Breyten Breytenbach in conversation with Joost Bosland
corner of the eye, as constituting a memory of seeing. One could then ask, yes, but who saw what exactly? Let’s not go there. So no, I don’t think I would present my photos the way he does. I don’t think I would want them framed and signed, they’re not art, whatever that may be, but I certainly would be incorporating them in some form or other into the paintings. Including them as they are, probably. Maybe in a collage way. Maybe as is. I also want to use them in relation to my poetry, in published form. And in any event, they are teaching me about seeing or observing without expectations.
acquaintances, people she admires, and she lost a publisher over it.
By now you could have bought a fancy camera if you wanted to. What is the fascination with the iPad?
In Painting the Eye, the little book you did with David Philip in 1993, you wrote that “In South Africa I would find it impossible to paint. I’m certainly not a South African painter by any measure.”
Firstly, as Yolande will confirm, because I’m a monkey pretending to be a monk when it comes to technology. I know just enough to click on the button. Then, because what I see or think I see on the screen of the iPad is what gets archived and even I know how to transmit these by way of conversion. Maybe too because the instants have no historical or intrinsic importance and can be deleted immediately. There is no history to these takes. And maybe because I have the illusion that the iPad makes me aware of the unseen lining the seen. And maybe I find the apparatus less intimidating exactly because it is not a fancy camera. Do you know the work of Claudia Rankine, the poet? I know the name. She started using visual images in her text. Not images she made herself but images by her friends,
My publisher doesn’t like it either. Maybe W.G. Sebald introduced us to the bad habit. He used really bad photography – but it went so perfectly with what he was talking about. The effacement of the memory and a thing half seen, et cetera. And I too sometimes use images produced by friends or people close to me. In that respect I’m very much a jackdaw picking up whatever shines or glitters. Thieving comes naturally. You could say I’m a true South African!
I think J.M. Coetzee also said some years ago already that he finds South Africa impossible to write about in that it is too dramatic. It is so blatantly in your face, as it were. But you don’t say you find it impossible to paint about South Africa. You say you find it impossible to paint in South Africa. Perhaps I need the distance. In some way, obviously, I’m always painting about South Africa but that would be more in a kind of deep fumbling way or perhaps in a brutal or a kind of cruel, alienated way ... That’s a word you use a lot, ‘obviously’, especially if things aren’t that obvious. I imagine you are alluding to your time in prison. If you do not want to go there, just say so. 15