William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud by Kentridge Studio

William Kentridge thinking aloud Conversations with Angela Breidbach

William Kentridge

Kunstwissenschaftliche

Bibliothek Series Editor Christian Posthofen

Volume 28

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Kรถnig, Kรถln

William Kentridge thinking aloud

Conversations with Angela Breidbach

© 2006 William Kentridge, Angela Breidbach and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln Photo credits: © William Kentridge for the illustrations Design: Silke Fahnert, Uwe Koch, Köln Lithography, Production: Printmanagement Plitt, Oberhausen Die Deutsche Bibliothek – CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Ein Titelsatz für diese Publikation ist bei Der Deutschen Bibliothek erhältlich ISBN 3-88375-908-2

Introduction William Kentridge is an artist who draws and makes films. For his drawings he releases loose, dusty particles of charcoal and chalk onto large-format sheets, creating ‘landscapes’ which he then treats as plastic forms, setting to work on them and displacing them little by little. Existing marks on the sheets are never entirely removed. They simply become blurred and are covered over again. There is a certain transparency to the different layers in these mutable drawings, and what has been remains visible, even when a new layer settles on it. Within this process SPACE manifests itself in various forms. First there’s the space of the activity itself, containing within it the artist, his perceptions, his thinking, and the making of the pictures. The pictorial space which arises can initially be located in the context of the drawings. The time travel, that these layered drawings set out on, generates yet more aspects of space. A camera records the process with single shots, capturing the disappearance of the first ‘space’— the space of the activity—along with something of the material nature of the drawings. A projector rhythmically replays the captured images at short intervals and transposes them into the continuum of film. Each minute of film is the result of up to a month’s worth of drawing. The space now embarking on its travels— driven by the artist’s perceptions, his drawings, the photos and the projections of the latter—has very different qualities at every stage. While the pictorial space of the drawings has a central perspective, their animated layerings require quite different explanations. Given that Kentridge has himself said, ‘I draw the way I think’, there’s every reason to seek parallels both in terms of contents and structures in his thinking and his work. Angela Breidbach has written widely on image theory, and has made a particular study of stereoscopic vision in the work of Cézanne and Helmholtz. In her discussions with William Kentridge she focused specifically on the qualities generated by his pictorial spaces at various stages and in various places during the work process. The vehicle for her questions is a series of spatial models, ranging from the notion of central perspective to the concept of stereoscopic vision. These spatial models relate not only to pictorial forms but also to modes of seeing and have an innate vitality of their own. Central perspective uses one-point perspective. A panoramic view compels viewers to gaze around themselves on all sides. Stereoscopic vision focuses on a central object from more than one direction. Moving around an object in this manner introduces a time dimension into the stereoscopic model which is more often than not taken to imply a simultaneous double view. Multiple modes of seeing allow Kentridge’s images to be grasped on an intellectual level. The pictorial spaces deriving from these models

are translations—with central perspective known to all, the panorama a more complicated matter, and a degree of uncertainty surrounding the notion of stereoscopic space which is certainly not simply a view through a mirror stereoscope. The search for points of contact between the formal nature of William Kentridge’s animations and these models was the incentive behind these conversations and the questions asked. The simultaneous and successive layering of drawings (which then become films) suggested the comparison with stereoscopic vision and with language, grammar and poetry. Coming from two directions at once, the following conversation could be described as ‘thinking aloud’ on forms of visuality with specific reference to the work of William Kentridge. As he spoke, the artist spontaneously sketched various workprocesses. Some of these drawings are diagrams, others are gestural demonstrations. As ‘visible thought’ these are an important part of the text and appear at intervals as they occurred during the discussions. In addition to the drawings, the text is also interspersed with illustrations of the works under discussion during the course of this extended conversation.

thinking aloud breidbach: The usual model for pictorial space and depth in static pictures is Gian Battista Alberti’s single-point perspective (Della Pittura, 1435) which in effect is an inversion of Euclid’s ‘cone of vision’. Alberti called the pictorial space the ‘finestra aperta’, by which he meant a section through the cone of vision which—with a square frame—becomes a pyramid of vision. The so-called ‘open window’ leads the gaze into a ‘box’ in which the lines leading into the depth converge on a vanishing point at the far end of the box. Could you say something about your early works from 1979, entitled Pit? kentridge: The first series of works I exhibited was a series of monoprints, showing a dark pit. I didn’t necessarily want to make a dark image; I had no result in my head. I began by covering a large etching plate with printing ink so that it was completely black, and then constructed the image by removing the ink. The fleshiness of the figures was achieved using thumb prints or tissue paper or cotton balls, lifting just a little ink, so that the bulk of the images remained dark and black. This is an early example of the way in which often things that are practical solutions or given conditions, things determined by the material one is working with, become an important part not just of the look of the work, but in constituting the substance and meaning of the image. In this case it had to do with this black ink and the process of removing ink, which in the end produced the subject of these dark theatrical pits we are looking into. The simple vanishing point is created if you put two lines converging at the top and two at the bottom of an image. One’s eyes are trained to receive this as an empty space. On the one hand you understand that these are simply lines drawn on a flat surface. On the other hand—perhaps it’s natural, or perhaps one’s eyes are trained by centuries of seeing in the Renaissance perspective—one immediately reads into it the space of a room. In the swimming pool, for example, all there is to construct an illusion of space are the three lines at the top and some isolated hints for reading the other lines. What I’m interested in is not so much that it’s the artist creating an illusion of space. There’s a hunger in everyone’s eyes to understand the world and to look for any clues to create the space. One cannot resist reading what one sees as patterns, constructing the space, ordering it. The sense is of the brain trying out different connections all the time, predicting what the space will do; this is why the most minimal of visual hints are seized upon as clues for reading sense into space. One of the elements of Minimalism and of a certain kind of abstraction is not so much purifying our seeing as fighting as hard as possible against what it is

‘Pit’, 1979, from a series of 36 monoprints, each 54 x 43 cm

to be seeing. And it is a kind of Puritanism—self-mutilation—to take all the various aspects of what the eyes are doing when they see and reduce them to one tiny element. To get back to the monoprints, their starting point is the principle of the single vanishing point of the Albertian perspective. At the top of the image you have people looking down into the pit and at the bottom of the pit you have some kind of dramatic performance. Some of the images are of my wife and myself, one of them is done from sketches I made in the courtroom while on trial under the Riotous Assemblies Act (in Johannesburg in 1979) with other students arrested during a political demonstration. breidbach: So there are two categories of viewers, the audience at the top of the image and ourselves, the audience on the outside, looking through the ‘open window’, on the one hand fixing the audience on the inside as an object of our gaze and on the other joining together with it to surround the group of figures on the stage. The audience on the inside and the outside are mirror images of each other. How does the situation of being encircled and held captive in other people’s gazes affect the two figures on the stage? kentridge: The viewers or spectators at the top are small figures, small blotches of ink left at the top of the image, which one reads as spectators looking down into the pit. But the vantage point of the view is not from the top, but from a centre in front of the image. The point of view that structures the image is

slightly above the people who perform. You’re looking at it neither from the perspective of the people performing in the pit nor from the perspective of the people up above looking down into the pit. And again, this is not something decided upfront, it wasn’t that I said, ‘let me find a perspective neither of what’s being watched, nor of the watchers, but of a third position.’ I’m thinking about it now for the first time, as we look at the images today. After this series of monoprints in 1979 I was caught in that particular rigid box; there was a strong urge to open the box and take away the four walls, its boundaries. And I went to the opposite extreme in looking for a solution to pictorial space. I made another series of etchings titled Domestic Scenes, usually enacted by masters and servants, or maids and madams. The space in them was suggested extremely simply. The etchings showed the figures performing some domestic drama, small figures; then right at the end of the etching process I would draw a simple horizontal line across the plate. Within the conventions for constructing space, as soon as one has that line it evokes a ground, a horizon, and space rooted to the ground. This was about 1981. And then I got completely stuck. I didn’t know how to do something that was neither the complete box of the pit, nor the schematic void of space of the Domestic Scenes series, in which the line which gives form to the space of the image is simultaneously like a line canceling out the image.

breidbach: Did you really intentionally draw the horizon line right through the figures, striking them out?

kentridge: I can’t remember. In some of them maybe, in others not. In most cases I probably drew the line through them and then stopped it out with varnish where it went across the figures.

I felt stuck in my work to the extent that I sold my etching press and closed the etching studio. At this point I decided I DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE AN ARTIST. I didn’t know what I was doing being an artist. I think there are two ways that you become an artist or a writer. The one is that you have a particular image or story or series of stories that you want to tell. The subject matter is burning. An expression needs to be found, starting from the subject and arriving at the image. The other way was the position I was in, which is not an unnatural one for a child of privilege in a house in which there are essentially no immediate problems around, no great dramas or crises. I had an absolute desire to be making drawings and objects, and from that desire began working, in the hope of finding images to draw. The form was prior. I could have said: ‘I want to do an image of people, trapped inside a dark world and being observed, and they don’t know they’re being observed and it’s about living one’s life half publicly, half hidden; what is the strongest way I can achieve that?… Let me work with darkness, let me work with ink, let me work with monoprints, with viewers up high and the people down below.’ That would be the second way. But mine was also about discovering that when starting with a plate filled with dark ink, if I put my thumb in it, it seemed to show a kind of fleshiness. If I cleaned the top of the sheet it suddenly suggested the perspective. Then investigating what happened when I made thumb prints at the bottom of the image and cleaned away the ink at the top; what was the world that then emerged? And so much of all the work comes from this kind of starting point. Beginning work in the belief that however you come to it, even if it seems to be entirely dictated by the medium or circumstances, in the end the work will be about who you are. It will be revealing of who one is. I think it protects you from the idea of

self-knowledge, which you think you are then going to express. It opens you up to discovering much more about yourself or about the world. To finish the narrative quickly. In 1981, when I decided I had no right to be an artist, I wanted to study further. I had been doing theatre work with a student theatre group in Johannesburg; I had been teaching at a private art school in Johannesburg; and had finished my degree in politics and African history. My wife—companion at the time, wife later—had just finished her medical studies. And I had a choice between going to an art school and going to a theatre school. I thought, ‘if I want to be an artist, I must be a real artist. If I want to be in theatre, then I must go and train to be a real actor.’ I had a sense—and certainly all my friends encouraged me in this view—that if I did both fields, I would forever be a dilettante. I thought, ‘if you spend all your time drawing, you’ll be a much better drawer than if you spend half your time drawing and half your time in the theatre. And you’ll be a much better theatre practitioner if you spend all your time in the theatre and really concentrate on it, than if you spend half your time drawing.’ It took me about ten years to understand how completely wrong that was. breidbach: Your friends’ encouragement wasn’t really a help, was it? kentridge: Well I decided I would go to theatre school. I went to theatre school in Paris and realized after three weeks that I shouldn’t be an actor. But I did the whole course and learned a huge amount about what it is to make an artwork, whether it’s a piece of writing or an image. And in fact if I teach drawing now, most of the teaching involves using theatre exercises, acting exercises, rather than drawing exercises. Coming back from theatre school, I thought, ‘I cannot be an artist and I cannot be an actor, how do I make a living?’ I got a job in the film industry as a kind of production designer, but really as someone who borrowed friends’ furniture, because there was never any design budget. But what I did learn was the way in which there were two different things: the room in which you were filming, kind of like the drawings of the pit; and the room that you saw through the camera lens. As long as you kept a coherence and an interest in what you saw in the camera lens, you could create all sorts of distortions in the room that you were filming, both in terms of lighting—instead of having a natural source of light, many different sources of lights can be used—and in terms of shifting perspective— things could be brought unnaturally close or moved further apart. I understood that in the act of making the image one didn’t need to be trapped by the precision and the notations of an Albertian single-point perspective. Walls could be

moved, floor angles could be changed, ceilings could be brought in and lowered, which seems natural and practical. You have to bring in artificial lights, move the furniture to where people are going to be standing, you bring in a box to make an actor higher or shorter, and you darken walls.

It struck me during this work that if I thought of constructing a drawing or painting in the same way, all these elements, which before had been rooted into position, inside the pit of the Albertian perspective, could be moved while still maintaining the idea of space within the picture and not coming to the conclusion that one necessarily must move towards a Greenbergian flatness. The alternative to the single-point perspective of the pit was not necessarily only the flatness of New York painting in the 1970s, which was the period in which I started painting as a student. breidbach: Instead of a spatial ‘box’, the images in the series Industry and Idleness show a number of interlocking pictorial planes. Did this very different treatment of space have something to do with your experience of working with film? kentridge: The next series of prints I did when I started drawing again in 1984/85 were the Hogarth in Johannesburg etchings. The South African film industry was a terrible place to work in at that time and I was incompetent as a designer for the film industry. I found myself back in the studio, in spite of all my decisions not to go back there. Now, after the film experience, I had a much more fluid acceptance of what space could be; there could be fragments of different kinds of space in an image. A ‘collage of space’ might be one way of describing different vanishing points, different angles and points of view. There was no attempt to achieve a single coherence, nor anything like the kind of fractioning

‘Double Shift on Weekends Too’, ‘Coda’, ‘Responsible Hedonism’, ‘Promises of Fortune’, 1986–87, from the series ‘Industry and Idleness’

of an image in the Cubist way. I did it fragment by fragment; it was still quite a conservative way of looking at space. These works formed a series of narrative prints, and they had to be not just about the surface of the etching plate, but also about the stories happening within them, which is an inversion of Hogarth’s set of prints Industry and Idleness, in which the industrious young man becomes the Lord Mayor of London and the idle person becomes a criminal and gets hanged. To simplify the story: in the South African context of 1985—in the middle of the state of emergency and pervasive state repression—the series was about the fact that however industrious you are, if the politics were against you, you would die on the pavements; and however lazy you were, if you were born into the right circumstances, you could still flourish and make a fortune. Hogarth’s story was

about human agency; mine was about how circumstances can sometimes be stronger. It was an inversion that worked very well in the context in which I was working. breidbach: In Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch up, Even Surpass of 1990, you abandon the frame. That work consists of fourteen sheets of paper, is eight meters wide and three meters high. Today it’s in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London. The sheets of paper fan out, as it were, from the viewer’s standpoint. The form of the work matches the properties of the optics of the viewer facing it. It’s a bit like a segment of a panorama, an arc encircling the viewer, only the arc is placed flat on the wall. The viewer is no longer facing an open-window picture frame. Now he/she sees the world—literally in this work—running by him or her. The world is outside, the viewer inside. The panorama (as one of the two circular models that we will touch on) contains the viewer within it. Each point in this extended work is at more or less the same distance from the viewer’s eyes. The form minimizes the distortions and foreshortenings which would normally arise at the outer extremes of an eight-meter long drawing. kentridge: One of the questions I had been stuck with when I had given up drawing, was the question of how one deals with large crowds of people. If one wants to show a mass of humanity, a huge number of people, what are the ways in which one can depict this? The starting point for me was Goya’s black paintings, some of which show crowds of people approaching. Goya gave his processions a diagonal direction. They look like photographs of crowds; this was one solution. I could imagine doing that, but it would be simply doing a new version

‘Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch-up, Even Surpass’, 1990, 300 x 800 cm

of Goya. There was also the image opening Bertolucci’s film Novecento, which is based on a famous Italian painting, showing a crowd of peasants walking towards you. This is much flatter than the Goya; they walk straight towards you in a row.

In fact it looks like a group photograph of a soccerteam, everybody facing straight towards you, in rows behind each other, the heads of the people at the back visible in the gaps between those in front. And even though it’s an image of people walking towards you, it’s extremely static.

One of the solutions that came was the idea of not having just an extremely long thin drawing. If one actually curves the horizon line, so that in each section of the curve people are standing upright on the ground, the viewer can’t look at it all in one. You see it as a row of fragments.

breidbach: The panorama is in effect a multiple single-point perspective. The viewer reads it along a temporal axis. Standing inside a complete panorama, you are obliged to turn round so that you can successfully take in the space through movement, instead of registering what is in front of one as visible, while what is to the right, the left and behind one remains unseen. In the case of the panorama, seeing is no longer simultaneous and directed without motion, but involves movement and is successive. The viewer progresses through the picture with his or her eyes. kentridge: In a way it needs that to be seen. At a glance, what you’re seeing is a fanshape. When you actually enter into these images you’re obliged to accommodate the angle and to move your head. From a single-point perspective it’s kind of banal. Your head needs to accept the ritual of the drawing and have a dialogue with it. The image came from a work I saw in New York in 1986 at the Metropolitan Museum. It was a small drawing from the 15th or 16th century, maybe designed for the decoration for a plate or a shield or simply a circular tondo drawing. It was of a battle drawn in a circle, following the curve of the circumference. I

remember a battle of chairs fighting each other. I’m not certain now if the idea of these chairs fighting is my projection onto the image of something I wished for, or whether it was the actual subject. I remember thinking that I could put people around that circle and I would have a form that could be used to show a lot of people moving and that would encapsulate time, without being simply a photograph of a crowd. A section of it then became the series of Arc/Procession drawings. 17

breidbach: In 1991, for the monumental Amsterdam City Hall you made a piece with the Dutch title Overvloed, which translates as both ‘flood’ and ‘superfluity’. Here the motif of a procession is projected as a circular image onto the barrel-vaulted roof. In this case, the movement is animated, the temporal axis is a constituent part of the work, not just of the viewing process. kentridge: That project started at one of the Venice Biennales. I spent all the time walking through churches with Tiepolo paintings on the ceilings. One of the interesting things about Tiepolo is the question of scale, which I had already had to deal with when I was working with film and projections. The small drawings I make can become huge when they are projected the size of a wall. This connects with the problems and solutions of space in fresco painting. There’s a close link between cinema and fresco painting; it’s closer than the connection between cinema and oil paintings on canvas which are part of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance tradition. When paintings get larger and larger, they collapse at a certain point under their own weight. Fresco painting was one of the solutions. A part of the attraction of projecting on a large scale is that one can have size without weight and still the easy option of removing the image. When you get tired of it, you

‘Overvloed’, 1999, stills from the animation of the same name

switch the projector off. You don’t make people live with that image forever around them. When I was looking at the Tiepolo ceilings, I thought it would be a natural thing to have a projection on a ceiling. You can do it without having to lie on your back under the actual ceiling, painting, for four years. And there’s a sense in which you can use the volume of the space. You can gather a whole lot of people to see it at one time for as long as the projection is on. I also became intrigued by what happens to

the perspective of space once you project into a ceiling. If you’re standing up and looking at a picture, your eye automatically sees a horizontal line that divides it into ground and sky. But when you actually physically lift your head up and crane it back over your neck, you become disoriented and it’s difficult to know what’s the top and what might be the bottom. When you see a photograph of a ceiling painting in a book, it’s much less intriguing than if you stand physically underneath it, with your head bent back. I’m not sure whether this has to do with the physiology of it, whether the orientation of our eyes is connected to gravity, and suddenly the gravity is at the back of your head rather than below your eyebrows; but there’s some kind of dislocation in looking up at images on a ceiling. In the most interesting ceiling paintings you find a real ambiguity about top and bottom, about how the perspective works and a sense of what it means to go round a cupola, as if you are going round the world, and how you are dealing with a circular rather than a straight line. So when an invitation came from Amsterdam to create a projection for a onenight event for the Prince Claus Fund annual award ceremony, I said I would do it if they had a ceiling I could use. And in fact they have a great ceiling in the building that used to be the Royal Palace and is now the City Hall in Amsterdam in Dam Square. The hall has a barrel vault thirty metres in height, and it was into this ceiling that the image would be projected. There was a Baroque painting on the ceiling and I had no idea how the image was going to read against the

existing surface. In fact it was really interesting against the fresco—like a palimpsest, where one image overlaid on another image yields a new image. The specifics of the image were given by the context: it was in Holland, it was a building built in the golden era (the 17th century) of Dutch wealth, colonization and power in the world. This is exactly the era when Holland first colonized the southern part of Africa. The City Hall was built in 1648, the Dutch arrived in South Africa in 1652, so I wanted to make a work about Europe and Africa. The image depicted a circular procession and it also included a series of texts,

‘Overvloed’, 1999, still from the animation of the same name

Dutch and African aphorisms reflecting their respective positions in the world. One of the African aphorisms—from West Africa, not from South Africa—was ‘One should not be too hopeful of a ship sailing from Europe’. And another, ‘My witness is in Europe, says the liar’. I did some of the text of the writing in mirrorwriting: ‘A nicely built city never resists destruction’, and another, ‘Getting thin is not dying’. Some sentences were in ordinary writing and some were given in this mirror-writing, which meant that to read them you either had to crane up your neck to the location, to see the projection, or you had to look into your little mirror—each of the four hundred guests had been given a mirror of their own. The project became about ways of looking either down into what was

almost a little prayer book, the mirror, or looking up into the ceiling, into heaven.

breidbach: Could this active connection between the images projected up into the vaulted ceiling, the viewers’ mirrors and their eyes be described as a distinct ‘form of seeing’? It would be a way of talking about the images, not only with reference to the location of the work of art, or to where they are processed according to the physiology of human sight and brain activity, but seeing both the locations and the architecture of the paths between them as a particular form. The hand-mirrors make the connection between the images on the ceiling and the viewers’ gaze. kentridge: A lot of things came out of this form. The image on the ceiling was repeated four hundred times in each little mirror. Everyone had their own portable screen and was connected into this Internet in the sky via this small image. It was a sense of public and private. When you are in one of these large churches where there’s a painting on the ceiling, you really have to look all the way from one side to the other—which is difficult when you are in the wrong position—to God, to the orientation of the paintings, if they have a single orientation. With the mirror you just shift it to the other side, you simply swivel your

body and you swivel the whole image. You cannot just turn the mirror in your hands, as some people tried to do, but if I hold the mirror facing myself, I can see and read the mirror-writing behind me correctly. breidbach: Could you only ever see segments of the curved image on the ceiling or catch the whole work in the hand-mirror?

kentridge: Both is possible. But one can read the upside down part of the given circular image by turning around one’s own axis, such that one has a position between the image and the mirror. breidbach: This form of seeing with the aid of mirrors is like a metaphor for the relationship of a picture to its many viewers. What we take away from pictures, what we carry away with us, is the inscribed memory of the whole, even if that may be very subjective and dependent on many individual circumstances. Within us, as viewers, the material of the picture is our own sight mechanism. kentridge: It’s obvious. Everybody looks at a movie screen and everybody is receiving the image on their retinas, but one doesn’t really think of this image, which shatters to an infinite number of versions of itself at every instant, waiting to be seen, as if saying, ‘absorb me, absorb me, absorb me …’. The game with the mirrors with their handheld miniature screens made a visible manifestation of the relation between image and seeing. The image was a shadow procession of people walking around. But it had to create the illusion that you were looking at these people as if they were walking upright into the sky. If you project figures with normal proportions into the bowed ceiling, all the figures will be very long. So the figures in fact had to be extremely foreshortened, to turn out correctly proportioned on the screen. The figures are made out of torn black paper, joined together with little wire connections, and for this work the figures from torn black pieces of paper were squat. It was very easy,

‘Faustus in Africa!’, 1995, drawing for the animation of the same name

when I worked with the projector and the piece of paper to work out how to squash them down. I could not begin with it here as a diagram without actually physically doing it. breidbach: You were only able to try it out in your studio, not in Amsterdam where the figures were to be projected. Did you know how their dimensions would work, projected onto the ceiling of the City Hall? kentridge: I hoped it would work out on the ceiling. They worked, walked, very beautifully. breidbach: The projection on the ceiling shows a circular, moving spatial model. We find the same thing in other works of yours from that time. In some of the drawings you made for Faustus in Africa! you created a circular image representing landscapes and—by means of planet systems and a clock—space and time, too. You made actual discs, round plates against dark backgrounds which you turned into objects like old-fashioned long-playing records by adding the words ‘La Voce del Padrone’ [His Masters Voice]. kentridge: These were images made for Faustus in Africa!, my second theatre project with the Handspring Puppet Company. To go briefly again through the story of my artistic trajectory: I had given up drawing. I had given up theatre after being to theatre school. I spent some time in the film world and found that to be terrible. I ended up drawing. After some years I discovered I was filming the works as I made them. That became a series of animated films. And then a couple of years after that I decided to work with the Handspring Puppet Company again, putting animated films together with the puppets they made. We invented a theatre which used projections and actors and puppets. So in spite of all my good decisions to only work in one field, not to do everything together, I discovered I should not make decisions like that, because I had no will-power to enforce them. I ended up back in the theatre. Today I still move between theatre, film and drawing. In Goethe’s Faust, it starts—I suppose as most Faust’s do—with the debate and the contest between God and Mephistopheles. This is a discussion as to what the status of Faust is, if he can be corrupted or is incorruptible. The production needed to work from the huge context—the world of God and Mephistopheles—all the way down to the particular place where Faust was going to be, even

‘Faustus in Africa!’, 1995, drawing for the animation of the same name

in Auerbach’s Tavern, which in our case got transported to Dar es Salaam. It was also a production about Europe and Africa, because there was a sense in the 18th century of Europe having no real interest in Africa. Hegel writes, ‘After the Pyramids, the World Spirit leaves Africa, never to return’. So there was a sense that Europe needs have nothing to do with that continent. In the 19th century, with the growth of colonialism, of course Europe became very interested in Africa and it absorbed as much of Africa as it could. This continues right up into the 1960s and 70s, and still to a significant extent now. With the end of the Cold War—because a lot of Cold War battles were fought in Africa—and the reunification of Germany in 1989 there was a sense of huge amounts of interest and donor money for aid being taken out of Africa and going back to Germany and the reconstruction of Eastern Europe. Africa was increasingly perceived as unsavable, impossible, to be written off. This was the climate in which the production of Goethe’s Faust was made. It was about a sense that Europe may think it has nothing to do with Africa, but it is in fact intimately connected with so many of the problems that still manifest themselves in Africa now. Thus it seemed appropriate to bring Faust into Africa, to set the drama in colonial Africa. We needed to do in the production what Goethe does: establish a location. Going from this world of God and the angels and the devils to this particular town, where Faust is. It’s a bit like children’s books in school, when they write:

William Kentridge Grade two Primary school Houghton Johannesburg Transvaal South Africa Africa Southern hemisphere World Solar system Milky Way The universe

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the opposite of a vanishing point. You are the initial point and you expand.

This is sort of a reverse perspectiveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in the hope that if someone looks at you from the outside, from the universe down towards you, you will still be the vanishing point, identified as the point for all incoming attention. There are different ways in which one tries to locate oneself as a child, to make sense of oneself

in space. I used to think of myself with two parents behind me, four grandparents behind them, great-grandparents behind them â&#x20AC;Ś so that quickly from oneself going backwards one has these enormous numbers of people, who went into the production of you, this child at the centre. And then you can also think forwards, if you have a child who has children, your grandchildren, the greatgrandchildren â&#x20AC;Ś not quite so smooth! The line back is very smooth, the line forward is not so smooth. From this one person these thousands would go forward. One exists as this extraordinary pressurized point of all the generations before coming down into one going through you. All the later generations are going out from you. This is kind of an astonishing image of oneself. And you realize that all the other people around you have an equal number of pressure points on them. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like that ceiling which breaks down into these mirrors. Each one of them can be seen as a particular individual screen in the centre, carrying and reflecting all the other images around it. breidbach: Those are circular models. Each person is the centre of their own world. Your first example seems more spatial to me: Space, starting with a

body, around which a hierarchy of relationships extends outwards. Instead of a vanishing point in the distance, connected to the body, the space opens out. Once again that could be compared to the panorama as a form of seeing. The second example you cite is as though time were travelling through a person.

‘Faustus in Africa!’, 1995, drawing for the animation of the same name

Battista Agnese da Venezia: ‘Astrological Circle’

And again the movement, beforehand and afterwards, extends outward and culminates in the individual person. In these models circles also appear as existential forms. kentridge: In Faustus I started with the movements of the planets of the solar system and the world and zoomed into the map of Africa to where Faust was. That was one of the circles. Within the piece itself we also had a sequence, in which we needed to change the scene, wanted to shift and slide parts of the world. You can either have a very long thin strip of film, in which you have bits of landscape and you slide these backwards and forwards in front of the camera, although for this you need a very long piece of paper across the studio. Or you can make it circular such that there are sections of landscape around the circumference; simply by turning that disc, you can shift the world from one scene to another. breidbach: It’s astonishing that in this situation the circle is the most suitable form for the animation, it reminds me of old models of time in the form of astro-

Giusto Menabuoi: ‘The Creation of the World’, 1376 –78, fresco in the Baptistery of the Cathedral of Padua

logical images. What you arrived at here as the best form for the animation has a tradition as a topology of the world in time and in the eyes of God. Did you find again, here, that the technical pictorial solution made sense in its own way, aside from its pragmatic necessity? kentridge: It’s a technique which involves moving the image of the landscape, the scenery for the production. So it was a technical solution to the problem of wanting to show a lot of scenes, enabling one to move a lot of landscape in front of the lens to show a large panorama, without having a long strip of paper. The segments have got a slight curve built into them, things can move quickly, slowly, return to the same point. Thus this technical solution did also have affinities to the curved horizons and the curved image of how the world is. breidbach: Would you allow me to make an association here with works such as Menabuoi’s fresco in the Baptistry in Padua? In it God is not just creating the world, it seems to me, it is as though His gaze remembers it, blesses it, contains it; the world itself turns into something like a great eye with an iris and a pupil, the world in the eye of the Lord. kentridge: I would. The question of a circular horizontal is not only an astronomical model; it’s also a model of seeing. I presume that the image that forms on the retina doesn’t have straight edges like a photograph. I mean I couldn’t begin to think what it is—is it circular? breidbach: The image on the retina is spherical for a number of reasons: one is the rounded, concave form of the retina itself. Connected to this is the fact that, as the centre of the image, the viewpoint—the place where the outward gaze is fixed—also causes the straight lines around it to bend and to appear spherical. With each change in the direction of the gaze, the spheres around the central point of the retina change their shape. Another reason is to do with the real distance of the viewpoint from the various points in the space and the concomitant foreshortening of the image with distance. These are the reasons— very different in their nature—why the corners and edges of straight spatial delineations shrink and produce worm’s-eye views. kentridge: One is so trained by five hundred years of looking at paintings, that we accept a sour natural way of seeing these rectangular images, these flat and not curved horizontals and verticals. When we see a curved horizontal or vertical it feels unnatural rather than natural. It’s not an important question, but the question may be, how much is this a training of generations of seeing and

how much is it determined in our brains that we search for straight lines? If I look at the wall over there, I read that edge from the floor to the wall as a straight line and the floorboard next to me has quite a steep angle meeting that horizontal. But as soon as I shift my view and face this wall until it becomes a horizontal, and the wall that was in front is now at the side, it meets that at an obtuse angle. If you put that all together, if you want to look all the way across the room, you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do it with both lines being flat; and you start approximating a circle. breidbach: So even a simple cubic space becomes a panorama. Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed this model as the basic form of our experience of seeing, more specifically, he maintained that it is by crossing through the periphery of our own bodies that we can get outside of ourselves, and that in the process we see that same periphery, as part of the whole picture. For Merleau-Ponty there is always something behind us that we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see; the circle does not reveal itself to

him by his turning and shifting his gaze, in the way that you describe. What you describe also includes a time factor in the spatial formula. kentridge: There was a partial eclipse of the sun in Johannesburg a few years ago. Every one of us made a little pinhole in a sheet of paper so that the sun could shine through it onto a lower sheet. You see the little dot of light. As the eclipse happens you have a shadow coming across the circle, taking a little bite out of that image of light, that circle. Now the first thing which I hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t realized was that if you cut a square hole, not a circular one, and put that close to the lower sheet, the image of light you get through it is of a square. As you move this piece of paper away from the ground, it loses focus because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s further away and

it’s no longer a square, it becomes a circle. The second observation was that when the eclipse comes, the shadow starts eating into the image of the sun. This happened as often as we all held our simple experimental double sheets, the upper one with the pinhole and the lower one to catch the image. Which shows that what you see here on the sheet of paper is not just light coming through that little hole, but rather an image of the sun itself, trying to come through the hole in the paper. In our house there’s a creeper growing over one of the windows. The sun comes through this window and on the floor it throws little spots of light where it has found gaps between the leaves. And one thinks that the spots all cor-

respond to the gaps and their shapes between the leaves, that there’s a large flat area of light coming in and the shadows of the leaves in front of it. But when the eclipse came, you in fact had all these different shapes and in each of them there was a little moon trying to obliterate part of the shadow. And that was completely unexpected; to suddenly see not just the shadow of two hundred leaves on the floor, but two hundred moons coming in front of those leaves. Each of those broken-up spots of light was an attempt by the sun to throw its image, to project itself completely through each of these spaces. Much as on the ceiling in the Amsterdam project you had a complete image, and whenever there was a surface below for it to land on it wasn’t a section of the image you got, but the entire image. If the mirrors had been close to the image then you would only have got a section, but as soon as there was sufficient distance—and the distance is obviously also given by the third element which is the eye—as soon as the angle is wide enough, you see the whole image. It suddenly made me understand how the world is this unbelievable series of the world as projection, not something there to be absorbed by us, but throwing itself out as

a projection to be absorbed by and shown on every surface it can. In every inch there’s a complete world trying to project itself. breidbach: This observation destroys the idea of the image and the viewer ‘facing’ each other. It destroys the idea not only of a viewpoint and a vanishing point, but also the notion that an image has a single outward direction. Like a projection or sunlight, every image is a projector: it propels itself in every direction on its own light rays. These directions are connected to endless numbers of vanishing points which reduce the image the further it travels outward until it appears in its entirety in very small openings, like holes in cardboard, little mirrors or eyes. You have taken our conversation from Alberti’s model of an ‘open window’ and the panorama—where the viewer’s eye or a mirror or a frame captures the surrounding landscape—to a model where an object sends out whole images in every direction, with the sun being the most radiant object near to us. But with the help of light rays, every coloured object does the same thing.

Leonardo talked of these surfaces of the world, each of which projects endless numbers of images in every direction. This model is very rarely discussed and it

seems to me that it has some relevance to image theory. I call it the stereoscopic model. In a panorama you have the viewer in the middle of his or her world; here you have an object in the centre of its own multiple projections, constantly shrinking as they travel away. As in your example of the eclipse of the sun, the point is the wholeness of each image. In natural seeing, two eyes always perceive a whole image—not a half-image as Helmholtz sometimes calls it—of the object lying close by (Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik. Berlin and Paris, 1867). The eyes surround the object, in effect tracing the outline of an ideal sphere. The whole yet very slightly different images they absorb are resolved by the shared brain. When you lay these many layers of drawings on top of each other, you animate a sequence of images of figures in time, yet you also turn them into a simultaneous experience. Is this only important for this dimension of movement which is thereby both driven forward and carefully held in check? Or are you also thinking about the viewer’s standpoint, are you thinking about animating and preserving various perceptions of a story, different ways of looking at something whole? kentridge: I think in my case it has to do with movement. I think of two things. When I started drawing as a student, I was influenced by some of the drawings by Giacometti, where you have a series of different approximations as

he tries to fix the form, in the sense of a multiplicity of lines to try to fix a figure that he is doing, drawing over and over. The other is Giacomo Balla’s image of a dog walking. When I was six I went to Italy for the first time for a summer holiday. I was completely struck with the petrol sign for Agip Petrol, which shows a

six-legged dog and is still the petrol sign in Italy. And then you see the six-legged dog in Balla’s painting of a woman taking her dachshund for a walk; this dog has various different legs. And around the same time you have the Nude Descending a Staircase by Duchamp. These were images showing a multiplicity of limbs.

Duchamp was halfway between Muybridge and Cubism. His image lacks the rigor of Cubism which looks at an object from different angles. Duchamp shows each angle sequentially. The very first animation I ever did—I was fourteen or fifteen—had to do with a succession of drawings. You draw on a piece of very thin paper, the last page in a pad; then you flip the second last page on top of it and you can see the ghost of the first image, so you can by tracing on top of it make a slight change and you flip the next page, and so on. That’s a simple multiple drawing registration. But there’s a different drawing for each moment of the frame. That was the first animation. The second animation used drawing with an architect’s drafting pen onto the film itself. A tiny stick figure is repeated a thousand times, each image on a successive frame of the film. In this case, like the flip-pad, there were different images. When I came to doing animation, which doesn’t use a different drawing for each frame, but rather an alteration of the same drawing, I was stuck with the problem of erasure. As you erase an arm and redraw it in a slightly different position, you’re left with the ghost image of where the arm had been. The first year that I was doing animation I tried every possible way to get rid of that ghost image. I got every kind of eraser. I bought an electric eraser. I tried to use shiny paper, different materials. It simply seemed to me a fault, an inadequacy in my technique. I thought, ‘well, I have to solve that problem for these films to work. You want an image walking across the white paper, you don’t want

all this rubbish and smudge and dirt and waste.’ When I finished the first one I hoped that people would excuse the bad erasing and I would solve this technical problem in due course. It took me about a year and a half to understand that the erasures were part of the films and, more than that, they were part of their meaning and part of their interest. They had to do with the sense of things. So it wasn’t as if I had a good idea, it was as if the good idea had happened to me and it took a long time before I could understand it. It struck me very forcibly that most of the things of interest I’ve done haven’t been things that I’ve known about or planned. They’re usually things I’ve struggled against and that have been let in out of necessity. It’s only long afterwards that there’s some part of me saying, ‘no, no, believe me, this fault is actually going to be fine …’ Another example: In the theatre I began working with Handspring Puppet Company. You can either have a manipulator underneath the puppet or you can work in the Japanese tradition, where there’s a manipulator on stage, but he’s covered in black and so he’s invisible or disappears from the audience’s sight, is hardly present. In the first theatre piece using puppets, Woyzeck on the Highveld, there were some sequences where we knew the manipulators would be visible with the puppets. And again, for months, we tried to work out settings, lightings, we let the manipulators stand behind the puppets and put a shelf over them. We tried top lighting, so they’d be in shadow. We concluded that we were just incompetent, we couldn’t do it. In the end the manipulators were visible next to the puppets. Again I thought, ‘well I hope the audience doesn’t really notice or mind and it’s a problem we still have to solve.’ And then I saw the audience watching the performance, and saying, ‘no, no, the part we really love best is the manipulator and puppet duet, when you see the two together …’ It was similar to these erasures, it wasn’t a clear thought or decision on my side; it was a fault, which had within it the heart of what we were doing. We took it in as a structure—more than a structure—with a whole series of meanings built into it. So to get back to your question now about different elements of space. I’ve

only thought of it in terms of temporality, something leaving a trace of where something was before in space, rather than trying to evoke a distance around me, or around the figure … breidbach: So while you made a virtue of necessity in not being able to erase the ghost pictures entirely, thus rendering them a composite part of the animation, did it ever occur to you that you were extending the space in addition to animating their movements? kentridge: No, this is a new thought for me, whether it is about space as well as about time. I’ve always thought of it being about time. I’m still not sure if it feels right, that it’s about changing space. There is a scene at the beginning of the film History of the Main Complaint, which shows a vanishing point road and a large sheet of paper in the foreground. In the next image the sheet of paper gets slightly smaller, and smaller, and smaller. That is an illusion of this sheet of paper flying away in the wind, heading towards the vanishing point as it goes. That is a different thing; a literal exposition of deep space, of single point perspective. It is not about the space surrounding an object in one position. breidbach: We find this model of space surrounding an object in an early drawing of yours. The triptych Dreams of Europe from 1984 – 85 shows a wounded body surrounded by elegantly dressed men and women in the background. The body appears to be not only pictorially divided into three sections,

‘Dreams of Europe’, 1984–85, triptych, each 100 x 73 cm

the men in attendance are treating him in their own special way: one scratches holes into the skin, the next one removes a newspaper from his lap which is covering his genitals and drops cigar ash onto the naked skin, the third is putting his eyes out. He sees nothing, they are looking at him and with them, as a second category of observers, we change the direction of our attitude to the body. The three pieces of the triptych show this wounded man from three directions, and in so doing inflict further injury upon him by dissecting him. Together with

‘Il Ritorno d’Ulisse’ model for the scenery

the other observers, we form an external circle, evoking a circus ring. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Fifth Duino Elegy on this form of the circus as a way of seeing: ‘Und um diese Mitte, die Rose des Zuschauns blüht und entblättert’ (‘And around this centre the rose of watching blossoms and sheds its petals’). Did you have anything to do with this model of an encompassing, multiple act of seeing when you were working on the triptych? Can you say something about this work? kentridge: This is a drawing that is based on two sources. One is Hogarth’s engraving Stages of Cruelty and the other are different fragments either from

Anatomical Theatre of Padua University, 1594, the oldest preserved anatomical theatre in the world

Beckmann or from August Sander, for some of the figures. The man with the cigar comes from Beckmann. I wanted to work with the elements of a triptych that were connected, but not identical. The disruptions were part of what you see. The form is also related to the situation of someone taking snapshots. One is used to seeing the world taken through cameras casually in different images that are related, but not identical instants. They are not seen simultaneously. So part of the pleasure arises from the disjunctions between the different elements. This was done in 1984. Ten years later I worked on the production of Monteverdiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Il Ritorno dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Ulisse (1998). We were halfway through the production when suddenly I remembered this drawing and realized that the production was recreating this drawing on stage. I was only really reminded when one of our lead singers, who was bald, looked exactly like one of the men around the body in the drawing. The scene had to do with Ulysses in an operating theatre being considered by the doctors around him. That was the set for the Ulysses medicinal anatomical theatre, with the body laid out on that operating table and doctors all around examining. In the background of the stage we had projected images and drawings of the inside of the body.

breidbach: Have you been to the Anatomical Theatre in Padua? kentridge: I haven’t. breidbach: It’s very steep and makes you lean forward onto the safety rails and look down as though through a tunnel onto the operating table. In the exhibition in Turin opening this January 2004 you will be showing an anamorphic drawing. In these kinds of pictures the model of spherical space no longer belongs to the location and extensions between object and viewer, but is built as a model for

seeing right into the make-up of the art work. The actual received image is the projection onto a cylindrical mirror that translates the information of an anamorphic drawing around it. kentridge: I have done a series of anamorphic drawings, but the main body of this work started in Italy, where I was taking a workshop a few years ago. The origin of the drawing was a combination of two things. We visited the museum of sciences in Florence, a day’s expedition, where they had some 17th or 18th century anamorphic drawings: cylindrical mirrors with drawings distorted on a plane below them, reflected and seen in the mirror. Coming back from that day trip to the farm where we were staying in Umbria, we found that workmen had been redoing the air-conditioning and they had left lying around offcuts of chromed metal heating duct pipes. These fairly good shiny cylindrical mirrors were immediately available. Within half an hour of getting back it was possible to find out the grammar of what it is to draw an anamorphic drawing. We discovered a lot of things. The first principle of it was that it is a contemporary

activity in the sense that until recently there was the assumption that if you are drawing or writing, doing and looking fall into one place. You control the activity under the pencil, as if the hand is seeing what it does. The image on a computer screen has become a common way of working now and it creates a displacement between doing with the mouse in one hand and the keyboard underneath it and the place on the screen where your eyes focus. There is a kind of a shifting space, which your arm muscles need to know to move in relation to the image on the screen. You get used to it in a few minutes. The displacement in the anamorphic drawing was one of looking at the screen, the cylindrical mirror, and not at this drawing hand. When you think, ‘I need to draw a circle’, you cannot follow your arm muscles’ experience of making this round form; to get a shape which will look like a circle in the cylindrical mirror, in fact you have to do a long kidney bean. All the marks that one does to create something on a mirror are anticipations of a translated form. A straight line on the paper becomes a perfect parabola on the mirror, whereas to get a straight line in the reflection, you have to draw a particular curve on the sheet. One of the images of all these beautifully looped hanging lines was made by ruler lines drawn across the circle. You get beautiful curves: parabolas. If you make a circular line on your drawing surrounding the mirror, in other words a circle around the central cylinder, that gives you a kind of a straight horizon line. And then each line you draw from the centre out to the circle reads as a line into the depth of the landscape. Whereas the drawing on the paper is a flat drawing, there is an astonishing illusion of space inside the mirror. The focal distance from the drawing to the mirror to your eye shifts. If the eye is closer to the drawing and the mirror, the focal distance is closer. If the eye is on top of the mirror, it is double the distance to the drawing. So there is this illusion of deep space leading inside the mirror. The image is not on the plane of the mirror, in some way your mind reads it as inside the dimension of that cylinder. A pigeon which I drew—in the mirror it is a pigeon, on the paper there is an elongated

strange objectâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in the mirror is absolutely trapped in the space of the cylinder. You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t read it as being on the surface, your eyes read it three dimensionally, at some place in the middle of the mirror; so it is like a bird trapped inside a birdcage. I had not anticipated that at all. I was interested in the play of constructing,

how one’s eye through the mirror will construct the image out of this unnatural odd shape on the ground. The cylindrical image in this [Turin] exhibition is the image of the bird that I’ve been describing. There is a large drawing of a pigeon, it’s a bird that flew into the window of the studio and killed itself against the glass. It is one of a series of projected, photographic drawings. I wanted to do Karl Blosveldt drawings. In this case it was taken as a specimen, this dead bird, putting it in a clamp and focusing a camera on it, and projecting from that camera onto this large sheet of paper. I adjusted the camera and the bird while looking at the projection on the sheet of paper, to find the image. It was like a piece of cinema, adjusting all the various elements, the lighting, the zoom, until it looked like a projected element. When that had been found, I traced the outline, working quite carefully. The drawing is large, about two meters high and one meter fifty wide; the drawn bird is twenty times life-size. I copied the big drawing of the bird in its distorted form around the mirror onto a circular sheet of paper. In the exhibition you see these three representations of the pigeon in close proximity. We hopefully will be able to see a small bird that floats in space and the very large image

of the bird, the mirror being a strange projection onto the large scale. breidbach: As you describe it, it seems as if the optical construction of an anamorphic work inverts common experiences with spherical spaces. Normally we would call ‘figure’ a compact thing, seen on its surface from outside. And we

know ‘landscape’ to be something which spreads out around a fixed point in its middle. Here the figure melts and undulates around the cylinder as its inorganic eye, whereas a landscape can be rendered by just two lines, one circumscribing the mirror and one leading off vertically from it. That way you create, as you

describe, a pathway leading into a depth of field with a horizon that spreads out in the image on the cylinder. Both the inside and outside are reflected into one another and invert one another. kentridge: I would like to make an animated film which is filmed from above, and projected back down onto black circles. From there it would project itself onto a cylindrical screen. The animated drawings would be anamorphic, the film would be read in the mirror. One of the things that can happen in the cylindrical drawing is that you can circle it. So if you draw a room, which you see as a flat room, there is almost a sense of being able to circle that room as you go round. breidbach: In the sense of when one walks around the work as an observer? kentridge: Yes, even from the back. It’s got a separate image from the back obviously. You can’t see that room from the back. In the case of the bird, there is another image built into the mirror on the back, an iris, a flower. There’s an area from the side, where you can see both the iris and the bird, not converging; when you see them from the side they shift to the edges of the mirror. If you come around in front, they shift back into the centre of the mirror. breidbach: The anamorphic film projected into the cylinder hasn’t actually been realized yet, it is still just an idea, isn’t it? kentridge: At this stage it is an idea, because it is so slow to do these drawings, and it is slow to do the animation, so it’s like slowness squared. It is just exponentially slower. It means that the amount of movement would be minimal. There is a movement of yourself as viewer that you can do around it. If you have a static

landscape, a landscape in which almost nothing is moving, maybe there is some grass shifting in the wind, there is a cloud slowly moving—then there is an invitation for that walk around. There is plenty to see because you are partly watching yourself, constructing this world inside this cylindrical mirror. One does not need a whole drama of actions to whirl around it. breidbach: When you began drawing, you worked with frontal spaces in frames with edges and then started filling in spherical horizons; pictures became segments of circles curved around the observer’s standpoint, or discs which revolve in a temporal frame and show landscapes on different sections of their periphery. You have described these spaces. In the spherical spaces the observer turns on his/her own axis or walks around an object such as the cylindrical mirrors. In so doing the observer also perceives him/herself as well as the image. Changing positions merely determines his/her perception of the image. In your animations you return to the pictorial form of the window. Bodily, though not in the brain—hopefully we shall talk about it later—the viewer is a passive observer of the works in question. He/she finds himself, almost anonymously, in a darkened cabin in which the films are being projected. Now if you were to animate the spherical space further, you would extend the given possibilities of the media image or film. You don’t just have a static picture with moving observers or moving images with observers in fixed positions. In an anamorphic mirror-film both sides—artist and the observer—would make up the animation. Actions on the part of the artist and the observer would interact at the intersection of the art work itself and develop henceforward as a new object of perception. kentridge: Yes, but I had not thought of it in these terms. I had not thought that the movement of the viewer around the cylinder was a central part of it, but maybe it is. Maybe I will discover when I make it what it is about; that the pleasure has to do with the walk around. breidbach: Let’s stick with the artist’s position. How important is your own movement when you are working? Is there a reference to it in the works? Whenever you place yourself in the image; you are not merely depicting yourself from the mirror as you do in the Tappeiner and Wulf documentary, and if you draw yourself from behind you have to have a whole series of mirrors and a whole choreography of performing for yourself. kentridge: There are different ways. What I use a lot now is a little video camera as a kind of sketch book. In the most recent film Tide Table this has pro-

vided a way of being able to stop and analyze what someone is doing in a movement. I stop in different frames of the video and test awkwardness of movement. If I need the smoothness of someone throwing a stone, I can find what the actual grammar of that is. In other words, it takes two seconds to pick up a stone and throw it, but where are the pauses, where is the acceleration? But if I use the camera a lot as a reference, I somehow get stuck within what it is Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m referring to, so it is a question of using it at times and not using it all the time. Sometimes I want accuracy; sometimes I want something that has nothing to do with accuracy. But for nuggets of information, for kernels of reference to how things move in the world, it is useful to work with the video camera. I also think there is a kind of strange approximation that happens. So that if one went frame by frame and almost as casually as you liked, placed the relative positions of limbs on each frame, when you came to project them together, even if they were really out of position on the plane, you would absolutely be able to see right there on the film the movement that you initially intended to capture. In some of these sequences in the new film Tide Table I would work from the camera as a reference, in particular for some of the movements of the little boy in the film. And at some point the figure in the film disappeared, it was such a mess. I lost track: which arm is that, what leg is it, where is that, whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s moving? Should I rather rub this out and move it down or rub that out and shift it across? But when projected, all the different fragments are somehow completely convincing as the movement of the figure. Now there is no outline, there is no real edge. Bits of drawing are making the image. My movement and filming it with the video camera work as references for the drawings. References also come from the mirror and from photographs. breidbach: You perform two roles, you are the performer, you perceive him and then draw. Are you the shadow figure performing in the film for the overture to the The Magic Flute that we saw in Goslar? kentridge: That is true, yes. breidbach: You understand a lot about movement, after all you studied drama. Does this self-referential aspect of acquiring knowledge through movement translate into drawing? It is something quite different whether you merely draw yourself or include those movements which the body has once performed and logged as a memory. kentridge: The Magic Flute overture, the animated film fragment called

Learning the Flute, was really a two-week project to try to find out what the language of the production was going to be, what kinds of images would form its vocabulary. I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I gave myself the two weeks, saying, ‘well, anything is allowed, anything is possible. See what emerges in two weeks’, in the hope that in the end of the two weeks I would know more about the production than at the beginning. I had the choice to either spend two weeks listening to different recordings and making notes; I had been listening to different interpretations, but to do it scientifically, I would have to compare five Papagenos and five Sarastros next to each other and find out why I like different points or what ones make sense. Or I could read. I have ten or eleven books on the subject sitting on my table, from a series on opera to books on the history of Masonic lodges to musical analysis of the opera. But the route into the production had to be much less scholarly, I needed to work from the centre out. It comes back to what I was talking about early on with those monoprints, saying that in the end the form of them, I mean not only the form, the substance and the meaning—people in this dark space being observed by others—was a byproduct or came out of the material and the size of the plate and the particular black ink that was on it in the way of making the images. In the same way the substance of what will be in the production of The Magic Flute came out of cir-

cumstances and needs of that two weeks’ work. While I was making it I was also working for the exhibition that I had in Goslar, where I wanted to do a small projection in the very beautiful Apostles’ Room in the Mönchehaus Museum. It is a room full of wood panelling, and with paintings on the wall. The audience is not allowed into this room, they can only stand at the doorway. This set the conditions for something that would be in the centre of the room, that could be viewed from the door and that would not be a projection on the wall. I needed to acknowledge the room and not fight against it; the solution was to keep the room dark and have an object in it. I decided to work with a projection on a blackboard, a blackboard being a real-life acceptable object that is a screen, but is not simply a movie screen. The expectation is that it is black, that it is something

that can change and the question was, could one project onto a black board? You need something light, to project on a black screen, to reflect the light. In fact there are so many different degrees on black. Deep black velvet that absorbs all light and reflects nothing would not be a good surface for projecting. But even though the hard wooden board is painted black it reflects a huge amount of light. If you do project on it, your eye does not see black with a bit of light in it. Your eye sees it as intensely white. And it looked absolutely like a chalk drawing. If one is working on a projection on black that calls for white lines, so that these read like the chalk on the blackboard, there are two ways of proceeding. The one is to work with a black sheet of paper and with white chalk—which is the way I’ve worked in a number of films. But there is something of a problem in that white pastel is crumbly and it’s crude, so you have to work on a really large sheet of paper, if you want the line to appear fine when you project it; and it is difficult after a lot of drawing to keep erasing, the paper gets shiny. Whereas if I work with charcoal, it is more flexible, you can get finer work and you can work more quickly. I decided to work with charcoal on a white sheet of paper, but then to invert that electronically. Everything that is white becomes black and every-

thing that is black becomes white. Now, we have to go back one step. I began this technique of inverting black and white in an earlier project, which was a project in response to George Méliès. We are going to get back to me as a shadow performing inside Learning the Flute, eventually, but let’s talk more about inverting black and white. In the middle of summer last year in Johannesburg we had a plague of ants. There were

ants everywhere. In the morning you would come into the kitchen and wherever there had been a piece of sugar or a drop of honey it would be covered with ants. However we tried to kill them they still came in, through the windows, through tiny cracks. Throughout the whole city there was this infestation of ants. And then I noticed one morning that on the bread board there was a series of black shapes, particular patterns of abstract black shapes. And it turned out that some syrup had been dropped there overnight and it was covered with ants, making these intense black shapes. I thought that if one starts then arranging that, certainly you can do drawings or paintings with ants. I was in the middle of a different project but I thought I would just do this as an aside; I put up a camera in the studio and a sheet of paper, and worked with sugar-water making drawings with ants, training ants to do drawing. I first had to draw a long line from outside the studio with sugar-water to the sheet of paper, so that the ants would learn where the sugar was in the studio. After a couple of hours there was this thin stream of ants that had found the sugar-water and followed it into the studio. I started to do simple line drawings with the sugar water. I waited and it would take about four hours for the ants to line up neatly at the edge of the sugar. breidbach: Did they become stuck to it or did they consume it and then walk away? kentridge: They eat and walk away. But the point is that when you zoomed in, what you saw was that in fact they were all perfectly lined up, as if they were parked in a big parkade at a shopping mall. And they would reverse out of position and others would take their place. So then I started a film which was drawn with ants, the Méliès series, one of which was the Journey to the Moon, which was a remake of George Méliès’ film of the same name. And the principle of the film—which was a whole separate project, we will not go into it at this moment—had to do with objects and things that were in the studio. I then decided that I would use these ants to do all the stars and constellations, by inverting them. Instead of having black dots on a white sheet of paper, you would have white dots, like the stars against the night sky. That was when I started thinking of inverting the whiteness and the blackness. breidbach: When was this? kentridge: This was in June of 2003. I was making the film Learning the Flute in September, just before the exhibition in Goslar. There were certain sequences in Learning the Flute which I had assumed I would do as positive images, in particular a series of drawings of Egyptian temples. As it was on the same film that I was

filming the lines that were to be inverted, I processed it all as negative and all as positive and suddenly had these images of Egyptian temples, but inverted, the negative of the drawings. The interiors went light instead of dark and the columns went black instead of light. Both give a beautiful image in the sense of working with scenery on stage; but much more importantly the transformation seemed to show a way of thinking about the relationship between the Queen of the Night and Sarastro. The Queen of the Night’s world is that of darkness and Sarastro’s world is of light. That sense of photographic negative and positive will be a central strand to the whole production. But it is something that arose out of the needs of the form—in this case the blackboard—that I happened to be working with; something that was not Zauberflöte at all, but rather the exhibition in Goslar. Within these two weeks, whilst playing with all these different ways and discovering the negative and positive processing of the drawings, I made other discoveries, for example that a simple line can move across a sheet of paper. Because it moves through time it can also hold on to its trajectory. In many ways it is

close to the experience of hearing a piece of music, which is hearing the movement of the note as it comes out, but also containing within ourselves both the memory of the other tones or elements that have gone before; and also having an expectation of where it will go afterwards. That sense of the note as a moving particle in the continuity of what has been heard and what is still to be heard seems to be possible with these very simple line drawings for the production. Coming back to your question about reference to self in the drawings: one of the things I was testing in the film Learning the Flute was filming myself with a little video camera, against a white background. It could have been anyone, one of the singers, but in this case I was in the studio, so I was the one to do it. I am a dark silhouette against the light background. The first stage is filming the silhouette. Then I project that video footage onto a small sheet of paper and freeze it as frame one. Then I shoot that sheet of paper with my 35 mm film camera, the camera I use for animation. I start to draw on the sheet. And then I advance the video projector one frame and I extend the drawing on the sheet of paper again and then shoot that with the 35 mm camera … and so on. In relation to

time and memory: it is not that I first draw and try to remember where my figure was filmed; it is done there in the moment. breidbach: As a draftsman you get very close to yourself as the performer. The performer helps the draftsman to find a representation or mimesis not only of the figure, but also of its movement. kentridge: It’s simply trying to find a technique, a solution for how one can bring the human image and the drawing together for these moments. But it also then had a sense of being able to pull these lines out of the world. Something that you understand as a reference for a real person, a shadow in movement, is able to construct these other worlds, with line drawings as event. So whether it is an image of the conductor, or Papageno or Sarastro—I don’t know where it will be used, but I know it will come in. breidbach: You spoke about beginning the project intuitively instead of informing yourself through scholarly books about interpretations of this opera. Was dancing the key to your intuitive approach to follow the musical lines, the melodies, to learn them, as you put it? kentridge: Dancing was a way of finding a sense of what kind of rhythm the music holds and then performing it and filming myself doing that. I was by myself, experimenting with music and movement in the studio. breidbach: You learn the flute by dancing it. Dancing as a form of searching and slowly exploring has, I feel, a lot to do with visual language and drawing as a medium. Next to the short excerpt from the dance, the linear dynamic of the film Learning The Flute has the gesture of tracks, which seem to pull this dance along. There seem to be several different possibilities for the translation of movement into the films? kentridge: And a lot of the movement, a lot of the animation of the other films is done by walking around the studio with the stopwatch and saying, ‘alright, the man is going to walk two steps and is going to pick up a stone and throw it. How does that feel?’ I would perform the action, time it and translate it into a number of frames: it is two and a half seconds, so it is sixty two frames. So the first part will be forty frames … I sometimes draw a line across the sheet of paper and I know: this is going to be the journey of my arm, roughly, and that will be forty frames, then the next part of the movement will take us to fifty-two … so it is dividing time into very simple graphic sequences.

breidbach: You have to be very patient with such a process; you do something in one second and translate it into thirty-one different frames. Spontaneity of movement and sober calculation are both required here. kentridge: Here is an easy gesture, going to pick up a stone and throw it; and you could take three steps and turn around and throw the stone. It is not harder to do this than to simply stand where you are and bend down and pick up the stone and throw it. But the one will take five days to draw and the other will take a day to draw and be finished. So the calculation starts early as an economy of what is possible and what is feasible, a balance between a slowness and a consciousness of what the film needs, and something that would be so slow that the films would never happen, never get made. That has do with oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own level of patience and obsession. Some animators have a different level and understand that they must spend six years making one five-minute animated film. breidbach: Nobody has that much patience.

kentridge: Yes, people do that. Only I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have that sort of patience. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m always looking for ways that make the process more direct and simple. breidbach: This leads me to another question: for us the observers, the consumers of your art, the whole complexity in every second and minute of the films has a palpable density and intensity. The degree of density you afford us is directly proportionate to the time you have available to invest in order to achieve it. Do you feel it a loss sometimes, as though your time, when measured against the beauty of your art, is being inverted?

kentridge: Yes, there is a balance between them. For example in a sequence of one of the early films there is an erotic gift to be given from Soho to Mrs. Eckstein, his lover. And I tried to imagine what image would have that sexual power. Does one draw a little horse over there, a horse that is galloping and galloping around his hand? And I thought â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;this is insaneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. First, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to draw a horse; secondly to have to draw that horse and making it move is going to take an hour for each movement, it is going to take me two weeks to do one circle. But if one has the same hand, and all you have is an image that any child can draw and recognize of a fish, you draw that fish in four seconds. You can erase it very easily and put it in a new position. In an hour you can have that fish doing a series of leaps and jumps. The image arose not out of deciding the perfect image for this gift, but out of a consideration of whether he should kiss her hand or hold something in his hand, something that seems manageable to do. In the end the image of the fish, which is wet and a bit like a sperm is a much happier image than a horse would have been. In this case it was good fortune, that something I found that was feasible to do was in fact a good idea. It is another example of how practical considerations or constraints, which one assumes have nothing to do with the image, actually become part of the meaning of it. It means that overall there are different strategies. For example, if you film a person and you want them to shift a physical expression, that is a very simple thing for an actor to do, but it is an enormously complicated thing to draw. The sense of psychology in a face is hardly ever there in the films. Whereas if you have a telephone and you want to turn it into a cat, you must use all the resources of Hollywood special effects, but the transformation is achieved very easily through the process of drawing. The films are certainly structured by things that the technique can do and what it cannot do. There are some sequences which are slow to draw, things which would take impossibly long. I try to build things in such that the technique seems to present itself as part of the material. And I work with a series of lists all the time. Even though the films do not have a script or a storyboard, I would start with a list of one to twenty of the scenes of the film. I might know that I want to have cows on the beach, so that is one of the pieces I would draw. I want to have Soho in the waves: another piece of information. That is how the film Tide Table, just finished, began. My drawing during the first week was a process of trying to find the grammar of a wave breaking; drawing the waves, knowing that this had to come into the film somewhere. So that was very slow, just to draw a wave breaking. Then I drew a shot of Soho in the waves. I looked at these two pieces of film together and made a list, which co-

ordinated these different pieces plus other scenes before them and other scenes after them. And a mixture of knowing the rough shape of the film so far, a sense of the next series of sequences, and understanding that there are some six months remaining, before one would expect the film to be finished. By now I know it will take nine months to do a film, with other activities that happen alongside. But it’s very obsessive; if I’m doing ordinary drawing, I work for five hours and it’s difficult to keep concentration. Drawing for animation is broken the whole time between changing a fragment of the drawing and the walk across to the camera and a walk back. There is a different rhythm provided through that walking, and through the pause at each stage to shoot the frames. And I can work for many more hours at this kind of drawing. breidbach: Is this because you don’t follow a plot in your stories? kentridge: Some people think very well narratively and I think very badly narratively. If I start with a script, the script will always be less interesting than what emerges through the awkwardnesses and gaps in the narrative. When the film is finished, I wish I’d started with a script, to make a real story. But if I try to do a script in advance, nothing happens, I can’t get it. breidbach: The process with which you construct a film engenders a high level of complexity even as you work. In the same way that you don’t animate the section of a single movement by juxtaposing individual images, but rather by layering many images on top of one another, you first hold all the images for the screenplay in your hand without any rigid plan. The connections between the images don’t follow the temporal trajectory of a storyline. Images accrue complexity. They concert with each other. kentridge: I’m not sure how complex or how simple the films are. breidbach: Don’t you think you capture complexity in them? kentridge: I don’t know. breidbach: Well, my idea is that they are able to show something like the complexity of visual thinking. But let us not rush too far ahead now … What is the dynamic of this game you describe, if not rational thought? Does it emanate from movement or do you call it association or is it the insistence of the graphic repetition and alteration on the paper?

kentridge: In this film for example, there is a sequence in which cows came in because I was thinking about AIDS as a disease in Africa—and it is a huge thing in South Africa—as describing it as a disease of thinning. In many parts of Africa, it is described as getting thin or slim. breidbach: You mentioned the African aphorism ‘Being thin is not dying …’ kentridge: That is an old, old aphorism. Here being thin is dying … and the thought of thin cows had at some point led me to think of Pharaoh’s dream, the dream that Joseph interprets of the thin cows, that come out of the sea, and they devour the fat cows. It is a dream of abundance followed by drought. Something gave me the thought that there were going to be fat cows and thin cows. It also could have been huge droughts in the country and newspaper photographs of thin cows. It is a kind of over-determination, the different points of entry that an image emerges from; there is no single vantage point. Those images of the cows starving or dying from the drought had a correlation to the people dying from AIDS, a plague in the country. And in South Africa the third point of entry for these images is that there is a particular part of the country, where there are many cows on the beaches, so these are familiar images. You’ll sit on the beach and suddenly a whole herd of cows will pass through. These are local references to the image of cows on the beach. I knew also, I’m not sure how this arose, that I wanted to have an African choir on the beach, just because in another part of the country there are a lot of church services that happen on the beach. breidbach: So you don’t just hear the choir, the choir actually appears on the beach? kentridge: It appears and you don’t know whether it is a baptism, or a drowning, or a burial. I thought it was going to be a burial that happened in the film. But then there was a crowd of people singing on the beach. They wear long white robes and I drew this sequence and from that suddenly remembered that the nanny who had looked after me as a child had been a devout follower of this particular church sect, the ZCC (Zion Christian Church). She started coming into the film as a solo woman or a member of the choir; and with her a young boy whom she was caring for. In the film you see different groups on the beach. One of them is this nanny with the boy. When I started editing the film, I wanted that figure to appear again and the boy particularly came into the film at the beginning and again at the end. Suddenly I realized that the film was very much about the journey of the boy

through the film and Soho, the usual man in the deck chair, watching it. And that in the end, the film became as much about the relationship of Soho to himself as a child, not to his child, but to his younger self. It is a question of: who is the person we were forty years ago? Is that the same person we are now? Or is it a different being altogether? If you imagine bumping into your earlier self, then would you be embarrassed by who you were? There is always something depressing about seeing pictures of oneself as a child and it is almost as though you feel you are saying ‘I’m sorry,’ to that photograph. ‘I was supposed to look after you, I was supposed to make good decisions, but somehow I made a whole lot of bad deci-

sions and in the end you turned into me.’ This odd relationship to oneself certainly became one of the interests of the film. A lot of Soho’s actions were determined by what happened to the boy. None of those would have been possible if I had simply started at the beginning; I don’t think they could have been planned from the beginning, they were not there when I started. It is one of the reasons for not working with a script. In general there are points of discovery during the

process of the work. breidbach: What I’d call complexity is that associations interrelate. You begin with one point or with a few images and you put them into a loose frame, a loose structure, and then you build things in and you have new combinations and perpetually find something new in them, such as the way you let one of your women stand out as your nanny from the rest of the choir, and she appears with the boy and the memory of this boy presents itself as the story of the film. You combine one thought with another, knotting new experiences or insights to images you constantly carry in your mind and work with at a given time. The individual work’s horizon widens and widens with every step with relational, partly connected, partly disparate images and then expands still further. It is complexity, not drama. It is visual thinking without a clear direction, maybe we could even say, without the vanishing point of a story. Your stories don’t end with the customary ‘The End’, they are circular. The question is even whether or not we can use this as a representation of how the brain works with visual associations? kentridge: I don’t know if it quite answers the question, but I will give two examples of things that struck me as illustrating the way in which the natural condition is one of continuously trying to solve riddles, making predictions of

order, trying to make things make sense. Things may simply not make sense, but try as hard as you like not to, your mind is trying to make sense of them. It is always a process of meeting the world halfway and then trying to get it to make sense in terms of what one knows already.

The first is an example of my daughter, when she was three. I was telling her about what had happened with our cat. The new cat had gone outside, I told her, and it was chased by the dog. And the cat then ran back inside through the cat flap and escaped. When my daughter was retelling the story, she said: ‘The cat went outside, the cat was chased by the dog and then it flapped its wings and it escaped.’ The cat flap was not a term that she knew, but she immediately tried whatever possible to fit it into an existing structure of knowledge. She knew ‘flap’ from a bird flapping its wings and immediately filled that into the story to complete the missing information. The other example comes from phoning Basil, a friend from the theatre company I have worked with. I asked: ‘what is Adrian doing, what projects is he working on?’ And he said to me—they were working on a theatre project— ‘Adrian is doing the tree search.’ And I thought, ‘tree search, tree search, don’t

know what a tree search is … of course I know this from the Internet and that it’s a way of searching for information, you have a term to enter and then there are different solutions given. You follow those up and it branches out, you get a whole tree. It’s a way of searching that gives you more and more information.’ And when we finished our conversation I asked Basil, ‘what was Adrian researching?’ He said, ‘what do you mean by researching?’ ‘You said he was doing a tree search?’ And he said, ‘no I didn’t, I said he was making a T-shirt.’ So in the moment that he said that word, my brain immediately scanned, didn’t know, and then not only constructed this complicated idea as to what Adrian was doing, his activity in the world, and at the same time accused me as a fool for not having heard it before, but also thought, ‘oh well, I’m sure I’ve heard it before, I’ve just forgotten it.’ The whole long history of this thought was built into the term in that instant. In both of these cases it is not saying that here it is a little hard to make sense. Our brain is working much faster than that, making these associations, filling in gaps, taking leaps. That would be the sense in which I understand associations working. To put it into terms of visuality and movement: think of the roughly torn shadow puppets that I have used in some of my work. A lot of them emerged through a process of tearing sheets of paper almost at random and then seeing what happens if one puts them together and were to move them. It is about seeing, not what you know, but what you recognize. When you look at a cloud, you don’t think, ‘what can I force myself to see?’ There is an image which presents itself as the head of an old man with his eye drawn big and the shoulder coming out. It is not about an active intelligence; it is about a category of recognition, which is there fighting to come out the whole time. breidbach: It reminds me of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s thoughts in praise of imperfection as a source of creative potential: ‘O thou artist, composer of narrative pictures, desist from using precisely formed lines to delineate individual pro-

portions and limbs, … for (Leonardo is formulating this as a critique of the wrong method of drawing) if the painter has already sketched out the limbs so perfectly in all of their parts, it would seem injurious to have to change something or to shift the limbs upwards or downwards or forward or to the back … I have seen blemishes on walls and in clouds, which have in turn prompted felicitous discoveries of the most diverse nature; even if these blemishes were completely devoid of perfection in their individual parts, they did not lack perfection in their movement or other effects they may have had.’ (Codex Urbinus, v-62 r) kentridge: There is so much we know and are not even aware of knowing. And if there is a slight shift in the cloud you recognize someone with a limb, walking in a particular way. I’ve worked with school groups, children of seven or eight. If you say to them. ‘I need you to do a picture of a dinosaur doing a back somersault in the air,’ that’s impossible. They don’t know how to do it. But if you tear some shapes out, a piece for a tail, a piece for the body, neck, head, legs and you just fit them together as the animal and move them under your hand, you recognize what it is doing and you can get seven years old kids to do a completely beautiful image of a dinosaur doing a back somersault in mid-air. breidbach: So one criterion is a certain fuzziness of form, unfinished form with open possibilities to play with and another is the manual shifting of such elements until they give you something. You described finding scenes in the films precisely through a measure of uncertainty and lack of direction of the building blocks. kentridge: You know it by recognizing it, rather than knowing before. You may not know what the shape of a lion or a dog is, but you can certainly recognize it as you see it. And this is halfway between drawing it and simply recognizing it. breidbach: Maybe the associative work is also recognizing what you draw from other directions latent in your memory: being thin is a symptom of AIDS as a disease, thinness is synonymous with the Pharaoh’s cows, the cows appear in the waves, Soho stood in the surf, the cows appear on the beach, the choir appears on the beach, one of women in the choir is recognized as the nanny, the boy comes to her, she cares for the boy who used to be Soho … You create a texture out of drawing, recognizing, drawing that which has been recognized …

kentridge: When one is doing the film, there is the hope in the same way. One is starting with a knowledge of a T-shirt but sometimes is ending up with a tree search. Or starting with a cat coming through the flap and in the end it flies away. That’s the kind of association. breidbach: Maybe the form of your approach is itself a kind of ‘tree search’. kentridge: When I was at university, I did not study fine arts, I studied politics and African history. The last text we read in my undergraduate degree was about Gadamer’s Truth and Method. This was in 1976, and the book had just recently been published in English. I remember only parts of the book, but one of the things this book is about became essential for me. There was the category of play. First he talks about the way of understanding language through colloquial use and through idiomatic use rather than from simply logical use. If you think of the word play in English, that’s an activity that you do. It is quite childlike in that sense, but if you think of it in this more idiomatic and abstract form, then you talk about the play of light on water, on objects, which you don’t really have control over. Following a set of rules of its own, and which you could choose to enter or not. This may not be a good understanding of the text, but it is what I learned from it. What it suggests is that through this activity of play, of giving yourself over to play and taking seriously the arbitrary rules of that particular form, when you play, a sense and a meaning can emerge. So it’s a way that was neither an approach of a positivistic or deterministic logic, which was the dominant philosophy around Johannesburg, where I was; nor even the kind of rigorous use of language that you would find in French philosophers writing at the time. But maybe it was an excuse to understand that play, something that starts quite light-heartedly, in a whimsical, uncertain way, can still have a value at the end. The end is not doomed by the uncertainty of the beginning. For something to be serious, it is often assumed that you need a serious programme, if you have your serious programme, then something serious can emerge. But this is to assert that you can start with something that is much more uncertain, that arises from other origins, like the demands of the technique, the demands of what is easy to draw. And it is still possible to arrive at sense or meaning. It may be a misunderstanding of Gadamer, but I hung on to that piece as a really helpful piece in understanding that one can work in a looser, more free way without it being random and without it being nonsense. breidbach: When you talk about ‘play’ do you mean the play on stage or also the play on associations?

kentridge: It was not the general approach to work with associations or with word plays. I did a film Felix in Exile. That was partly because EXILE is a kind of palindrome, it is a near reversal of FELIX. The question was, how could I do a film that is about a word game, about words? But in the end it entered into the substance of the film. breidbach: This mirror-symmetry of both words becomes an actual objective motif in the middle of the film when you have this wonderful image of Felix glimpsing himself in the bathroom mirror … kentridge: I tell you something very interesting about the mirror. I have just realized recently who he is looking at through the mirror. Felix has been a character that has been in the films from the beginning. His name came from a dream. It was a dream phrase, as was the name Soho Eckstein. At that point I was keeping a dream diary and I would write down odd phrases. There were not images, they were just phrases. When I did the first film, I needed a name for my two characters and I remembered my dream diary and went through it and found these two names. But I had never understood, who or why the name Felix. And just a few months ago, and it seems so obvious, someone pointed out that my mother’s name is Felicia. And I suddenly think, ‘is that me looking back at my mother in the mirror? Who is the Felix in it? Where does Felix fit into the dream? What is the association?’ But for twelve years after I’d made the film I did not make the connection back to my mother’s name at all, until somebody said, your mother’s name is Felicia, it must be her. Of course, and it is so obvious that I must have been repressing it for all those years. breidbach: Is such an objectivisation of the subjective a component of the game? kentridge: I start anywhere in the hope that it can be finished, but halfway along I’ll start to see what it means. In the belief also that if in the end there is a terrible image of someone there that emerges in the film, then that is part of who I am. If I find some arrogance in the film, then that is who I am. So there is also this sense of knowing that you cannot avoid your fate. Whether you like it or not, who you are is going to come out in the work. I started the film Tide Table, thinking that the last films had been so introverted, so much about Soho looking into himself, I wanted to have one where he is active in the world again. So there would be cows on the beach, a choir on the beach. Not just him in his room. It would be outside, there would be all these

other people. The film is made and he is somehow more on his own than in any of the other films. All the other people are happening around him and he is lost in his own world. In spite of all those decisions at the beginning of how I think it is going to be, it just did not turn out as planned. The story that is most terrifying and astonishing to me is the end of the story of Perseus. Perseus’s grandfather consulted the oracle and is told that he’s going to be killed by his grandson. So he throws his daughter out with her son into the waves. Perseus then grows up to become a shepherd and goes and kills the Gorgon and he is a hero. He hears that he is going to kill his grandfather and he says, ‘I’ve no desire to kill my grandfather. I’m going to go home and forgive him and all will be fine.’ And he sets off home. The grandfather hears that Perseus is on his way home, and thinks, ‘he’s going to come home and kill me,’ so he flees his homeland in disguise. Perseus arrives on a little island just before he reaches his grandfather’s kingdom and there is an athletics competition. He decides to enter,

and he throws the discus. He throws the discus so far that it goes over the playing field into the crowd. In the crowd there is this old man sitting … and it is of course his grandfather in disguise. Perseus kills him. And one thinks, ‘why didn’t he stay home, why didn’t the old man sit one seat further across …’ That sense that whatever you’re doing it is coming towards that moment, inevitably. And I suppose there is that sense that in the end the films will be what they are, and that an artist looks at himself in the end—not in a narrative sense, but that the character is who you are, that it is always a kind of self-portraiture.

breidbach: You explained how you make associations between images. You explain that with this the artist is part of the work, the images of the work turn out to be his own impressions and own memories, even something akin to his personal fate. If we call visuality and its art in this sense a ‘language’ and assume that you speak this language fluently—that you invented forms to make images literally fluent—then what is the vocabulary of your art and what its grammar? How do you produce this kind of thinking? Perhaps it’s a little pushy of me, but may we return to the question of body memory and movement? Visual thinking and its language starting with simple seeing and manual actions right through to associations of images in the brain, which can include layers of memory of an individual fate, are bona fide activities of the body. They are quite different to logical, objective thinking which we tend to practice. Animated films have a completely different dynamic to them in contrast to letting others act and then simply filming the action. How do you keep this mobility active in yourself? How does the body work the thinking process? Is the perpetual walk from drawing board to your technical eye, the camera, that is to say, the inherent gap bridged a thousand times between doing and finding, part of what we have called ‘association’? kentridge: The activity of walking is very important. In the studio I have the wall with the drawing and I have the camera and there is a walk to and from the drawing to the camera. It is both a practical necessity and a need. Sometimes I’ve had an assistant at the camera, then I’ve just walked to the side whilst the assistant shot a couple of frames and then I walked back—and it completely didn’t work. It didn’t work both because I got too anxious about the length of time the assistants were standing, doing nothing, waiting for me, so I drew too quickly; and also because I was stepping to the side, and I never got to see the drawing. The walk from the drawing back to the camera, where I shoot the frames, and then back to the drawing, and so on, is very important. Each time you walk away and return, there is a glance at the drawing, a fresh view of it. breidbach: The game between drawing and recognizing, as you described it before is not only a mental game; you build active movement into your particular process of visual thinking. kentridge: I know for example that I need to move a line down the sheet of paper and it is going to take twenty adjustments. I make twenty walks to and fro in the hope that at some point in that journey I’ll have some idea about what happens when the line reaches the bottom. So it is a mesmerizing process. That is the one walk that happens in the studio. Between the sequences I walk further

away and stalk there, trying to imagine what the scene is, what its time and shape is. Movement is very much part of the working process. The one place where nothing happens is when I’m sitting at the desk. It’s a disaster. It’s fine if I’m making a list for things I’ll be doing, trying to reassure myself that it is possible to bring certain things into a frame of time. The actual physical activity of making the drawings is different, is an intensive process. It is a comfort in a practical sense, it is very central to me in times of distress or depression, that physical activity in a primitive, therapeutic way works to calm me down to make things. breidbach: Yes, and does so much more than that. kentridge: I come from a very logical and rational family. My father is a lawyer. I had to establish myself in the world as not just being his son, his child. I had to find a way of arriving at knowledge that was not subject to cross-examination, not subject to legal reasoning. When I was in the field of ordinary reasoning I found I was always under his opinions. It is not that I struggled under him, his opinions just felt natural and right and all-powerful. I think that one of the reasons for making drawings was that this was a way of trying to find knowledge or find opinions that came through a completely different route. So in the end there was some meaning. It wasn’t as if I dreamed it up with nothing, no thoughts, but they had to come through different ways, other ways entirely to those of legal reasoning. There is no expectation in drawing that you are going to have the kind of reasoning that a legal argument has. So to be making drawings, it is natural that you start in the centre. You don’t have a plan about the whole thing. You don’t have to write a dissertation about the drawing, before you make it. You start at some point in the middle, you follow, you expand. You follow where it’s going. It is partly a projection of an image you have in your head; it is partly a reception, what you recognize as the drawing proceeds. The idea when making the films is to work with the same logic as in making the drawings, where things can start somewhere in the middle. I work associatively, responding to what arises, in the hope that in the end you would not just be left with noise, you would be left with something that had some sense if not clear and perfect coherence. It would be like the metaphor you mentioned yesterday of blackness, white milk and early, the meaning somewhere in the centre of three different elements. breidbach: It will be interesting during the course of the discussion to discover which elements of a visual grammar can be compared with similar structures in language.

kentridge: Combining elements constantly requires different strategies for images to emerge. This play with language is one direction. Working from the demands of the form outward, like the black ink in the monoprint and the blackboard, is a second one. Working from the demands of the technique, like the little fish in the hand, is a third one. These are all things that theoretically should be outside the space of narrative or of finding the story, but are all strategies of trying to find ways into the work. They do not start with a good idea at the beginning; they start with a series of different bad ideas. breidbach: Is there a common language in the brain for words and images? kentridge: What I’ve been talking about is the fact that making an image is absolutely a common way that we use to make sense of the world. It is not reserved for making drawings. The drawing is a diagram of the way that we make sense of the world, constructing, filling in gaps, trying to find coherences. breidbach: In the black and white works we find blue lines like vectors and red marks in the landscapes. Could one read them as poetological signs for the ways in which the world is transported via images to the faculties of perception or thought or indeed, the way in which thoughts, feelings and insults etc. themselves enter the normal world and mark the landscape? kentridge: The blue lines that go through the drawings are, as you say, a visual depiction of something we know but do not see. I had not thought of the charcoal drawing as the poetry and the blue lines as the poetology, but maybe that’s so … There are two layers, in the same way as you may have something like a photograph and then have annotations upon it. There are those forensic photographs of the body and then notes about the photograph, drawn lines and diagrams. breidbach: What I would call poetology is, for example, the film passage in Felix in Exile where Felix and his female counterpart form a mirror symmetry. You talked about it before, about Felix and Felicia. On Felix’s side of the mirror is an active space, visual reflection becomes the exile located on the other side, a living inversion of one’s own image just as in the palindrome of the title. She and he look into each other’s eyes, her left eye sees into his right eye through the telescope. And then, going on in the sequence of the film, we follow the path of her sight into Felix’s eye. The film transports us through the pupil into the background of the eye and shows us an African landscape, nature located in the eye;

‘Felix in Exile’, 1994, drawing for the animation of the same name, 120 x 160 cm

‘Stereoscope’, 1998–99, drawing for the animation of the same name, 57 x 80 cm

we hear African rhythms and see the landscape shift into the container of the brain, where it undergoes other metamorphoses. You show the world as a visual thought and the ways in which it comes into being. Such simple blue vectors are merely pathways of perception thereby, but when they are combined to form complex patterns, one might well call them poetological. Felix’s reflected apprehension of another world, which becomes his world, generates feelings and moods, which in turn can no longer be described as perceptions. kentridge: And then for me the interesting thing about this sequence is this. I started with the image where Felix looks in the mirror. He sees himself. He starts to shave and he shaves his face away. As he shaves his face disappears in the mirror. And then I thought, ‘well, what happens now, his bowl of water can appear … ’ and only after a long time, after sitting with it for two or three days did I realise that the woman Nandi could appear. So it was not as though I knew at the beginning of the sequence that I needed to bring her together with him. It was at the end of the last moment of the scene and obviously it is very central to the film. This telescope did not exist as an idea at the beginning. So this is another instance in which it is absolutely in the hope that somewhere in the middle of the process solutions will present themselves. For some reason which my brain

knows, but that I do not know, I erased his face, and allowed a space for her to come in … And these discoveries always have the effect on me of feeling not, ‘what a good idea,’ but rather, ‘how stupid I was, not to know that all along,’ or, ‘why did I have to wait for three days, of course she had to be there.’ breidbach: What does the water signify—drawn in blue—in the bowl next to the mirror or at the bottom of the landscapes? kentridge: The area around Johannesburg is very dry and so to make it blue in reality, to make blue pools of water, would be an enormous engineering project. But in a drawing it is a gift you can give with just three lines of blue pastel. So it is a kind of utopian image of the landscape outside Johannesburg. breidbach: You put colours as an additional layer, as a comment or as a desire into the drawings. We find such blue vectorial lines in the film Stereoscope too. kentridge: Yes, there are a lot there.

‘Stereoscope’, 1998–99, drawing for the animation of the same name, 120 x 160 cm

breidbach: In a sequence in Stereoscope such a line shoots right into Soho’s heart and dashes him against the wall. You show the old switchboard in the film, whose flow of information takes on an aggressive life of its own and marks out threatening pathways through time and space. Also this double thinking in Soho, his symmetry and contrast with his alter ego when he appears twice juxtaposed stereoscopically, is conveyed through the blue lines. kentridge: In Stereoscope I was interested in what I was feeling at the time; that on the one hand my life was much too complicated, there were too many complications that I could not deal with. On the other hand the image of a completely simplified, pared-down life also seemed impossible. So in the film—this was the idea, I don’t know if this is visible to anyone else—the one room splits into one half that gets fuller and fuller and more and more impossibly busy; and the other becomes increasingly empty and leaves just Soho alone. Both are impossible situations. So it is about the balance between finding a full life and an empty life in the simplest sense. I think your description of the vectors is right. It partly has to do with choosing images of these obsolete technologies, like this switchboard, in which those strings of lines and vectors going in are part of the actual world, so it becomes a kind of naturalism; but it also refers to something that we know but do not see in the world now—where in fact there are infinitely more lines of contact, connecting us. We feel those pressures between twenty different phones and computers and e-mail and travel, and all the different ways that we somehow have to try to make sense of ourselves between all these different distractions around us. breidbach: We have talked about drawing and associational work and language. We also talked about models of seeing, forms of seeing, the formalized connecting space between the objects in the world and the eyes. I would like to talk now about stereoscopic seeing as a model first of all and then how this way of seeing relates to poetry and, in particular, to metaphor as a form. kentridge: Would it be to talk about a comparison between stereoscopy or the stereoscope and metaphor? breidbach: Whilst you were making the film Stereoscope, Anna Maria Tappeiner and Reinhard Wulf made a documentary film Drawing the Passing about you and your work. In conversation with them you clarify a diagram in the film, which traces the channels of sight in the stereoscopic apparatus. You say that this is a stereoscope, a visual machine which passes on double images to

vision and thought, which then collate these impressions into the effect of space. You would go the opposite way. You would begin with the mind and its split experience and draw two different parallel pictures. The stereoscopic model

starts with a stereo image of one world, which is then integrated inside the brain, whereas the model in your film begins with divided images in the brain which are juxtaposed pictorially as two realities and give rise to two worlds. Our discussion could be directed towards this question: how are both models connected and in which contexts can we think of them? kentridge: One understands the double image, the two photographs of a trad-

itional stereoscope, as a true representation of the world. On our retinas arrive two flat images; the construction of them as three-dimensional is an active construction of the brain. The illusion of three dimensions seems to coincide with

the spatial experience of the world, when you approach it through touch and through other senses. It is the experience of being near, of feeling the world physically. Looking at stereoscopic double images, you feel your brain doing an act of construction of space. That makes it clear that it is not the way the world is, but that it is something that our brains are trained to do. At one moment you see two different images which are out of focus. Bringing them together is an act. It feels like an act in which your eyes are focusing, but it is your brain pulling those two images together. Suddenly you have the illusion or the sense of three dimensions. And when one looks out into the world, one feels that one actually sees how the world is. When you look at it in two flat images you understand the work that is been done in constructing those three dimensions. One of the things that happen with binoculars or stereoscopes is, that the world of depth gets constructed in planes, so that you see the world like a baroque theatre in a stereoscope: flat planes receding in depth, rather than some unbroken homogeneity of the space outside. If you think of quantum physics—not that I understand quantum physics—it’s not that you have an electron that seems to move covering a whole area, it’s rather that you have different energy levels and the electrons jump to the next energy level. With the stereoscope as well as in the baroque theatre you have a distinct series of planes that recede into the distance. So a baroque theatre as a life-size version of what the stereoscope offers you is quite interesting. I am starting on new terrain; it will come back when we talk about the production of The Magic Flute. In the projection of animated drawings, which is a way I had been working in theatre, we find a middle ground—this is to work it out as I speak—of the baroque sets, the different screens, the different layers, the different areas of scenery, that give the illusion of depth. The projection of an image in the back corresponds in a way to a stereoscopic photograph, a stereoscopic movie. And maybe one way to think of the project is as being caught inside this artificial, formalized creation of depth. There is another photographic connection to distance and space and the baroque theatre. One can think of the iris, the diaphragm of a camera, which opens up to give you a larger input of light, to get the exposure required. And also in terms of focusing you have the bellows, which move in and out. These different elements of the scene could also be like the bellows. So the whole stage could also contract and expand, either like the iris or the centre of the lens, or like the bellows of the camera. breidbach: Would you like me to explain why the stereoscopic image gives the space a flat depth? Why it doesn’t lead to a vanishing point, but, like your stage, is captured flat from behind?

kentridge: Yes, yes … breidbach: Hermann von Helmholtz calls the stereoscopic image a ‘relief’. The nearer an object is to the two eyes, the more the individual angles of vision differ in relation to it. The measure of difference between the two flat images conveys a great deal of haptic information about the near field. The further single objects are away from the eyes, the more this haptic experience of an approach from two sides subsides; with normal vision, the angle of incidence of both images has already dissipated beyond the immediate near field so that both images coalesce into one flat image. The impression of space fades step by step with distance. When you experience the stereoscopic effect, the impression is all the more immediate and near. Stereoscopic space is a mental space, so to speak. The mind produces it by the measure of difference between each individual eye’s projections. In comparison to the real world, the space to which it refers, stereoscopic space loses the qualities of homogeneity and continuity. In fact, this space is constituted, as you point out, by the gaps between one flat plane and another. kentridge: Comparing the photo and the natural view, it is interesting that when looking at the world, if I look at you and I’m looking at my hand in front of you, I don’t experience it in the same way as different planes in the photo. I think that it has to do with focus. In fact in the stereoscopic photo, if you work with a small aperture you can have a big depth of field so that everything is in focus. My hand is in focus and your head and the wall, so then they have to get reduced to planes; whereas with the natural view of my eyes I can either focus on my hand or on your head or on the wall, and cannot compare the three planes at one time as one can in the photo. breidbach: Helmholtz also says one can train oneself to become aware of the stereo quality of the retinal images or stereoscopic space before the brain—or the spirit as he calls it—has had a chance to unify them. When you look at one object and want to be aware of the difference between the images, you can look alternately with the right and the left eye whilst the other eye is closed and compare them and actually feel the gap. The images literally jump from one side to the other and reveal their differences. Or one can compare not the two images of one object, but the relation of one object to another behind it. The edges of windows as you look out are suited to this exercise and you can perceive the points of convergence clearly jumping to and fro. When you try this with both eyes again you see that the experience of space between these gaps can only be built upon using different foci and this happens sequentially. There’s a difference

here between normal stereoscopic vision and stereoscopic double photographs as there is between period of time and point in time. You can capture the surface of water in a split second in a photograph and the stereo image of its gleaming, moving surface viewed from both sides becomes frozen, whereas the lights dance before your eyes in normal vision and, in conjunction with this, elicit a high degree of complexity, which is itself difficult to observe. The artificial point in time in the stereo photo renders the spatial effect easier to analyze. If you look at these photographs using the left and right eyes alternately you can see the light dancing to and fro once again. All of these exercises are aimed at precipitating out the constitutive elements of stereoscopic complexity, if only then perhaps to consciously reassemble them afterwards.

Let us return to the film Stereoscope. Why did you choose a programmatic title with reference to a way of seeing? In the interview with Tappeiner and Wulf you state that you relate it to the meaning, the psychological inner action of the film. What about the formal aspect? Do both title and form of the film bear witness to a poetological reflection of your approach? Johann Sebastian Bach composed the musical form of the fugue and when Paul Celan called his poem Todesfuge, the title also alluded to the poetic form of laying down layers of meaning in order to deposit sense both in them, between them and indeed, in the very measure of their relative distance to one another, be it as here with the inversion of the sense: ‘Schwarze Milch der Frühe’. In your film Stereoscope, the two contradictory elements of Soho’s inner experience don’t just give you the sum of his psychological state of mind. The film’s narrative space is predicated precisely upon the incompatibility of Soho’s images, in the same way that this quality allows stereoscopic space to arise, which is then also described not as natural space, but as an internal narrative space. Did you choose the title for the internal drama of

the film only, or did you also consider it in terms of its pure form, the nature of seeing itself? kentridge: The film was not made to be about the nature of stereoscopy. It was using the example of a stereoscope to describe a psychological phenomenon, saying that one can divide a real world and understand it as being produced by these two flat images. Normally you have two flat images and your brain combines them into the illusion of a single image. One could split what appears to be a single life and understand it as two contradictory impulses which drive us, which we take with us through the world, but which get combined moment to moment, as seen by ourselves and other people as one person moving through the world. In Stereoscope I was interested in the duel between two contradictory ways of living. One can have a life which is more or less coherent; if it gets fuller and fuller, which it was on one side of the screen, there is a point at which it becomes impossible. One doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to live that life. And if one keeps on simplifying and reducing oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life, extracting things, repressing things, it

becomes a very solitary and equally difficult space to negotiate. When I made the film, I was in the state of feeling split between a desire for extreme control and simplicity and a sense of absorbing and being involved by the world. As both of those became kind of impossible positions, in the tension between them the world exploded: the city is in flames as a metaphor for the way that I was exploding inside. The convention of a stereoscopic image is one which is made of two almost identical elements. So that gave a visual form to the drawings. I started with identical images which then shift out of parallel. breidbach: There is one passage in which you show the stereoscope as an object and alternately the ways in which images enter and exit. kentridge: Yes, drawn as a diagram of the stereoscope. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s for experts. There is one diagram which looks like a wire. It was in a sense like a wiring dia-

gram, not of the brain, but of how things connect. These blue lines describe on the one hand the overloaded connections we have in the world. How does one hold together in one moment talking to someone, the next moment there is a completely different conversation and there is a third world, that one has to enter into within a day. This is a built-in crazy schizophrenia. That was part of the world that seemed impossible to maintain. So those blue lines on the one hand were telephone lines connecting different switchboards. At that moment, when the blue lines form into a stereoscope, then a single machine keeps on splitting into two, it is a telephone, it is a switchboard, it is a plotter, it is a cat, it is a typewriter. Part of it was wanting to disassemble the mess and see what is there. You take a knot and you start unknotting. My concern at that time was not the meaning of it at that point, but the question of how one introduces within the film the idea of the two men and their two offices, two almost-the-same activities, which then get out of sync. breidbach: They play games with one another, they squabble and they spy on one another. kentridge: Yes, the one watches the other. They had started with the same amount of things on the desk. The shops and little cafés in Johannesburg in my childhood used to have signs with double images. One could imagine they began with a stereoscopic image showing the shopkeeper at his counter on both sides. That was the imagined picture that wasn’t there. What appeared would be the one very fat person on the left with lots of money bags, saying, ‘I sold for cash’, and the other man on the right, thin as a stick with nothing in front of him, saying, ‘I sold on credit’. That was also a portrayal of two different possible lives. breidbach: You posed the question for yourself in an interview with Carolyn Christov Bakargiev whether drawing could be a metaphor for the way in which we think. Could you imagine transposing the phrase ‘the way in which we think’ on to a pictorial plane, onto the level of an image or imagery? In terms of picture theory there are two simple access points between thinking and related images. According to the physiology of vision this theory can thematize images as a mimetic doubling of what is in the world according to given physiological laws. What is then imagination or the freedom of visual thought? It would be easy to say that there are thoughts, fantasies and inner dramas for which one can think up representative images and then turn them into art. These inner thoughts can be called imagination, invention, myth, whole worlds of ideas adjacent to reality, comparable to fantastic stories, like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings. They thrive on an invented vocabulary and create mythical,

contiguous counter-worlds beyond reality. The vocabulary of your drawings is made up of personal visual experiences. But you do not merely express these experiences, you extend them to take in other broader connections and contexts, which in turn give rise to something else other than the supposed freedom of this imagination adjacent to the normal world. You create a grammar based on visual experience. How do you devise it? kentridge: There is a sense of state of feeling, emotion, which somehow calls up corresponding images or images that have some associative connection. There are moments of an idea coming into being, that I cannot recall. These moments are either repressed or disappear. It is very difficult to know what the moment or the logic of it was. At some point there must have been a connection, an emotional state of feeling—like in the film Stereoscope. How does one deal with a life, which on the one hand gets too full and on the other hand very empty? And there is a memory of what a stereoscope is. I say a memory of a stereoscope, because, even though the heyday of pre-cinema optical devices was one hundred years ago, the late 1950s and late 1960s popularized them through a children’s toy called a ‘viewmaster’. There would be discs with double images, which one could rotate to view through the eyepiece. breidbach: I had one as a child—made from cheap plastic. kentridge: They were cheap plastic or beautiful bakelite, when I was a child. There would be pictures of the Grand Canyon and American films and Westerns. I remember being struck that what I was looking at was not a picture. One had a sense of being present in the space, rather than a distant observer. And even these photographs of the First World War seemed to have a different status to what it is to be looking at stereoscopic images beside each other. Through the interpolation of the planes, one felt transported back into that space, even though you knew they were two flat images you were looking at from outside. There was something about the memory from childhood of what those stereoscopic images were, combined with my more recent ideas of what models of them

are, and how 19th century stereoscopes worked. I don’t know what the point of connection was at first spark. breidbach: Isn’t your experience of the viewmaster precisely the form in which your drawing works—particularly in the film Stereoscope—as a metaphor for this kind of thinking? The stereoscope associates two flat images to a space into which the observer feels drawn rather than left standing in front of it. In the process of thinking or in stories, we tend to be within the images rather than standing in front of them. Language instigates thought by use of simple words. It augments the dimension of added words through grammar into sense as a kind of space in which one can find oneself. Is it not possible then to find a model based on the form of stereoscopic association according to which you might ‘draw as you think’? kentridge: Yes, and this is a difficult process, because what we are doing in the interview now is obviously thinking thinking, rather than visual thinking. But the principle of making the films, like the film Stereoscope is absolutely from the visual backwards, the description of associative meaning is secondary and partly reimposed now, once the event has actually happened, trying to find the logic that must have been there, rather than starting from these logics directly. When I made the film I certainly wasn’t thinking, what can one learn about stereoscopy, or about how the brain works stereoscopically from the film. Rather I was taking stereoscopy as given and using that as a metaphor. A much more simple, much more direct intention. But now, having said that, I’m interested in the nature of the stereoscopic form. For me I suppose the interest always starts in a formal way. I’m interested in the question, because I love the idea of a three-dimensional drawing: baroque theatre as a three dimensional drawing. I’ve been working this year on a series of films which come from George Méliès. Méliès is a performer in front of his painting. He paints a backdrop and then he performs in front of it. His dancing relates to the set. He often changes and adjusts the set as part of the film that he makes. Bruce Naumann performs as the artist in the empty studio. It is a performance in the empty space as the canvas. If you think of Jackson Pollock’s films, you see him doing a dance, drawing space into motion as he constructs the painting. And if one thinks of a baroque theatre set, the performance in it gets close to Méliès, but in three dimensions. There is a sense of depth in it, in the very structure of the way the sets are made. The essence of it is not simply a backdrop and it is not simply a cyclorama, it is not simply a screen, but there is an artificially constructed sense of depth, through different layers and planes.

My interest in this question about space comes in a projection forward, from effects I am trying to achieve in the Zauberflöte now; a project that consists of making large-scale, three dimensional drawings which are like models for the theatre set. The idea would be to make steroscopic photographs of the drawings, so that when you look at them, you do not just see a representation of the different planes of the baroque theatre, but absolutely construct a kind of experience of it through the stereoscope. And that exploration of what is entailed in drawing the production in these models gives me whole directions to think about working for the next six months on the production. I explain this simply as a way of saying that it is this kind of chain of excitement and projection forward, this desire to work, to do it, that is the basis for the work happening. All theoretical explanation as to how it works, about its implications, follows behind. I believe that those enthusiasms, those excesses of energy towards working, are not completely random, but have to do with series of connections, like those blue lines, being made and coming together. In those connections coming together, the sense is made; the theory finds its root. So you have different impulses, different lines of association: images, the Baroque theatre, the stereoscope, the stereoscopic camera, the diaphragm of a camera, and in the end it makes an image. breidbach: And what is the concrete starting point for the drawing? A pure interest in lines or structures or in doing … kentridge: Doing … breidbach: … or seeing? kentridge: The doing is to see. When I talk about seeing, I have it in my head as a sense of different layers, different shades of grey, almost strands of connecting one layer to another. It is a kind of a day-dream forward of not just the object or the idea of the object, but moments of its construction. And then of course when the process has started there is the thought, ‘what was that crazy energy and enthusiasm I had? What I do is not nearly as interesting as what I felt to have the energy for.’ But that is the point about the relationship of talking about the ideas in the work and the making of it. They are often quite different. So sometimes I feel that you want me to have a certainty of reflection on what things mean that I do not have. To go back, your question was about the nature and the relation between an image of stereoscopy and making the film. It is an interesting question, because

the impulse is not an idea, it is not an image of the finished thing, although the glimmer of that is obviously some image. It registers as a kind of excitement, an enthusiasm or a desire, to do the work, to start, taking two pieces of card and put one behind the other and see what that starts to suggest, how it shifts and changes. breidbach: So you never search for images for the whole idea, but begin at one point, waiting to see what further steps the work itself will evoke? kentridge: I am nervous about belittling the idea in advance. And also the idea of what one thinks one is doing is often very different from what one does. Sometimes one has a great idea, but you carry out that idea and when it’s made there is a huge difference between how you thought it was going to work and how it actually does work. And at the same time there are other things for which you don’t have great expectations as to what they will be or how they will work. These can be kind of revelations, which one can recognize, but not predict. How much of the world is inside this, how much are we bringing in and how much do we project out? To take the example of earlier, if you ask a child what a dinosaur looks like doing a back somersault, it is very difficult for a child to draw it or to be able to describe it. But though they had never seen a dinosaur doing a back somersault, an image of that would be very easily recognized. If a series of images is presented, the mind can then complete, construct, predict. Recognizing is reading. It finishes the image’s work of understanding the dinosaur’s movement. breidbach: Please let me try to summarize this: you don’t start with an inner image as image, but with an inner emotion or something you want to articulate; yet then you start to touch the things and start to work with the material’s properties and own rules. You let the back somersault of the dinosaur happen with your hands instead of trying to visualize it beforehand. You find a haptic method of imagining it. But you also said that the stereoscopic view is kind of a haptic experience of space as well. There is a similarity between the stereoscopic view and the manner in which you feel your way into a subject when working. A comparison between these two forms of experience could be a neat point of connection with an image theory, which justifiably asks what imagination or inner image might actually be. A contrast to the outer image, to perceptions without imagination, as Helmholtz says, doesn’t occur in your model of experience, for both the multiple vision as well as a haptic, feeling arrangement of the images transport that which we call imagination or memory, sensorially with our

hands and our eyes. In the act of seeing as with drawing, both the brain and its images form an inseparable unity with the periphery of the body engaged in action. As you explain, your drawing doesn’t just produce a piece of art, but it also produces images in your head in the same way that normal vision as a process not only registers the world but also gathers a vocabulary in order to allow the images in one’s head to arise and function. In this way inner and outer pictures are, like doing and thinking, anything but separate categories. Hence it is unavoidable for you to be within the process of which you are part. kentridge: I am trying to think of a concrete example. In Tide Table, the most recent film, we see Soho Eckstein on the beach. A few years ago someone was shooting a documentary about my films. We were in Brazil on top of some mountain in Rio and he said, ‘what about other projects, where will Soho Eckstein be in another film? Can you imagine it?’ I said, ‘well, I could imagine him being on the beach; the film would be about Soho at the beach and what could happen … Are there other people on the beach, does he meet people, is that his memory that he is seeing, what is his relationship to the waves, what does it look like to show the wave breaking?’ A kind of thinking aloud, just letting associations happen. It wasn’t anything I’d given thought to. Three years later I found myself deciding to draw Soho on the beach. It had been an open thought, it could have been Soho in any circumstance, but the one that came to mind was

the beach, maybe because we could see the beach from where we were on the mountain, because it was summer. But when I came to finish the film, I understood that it was a lot about my father and myself, myself and my son, my grandfather and my father. In fact the film is not about any of those people, but it is about the relationship to one’s younger self. Is the image of oneself as a child like one’s child or is it different? Does one feel protective towards the young person? breidbach: The piece began with the problem: how do I draw a wave breaking? That is the pragmatic basis or beginning. On the other hand the inner motivation to start working was not the image of a wave, but Soho’s feeling of connection with it, reminding him of his childhood. No images exist for feelings, but there are images of a wave breaking which might be a start and the work itself brings out meanings, connotations and ideas that were anything but clear thoughts at the outset. kentridge: It’s not a random motivation. Something within me wanted to try animating the sea. I will think I have forgotten about it, and then I come across some photographs of a 19th century French photographer, Albert Londe, and a book of a mid-19th century photographer, Gustave Le Gray, also with wonderful photographs of the sea. Something about those photographs made me want to do drawings based on them. But the sea is moving and these were still photographs, so they seemed bad models for me to use it as any kind of reference for a moving sea. The two French photographers disappeared. But they had given another impulse to work with the sea. There is a model for the disappearing impulse of an idea in Cockney rhyming slang. English working-class London slang words for objects are made by a rhyming couplet. Instead of saying a word for ‘stairs’, you will say ‘apples and pears’. ‘I am going to go up the apples and pears’ instead of ‘I’m going up the stairs’. Or, you would say ‘feet’ by the rhyming couplet ‘plates of meat’. ‘I need to get off my plates of meat’ instead of ‘my feet’. Then what happens within Cockney rhyming slang is that you only use the first word. So instead of saying, ‘my shoes are too tight. I’ve got to get off my plates of meat, my feet’, you say, ‘my shoes are killing me; I’ve got to get off my plates’. You don’t say, ‘I’m going up the apples and pears’ for the stairs, you say, ‘I’m going up the apples’. The key point of connection was there initially, but then it disappears. The Gustave Le Gray photograph was essential for the idea of the wave, but then it disappeared from the process. So very often an initiating idea is there, but as soon as the project starts, that disappears and I realize that something that was

secondary becomes the heart of what is being done. It is often difficult to retract what was the first stage. That is why I get apprehensive about what seem to be good ideas, like the rhyming part of the slang. But when I start, those will be thrown out. breidbach: ‘Apples and pears’ provides the idea of ‘stairs’ or ‘plates of meat’ gives us ‘feet’. That leads us again to the stereoscopic model as a model of two projections leading from two directions into the idea that is never articulated, but rather thought instead with the vocabulary of both words. Here the idea is the space, albeit a much sought-after dimensional extension of the given project-

ive vocabulary in the 19th century. The model for metaphor can be found here in language, two terms hold an idea in themselves and between themselves, an image, a space, which is not spoken but implied or thought via them. What you said about Cockney rhyming slang doesn’t merely affect the presence of the two substitute words but also the association with and recollection of the idea, which remains unsaid.

kentridge: Yes, and the clue, the rhyming second part of the couplet, disappears. If you don’t know the clue, you never receive the idea. In Johannesburg some years ago, a guy came up to me and some friends and said: ‘Are you guys four-wheelers?’ I thought, ‘what does he mean, four-wheelers?’ Then I associated: ‘four-wheel skid’. A motorcar has got a four-wheel skid. Skid rhymes with Yid. So it’s like asking someone, ‘are you Jewish? Are you a four-wheeler?’ There is another thing in what we are talking about, for which Cockney rhyming slang is a good metaphor. You have the two words and they have a relationship which makes a sense or a story. Then what happens is that you have only one word and a gap in that story. Either you have to know what the answer is to bring it in and make sense; or what we do when we listen to anything is that we realize there is something missing and we instantly search for different possibilities. Our brain constructs different points of connection across. We think that the apples and pears make stairs, reclaiming usually all three terms. In a lot of cases we are given the one and the other and we fill in the third one. And sometimes it’s close to the original, to the first impulse of the idea; and if not, we are very good at putting another into its place. You were asking about the film Stereoscope and the starting ideas. What I’ve been doing is kind of pulling together different possible starting points. The view-master was one possible starting point. The thought that perhaps it might

have been there at the film’s inception is a projection of today. One is always trying to construct narratives of sense or narratives of possibility. breidbach: What constitutes the sense or meaning of the narrative in Stereoscope? It is not the one half of the story in which Soho’s room fills up nor the other half, in that the other room empties. The meaning of the film seems to derive precisely from the degree of distance between the divided rooms. kentridge: When I made the film, there were two different elements. There was the world outside and there was the divided room. One connection between the two elements were these blue lines that connected one room to the other room and they also went through the world, from room to room, like a camera panning across the city and going to different windows. There was the question of how one brought the world outside into this. What is its place in this divided life, in a life that seems to get very full and a life that gets very empty? Formally that came just by zooming into the line in the middle that was in that very membrane, and finding there the rest of the world. The line in the middle opens up, it expands as an open gap between the two rooms and the world floods in. I’ve never thought of it in those terms of a membrane between the two parts of the stereoscope. There is a way in which the body with the skin as a membrane has a similar feeling. The world inside of us has a heart, lungs, intestines. All the things that work inside like the brain, which we know are there, but which we take for granted. We know we have to look after them, but maybe we hope that they are not going to let us down: I won’t be killed by my heart, my kidney won’t collapse. If something is outside of us, it is also something within us: Is this person to be reliable or is this person not to be trusted. There is a thread from outside and one from inside. And we know that in the end we are going to be killed by one or the other. Either our bodies will collapse inside us or something outside will kill us. But what is this extraordinary thin membrane, which is neither inside us, nor outside us? breidbach: There are two pictures I think. The membrane as living organism transports chemicals from the inside out. Active skin cells absorb substances from outside and expel other substances. You say that inside and outside are connected both as Life and as the possibility of a fatal threat, and that in between there is almost nothing material remaining, namely the surface of the body. That’s an almost mathematical definition of space, its bodies and its surfaces, which I first discovered in Leonardo. He writes that geometry commences with the surfaces of the body and they have their source in the line and the line has its source in the

dot. But just as the dot doesn’t belong to the tip of the pencil but rather to the dimension of complete unexpandability, the line would be, though flexible, i.e. not part of the plane which it describes. And in this way the surfaces of the body, although they form the outline of bodies—and for Leonardo the draftsman the living human body with its organic inner life, its ability to move and its gestures belongs to the bodies—they are not a material part of these bodies, but rather belong strictly to part of a dimension of the plane stretching in two directions. kentridge: On the one hand our skin is a metaphor for that part of ourselves that is our own. It is not the world inside you, as one’s organs are; it is a tissue that is other, that is obviously part of us, but not the same as us. And then there is everything from the skin outwards that is the rest of the world, to which we are connected, but which is not us. What is that immensely thin virtual film, imagined film, of being? It’s obviously mind. It is not any physical part of the body. breidbach: That’s a bit like the mental idea of a surface, a plane as in E.A. Abbot’s novel Flatland from 1884. Of course surfaces are the points of reference for artists and draftsmen, because of the fact that light fractures over them and their quality points to the material character of the body which they surround, even if they aren’t strictly speaking a physical part of it. In Stereoscope you reverse the relationship between the inside and the outside of the body. In this way you prepare the image of the viewing room. A double body of Soho in both of his rooms with two membranes opens a gap in between and allows the world to enter. Precisely the schizophrenic measure of the distance between both of Soho’s worlds grants entry to the projection of a loud, chaotic world. That is the visualisation of the world, the world in the void or space as it is thought up. The organic image of the membrane belongs here, because before the images of the world can become visual thoughts, they have to travel through the double cornea into the eyes and brain. Thinking is physiological too. What you say about the skin seems to hold true for the whole body. You show the world as thoughts when you place them between the two membranes. kentridge: I do. breidbach: The outside world doesn’t become purely subjective in the process of thinking. kentridge: It is still the outside; when it goes into that central line it is also about how we approach the outside world. We approach the outside world very

much in terms of what is happening inside us. So that chaos of the world in that centre of between the membranes had to do with the chaos that was happening as a result of those two rooms splitting up. Our theories about how the world is are so connected to who we are even though they are represented as rational arguments. The connection to what is in us makes sense of the world as we approach. Michel Foucault can write a book about discipline and punishment, which on the one hand is a piece of rational exploration of different forms of control in a being, Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment. But on the other hand, it reflects a need to understand the world from the way he is inside. When one is in a state of collapse, of overload, one recognizes this overload in the world outside, and is either consoled by that recognition or energized by it or distressed by it, but one feels a kind of rapport between one’s own state and things seen in the world. breidbach: One’s own sensitivity seems to be decisive for the things that touch you from outside and for what attracts your attention. kentridge: In that sense the world outside did feel internal, even if it is about bombings in Kenya and riots in Moscow and student demonstrations in Cape Town and students being killed in Jakarta, which were all specific images for Stereoscope. They all get put into the membrane between the two men as a way of describing how they would absorb the news of events and forms outside in ways which correspond to an emotional response to them. breidbach: The act of seeing takes the world from the outside to the inside.

The direction of such normal vectors of pure perception are reversed when we talk about the effect of our own mental state on our attentiveness for the outside world. And yet the world isn’t a pure construct of the subject. It is real and different at every turn. How do observers identify with your images? In an interview you refer to an image in the film Ubu tells the truth from 1997 in which a walkman attached to a pig’s head explodes. Policemen in South Africa had tested a bomb on a pig in exactly the same way and then used the same method to kill a man. That is political reality and not a construction. You said ‘If you stick closely 93

enough to specifics—which are usually stranger than fiction—somehow that authenticity will convince an audience, bring them along with you.’ It is a nonmulticultural argument; it is a confession of showing the world through one’s own specific and non-exchangeable point of view. kentridge: It is the contrary of being universal, but then it appears to be much more universal. Experiences, films, books, plays gain power as we are invited to be present in that gap. There is a balance between giving every minute detail, so that the viewer has to do no real journey; and giving so little information that it would be the same as asking the viewer to write the novel himself. There is a measure in that balance of what is there and what is not there. In a literary genre, say in James Joyce’s Ulysses, one is given the image of the city of Dublin. I’ve never been to Dublin; I have not seen many photographs of Dublin. But from the details given by the dialogues in that book one is invited to construct a Dublin, a Dublin of the imagination, one’s own Dublin. Specifically given details leave huge gaps between them. They give up the idea of a visual coherence of the place or its spatial continuity. One can recognize this balanced measure of given specifics and hence be invited to complete an imagined wholeness of the place by a series of one’s own images. One can construct the city by filling the gaps. If you say: ‘The security police sent a letter bomb and blew someone’s head off’, you have to reconstruct within that sentence whether it is a letter or a parcel or a fat letter; whether the person received it in their office or some other space. Or you may have seen a photograph in the newspaper of a burned-out office or think that perhaps it’s like the car bombs in Iraq, and use this as an image of what a bomb does, then edit out what is seen of the motor car in imagination. During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, there was evidence of a walkman with headphones that was sent to someone by the police. He put the headphones on and he turned on the walkman and blew his head off. In the evidence before the commission the policeman explained how they had tested this out on the pig’s head. They had put the headphones onto a pig’s head to see what damage it would do when it exploded. The fact that it is a fairly specific drawing of a pig’s head and a true drawing of headphones invites the audience to make those links. With references to pigs or pig farms, with some experience of the sensation of wearing headphones, you build a story from your own experience. Within the specifics and their combinations are details in which we can find recognitions and from those recognitions build up possible stories, a possible third element when the rhyming couplet or only one part of it is given.

breidbach: So the jumps in a story are not omissions designed to cut down on time, but are important creative elements. kentridge: All story-telling does this. Sometimes large jumps are required. Any form of mimesis is always about a radical paring down. You extract the essential parts and make the information thinner. breidbach: Perhaps we should try to talk about metaphor. You show a pig wearing headphones as a guinea-pig for a political assassination. You show this image and this conjures up a second image of a man who has become a political victim whose story actually exists, but which is only evoked, not stated. Structurally speaking, this has the form of a metaphor.

Paul Ricoeur called this ontological connection of both elements a metaphor, i.e. that a thing could simultaneously be another thing and yet not be it (Paul Ricoeur: The Living Metaphor, 1975). A pig wearing headphones which explode is a man with a headphone bomb and is at the same time not this man. The meaning is self-evident; a man is killed in a way, which would even be perverse and cruel when inflicted upon a pig. Here the pig with the headphones belongs to the real story of the murdered man. As you say, life can paint more terrible pictures than fiction.

kentridge: I’m trying to think of more simple images, if it always works that way. breidbach: It is different from the metamorphoses you invent, when one thing transforms itself into something else. A telephone becoming a cat, or a cigar turns into a coffee cup. In the form of the visual metaphor, two things are brought together as one and it is the double connotation or double existence which postulates a third entity. The Soho in the left window of Stereoscope is the same one as the Soho on the right and simultaneously not the same one. kentridge: There are chains of associations of different things that lead together and seem to push into a metaphor. Let’s go back to Die Zauberflöte. In the project I did for Goslar, which we have spoken about—I described the process of working on a blackboard that suggested working with inverting the white and the black of a paper to represent the idea of a photographic negative; that introduced a photographic metaphor into the realm of photography. It has to do with darkness and light; the dark room of the Queen of the Night and the bright sunlight of Sarastro, very simple terms. The scene instruction for the last scene is brilliant, blinding light, in which we see Tamino and Pamina given the robes of the priests. What is the nature of that blinding light at the end, if one is working with a screen? Up to then images were shifting across the screen and in the end, what is called for by the libretto, is pure light: the light of success, of reason, of the realm of the triumph of the philosophers. But then one thinks back to this photographic metaphor of what that light means for the motion picture of the projector. You get that light when the film is finished, when it is run out, and there is nothing going through the projector. In other words you get the death of everything. It represents the point when all that has been of interest, that is made up of black and white—the people, the world that is neither completely the one nor the other—turns into emptiness. The opera as a whole, as this film which has been this series of images shifting through it, ends when the film ends. When the opera finishes, we get to the last scene, and there are just lights, no more film to go through, nothing more to be said. One understands that the opera itself, the very structure of it, its irrationality, its contradictions, all those elements within it are themselves a kind of critique of Sarastro’s world. Thinking of the empty screen when the film is finished brings back the whole era of early black and white movies, as one element that goes into the production. But it also gives me an understanding of how the opera works. Why is this opera so wonderful? I think because within it there is a very strong kind of moral strain going through the libretto, through the long journey. Yet within the form of the opera 96

itself and the nature of opera as event there is a cautionary levelling of that utopianism that gives it a sense and humanness. The opera is fantastic because of the range of different things and because of the contradictions within it. The complete irrationality of opera as form, the range of different things that do happen within that opera, is a good model of how the world is. All its contradictions and ambiguities, I think, are to be celebrated rather than either avoided or explained. breidbach: So the actual sense or meaning of the story in your cinematographic version is not the end with a triumph of the light, but the drama itself with all its contrasts. You have found a model for meaning, based not on a continuous, rational philosophical order, but consisting of specific exciting images. The actions of the protagonists are contradictory and cause gaps to be left between them. This is more than a model; it’s the living process itself, the opera has to be performed, not discussed. Paul Cézanne painted models of ways of seeing and their spatial construction more or less encrypted in some of his works . But for the majority of his work he talked about ‘realization’; accordingly, the artist’s mandate was to realize the world. The artist no longer stands as a philosophical onlooker in front of the ideas of his work—what we are currently engaged in and are calling ‘thinking aloud’—but is part of the process and this constitutes labour and entails the investment of a good deal of one’s energy. Sarastro is the wisest one, but in your version of the story, the sheer effulgence of his wisdom erases the contours of the narrative to infinity and extinguishes them at the end. By the way, Cézanne also maintained that light doesn’t exist for the painter, only colours. kentridge: If one has an image, and the image gets brighter and brighter, in the beginning it is rich and soon it gets bleached out and becomes complete lightness and emptiness. breidbach: To what extent do you realize that in this form you allow things to appear as objects of sensory thought, rather than objects of philosophical or mystical thought or objects of the outer world? In the real world the light means daylight, sunlight, summer, growth, warmth and other nice things, a mixture of light and life. kentridge: No, pure light is terrible. Your eyes are blinded by the sun. You have to protect yourself, you need a hat and dark sunglasses and you look for some shade. I think neither the pure light is something that humans are meant to be confronted with, nor pure darkness.

breidbach: In normal sight pure light bleaches out contrasts and contrasts are objects of perception. Philosophical thinking favours the pure light as an image for mystical or scientific insight, as though light is able to shine upon the tenebrity of ignorance or somehow illuminate our thinking. Against this background, the metaphor as a form of meaning is something quite different in the way we have just tried to reconstruct it with the example of the pig. Meaning arises in the case of metaphor not by means of a streaming, pure insight, but in the conjoining of two disparate images projected into one another without creating a continuum. It is precisely in this distance, this contrast of both realities brought together in one place that something new is born, something illuminating, without necessarily being articulated. kentridge: I have not thought through these ideas about the movie light at the end until now. The difference between actual light and bright light, and this critique of the bright light, is a vague proposition that will be tested. The actual discovering will be in doing the work. It links in another way to the shadow work that I have done for a long time. It was done for the pleasures of making black paper cut-outs. But in retrospect it also has to do with the pleasures of immateriality seeming very material. The shadows as cut-out projections were really made out of bronze or out of paper. The work was haptical. Its visual effect was made of contrasting shadow against light. The pure light in philosophy or political theory, not only in visual terms, seems dangerous, rather than being a stimulus for a society’s good development. If you take Plato’s metaphor of the cave, it is about people leading people out of the dark shadows into the bright sunlight; it is the same as Sarastro’s journey. In both cases light is blinding. In Plato’s Republic there is the idea that when you’ve got used to the bright light, you will see the truth and the good and the Platonic forms and understand the nature of the world and the ethics of the world. Or develop an ethics from understanding the forms. The historical experience of the Republic is that the philosopher princes, their pure reasons, are dangerous; they need control over us. Our best hope seems to be something much more imperfect. If there are mistakes, there will not be titanic, huge, gigantic mistakes that destroy whole generations at a time. The monopoly of knowledge should not be invested with people outside, but with people actually living their lives. It is a sense of a vanguard of understanding, as in Leninism—and this had a very bad history in the last hundred years. Because philosopher kings knew best, they understood. This translated into calamities not just once or twice, but very regularly. Mozart could not have been aware of this philosophy, because it had not happened yet. The opera was created in 1791, the French Revolution terror triumphs about 1793; heads being lopped off at the Sarastro-like Robespierre’s 98

behest. Sarastro has all knowledge, but assumes he has to kidnap people, do whatever is necessary to enable a new society to be built. So I think the critique of that pure light is also a historical experience. Wherever there is bright light, it is the light of an interrogation; and the most generous interpretation would be to assume itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a movie coming to an end. breidbach: I saw the film Automatic Writing in Goslar. You show this womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body turning into writing and the writing melting down into the form of a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body again; the transformation is repeated constantly in new forms. There is also the man, who is sitting there and thinking. Here again: to what extent did you invent these figures as subjects of sensory thought rather than as natural actual external bodies? The writing makes it obvious that the film inhabits a sphere of language and thought. Does it make a difference if a figure is drawn naturally or drawn as an object of thinking? How did you come to make this film?

kentridge: I thought I was going to do a film which is a sort of conversation between Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese writer, and Luigi Pirandello, the Italian playwright. And I thought I would have two people sitting facing each other at a table exchanging ideas in a conversation between them. I had been reading books of Pessoa and plays of Pirandello. I try again now to reconstruct what I have completely forgotten. I think I knew it was going to be called Automatic Writing at the beginning, from the Surrealists, who would write under the influence of drugs or try to find ways of automatically producing words, without conscious control; and then find out what associations they made. With the Surrealists I was making an enquiry into the ways in which an image emerges. If one takes two objects, what is the metaphor that they make, what is the third thing that our brain constructs between them? What arrives if you have the empty

sheet of paper and this empty table? What on the one hand is the writing that arrives? What on the other hand are the images that will emerge? What is the film that I will make if I try to not have it planned in advance? From that came the idea of images consolidating themselves, as though being pulled by a magnet into different forms, which became drawings of my wife Anne. I am not sure what the need was in me, that she should be an image in the film. I remember thinking there would be a woman between Pessoa and Pirandello so I needed a model and would ask Anne to be my image. I was interested in the transformation of one woman being drawn up from two sides, from two men, but in the process of the work Pessoa and Pirandello gradually disappeared from the project and the transformational aspect stayed. breidbach: Indeed, the magnets which pull the figure of the woman in different directions and transform her are the eyes, the respective gazes of the two men, each of which construct her differently. kentridge: It would have taken ages to learn the portraits of Pirandello and Pessoa. And so she gets drawn into the words and disappears again and drawn into the words and disappears again and the third or the fourth time it grows into me next to her. I thought something has to be different, it can’t be the same, rather than concluding that what her image needed was mine next to it. Then she disappears back into the words and a self-portrait kind of representation is left at the table. In other words: this endpoint of the film is the person trying to find an idea to work with. This makes the film process circular. In the end we see the man thinking about what image will emerge and how will it get there and the film starts from the beginning. breidbach: The story is about the act of creating images and the story’s images appear within the narrative of their invention, which is simultaneously brought forward and reflected in an automatic ductus. kentridge: There is an interest in the quality of the starting point of the work. It is not theoretical. The starting point is the urge to make the work. It doesn’t have to do with any knowledge about the process; it even has to do with a partial blindness of being in the middle of the process, being part of it. In the case of Automatic Writing, I was in a very simple way tracking the process and I’d list images to help me to track it. Handwriting is the idea of a calligraphic mark, which is halfway between writing and drawing; it’s a drawing of writing. That was one thing. The presence of Anne was another element, which could help to find out what the story was. The work was trying to make visible processes that I’m

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aware of, but which are invisible. You don’t see your waiting for an idea to arrive. This is a kind of making that process of waiting concrete. One’s mind obviously works five thousand times faster then the animated films do. There are fifty thousand different thoughts that go through one’s head. But the hope is that what you recognize when you see the films is the way in which minds work or ideas emerge. breidbach: You speak of invisible processes. If they are the processes of inventing images, then one might define invisibility differently: not as a location beyond the visible, but as something which exists associatively between the interstices of the visible. You were talking about exact external references of the outer world and yet you say they transport fifty thousand other thoughts at the same time, which perhaps never enter consciousness, at least they don’t get shown. They place invisibility between the centres of attention. The invisible constitutes itself as a creative gap between the visible, but is nonetheless an image. In this sense we are not leaving the arena of vision when talking about thought. kentridge: That recalls the Baroque metaphor we were using early on, the stereoscopic one. There are different centres of visibility, but between them on the stage are all those gaps, to where the actors can come and perform. breidbach: You would not have the gaps without the visible screens bearing your animations. This is how the singers are situated in the image. The opera is not merely commented upon but is actually placed into the space of the drawing. Visibility and its specific concomitant interstices seem to provide a highly

ordered visual grammar. Perhaps, after having said quite a lot about the visual language of your work, we could use this as a starting point to tackle the poetry in your art? kentridge: I am wary of the term poetic, because in a loose sense of someone saying, ‘a painting is poetic,’ it usually means it is quite soft and unstructured and 101

maybe sentimental. So I need to know what you mean, when you say ‘poetic’. breidbach: People say that your art is poetic, in fact in almost every essay that is written about it. kentridge: A poem has to do with a precise paring down in the choice of words so that what would be a short story or an essay becomes six lines or twenty lines. It has to do with understanding words as not just carrying specific meanings of objects in the world, but being part of a rhythm and a combination of words that have other associations which strengthen the specific meaning. So I’m not sure how one translates that into visual art, how one maps the idea of a poem onto the idea of a drawing or a film. There are certain similarities: a poem has a certain brevity compared to a short story or a novel. And the animated films have a certain brevity compared to a more usual feature length film. So there is a sense of condensation. In a poem there is an expectation of inviting the reader to fill in all the elisions to make something that is tight and precise into a larger world and maybe there is a similar process in the films. But more than that I’m not sure what you mean when you say the work is poetic. breidbach: I also see it critically, because if you relate the poetic content to its themes, it wouldn’t apply. Your work is to a large extent political, both thematically and in terms of its commitment. And it might be wrong to call the attenuations, cutting, reducing, etc. in any way poetic. You don’t reduce a drawing towards abstraction, you don’t reduce the visual information, you build upon it. You do not create idealized figures, you draw them as they are. Soho in his suit looks more formal, professional and doesn’t really resemble a poetic hero. And yet he is a poetic figure. Why is that? kentridge: What would make the films poetic and not prose? There is an image in Tide Table of someone walking. As she walks, newspaper is spread out under her feet. And she walks along and there is a sort of path of newspaper blowing under as her feet walk along. Is that a poetic image or a prose image? What would we be talking about if we take that specific image as poetry? breidbach: This really does sound like a poetic action, a gesture of devotion. Her steps are accorded meaning. White sheets of paper pave the way for her naked feet. They both attend and accompany her steps. They roll like a carpet beneath her delicate stride. You wouldn’t even need a poetic structure, whatever this might be, for an image like this in order to call it poetic.

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kentridge: The association that does make sense is that of language and animation, of language and film, which have a better immediate correlation than language and photograph or language and static image. breidbach: Normal films or animated films correlate to the continuum of time; like language, their formal grammar is first of all that of addition. One image is added to the next. A grammar bearing meaning is constructed first of all on the content of the films and not so much their form. Perhaps the key to the poetry in your art can be found in the simple order or relationship of the images to one another as grammar. Poetry could be the way in which you layer visual impressions on top of one another in the passage of time, so that they appear to be simultaneous. Your films do not only follow time, they stack the images and allow time passages to congeal into spaces. Many individual images remain transparent to one another, they know one another, the later impression remembers the former and connects itself to it. You say that in the poetry of language one word is part of a rhythm and combination of words and that one word remains transparent to another. A normal animated film cannot achieve this formally with its individual images, because they are sequential and are added to one another. In the same way that linguistic grammar does not merely place words next to one another, but builds sentences, so too do your images find a hierarchical relationship or order to each other. They retain and remember one another. Drawings construct chords from these transparent layers. From here we can arrive at poetry not only via comparison with language, but also via a comparison with chords in music. kentridge: Traditional animation has an extraordinary range of possibilities. Speed and motion are beautiful and all actions have no consequences. There is a sense of extraordinary violence that has no consequence. So a safe falls on someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head and they get squashed flat but they reconstitute themselves. They go through a meat chopping board and get chopped up by thousand knifes and in the next frame they put themselves back. They are flattened by a steamroller and then they get up again. In my films there are very few changes from things being violently destroyed and rising again as a transformation, and that reduction might be one of their elements. breidbach: Are you talking about language or poetry? kentridge: I am not sure if what I do should be termed poetic.

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breidbach: It might be easier to talk about grammar first: the traditional animated film is perhaps as you have described it, not only violent and irresponsible in terms of its content, but formally too. One image doesn’t remember, doesn’t respond to the other image. The procession of images celebrates every possibility of swift animation as renewal after destruction, but doesn’t possess a technique to remember how something was before is was destroyed. In the grammar of language you know the beginning of the sentence when finishing it, you know what the subject is when you conjugate the verb. Grammar constructs a body of connected elements in time. kentridge: We put thought into language in this sense: I make the sentence

now and I prepared it in my head entirely. No, I correct myself: I thought the sentence through, before I spoke and rehearsed, then performed it. What I’d rehearsed in my head was: I make the sentence now as I have spoken and then I perform it. I make the sentence now, as I have … but I forgot what I prepared. That’s a very artificial way. Occasionally one walks around within an important conversation or a difficult conversation and one rehearses the words in one’s head, before one says them. But in general the sentence I say now I haven’t thought through in my head before, it is being constructed as I speak it with the trust that my mind is remembering the starting point, where the subordinate clauses are and even if the sentence goes on I can still find a logic to complete it. So there is an intelligence, which is blind to us and works every time we talk in terms of constructing the sentences. There is a pre-structuring and sending up bits of language into the world as it goes and that I think is similar to the way that animation works. Having made a start, I am trusting that in the same way that one’s brain and tongue combine to get some communicable sense into the world at the end of a sentence, a similar process will happen through the sequence of the drawing. And also in the same way as in talking, as one is finishing one sentence there is something in this sentence that is provoking not just the next sentence but the next chain of thought. It allows certain chains of thought to percolate in the back of one’s head which one may express in time, but keeping some track of where the conversation is going. That’s quite similar to the process of constructing the films, of working on an element within which there may be a suggestion. When we talked about association earlier in the interview I mentioned that in Tide Table there is a sequence of a choir on the beach. I found the suggestion for

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drawing the choir in the course of drawing waves breaking. In the process of drawing the choir I understood that one of the figures, a woman in her church robes, was coming towards me, was calling to be drawn again as my childhood nanny, another development in the film. This is not something I knew at the beginning of the sentence, the sentence in which I was drawing a crowd on the beach. But in that process there was a supplementary thought that started emerging, which was then followed by drawing the close-up of the one church member. The structure of the way I develop the series of drawings is similar to the structure of the way in which we speak ordinarily. But I want to know if there were ‘Gründe’ in my head of doing the drawing or choosing the choir, that already knew that my nanny needed to come into the film, that my ‘Verstand’ didn’t know. (Reference to Blaise Pascal’s phrase: ‘Das Herz hat seine Gründe, die der Verstand nicht kennt’ [‘The heart has its reasons which reason cannot divine’], illustrated by Odilon Redon in the form of a figure touching the heart through a slit in the chest.) breidbach: Language transports its own impulses. Is it possible to trace what you describe, namely moving from one image to the next, right into the minute constituent parts of the film? Memory is not a basket full of oranges; impressions are not gathered equally, they scan forwards and backwards and build up a qualitative order. Your special technique seems to make it possible to devise a pictorial form for this and maybe manages to trace nothing less than the processes of a visual grammar. The movement of the images becomes a hierarchically graded order of sensory impressions. That is something quite different from traditional animation motifs bringing external movements mimetically into the flow of images. The images are not ordered in a row, but flow into each other, are prethought or surprisingly suddenly there, building up together and not forgetting one another after they have passed. kentridge: The specific image in Tide Table, the sequence of the feet walking across the newspaper, came from a dream. In a dream I had a year ago, one of its moments was that I was laying down newspapers at the feet of someone walking along a path. I wanted to put it in the film, and then see if it had a weight or if it had some associative resonance. It’s not that I think the dream images are true or that they reveal the world, but one understands that there is a pressure of the combination of images that arrive in the dreams. Two things: one is, it is intriguing how dreams construct themselves, how images come together as disconnected elements fitting together. On the other hand I’m wary of dreams, because recounting dreams becomes extremely boring and unrevealing. Listening to someone else’s dreams can let one find connections, but a dream which is fantastic to a dreamer, is

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not automatically fascinating to a viewer. But I have in different films tried to test out different images, not entire dreams, but moments in them. The construction of our dreams is out of our power, it is our image, but we are powerless against it. It arises, whether we like it or not. We either remember it or do not. Dreams are one way in which our non-rational intelligence is present in us and the way we construct a sentence as we start speaking is another way. The image of rationality is one of having all the pieces of evidence in front of one and evaluating the evidence and making logical deductions. But that is not how we speak or how we dream. breidbach: In a similar way to thinking, you say that you are interested in how one dreams and not so much what one dreams. After I saw a William Kentridge work—the film Zeno Writing at the eleventh Documenta in Kassel—I thought: ‘looking at these structures gives me the feeling as if I am following events in my own dream.’ You modulate our way of looking into that of a dream, and yet the contents of the images in the film are real. One sees images from the First World War, which are neither charged with pathos, nor are they in any way censored. They combine with one another as nightmares do. Cigarette smoke rises and associates a crashing plane, its spiralling and spinning motion emerges from the smoke propelling it inexorably downwards in the same way that the black smoke had journeyed upward. However, the staggering lightness of these images doesn’t open up a vein of irrationality, which one might readily associate with a dream. The images can be conveyed to a rational mind and its stock of experiences. kentridge: To say ‘a thought is not rational’ is not to say it cannot be explained or excavated. The archaeology of the image, both its origin and its meaning are two different directions. But the construction of that image is not what one does if one consciously sets out to do something; it is done for one, by one. breidbach: This image of newspapers flying under someone’s feet as they walk is a construct or invention in your dream, it is new to you. And yet it consists of thoughts or feelings and gestures, you must have felt before, if not consciously. You appear to give in to the dream process in your images and choose a similar process, formally speaking. Rationality and dreams might not be separated areas of thinking, but they are different forms. The films construct reality in the form of a dream. It is precisely this form that seems to make an identification possible on our part in the other direction of reading the images. For neither the political reality in South Africa, nor private thoughts and gestures on the part of the artist are easy for us to apprehend. I am not a smoker, but when I read the phrase: ‘I promise my wife to stop smoking tomorrow at 2 p.m.’ in the film Zeno

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Writing, the conjunctions of the series of images suggest, that I am developing my own thoughts. The images gradually build over a period of time into an integrated whole. One could define it this way, that inner images do not categorically form the obverse of external impressions, but rather that they are placed together as external impressions to surprising, new forms. In order to talk about the poetry in your work we must first of all not only

search for form rather than meaning, but also look for the formal qualities of the condensing or reduction you undertake. To what extent is the form of your language anything other than an eloquent associational cavalcade of images? How are sentences shortened to let one word appear as a part of a rhythm of a lexical context? Is there a structural key to metaphor? kentridge: I could imagine a language equivalent, where if each time you used a word, you had to go and fetch that word and carry it a kilometre. If I am very energetic I might carry this whole wheelbarrow of words across three kilometres: all these kilometres with all these words. I can choose and construct. A poet would feel a linguistic pressure or a pressure from the tradition of poetryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;all the poems one has read, all the different ways of writing poemsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to be circumspect, because even if it is a long poem it is a reduction and a selection from many possible words. The form and the tradition of the medium give a certain pressure. With the animation I do it is a pressure of the amount of work and the length of time. That is one of the reasons why I cannot work with a studio. That in a sense could reduce the pressure, because in a studio of fifty people, you could allocate 107

different people to draw different sequences. It has to do with my sense of undertaking the task myself, becoming aware of what the essential and necessary images may be that I think I need, not for a story I already know, but for some kind of shape or coherence I develop from the starting point of a few images. breidbach: There are few sequences at the beginning and they are supposed to be connected across the distances between them. How do you differentiate between what it means to fill the gaps between the images or conversely, to create points of connection between them? kentridge: It is not that it is important to show that there are gaps between the different sequences. It is that there are immense gaps. For example there is one drawing done with cows on the beach and the next image is a man on the beach by himself. What are the different points of connection that are needed? Is the man watching the cows on the beach and they are in the same world and then the cows turn to poles? Are the cows getting thinner, dying, and the man remains? There could be any number of different relations between the two images, actions that happen between and associations that go together with them. The cows getting thin and fat as in Pharaohâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dream and Josephâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interpretation of it; associations of thinness and diseases of thinning and AIDS, described as a disease of thinning. One thinks of people at the beach dying; one thinks of plagues and AIDS as a plague in South Africa. You think of plagues on the beach and you associate cholera and death events and a man on his own on the beach. Within all the different realms of associations there are different directions that it could be about in this particular film. It could go from the idea of the plague to the idea of Pharaohâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dream to the cows to the emptiness to the man on the beach to the boy, who is the man as a child. breidbach: The spatial form in which you couple images has undoubted stereoscopic qualities. You put these thought images in a specific order. You find a grammar of association or connection which binds the images in the temporal flux. One image not only follows another but also appears within the other. kentridge: I have to bear the emptiness, the gap between the images at the beginning and carry it into the process of drawing. Unless those gaps are left, it is difficult to find space for these other connections to fit in, to join on. If I know in advance exactly how we are going from the cows on the beach to the man on the beach, there is hard work in just following through what I think I already know and it is less easy for new associative elements to come in.

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breidbach: So the state of partial emptiness is just as much a constitutive part for the structure as is its literal multi-layeredness. It is part of the finished film. To an extent there are creative leaps between the images. The observer is not only confronted by the rich plethora of interrelated drawings, it is also possible by means of abrupt breaks in the images to use the gaps to insert personal intuitive thoughts and images into the films. kentridge: There are creative gaps. Some people are content with much larger gaps. I could imagine a film in which you see the cows, and then you have a long period of blackness and then you see the beach and you have a short period of blackness. This is when you make it a film about those gaps and filling in. That would feel artificial to me, because the idea comes from this discussion, not from the drawings. breidbach: Stereoscopy is characterized itself by two qualities: there are two images and there is an exact measure of gap between them. This is a model. These gaps are not blind. The literary specialist William Bedell Stanford (Greek Metaphor. Studies in Theory and Practice. Oxford, 1936) used the model of stereoscopy to characterize metaphor. He wrote: ‘That is true and perfect metaphor because, so to speak, both eyeholes of the stereoscope are open even to simple men; so all the image is solid and real.’ He adds furthermore: ‘Metaphor is the stereoscope of ideas.’ He designates metaphor to be a matter of both conceptual synthesis and perceptual synthesis. In stereoscopy as a model for metaphor both perception and thought come together as one performance, giving rise to one entity. In language, stereoscopy can be a model for metaphor. In vision, stereoscopy is a real act and renders the term metaphor a both vivid and plastic entity. The communal performance of seeing the images and ‘thinking’ them creates the power of vision. They lend metaphor a visible form. Thus we have come a long way, I feel, in an approach to the poetry in your art. We have been able to relate the model of stereoscopy to the form of your films.

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Your art utilizes the perception of concrete images, but it is not illustrative. Its images are derived from memory and are conceived as narratives, but are not moulded from the invisible. The fluency of form in the films prompts a comparison with language. But then you interrupt this fluency with two techniques: first, you layer drawings, each one differing from its predecessor and remaining transparent to it. And secondly, when applied to the whole story, you dislocate the images to create gaps between individual narrative elements. You blend

images on two levels: not only in terms of thousands of drawings, but also in terms of the images in the narrative content. The measure of these dislocations contributes information to the images and the narratives. You decelerate the linguistic flow and perhaps with this method—let’s call it the stereoscopic method—a form has been crystalized, which is in and of itself metaphorical. At the outset you describe the fact that the layering of drawings is responsible for the motor activity in the films. The animations do not merely make moving bodies their object. They are objects themselves of an animated, moving observation. Muybridge’s chronophotography observes movement. Your films are derived from an animated observation. They combine details in new ways and layer them with multiplicity. The images thrive on the tension and distance arising between them. Stereoscopy is a circular model. The person viewing the object walks round it and composes the images derived from many different directions and multiple angles into one spatial impression. In this way the image is made ‘solid and real’, as Stanford puts it. In the case of vision, space itself is created. However, this is not space which merely reconstructs external space in boxes, but rather space which is concerned with mentally assembling the aggregate of multiple viewing points, i.e. to see images from multiple directions and to amalgamate them in one’s mind. This is how metaphor is put together in language and perhaps this—via this model, which after all is derived from sight and seeing—can be applied most appositely to visual art. When we look at your films, we follow the construction of thought images as though they were our own. It is precisely the form of the films, 110

which leads us to identify with them. It is precisely the form, which is poetic. kentridge: Let me summarize the theory with two examples from my point of view: we spoke about the anamorphic drawings. There is a connection between those diagrams you showed me of the Cézanne paintings (Angela Breidbach: Anschauungsraum bei Cézanne, Cézanne und Helmholtz, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2003) and the anamorphosis on the cylinder. We were talking about the viewers making a journey around the edge of the ellipse. Viewing is an act of moving around a static object and seeing it from all the different points of view. Let’s see what happens with the anamorphic drawing. The anamorphic drawing at the base of the cylinder precedes the place of the viewer around the cylinder to constitute the anamorphic image on the cylinder. It is as if the act of the viewer constructs a coherent image that we have of the object. It corresponds to the act of viewing principle that you described, when one thinks of the eye not just as camera obscura, but as magic lantern. In this case the viewer is a magic lantern and the anamorphic drawing stands in for the viewer projecting this image on to the world. That is when he or she recognizes the object in the anamorphic mirror. I suppose the pleasures of anamorphosis are that one does something that is unreadable and then you hold the sheet at an angle to the eyes, from where you can read it easily—it is the awareness, not of an object simply to be seen, but a world or an image that makes sense through our active looking. When you see the image on the cylindrical mirror you are aware of having constructed that image through gathering the distorted image into the pressure of the correcting mirror. breidbach: This activity constructs its own grammar and its own meaning and renders itself thus an object, which one can then observe. kentridge: There are certain pleasures we spoke about last time: how straight lines become parabolas, curves become straight lines. The pleasure is that of finding and understanding what active seeing involves. I think that when one sees into a distorted mirror it is not different to how one sees the rest of the world. All it does is to make that particular process apparent and it makes the process of constructing the subject of experience or analysis. One does that all the time, that’s what looking is, a mediation between what one knows and what one recognizes, what one anticipates and predicts. Whatever ostensible object is being drawn, whether it is a tree or an apple or an erotic scene, whatever the drawings are, they are really an excuse for the pleasure of reminding ourselves, what it is that we do when we see.

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Weighing and Wantingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, 1997â&#x20AC;&#x201C;98, drawing for the animation of the same name, 120 x 160 cm

breidbach: I would call it the poetological key in your art that you are able to reveal the conditions for seeing in this way. kentridge: The other thing which seems important at the end of the conversation is the non-theoretical aspect of my work: we are talking about a kind of poetry of necessity. But we are talking about manual labour. And we are talking about found objects. Found objects as a category are a small particular section of the history of art, when suddenly one takes something that gets put into a museum like a urinal or a bicycle. I am interested in found objects rather in a sense of things that exist in the world and are recognized as being part of what one wants to put into the art rather than being simply searched for in the brain. One hopes for the process of recognition while walking around outside either looking for a piece of text or for an object to draw, hopes to make a link between something that is outside and something that is already stored inside. When one is walking in this sense, one is constantly searching for a sense outside that corresponds, is referring or amplifying, what is inside. breidbach: How do you go about finding such objects to incorporate into the ongoing process of a particular work?

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William Kentridge is a draftsman and film maker. He is known to an international audience since documenta X. By linking political content with individual mythology and by a process of photographing his framed drawings, changing and re-photographing them, he creates animated films—this being the specific fascination of his art. Angela Breidbach is an artist and image-theoretician. During their conversations, Kentridge and Breidbach reflect on the principles of perception of his work and discuss simultaneous and successive models of space which range from central perspective to panorama to stereoscopy and their transmission to the medium of film. The conversations are inspired by Kentridge’s continuously emerging understanding of himself as an artist.

William Kentridge was born 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he lives and works. Angela Breidbach was born 1960 in Aachen, Germany. She lives and works in Hamburg. Publications among others: Anschauungsraum

bei Cézanne, Cézanne und Helmholtz, Munich: Fink, 2003.

Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Band 28, ISBN 3-88375-908-2 Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln