Message from the Library No. 3
William Kentridge Let Us Try for Once 15 ½ Thoughts in the Library
Sunday, December 9, 2018 Brooklyn Public Library
Message from the Library, a series by BPL Presents, is made possible with the generous support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
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ere we go. This is a transcript of a talk I gave in my
studio in Johannesburg on the 18th of October this
year in anticipation and preparation for the talk that I give to you now in the library in Brooklyn. The studio
walls with their drawings pinned to them, yesterday’s list of things to be done, photostats and newspaper cuttings pinned to the wall will have to stand in for the stacks
of shelves around us and below us. The trestle table, the tripod, the ladders, the sets of plan chests with their
drawers, have to stand in for you, the audience, listening to the talk.
I did this walking slowly backwards and forwards
across the studio as I would backwards and forwards in
this room in the library. Hoping for a kind of peripheral
thinking to accompany the peripheral vision that is there in the studio as you walk past one unfinished drawing or a note from two weeks ago to a postcard that’s pinned to the wall. This in the hope that the activity would 1
somehow order and shape these Thoughts in the Library. I
order, a disordering of a coherence.
the circuit of the studio, trying to work out whether this
old dictionaries, they are encyclopedias, books that are
oner in the Book’, ‘Thinking in Material’, ‘If the Good
no particularly valuable books. They are books found liv-
strode around the studio, that’s maybe sixty paces doing should be called ‘The Smell of Old Books’, ‘The Pris-
What are the books I choose? In general they are
superseded by newer editions. In general no rare books,
Doctor’, ‘Let’s Try for Once’. But let us keep to 15 ½
ing the end of their lives on the shelves of second-hand
Thoughts in the Library.
and antiquarian bookstores. The books are chosen partly for the association of list-ness in them. Encyclopedias
and dictionaries are lists and demonstrate an ordering of
1. The Smell of Old Books
knowledge in one form or another, by subject, by alpha-
I draw in old books. Sometimes I draw in the books themselves, but generally speaking I dismember the
books, pulling the cover from the glue holding the spine, slicing through the string that is holding the bound sig-
natures and separating the pages. It’s an undoing of what
bet, into a coherence. The drawing on top of them is
always a re-inscribing of a different kind of thinking on top of the words of the book.
But the books are usually chosen for the quality of
Dante describes at the end of Paradiso when all the pages
their paper and for their typography and density of ink.
air and are gathered into one single book, a chaos of
slightly smoother surface if I’m going to use an ink wash
and all the leaves of the Cumaean Sybil fly through the
A very rough tooth if I’m going to draw in charcoal, a
and I want to precipitate out the different intensities of
knowledge forming itself into a coherence. Although
ink washes. The amount of size* that’s in the paper, how
I cut the books mainly for the ease of drawing on the
sheets of paper and for the ease of photographing them
* A gelatinous solution used in gilding paper, stiffening textiles, and preparing plastered walls for decoration.
later into an animated film, it is also a dismembering of
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absorbent it is. Sometimes I need a shiny surface if I
pages of a flip book. It can turn into a seven-, or eight-,
want to wipe a charcoal mark off with a simple brush of
or twelve-minute film, many thousands of pages.
my hand or a chamois leather cloth. Sometimes they are
Associations spread out from this. The pages
chosen for their size and proportion, how an open book
become two things. They become the frames of a film.
the books generally are turned into extended flipbooks.
thousands of frames is a way of transforming time into
fits into the format of a film frame. And the drawings in
So in the same way that a roll of celluloid film with its
That is to say variations on themes, each page being a
physical weight, these pages of the book also encapsu-
different frame.
late time as if each page is a day in the life of a prisoner
in the book who will never escape the book. Whichever page you open, there you are.
2. The Prisoner in the Book
One is always aware that even as one looks at a
What is it to have all these different pages, this multi-
tude of different images that one has when one disman-
book there’s this duality. There are the words of the text
a man walking backwards and forwards. It is a zoetrope,
towards you, and as they do, sitting next to your reading
and their relationship to the history of the world coming
tles a book? I do a drawing of a man or an animation of
faculty, are all the associations that the words you’ve read
that is to say the movement gets to one position and
bring to mind. And the sense of the book is not deep
starts again where it left off, so it can become an endless
inside it, but hovers somewhere between the book itself
repetition. The man in the book, just as I am walking in
and us, the readers and our projections.
the studio and stride from one side of the page to the
other, turns and returns even as the pages are moving.
It’s a way of making an extended flip book, not the one and a half seconds of the usual forty-six slightly stiff
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3. Thinking in Material
There always needs to be a connection between the topic that is being addressed and the material in which one thinks about it. This may be charcoal, it may be ink, it
knowledge in the world, its provisionality. The collage and the reordering becomes the subject itself. 4. Reading the White Spaces
may be the gesture of an actor, but always this has to
I come from a family of lawyers. Both my parents were
simply illustrating thoughts that one already has. If one
in South Africa, and my maternal and paternal grandfa-
be one of the ways of arriving at thoughts rather than
lawyers, my grandmother was the first woman advocate
is talking about dismantling books, one is talking about
thers were both lawyers. It became essential for me to try
that not just as a technique but also as a way of thinking
to find a way of arriving at and making an understanding
about the world. Thinking about the world as collage, as
of the world that was impervious to the techniques and
disordered fragments being brought together, reordered,
making a new alphabet of the pages of the dictionary, the half-images on one page connected to the half-image on another.
This act of reordering, dismembering and reor-
arguments of legal cross-examination.
Years later I discovered that within the Jewish
liturgical tradition, there’s both the strand that was very familiar to my family (in its secular form) of taking the laws and dissecting them minutely and finding all the
dering is always the essential activity of the studio. The
possible interpretations of particular words through a
world is invited into the studio, it is taken apart into
forensic examination of each phrase and argument. Later
fragments, the fragments are reordered and then sent
I discovered that there is also a style of Jewish prayer, a
back out into the world as a song, a drawing, a piece of
much more ecstatic one, that is less concerned with the
theatre. This dismantling is not simply a technique or a
details of the law but finds a more direct connection to
strategy, but also can be a revelation of the instability of
the religious world (in their words of course, to God).
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And that for these people, a section of the Hasidic com-
the tripod standing in the corner there, of the rightness
the white spaces were as useful in promoting this devo-
ing, of tugging, of finger waving, of arms waving from
munity, the spaces between the letters, between the lines, tion, this connection to the other world as were the black printed letters of the press. And I thought, ‘Oh, all my
life without knowing there’s been this Hasid in me that
that I’m saying. A whole series of gestures, of shirt pullside to side, of fists moved in emphasis, trying to con-
nect, trying to persuade these inanimate objects of the connection of what I am saying to the world.
is interested in what happens on and beyond the words.’
There are the gaps between the words which are
pauses, breaths, change of volume, of emphasis, which are devices outside of the specific words and their argument
5. Pause
to make the connection to the world. We are always im-
One has to understand there is a strange relationship of
plicated in what we hope will be an objective knowledge.
words to the world. We cannot trust them. The printed
book gives a kind of spurious authority to this relation-
ship. In common speech we are much more aware of this difficult and tenuous connection. Do the words have a
We’re busy subdividing and taking the world apart here. We’ve got the words, we’ve got the gaps between the
words, we’ve got the materiality of the ink, the specific
paper, we’ve got the biography of the reader meeting it.
direct connection to the objects in the world that they
What appeared to start off as a simple book has shat-
name, or are they simply a series of observations that
float above the world and invite us to make connections
between them and the world? And so in everyday speech, in this talk I’m doing as I walk around the studio, this
talk that I am doing now, I realise I’m gesturing with my
tered into all these different strands of possible meaning. The certainty of the book changes into something that is provisional.
hand, trying to impress this empty chair or that table or
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6.
7. The Young Boy
That’s a small fragment from Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate,
Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, pögiff, kwii Ee. Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff too, tillll, jüü Kaa rakete rinnzekete rakete rinnzekete rakete rinnzekete rakete rinnzekete rakete rinnzekete rakete rinnzekete Beeeee bö
where words are removed and what you have is simply the effect of the activity of speaking. Compare this to
Svetlana Alexievich in her extraordinary series of books
which are transcripts of oral recordings of participants in different events in Soviet history. She writes of a young
soldier, or she doesn’t write, she records someone talking about a young soldier in the Soviet-Afghan war in the
1970s. “The young boy took a long time to die and as he lay there he said the words for everything his eyes came
across, just like a child who is just learning to speak. Sky. Mountain. Tree. Bird. Haversack.”
Here we have language at its most basic, in ex-
Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff too, tillll, jüü Kaa
tremis, trying to tie the word to the world. Somewhere
fümmsböwötää fümmsböwötääzää fümmsböwötääzääUu fümmsböwötääzääUu pögiff
how our language ties us to the world and enables us to
between the two—between Svetlana Alexievich’s young boy and the Ursonate of Kurt Schwitters with all its
grunts, pauses, gestures and sounds—we operate with make meaning both of the world and ourselves.
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8. On Provisionality, Number One
9. On Provisionality, Number Two
One can look at the world as either fact or process. In a
This physical provisionality also alerts us to other kinds
photograph, one has a fact. Here is the table, a wooden
of provisionalities. The certainty of knowledge being a
is a book on the table. You take a photograph and these
senses and meanings. It alerts us to the precarious victo-
sculpture stand, there is the chair, there is the tripod, here are the facts of the studio. Or one could make a film, and
think of all of this as provisional, as one frame in a string of frames, with a history both backwards and forwards.
Run the film backwards: the book is unbound, the pages are uninked, the blank pages return to the wood pulp
from which they were made, into the planks which have been shredded, back into the tree. Run the tree back-
wards: the tall branches shrivel and get smaller, the trunk gets thinner and lower, it becomes a sapling and the
sapling disappears back down under the earth into its
acorn. Or to run the film from the present fact forwards,
moment of coherence amongst a sea of possible other
ries we thought solid and established. Whether they’re
victories of civil rights, victories of democracy, victories of rationality, we understand how fragile they are and that they were wrested out of ignorance, superstition, bigotry, and have a moment of flowering. But there’s
ahead of them also the enormous danger of them disin-
tegrating back into the fire, into the ash, into the smoke. The material is always, at least for an artist, the only way to think about the immaterial.
10. The Weight of Words
it expands in the opposite direction: the book no longer
There’s a deep reassurance in the weight of a book in
fire, the smoke, the ashes. Now the book is seen as one
us. There are some people fortunate enough to remem-
on the shelf, the book on the pavement, the book in the
one’s hands, the comfort of the book remembering for
moment in this process of mutation.
ber all the plots, all the characters of all the books they have ever read, but for those of us who are not on this
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memory spectrum whatsoever, there is a reassurance in
11. The Epigenetics of the Book
the books that sit on your shelf silently holding their
There is a way in which the shelves of books around
for you. So that if at a sudden moment you think of a
a negative self-portrait of all the books that one hasn’t
breath and keeping that knowledge and those memories name, a line you want to find, you can walk to the bookshelf, reach up, and remember that about two thirds of
the way through the book, on the top right-hand corner somewhere, sits this particular fact that you want. And the book will be there ready to produce it.
one are a long-term self-portrait. One of course can do read, and a reproachful self-portrait of all the books
which you’ve actually gone to the trouble of buying and are sitting on your shelves or in piles next to your bed, that have also not been read. Possibly there is a third
category, apart from the books you’ve read and the books
If the book is not there—your hand reaches for it
you have intended to read. These are books that you’ve
and there’s no book of that name on that section of the
acquired, as gifts or through purchase, which you’re very
shelf—or you find the book and the page that should
happy to have on your shelves even though you know
have that text, on the top right-hand corner, but it does
it’s completely unlikely you will ever open them or read
not have it, one feels as bereft as when you think there’s
them.
that last bar of chocolate and reach for it and it’s not
The book is similar to a shopping list, which re-
there, though your tongue is already salivating in antic-
members for you. This has to do with the physicality of
in fact is on the bottom left-hand corner of the page, one
Jeppe. Mining on the Witwatersrand, 1946. In contrast
ipation of what will come. And if you discover this line feels the book has betrayed you, or at least tricked you, rather than your memory.
the specimen. I go to the shelf, take a volume at random: to this, this walk around the studio makes me think of
the invisibility of the digital. What a relief that Kindles, which were going to take over the world, are fading, or
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at least are marginal. Much as people thought that the
a book is a man’s best friend, inside of a dog it’s too dark
obsolete and we now know that it’s simply a small, useful
of the paper, of the sound of the page. There’s no doubt
microwave oven would render all other kinds of cooking adjunct in the kitchen for heating leftover dinners and warming milk for the baby.
This is not just a Luddite pleasure in the material-
ity of the book, but also an anxiety about the invisibility
to read.” There is something of the talisman of the ink, that the algorithms, the Google Search are infinitely
more efficient than strolling along the shelves of a library imagining which book you should pull out.
There is also an institutional fetishism of books.
of the world of Photoshop, the immateriality of drone
Some years ago I was in Oxford, in one of the beautiful
no cost of transforming the world. There’s something
fifteenth-century books of the doings of different
warfare, which are obviously connected, of the ease and
libraries of one of the colleges, filled with stacks of
about the typed-over typescript, about the yellowing
Franciscan societies and other orders of monks. The
Sellotape and roughly cut pages which have been cut
library tables were all filled with students, there was
and pasted together, which shows in its material form a
not one single book visible on any of the tables, only
process of thinking that is tangible—change has to be
computers. And I asked the librarian, surely I could take
fought for. This is rendered invisible in digital format.
at least one of these books to make drawings in it. What
The cost of change disappears.
were the chances of anyone ever opening one of those books again? But unfortunately my pleas fell on deaf
ears. I will not even attempt to make the same request
12. Starve the Algorithm
There’s no doubt a fetishism in this object of the book
I’m holding onto, but sometimes we have to protect our
fetishes. As Groucho Marx remarked, “Outside of a dog
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here in this library.
But there is something of the peripheral thinking
and peripheral vision of walking down a stack of shelves
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that we miss. And we must also of course know that the
ourselves? Because it is not just knowledge or images we
Google makes to every object we search for is a fiction.
part of who we are. And the images and inefficiencies
idea of all the thousands of solutions and results that
We put in a subject and seventeen million four hundred
thousand nine hundred and thirty-two answers are given to that question, but we know that 99.99% of people
consulting that topic will read the first three items, and
the other seventeen million four hundred thousand nine
are finding, but also understand that these images are
and physical weight of the books tie us to the world in a more direct and immediate way than these invisible technologies.
13. If the Good Doctor
hundred and twenty-nine are redundant, are a kind of
A few years ago in Johannesburg I founded a small art
up on.
brings together different artists, musicians, poets, vid-
showy window dressing that’s never going to be checked In this, let me immediately explain my culpability.
If I’m looking for images of Italian gas masks from the
First World War, in previous years I or an assistant would have gone to the library and trawled through books
on the First World War hoping to come across one or
centre called the Centre for the Less Good Idea, which eo-makers, writers, who work on different projects to-
gether or develop their own projects, done on the basis
that it is in the process of work itself that ideas emerge.
Somewhere in the physicality of making the drawing, of
the conversation between the dancer and the film-maker,
other grainy photo of a gas mask that may be Italian
from that period. And now of course you hit the button and there are forty-three thousand images of Italian gas masks. But what is it to try to resist the algorithm? To say within the inefficiency we need to find a place for
of seeing what this particular sound does to that image as you watch it in the world, somewhere amongst this
chaos, ideas emerge from the margins, from the periphery, and inform or transform the initial idea.
This is a strategy for working across mediums. But
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it is also a way of constructing a safe space for uncer-
of different traditions and identities. Of course in South
project is extraordinary. There have been some very un-
attempt to fight against the imposition of identity by
tainty. The energy it has generated for participants in the remarkable pieces made at the Centre, there’s no doubt about that. But there have been some beautiful pieces
that would not have arrived if participants had had to
start with a proposal, a proposition, an understanding of what they wanted to do at the beginning.
The name of the Centre comes from a Tswana
proverb: “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.” It is a strategy for making performances
and art, but it also has to do with a belief that the grand ideas, the grand certainties are always accompanied by
violence and authoritarianism. Every large idea has let us down and is accompanied by invading armies. Our only hope is to try to find ideas at the margins, small provi-
sional ways of working—and in this way, make our way through the morass of the contemporary world.
I think it is not insignificant that this centre is lo-
cated in my hometown, Johannesburg, which has always
only made sense of itself and the world through a mixing
Africa the fight against apartheid was in many ways an apartheid laws.
14. In Praise of Bastardy
Johannesburg is a young city, only a hundred and thir-
ty years old or so. Its population has always come from
outside of the city—from Mozambique, from KwaZulu Natal, from Lesotho, from the far reaches of the coun-
try. Miners arrived from Cornwall, traders from Gujarat, people fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. It is made up
from these radically different groups of people. Obviously in Johannesburg history has allocated people to deeply stratified and separated societies of privilege and domination. But nonetheless, it has been a vital example of
what it is to think and to construct something from the edges of a tradition rather than from deep inside it.
Mahatma Gandhi, who is probably our second
most famous citizen, lived in Johannesburg for twenty
years. He was a young lawyer trained in Britain and came
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to Johannesburg to look after the interest of Gujarat
bastardy. On the one hand loving the stability of those
in South Africa he developed his political philosophy
house across the garden. On the other hand, taking them
traders who’d settled in South Africa. During his period that he carried through the rest of his life, and that led to the different forms of passive resistance and protest that eventually resulted in Indian Independence.
He had arrived in South Africa as an English-
trained barrister, very much deracinated from his Indian roots. He was brought back to his Indian tradition not
by his parents, not by studies that he’d done in India, but
by Johannesburg Jewish architects showing him works of Ruskin, the English aesthete whose work was indebted
to Madam Blavatsky and the theosophists who had used a mistranslated, badly understood version of the Bhaga-
shelves, of tomes in the stacks below or the library in my apart, using them as a scavenger, as a hyena, dismantling
and dismembering. Hoping for moments of elucidation, for sparks to jump from one idea to another so that one can reach a point, an image, an idea one has not anticipated. In the belief that the paradox, the contradic-
tion, the ideas that are sitting in the margin are not just there as mistakes, as aberrations in our understating of the world, but are in fact central to it. Believing in the mistranslation.
15. Let Us Try for Once
vad Gita and Indian mysticism, and talking to the dead,
The absurd drama of Gandhi’s history is not a mistake,
derstanding Satyagraha not through a deep identity with
book striding backwards and forwards across the pag-
to arrive at their philosophy. Gandhi came back to un-
India, but through this other bastardised route, through the peripheral thinking and the chance meetings of all
it’s how we have to be in the world. The prisoner in the es as I’ve been striding across the length and breadth of the studio while recording this talk to the silent studio
these other strands of looking at the world.
... (Not so silent. In fact, the bright sunshine when I
I’m caught up in this bastardy, in this paradox of
started talking has given way to the rumbling of thunder
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as a huge storm approaches Johannesburg, and we will have the great relief of rain in the next forty minutes). The prisoner in the book walking backwards and for-
wards, what does he wait for? He waits for the page to
fall out, for the pages to separate, for a new page to come in, for some new thought to take him out of the rhythm in which he is stuck, for a new page to arrive in front of him on which in twenty, in sixty-four point bold type is written, “Let us try for once not to be right.” ¼
Thank you. That concludes the talk and the record-
ing in the studio. It’s a beautiful October Johannesburg
day, the purple jacarandas are filling the windows of the studio against the now very dark sky. If we have a hail
storm, the jacaranda flowers will all be on the ground in the next hour.
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William Kentridge (born Johannesburg, South Africa, 1955) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre, and opera productions. His practice is born out of a cross-fertilization between mediums and genres. His work responds to the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, within the context of South Africa’s socio-political landscape. His aesthetics are drawn from the medium of film’s own history, from stop-motion animation to early special effects. Kentridge’s drawing, specifically the dynamism of an erased and redrawn mark, is an integral part of his expanded animation and filmmaking practice, where the meanings of his films are developed during the process of their making. Kentridge’s practice also incorporates his theatre training. Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including Documenta in Kassel, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Musée du Louvre in Paris, Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen. Opera productions include Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Shostakovich’s The Nose, and Alban Berg’s Lulu, and have been seen at opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan, English National Opera in London, Opera de Lyon, Dutch National Opera, and others.
A biannual presentation, Message from the Library hosts leading cultural figures commissioned by the Brooklyn Public Library’s BPL Presents to reflect on today’s most critical issues in our local and global communities. The series is part of BPL’s mission to convene diverse voices in the Library’s safe space to have meaningful dialogue about the cultural, economic, social, and political issues of the day. Typeset in Caslon and Akzidenz Grotesk and designed by Ugly Duckling Presse in collaboration with BPL Presents, this pamphlet was printed digitally and bound at G&H Soho in an edition limited to seven hundred copies with French Paper Co. covers printed letterpress at the UDP studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn.