William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letters and Lines by Kentridge Studio

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE VIVIENNE KOORLAND

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; CONVERSATIONS IN LETTERS AND LINES

PLEASE NOTE This is an excerpt of this book. Courtesy The Fruitmarket Gallery. www.fruitmarket.co.uk

pre v ious p age s â&#x20AC;&#x201D; stills from Notes Towards a Model Opera, 2015, three channel video installation, colour, sound, 11:22 mins details from PAYS INCONNU, 2016, oil and twine on stitched linen and burlap, 244 x 366 cm

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE VIVIENNE KOORLAND — CONVERSATIONS IN LETTERS AND LINES — TAMAR GARB BRIONY FER JOSEPH LEO KOERNER ED KRČMA GRISELDA POLLOCK

This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition W I L L IA M K E N T R I D G E A N D V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D : C O N V E R S AT IO N S I N L E T T E R S A N D L I N E S Curated by Tamar Garb 19 November 2016 – 19 February 2017 The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh Published by The Fruitmarket Gallery 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF Tel: +44 (0)131 225 2383 info@fruitmarket.co.uk www.fruitmarket.co.uk Edited by Tamar Garb and Fiona Bradley Designed and typeset by Elizabeth McLean Assisted by Susie Gladwin Publication supported by Marian Goodman Gallery New York / Paris / London Tel: +44 20 7099 0088 www.mariangoodman.com ISBN 978-1-908612-41-0 © 2016 The Fruitmarket Gallery, the artists, authors and photographers. Distributed by Reaktion Press, London 32, Waterside, 44–48 Wharf Road, London N1 7UX

front cover: installation view of Notes Towards a Model Opera, 2015 three channel video installation, colour, sound, 11:22 mins back cover: detail from DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI (THOUGHTS ARE FREE), 2015 oil and pigment on stitched canvas and linen, 196 x 170 cm

CONTENTS — PREFACE FIONA BRADLEY

18 MAPPING, MAKING, MARKING: PLOTTING THE WORK OF KENTRIDGE AND KOORLAND TAMAR GARB

60 WILLIAM KENTRIDGE AND VIVIENNE KOORLAND IN CONVERSATION WITH TAMAR GARB

118 THE WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE JOSEPH LEO KOERNER

148 NOCTURNAL PAINTING: DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI BRIONY FER

158 DRAWING FROM DAMAGED LIFE ED KRČMA

166 NAMING AND UNNAMING: TRACING TRAUMA BY OTHER MEANS GRISELDA POLLOCK

176 LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION 18 8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 19 0

PREFACE â&#x20AC;&#x201D; FIONA BRADLEY

I have long been interested in conversations between artists. In the questions artists dare to ask each other and the answers they think to give. The quality of attention that artists bring to the business of looking at art can be of a different order than that of other viewers, and can bring particular insights. So I was excited when Tamar Garb brought to The Fruitmarket Gallery an idea for an exhibition and publication focusing on what she presented as a long term conversation between Vivienne Koorland and William Kentridge. Koorland and Kentridge have been friends since they met while at university in the 1970s. Beginning with a shared interest in politics, critical theory and culture, in what was and wasn’t possible in art and literature in their specific political and cultural situation, they have ever since, in Kentridge’s words, ‘done [their] work in different ways: often coming from the same source or out of the same questions’. Their work takes account of the complexities of history as lived experience, both artists making sense of themselves and their work in relation to the political, colonial, social, familial and individual histories to which they bear witness. This publication, and the exhibition it accompanies, bring together the work of Kentridge and Koorland, inviting and enabling us to look at the two practices in dialogue. Garb, herself a long-standing friend of both artists, has selected mostly very recent works by each artist (although this recent work is, in each case, contextualised by an important much earlier piece). Garb’s selection, together with her essay in this publication, and the new conversation between Kentridge and Koorland that she has recorded for it, highlights the formal and thematic links between their practices, mapping their artistic friendship through shared artistic strategies and a common sense of the urgency and agency of art. Kentridge, Koorland and Garb are joined in the publication by four other distinguished art historians. I am proud and pleased that their looking and thinking is enriched by the further thoughts of Briony Fer, Joseph Leo Koerner, Ed Krčma and Griselda Pollock, who have brought their intelligence to bear on the artists individually and together. I am grateful to Tamar Garb for her insights into the work of William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland, and for bringing them together in this way. I thank these two great artists for their wonderful work, and for their generosity in inviting audiences here in Scotland, and readers of this publication long after the exhibition has ended, to join with them as they think with and about each other’s art. Fiona Bradley Director, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

pre v i ous — V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D S A FA R M M A P : S ET T L E M E N T S 2008 oil and lead on stitched burlap over linen, 259 x 211 cm V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D S A FA R M M A P : DE P ORTAT I ON S 2008 oil and lead on stitched burlap over linen, 259 x 211 cm — V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D C E L I E , I ’M S O LON E S OM E I C OU L D C RY 2016 oil and twine on stitched linen and burlap, 150 x 242 cm

pre v ious

— V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D PAYS I N C ON N U 2016 oil and twine on stitched linen and burlap, 244 x 366 cm

— W I L L IA M K E N T R I D G E N OT E S T OWA R D S A MODE L OPE R A 2015 installation views three channel video installation, colour, sound, 11:22 mins

pre v ious

— W I L L IA M K E N T R I D G E stills from N OT E S T OWA R D S A MODE L OPE R A 2015 three channel video installation, colour, sound, 11:22 mins

— W I L L IA M K E N T R I D G E stills from A NAT OM Y OF M E L A N C H OLY 2012 HD video, 2:21 mins

V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D SU N B I R D 2012 oil on stitched linen, two panels, 154 x 101 cm

V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D A N G OL A 2013 oil and lead on stitched burlap over linen, 216 x 274 cm

V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D A L L MOU N TA I N S R I DE 2011 oil on linen in wood frame with staples, 135 x 119 cm

V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D KOPPI E S 2012 oil on linen, two panels, 140 x 254 cm

W I L L IA M K E N T R I D G E stills from S E C ON D - HA N D R E A DI N G 2013 HD video, 7 mins

MAPPING, MAKING, MARKING: PLOTTING THE WORK OF KENTRIDGE AND KOORLAND â&#x20AC;&#x201D; TAMAR GARB

… we have both done our work in different ways often coming from the same source or out of the same questions. WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

I guess we are both wedded to the idea of work and the ‘work’ of art. That is what we do. That is how we live. VIVIENNE KOORLAND1

— How to map two artists side by side? How to make meaning out of their parallel lives and projects, their shared formation and divergent paths, their ongoing dialogue and points of disagreement? How to think with and alongside them, to write the links and unravel the tensions made manifest in two distinct bodies of work, so that our attention is at once precise and expansive?2 Let us start with two recent works by William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland included in Conversations in Letters and Lines. Both Koorland’s PAYS INCONNU (2016) and Kentridge’s Notes Towards A Model Opera (2015) are premised and fabricated on the metaphorics and materiality of mapping. They take cartographic representations of place as the ground for thinking a relation to the world and its pasts, of scrambling time and place in imaginative constructions that honour the totems and signs of history while disobeying its teleologies, spatial demarcations and chronologies. Neither produces access to an unmediated sense of a border-bound location or temporally-fixed experience. Instead it is the insignia and symbols, the codes and representational tropes of past picturing that furnish their monumental constructions with a language through which to plot a felt encounter with history and to question their own places in its vexed and ambiguous inheritance. Koorland’s magisterial map painting PAYS INCONNU takes its cue from an impressive eighteenth century precedent, itself measuring nearly three metres by two metres.3 Made as a gift for Louis XVI by the hunter/collector, François Le Vaillant in the 1790s, with the help of artists and map makers, The King’s Map (as it is called) provides a stylised visualisation of its ‘hero’s’ successive forays across Southern Africa between 1781 and 17844. These are inked in thin reddish lines across the richly populated terrain, ostensibly tracking Le Vaillant’s journeys, chronicled in his popular Voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique (1790) and in a second volume of 1795.5 The map

was made after the publication of these narrative accounts, both to illustrate the routes and to locate the adventures in the ‘fact’ of scientific picturing, whether of the voyages undertaken or of the marvellous specimens discovered. The result is a work of unprecedented precision and care. Populating the mountainous surface with its neatly arrayed peaks, vein-like rivers and earth-toned terrain (a variegated green and beige stands in for the fecund land while a verdant fringe hugs its uneven shore) is a cornucopia of creatures standing (for the most part) in profile as if posing obediently for the naturalist who takes note of their distribution and appearance. Amongst the compendium of birds and animals are a few botanical specimens that seem to have migrated from a plant atlas onto the flat plane of the map so as to reference the natural environment. The map, notwithstanding its occasional anomaly (an Indian elephant, for example, has strayed into an alien landscape) contains a wealth of information, the product of an Enlightenment quest to chronicle the world and conquer ignorance by tabulating and recording its riches.6 It is this expanse of land and its serried inhabitants that form the ground of Koorland’s reworking. But hers is no accurate copy or facsimile. Instead Le Vaillant’s map provides a supporting scaffold and series of figures from which the artist chooses to populate her own painterly world, more phantasm than historical record. Selections are intuitively made, spaces between them contracted or shifted, so that the mysterious and fabulous array of miniature but out of scale creatures appear in Koorland’s map to strut and graze in their native habitat with imperious, almost majestic authority. Gone are Le Vaillant’s labels and captions, the classificatory filters and taxonomic insertions that sought to know and to sort the animals. It is their land and they move across it without obeisance to the hunter/collector, however important or progressive his project. Here they appear not as trophies of science or slaughter but as free-ranging emblems of the richness and wonder of the world. Each is unique and proud and precious. They possess the ground of the painting as if located on the plains of their land, their shadows anchoring them firmly onto the surface of the burlap beneath. But into their decorative splendour strays one anomalous creature, a pet dog, painted on a patch of canvas sewn onto the ocean at the bottom right-hand corner of the work. This is the only animal whose origin is not to be found on the eighteenth century source. He appears to have drifted onto the picture plane from another time and place. He stands eagerly on all fours, tail erect, tongue hanging thirstily out of his open jaw, an emblem of domesticity and categorical disjuncture in an otherwise coherent eighteenth century bestiary. In the bottom right hand corner of his patch is his name, ‘Nick’, the only creature (besides the artist) who is hailed as an individual in an assertively anonymised world. The insertion of Nick brings us back to the present and to the space of making of which he is part. Not contained on the land but implanted on the surface of the sea, he is situated elsewhere, much like the artist herself.7 That Koorland emplots her canine friend onto a separate piece of fabric is not in itself of note. A number of animals on the mainland, like the spread-quilled porcupine and long-eared hare, are also painted on separate patches that are roughly sewn onto the picture’s surface. In any case, a close scrutiny of Le Vaillant’s map shows that it too is covered with the occasional attached paper papillon, which hovers conspicuously over the whole so that the source is itself a layered, assertively handmade thing. Koorland pays homage to the precariousness and materiality of her precedent, its fragile beauty subject to time and deterioration, palpably handmade, imperfect and ageing. That materials themselves carry history is at the heart of Koorland’s endeavour. Her ground

D E TA I L S above and below right: François Le Vaillant, The King’s Map, 1781–84, map, 59 x 84 cm below left: Vivienne Koorland, ‘Nick’ from PAYS INCONNU, 2016

D E TA I L S Vivienne Koorland, PAYS INCONNU, 2016

mimics the tawny tonalities of The King’s Map, but it also betrays its own past by allowing the bluegreen grid and commercial labelling imprinted into the burlap (once used to convey grain across continents) to show through, puncturing the abstract cartographic design of the world with the scarred sacking that exports its produce. ‘BEY PLC’ and ‘e of Ethiopi’ are among the fragments of words left visible in stencilled lettering on the stitched burlap, bringing another part of Africa into the scene, not as image but as text, a residue of the use to which the fabric of the painting was once put, and a portent of the way that the land it depicts came to signify. Numbers, too, are imprinted in blue, referencing the calendars and the counting, the exports and exchanges, by which the riches of this land were traded. Multiple temporalities collide, the culture of industrial food production and the labour that produces it disrupting the serene order of an animal kingdom arrayed as if forming an inventory of paradise. The staining of the support is not the only evidence of human presence in the work. We have already seen that Le Vaillant had plotted his journey in red ink as if planting his existence over the landscape. Koorland chooses not to replicate his trail, leaving the ground to read as a country in which animals can roam freely and rule. But she does reproduce the painted cartouches that populate the eighteenth century map with idealised vignettes of indigenous folk, statuesquely posed in romantic and illusionistic settings. Like three dimensional windows in the schematic surface of The King’s Map, the cartouches open out onto hills and plains, blue skies and distant mountains that serve to enshrine perspectival vision as both natural and pictorially true. Framed in their ornately painted surrounds, the ornamental insets provide an alternative representational system to that of the laid out land. Koorland mimics this to some extent but her loose-brushed copying and painterly textures – as much Velázquez as Watteau – allow the texture of the support to show through, and the handmade stitching around the roughly cut rectangles that break the edges of the painted surrounds declare their stuck-on materiality so that the copied cartouches are rendered as opaque and frontal as the shallow (but undulating) ground of the map. The large, central cartouche is especially interesting for here Le Vaillant had inscribed his own elegant self, replete with feathered hat and hunting rifle, into a scene that also included his greyhound and pet baboon, as well as his trusty companion and a couple of apparently local inhabitants, as if to reveal the circumstances under which the map was made. Behind his prancing figure are characteristic African huts, on the other side sit the wagons and tents of his expedition, a distillation of the encounter that he mapped and narrated. Koorland lifts this little picture out of history, reproducing it like a rough translation in which the elements are recognisable but distorted. This addition no longer reads as an insert or an opening but as a covering that sits on the surface, itself layered with a stuck-on rectangle that reveals the fabricated nature of the scene. There is nothing seamless or transparent here. What we have is a quotation that has been queered or refracted. And as if to assert the weight and presence of the picture within the picture, Koorland invents a small bird to sit on its uppermost edge and survey the surrounding plains (‘forgive us our Trespasses’, underscores a bird in the predella of Sunbird (2015), referencing both the usurpation of land and a generic notion of sin that comes with taking what is not one’s own.) In the bird’s purview is Koorland’s reworked signatory cartouche, crowned by the King’s coat of arms, which has replaced the inscribed history of the map’s authorship with the name of the artist herself.8 The words ‘PAYS INCONNU’ are appropriated from the uninhabited northern

reaches of The King’s Map and serve as Koorland’s overarching title, connoting an unknown land, a painted paradise, whose marvels – though bare to the eye – present a mystery and magic that is beyond knowledge or the cartographic imaginary. Beneath the multilingual signature ‘Vivienne Asya Koorland’ are the dates 2015–2016 bringing the map firmly into the present and replacing the 1790s of the source with a vantage point that is at once elsewhere and delayed. From this perspective and with hindsight the optimistic fervour of the Enlightenment project looks different. So too does the concern with mapping and making, not only in relation to plotting journeys and creatures and campsites, but in creating a dialogue between the diagrammatic and the perspectival view, the plane and the vista, the surface and the scene, the brushed and the delineated, each pair supplying alternative technologies through which a world can be known and narrated. Kentridge, like Koorland, is exercised by histories of representation: the conventions and gadgets, equipment and devices that construct our visualisation and experience of the world. Notes Towards A Model Opera, like all of his films, is as much about the layered filters of representation it unravels as it is about the scenes/stories it fabricates. Comprising a three screen projection with a sumptuous and all-enveloping soundtrack, the piece, as the title suggests, plays on the ‘high communist Gesamtkunstwerks’ known as ‘model operas’ which were sanctioned by Jiang Qing (wife of Mao Zedong) and much performed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–76.9 Supported for their rejection of the powerful (the kings, generals and beautiful maidens beloved of the Peking Opera) the model operas were devoted to narrativising revolutionary triumphs and the bravery of the common people. It is the choreography of popular celebration that Kentridge distils into the figure of the African dancer, at once ballerina en pointe and revolutionary allegory, who alternates her agitated circling between elegant classical gestures and the contagious rhythmic movements of the African dance hall. Dressed like a comrade in arms, with bonnet rouge and slung rifle, red flag, green militarised skirt and revolver in hand, she appears at one point as a composite of Delacroix’s 1830 Liberty Leading the People and her gun-toting adolescent sidekick, except that she dances not on the barricades of Paris, but over a pairing of maps that juxtapose Johannesburg and its surrounds with the coloured-in contours of twentieth-century China. The musical accompaniment is similarly layered, veering between re-mixed versions of the Internationale (in Zulu, Mandarin and Russian) and the rhythms of a 1950s swing band impeccably interwoven and overplayed by the composer Philip Miller (Kentridge’s long-time collaborator). The subtle weaving of sounds allows histories/cultures to rub up against one another, finding synergies and analogies where none might have been thought to exist. It is one thing to combine various translations of the same revolutionary song, another to allow 1950s African and American tunes and rhythms to insert themselves so as to create a composite sound in which disparate geographies connect. This sonic synthesis is mirrored in the juxtaposition of places: the familiar terrain of the city of gold pasted onto a mine ledger is placed alongside the commercialised atlases of school-room geography that show the enormity and colourful stretch of the People’s Republic of China, referencing both the period of consolidation of Maoist rule and the decolonisation of African States in the 1950s and 1960s (a classic 1950s photograph of Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of independent Ghana, flashes momentarily on the screen as do other snapshots of colonial encounter) and at one point revolutionary African male figures join the female dancer in a celebratory jig against the backdrop of the Chinese map.

D E TA I L S left: Vivienne Koorland, PAYS INCONNU, 2016 right: William Kentridge, installation views of Notes Toward a Model Opera, 2015

D E TA I L S left and below right: William Kentridge, installation view of Notes Toward a Model Opera, 2015 above right: William Kentridge, still from Other Faces, 2011

About halfway through the film a pair of carnivalesque figures cavort like shadow puppets in front of a characteristic Highveld landscape in a digitised montage that interweaves charcoal drawings of mine dumps and electricity pylons with Chinese and South African maps. Towards the end of the film the Chinese map becomes transparent to reveal the familiar Kentridge drawing of a mine dump and a movie screen (reminiscent of his Other Faces of 2011), but now the commercialised blue of the atlas seems to have coloured the sky of Johannesburg so that the sense of separation between these spaces collapses – as does the distinction between the schematic language of cartography and the illusionistic realism of perspectival drawing. China and Africa, the subject of ever-new forms of colonial encounter, seem to emanate together from this collision and confusion of references. But this geopolitical confrontation – staged also in calligraphic markings through which African birds become Chinese characters that fly over Mandarin and European book pages – is accompanied by a number of sub-themes and references that bring in other places and times. Revolutionary fervour (as embodied in the dancer or slogan-bearing demagogue) refers also to the Paris Commune of 1871 and references to French newspapers are inserted alongside a lightning quick appearance of Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian (1867–68) plus a longer deconstruction (through pamphlet-like stuck-on drawings, Kentridge’s own papillons, so to speak) of his floral still-lifes animated on a windswept surface, a meditation on making and art and beauty against the backdrop of an imploding world. The inclusion of French references is not arbitrary. It was in Manet’s Paris that the Internationale was composed by the Communard Eugène Pottier, and it was this short-lived (and violently suppressed) workers’ uprising that gave its name to the subsequent social experiments of which the Cultural Revolution was one. Visually, sonically, intertextually, Notes Towards A Model Opera, speaks to the overlaying of events and geographies without ever narrating or describing the links. Central to Kentridge’s palimpsestic strategy is the shallow but dense space he constructs as his ground. Here, it is not, as in Koorland’s case, the literally heavy superimposition of materials and textures that is at stake (even Kentridge’s drawings are on paper and executed in the featherylight powders of charcoal and dust or the seeping liquidity of ink), but rather the illusion of layering that the plane of the screen can allow. The filmed surfaces of books, maps, photographs and ruled ledgers provide, in montage and overlays, the flattened backdrops against which actors and puppets perform, creating simultaneous textual, temporal and spatial references through which their actions can be read. Increasingly in recent years, Kentridge has inserted his own body into similar environments using the sheets of an old volume and the rhythms of page turning (simulated as if in early cinematic constructions that signify as animated flip-books) as a space for experimenting with movement and figuration and form. Anatomy of Melancholy (2012), for example, begins after a brief glimpse of the artist’s hand and a battered book-cover, as a flurry of page-turning to the whirring of an old projector. Shapes soon appear: flat rectangles and triangles and ampersands evolve into ‘Chinese’ characters and birds in flight, stencilled words (‘black, blank, blanc’) are replaced by the quickstepping moves of Kentridge and his female dance partner who tango on each side of the seam until, eventually, the artist is pursued off camera by one of the loosely drawn ‘Chinese’ characters who seems to hunt him down as if to punish him for appropriating a script not his own. At the core of the work is a meditation on language and literacy, not only in relation to competing modalities

of representation (constructivist abstraction versus realist figuration – when does a shape become a man and a man become a shape?), but through the superimposition of stencilled words onto the printed page that brings the drama of race (‘black/blanc’) and the issue of signification (‘blank’ stencilled over the fullness of text) into the frame of vision. For both Kentridge and Koorland, books and writing (whether reproduced text, stencilled letters or handwritten script) provide the fulcrum for thinking about history and the inheritance/ mediation of thought. For Kentridge, as we have seen, old volumes can be drawn on, page by numbered page, and then photographed, rearranged and projected at dizzying speed, with familiar icons and images (the prone corpse is one recurring motif, the megaphone; typewriter and coffee pot, familiar from the earlier Drawings for Projection (1989–2013) are others10) alternating with abstract shapes, dissolving forms, moving figures and familiar landscapes. The effect is of a compendium of representational possibilities, from realist simulations of flight or gait to simplified choreographies of shape, each placed over printed paper within the resonant covers of old books. The act of reading and looking are intertwined as pages turn mechanically in front of the eye. For Koorland too, painting opens up a space in which reading and looking become analogous, even coterminous activities. Works like THE DIVIDE (2013) and DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI (THOUGHTS ARE FREE, 2015) invite one to decipher the painstakingly transcribed letters of a story or a song, but at the same time, they provide a space for imaginative projection, reverie and reflection11. In THE DIVIDE, the early twentienth century Bengali writer, Rabindranath Tagore’s short story of the same title is transplanted, in translation, onto a divided surface. In THOUGHTS ARE FREE, the words ‘Die Gedanken sind frei’ surmount a simulated night sky filled with stars alongside English and German versions of the song. Looking and reading are intertwined here: but it’s not only a matter of symbolism or content (a division between neighbours suggesting a divided canvas, a defiant cry for freedom accompanying the illusion of liberated constellations of ideas and dreams), it’s also an invitation to look at words as things (painted, scraped, shaped and formed) and to read things as signs (full, rich, complex, resonant) so that conventional divisions between poetry and painting collapse.12 Where Kentridge accelerates reading to the frenzied but rhythmic pace of a dance, Koorland thickens it in paint and texture so that it is slowed down, weighted with the material substance of life and contingent on the physical framework it inhabits. Books as material objects as well as containers of knowledge have long served Koorland as a resource. As early as 1987, she reproduced and enlarged a picture of a pot plant by a child, Jacques Benguigui (taken from Serge Klarsfeld’s 1984 book The Children of Izieu which memorialised those transported from a children’s home at Izieu, to the collection centre at Drancy and then to Auschwitz13) accompanied by the words Vive Maman scripted, as if made from a garland of flowers. The boy’s drawing is copied onto a vast canvas about a third of which is covered with the torn out pages of an early twentieth century volume eulogising the spiritual and formal virtues of French Gothic churches. The racialising rhetoric underpinning the celebration of ‘Gallic’ style and Christian architecture provides an uncomfortable bed for the support of the naive floral tribute, copied carefully from the hand of the dead child like a desperate banner of defiance. In reproducing the unschooled markings of a child – a very adult device which Koorland has used repeatedly since, drawing from books such as War Through Children’s Eyes for works like How I Live (1993–2008) – she rescues the voice of a witness who has not lived to tell his tale.14 Benguigui, author of the

D E TA I L S William Kentridge, drawings for Anatomy of Melancholy, 2012

D E TA I L S clockwise from above left: Vivienne Koorland, VIVE MAMAN, 1987; Vivienne Koorland, ANGOLA, 2013 William Kentridge, still from Felix in Exile, 1994

original VIVE MAMAN drawing, was Jewish – racially marked as Other – and so excluded from the sanctuary that the ‘Gothic’ was thought to embrace.15 As if to underscore the connection between racialised thinking (however lofty) and exterminatory violence, Koorland has also included on her canvas in the bottom right hand corner, a pasted article from the New York Times which reproduced a photograph of the Russian teenager Masha Bruskina who was executed in 1941 by the Nazis alongside a pair of Minsk partisans.16 The remnants of a high-minded treatise and disposable piece of newsprint co-exist here creating a physically and conceptually dense platform for Jacques’ tragically hopeful refrain.17 The appropriation of actual pages from the newspaper replete with their cheap reproductions is typical of Koorland’s recourse to the material residues of history. For both Kentridge and Koorland, newspapers, whether historical as in Kentridge’s raiding of the Paris Journal Officiel of 1871, or contemporary as in the use of daily reportage (they are both scavengers of news and information) provide an indispensable repository of material. Kentridge frequently uses newspapers – and the old-fashioned printing presses from which they emanate – as props and crime-scene paraphernalia, covering corpses and absorbing blood stains or wafting mysteriously into the wind as in Felix in Exile (1994) in which drawings, diagrams, press photos and prints create a rich representational field. Newspapers also serve to provide stories or icons, as in the case of Koorland’s ANGOLA (2013), which is based on an article about the removal of a cell and watchtower from the maximum security prison in Louisiana to the National Museum for African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Here Koorland appropriates the overdetermined signifier of the watchtower (one thinks of Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Alain Resnais and latterly Yael Bartana) onto the tattooed skin of the burlap (with its turquoise grid and sutured surface) and accompanies the title ‘ANGOLA’ at the bottom of the work with the name of the most famous African ex-prisoner ‘NELSON MANDELA DEC 2013’, to register both that she finished the painting on the day of his death, and that the prison’s name, housing predominantly African American prisoners, is also the name of an African country from which their ancestors might have been forcibly taken. At other times, though, it is the actual cut out extracts/pages from newspapers (or often postcards) that she collages onto her paintings as she has done since VIVE MAMAN. Here the literal fabric of history as well as its iconic significance is made tangible through the collision of textures, patina and weight so that the painting itself functions as an archive or safe-keeping store. It was in the late 1980s that Koorland started making works on the actual bodies of books, drawing on the back or inside covers of damaged volumes, rescued from skips and secondhand shops, or on the spines of stacked or separated items, as if to turn them inside out so that their contents appear to be worn on their sleeves. Winter Battle: Champagne (1994), for example, transcribes a World War I battle map onto a single weathered and brittle spine, while a contemporary work comprises the stacked and stuck collection of five volumes that function as a heavy support for a similar image, with its arrows and points of confrontation, its placenames and inked-in borders tracing the pathway and progress of troops. Kentridge, too, has worked consistently on salvaged tomes, recently using the inside of dismembered mine ledgers and accounts books as the support for drawings that superimpose the scarred and brutalised landscape of Johannesburg over registers of labouring lives. For Kentridge, such drawings, as we have seen, have also served as the mise-en-scène for films such as Other Faces or Notes Towards A Model Opera, where maps and illusionistic settings

jostle in the space of the screen with the gridded underbelly of the account book or ledger that stands in for the foundations, not only of metropolitan life under capital, but of modern representation itself. The Drawings for Projection, on which Kentridge has been working since 1989, deal, as much as anything, with the process of drawing itself. They seem to dramatise what it is to make sense of the world graphically, to make it come into being as mark and trace on a plane. Central to the mapping and plotting and picturing (on surfaces within surfaces, through lenses and prosthetics, on mirrors, pools and screens) are the personae through which Kentridge has sought to find or locate a self, in effect to externalise the possibilities of being in a strange and unknowable world – a ‘pays inconnu’ full of prints and politics and people. Throughout the series (there are ten films to date) the characters of Soho Eckstein (the ruthless capitalist fat-cat turned pathetic cuckold) and Felix Teitelbaum (the anxious dreamer and thinker) articulate opposing subject positions, representatives of white South African masculinity, caught in their own personal dramas but also implicated in the violence around them. While Teitelbaum has often been identified as an avatar for the artist himself, Soho has been seen as the enemy, the mine boss cum landowner who ruthlessly surveys the land, greedily exploiting its wealth. Gradually though, as the series develops, Soho’s fallibility and vulnerability become apparent and he comes, more and more, to physically resemble generations of Kentridge patriarchs: his suit derives from one worn by the artist’s grandfather while his features become infused with a generic familial resemblance. In Other Faces, the last of the Soho Chronicles to date, Soho finds himself in a road-rage encounter, his old, angry, aggressive self, yelling uncontrollably at his African counterpart (to the background sounds of traffic, swearing and Zulu verbal abuse) while the words ‘You Fucken White Man’, stencilled onto a certificate for the African Banking Corporation, flash momentarily on the screen. It is hard to imagine that the artist does not feel himself addressed by this hostile curse. Or that the soul-searching that Soho must undertake is not also that of his author. With time and age, a more complex sense of multiple, conflicting forms of identification come into play in the Drawings for Projection with the belligerent pater familias Soho steadily becoming offset by a gentler, more domesticated side. In Other Faces, in addition to the bellicose bully, a mellow Soho contemplates his garden, cradles a sphinx-like baby/ invalid and ministers lovingly to his dying wife. Of all of the ‘Soho Chronicles’, Other Faces is most overtly interlaced with autobiographical references. Now the family album, home movies and private snapshots provide the source material for intimate and tactile encounters: the child is cradled by the nanny, the family cavort in the pool, the young mother protects her son and the question of where the artist positions himself in the face of all of this becomes clearly part of the plot. Interweaving the family drama is the wider world of street photography and trade, of angry crowds and toyi-toying19 grave diggers, of indigenous birds and a disintegrating drive-in movie screen that both projects the family history and provides a platform for liberated form. Where does the subject secret himself in the narrative overload and pictorial excess of his work? For Kentridge – with his interest in performance and theatre – the use of his own body as a character, double or dummy has become increasingly prevalent and visible in his work. In his characteristic uniform of black trousers, white shirt and pince-nez, the artist performs himself in a series of self-mocking moves, pirouetting and strutting with varying props and partners (himself included) as if to insert himself visibly into the frame. Where Soho and Felix function as secretive

D E TA I L S above: Vivienne Koorland, Winter Battle: Champagne, 1994 below: William Kentridge, stills from Other Faces, 2011

D E TA I L S left: William Kentridge, stills from Other Faces, 2011 right: William Kentridge, drawing for Other Faces, 2011

surrogates, split subjects who together articulate something of the alienation and collusion that being a man and white and South African entails, the self-mocking absurdity of the Kentridge character who dances and cavorts over the pages of books provides only an external carapace under which the subject remains occluded or veiled. There is no exposure of an inner life or interiority here. But the sense of a hidden self, sealed beneath the stains and pages of history is made literal in the filming of one of the Carnets d’Egypte (2010), which is shot over the pages of an old ‘East Rand Proprietary Mines’ ledger from 1906, and screened in reverse, so that the process of making and unmaking are fused. Here we see the white sleeved arms and bare hands of the artist appearing gradually to remove paint and paper from a page, un-painting his own charcoal picture with his brush in order eventually to reveal an image of his bespectacled self, cradling an oversized infant in his arms. This final image (unearthed beneath layers of stuff) closely resembles the picture of Soho in Other Faces looking tenderly down at his arm-held bundle: part animal/part human, part adult/part child, Soho’s wife turned ward, now protected in his paternal embrace. The fusion of Kentridge and Soho is overt here. The artist sees himself in the guise of his fabricated character, who also serves as father and grandfather in a complex patrilineal tale. But what of the subject made visible/material in Koorland’s work? For her it is no longer the appearance or depiction of a self but rather the assertion of a proper name – an abstract, coded inscription – that appears to do the work of self-mapping. We have seen, for example, how the artist replaced Le Vaillant and his collaborators with her own signature in PAYS INCONNU, inscribing herself onto the borrowed source which she remakes and reworks as her own. In a painting like How I Live, comprising two transcribed and enlarged children’s drawings, she replaces the name of one child–author ‘Hyla, Julian’ with her own, ‘Koorland, Vivienne Asya’, inserting her place and date of birth over the right hand side of the canvas on which a related, but separate sketch (made by a different child) is transcribed.20 There is a conflation of authorship here, mirroring the identification that Koorland stages between herself and the displaced children. But by altering scale and synthesising her sources, Koorland imprints herself in more than name alone: in her touch and monumental transcription, with laborious, handmade stitching and stuck-together surface, she embeds her physical presence in the painting, creating an immersive and all-enveloping expanse. In her early work Koorland had bared her actual body and life in a series of autobiographical etchings revealing intimate details of her studio, companions and context. More recently she has described her painted animal bust Bokkie (2007) as a self-portrait, a weeping witness over a charred and embattled land.21 But for some time Koorland has cathected a self to landscape or history through borrowed forms or toponyms that encode a personal connection to place. In a word painting such as SA FARM MAP: Settlements (2008), the resonant names of ‘farms’ and ‘settlements’ are plotted over a vast expanse like a colossal concrete poem or a spatialised incantation that invites reciting aloud. In those familiar names lies Koorland’s connection to the country of her birth, learned through her Afrikaans-speaking grandmother’s voice, and now arrayed like distant signposts on the land.22 Some of these names appear again in Koppies (2012), accompanied by a repeated mound, a personalised sign for Lion’s Head, the mountain that presides majestically over Table Bay in Cape Town and signifies unashamedly as ‘home’. In the companion piece to SA FARM MAP: Settlements, SA FARM MAP: Deportations (2012), the names have a different resonance as these record the dispossessed smallholdings of black farmers forced off their land in the late nineteenth century.

The words ‘Compensation’ and ‘Deportations’ are included on the scrubbed-in surface, like those of the Griqua and Dutch farmsteads some of whose names seem to be partly erased or submerged in the ground. Unlike PAYS INCONNU, there are no wondrous creatures or eighteenth century ornamental insets to provide relief from the devastation implied. Instead the ghosts of half obscured place-names emerge from the violated earth. Paintings to be read or recited, the irony of their meanings is clear: ‘Hopestad’ (city of hope), ‘Grootgeluk’ (great fortune), ‘Felicitas’ (happiness) ‘Mooiplaas’ (beautiful farm), in these names lie earlier dreams of plenty, now left as hollow shells of the past. For Koorland, they come multiply freighted with loss, not only of a ‘home’ that she longs for but of a world and a ‘self ’ that never was. Perhaps the paucity of means of the farm paintings points to the ultimate failure that haunts earlier dreams of plenitude. Now nothing remains but ruination and hurt, heaped both on the land and its inhabitants. In contrast, Koorland’s reworking of The King’s Map in PAYS INCONNU brings back some of the hope and wonder that accompanied Enlightenment curiosity. There she omitted the taxonomic filtering and toponymic self-plotting of the explorer Le Vaillant, instead usurping his sense of himself as inhabiting an African fête galante, the model for her painted paradise (à la Tiepelo) more fabulous than life on this earth. This is no escapist fantasy or deluded pre-colonial myth. Instead it represents an act of faith in what the imagination and the hand can project. For all its preoccupation with ‘pain’ then, Koorland’s project is filled with purpose. So too is that of Kentridge. More whimsical or irreverent perhaps than that of his long-time friend, more eclectic and carefree in its appropriation and experimentation with the past, it nevertheless displays the same faith in a craft and an ethics of making. Both are committed, as Koorland says to the ‘work’ of the ‘work of art’. That is what they do. That is how they live: assembling and mapping and marking, piecing together out of the remnants and fragments of history something that is both invented and found. E N DNOTE S 1. 2.

3. 4.

Extracts from the conversation recorded in Johannesburg in July 2015 between Tamar Garb, William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland. See pp.118–145 in this volume. I will not rehearse the manner of their meeting or the circumstances of their early encounter. Nor the way their lives have diverged or their own ongoing sense of what they share, and how their approach to life and work converges and differs. These are poignantly covered in the conversation recorded in Kentridge’s studio in July 2015, and edited for this volume. See pp.118–145. More information on The King’s Map can be found at www. gallica.bnf.fr. The map is now in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. The world expert on the map, Ian Glenn, has written extensively about it. See François Le Vaillant’s Travels into the interior of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, Volume 1, translated and edited by Ian Glenn, with the assistance of Catherine Lauga Du Plessis and Ian Farlam (Van Riebeeck Society, Cape Town, 2007); ‘Francois Levaillant and the Mapping of Southern Africa’, Alternation, 14, 2 (2007), pp.25–39; ‘Eighteenth-century natural history, travel writing and South African literary historiography’, in David Attwell and Derek Attridge (eds), The Cambridge History of South African Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012, pp.158–84. In 2012–2013 Glenn curated the exhibition The King’s Map, François Le Vaillant in Southern Africa 1781–1784 at the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town. No catalogue was published, but it was here that Koorland first encountered the map alongside the accompanying works on paper that were displayed, as

D E TA I L S above: Vivienne Koorland, SA FARM MAP: Settlements, 2008; SA FARM MAP: Deportations, 2008 below: William Kentridge, drawings from 2nd Hand Reading, 2013

5. 6.

7. 8.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

well as a large, taxidermied giraffe that was exhibited in the same museum to recall the export of the first giraffe specimen and skin from Africa to France by Le Vaillant. In fact the inked line is not an accurate representation of the path taken and, like all maps, The King’s Map is as much a representational artifice as it is a verifiable portrayal. The map’s place in post-colonial scholarship is controversial. Seen by scholars like Michèle Duchet and Mary Louise Pratt as a manifestation of imperialist and colonialist sympathies, the map is rescued by Ian Glenn who argues for François Le Vaillant’s anti-colonial sentiments and his contribution to natural science as well as its innovative cartographic expression of the bio-geography of the country. See Glenn (2007) op.cit., p.29. I am grateful to Glenn for a lengthy discussion of the map and for his enthusiastic championing of its complexity and sheer physical impact. (Conversation with the author on 3 April, 2016.) It might be interesting to think of ‘Nick’ as a surrogate for the artist. She has used animals as selfportraits before. See especially Bokkie (2007), as discussed in the conversation with Kentridge on p.130. The original cartouche included the words: ‘constructed for the King, on the observations of M. Le Vaillant, by M. de Laborde, the former first valet of the King’s chamber, governor of the Louvre, one of the farmers-general of his Majesty – and the King’s former banker.’ Translated from the French. See Glenn (2007) op. cit., p.28. See Philip Tinari, ‘Notes on Notes Towards A Model Opera, in Alfreda Murck, Andrew Soloman, Philip Tinari and William Kentridge, Notes Towards A Model Opera Buchanglung Walther König, Cologne, 2016, p.156. For a rich analysis of the iconography of these ten films, see Matthew Kentridge, The Soho Chronicles: 10 Films by William Kentridge, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2015. Ed Krčma writes tellingly of THE DIVIDE in his essay in this volume while Briony Fer focusses on DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI (THOUGHTS ARE FREE). Koorland has been painting whole poems, letters, lists and texts onto paintings for some time. For a discussion of a range of these, see Tamar Garb, ‘Reisemalheurs’ in Tamar Garb (ed.), Vivienne Koorland: Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes), Freud Museum, London, 2007, pp.3–22 and Nanette Salomon, Vivienne Koorland: Contents, Songbooks and Other Paintings, Gallery of the College of Staten Island, New York, 2004. Serge Klarsfeld, The Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1983. Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Jan Tomasz Gross (eds), War Through Children’s Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939–1941, Hoover Press, Stanford University, 1981. For an extensive discussion of Koorland’s appropriation of children’s language, see Griselda Pollock’s essay in this volume, pp.76–185. This information is supplied in the Klarsfeld book from which Koorland took her image. See Klarsfeld (1983) op.cit., p.51. See Bill Keller, ‘Echo of ’41 in Minsk: Was the Heroine a Jew?’, New York Times, 15 September, 1987. Downloaded from http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/15/world/echo-of-41-in-minsk-was-the-heroinea-jew.html. Koorland speaks of how she came across this article while working on her painting. Having run out of the pages of the French volume on Gothic churches, she completed her pasted ground by sticking in the page from the New York Times and painting a copy of the image of Marsha Bruskina below. (Conversation with the artist, April 2016.) VIVE MAMAN was shown alongside a series of paintings of the same theme in Koorland’s solo exhibition Izieu Paintings in 1997 at the Schmidt Center Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. See Kentridge (2015), op.cit., for this. Toyi-toyi is a form of rebellious dancing used in political protest in South Africa. The drawings of Julian H and Zbigniew P are combined in Koorland’s ‘double page spread’. In the original source they sit, one on top of another on the page, each with their makers’ names at the top right hand corner of their drawings. See Grudzinska-Gross and Gross (1981), op.cit., np.

21. See conversation with Tamar Garb and William Kentridge, July 2015, pp.118–145. For a detailed discussion of this work, see Tamar Garb, ‘A Land of Signs’ in Tamar Garb (ed.), Home Lands/Land Marks: Contemporary Art from South Africa, (exh. cat.) Haunch of Venison, London, 2009. 22. See conversation with Tamar Garb and William Kentridge, July 2015, for Koorland’s account of her relationship to her grandmother, p.134.

pre v ious

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D H OW I L I V E 2008 oil and lead on stitched burlap over linen, 366 x 488 cm

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; W I L L IA M K E N T R I D G E stills from OT H E R FAC E S 2011 35 mm film transferred to video, 9:45 mins

V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D DI E G E D A N K E N S I N D F R E I ( T H OU G H T S A R E F R E E ) 2015 oil and pigment on stitched canvas and linen, 196 x 170 cm

V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D T H E DI V I DE 2013 oil and pigment on linen with copper tacks, 196 x 170 cm

W I L L IA M K E N T R I D G E stills from TA N G O F OR PAG E T U R N I N G 2012 HD video, 2:53 mins

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V I V I E N N E KO O R L A N D VIVE MAMAN 1987 oil, book pages, newsprint, varnish, glue and charcoal on linen, 274 x 216 cm

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W I L L IA M K E N T R I D G E stills from F E L I X I N E X I L E 1994 35 mm animated film transferred to video, 8:43 mins

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WILLIAM KENTRIDGE AND VIVIENNE KOORLAND — IN CONVERSATION WITH TAMAR GARB, JULY 2015

TAMAR GARB (TG) Would you both cast your minds back to where and when you first met. What are your memories of that encounter? WILLIAM KENTRIDGE (WK) My first memory of your existence, Vivienne, was through a drawing. This happened some time before I actually met you. I noticed that Timothy, my friend and your boyfriend then, had a beautiful pencil drawing of a violinist in his student residence at Wits – where we were both studying politics. He told me that it was by you. I was very struck by that drawing. Do you remember it? VIVIENNE KOORLAND (VK) I do. I used to go to the performances of the Cape Town City Orchestra and draw the musicians from my seat. It was one of those.

My first memory of you, William, also preceded our meeting. Tim came back from Wits for the holidays to Cape Town and he unrolled a small woodcut by you – about 12–15 inches across. It was taken from an old photograph of an historical group portrait. Do you remember that woodcut? WK I do, it was of the British South Africa Company going into what is now Zimbabwe, what was Rhodesia. I used it as a frontispiece for a university politics essay. VK Probably yours was the only politics essay that had an author-illustrated frontispiece. WK I think so, I didn’t have much to say so I needed all the help I could get! I think I did come across a print of it quite recently.

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above: William Kentridge, British South Africa Company Expedition to Matabeleland, 1976, linocut on paper, 38 x 49.5 cm; below: Vivienne Koorland, Aspecto/ Aspectus, 1978, etching/aquatint, 41 x 51 cm

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TG When did you actually meet one another? WK We met when Vivienne came to spend some days in Johannesburg. It would have been 1975. VK It was not easily forgettable. In that terrible high rise tower … WK Yes, that’s where we met, and your week in that apartment was not a great pleasure. VK That’s an understatement. It was a nightmare. The environment was the sort we, Tim and I, could not tolerate then. I’m sure we met in that awful apartment. Your hair was black then! WK Yes, I’m afraid so.

the portrait, which you had struggled over during the university vacation, of John Hastings. And your painting of the roof, the shingles of the Michaelis Art school. TG Vivienne, you were also doing agitprop prints then, with people in them. And you, William, were integrating reworked archival images into politics essays. How did you both view figuration at the time and specifically portraiture? What were your reference points for thinking about art and politics? WK Portraiture wasn’t what I did. There were images with heads in them, but not in the kind of way that portraiture demands … I always had a sense of Vivienne taking the lead on the question of looking at another person in the portrait. I think she was making a portrait of you at the same time.

VK And you were slim and slight … WK Also different. VK And you were very, very shy. WK Oh really? I don’t remember the shy part. But I am sure I didn’t want to talk about myself. VK No. I came in and I remember you sitting there. It was a student apartment so there wasn’t much furniture. You were sitting against the wall on the floor. You and Timothy were doing your politics and history. But I was totally absorbed with my art: my painting and my prints and my etchings. WK Yes, I remember. I next saw your work when I came down to Cape Town and visited the Michaelis end of year show. I particularly remember some big etchings of yours, with you and your grandfather in them. And also

TG Yes, it’s a portrait which shows me wearing Vivienne’s mother Talma’s (Thelma) slippers and a big winter coat. And anxiously clasping my hands. The painting now hangs in my house. WK At that stage, in the mid-1970s, we were struggling to think through what images needed to be made; it was a very Leninist sort of view. What is to be done? What needs to be made? That’s one of the reasons why I stopped thinking of myself as someone making images for several years, because I couldn’t answer that question. I always seemed to be thinking on behalf of someone else, and I realised that in fact I couldn’t begin to know what other people were thinking. VK So when had you started making images, William?

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clockwise from above: Vivienne Koorland, Portrait of Tamar, 1977, oil on canvas, 152 x 122 cm; Painting John (Hastings), 1977, etching/aquatint, 30 x 23 cm; Courtyard, 1975, oil on canvas, 59 x 48 cm; Portrait of Tamar (detail), 1977

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clockwise from above left: Vivienne Koorland, Abasebenzi, December 1974 No. 8, newspaper; Abasebenzi, April 1975 No. 3b, newspaper; Abasebenzi, January 1975 No. 1, newspaper; Abasebenzi, May 1974 No. 4, newspaper; Abasebenzi, September 1975 No. 6, newspaper; Abasebenzi, February 1975 No. 2 (detail), newspaper; Umquashi, 1974, drypoint etching

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WK I started making images as all children do, as a child. I just forgot to stop. And then while I was studying politics, I started going to the Johannesburg Art Foundation in the evenings. Moving between the university and academic courses and the art studio.

VK I was later exposed to the portraits of Alberto Giacometti which was intense, magnificent and excruciating for me. I thought, that was what I was trying to do, and that he had done it! But, again, it was also the emotional cost of the process that I went through to make the portraits and the amount of time and contact that the process demanded from someone else. I needed huge commitment from the sitter, which was hard to ask for, and then of course the ending of it was unbearable.

TG Vivienne, were you aware of the kind of images that William was generating at that early point? VK No. But I was also thinking, as William was saying, about the confrontation between art and the Leninist idea of purpose, of making images that serve a social purpose or the State. We were under so much pressure in South Africa, we struggled to know what we were trying to do, but in any case, we really came up against that wall. We were so hard on ourselves – very unforgiving of ourselves and others – in the insanity that was Apartheid. I was a Marxist and belonged to a Marxist reading group, and I was constantly thinking about these relationships and the place of the illegal trade union movement. Then, on the other hand, also of the more hermetic nature of the private diary-like stream-of-consciousness work that I was producing freely, the etchings and the painful process of portraiture, that long, extended encounter/confrontation with somebody else. That was difficult for me. It became fraught, and in the end I stopped making portraits for that reason, the degree of engagement at that pitch couldn’t be sustained in quotidian life.

WK Which ending? You mean when you finished the painting?

WK For me it seemed inconceivable that you would have stopped with the portraits when you were so expert at them. They were such beautiful portraits. I thought if you could do portraits so well, why would you stop?

WK It is so interesting just hearing you talk, Vivienne. I am struck by the way in which ‘pain’ is such a prominent word and so much part of it, of the activity of looking, or relinquishing looking or giving up the figure. I chose a very,

VK Yes. The finishing of it was unbearable. Because the intimacy of the encounter had to be broken. And even the habit of the encounter. The encounter either way was over. TG William, you say you never did portraits, but you have always drawn figures and continue to do so. Vivienne, you relinquished the figure or the human body in some way in the 1980s? VK Yes. That was a painful process. I never returned to it in the same way again … although I continued to paint portraits in Berlin and then after in Paris, but that was an even unhappier experience: it didn’t help that the school in Berlin paid an old man to sit naked just for me. It was all an existential nightmare. The question ‘what did you do during the war?’ burning brightly in my addled brain … so painful, so disturbing.

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above: Vivienne Koorland, World War I, 1994, oil on paper and gauze over stripped book spines, 24 x 22 x 16 cm; below: William Kentridge, Diva About Face, 2008, Indian ink on found encyclopaedia pages, 25.5 x 39 cm

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very different process. I suppose the deep consideration of those questions was absent; the encounter with actual people was not really the issue for me. Rather the figures in the animated films I was making had a reference to already mediated narratives of looking at figures in space, in history, in representation and in landscapes. I think that we both had a parallel interest in images and what they mean, but also in the echoes they have with people who have made images before – as you were saying, regarding Giacometti and the thought ‘my God he’s done it already’. So there’s that double strand that one goes through of looking at other paintings and drawings and doing one’s own work. I don’t think I ever consciously thought, ‘what is my attitude towards the figure’? Or questioned my attitude towards portraiture as such: there are faces or figures, and I discover at the end or in the process of working, what they mean. Almost all the things which have been of interest to me or others in my work have come out of me not knowing what I am doing, or discovering them or having them pointed out. So, Vivienne, I’m interested in the way you talk about the pain you felt when you relinquished painting the figure, when you said that in terms of all the painting happening around you, you felt so out of kilter. There were all those people like Salomé and other painters …?

their interest and who showed their contempt for that history and skill. For me, from the outside, I thought, my God the strength to hang on to that in that context was so moving and impressive. Perhaps South Africa being so much at the periphery of the art world made all of those choices somewhat easier. There wasn’t that sense of a huge juggernaut of what was expected trundling along beside you.

VK Yes, K.H. Hödicke et al … the Neue Wilden, the first neo-expressionists.

VK Because I think that in philosophical terms whatever he wanted to say about art could never have translated into permitting a narrative in painting. Like Rothko, who needed to flee the unbearableness of Content.

WK … who had such a different attitude towards painting to yours, and I’m thinking about what it took to hang onto what you needed to, in terms of a devotion to what it is actually to put paint on canvas – artists like Jörg Immendorff, for whom that was the least of

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VK Yes, that’s an interesting point. But I was hugely drawn to German painting as I am still today. For me a painting is often still a German object, even now. When I was a student in Berlin, Hödicke was teaching at the School and I most strongly regret I did not join his class. But I was so young and was by then in a paroxysm of homesickness so severe that I lost my natural boldness. It had to do with so many things: with adopting another language, going to colloquia in German and leaving with splitting headaches because I wanted to say things, to participate, and I felt I couldn’t because I was afraid to make mistakes in German. I can’t overestimate here the influence of Adorno on my view of the world. That might have been a terrible influence, indeed I think it was, but it was enormous, so that, really, I should have become an abstract painter. WK Why should Adorno have made you an abstract painter?

WK Adorno is also important for me, but I took a completely different kind of message from him. I was reading him, as we all were.

Few of us were able to read all the works, and Minima Moralia was the one accessible Adorno book for me. It was fundamental and the thing I took from it was ‘fragmentation’. The world as damaged and fragmented, and the realisation that one can work with fragments to see what they add up to. One can either take parts or already existing fragments or one can shatter what is there, what seems coherent, and rearrange them as Adorno does in that book, and see what they add up to. To take quite mundane or prosaic objects or ideas as he did, and then tease them out or see what other echoes they have. In a way, that book gave me a licence to feel I could make a film that doesn’t have a narrative structure, that doesn’t have a script or a storyboard, that can start with different images and see what they become. I was aware that this may well have been a misreading of Adorno, but I was interested in the productivity of that– of a misunderstanding, a productive misunderstanding. VK Of course, I agree with your point about fragmentation, but we do see the narrative issue differently. What I think I took from that book was the subtitle, Reflections From Damaged Life. And the hopelessness, his mournful, devoted dedication to Horkheimer and the degree of alienation, as well as his classical idea of the essentially hermetic quality of art. Where he writes in Minima Moralia: ‘To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewellery, and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity to act as subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there

is life no longer … ’! When Adorno uses a word like ‘reflection’, it’s already complex: chimeric? Or profound? I also deeply internalised the ancient idea of initiation. Tim’s father returned from Japan in the 1970s bringing us these amazingly wrapped-up things, where the whole point of the surprise was their wrappedupness, and where the whole thing was in the wrapping of them, and I remember raving about how the Japanese would keep their most precious objects hidden from view, from the defiling gaze of too many eyes … I loved that. That was completely natural to me: the idea of exposure was too painful. WK That’s so interesting, because there is part of you that has resisted exposure all along. You’d be happy if your works stayed locked up, hidden from view … every experience of showing them to people has been a kind of torture for you. VK Yes. Sometimes, not always. But I’m not an exhibitionist. WK As opposed to me who still has the child’s attitude of pulling the wrapping off and seeing what the thing is, and saying ‘oh my God, the preciousness of Japanese wrapping’. So, it’s a kind of different response to an identical source. Minima Moralia is still a fundamental book in my head. And the thinking that Adorno prompted with his assertation that there was no more lyric poetry after Auschwitz is ongoing. So we should all go home, or we should plant soya beans or do good works, but not think we could involve ourselves in the imaginative world. Or we could say: no, he’s absolutely wrong, even though it’s terrible that there is lyric poetry, there is lyric poetry. I know there’s lots of dispute as to quite what Adorno meant by his comment, and my own

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Vivienne Koorland, By Dint of Moral Zeal the Well-Meaning Become Destroyers, 1975, woodcut, 25 x 20 cm

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above: Vivienne Koorland, No 17 Heldengrab (Grave of Heroes), 1994, book spine fragment, oil on paper, gauze, leather and card, 8 x 19 cm; left: William Kentridge, drawings for Second-hand Reading (film) and 2nd Hand Reading (book), 2013, Indian ink, digital print on Shorter Oxford Dictionary pages, 27 x 19.5 cm

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interpretation is probably not correct. For me it suggests our inability to hold on to a historical hurt as we should. To actually make sense of history we should be paralysed but the fact that we aren’t shows us the gap in our receptivity or what we can hang on to, and that loss of memory then serves, itself, as a kind of response to Adorno.

the camp was split: there was the Ophüls camp and the Lanzmann camp. I was with Ophüls then. But more than thirty years later, of course, I see and critically understand them in an entirely different way. I see now what they have both given to us. I could not appreciate Lanzmann’s achievement at first. Ophüls, on the other hand, brilliant and combative, he was my man: The Sorrow and the Pity, that militant confrontation with his subject with none of the preciousness that Lanzmann displayed, which I now realise was a fantastic but devious type of control. Incidentally, I feel a very personal gratitude to Lanzmann now for the archive he has given to us, which would not exist were it not for his endeavour.

VK Well, I agree that trauma doesn’t always paralyse but could even galvanise. But I don’t think that not producing art was what he meant. One of the few who filled in the space for me with something substantive to say on this question, this lacuna, is Giorgio Agamben. Although he doesn’t actually speak of ‘victim’, his analysis of ‘witness’ and the overused term ‘bearing witness’ is illuminating. And the idea of the impossibility of recording certain things only because none of us survives our own death to come back and tell of it.

WK It’s interesting because for you it was a matter of making a choice between Lanzmann and Ophüls at the time, while I was completely eclectic. I mean I thought The Sorrow and the Pity was an extraordinary film and had extraordinary things in it, and there were things I got from Shoah that I didn’t get from anywhere else, but I didn’t think I had to choose. There was a sense of taking different elements that spoke to me or kindled different memories or gave insight into a different way of working from each. I’ve always felt much less rigorous than you Vivienne, and for a long time that really worried me. I thought to be a real artist I should be much more focused, much more decisive. I wanted to be more selfinterrogating …

WK The interesting thing that ties both into Agamben and Adorno, the fundamental thing that I think was formative for both of us is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), in terms of what it is to describe not an actual event but the things around it. For me the Lanzmann film was also an astonishing revelation about the nature of geography or landscape or terrain. VK Yes. But you know, in 1976, my father Victor gave me the book of the script of Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity. So I knew it before I was able to see the film, and it was hugely impressive, very formative for me: Ophüls’ ideas and his view of history, and his technique, his way of extracting the information he pursued. Later, in 1985, when I first saw Shoah in French in Paris, for me,

VK In fact, the opposite is true. Trauma can’t kill creativity but self-criticism can … bête comme un peintre. WK I don’t know, whichever way it was, we

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have both done our work in different ways often coming from the same source or out of the same questions. TG What interests me is the way in which you both deal with your own selves in your work. William, your work has changed a lot from working with avatars and surrogates to actually working with your own body and image. And, Vivienne, it seems to me that you have always been hiding. You once told me that your painting of the springbok Bokkie (2007) was a self-portrait in disguise. VK No, Bokkie is a self-portrait . My selfportrait. It’s not a disguise. And I’m not hiding. Slow to reveal – that’s my religion. But Bokkie is direct and visceral. Bokkie is me. I am Bokkie. Agamben helped me to understand that afterwards, after painting Bokkie: not victim, but witness. WK Vivienne, seeing your early etchings of your grandfather and you … Those were a kind of revelation, making me realise ‘one can put oneself into a picture’, all those family stories could be taken into the work. Seeing those pictures made me think: ‘oh, that’s a way of thinking about what is allowed into a picture’. This was so different from the Leninist view where it had to be the working class or a revolutionary thought or some political struggle that allowed you to put yourself in a work, and then of course in the animated films one of the figures started resembling me so of course it became a kind of self-portrait in the third person. But I’m interested in Bokkie as a self-portrait. Once you say it, it’s clear to me. VK Yes, and I think that when an artist strongly

anthropomorphises an animal or an object, it stands in for the self. This is how I see and feel it to be. And there is also the poetic and phenomenological idea of what happens when our eyes meet. Sometimes when you look at a painting, you just know that it is a selfportrait because you pick up on your eyes meeting. Its not physical, but metaphysical: that mutual gaze. TG It’s a form of recognition? VK Yes, exactly. There is a very special and specific recognition which actually may not even involve the representation of eyes. It has to do with the motivation of bringing a particular piece into being in the first place. Yes, Bokkie is in every way a self-portrait. TG I had forgotten the etchings that William’s talking about, and I remember your naked self-portraits in which you were comfortable drawing yourself in a quite recognisable way. VK Yes, right through art school I did hundreds of recognisable self-portraits. The etchings functioned as sketchbooks, they were liquid expression, just pouring out. I liked that medium better than actually sketching. For me it was more immediate than pen to paper. TG But about the mid 1980s you stopped doing those kinds of portraits? VK I have only one recent one that I made three years ago, a three-minute portrait, a self-portrait in oil on canvas. WK One thing I do remember was your astonishing ability to get a likeness, which is something I have always struggled with.

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clockwise from above left: William Kentridge, drawings for the film Second-hand Reading, 2013, Indian ink, digital print on Shorter Oxford Dictionary pages, 27 x 19.5 cm; Vivienne Koorland, Self Portrait, 1976, etching/ aquatint, 30 x 23 cm; Vivienne Koorland, Bokkie, 2007, oil on burlap over linen, 130 x 114 cm

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Vivienne Koorland, Untitled (self portrait), 1976, oil on board, 122 x 91 cm; William Kentridge, Muizenberg 1933, 1976, linocut on paper, 33 x 35 cm; Bird Catching, 2006, aquatint and drypoint, 49 x 49 cm each;

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VK It’s true. I was gifted at caricature, also outside of the Fine Art fortress. But that would have been another life, another pursuit. I went the hermetic way.

mind. I was going to go far away, whether I hated it or whether I didn’t. And I did hate it. And I was going to stay there, whether I was happy or not. And I was not happy, but going back was never going to be an option either. I knew that I would never, ever, wrap myself in the comfort of familiarity again. It was hard.

TG But you yourself, William, have learned to make a likeness of yourself. WK Yes because that’s … . Whether I like it or not, it comes out that way. I play with my self image: it’s like having a commedia dell’arte character, he’s there to perform other things, it’s not about psychic confrontation. There’s no inner life and if there is inner life it is revealed by the gross motor movements of the figure on the screen, it’s not about that intense looking at the eyes or the eyes looking out. TG Vivienne, you mentioned homesickness, and I wanted to talk about the relationship both of you have to place. You made such different choices: one to leave, one to stay, but both to live between, ‘home’ and ‘away’. Let’s go back to thinking about how those decisions were made and how you now understand your relationship to place. VK I can’t tell you the story as I would have told it to you when I was twenty-one. But long afterwards, decades later, I felt cheated in that it was never an option for me to stay. It was only much later that I realised I was acting out my mother Talma’s terrible story: orphaned in her place of birth in Poland, then hidden, and afterwards shunted from pillar to post until she landed in an orphanage in South Africa. Sixty years later she said no one ever asked, ‘would you like to stay here, do you want to go there?’ I didn’t know those things, that story, in so many words, back when I made huge choices, but I eventually recognised that I acted out every aspect of that whole refugee cycle and frame of

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WK I think it certainly does have to do with one’s parents’ and one’s own trajectory. I remember you referring when I first met you, to the category of the ‘wandering Jew’. Now it was not that I had never heard that phrase before, but it didn’t feature as a category in my head, because we had come from a family that had been stable for three generations in South Africa. We were the un-wandering! You were the wandering Jew and I the immovable Jew. I’ve never thought of it in that way, but it also happens to be my family trajectory, only it happened three generations before that they had travelled from Lithuania to South Africa, whereas for you it was your mother’s generation. So, insofar as I was living out my parents’ life, I was staying put; insofar as you were living out yours, you were moving. The ‘wandering Jew’ was your image of yourself. Daniel Deronda, the Anglicised Jew making it in the world, I think was my image of my parents, or my father, at least – knowing you were Jewish, but connected to this very Anglicised world. Lithuania always seemed a million miles away, whereas Poland was always close to you, I think? VK In a way, but at the same time … it might as well have been Pluto. It was decades later that I woke up to the fact that I was in my mother’s womb inside of seven years of the inferno that had ejected her from Poland, and that eventually catapulted her to South Africa in 1948. But at the same time, I always

knew it, always understood it, remembering it even before I could speak. So I know that we are born with memory. It’s not a narrative memory, it’s the lived memory of crude experience. Even so, five years ago, when some actual facts emerged from my mother’s story, finally, it really blew my mind. TG Nevertheless, both of you, culturally and intellectually, live and have lived between worlds. What was it to be both rooted in one place and looking elsewhere all the time, and how has that impacted your work? WK It’s true that all the stuff that we were reading at university was very much European. That was what formed our language. It made us aware that we were scrambling at the edges of a tradition, rather than being deeply inside it. Vivienne, you got far more insight being able to speak German and French, and being able to read in those languages, whereas for me it was always a life in translation. But I have had a sense later of the gains – obviously there are costs –from being at the edge of, rather than at the centre, of a tradition. VK Yes, we were definitely straddling several worlds. My paternal grandmother Cecilia was born on a strawberry farm in Stellenbosch in 1906. Her first language was Afrikaans, and her sister was a botanist who grew indigenous seeds from bulbs to be sent all over the world. She gave me a lifetime of terrain to traverse. When I was a little girl, my grandmother took me the length and breadth of South Africa in her pre-war Chevy on dirt roads, and so I really developed that overwhelming relationship to the land. To the point where, when I later went elsewhere – and this was a sort of skewed symptom of being crippled by homesickness

– the grass was not real grass, it was somehow artificial, a mountain was not a mountain, it was not as real as in South Africa, the beloved homeland. I later had to go to Tibet to feel that there were real mountains elsewhere. WK So you went away believing the real mountains were in South Africa, I stayed here thinking the real grass and the real mountains were everywhere else. It took me a long time – until the mid or late 1980s – to start looking or enjoying the fact of drawing the landscape where I actually was. VK Well, we had contempt for our South African education, and we were well aware of the colonial nature of it. But we also felt that it equipped us to approach things from ‘elsewhere’, or to read things from ‘elsewhere’, and to understand what was being produced away from the ostensible centres of the world. And somehow because of that mad education, we acquired special tools to understand paradoxes and differences and specific places far from the focus of our reading. WK Yes, there’s no doubt that the extraordinary political situation of South Africa gave us an early insight into instability, contradiction and paradox as a norm rather than an aberration at the edge of the world. The fact that we were reading all the stuff we read, meant of necessity that we read from outside the context described. If you were reading a French book you had to imagine a possible Paris, if you were reading a Russian book you had to intuit Moscow, rather than being someone who had grown up in the city – it gave us a curious confidence, not an accurate understanding of other contexts necessarily, but the possibility of an empathetic understanding of worlds that were not our own.

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above: Vivienne Koorland, CELIE, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m So Lonesome I Could Cry (details), 2016, oil and twine on stitched linen and burlap, 150 x 242 cm; below: William Kentridge, drawing for Other Faces, 2011, 35 mm film transferred to video, 9:45 mins

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left and above: William Kentridge, stills from Other Faces, 2011, 35 mm film transferred to video, 9:45 mins; below left: Vivienne Koorland, SA FARM MAP: Deportations, 2008, oil and lead on stitched burlap over linen, 259 x 211 cm; below right: Vivienne Koorland, White Alphabet Drawing, 1998â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2011, oil, crayon, gum tape on paper over book boards, 47 x 31 cm

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TG I know that one often characterises the fragmentation of our lives as a cross to bear, but it’s also a huge advantage to live between cultures and spaces.

phrases and slogans – remaking slogans and signs.

VK Yes, that might be true, but in terms of the heart, a life is a lived life and through it all is the human being with the feeling and the soul that has to endure the loss. WK Vivienne, I didn’t know the story of your grandmother’s sister and the seeds.

VK As a teenager, I developed a real fascination with actual type and typography and script and letters. The act of writing is integral to my practice because even prior to that, from the age of six or seven, just about every single year of my schooling, I received the prize for handwriting. WK That is so far from me, I was the worst. I was the untidy boy. I appropriate a story from my father, who at age eight, had his homework book held up in front of the class (this is family folklore), with the teacher saying: ‘Look class, Kentridge has had his homework done by his army of trained ants!’

TG That explains to some extent where all the Afrikaans farm names come from? WK But for me, I also see the connection [in your work] between those farm names and the names of towns destroyed in the First World War. And the children’s handwriting and the children’s drawings from Theresienstadt, those formed to me a kind of a link and a line. They’re a lifetime of a journey, literally place names from different parts of the world put together on the canvas. Lost places perhaps, only words.

TG Vivienne, you, on the other hand had this perfect cursive script. But then you ended up ‘copying’ everybody else’s in your painting. VK Yes, because I was aware from when I first learnt how to write that implicit in the writing was the question of the degree to which the script was expressing me.

TG What about words and language in your work? Can you both describe how you first started to think about how to integrate alphabets and letters into your work?

WK Well, if I had asked myself that, I would have had to shoot myself. I thought, I’m the smart person, there’s this other idiot writing these scrawls on this paper, not me.

WK The first words I used in drawings were surtitles, like the intertitles in silent films. That was where a piece of text from the first animated film came in. It links to narrative, helping to move a story forward. Later on, I started just enjoying both what it was to draw writing or draw printing, so the drawing of a word or the drawing of a phrase as in those titles. And then later on they related to the Russian work, and to Russian

VK I was hard on myself. When I was at nursery school watching the teacher read to us, holding a story book open in her hands, displaying two pages of text and pointing to the words as she read them. At the time I was thinking: this is a conspiracy, those marks, what she is pointing to, do not represent the words that she’s saying or the meaning that they have. She’s performing some kind of a trick.

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TG But that, in the end, is what your whole life’s work as a painter has been about – working out whether the marks you make represent the content that they are supposed to contain. VK Yes, and because that remains ever elusive and in flux, I decided a long time ago that the only thing I could justify doing was citing things: various citations of things that comprise only one of many possibilities of representation or meaning. The biggest lesson I learned in painting was from my tutor, Stanley Pinker, at Michaelis, and this was during the thirty agonising days that I was painting my portrait of John Hastings. I was very proud of this portrait, but the problem was that the situation – the perfect sitting, the canvas, the beautiful lead-primed canvas I built, the setting – painting in such comfort and warm closeness, everything was so perfect that it was all too overwhelming and I struggled over how I could produce only one single painting from all of this perfection, this amazing opportunity. How could I possibly settle on one particular version of this? And every day, therefore, I could do nothing but come up short of my own expectation, and because I came up short (I sound like Thomas Bernhard here) and obviously failed my own expectations, I would take my palette knives and scrape off John’s whole beautifully painted face so in the end there were holes in the canvas, and then on about day twenty-nine, Stanley said, ‘what you have got to understand about painting is you can only make one at a time.’ I put back John’s face on day thirty and understood that just by allowing it to remain there, meant that that was my chosen painting. TG But what is interesting about that, in relation to both your practices, is the notion of

the surface as a palimpsest, and the laborious erasing and re-making and building and scratching that is key to both of you. VK Yes, absolutely, it’s the reason that I build my own things, it’s the reason I’m not drawn to pencil on paper or anything that is light and ephemeral. I need my structures to support the struggle. WK For me the whole process was tied to drawing with charcoal. The thing about charcoal is that it is ephemeral: you can just wipe away a whole drawing with the flap of a cloth. You can alter something as quickly as you can think. It’s a different kind of hard-won alteration that you have with paint; it’s a very different thing to want to scrape away paint and wait for it to dry and then paint on top and redo it. It definitely does allow meaning to build up through the evident reworking of it, through visible traces. And you are aware of the time invested into the canvas or onto the sheet of paper that’s still got all its alterations. It’s so there in your painting, in the fact of the different pieces of canvas evidently sewn and hammered together. TG William, when did you realise that the best way of conveying that was through turning drawing into animated film? How did it move from being a drawing to a film? WK The technique was already there. I was drawing in charcoal and erasing in order to arrive at a single drawing, and the first film was made in order to watch the process of a drawing coming into being. And then I realised that when the drawing was ostensibly finished the process of erasing and redrawing could continue. So the first films would largely be

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above: Vivienne Koorland, Portrait of John Hastings (detail on left), 1976, oil on canvas, 148 x 120 cm; left and below: William Kentridge, drawings for 2nd Hand Reading, 2013, Indian ink, digital print on Shorter Oxford Dictionary pages, 27 x 19.5 cm

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above: Vivienne Koorland, CELIE, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m So Lonesome I Could Cry (detail), 2016, oil and twine on stitched linen and burlap, 150 x 242 cm; below: William Kentridge, stills from Felix in Exile, 1994, 35mm animated film transferred to video, 8:43 mins

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a matter of watching the drawing come into being, and then later on you could drop out the first section. You’d seen a blank paper slowly gathering its marks that made up the drawing. But it wasn’t me saying: ‘I want to make a film, what technique shall I use, oh I think I’ll use charcoal.’ It happened the other way round.

is that putting things together on the surface provides a great kind of comfort, my very favourite. It might be the only genuine comfort in my waking life, other comforts would just be an escape, like watching a film, or tempting fate. WK I can talk about a sense of comfort for me. It was a moment when I understood again that being an artist is the right thing for me. It was when my daughter Alice got sick that I discovered that however terrible I was feeling, after two hours in the studio working, there would be a kind of calm. It had to do with the rhythm of physically moving: of walking, of making, of dealing with materials, of that conversation between yourself and the object that’s being made on the sheet of paper, and it felt … like a physical comfort and I understood then that the studio wasn’t just a place or a luxury; it was a fundamental extension of who I was. The word ‘comfort’ has a very strong echo for me, in what it is to spend one’s days in the studio.

TG And for you, Vivienne, the cutting and stitching and pasting, and the using and reusing of fragments over time surely relates to an analogous process of building? VK Yes. TG There’s a very strong fabricated physicality, an assertive materiality in both your work. That sense of building, with stitching and sticking, pasting and erasing, drawing and re-drawing, the making and remaking, the labour entailed. WK I think that that’s a clear similarity: both of us are actually getting our hands dirty so to speak, we aren’t employing other people to do the drawing or painting.

TG I guess it’s a way of being with and thinking in and through materials. There’s a calm and a comfort in that. And in the process of drawing. I was wondering about line and the way in which both of you use drawing as a way of investigating the world and being in it.

VK I have this mad idea that if something is worth doing it’s worth doing with great difficulty. A work won’t convince me if it isn’t hard won. Having said that, of course intuitiveness and spontaneity are part of the work process all the time. Some of my most beloved paintings like Bokkie, or VIVE MAMAN or THE DIVIDE happened largely on automatic pilot. You can imagine how wonderful it feels when a painting makes itself. Sadly, that can’t happen always, but it’s what you live for. The other thing I wanted to say before when we were talking about all the sturm und drang and the pain of it all,

VK I want to show you both a drawing from 1990. It’s a drawing of words so it’s not usually what you would think of as lines but to me this is as good a drawing as I have ever made. The words are not mine and neither is the translation, the script, or the ‘signature’. They read: ‘We miss you darling Daddy. On 14 May 1941 the Boche snatched you from

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us and deported you to Pithiviers. On 24 June 1942, Hitler’s brutes deported you to Auschwitz and killed you, at the age of 35. We shall never forget you darling Daddy, you are graven in our memories forever. You left two children, when they are grown they will avenge you and hate those dirty Hitlerite villains. 19 May 1946’. Signed Lazare, and me, Vivienne Asya Koorland, 1990. It’s from a tombstone in France. WK There’s a text, which I have got a painting of, which is also a death notice. It is from the newspaper of the Paris Commune of 1871. I have just used it in a project about the Cultural Revolution in China, Notes Towards A Model Opera, and it’s about the absurd, rather than the tragic.The translation is: ‘And we announce the death in Paris of Monsieur Barroilhet, a baritone in the National Opera. Monsieur Barroilhet possessed a very curious collection of paintings ancient and modern, well appreciated by connoisseurs. Monsieur Barroilhet died playing dominoes.’ This is published in the newspaper of the Commune under siege, and they are playing dominoes! TG This is a wonderful encapsulation of the different sensibilities that we’re dealing with here. You are engaged with similar themes, but with a kind of wicked humour, burlesque, parody, satire, irony on your part, William, and on your part, Vivienne, with a sense of the terrible, the tragic weightiness of all of these phenomena of life and death. VK Yes, but I’m critical of histrionic art. And am often revolted by it, although I can love the kitsch elements, if they are dark enough, like Hans Jürgen Syberberg. I’ll enjoy the brilliance of it. I’m drawn to black humour.

My father was obsessed with Ambrose Bierce. If I could make funny art, I would. I just can’t. But like everyone, I love things that are funny. Art, though, is rarely funny. Even when very funny people, comedians, weigh in on the subject of pain, it hurts. WK There was another very nice piece in this newspaper from the Paris Commune, most of which is concerned with what was happening on the fortifications, and news from the front, and cries of ‘Vive la Commune’ as well as calls to arms …. They had this very nice thing from the federation of artists who had to appear at the Théâtre du Châtelet for military training to defend it. But another fait divers had announced the death at the age of fifty-four of someone’s wife. And in announcing this the man wished to say firstly she was in good health and living in London, and she couldn’t possibly be fifty-four, and she was in fact born in 1821, so fifty years old. I was using this as a piece about the kind of non-totalised world that existed then compared to what would happen later. And the mere fact that a newspaper would publish such things. TG You both take on the responsibility of addressing the past, whether in some narrative form which scrambles history and place, or whether it’s through the layering of the tokens and signs of history. WK Yes, I think landscape maps history in a way in Vivienne’s paintings. And the canvas surface itself is like a landscape with the painting serving as a map on top of it. So the actual burlap stands in literally for the ground of the painting and the ground of the world. To some extent there’s a similarity with the drawings that I do on pages or found surfaces.

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above: William Kentridge, Journal Officiel (drawing for Notes Towards a Model Opera, detail on right), 2015, Indian ink on dictionary pages, 364 x 192 cm; below: Vivienne Koorland, Lazare (detail on left), 1990, charcoal on paper over book boards, 24 x 18 cm

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Vivienne Koorland, THE LOCAL MONUMENTS II: Central Africa, 1997, oil, charcoal, glue and book pages on linen, 267 x 228 cm

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They exist on a ground that is not a neutral white sheet of paper or pure white primed canvas. There’s already a history in the layer underneath.

the real thing in a real library, in the absence of anyone using them, started to feel like decoration, beautiful decoration on a film set. Drawing on them felt less like vandalism and more like an act of preservation.

VK Yes, I love that, a ground that is full rather than empty. Book pages and covers have functioned like that for me too. I remember going to Freud’s house in London in 1973 with my father when I was fifteen and being confronted with a sealed-off library – forbidden fruit. At that stage I fantasised about drawing across the covers and spines. I didn’t think of it as a violent defacement. I waited until 1991 during the Gulf War to draw across book spines and I made a drawing installation entitled Last Letters from Stalingrad. Soon after, I made an enormous drawing installation in a gallery in Boston, called World War that had lots of drawings of maps and placenames across the spines of bundles of books and also on book boards: World War One battle terrains from crude German military maps from 1916, just before the war turned against them completely. I don’t like rules. But according to Richard Wagner and the tenets of Great German Art and Romantic art in general, rules must be learned in order that the very greatest among us break them. WK When I was at Oxford in 2013, at Queen’s College, which was filled with shelves of early books, I saw hundreds of students at tables without one single book in front of them, only open laptops. And I noticed that some of the books on the shelves had titles like, The Annals of the Meeting of the Franciscan Society from 1430, and I said to them, ‘C’mon, no one is ever, ever going to open one of these books! Can’t I just take one to draw on?’ I felt such a sense of sadness about the disappearing world of books. In a strange way these books, which were

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TG Perhaps one that acknowledges their very physicality. And registers the labour involved in making things. Even old books were handmade and hard-won as material objects. That’s something that you both admire and emulate in your own work. VK I have one drawing entitled Labour (1988–89), because of the excruciating way I put it together. It consists of two line-long columns that I laboriously tore from the New York Times in the 1980s and those bits of newsprint text travelled, over time, from one canvas to another, and finally settled pasted on a fragment of canvas that I called Labour. I guess we are both wedded to the idea of work and the ‘work’ of art. That is what we do. That is how we live. It’s even the title of one of my paintings here. WK Yes, it’s a commitment to the labour of making and the meanings it generates.

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LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION — WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

F E L I X I N E X I L E , 1994 35mm animated film transferred to video, 8:43 mins Editing Angus Gibson Sound Wilbert Schübel Music Philip Miller Musicians (String trio) Peta-Ann Holdcroft, Marjan Vonk-Stirling, Jan Pustejovsky) Go Tlapsha Didiba by Motsumi Makhene (sung by Sibongile Khumalo)

N OT E S T OWA R D S A MODE L OPE R A , 2 015 three channel video installation, colour, sound, 11:22 mins Choreographer and dancer Dada Masilo Music composition and arrangement Philip Miller Additional music composition Johannes Serekeho with Music performed by First St John Brass Band Video editing and construction Zana Marovic and Janus Fouché Sound mixing Gavan Eckhart Costume design Greta Goiris

OT H E R FAC E S , 201 1 35 mm film transferred to video, 9:45 mins Editing Catherine Meyburgh Music and sound design Philip Miller Voice Ann Masina and Bham Ntabeni Sound mix Wilbert Schübel and Gavan Eckhart

Musicians Vocals Bham Ntabeni, Moses Moeta, Joanna Dudley, Ann Masina, Tlale Makhene, Thato Motlhaolwa Percussion Tlale Makhene, Trombone Dan Selsick Trumpet and spoons Adam Howard Tuba George Fombe, Guitar Charles Knighten-Pullen Stroh violin Waldo Alexander

A NAT OM Y OF M E L A N C H OLY, 201 2 (from triptych of three flip book films, N O, I T I S ) HD video, 2:21 mins Editing Melissa Parry

Performers Dada Masilo, Tlale Makhene, Bham Ntabeni, Thato Mothlaolwa, Thabani Edwin Ntuli Members of First St John Brass Band Members of African Immanuel Essemblies Brass Band

TA N G O F OR PAG E T U R N I N G , 201 2 HD video, 2:53 mins Music Philip Miller Voice Joanna Dudley Editing Zana Marovic S E C ON D - HA N D R E A DI N G , 2013 HD video, 7 mins Music and voice Neo Muyanga Editing Snežana Marović

All works courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Paris, London; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town; Galleria Lia Rumma, Naples, Milan

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LIST OF WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION — VIVIENNE KOORLAND

V I V E M A M A N , 1987 oil, book pages, newsprint, varnish, glue, and charcoal on linen, 274 x 216 cm

T H E DI V I DE , 2 013 oil and pigment on linen with copper tacks 196 x 170 cm

H OW I L I V E , 2008 oil and lead on stitched burlap over linen 366 x 488 cm

DI E G E D A N K E N S I N D F R E I ( T H OU G H T S A R E F R E E ) , 2 015 oil and pigment on stitched canvas and linen 196 x 170 cm

S A FA R M M A P : S ET T L E M E N T S , 2008 oil and lead on stitched burlap over linen 259 x 211 cm

C E L I E , I ’M S O LON E S OM E I C OU L D C RY, 2 016 oil and twine on stitched linen and burlap, 150 x 242 cm

S A FA R M M A P : DE P ORTAT I ON S , 2008 oil and lead on stitched burlap over linen 259 x 211 cm

PAYS I N C ON N U, 2 016 oil and twine on stitched linen and burlap, 244 x 366 cm

A L L MOU N TA I N S R I DE , 201 1 oil on linen in wood frame with staples 135 x 119 cm KOPPI E S , 201 2 oil on linen, two panels, 140 x 254 cm SU N B I R D, 201 2 oil on stitched linen, two panels 154 x 101 cm A N G OL A , 2013 oil and lead on stitched burlap over linen 216 x 274 cm A N G OL A / LO OKOU T, 2013 oil and linen, 94 x 81 cm

All works courtesy the artist

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS —

Tamar Garb: I am grateful to both artists for the generosity with which they have embraced this dialogue and this exhibition. It has been my privilege and pleasure to work on it with them. Thanks too to my colleagues at The Fruitmarket Gallery who have been exemplary in every way, and especially to Fiona Bradley whose faith in this project made it possible. Vivienne Koorland: I am grateful to the following people whose marks are traceable in this exhibition: the Gottlieb Foundation in New York for a generous grant; my friends, the artist/activist Laurie Arbeiter and transactional lawyer Jennifer Hobbs, whose astonishing devotion, love and care watered me and brought a sick plant back to life; Hayden Russell Proud, Curator of Historical Paintings and Sculptures at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, who in March 2013 took me to see Professor Ian Glenn’s marvellous exhibition The King’s Map, and without whom my painting PAYS INCONNU, on which I worked from mid-2015 until mid-2016, would not have come into being. I cannot imagine that year without its sustenance. Thank you to Malcolm Hill in New York for his studio support, Rasaad Jamie, AnneMarie Kammerlander, Gracie Mansion, Lynn Gernert, Kathleen Bogacz, Adrian Rifkin and Denis Echard, Moira and Victor Benigson, Andre Koorland and Talma Koorland Mitchell for succour and nourishment. I should also like to thank Fiona Bradley, Director of The Fruitmarket Gallery for her vision, and her colleagues, for their kindness, insight and enthusiasm

in mounting this beautiful show; my fellow-artist William Kentridge and his wife, Dr. Anne Stanwix, rheumatologist and avid reader, for the time, as my mother would say, for our history together, for this collaboration, and for the reflection in your eyes; Briony Fer, Joseph Koerner, Ed KrČma and Griselda Pollock, four extraordinary art historians and visual theorists with four strikingly differently-cadenced voices, for their irradiated essays; and finally, Tamar Garb, FBA, Professor in the History of Art, Director of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, Curator, friend and ally, sister South African and intellectual soulmate since 1975, whose birthday gift of a map this year provided material for my painting CELIE, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, and who, in conjuring this exhibition as only she could, as well as through her distinctive writing, explores and expresses our (all three) shared and differing topography, geography and repository of the past, and her unique placement and perspective in bringing its theme to light. I thank her for this enrichment. Picture credits: William Kentridge images courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan. Vivienne Koorland images courtesy the artist. p.63: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photographers: Thierry Bal, Thys Dullaart, John Hodgkiss All rights reserved.

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Commissioning Patrons Alexander and Miranda Leslie George Morris Nicky Wilson

The Fruitmarket Gallery shows the work of some of the world’s most important Scottish and international artists and helps people engage with it in a way that is meaningful to them – for free. We are committed to making contemporary art accessible without compromising art or underestimating audiences. We aim to bring artists and audiences together, recognising that art can change lives and help us understand ourselves in the world. We make exhibitions, publications and events directly in collaboration with artists. We celebrate new thinking, and offer an international platform for artists, curators and writers, whether they have made their reputation here or abroad. The Fruitmarket Gallery welcomes all audiences. We make it easy for everyone to engage with art, encouraging questions and supporting debate.

Programme Patrons Sophie Crichton Stuart Alistair and Susan Duff Barry Rosen Patrons Martin Adam and William Zachs Nan and Robin Arnott Christina Chaplin Elizabeth Cowling Sarah Donaldson Ray Entwistle Catherine Holden Florence and Richard Ingleby

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Callum Innes Robin Jack Werner Keschner and Catherine Muirden Iain McFadden Diana McMicking Will Ramsay Ruth Rattenbury Silvy Weatherall Nicky and Robert Wilson and those who wish to remain anonymous. Staff Fiona Bradley: Director Georgia Dennison: Administrator Allison Everett: Bookshop Manager Susan Gladwin: Programme Assistant Colin MacFarlane: Senior Installation Technician Elizabeth McLean: Deputy Director Jamie Mitchell: Gallery Manager Iain Morrison: Enterprise Manager Caitlin Page: Learning Programme Manager Tracy Morgan: Learning Programme Manager (Maternity Cover) Simon Shaw: Installation Technician Claire Sylvester: Development Manager Armida Taylor: Head of Development Louise Warmington: Press and Marketing Manager Nichola Waygood: Finance Manager Samantha Woods: Exhibitions Organiser Lindsay Boyd, SinĂŠad Bracken, Andrew Gannon, Catherine Hiley, Tom Holland, Lindsay Hutchison, Vessela Ivkova, Kate Livingstone, Sarah Mockford, Zivile Siutilaite, Hamish Young: Information Assistants.

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