Message from the Library No.3. William Kentridge: 15 1/2 Thoughts in the Library

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superseded by newer editions.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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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.