstripe suit.)

Here, by analogy, is the man carrying the tree, who becomes the tree. My references, too, are also surely from Ovid’s exploration of the panic that accompanies all metamorphoses. Trying to escape a husband’s murderous rage, a woman turns into a bird and flies away.

Daphne, fleeing the attentions of Apollo, turns into a laurel tree.

And of course Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane.

I thought of none of these connections while making the linocut, but I presume all were there in some antechamber of the brain, watching my blindness. P

Jane Taylor

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Several years ago, when I was working with Kentridge on making a new opera, Confessions of Zeno, based on a novel by Italo Svevo, we committed ourselves to making dream figures that were shadow puppets that stalked the horizon of our primary character’s mental landscape. Several of the figures were prototransformers, figures who had two distinct profiles and could switch from one to another within an elegant and pretty easy swivel of the puppet from one profile to another, changing from innocent figure to bizarre conglomerate. At some point these dreamscapes were historically grounded, as WWI entered the frame of the work and persons and trees began to merge into one another, stalking across the landscape. These figures in some ways gave rise to Kentridge’s experiments in two- and three-dimensional forms, with figures that read as one thing in a particular frame, and as something else if read from ninety degrees. P

Calcium Carbonate Learning the Flute, 2003 Projection on blackboard

William kentridge

A blackboard, a stick of chalk. The materials are enough to set everything in motion. Dots of white on black. The night sky.

The swipe of a cloth. The luminous grey of the nebula in Orion, the haze of the Milky Way. Join the dots and you have constellations. Not necessarily the impossible constellations of the Greeks, but contemporary images waiting to be seen in the sky (a boot, a spade, a primus stove – these, in the theatre production of Woyzeck; the first time I had made these constellations).

In the ZauberflĂśte there are constellations of Isis, of Anubis, of the sphinx. Draw an ellipse and you have both a school geometry lesson and the orbit of a planet. Set the drawings in motion (draw, rub out, redraw, rub out, redraw . . .). Fit the perigee and apogee to the crescendos and diminuendos of the voice and the singer moves all the heavens . . . P

Jane Taylor

. . . and our souls. The conjunctions of cosmic and the aural sublime meet one another, declaiming the mathematical necessity in composition.

The earliest flutes are made from bone. A flute that is 35,000 to 40,000 years old was found about a decade ago, in a trove of human detritus in a cave, Hohle Fels, just north of the Danube Valley (near to where the earliest Homo sapiens would have crossed to Europe from Africa). This flute is broken off at one end, but has five finger-holes, apparently carved by stone tools.

These various bone flutes have afforded the cave the status of a World Heritage Site.

DNA has been extracted from human femur bone fragments from the Hohle Fels cave. P

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View-Master Drawing for Preparing the Flute, 2005 Tondo drawing

William kentridge

The images I recall would have been the size of the nail of my baby finger now, although I suppose for a child they would have been the size of a child’s thumb-nail.

I am thinking of a miniature series of images put into a plastic View-Master – in fact they were made of Bakelite, in my memory. There was a trigger one would depress to advance the images, and in astonishing three-dimensionality we would have whole worlds revealed to us.

The circular drawing for Learning The Flute is a miniature of the large projection, but it is also an enlargement from that minute scale of the View-Master in which I imagined people performing on theatre stages who had been shrunk down to even smaller figures that would fit into a gramophone to play the music on records. These are illusions from my childhood.

A tondo is always disconcerting. We lose the certainty of a horizon line, the edge of a frame that gives us the clarity of what’s up and what’s down, and one can set the world spinning by imagining or actually setting the tondo or circular drawing in motion. So it is a movement, a sky map, a printed book, or it has a circular sky map turning, as in the night sky for the ‘Queen of the Night’ aria in The Magic Flute. Or it shows different windows into the world which one sees either in a stereoscopic View-Master slide or in the different windows that make up the circular drawing for the image in The Magic Flute. P

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Jane Taylor

Kentridge has in various ways explored strategies for representing the danse macabre of the human being moving through time and space. The tondo is a space/time compression of the alternative strategy to the ‘Progress’ form deployed in several recent works. The tondo has the advantage of hypothetical infinity, as the pursuit has no delimited end.

The image is in the form used by Kentridge in his theatre work, with drawings arrayed around a disc that is spun and filmed in order to create visual dynamism or, in certain cases, the illusion of movement or passage.

His Refusal of Time and his What Will Come (has already come) are both structured simultaneously inside a scrutiny of linear/ historical time as well as the reiterative temporality of trauma’s repetitions and regression. Many of his works seem to be seeking to manage both of these operations at once. This motif will be addressed in the comments below on Tide Table.

An early experiment with figures trapped pacing back and forth inside a closed form can be found in Medicine Chest, a film that represents the shelves of the medicine cabinet as miniature horizons which do not release their captives. P

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Paper Theatre Drawing for Preparing the Flute, 2005 Drawing

William kentridge

A model has been made of a theatrical stage and a drawing is done to fit the model. From this drawing a canvas painting is done, a theatre backdrop forty times the size of the original drawing, fifteen metres wide rather than eighty centimetres wide. But the paper drawing is the original and, in a way, the miniature theatre with which I have worked in my studio is the original. The painted canvas backdrop is the copy – a rather bloated copy. The singers feel like bloated enlargements of the paper cut-out figures that I have been moving around inside the model. One is caught between wanting to see the model as a miniature version of the stage production (which is a model of the huge world) and, when we do see the huge world, imagining it as an enlargement of the stage show (which is itself an inflated studio toy theatre).

The drawing is a drawing in itself, but it is an applied drawing, a drawing made in the service of what it will become as it is bastardised into the large painted backdrop on the stage.

Its position is indeterminate: on the one hand absolutely the original – on the other hand, simply a preparatory and necessary stage in something that will be achieved on stage. But of course, the stage production is finished and gone; even the model is no longer there, and what remains is the original drawing, eighty centimetres wide. P

94

Jane Taylor

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Kentridge here thinks aloud about the relation between the work of art and the applied work of art, in a sense asking himself about the distinction he is making between the two. There is a substantial discussion of these questions in the final third of the ‘conversation’ pages in this catalogue. There he considers his often rather enigmatic drawings that are constituted out of bureaucratic lists – names of the dead, or lists of supplies.

These textual inscriptions provide evidence of what the archive has shown: that the compelling trace of a human tragedy is as likely to be held in an accounting record or a bill of sale as in a drawing of human beings in human pursuits. Such documents are necessary for the colonial endeavour and in the pursuit of capital accumulation. Kentridge also meditates on those drawings that he generates as ‘seconds’ – rough disposables that originate as working copies of finished drawings. These looser versions are understood by Kentridge to be produced in order to be sacrificed to the time arts of his film-making (where a drawing will be ‘covered over’ or ‘ruined ‘ in some way). However, on occasion, these rough versions end up providing him with greater aesthetic joy, as they are less arch than the originals as works; and so in the end, on occasion, the first drawing will be the one sacrificed to the film-maker, and the duplicate will step up to become the elevated drawing. P

Catching Neutrinos Bird Catching, from The Magic Flute, 2006 Suite of ten etchings

William kentridge

An etching is the record of damage done. It leaves the traces of the damage done to the copper plate. Every abrasure, every line etched into it, every biting bitten into the copper by an acid is there, it is held, and will be released as evidence when the print is made.

In a way, the etching is a hard negative; a negative in copper, rather than the familiar chemical processing of a photographic negative to make the positive print. Here there is the inking, the hand-wiping, the dampening of the paper, and the sending of the paper through the press. This reveals not the tonal opposite of the negative, but rather the mirror opposite of the negative plate. It’s a kind of alchemy of copper: catching the time of the hand with the burin or engraving tool or dry-point needle that was used to gouge into the copper, to leave a mark of damage.

Everything is held in the copper. Whether it is Papageno jumping to catch birds or the birds in flight, it is about capturing time, the time of making, in the copper.

The birds are all taken from the pages of Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa, an ornithological guidebook that shows that one can most effectively capture the bird as species in a watercolour rather than a photograph. Any photograph will represent the bird as an individual, with its own tail feathers, its own curious cap of inky black markings, its own beak. The photographs give the detail of the specific individual, but not the generic character of the bird group, which is where the drawings succeed.

But still, I wish these were better portraits of birds. P

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JANE TAYLOR

For some years Kentridge has been engaged with making portraits of birds. One significant hyperrealist work, almost forensic in its observation, was a massively upscaled drawing of a dead dove that had been found in the garden. In recent years Kentridge has made several bird portraits of varying wit and elegance, often with rapid but deft brushstrokes and marks that gesture toward classes of birds but that resist the imperative to be any individual one. More recently much of his attention has been diverted from the bird study to the exploration of birds in flight. One might postulate that classification and migration have been folded into a single question of the fixing of identity.

Other Faces is a recent film that develops these enquiries through looking at the autobiography in relation to lineage, mobility, generation and geography. It uses the flight of birds as a key metaphor for ‘the fugitive’, with regard both to memory and person. P

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Even Now Drawing for Woyzeck on the Highveld, 1992 Drawing

William kentridge

“If we ever get to heaven, we’d have to help make the thunder.”

Büchner was writing about the desperation of poverty in 1837.

Woyzeck on the Highveld was made in 1992 and Büchner’s equation of poverty, desperation and ‘the bleakness of life becoming the bleakness of landscape’ held true. The question of doing the production was a question of trying to make sense of the continuity rather than the differences between the military world of Prussia and the industrial and (almost) postindustrial world of South Africa.

It is an unredeemed landscape. One has a sense in Johannesburg of the mine-owners living in the leafy suburbs with a lush softness around them; that the world they have created and upon which their leafiness depends is this bleak world of civil engineering, dry grass and harsh light. For them, the inside of a factory is where the work is done that generates the surplus they demand, and from which they can retreat, but for the people working there, the Woyzecks, this is all their world from which there is no escape. |The burnt dry landscape is their world.

I started calling myself an artist in my thirties when I discovered not just the necessity but the pleasure of drawing the landscape just to the south of Johannesburg, to the south of the leafy suburb I lived in. And also when I discovered the pleasure of a soft chamois leather dipped into charcoal dust and wiped across the white surface of the paper, leaving not just a train of dark charcoal grit on the paper but also of a darkening sky above a light horizon. P

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Jane TAYLOR

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Woyzeck on the Highveld was Kentridge’s first collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, and it precipitated an ongoing endeavour in mutual provocation that has lasted for decades.

One of the important disclosures that arose from this inaugural joint venture was the discovery that a landscape drawn and filmed by Kentridge can, in the puppet theatre, function in several ways at once. Most significantly, it can provide a ‘virtual set’ if it is filmed and projected on to the back wall of the puppet theatre. In this sense it provides the illusion of a literal, three-dimensional space within which the action can be dramatised. At the same time, with the incremental supplement of various signifying details, the landscape as drawn could include various elements that might allude to a texture of mood or provide a symbolic and metaphoric subtext of a scene, or even suggest the inner landscape of a character, providing an environment within which the thought and affective universe of the puppet might be represented. P

All That Walk Nose 1 (Scissors), 2007 Bronze

William kentridge

THE GENERAL: In Gogol’s short story and in Shostakovich’s opera the need of Kovalyov is to find his nose and the need of the nose is to stay absent, to abscond. In order to abscond, what the nose needs are legs. It does not need arms, it does not need a back. And the legs – in the scale model – are anything that has the principle of propulsion and ambulatory movement inside them.

So every pair of scissors, every set of geometrical compasses, every calliper, every pair of secateurs has in their pivot, in the centre, the possibility of legs walking. And if you turn a pair of scissors upside down or work with a pair of secateurs, it’s not that one has to imagine them as legs; the idea of legs arises from within the secateurs. It doesn’t take great imagination to see the pair of scissors as a pair of legs. It takes an act of blindness to not see them as a pair of legs.

THE SPECIFIC: But to put a nose on stage one needs a nose that a person can hide inside in order to move about, so a small retroussé snub nose would not work. One needs a nose with a certain heft. For this I used a good Ashkenazi Jewish nose, I suppose a self-portrait, the nose as a self-portrait. One can do a self-portrait in many different forms. This would be ‘nose as self-portrait’ but one could as easily make a ‘coffee pot as self-portrait’. Or a self-portrait of all the objects one has drawn or made and a negative self-portrait in all those, in the gaps left, seeing oneself in the gaps left of all the objects not drawn and subjects not completed. So if the nose walking is a self-portrait, then I suppose the legs have to, in one sense or another, also be a portrait of my legs, in which case the rather thin handles of a pair of pliers or tin snips seem more appropriate than the moulded and shaped and fat legs of a pair of secateurs.

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The books on which the nose stands (the sculpture-stand) are a kind of miniature plinth, and because a lot of the work on the opera The Nose started with a theatrical model, many of the household objects used in that theatrical model – say, the bottom half of a moka coffee pot as the base for a table – in fact became the model for what was enlarged on stage. So the coffee table we had on stage was simply an enlargement of the moka coffee pot we’d used in the model. There’s always a shrinking and expansion, and it’s difficult to say which is primary and which is secondary. Is the stage the primary and the model the secondary, although the coffee pot and the thin legs of the pair of tin snips are the actual primary? Are the thin legs of the tin snips trying to copy my legs or are my legs longing to be the tin snips? P JANE TAYLOR

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Irresistible anthropomorphism. So that is your practice? P

The Passionate Absurd I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008 Installation of eight projections

William kentridge

I have named these scenes ‘the passionate absurd’ – and I mean, not ‘absurd’ in the sense of a joke, a folly, or the ridiculous, but rather to invoke a logic that has gone awry, where the rules of logic cease to apply.

I have quoted from the plenary session in which Stalin’s sometime favourite, Bukharin, is having to battle for his life against the accusations of the Central Committee, much as others had in prior years battled to save themselves from Bukharin’s ideological violence.

Ironically, Bukharin is caught up within his own mistrust of language.

To the Party’s insistence that he should be thrown into prison, he can respond only with the plea, “Comrades, I am speaking sincerely.”

Their rejoinder is “Oh, we accuse you sincerely.”

He asks of Stalin, “But Comrade Stalin, I need to know, when you said I was guilty, did you really think I was guilty or were you being strategic?”

Here a lie is acceptable if it is in the service of something else, such as, in this instance, the Party. The grim court records include the note, at several points, “Laughter in the room”, leaving a linguistic trace of the ethos of vicious factional fighting and character assassination.

I am conscious on reflection here of the use of grotesque cartoons in Ubu & the Truth Commission as one means of considering textures of meaning behind the Truth Commission hearings. One brings these things into a dialogue not in order that they cancel each other out but so that the juxtaposition will amplify the meanings implicit in both.

In working on Ubu & the Truth Commission we were committed to exploring how closely one could bring the grotesque and the serious into a productive collision through art. Because of the strange discomfort of the absurdity of the cartoon drawings, one could somehow observe the archival images with greater clarity. P

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JANE TAYLOR

Shostakovich’s opera The Nose is the composer’s response to the violent absurdity of the times in which he lived, and is at the same time a tribute to the comic genius of Gogol. Kentridge situates his interpretation precisely within his own world historical context while deploying the archive of Stalin’s notorious show trials that oversaw the purging and execution of countless political opponents. Bukharin was a Bolshevik and a significant ideologue, and his Imperialism and World Economy influenced Lenin, even though Bukharin would come to be regarded with some suspicion

by Lenin for his links with the European Left and his antistatism.

Bukharin contributed to Stalin’s paper of great significance for South African history, Marxism and the National Question.

He had worked closely with Lenin and Trotsky, and his Bolshevik convictions gave him a leading place as editor of Pravda – the party media instrument that terrorised Shostakovich for much of his career, which Stalin would use to accuse the composer of ‘formalism’.

Over the years Bukharin moved from his position as a leftist economic theorist to the right, becoming aligned with Stalinist economic policies. He rose to become General Secretary of the executive committee of the Comintern and was aligned against Trotsky; however, he deviated from Stalin’s position on forced collectivisation, and wrote of the brutalising damage done to communists involved in the slaughter of the kulaks: “They are no longer human beings. They have truly become the cogs in a terrible machine.” ⁴ Ultimately Bukharin was outmanoeuvred and his shifts in ideology were used against him. Personal documents and tapped conversations provided evidence in a grim and often grotesque show trial, that turned on a fine-grained interpretation of sincerity. He was executed in 1938. The characterisation of Bukharin as the type of ‘the nose’ suggests the mortal intimacy of the Stalinism regime. P

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Nicolaevsky, Boris. Power and the Soviet Elite. New York, 1965: pp 18-19.

A Drawing as Big as the World Drawing for 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, 2003 Collage drawing

William kentridge

Borges writes about the ambitious geographer who wanted such an accurate map of the world that it was drawn at a scale of one-toone, ultimately covering every object with a map that matches it in size. The drawing for the Méliès films is a real-scale drawing. In other words, it is not a drawing of the theatre set, of the backdrop to the projection; rather, it is the backdrop for the making of the film, with chairs drawn to an exact scale as a virtual copy of real chairs.

The marks are not representations of a drawing used in the film, but are the actual sheets of paper that we used in the film, which hover between being drawings in themselves and the film – that is, a record of the film which can itself vary in scale when shown, depending on the size of the projection. It has thus far never been projected at full scale; it’s always been shown considerably smaller – almost as if one has to expand the screen to the size of a room in order to make the film, and then contract it back down again, back into the insides of the camera, and from there into the insides of the projector, and then back on to the projected surface of the screen or wall.

It’s rather like an enlargement of those old backdrops that people would stand in front of in order to have their photographs taken, or the more archaic costume cut-outs in the photographer’s studio, with a space for the photographed subject to position their head in order to be photographed within some other world or context.

My mimicry was of my studio and my spaceship as one thing. It was as if I drew the context (the inside of the spaceship) and then stood in front of it, in order to be inside the spaceship. This was done at the scale of myself. Drawing my studio and putting drawings on my wall, to resemble a studio with drawings on the wall, reminded me of the Borgesian endeavour. Here is a one-to-one scale-drawing of the studio placed into the studio in order to remind myself that I am in the studio, and that the journey to the moon doesn’t need to step beyond the bounds of the studio itself. P

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JANE TAYLOR

Kentridge has often noted that he constantly reworks questions that he has explored elsewhere. The photographer’s studio backdrop is a significant element in the film Other Faces, when bystanders posing for a street photographer observe an episode of road rage as two drivers whose cars have collided engage in robust verbal sparring, each of them contesting for their right to dominate the road. I AM NOTHING & SHOULD BE EVERYTHING is flashed across the screen, as if a cosmic conflict is under way.⁵ The onlookers stand posing in front of the taut screens of cloth that constitute two-dimensional ‘figures’ of alternate worlds, contesting realities. P

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This is a quotation from Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

I Film My Eight-Year-Old Son 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, 2003 Installation of nine film projections

William kentridge

I film my eight-year-old son. He takes some pencils, some sheets of paper and a jar of black ink. With a sweep of his arm he throws the ink across the studio. It runs down the wall, and the throws the pencils over his shoulder. He tears the sheets of paper and scatters them.

We run this film in reverse. And there is a utopian return to perfection. The papers reconstruct themselves. Without looking, he catches all the pencils as they arrive above his shoulder.

He does not drop one. In the jar he catches the ink. He does not spill a drop. The wall is pristine. My son’s joy at his skill is overflowing. “Can I do it again?” he asks. “Yes,” I say, “but first we have to pick up the paper, gather the pencils and clean the wall.” P

JANE TAYLOR

While Kentridge was working toward his production of Mozart’s Magic Flute, he produced his 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, an exploration of the creative act which was also a meditation on the buffo comedy that enabled his interpretation of the birdcatcher, Papageno, in the opera.

In The Magic Flute the circling motif of a nucleus inside an atom is analogous to the spiralling spheres of the planets.

This is a question of scale. In the Day for Night tribute to Méliès’s film oeuvre, a column of ants is induced by Kentridge to follow sugar trails, and is filmed; the film is then digitally flipped into the negative, so that the ants can become pulsing white micro-organisms dancing as constellations in an infinite night sky.

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The meditation on the inversions of dark/light and day/night involves cinematic questions, certainly, about the classic cinema trick of filming in the day and changing the light values in order for a scene to read as night; however, within the context of Kentridge’s production of Mozart’s Magic Flute, it is also a meditation on the goods and evils of the Enlightenment (and its colonial legacies), which provides a filter for interpreting the opera’s contest between the Queen of the Night and Sarastro.

This battle is composed by Mozart as a contest between two vocal ranges pushed to the extreme: at the high end the soprano has to cope with F6 and at the low end Sarastro must manage F2. P

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Time in the Grey Pages Second-hand Reading, 2013 Flip-book film

William kentridge

This film is in a technical dialogue with my long-term exploration of the history of film and animation. It appears at a glance to be a filmed version of a flip book, with pages being rapidly ‘flipped’ to reveal various images of the figure of a man in perpetual agitated movement back and forth across the page, at times loping, at times pacing or running. The figure remains trapped always within the margins of each page, and never stepping into the gutter (as it were). The work is technically not a flip book but is made through projecting drawings of a pacing figure on to filmed pages of a book being turned, rather than figures actually being drawn on these pages. ⁶ One’s experience is like that of viewing a flip book, but it is also like a zoetrope because it’s one action that repeats itself again and again endlessly with a kind of circular form, that spirals the man back and forth without his ever escaping any one single page. This is suggestive for me of Borges’s Book of Sand, a book which ostensibly has neither beginning nor ending. P

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The introductory conversation in this catalogue (page 18) discusses how Secondhand Reading arose in response to an invitation to consider a commission.

That prompt arose from a curator giving Kentridge an oral account of a historical political prisoner who died incarcerated in a castle, and who had spent his years pacing back and forth. He was expecting his imminent release by a brother, though it was that brother who was ultimately responsible for his prolonged captivity.

In some terms, the ‘second-hand reading’ might describe the oral report given to Kentridge, or it might suggest the status of the trapped figure who is making his way through the book via an act of pacing, while we register this as an act of reading.

jane taylor

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The circular form discussed is a film, and thus a linear work that extends across time, but it is also in a dialogue with Kentridge’s tondo works, such as his drawing for Preparing the Flute. P

Counting Stitches Tableau des Finances et du Commerce de la partie Françoise de S. Domingue, 2011 Tapestry

William kentridge

Tapestry is a digital art. An image is divided precisely into an array of decisions, so many thousand across its width, so many thousand along its length. An X and Y axis of warp and weft, locating every decision precisely. Every line or shape in the initial drawing is mapped against the crossing of the threads.

Every gesture in the drawing is tamed into a series of exact moments. Does the line start at this thread or the next?

The indecision of the artist, every smudge of line, must be resolved into ‘here it stops, here it changes’. A new bobbin of a different coloured thread must be used from this point.

History repeats itself: weaving led the way to digital control.

The punch cards of early computers (so I am told) were based on punch cards used to control the heddles of eighteenth-century textile looms.

A tapestry is the opposite of a charcoal smudge or the blending of oil paint, the opposite of the indeterminacy of a glaze or varnish.

It feels closest to a digital video projection, which itself is a movable mural. The digital scale is not determined by the drawing on which it is based but is able to expand or contract (in each weaving of the drawing) according to the wall or screen it will inhabit. P

JANE TAYLOR

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Half-tones: does the eye see an infinity of them or, as language theorists like to tell us, do we see those colours that are available to us in language? Peter Hoeg plays with this conceit in Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, which introduces us to an astonishing array of definitions and descriptions of the frozen vapour. Are there only so many threads of distinct colour? P

“Translated from the Czech by J Carraway” Eight Figures, 2010 Drawing for linocut print

William kentridge

In the province of H, in the last century, a company of itinerant actors plied their trade between the villages surrounding the town of L. They rehearsed and performed the grand histories, the local scandals, the familiar fake folk tales of the region. But then their performances grew too familiar, the stories too often repeated, the tired gestures and the histrionic groans too predictable. The audiences dwindled.

In one village they were chased out by boys throwing stones and the village dogs barking. They were reduced to performing for themselves, staying in a barn, fed by the charity of a farmer, stepping on and off the carpet that was their stage to be both audience and performer.

In the end the only story was their story, the story of the company stepping on and off the carpet.

STOP!!!!! STOP. This is why I am an artist and not a writer.

I don’t know who the figures are. The windmill lady came from a drawing done on the West Coast of South Africa, looking at a windmill.

Some of the figures come from work on the Shostakovich opera The Nose. That is Tatlin’s Monument that one of the men is carrying away.

It is a gathering of figures from different projects, performers from different plays on stage together, ready to move from village to village . . .

STOP!!!!! STOP. P

JANE TAYLOR

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There is an obstinate return of known characters (familiars) who populate the Kentridge landscape. This would not be surprising to Freud, who was resolved in his understanding that everyone new that we encounter takes on the old jacket and familiar boots of the family member. Relations, however invigorating and inventive, are necessarily given the task of acting out familiar roles. It is no surprise then that the figures here have appeared before, and that they carry off the detritus from tasks previously undertaken, and that they stride forth as shadows of a past event within a perpetual present. P

Soho on the Beach Tide Table, 2003 Animated charcoal-drawing film

William kentridge

There are at least four generations in the film. The founding image is my grandfather in his homburg and pinstripe suit on a deckchair on Muizenberg beach. Next to him is my father at eight years of age with his primary-school cap on his head and his brother sitting beside him.

Now, after I’d made Tide Table, I realised of course I’d already drawn the man in the deckchair in an early linocut based on my grandfather from that family photo – and in fact my memory was wrong.

The deckchair had the pinstripes, not the suit of the man sitting in it.

By the time I made Tide Table I was a similar age to my grandfather in the photo. I was slightly younger, but my son was more or less the same age my father was in that photograph. So in the film I and my grandfather are, in a way, mixed together, and my son becomes an image of a younger self rather than necessarily a son – even though the reference is back to my father. There is a compression of time with us playing different roles: my grandfather, my father, myself, and my son.

The boy skipping stones on the beach is my father, but in making the drawings for the film I had my son staging the scene.

But my son, Sam, is left–handed, and my father is right-handed, and I too am right-handed. The older self throws a stone right-handed, the old Soho throws a stone right-handed, but his younger self throws the stone left-handed. This was a detail that my brother noticed when he watched the film and wrote about it. He was watching the film more closely than I ever did.

That’s something that people watching the film can perhaps look out for. P

JANE TAYLOR

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Kentridge’s recent meditations on Time have agitated the distinctions between historical time and cosmic time, as two orders of logic.

This film is grounded very distinctly in the context of the emergent AIDS crisis of the Mbeki presidency: however, it also charts the reiterative oceanic rise and fall, with a memorable image that conflates the cyclical movement of wave action with a graph of the stock market’s rise and fall. P

Harlequin Semaphore, from The Refusal of Time, 2011 Kinetic sculpture

William kentridge

Hector Berlioz, the composer, wrote a short story describing a conductor who had an orchestra dispersed amongst several villages across the hills, and he conducted this orchestra using an oversized mechanical telegraph machine, the kind of semaphore machine that was used in the days before electric telegraphy, in order to send either military or other messages from hilltop to hilltop. Our semaphore machine is an enlargement of the human body. The body, instead of being one metre eighty high, is maybe three or four metres high. The arms, instead of simply having the width of one-and-a-half metres, have a three- or four-metre width, so that things which would be invisible to the human eye across a large distance can still be seen.

In the original design there’s a correlation between the movements of the operator and the movements of the large arms at the top of the semaphore. Lift your left arm and the left arm of the semaphore goes up. When making the semaphore machine for Refusal of Time, we did an inversion so that when your left arm goes up, the right arm of the semaphore goes up; if you dip your left shoulder, on the semaphore machine the left shoulder goes up. This has the effect of making the combination of operator and machine into a commedia dell’arte performer; where there’s a counteraction between the hips and the shoulders when everything is on the diagonal, when you drop your shoulder and lift your knee. I suspect this is largely not seen by the audience and it certainly made the operation of the machine very counterintuitive for the performers on stage.

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I would describe this as a failed machine. Not that it didn’t work – no, it did its work reliably – but that strange stylised dance I wanted to be visible between the operator and the machine was, I think, largely unseen by the audience. Attention was captured by many other things on the stage at the time it was being used. It stands in the exhibition as a kind of apology, sent into the corner. It should have a dunce cap on its head. P Jane Taylor

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The elision that Kentridge makes between human form and machine is integral to his aesthetic query. There is a mystical materialism at work here, and it informs the work with puppets, as well as the Small Bellows kinetic sculpture. In many of the self-portraits we get the sense that Kentridge is puzzling over the strange automaton – or performing bear – that is himself. P

A Pneumatic Sigh Small Bellows, 2011 Kinetic sculpture

William kentridge

We were considering making something that’s between an instrument and a machine and ‘a human clock’. The human clock would engage in the action of breathing and the beating of the heart. These are both ways of keeping the body alive and of measuring out time. We wanted a synthesis. Not a sewing machine meeting an umbrella on an operating table (the classic surrealist formulation, with several separate parts) but, say, a drill turning a small accordion or concertina that breathes in and out, with an ear trumpet that amplifies the sound of the breath of the contracting and expanding bellows.

It is not just a device: it is a kind of portrait, it’s a person. In terms of height and scale and proportions, it settles easily into a person.

There’s a head – his breathing head that turns and looks and breathes. (But that is a description arising from my trying to rescue it, trying to get it to make sense, though it was not made with that idea. It was perhaps the pleasure of the sound of the breathing, which is kind of human.) I am not wanting to ‘give it human lines’, yet I am interested in you saying to yourself, “Isn’t it curious how it sounds like a human being?” Then you think about its scale.

Yet it is also a useless machine. P

JANE TAYLOR

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There are several previous versions of this same humanising effect of breath explored in Kentridge’s oeuvre across various media.

Kentridge’s long and deep exploration of puppetry, which arose in the first instance through his work with Handspring Puppet Company, has given rise to a substantial consideration of the persuasive performance power of the regularised pulsing of breath within a body. This is something of a mantra for Handspring too.

During his production of the Monteverdi opera Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, the action of the narrative is structured as a dreamscape arising from the mind of the returned Ulysses, who dreams his past adventures and travels. The character of Ulysses is performed by a recumbent puppet, who lies at the fore-edge of the stage, asleep.

In order for that figure to be asleep rather than a lump of inert matter, the puppet has to be kept animated, through a gentle breathing action, across the arc of the opera. In some senses, this is economic folly, but that is the power of the choice. The rather profligate decision to ‘breathe’ the puppet is saturated with meaning.

Not only do we experience the figure as sensate, but we also intuit the antirationalist economy of the activity. It is seemingly gainless expenditure, and that situates the sustaining of the puppet beyond a relation of utility.

Kentridge situates himself very precisely within an experimentalism that registers the intersection of the human and the technical, and his interest in early modern aesthetics and the history of science pushes the threshold of that intersection between the human and technology about as far back as the origin of species.

There is a manifestly meaningful life-support machine that breathes and strokes out time in the film History of the Main Complaint, and the recent performance of The Head & the Load stages the intersection of the colonial subject with machineries of great scale and grandiloquence. The demands of these objects on stage become ever more and more immense. As Kentridge notes, “We’re talking much longer about the object and taking forever.” P

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About the Naomi Milgrom Foundation

The Naomi Milgrom Foundation was founded in 2014, and its purpose is to enrich Australian cultural life by engaging new audiences with exceptional art, design and architecture. The Foundation, led by Naomi Milgrom AO, has become a model for public-private collaboration by enabling new projects with a focus on public, industry and education components.

A not-for-profit organisation, the Foundation champions multidisciplinary projects that explore design’s close interconnections with contemporary culture. The MPavilion series is the Foundation’s centrepiece project, encouraging design debate and cultural exchange, and has become Australia’s leading architecture commission.

The exhibition William Kentridge: That Which We Do Not Remember at the Art Gallery of New South Wales celebrates the artist’s use of multiple and interrelated mediums and disciplines. Kentridge was invited by Milgrom to curate the exhibition, which includes pieces from Milgrom’s distinguished collection, one of the largest holdings of Kentridge’s works.

The Foundation’s support of this publication and exhibition coincides with its support of The Head & the Load: William Kentridge, a world premiere performance in London at Tate Modern, which opened earlier this year.

The Naomi Milgrom Foundation would like to acknowledge its extraordinary association with William Kentridge and thank him for his endless enthusiasm and support over the years, designer Sabine Theunissen, Anne McIlleron, Michael Brand, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Gallery’s team, Michele Cooper-Hede, curator of the Naomi Milgrom Collection, writer Jane Taylor and book designer Carla Saunders. P

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A Note from the Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Few visitors will forget the experience of encountering William Kentridge’s video installation I am not me, the horse is not mine on Cockatoo Island in 2008 as part of the 16th Biennale of Sydney. Projected on to walls rich in the traces of Sydney’s colonial and industrial past, Kentridge’s complex and sometimes comical shadow-play, with its cascade of allusions to twentieth-century opera, film and utopian politics, gripped the imaginations of all who saw it.

It was therefore a moment of great excitement when, in 2016, the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ long-time supporters Luca and Anita Belgiorno-Nettis came to me with the news of their intention to gift this eight-channel video installation to the Gallery. That act of generosity was the trigger for a conversation that has resulted in the magnificent exhibition which this publication accompanies. Both have been made possible through the support and collaboration of another esteemed patron, Naomi Milgrom AO. A passionate supporter of Kentridge’s work, Naomi has assembled a major collection of his art over the course of more than fifteen years. And it is through loans from this collection and the artist’s studio, as well as the Gallery’s own existing holdings of Kentridge’s works, that we have been able to assemble a presentation of exceptional richness.

It is interesting to note just how prominently Australia figures in Kentridge’s distinguished exhibition history. Since first appearing at Sydney’s Annandale Galleries, where his work has been exhibited regularly since 1997, Kentridge has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including major solo presentations at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2004);

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National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2006); Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne (2012); and a touring exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2016).

The current Sydney exhibition is unique because its checklist and design have been especially conceived by the artist to draw connections between what may seem like disparate aspects of his practice: from his engagement with opera to his interest in early cinema, from his inimitable animated drawings to sculpture and works on paper. Installed in a completely remodelled layout |of the John Kaldor Family Galleries, the exhibition will allow viewers to encounter works executed over the course of more than two decades, and to trace tangents and developments in thought and form.

I am deeply grateful to Sabine Theunissen (a frequent collaborator with William on the design of his exhibitions and opera productions) and studio manager Anne McIlleron for their commitment and creativity in devising such an innovative exhibition. And also to Jane Taylor, who developed this publication with William, and Naomi Milgrom AO, who was responsible for nurturing it into being.

For the works here at the Gallery, I reiterate my thanks to Luca and Anita Belgiorno-Nettis for gifting the beguiling and multilayered centrepiece of the exhibition, and also acknowledge Ruth Faerber, for her gift of Walking man (2000), and Gretel Packer, for the long-term loan of Second-hand reading (2013), both of which make important contributions to the exhibition.

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I thank everyone at the Gallery who contributed to the realisation of this exhibition – especially Nicholas Chambers, Danielle Earp and Belqis Youssofzay. I also acknowledge the important contribution of Michele Cooper-Hede, Curator of the Naomi Milgrom AO Collection.

My sincere appreciation goes to Naomi Milgrom AO whose friendship with William and commitment to his work have been instrumental in shaping this exhibition. It truly would not have been possible to stage an exhibition of this amplitude without Naomi’s extraordinary collection and the generous support that has been provided through the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

I can only conclude by thanking William himself – for the loans from his studio and, moreover, for the thoughtfulness and inventiveness with which he approached this exhibition and publication. His is art of the kind that I and all my colleagues love to see and share with our public at the Art Gallery of New South Wales: imaginative, humane, experimental, visionary, and deeply interested in the issues of our time. P —Michael Brand, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales

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list of works

Page 42

That Which We Do Not Remember, 2017

Page 50

Ubu drawing (Drawing Man), 1997

Relief, printed from 13 woodblocks on

Charcoal, pastel, dry pigment and

Somerset Velvet, Soft White, 300 gsm

gouache on paper

Final work comprised of 29 individual

219,7 x 106,7 cm

sheets adhered by 56 aluminium pins

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

200 x 210 cm Edition of 12

Page 52

Four Heads, 2007

Printed by Jillian Ross, Sbongiseni Khulu,

Head I

Chad Cordeiro at David Krut Workshop

Head II

Production Assistants: John Woodward

Head III

(carving); Alan Epstein (carpentry);

Head IV

Roxy Kaczmarek (post-production)

Lithography, letterpress, scanned book

Collection of the artist

pages, hand-colouring and chine collĂŠ Head I: 35 x 30 x 22 cm

Page 46

What Will Come (has already come), 2007

Head II: 37 x 25 x 20 cm

35 mm film (colour, sound) transferred to

Head III: 32 x 25 x 20 cm

video, cylindrical polished steel mirror

Head IV: 40 x 37 x 25

8:40 min.

Edition of 25

104,7 x 121,9 x 121,9 cm

Printed at The Artists’ Press by Mark

Editing and sound: Catherine Meyburgh

Attwood, Leshoka Legate, Uli Kuehle

Music: Dmitri Shostakovich,

and Sarah Dudley for collaboration and

Piano Trio no.2; Micheli and Ruccione,

proofing. Leshoka Legate, Uli Kuehle,

Facetta Nera; music from Ethiopia and

Sarah Dudley, Jacky Tsila and Syneth

Eritrea (composers and performers

Nyandeni for edition printing and

unknown), Mbila Solo, Love Song,

production.

Song to the Emperor

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO Page 56 Page 48

Self-Portrait, 1998

Ubu drawing (Cartographer), 1997

Charcoal and watercolour on found pages

Charcoal, pastel, dry pigment

31 x 44 cm

and gouache on paper

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

240 x 120 cm Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

147

Page 60

Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008

Page 64

Telegrams from the Nose (Four Portraits), 2007

Artist's book

Indian ink, coloured pencil and collage

26 x 19,5 cm

on found pages

Edition of 1,500

25 x 23,5 cm

Captures, Éditions ValÊrie Cudel, Valence

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO Page 65 Page 62

Telegrams from the Nose

Parcours d'atelier, 2007

(Sneeze Snore Snooze), 2007

Collage, pen, ink and red pencil on paper

Indian ink, coloured pencil, digital print

24,6 x 39,3 cm

and collage on found pages

Collection of the artist

25 x 23,5 cm Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Page 64

Telegrams from the Nose (Newspaper), 2007 Indian ink and coloured pencil

Page 65

Telegrams from the Nose

on found pages

(Another Kheppi Ending), 2007

25 x 23,5 cm

Watercolour, coloured pencil, digital print

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

and collage on found pages 25 x 23,5 cm

Page 64

Telegrams from the Nose

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

(World on Its Hind Legs), 2007 Indian ink, coloured pencil and collage

Page 65

Telegrams from the Nose

on found pages

(I am not me the horse is not mine), 2007

25 x 23,5 cm

Indian ink, coloured pencil, digital print

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

and collage on found pages 25 x 23,5 cm

Page 64

Telegrams from the Nose (Megaphone), 2007

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Indian ink, coloured pencil, digital print and collage on found pages

Page 65

Telegrams from the Nose

25 x 23,5 cm

(Nose in the Bath), 2007

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Indian ink, coloured pencil and collage on found pages

Page 64

Telegrams from the Nose

25 x 23,5 cm

(To the Heroes of Oil Painting), 2007

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Coloured pencil, digital print and collage on found pages 25 x 23,5 cm Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

148

Page 68

The Over-determined Branch, 2013

Page 80

Seven unbound prints for Receiver, 2005

Charcoal, coloured pencil, Indian ink,

Photogravure, drypoint, engraving on

digital print and watercolour on pages from

handmade abaca paper

the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

30 x 45 cm; 24 x 28 cm; 37 x 28 cm; 25 x 28

160 x 120 cm

cm; 34 x 28 cm; 40 x 28 cm, 40 x 28 cm

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Published by Dieu Donné Press, Inc., New York, with Galamander Press, New York

Page 72

The Hope in the Charcoal Cloud, 2014

Papermaker: Sue Gosin

Charcoal, coloured pencil, Indian ink,

Printed by Randy Hemminghaus,

digital print and watercolour on pages from

Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper

the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

160 x 120 cm Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Page 86

Walking Man, 2000 Linocut on 38 gsm rice paper

Page 76

2nd Hand Reading, 2013

248 x 101,5 cm

Indian ink on pages from Universal

Edition of 25 on paper and 9 on canvas

technological dictionary; or, Familiar

Printed by Osiah Masekoameng, Artist

explanation of the terms used in all arts

Proof Studio

and sciences, George Crabb, 1826

AGNSW Collection: Gift of Ruth Faerber

178 x 113 cm

2017. Donated through the Australian

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Government’s Cultural Gifts Program in memory of Hans Faerber.

Page 78

Receiver, 2005 Artist’s book of poems by Wislawa Symborska

Page 88

Learning the Flute, 2003

and prints by William Kentridge

35 mm film (colour, sound) transferred

Illustrated book with nine drypoints,

to video, wooden chalkboard

seven photogravures, four photogravures

8 min.

with drypoint, one unbound photogravure

Video editing: Catherine Meyburgh

and drypoint all on handmade abaca paper;

Music: from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte

letterpress cover

Collection Naomi Milgrom AO

38 x 29,5 cm Edition of 50

Page 90

Drawing for Preparing the Flute, 2006

Published by Dieu Donné Press, Inc. with

Charcoal, pastel, pencil, found pages

Galamander Press, New York

and collage on paper

Papermaker: Sue Gosin

117 cm diameter

Printed by Randy Hemminghaus,

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

149

Page 94

Drawing for Preparing the Flute, 2005

Page 114

Drawing for 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès,

Charcoal, pastel and collage on paper

Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, 2003

80,5 x 113 cm

Charcoal, pastel, pencil, found pages and

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

collage on paper 255 x 555 cm

Page 98

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Bird Catching (suite of 10 prints), 2006 Aquatint and drypoint on Hahnemühle warm white 300 gsm paper

Page 118

7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for

47 x 47 cm each

Night and Journey to the Moon, 2003

Edition of 18

Nine-channel video installation with sound

Printed by Tim Foulds, Artist Proof Studio

Collection of the artist

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès: Page 102

Drawing for Woyzeck on the Highveld, 1992

Installation of 7 film fragments:

Charcoal and pastel on paper

Invisible Mending, 1:30 min.

120 x 150 cm

Moveable Assets, 2:40 min.

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

Autodidact, 5:10 min.

Feats of Prestidigitation, 1:50 min

Page 106

Nose I (Scissors), 2007

Tabula Rasa I, 2:50 min.

Bronze

Tabula Rasa II, 2:10 min.

30 x 16 x 14 cm

Balancing Act, 1:20 min.

Cast by Bronze Age Foundry

16mm and 35mm films transferred to

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

seven-channel video Video editing: Catherine Meyburgh

Page 110

I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008 Eight-channel video installation

Day for Night

DVcam, HD video (colour, sound)

16 mm film (colour, silent) transferred

6 min.

to video

Video editing: Catherine Meyburgh

6:32 min.

Music: Philip Miller

Video editing: Catherine Meyburgh

AGNSW Collection: Gift of Anita and Luca Belgiorno-Nettis 2017. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.

150

Page 118

Journey to the Moon

Page 128

Tide Table, 2003

35 mm film (black and white, sound)

35 mm film (colour, sound) transferred

transferred to video

to video

7:10 min.

8:50 min.

Video editing: Catherine Meyburgh

Music: Franco et le TP O.K. Jazz,

Music: Philip Miller

Likambo Ya Ngana; singers from the

Piano: Jill Richards

Market Theatre Laboratory Sound: Wilbert Schübel

Page 122

Second-hand Reading, 2013

AGNSW Collection: Purchased 2005

HD Video (colour, sound) 7:01 min.

Page 124

Page 130

Semaphore, 2011

Music and voice: Neo Muyanga

Wood, steel, cogs and cloth

Video editing: Snežana Marović

3 x 1.6 x 1.4 m

Private Collection

Collection of the artist

Tableau des Finances et du Commerce de la

Page 134

Small Bellows, 2011

partie Françoise de S. Domingue, 2011

Mild steel, wood, springs, steel cables

Tapestry

and found objects

322 x 369 cm

184 x 74 x 42 cm

Woven by Stephens Tapestry Studio

Collection of AGNSW

Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO Page 126

Eight Figures, 2010 Poster paint, charcoal, coloured pencil and pastel on paper 107,5 x 207 cm Collection of Naomi Milgrom AO

151

Published by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation Copyright of texts, the authors Copyright of images, the artist and the publisher ISBN 978-0-646-98935-8

Four A.M. from Poems New and Collected, 1957-1977 by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.

Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

All rights reserved.

Exhibition design by Sabine Theunissen Coordinated by Anne McIlleron Publication design by Carla Saunders

Exhibition and catalogue sponsored by Naomi Milgrom AO through the Naomi Milgrom Foundation

Catalogue printed in Germany by Optimal Media on Munken Pure 120 gsm and Munken Pure 150 gsm. Typeset in Calluna and Freight Text Pro.