Fire Walker

FIRE WALKER 2011 128 pages 200 x 300 mm

fire walker

william kentridge & gerhard marx

published by fourthwall books in 2011 All essays © 2011 the authors All photographs © 2011 the photographers © Fourthwall Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Conceived and designed by Oliver Barstow Edited by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen The text was output in the typeface Arnhem designed by Fred Smeijers. The book was made and printed in South Africa by Ultra Litho Pty Ltd. Paper 130 gsm Munken Lynx.

Front cover quote from ‘Urban Mythologies’ by Mpho Matsipa.

ISBN deluxe edition 978-0-9869850-1-0 ISBN standard edition 978-0-9869850-2-7

FW fourthwall books www.fourthwallbooks.com

Contents

1 • introduction Bronwyn Law-Viljoen

12 • essay one Now You See Her, Now You Don’t Alexandra Dodd

25 • Six Conversations Oliver Barstow

50 • photo essay Constructing Fire Walker John Hodgkiss

60 • essay two Urban Mythologies Mpho Matsipa

70 • photo essay Three Fire Walkers Ben Law-Viljoen

78 • essay three Ma Firewalker and Mr Typewriter-Head: Maps, Marx and Kentridge Mark Gevisser

88 • photo essay Six Monuments Alastair McLachlan

102 • essay four Walking With / Walking Alongside / Walking Against?

Zen Marie and Jonathan Cane

121 • acknowledgments

intr od uction Bronwyn Law-Viljoen

Rethinking the human condition … means going back over the forms of denial of recognition that populate our everyday settings.

—Josep Ramoneda1 … what is it that constitutes public space as real experience? Over and above sociological, political and functional requirements, what has just made public space recognisable is a material fact. A fact where aesthetics is frequently distorted and distorting, yet where expression and communication pass through a particular material configuration.

—Manuel de Solà-Morales2

johannesburg presents itself to us in several possible ways: as the ruins of a utopian European dream of the city as ordered and rational; as the remnant of a city that grew out of the geographical and human upheaval of industrial invention and the discovery of gold; as the fractured, emerging post-apartheid metropolis that has been described, variously, as ‘elusive,’ haunted,’ ‘dystopian’; as the African city emblematic of a new way of being in the world, a city of migrant life, of new relationships and porous boundaries, at once dangerous and exhilarating, chaotic and productive.

All of these representations—these urban personalities—coalesce into a new mythology of the city that is sometimes in danger of obscuring the daily, lived-in reality of the actual city. In other words, it is possible for us to become so enamoured of the narratives that make up our idea of the city that we forget the metropolis— extraordinary in many ways, ordinary in as many others—that is not, cannot simply be, an extension of our desires for what the urban ought to look like.

In their essay ‘Ghosts in the City,’ published in French in the early nineties, and then in English later in the decade in the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life, Luce Giard and Michel de Certeau remind us of the minutiae of city living, the daily enactments of life that disavow our grand mythologies of the urban but that nonetheless lend themselves to the formation of what they call ‘the mythical.’ Theirs is a beautiful and minute mythology of the city (‘One must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name, folded up inside this thimble like the silk dress of a fairy’). The flow of human activity in the city is comprised of quite small things, which they describe as gestures and narratives: Within the perspective of a new democratization, a condition for a new aesthetics, two networks in particular hold our attention: gestures and narratives. […]

Gestures are the true archives of the city; if one understands by “archives” the past that is selected and reused according to present custom. They remake the urban landscape every

1

1 ‘The City and the Human Condition’ in In Favour of Public Space: Ten Years of the European Prize for Urban Public Space.

Barcelona: CCCB and Actar, 2010, p. 21.

2 ‘The Impossible Project of Public Space’ in In Favour of Public Space, p. 26.

int roduction

day. They sculpt a thousand pasts that are perhaps no longer namable and that structure no less their experience of the city. […]

3 Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol. The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking. Trans.

Timothy J. Tomasik.

Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, pp. 141, 142.

4 ‘People as Infrastructure’ in Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (eds.).

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis.

Johannesburg: Wits University Press and North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 70, 89, emphases mine.

The wordless histories of walking, dressing, housing, or cooking shape neighborhoods on behalf of absences; they trace out memories that no longer have a place—childhoods, genealogical traditions, timeless events. Such is the “work” of urban narratives as well.

They insinuate different spaces in cafés, offices, and buildings ... they render the city “believable,” affect it with unknown depth to be inventoried, and open it up to journeys.3

Gestures and narratives: the first as the archive created by making use of the past over and over again through custom (the way we do things now); the second as the collection of activities that unfold daily in the city, ordinary things like eating and walking. Writing more recently in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Abdoumaliq Simone says something not dissimilar to this. But where Giard and de Certeau deploy the notions of gesture and narrative to conjure a possible and wished-for humane city, Simone (having learnt from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben) is tougher, speaking not of gesture and narrative, but of ‘activities’ and of the ‘minimalist offering’ of ‘bare life.’ But despite his tone and the different emphasis of his argument, Simone does not end up far from his two predecessors—with the metaphor of a journey: State administrations and civil institutions have lacked the political and economic power to assign the diversity of activities taking place within the city (buying, selling, residing, etc.) to bounded spaces of deployment, codes of articulation, or the purview of designated actors. According to conventional imaginaries of urbanization, which locate urban productivity in the social division of labor and the consolidation of individuation, African cities are incomplete. […]

With limited institutional anchorage and financial capital, most African urban residents have to make what they can out of their bare lives. Although they bring little to the table of prospective collaboration and participate in few of the mediating structures that deter or determine how individuals interact with others, this seemingly minimalist offering— bare life—is somehow redeemed. It is allowed innumerable possibilities of combination and interchange that preclude any definitive judgment of efficacy or impossibility.

By throwing their intensifying particularisms—of identity, location, destination, and livelihood—into the fray, urban residents generate a sense of unaccountable movement that might remain geographically circumscribed or travel great distances.4

For Simone, the diverse activities of city residents push against the ‘official’ narratives of city life (its legislated and policed parameters) and for this reason the assumption is made that the African city is incomplete. But in reality, these activities (made, it is true, out of the very basics, out of the barest of things) allow new exchanges to take place.

For this reason they should not be seen as rendering the city incomplete, but rather as proposing entirely new geographies and journeys.

These two different iterations of the meaning of city life arrive at the very same idea— of space traversed, of distance travelled. The metaphor of travel branches out in a

2

fi re wal ker

number of directions: one can be a commuter and travel; but one can also be an exile or a refugee and travel. The point is that society is on the move in ways not imagined by the map makers and city planners of the nineteenth century, whose imaginations gave rise (hindered and helped, it is true, first by the fevered imaginations of golddiggers of every stripe, and then by apartheid ideologues) to the city we have inherited.

Now movement, or more properly migration, is the mode of being. We live, as many contemporary philosophers have pointed out, in a state of migration: migrant life is our new human condition, whether we ourselves are migrants or not. It is not solely those who have travelled for one reason or another, good or bad, who inhabit the migrant life, it is all of us whose lives are being shaped in visible and invisible ways by the fact of so much human translocation.

Fire Walker is emblematic of this moment, this condition: she strides, moves, travels.

The figure she refers to—the woman vendor—is defined by her constant relocation; her survival is dependent on her moving through the city, following its economic and human vicissitudes from one place to the next. But she does not, as a result of this movement, display a sense of dislocation, of not belonging. Instead, she belongs in the most fundamental of ways to the places and people she passes daily. She establishes her identity at every turn, makes her mark wherever she stops, demonstrates her agency in the places she sets up shop, leaves her trace behind, and, above all, always returns. This woman—represented, it is true, in eleven metres of steel and paint, and therefore appropriated by the mythological, however fragmented that mythology, however heterogeneous its gestures hope to be—suggests our own experience of the urban. How we have appropriated her, and why—to serve what and whose purpose— are questions explored in this book. At the very least, the sculpture allows, insists on, various points of view. She is best viewed on foot, which means the artists, whatever else they might have hoped for in their fulfillment of this public commission, envisaged a pedestrian viewer, a person engaged with the life of the street. This is not a utopian vision; it is simply an observation about walking in the city.

This book began as a very simple idea: a document on the making of a public sculpture for the City of Johannesburg, to be installed downtown before that now much-vaunted event, the 2010 Soccer World Cup. Over time, however, the book has grown beyond its original conception, partly because of reverberations from the countless conversations that have taken place over the last several years about public space in general and the public spaces of Johannesburg in particular, and partly from thinking about this sculpture in the light of a constantly changing and debated idea of the public realm and who uses and ‘owns’ it.

Fire Walker (the book) has evolved, therefore, into something of a hybrid, fractured creation, which we welcome. The original conception remains, but the book has absorbed several things along the way and, we hope, contributes some new thoughts to the meaning and place of public art.

The writers of the four essays that we have included here all approach and circle Fire Walker, drawing very different conclusions from their experience of this large sculpture stationed at the foot of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge in a small park that once served as a site for taxi washers. Alexandra Dodd reads the work optimistically, as a

3

int roduction

representation of a new openness in the city and part of a progressive and visionary artworks programme that promises to reinterpret and reinvent public space.

‡ Following pages P. 5 William Kentridge studio, 2010 Pp. 6–7 Gerhard Marx and William Kentridge in Kentridge studio, 2010 Pp. 8–9 William Kentridge studio with Fire Walker maquette (centre right), 2010 Pp. 10–11 Gerhard Marx in his studio, 2010

Mark Gevisser engages with Fire Walker in a quite different way, reading her historically, as a point on a new map of the city, a possible way of recouping what was never recorded in official histories, or in official mappings of urban space. She is a figure to be reckoned with because she may help in the making of an entirely new metropolitan mythology.

In counterpoint to this reading, Mpho Matsipa takes up the very question that Gevisser’s essay implicitly poses: who is the fire walker and where does she figure in new iterations of space in the city? Matsipa suggests that the sculpture, rather than presenting us with a new openness, reiterates the ‘ghostly’ presence of certain residents and users of the city, that the fracturedness that some celebrate draws attention to a perennial problem of representation of black women in the official and regulated life of the city.

Jonathan Cane and Zen Marie play fast and loose with the very discourses that make possible the debates about public art into which Fire Walker is inserted. Her political life is made explicit here so that she is more than the sum of her (fragmented) parts, at once an aesthetic object and a participant/interlocutor in the complex negotiations around ownership, art in the public realm, urban planning, and domains of inclusion and exclusion, collaboration and participation.

We welcome all of these ideas and we thank the writers for their various engagements with a book project that took a long time to resolve into anything like a complete image.

In addition to the essays, six interviews with the various participants in the making of Fire Walker provide insights into the process of commissioning, planning and constructing the sculpture. We thank the interviewees for participating so readily in the conversations set in motion by the making of a work of this scale.

The three photographers who contributed to this book gave us the visual texture we were looking for, not only helping us to see the sculpture from a variety of perspectives, but also its relation, on the one hand, to the city’s historical monuments and, on the other, to the real women who were the inspiration for the original drawing of the fire walker. We also thank the people who were willing to be photographed— they have allowed us to suggest the complexity of the questions that swirl around the very idea of art for the public realm, the realm that they themselves inhabit in a myriad ways.

Finally, we are deeply grateful to William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx for entering the fray and allowing their own practice to be subjected to scrutiny and play. When artists make work for public spaces they are undoubtedly and inevitably giving expression to their own imaginings about the city. Their engagement is made all the more meaningful by their willingness to engage various interlocutors in an ongoing and, for the future life of the city, vital conversation about public space.

4

essay one

Now you see her, now you don’t Alexandra Dodd

johannesburg, January 2010: first month of the new decade. Streets are strangely cool and quiet, washed clean by the violence of a recent summer storm. Flock of birds draws a tentative dotted line through the milky pre-dusk sky above Empire Road—an empire long gone.

‡ Artists’ early site visit, crossing the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, 2009

Right up the hill into Braamfontein, past the palm trees in front of the University of the Witwatersrand, the giant concrete Eland bereft of its prehistoric expanse of veld. Then down into the city—the ‘inner’ city where there is no choice but to be ‘in’ it. Immersed. Alert. Alive. Veer left at the sleek white lines of the Mandela Bridge, towards the transport zone where taxis and trains empty their human cargo into the streets of the metropolis.

Giant billboards to the left and right of the bridge brazenly taunt conscientious citizens with outsize tumblers of intoxicating golden liquid, as the road curves voluptuously past a monumental slab that names and dates the structure: Queen Elizabeth Bridge, 1953.

The stubborn repetition of relief work in the concrete conjures a small assembly of white men in dark suits, hats and neat moustaches. ‘We are gathered here on this day in the year of Our Lord 1953 to cut the ribbon …’ Nationalist bureaucrats sculpting a city destined for defunctness retreat into the shade of a nearby civic building for a hefty slice of milk tart and an afternoon of paperwork.

The archaic constancy of another time stands out awkwardly against the backdrop of Park Station’s relentless radical transits. Gritty tracks run between discarded Kentucky Fried Chicken cartons and burnt-out taxi tyres facilitating a daily pageant of arrivals and departures. Now we’re getting warmer—closer to the inconstant spirit of the place.

13

Now y ou see he r, now you don’t

And now the eye is being taken by a billboard reminding the restive populace that 2.7 million houses have been built in fourteen years, and another advertising Italian footwear to newly hip pedestrians. Traffic light flicks red. And now you see it. A sudden riot of black and white planes, like ripped pieces of paper thrown up into the air. Against the brick backdrop of the Metro Mall and Taxi Rank, the image slips decisively into focus.

There she is: Fire Walker, a woman hurrying forward through the city streets carrying a brazier on her head. But just as you see her, the light changes green and you’re accelerating past her and she is dissolving into shards of black and white and she is gone and you’ve moved past her and on to King Pie, the Gazankulu Barber Shop and Still Waters memorial tombstones on the corner of Bree Street. What was that? Who was she?

Fire Walker is a sculptural collaboration between artists William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx.

When seen at a particular angle, the elevenmetre-high assemblage of laser-cut steel plates creates the silhouetted image of a woman carrying a burning brazier on her head. But just as quickly, as you move past the sculpture, the image disappears, fragmenting into other, more abstract, visual possibilities.

When seen in a fractured state, the work is animated. As opposed to the monumentality we associate with traditional public sculpture, Fire Walker has a relational quality. It is up to you as the viewer to find the point of coherence in the sculpture, because as you move, the sculpture changes.

‘At times it seems as if she strides ahead with great certainty, at times she seems about to trip and fall and at times the work is evocative of a riotous, or perhaps joyous mass of people, just before the work flies into complete abstraction,’ say Kentridge and Marx.1 The women on whom this fleeting image is based are part of Johannesburg’s street culture.

Selling roasted ‘mielies’ and ‘smileys’ (roasted sheep heads) to pedestrians, they can be spotted amongst the sidewalk mix of nations and generations, carrying their burning braziers aloft in search of a good spot from which to sell their juicy pavement fare. ‘They were even present in the very spot where the work has been installed on the day of the first site visit,’ say the two artists. ‘In this sense, the work is a monument to the everyday, the overlooked, and to the activities that have taken place on that site for so many years.’

Only months before the launch of Fire Walker at the end of 2009, the triangular site, which the work now inhabits, was used as car-wash area occupied by about eighty taxis at a time. The site is now a small green landscaped park, with new lighting, bollards and pathways. If you didn’t know it, you’d never guess what used to be there.

Like an old scab, the past has fallen away from the city’s surface.

Only the empty rubble-strewn lots northeast of it offer up clues to the gritty history of the place.

But in time those too will be transformed into a newly productive, newly regulated zone of urban life. The skeletal tree covered in carbon fumes from the overnight fires of the homeless will be gone, along with the clusters of off-duty taxi drivers sitting around on burst tyres shooting the breeze over a game of cards between shifts. On those future streets, a mielie hawker might be as quaint a memory as the maroon fezzes worn by traders who occupied this part of Johannesburg at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Beneath the clean streets of contemporary New York, lie the scarred and mashed up remains of sludgy alleys that used to be the stomping ground of the cut-throat villains who populate Martin Scorcese’s 2003 masterpiece, Gangs of New York, chronicling a nineteenth-century territorial war in Lower Manhattan’s Five Points district. Under the civil contemporary skin of the city, rage hot histories of conflict and becoming.

The film ends with a visual summary of how the city shifts over the next hundred years, as modern New York begins building up from

15

1 William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx. ‘Fire Walker, Queen Elizabeth Bridge, 2009 Artists’ Statement’ issued via email by Zanele Mamba of the Johannesburg Development Agency on 9 June 2009. ‡ Facing page Opening of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, Johannesburg, 1953.

Image courtesy Museum Africa

ESSAY ONE

the Brooklyn Bridge all the way to the World Trade Center, and the graves of the warring protagonists become covered in bushes and weeds as if they were never there.

2 Paul Auster. The Brooklyn Follies.

London: Faber and Faber, 2005, p. 301.

3 Gogo is a Zulu word meaning ‘grandmother.’

4 ‘Loxion’ is a corruption of the word ‘location,’ a term used to describe a township in South Africa. The phrase ‘loxion kulcha’ refers to urban African fashions and lifestyles. ‡ Facing page Women at Johannesburg Christmas Annual, 1906. Image courtesy Museum Africa

‘Who bothers to publish biographies of the ordinary, the unsung, the workaday people we pass on the street and barely take the trouble to notice?’ writes Paul Auster, a quintessentially urban writer in his grittily metropolitan novel, Brooklyn Follies. ‘Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements … a few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people.’2 Moved by the elaborate tales spun by everyday lives, the quirky protagonist in Auster’s novel resolves to form a company to ‘publish books about the forgotten ones, to rescue the stories and facts and documents before they disappeared—and shape them into a continuous narrative, the narrative of life.’

This idea of lives disappearing, moments dissolving, is key to Fire Walker in more ways than one. For it is not just the image that explodes into abstraction as you drive or walk by. There are other kinds of disappearance at play here. When last did you actually see a ‘fire walker’—a stoic world-weary gogo3 carrying a brazier on her head? Is she not becoming a phantom herself?

These women evoke an industrial era—urban and rural modes colliding in the wildly textured and richly flavoured economic melting pot of the city. Like the disappearing mine dumps, the fire walker is a twentieth-century Johannesburg archetype that is fast fading from the picture as the city clutches at new markets and slicker incarnations for a virtual millennium, trading in futures. ‘Loxion to loxion, corner to corner,’4 announces a Cell C mobile phone advert in colloquial streetspeak emblazoned on the wall of the Metro Mall and Taxi Rank.

From the fantastical projections of the first glinteyed prospector on the dusty Reef to utopian 2010 visions of Singaporean seamlessness, Johannesburg has always been subject to wildly divergent visions of the future. A defiant and bruised mistress of reinvention, she will, time and time again, make herself new. One has only to think back one hundred years to what the city was like in 1910 …

An archival search through the Museum Africa photographic library for images of fire walkers and bridges uncovers sepia and pastelhued postcard images of a city that could be mistaken for early twentieth-century Paris, with elaborate Art Deco buildings overlooking orderly thoroughfares of horse-drawn carriages as if they were the banks of the Seine. Since then the standards and ideals of Modernism have been actively subverted and, if anything, the city has asserted its Afropolitan informality—its marginal and contingent nature. Johannesburg seems to be a city most authentically itself while in the process of becoming something else.

For Kentridge, the sculpture evokes memories of the 1990s when there were numerous women in the city using the braziers for business and to warm themselves. ‘There were always women walking around carrying the braziers on their heads,’ he says. Fire walkers are a less common sight these days. As we move into the future, the sculpture is likely to take on a more spectral quality, appearing to us as a ghost from our past.

It references a more elemental, rural migrant past, already one step removed from the largely post-industrial present. Through the figure of a woman, it gently pays homage to the city’s migrant working-class history.

But unlike the rash of street name changes that has infected South Africa’s cities in recent years, evidencing an unimaginative and hubristic new nationalism, the sculpture is less about lionising demigods and foot soldiers of the Party, than acknowledging the unsung lives of the people.

Fire Walker’s location on the southern edge of a bridge calls to mind a novel by Sri LankanCanadian novelist Michael Ondaatje, called In the

16

Now y ou see he r, now you don’t

Skin of a Lion. Set in the Toronto of the 1920s, the novel tells of tunnel-builders, bridge-builders, tanners, butchers—all migrants whose hard labour was integral to the making of their new adopted home.

‘Originally cart roads, mud roads, planked in 1910, they are now being tarred,’ writes Ondaatje.

‘Bricks are banged into the earth and narrow creeks of sand are poured between them. The tar is spread. Butumiers, bitumatori, tarrers, get onto their knees and lean their weight over the wooden block irons, which arc and sweep. The smell of tar seeps through the porous body of their clothes. The black of it is permanent under the nails. They can feel the bricks under their kneecaps as they crawl backwards towards the bridge, their bodies almost horizontal over the viscous black river, their heads drunk within the fumes.’5 Instead of the rich and politically powerful, who are immortalised in the official history books, Ondaatje rescues anonymous workers and peripheral characters from archival oblivion by placing them at the centre of his novel.

Fire Walker seems to have been born of a similar impulse to valorise the everyman/ woman, and, in this sense, the sculpture’s content immaculately inhabits its form. Its deconstructed plains of black and white recall Cubist collages and the aesthetics of the Russian Constructivists who rejected the nineteenthcentury French slogan ‘art for art’s sake’ in favour of art as a practice governed by social imperatives. Eschewing the idea of the artist as isolated creator in an unflinching embrace of the communal aspirations of the new regime, the Constructivists aimed to revolutionise the threedimensional arts by interrogating the material properties and spatial presence of the object.6 Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s declaration ‘the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes,’ Constructivist artists and designers participated in public life throughout the Russian Civil War (1918–20), attempting to create works that would take viewers out of expected traditional settings, disrupting their senses and making them active viewers of the artwork. Fire

Walker does just that, requiring the viewer to be in a particular position in order to be able to perceive the coherent image.

Throughout his career, Kentridge has found inspiration in post-revolutionary Russia and Weimer Germany, ‘milieus that fostered socialengineering experiments intended to produce a kind of heaven on earth,’ writes Mark Rosenthal in an essay entitled ‘William Kentridge: A Portrait of the Artist’ in the book, K5: William Kentridge, Five Themes. Artists like Vladimir Tatlin, with his Monument to the Third International (1915), and Kazimir Malevich, with Black Square (1915), expressed great hope and idealism through abstraction, and Kentridge has been long been drawn to the political optimism of a time before the world was, as he describes it, ‘exhausted by war and failure.’7 Kentridge and Marx, who look upon the utopian thinking of the Constructivists with the jaded hindsight of the twentieth century, may well marvel at their capacity for total submission to Bolshevik ideals. But as artists they are at liberty to retrieve and revivify chosen elements of that fevered idealism. In the hypermodern present, hope springs up in the remix.

In 2003, La Monnaie, Belgium’s leading opera house, commissioned Kentridge to stage and direct a production of Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute. This commission resulted in a bounteous body of work that includes, in addition to the 2005 production, a film, two miniature theatre pieces, an anamorphic film and a host of drawings and prints.

An artist who has blazed a trail in innovative theatre set design, Marx stepped in to assist Kentridge with aspects of The Magic Flute and has been working on and off with him ever since.

In 2008, Kentridge was commissioned by Teatro La Fenice in Venice to create a video work to be screened while the orchestra warms up. Marx helped Kentridge with the creation of a series of sculptural forms that would feature in this video.

‘William wanted to create something that collapses into abstraction then finds a moment

19

5 Michael Ondaatje.

In the Skin of a Lion.

London: Picador, 1987, pp. 27–8.

6 Margarita Tupitsyn (ed.). Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism.

London: Tate Publishing, 2009.

7 Mark Rosenthal (ed.). K5: William Kentridge, Five Themes. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Norton Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2009, p. 39. ‡ Facing page Johannesburg circa 1955. Image courtesy Museum Africa

ESSAY ONE

‡ Above Man with brazier, corner of Jorissen and President Streets, Johannesburg, 17 July 1959. Image courtesy Museum Africa

that makes sense, then collapses again—like a sculpture that finds its pitch every now and again, then loses it again,’ says Marx. ‘But the great thing about working with William is that things enter into a mode of serious playfulness where they just snowball. So these forms started off as twirly bits of wire with little bits of paper stuck to them, but soon we started thinking: What if we could cast them in bronze?’

It was out of this series of sculptures, some of which were integrated into the video piece for La Fenice and some included in an exhibition at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, that Fire Walker found her genesis. ‘As we began to solidify these objects, it emerged that the side view—the collapsed view—became very beautiful in abstract Modernist terms—it had this Kandinsky-esque, Villa-esque feel,’ says Marx.

The ‘collapsed view’ or fleeting image is something Kentridge and Marx have both individually explored. The idea of an image that is constituted from something else and takes shape against the palimpsest of other textures or patterns is native to Marx’s oeuvre. In his works, the key image is often hidden from immediate view, requiring more detailed attention for it to become apparent to the eye.

It could be a skull constituted from the myriad light sources within a galaxy, a body made whole by fragments of maps or a face that emerges from a tangle of weeds. Marx employs old modes of exploration, from anatomical drawing to botanical classification and astronomy, gently militating against the certainties of the present in favour of liminal hauntings that suggest that our own backyard remains more complex and mysterious than we could ever imagine.

Something of this mystery inhabits the phantom figure of Fire Walker, which Marx describes as ‘an irrational kind of piece, with no 90º angles.’

Unlike the monumentality and bronze certainties of public structures of earlier eras, Johannesburg’s new wave of public art has a more playful, free-spirited tone in keeping with a post-apartheid city that is still taking shape. It is impossible to drive around Johannesburg without encountering some form of construction, road resurfacing or architectural reinvention as the city takes on new identities.

And when it comes to public sculpture, the Johannesburg Development Agency has been Joburg’s key protagonist, ensuring the inclusion of public art in all of its urban upgrade projects from Mary Fitzgerald Square to the Faraday

20

Now y ou see he r, now you don’t

Street market, from the Baragwanath Taxi Rank to the Drill Hall, Pieter Roos Park, Constitution Hill, Metro Mall and others. Over the past year or two, numerous public sculptures have been commissioned and installed as part of the City of Johannesburg’s public environment upgrade in the run up to the 2010 football World Cup. ‘This is just one of many public sculptures which are re-animating and re-imagining the city,’ says Kentridge, ‘and I am very pleased to be part of this moment in which there is a great possibility for further change to happen in the city.’

If you choose to see beyond the half-collapsed buildings, semi-decayed billboards, unfinished construction work and seeming disorder of taxis and traders, you see another Johannesburg on the brink of becoming. It fills you with a strange optimism that makes your heart beat faster every time you cross the bridge. As you’re crossing over, you look up, and in a flash of sublime coherence, you see a form whose fragmentedness affirms the city’s open-ended future.

‡ Fire Walker site from Pim Street, 2009 ‡ Following pages Kagiso Pat Mautloa, Brazier Series, 1999, photograph and lightbox. Image courtesy Goodman Gallery

21

si x CONVE R S A T I O N S Oliver Barstow

what follows is a series of conversations with the professional team that made Fire Walker a reality: the steelworker, the engineer and the production manager, whose task it was to translate the one-metre maquette, made of paper and cardboard, into a structure eleven times that size, made of mild steel, anchor bolts and I-beams; the former CEO of the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA), which was responsible for initiating the artworks programme in Johannesburg that Fire Walker is part of; and The Trinity Session, an art collective and intermediary body that has worked closely with the JDA on various public art initiatives.

Gathering these voices is an attempt to present a cohesive picture of how public art happens in a developing city like Johannesburg. But, as Fire Walker illustrates, this is a fragmented picture, one made unstable by the questions that each part of the process inevitably raises.

Having these conversations has also required navigating the city, metaphorically mapping its disparate landscape—from the steelworker’s yard in Industria North to the former CEO’s office in the banking quarter of Rosebank—as Gerhard Marx does in his work Foot Map. And just as the Fire Walker sculpture can be read from multiple approaches, these conversations do not prescribe a way of seeing this fragmented view.

25

The A rtists William Kentridge (WK) Gerhard Marx (GM)

1 An Afrikaans word and South African colloquialism meaning ‘a small hill.’

the Kentridge studio, where I met William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx for this conversation, is in Houghton, a suburb that is home to some of Johannesburg’s betterknown residents—Nelson Mandela among them. The studio is set on stilts against a rocky outcrop that forms part of a koppie,1 levelled towards the middle where the main house, home to the Kentridge family for three generations, stands surrounded by a well-kept, terraced garden. There is a view to the north over the treetops of the surrounding suburb, all the way to the horizon line—a rare site in Johannesburg.

Standing here gives a feeling of refuge, of setting one’s feet onto a stable piece of land that, when compared to the surrounding city, feels certain of its future.

The questions put together for this conversation presupposed a clear set of intentions on the part of the artists. The intended audience, the viewer’s reading and perception of the work, the meaning behind the image of the woman with the brazier on her head, the intention behind the decision to fragment the image: all of these aspects, the questions assumed, could be explained by the artists and so provide a clear trajectory—from the x-axis to the y-axis—of the creative process. Instead, the questions met with a reluctance on the part of the artists to think on behalf of the viewer, and even on behalf of the sculpture itself. Their work, while guided by an underlying intention, is not encumbered by a search for meaning. There is an intuitive engagement in the unexpected and the co-incidental—a serious playfulness.

[If you talk ... ]

26

‘if you talk about the formal aspects of the work, the game, [then] the central premise of the piece is working in three dimensions to make two dimensions. It is anti-sculptural. It does the opposite of what a sculpture is supposed to do.

If we’d started by saying ‘let’s make an abstract constructivist sculpture,’ I think the result would have been a lot less interesting. It is not only by chance that we end up where we do, but that the finished sculpture is the result of a different process, a series of solutions to other questions.

It has been the same with a lot of the drawings I have done for film or theatre. The drawings are there out of a need for something other than themselves—the narrative or story-line—which allows for images and drawings to come together that would not have otherwise had the chance to do so had it not been for the pressure of the other meaning that was required.’ (WK) ‘In a sense you arrive at the angles and lines— the abstract elements of the work—through an external function, which is the need for the image to make sense from a particular perspective. Within this process there are

compositional concerns with dynamism, coherence and attraction.’ (GM) The principle for Fire Walker came about as part of a series of works made to be projected as silhouettes, that disintegrate and reconstitute themselves, onto the facade of the opera house at La Fenice in Venice, to accompany the sound of an orchestra tuning, which goes from chaos to coherence—when the A is played on the Obo to the first violin and back—to disintegration.

As projections, the first sculptures in this series were primarily two-dimensional, being about silhouette or ‘thick, self-standing shadows’ as Kentridge describes them. Fire Walker differs in that, as an object in itself, rather than a projection, it becomes about deep space and the three-dimensional.

‘It’s a bit like colouring in. You start with the drawing of the silhouette and you can do anything you like within the boundaries of that shape. Sometimes this would involve tearing paper as the shapes to fill up the silhouette. If you then extend the z-axis, so to speak, you can

27

‡ William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx, Kentridge studio, 2010

in front of you because the idea for the next one had already presented itself. One of us would make an impossible proposal and because the idea shifts between minds, you are constantly negotiating a different space and different solutions and these lead to different questions presenting themselves.’ (GM) ‘Generally I have made the drawing for the silhouette or the image that we are working on.

The process by which the image gets transformed into a sculpture is very much a conversation between the two of us. The working out of the structure—not just the structure as support, but the actual composition of the structure—was more Gerhard than me. It was a collaboration in the sense that the sculpture would have been impossible without either of us. Also, let it be said, that for a lot of the work one needs four hands.’ (WK)

go as far forward and as far behind it as you like, so long as you remain within the perimeter. The first decision is to hold a section of the drawing in space—we can put this section of the brazier over here in space and it can connect to another piece of the brazier one metre away. Are we then going to join the two pieces with a straight or angular line? The important thing for the coherence of the drawing is the two sections of the brazier floating in space. There are a lot of decisions that happen during this process.

Certain lines or connection points get in the way of others, some are not structurally viable.

It’s a mixture of engineering, dynamism and constructivist composition.’ (WK) ‘With every sculpture we built, the idea for the next one would take shape. So we would be working on one and say ‘what if we did it like this instead?’ And that would lead us to the next one.

You couldn’t work fast enough on the sculpture

Another way in which Fire Walker differs from the series of silhouettes made for La Fenice is in the use of the white planes that make up the sculpture. For the La Fenice works, the sculptures were made to be filmed against a neutral background so that there was no interference in the rotation of the silhouette.

But with Fire Walker, a work intended for public space, a different set of challenges was at play.

‘Originally the idea was for the sculpture to be on high pylons so that from a low angle you would see it silhouetted against the sky. But even at a large scale, this made the sculpture look half the size. It was decided that the sculpture actually needed to be at ground level so that the viewer would get a direct sense of the scale.

But at ground level in the city there is the visual noise of billboards, buildings, hoardings, taxis and so on. Between all of this the sculpture, as a black shape, disappears. In the absence of a huge white wall to build the sculpture against we made the decision to build the wall into the sculpture using the white planes. This added to the dynamic because suddenly you had the possibility of a different image on the back. This is where the image of the second figure—the man—came into the composition. This was

28

similar to a lot of the things I have done. It starts off as a reluctant solution to a problem that can’t be solved otherwise, that turns out not to be a deficit but actually changes and adds to the work.’ (WK) ‘It is also an interesting gesture that she carries her own background with her. One primarily reads public sculpture as a silhouette, even if it is a three-dimensional bronze form. If you think about the sculpture of the angel at the Johannesburg Zoo, or the miner on the edge of the R24 [highway], they are primarily etched against the sky. I think Fire Walker uses the basic language of public sculpture—the silhouette— but explores it in different dimensions.’ (GM) Fire Walker uses a complex aesthetic principle— the fragmenting and coming together of a number of planes—to present an image of the everyday—the woman carrying the mbawula.2 This aspect of the sculpture presents a challenge to the viewer, requiring their active participation in constructing the image. This engagement, conceptually speaking, can spin in a number of different ways. The question is why? Was there an intention on the part of the artists?

‘This is not something I thought about for a second. It was there from the beginning of the project of incoherence and coherence—the way in which we make coherence in the world, the way in which one completes a meaning, the

way in which one can see one thing becoming something else. This didn’t seem like an inappropriate gesture to be making in public space. The sculpture demands a generosity from the viewer and for the viewer to also understand the nature of the visual game. I think part of whether the sculpture works depends on the viewer’s pleasure in understanding that they have constructed the image. It’s a bit like lying on your back and looking at the clouds where you recognise certain shapes. You know the cloud isn’t a dog but you can’t stop yourself from seeing a dog in the cloud. You know it’s not a woman with a brazier on her head. It’s a few steel plates at different angles. But, at a certain point it does become a woman with a brazier on her head. You see both things. You’re not pretending the one isn’t the other.’ (WK) ‘The work is not primarily a sculpture of a woman carrying a brazier on her head. The fragmented views are as much a part of the work—if not more so—as the coherent views.

The two coherent views—the woman carrying the brazier and the walking male figure on the other side—haunt the fragmented, exploded composition with the memory of a fleeting moment in which things settled to make sense.

But this moment is lost as soon as the viewer moves. The work is more concerned with the ephemeral and transient than it is with the monumental, singular image.

Also, the basic premise of making a public

29

‡ Facing page / above William Kentridge preparing to create a photogravure image, 2010. From several photographs taken, one would be used for a print that included photogravure, drypoint and engraving 2 The Zulu word for ‘a container of fire.’

‘The sculpture is certainly done in the spirit that there are many possibilities open in the city right now, and that there is the possibility of agency, which is shown in the way the viewer constructs the image themselves. Also, the image itself has a reference back to the old monumental sculptures, which are primarily of dead heroes on plinths. This is an unsung hero.

A figure worthy of civic pride and recognition who, in the normal scheme of things, would not have been recognised by the city. Talking now as an interpreter rather than the maker of the work, there is something in the sculpture which says that even the most forbidding and solid structures that appear to us are actually very fragile. What appears as fact is only one moment in a whole process.’ (WK)

work is that you do not get to choose or control Gerhard Marx studio, the nature of your audience. From that point of 2011 view the work is really there to brush up against the diversity of people who move past or use the site. This goes for the street vendor selling loose cigarettes or sweets, to the banker who flies past in a car with his window shut. In terms of the ideal viewing position for the work, we chose to favour the pedestrian. The work almost makes sense from a car but never completely. To get the best view you have to step onto the pavement right in front of the sculpture, which places you right in the middle of the bustle of innercity Johannesburg. The work asks the viewer to participate in its context.’ (GM) ‡ Above / facing page

One of the many possible ways of interpreting the sculpture would be to the view the planes as a geological metaphor of sorts that comments on the nature of living in Johannesburg—ruptured, colliding, unstable, but also, once settled, open to the possibility of new and unexpected formations.

What is interesting about the sculpture is that it always goes both ways—it is collapsing even as it moves toward cohesion. There was a sense of this throughout the project, that one is building and taking things apart at the same time. The building of the park around the sculpture felt like an ambiguous gesture. On the one hand it acknowledges the pedestrian culture by providing walkways and a formal park space. On the other, the arrival of the park affected the taxi-washers and the women who used the site to burn their braziers. That’s Johannesburg—everything always moves in two directions. There is a way in which things are being built in Johannesburg at this point, where less consideration is being given to detail and democracy than would be applied to similar projects in the UK or Europe for example.

The outpouring of public sculpture that has happened recently reflects a zeitgeist. There is a level of chance and expression that comes into play that wouldn’t usually be associated with public sculpture. At is most literal, Fire Walker is a process of taking a work developed experimentally in a studio and placing it into public space to see what happens. There is a dialogue between the private and the public, the ephemeral and the monumental, that remains unresolved.’ (GM)

30