aide-mÉmoire

A Conversation between Jane Taylor and William Kentridge

preamble

It is an overcast day in the studio in Houghton. The conversation begins as if there are some proprieties, and there are semblances of the familiar calm of conversation, but within a sentence or two there is the thinking aloud of a mind racing against itself, as Kentridge wrestles with those things yet to be drawn, whether because neglected, or repressed, or overlooked. Many of the exchanges that follow concern the undrawn as abiding preoccupation for the artist.

This exhibition (of That Which We Do Not Remember) seems to bear, for Kentridge, a mirroring relation to ‘that which is not drawn’.

Much of what has engaged Kentridge aesthetically over the past several decades might be characterised as ‘the fugitive’. The title of this exhibition, That Which We Do Not Remember, bears an enigmatic relation to several bodies of Kentridge’s work that seek to probe the fleeting trace, or the illusory glimpse in the mind’s eye, or the evasions of the self.

To the Conversation, then.

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Wk: Let’s begin with a list of possible phrases, subtitles for sections of the conversation. We can put this as a putative table of contents that never gets . . .

. . . activated.

These are promises of things that are never fulfilled.

Self-portrait of abSence the project of objectS a table-top Self-portrait tell them about tell them about a pneumatic Sigh Wild inexplicable avarice took hold of everything, of everyone. Wild inexplicable avarice took hold of everyone

So let’s stop again there and start with a couple of these.

The list is nearly done. (He urges.)

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jt: Okay.

So then we’ve done it, we’ve finished these pages, and we either come back to these or not.*

Kentridge is keenly aware that he is to leave the next day for a workshop on The Head & the Load, and he feels the obligation inside himself that he must at least gesture toward those things which he knows he has not yet drawn, things he has not remembered.

god: hiS treeS and floWerS turned out much better than hiS people freedom – We miSSed the boat again the paper’S deSire to be the tree forgetting to ignore her thighS a Saving SorroW (and the Latin for that is tristitia salutifera) forgetting to deteSt the old Seven corpSeS in three minuteS a hero With no place to ShoW hiS proWeSS the Sofa underStandS the Situation recreational danger defenSive Sleeping both . . . and . . . (that’s a double figure filmed twice)¹

William adds: These phrases come from a notebook I had simply labelled ‘WORDS’ on the cover, a commonplace of phrases from different projects, some from The Head & the Load (a work currently underway which finds various languages to explore the role of Africans during the First World War), some from Notes Towards a Model Opera (a project about the Chinese Cultural Revolution) and many which I forget both where they came from and even what they refer to. There could be a paragraph for each one, but then we go down a rabbit hole and the guidebook disappears.

(Continues) That ‘both . . . and . . . ’ has the dramatic structure of farce, it seems to me. We witness the consequence of the two narrative choices simultaneously launched into the world. It makes me think of both terror and the absurd.

Farce enters in, but so does menace. This is something of a familiar strategy for you. You free yourself from the anxiety of trying to represent contradictions, through celebrating ambiguity. Somehow you know inside your practice to give yourself the licence to

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jt: take a break from the burden of representation, through deploying laughter.

Rather distinctively, you link the words ‘both . . . and . . .’ with multiple doors, because of your reference to farce. This is also a kind of Beckettian very short play. Maybe you should make a series of short plays with only two words.

Thinking of farce, I remember that marvellous Dada dance piece [with Dada Masilo] which combines drawn and actual spaces. It recreates the scenes of French farce, with the lover coming in through a virtual door that is drawn on the wall. Can you meditate on that at all productively?

About all these doors that go nowhere?

And there you’re thinking about theatre as both two-dimensional and three-dimensional drawing. This conjunction of two and three dimensions is part of your evolving enquiry. Yes, great, off you go! I can see your pleasure. This is one of your impossible drawings.

On the stage, there is the ‘fake reality’ of the set. In a theatre production, one explores the artifice of that stage door, a real door in a fake wall, tests its limits. That is the illusionism of a painted theatre flat with a working door inserted into it.

Because our experiment balanced between theatre and film, our door is even more fake than a stage door. It is a drawn version of a stage door (just a sheet of cardboard against a solid wall). That kind of entrance is just fine for filming, and is part of the joke. If the door was actually for use on stage, rather than for film, you’d have to have a hole in the wall, and then it would be easy to make a real door. But here, where there is no hole in the wall and we are working on film, you can just stand your character concealed behind the sheet of board with a door drawn on it, switch the camera on and then swivel the piece of board and have the character appear to come in through the door.

A small piece of oneself, as viewer, registers that one is being duped – that one is in a ‘Looney Tunes moment’.

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Wk: In this world of illusions, there needs to be a material that one can think in quickly. This is something that I have learned through working across media, and it has informed my sculptural work. Even if a sculpture will end up in bronze, it needs to start in a material that allows for flexible, fast work. In some cases the material would be cardboard, paper, wax and then it goes through a very careful process of further transformation into a mould and a cast and a wax cast and burning out the wax and pouring in the bronze and correcting the piece.

To go back to the fake wall briefly, in order to consider what you learn by working across different materials: here we have film-making and theatre-work disrupting each other, changing the limits of the possible. I like your formulation, “fine for filming”. You understand the kind of burden inside of the threedimensional obligations, on one hand, and the two-dimensional obligations, as well as the difference between theatre and film – that the illusionism of film allows you to create fluidity, and a rapidity of engagement that standard theatre practice resists in a way. So it’s interesting that you actually are trying to bring both of those media together, because you’re trying to delimit yourself at the same time as you’re trying to give yourself maximal licence. And I suspect in some ways that is the Méliès endeavour.²

There have been two postulated distinct lineages of film’s complex and multiple origins. One, leading to the realist tradition, originated in the work of the Lumière brothers, a kind of film en plein air tradition that becomes associated with documentary and with the naturalist traditions that lead to the faux reality of Hollywood drama. The other leads to the so-called ‘studio’ tradition which evolved out of the artistry and illusionism of Georges Méliès. His idea arising from ‘that which is not drawn’ is a testing of the threshold of the actual in relation to the liberties of the possible.

Yes, and with regard to the question, ‘What is a performance in the studio?’, there are some performances which exist as live performances, like my performance of Schwitters’s Ursonate.

For me the Ursonate was an interesting project. KurtSchwitters and the Dada poetry inaugurated a resistance to an understanding that language makes sense of the world. Dada deliberately

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Wk: explores elements that could not be forced into an interpretation or a reasonable meaning. And I’m interested in – as it were – putting the Ursonate back into the world, not as incoherent, but rather performing it as if it were a lecture, as if it made sense, as if every line had a sense.

So here’s a sort of jocular comment. You’ve always made the assertion that you didn’t end up as a lecturer precisely because you couldn’t hold detailed information in your mind accurately and what becomes more and more inaccurate . . .

(Interrupts) No, more than . . . Much worse than that.

Why?

Not just that I couldn’t hold detailed information in my head, but that I felt that if I couldn’t find the right argument in an authoritative book . . .

. . . you’d make it up.

I’d make it up, as one does in debating. And there are certain fields, in ethical activities like the law or in academe, where you would correctly be rusticated or struck off the roll if you invented evidence, if you invented authorities, invented cases, invented an academic genealogy of information that didn’t exist.*

Kentridge has sought to reconcile the demands of a representational burden located in historical time on the Highveld landscape (the obligations of Soviet Realism) with the exuberant experimentalism of theatre. Because he so often works with antirealist languages, such as drawing, puppetry and manipulated objects, his films resist collapsing into ‘the real’. In an early shot from What Will Come (has already come) we can just detect Kentridge’s hand as the artefacturer; he stirs the cosmos, precipitating creative time, as if he is some kind of potentate. The same jest about the artist’s self as a god is evident in his drawings and animations for The Magic Flute, though there he is, also, the buffo-ish figure of Papageno, the birdcatcher. The work does manifest what seems both empathy and irony between Kentridge and Mozart as the former tests the limits of his creative vainglory against the composer.

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jt: This is an important qualifier. You use the phrasing, “You would correctly be rusticated.” We will come back later to think about the place of the law in your art.

As a creator, you need to be in a safe space. So the space within the artistic sphere is where it is understood that everything is a possible construction, and construction of the world rather than a revelation of the world.

Yes, the term that you used was ‘invented’. That was the lawless act – an act of invention.

What we are saying is that this can be a conversation and the notes about a conversation.

Lists, too, could be there. At one stage we talked about a list of things which have been drawn and, by contrast, a list of things I’ve never drawn, and you were going to throw me challenges: “Have you . . . or haven’t you?”

Okay, so then the question is, going back to your comment, how many of these have you actually executed, even though asserting that these are impossible projects?

Well, a lot of them did come out of projects, or the phrases associated with projects. The paper’s desire to be the tree is from thinking about the nature of books, of a tree being turned into paper pulp, the paper pulp being turned into a book, and the book holding the writing about the tree in it (and that’s sort of linked back, and it is transformed back into the tree). I am also very much aware of the tree as that moment of transition between acorn, table, book, fire and ash.

And here you are invoking your much-loved phrase, from the Latin? Smoke, ash . . . *

That phrase is one Kentridge uses in the opera we worked on together, Confessions of Zeno. The Zeno character is tormented because he cannot give up smoking, a symptom of his failed relationships, familial and erotic. In the production Kentridge used smoke as a strong visual trace, and at one point,

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as Zeno’s known world is consumed by smoke from the explosions of WWI, the phrase ‘Smoke, Ashes, Fable’ is a wraith on the projection screen behind the action. The actor Dawid Minnaar had just given up smoking and so was using herbal cigarettes on stage.

Yes, that’s ‘smoke, ashes, fable’.³ This is specifically about a transformation of material. The alchemy of the tree into a book, a tree into thinking.

In 2017 Kentridge opened an exhibition in Bruges, Smoke, Ashes, Fable, curated by Margaret Koerner. The phrase ‘smoke, ashes, fable’ is from the historian Herodotus, and is reprised by Marcus Aurelius in the late second-century CE: “Where is it all now? Smoke, ashes, fable. Or perhaps it is no longer even fable.”

I think also of Teitelbaum, Felix Teitelbaum, your sentimental traveller in the early Soho films, who wanders naked around the city of Johannesburg. He is a ‘title tree’, like this drawing.

I hadn’t thought of the title tree. I know that ‘title tree’ is a kind of literal translation, but if I think of him as anything it is as an entitled tree. The Teitelbaum is the tree, Soho Eckstein is the stone. ‘The tree and the stone’ is another phrase we could have had. ‘The comfort of a stone’. Several drawings were made of Soho with his head on a stone.

(I think the phrases work both as a marker of an idea and also as a protective barrier. If the phrase is there, I don’t have to go behind and interrogate too closely the thoughts behind the idea.)

My trees are important. If one wants to talk about trees, one goes off in four different directions. What is it, for a person to be a tree?

And what is that?

No, we just put that as a question. “What is it . . .?”

I know, but I am intrigued. What is that for you?

We’ve got history on trees. And trees have history on us. In Germany trees are difficult and dangerous to fell, because they

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Wk: are full of shrapnel. Just this week in Norway they found trees which you can date through the presence of chemicals that were used by the Germans to make the artificial fog that was pumped into the air around their battleships to hide them in the fjords from the British navy. The chemicals of the artificial fog are recorded in the trees for the year 1941. And the trees carry the history because their existence is so much longer than a human being’s.

You have not done with trees, and certainly you have not done with war.

The two are, in time, bound up in one another because both a book and a tree become a clock. Rather as the tree becomes a book, so the chemical fog is caught inside the rings of the tree (persisting through a changing form) and the shrapnel is caught in the trunk.

The turning of the pages of the book marks the passage of time. One can think of making a book without end, a circular book which has a spine that is a cylinder. And a thousand pages radiate from a central core, as if there is no back cover and no front, no necessary beginning or end.

It is an endless Scheherazade. So that too is a project not yet made?

The thought arises as a note both for What Will Come (has already come) and for Second-hand Reading, although they are separate works, made at distinct times.

These works both respond in part to the perception that the artwork is a window on the world. Any window has a frame. When you are working with anamorphic projection, you don’t have an edge, no frame.⁴

What I like about the anamorphic portraits is the fact that there are two figures conjoined at the back, if you look at them from a particular perspective. Seen from one particular angle, they seem to be staring away from one another, into the remote distance; while from the other side (the front?) the two are

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jt: staring directly at one another. It’s marvellous, because it shows that the Janus-faced figures are, from one perspective, locked together in a mutual gaze.

Anamorphic arts became very popular during the Renaissance in Europe, as artists were exploring new techniques for figuring perspectival drawing. The anamorphic image is distorted in such a way as to be legible only when viewed via some kind of warped mirror. The curved image is elongated, or foreshortened in curious measure, casting before the eye an enigmatic scene. In such terms it does not have a stable frame, because the image almost ‘leers’ from out of its fixed place.

These then are images as seen, alternately, from a closed and an open universe. From the perspective of history, and the perspective of myth?

The anamorph is a technical viewing device for distorting the image.

It destabilises our sense of what it is we see, and how we see it.

A cylindrical mirror stands end-on upon a drawing. We only see fifty percent of the surface of the curved mirror when we look at it. Because of the curve of the surface, what we see reflected is very compacted at the edges, and very expansive at the centre. Our ‘frame’, the mirror, is reflecting seventy percent of the drawing into our viewing plane. It is not that the mirror stops reflecting behind the tube. As soon as you circle around, you will find the world of the image there waiting for you. You can have both the faces looking out on one surface but in fact the faces go almost all the way around to the back, and so you join the two heads at the back.

If you had one head on one side and another head on the other, you’d see one very thin head at one end and another thin head on the other, not a continuous form. In the drawing, the heads have to be just a tiny bit adjoined at the back. What the mirror sees is not what the eye sees. Not at all.

And that’s marvellous, because the absolute assumption is that the mirror is the truth of what you are seeing.

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Wk: Yes, there are many things about the virtues of lies. Here the images don’t correspond to the world but they reveal a kind of truth.

That’s an important principle. Can you elaborate a bit more about it? It’s often so integral to your work.

The primary lie of all art is that you know it is an illusion even while you fool yourself. If you take a black piece of paper and tear it into a shape, you know the truth of it is that it’s a roughly torn piece of paper and the lie that you tell yourself is – look! – that is a coffee pot.

If the outline of it corresponds to certain shapes which are there in one’s head, you can’t stop yourself from recognising it. I think that this reveals an unstoppable desire for things to make sense to us. It’s not that we don’t know that there are lies, but we can’t resist the lie.⁵

In 2012 Kentridge was invited to give the Norton lectures at Harvard University. The series of talks was titled ‘Drawing Lessons’ though it was not, as is conventional under such a title, a class on how to draw but rather a consideration of what one learns through the activity of drawing: the process of ‘seeing in’, in which the individual effectively makes something in the world not because they have the capacity to craft it, but rather because they have the capacity to recognise it once it is visible.

The easiest instance for explaining this is to remember that we actually see, with the natural eye, an inverted image of the world; the eye actually flips everything by a hundred and eighty degrees, and our brains have to cope with a world standing on its head . . .

Yes, and the second great thing that we live by, is the threedimensionality of vision – although we know that it’s a construction in our head, that our eyes are seeing in twodimensional images that we combine in order to create a threedimensional scene.

This we experience when we look through a stereoscope. At first, nothing is resolved, but suddenly, as the two images bracket together and we instantly see in three dimensions, the viewer groans, or grunts – “Ah, now I have it!”

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Wk: A gasp . . .

. . . when the brain suddenly does the work of pushing the two images into one another, which thrusts them into depth at the same time. The moment you lose the two distinct focused images, they merge and jump out at you in three-dimensional depth, and you attain a single three-dimensional image.

I think of the child who wrestles to make proper use and sense of the stereoscope, pushing it back and forth without success, and then – suddenly – it coheres, the world flips into focus, and the child feels a sudden surge of potency, because . . .

. . . they realise – “Oh, I can. I’ve done it.”

“I have made sense of the world.”

And here I am going to lead us to consider Second-hand Reading, a much more recent work (2013), because the conjunction between the two is so instructive.

Okay, Second-hand Reading is also The Prisoner in the Book.

This is the story of a work on the show that both was and was not drawn. Some years ago I was invited to make a work for a specific museum in France. I did not make that work, but the questions which it provoked in me gave rise to another piece, which is on the show here.

Outside Bourganeuf in France there is a ruined castle, which in the thirteenth or fourteenth century held a political prisoner from the Middle East who was captured during the Crusades and held ransom for thirty years in the castle.* He was never ransomed, because his brother had taken over as grand vizier, and would rather keep that position than liberate his brother.⁶

This narrative thread was placed between us in the conversation, hovering somewhere between smoke, ashes, and fable. In pursuit of some anchoring supplementary history, Kentridge wrote to the museum curator who had originally suggested the possible project and asked for additional historical detail, while I pursued what I could of the narrative thread, and came up, first,

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with the name of Bodrum Castle, which is how I learned the bare bones of the story. The mortal rivalry between the brothers clung to me, and I reported back to Kentridge the statement I recollected as associated with the two men: “Sovereignty knows no siblings.” However, on returning to the source I discovered that I had wholly reworked the sentence that was attributed to the older brother. His tough-minded observation had actually been “Between rulers there is no kinship.”

In my research, the captive was revealed to be Sultan Cem, who, we became aware, is also known to the historical record as Djem or Zizim, and had been captured by the Knights of Rhodes during a conflict with his half-brother Bayezid II during the fifteenth century, as Moorish and Christian interests sought to consolidate their interests in the region. Cem (the younger) in several accounts is described as a ‘Pretender’ to the Ottoman empire. The two brothers battled in several regions across the following years, until Cem sought the protection of the French captain of Bodrum Castle, who was grand master of the Knights of St John on Rhodes. In July 1482, Cem arrived on the island and was received with honour. Ostensibly seeking a perpetual peace between the Ottoman Empire and Christendom, the Knights’ captain, Pierre d’Abrusson, accepted 40,000 ducats, in exchange for protection for Cem. After some consideration, the captain subsequently decided that conflict with Bayezid would have dire consequences, so he covertly agreed to imprison Cem. The church at Rome at one point intervened, seeking actively to deploy Cem to engage in battle with the Ottoman empire; but Bayezid paid Pope Innocent VIII 120,000 crowns (at the time, equal to all other annual sources of papal revenue combined), one hundred Moorish slaves, a relic of the Holy Lance and an annual fee of 4,000 ducats. Apparently much of the fee for the building of the Sistine Chapel was paid through these Ottoman ransoms, and such a sum was presumably sufficient to secure the Pope’s indulgence. It is small wonder that the history and fable of Cem have found expression in various literary and aesthetic treatments, though few are as enigmatic and desolate as Kentridge’s pacing man, trapped inside the Book. The records suggest that Cem died after just more than a decade in captivity, having spent his last years plotting his revenge and return to power.

I was asked whether I wanted to do a project for a museum at this castle, and thought, ‘How does one show a prisoner held captive for all that time?’ I thought of the pages of a book being the equivalent of the days of one’s life, and so I initially had the idea of a person walking back and forth inside the pages of the book, never escaping from the printed page into the empty margins.

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jt: How to do this? It is a trick based on the flip books that I had explored for years as an early animation technology.

Here is where this work reminds me of the anamorphic drawings which, as you say, have no frame, no edge. You described, too, the book with no back and no front cover, but with a spine which could turn and turn and turn without ending.

We have the sense of the passage of time, as the man runs on the pages, because of the variation in the shape of the text that provides the ground behind the figure, on the pages of the dictionary. At times, the eye sees only the figure drawn pacing back and forth . . .

. . . and never becomes aware of the page that is the support of the drawing . . .

Yes, and at times, abruptly, you are made aware of that physical typed page, when a sudden block of short lines appears visible on the paper, instead of the regularly spaced text, and one realises that the ground has changed. It looks suddenly as if both time and space are being covered.

The caged figure alludes also to Rilke’s panther, which you have drawn pacing back and forth. For Rilke, the panther is ever aware of the bars: “till his gaze, from weariness, lets all things go”, although there are moments when “[a]n image enters in” and plunges into the animal’s heart.

One of the questions that persists in this saga of the undrawn arises from a consideration of the relation between image and language. I think of your title tree. What are those words, and what world do they point us to, outside of the realm of the branches, as wood is turned into paper and writings emerge?*

Kentridge retains a perpetual fascination with thought and abstraction, while insisting on following technique and practice. This ambivalence has given rise to several enigmatic experiments that rely on play to do his thinking. Several recent productions have sought to institute unrealisable projects in order, as it were, to realise them. This, it seems to me, is not wholly unrelated to the project of ‘undrawable’ drawings.

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Wk: Can we return to your ongoing investigation of the eye? There seems to me a kind of breakthrough when you were making The Magic Flute, which, for all its sumptuous lavish beauty, was really a philosophical treatise of a kind, and a meditation on Optics.⁷

In the group of undrawable but drawn experiments, I would identify 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès as well as The Nose, and thus it is that these result in artworks that, in principle, are well-nigh impossible. This cluster of works both undrawable and drawn expands exponentially. The three-dimensional/twodimensional experimentalism of the theatre/film interface is part of this enquiry.

This happens as an accident. I was making a series of experimental short films in various forms, loosely as a tribute to Georges Méliès, the early cinema pioneer. I was using illusionism, with films that were screened reversed in order to invert time, for example. While I was working away there, a small community of ants moved into the studio. I became fascinated by their activity, and realised that with a sugar trail I could manipulate them to move in formation. I became an ant wrangler. And they dashed about, following invisible lines, making waves and paisley motifs, trailing after one another. If I filmed them, I understood that I had a live animation line. What was a real discovery was when I then treated the film as ‘day for night’, flipping over the values, so that I ended up with a field of white ants on a black ground. Filmed at a certain remove, these became an organic and mobile cluster of constellations, blinking in the night sky. This showed me a whole visual language for working with the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, while thinking about the Enlightenment.

I remember being struck by your discovery that you can project something on to a black wall . . .

. . . in black and white . . .

. . . and we will read it for the difference; we will find the black and white in the projection on the black wall.

Yes, if you are projecting in a space with ambient light, it works best with a dark screen and a strong projector.

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jt: So that if you have a medium dark room with a medium grey piece of paper and you switch off the lights and there’s a very dim light, an ambient light, you see it as a grey sheet of paper. As soon as you put the image with the white lines on the black background, the medium grey becomes both a bright white and an intense black. One has a relative pitch of colour rather than an absolute pitch.

It was a kind of magic, watching black turn into white. Having grown up with movie projectors and the principle of the luminous movie-screen, I was startled to discover that I could, with a data-projector, use a blackboard as a projection screen. The projected images appear crisp, as white on black.

So then what comes to mind is your discovery that the dark arts in The Magic Flute provide an allegory for the underground of the Enlightenment.

It’s an organisational principle because it shows the relationship between the negative and the positive. Literally, I am drawing with black on white, but I can invert it so that we are watching white on black. Initially that was done by using the film negative rather than making a positive print of it, so that there is inversion of white and black. Now it is done digitally. Thishas all sorts of practical advantages. It is easier to draw a fine line with black than with white, because charcoal is softer and more friable than chalk, so it makes a clean and soft, consistent line. Chalk tends to splinter and is more brittle. It’s also easier to erase charcoal on white paper than white chalk on a black background, although I have done both and sometimes in one film I have used both because of the difference in effect – the rough and jagged line in a work like Ubu Tells the Truth is made with chalk on black paper.

So this makes me think about the question of the law in your life. It seems to me that there is something in your constitution, as well as your aesthetic, that is fundamentally postcolonial, or anticolonial. It relates back to give uS back our Sun from Refuse the Hour, which you had anticipated in The Magic Flute in the way that you stage the Enlightenment as an inherently contradictory project rather than a necessary beneficence. ⁸

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Refuse the Hour was first performed in 2012 and has been described as a ‘multimedia chamber opera’ which arose in part out of a series of conversations with science historian Peter Galison. It is a ‘brief history of time’ to which Kentridge brings both mythology and postcolonial history.

I think now of the ambivalent relationship that is in so many of my projects: I refer here to the ambivalent relationship I have with the Enlightenment. Completely dependent on it, growing up through it, in belief of it – and still in belief of it – but understanding that within it (not as an aberration or a mistake, or at the side but at the heart of it) are a lot of the disasters of colonialism.

Not in the sense that there were good people and there were bad people but that often within the very best of intentions the most disastrous results come about.

One has to try to find a multitude of less bad solutions. One can’t say, “Well, we only want the good education that missionaries might have brought without any of the other destructive things that came in their wake.” We understand that those have been inextricably linked and the current questions of decolonisation are still stuck in that paradox. So it’s beyond psychology, and ultimately, because of the history, there seems to be no good solution.

In The Head & the Load, which is my current project about the First World War in Africa, a central question concerns the paradox of colonialism. Some of the educated African elite fought for the right to fight in the war (in the misguided hope that after the war they would be seen as equal citizens and be given equal rights). Others moved away, saying, why should we die for a cause which is not ours?

There is a complete entanglement, then, of the technological enquiry inside the philosophical enquiry. This has led to the fugitive escape for you through laughter and through playfulness, and desire . . .

There is an exploration through technology, yes. The representation of technology – fake machines, a big semaphore machine, a little pumping of air that is done. There is this faux technology, but

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jt: I am also interested in the real technologies of seeing: the stereoscope, the anamorphic projections, phenakistiscopes, zoetropes, which – though real – are also things through which you know you are deluding your brain.

Is this the way in which language is unreliable? We always hope that language is tied to the world: a tree outside has a line between the word ‘tree’ and the tree trunk – and this applies to abstract concepts too: say, with ‘anger’, there is the word ‘anger’ and the emotion that’s boiling inside someone. We hope that they are somehow tied.

Or is language a floating cloud that moves over the world making some connections to it, but always allowing itself to float free of it? There is not so much a list of nouns or verbs, but larger constructions: a range of things in addition to the letters in words, that tie those words to the world. These supplements can include intangibles such as vocal or visual emphasis, or the gesture, the sigh, the pause, the repetition, the flowery language, the use, say, of Anglo-Saxon short grunts rather than Latinate words in English. A whole series of invisible things.

Now described as ‘rhetoric’, basically.

Yes, rhetoric. We tend to think, okay, there’s rhetoric that heightens and swells language, and then there’s rhetoric that is debasing it or devaluing it until we associate it with lies. But within the deep structure, we reach what we think of as falsehood very quickly: we suspect that there is not false language and true, but rather that language is inherently treacherous. I think it is impossible to separate language from rhetoric.

You prompt me here. I must send you a link to the opening address of the Royal Society in 1645. Their statement focuses precisely on linguistic choices between rhetoric and plain style.* There was an attempt to advocate an English that was free of flourishes, tropes and figures, in order to have a language that was adequate to science or to truth. ⁹

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The word ‘gloss’ has a complex etymology that points to the conjunction of some of these ideas. A gloss, it seems, originates in the Icelandic glossi, a spark, a flame. But the word is also associated with notions of ornamentation, a sheen, something alluring. Further, a gloss on a word is a brief notation on the meaning of that word, often giving synonyms or etymologies, and in this sense the meaning of a word is indistinguishable from its supplements. A glossary, by contrast, is a list of precise definitions of terms that might be considered technical or specialist.

The Royal Society began to emerge in the 1640s but got its Royal Charter in 1660. Early advocates included Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, John Wallis, John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and William Petty. They were largely natural scientists defending their enquiries against the impact of the Civil War in England. Some grouped together in London, where they met at Gresham College, and others gathered in Oxford under the presumption that the remote university would be detached from the war. Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667) is a plea to rid the language of specious “Tropes and Figures”, in order to return to the simple truth. These sentiments may be understood to have something in common with the antitheatrical prejudice of the times, which had led to the closing of the theatres in England; there is more than a shadowy resemblance to Plato’s hostility to art.

And I’m sure that as you read it now, every instance of rhetoric is there. All of it.

Of course, it’s marvellous.

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels there is a satire based on some of these principles. (And here, perhaps is a drawing not yet drawn.) Gulliver visits the ‘Grand Academy of Lagado’ where he learns that there are several vast experiments underway: one is a reversal of time that will extract food from excrement and sunlight from plants and another is an attempt to substitute language with things. Everyone has to have an object that can stand in for any word they wish to speak, so in order to mention, say, a cucumber, the speaker would have to carry a cucumber in their pocket.

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Wk: A drawing of a cucumber would be very dull. It would have to be a drawing of a pineapple – so you would have to want to talk about pineapples.

At the end of The Head & The Load there’s a piece of text that has its origin in Svetlana Alexievich writing about the war in Afghanistan. The line is about a young boy who took a long time to die, and as he was dying he looked around him and just said the words of the objects he could see, like a young child learning to speak. Tree, mountain, bird, haversack. And in the production we expand this into a list of words that are . . . endless; he is in extremis. What has his language become? At the very end, he is still trying to make that connection of word to world and to object. So it’s a hopeful or utopian moment at the end of the piece, which has been so much about the impossibility of language or communication.

That’s devastating.

What does that mean? I ask myself. And then my next question is, How do we stage it? What does it mean to see it, to hear it? You’ve got someone speaking the chain of words, and you have those words hanging in the air like projections. How long can these continue? Is it infinitely hopeful, or infinitely despairing? That gives rise to a question about the staging of language.

I think that perhaps, in the staging, we will put those words much earlier on as well. At first the audience don’t understand what those words in the sky are, and then, eventually, you understand them right at the end of the piece. (After the workshop, these words are spoken in counterpoint to the list of the dead read out at the same time.)

And so sense enters the world with death. Artifice ends. When the words come back to you.

When they come back.

It is a matter of staging and performance. We have one very small performer who’s quiet, in his gas mask and his white uniform. I am asking myself, Do we have him slowly walking across the stage while these words arrive? Do I allow this as

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10 a slow silent moment? What is the way that it could be made eloquent, where does it overinflate and collapse under its own weight? We add strains of the violin underneath the scene, and test that. The boy takes a long time to die. It’s about the words, because there are some words which would be in siSwati or Swahili, which for most people in the audience would not be understood. There are some which are still recognisable to English-speakers, such as ‘haversack’. But other ones, like ‘sweet honey’, would be spoken either in both English and an African language or only in an African language, with some understood, some not understood.

But I think it is about trying to ask, Is there a mutually comprehensible language after the slaughter? That’s both the historic question and obviously a completely contemporary question.

Your recent work is deeply attentive to the burdens of colonialism. Still, it is with an extraordinary exuberance that you are extending into new spaces. In the past several years you have expanded your studio from out of your historical home into the city. You’ve also created performance spaces there, in Maboneng, where you have instituted several stage spaces . . . And I suspect in some way you’ve displaced your father out of his home, and taken over the house so that that can also become a place in which the endeavour of legitimate lying can flourish. That may seem facetious, but I say that in all seriousness, because that is the way in which you defend yourself against external authorities in order to defend internal authority.

It’s always an ongoing question.

The Centre For The Less Good Idea ¹⁰ houses the question of how we collectively take responsibility for constructing the world. Who takes responsibility, and for which functions? Who does that work? Is that a collective responsibility?

And how does imagination defend itself?

The Centre for the Less Good Idea is an arts incubator launched by Kentridge in 2017. Kentridge’s studio spaces and several adjacent venues in inner-city Johannesburg have been equipped with the basic workings of several theatre

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spaces, with lighting rigs, seating and temporary stages, as well as the infrastructure for digital projection and sound. Bronwyn Lace, herself an artist, is the animateur of the riotous assembly, working with Kentridge to knock these events into a robust coherence. It is interesting that here Kentridge’s primary commitment is to performance and live arts.

This is the politics of ‘that which is not drawn’ – every moment of every unit of time and space is in the emergent. Here we are again exploring the intersection of two-dimensional and three-dimensional representations. And we are inside your preoccupation with time, generation, re-generation.

Several parallel projects are ongoing, and there is a negotiation about how we make sense of it all, the whole time, and that it’s always a construction and that a picture is always caught somewhere between the world that it comes out of and what we project on to it as a viewer. These are all propositions that I am trying to explore in the inner-city project in Maboneng. I’m trying to. But each time something doesn’t work, each time there’s a performance at the Centre that falls flat, that constitutes a kind of a counterargument which says, Work it out clearly in advance. Make sure you have a good plan.

Each time something goes wrong, I don’t just think, It’s not just that that was not a beautiful piece of theatre, but I ask, Does this show that this way of thinking about the world is fundamentally wrong?

So you’ve got the law in contest with improvisation at the same time and always.

I’ve got the law?

It gives you the right to just mess about in a kind of economy – a moral economy inside the recklessness of the enquiry.

And for some reason in all of that deliberation, my mind flashed back to a scene from several years ago on the hillside in Hamakuya village in Limpopo, with everybody looking up at the total eclipse of the sun through strange hand-made blackpaper glasses. I’m thinking of how many different idiosyncratic

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Wk: experiments have arisen in some kind of way out of that cosmic moment, an eclipse, in which the verities and the certainties of the world were proven to be completely illusory. Standing there on the hillside, the wall of blackness rushes towards one. That event was completely unanticipated by me. I had no idea that that was how the eclipse presents itself.

It’s like this general anaesthetic coming over the world; there’s a sudden rush and it’s unlike anything else. And obviously that’s the difference between a ninety-nine point nine percent eclipse, and a total eclipse. It cannot be anticipated, in a way.

It’s not a black hole, but it’s almost like suddenly you’re in the black hole, not knowing what will emerge, and things that otherwise are invisible are seen: the stars that you can suddenly see in the middle of the day, which are there the whole time. It’s not like they suddenly appear. They’re there the whole time, but you can now perceive them because of the contrast against the sky.

As there’s that projection on the black wall that is there all the time.

Yes, and it is an illusion when one says, Oh, the stars are fading, as daylight comes. It’s our sight that is failing to see them. They haven’t disappeared. They’re still holding on to their same brightness, which is obviously obliterated by the brightness of the sun.

The eclipse is a good reference here because it takes us to the black square, in That Which We Do Not Remember, the black woodcut which alludes to a section of the Triumphs and Laments frieze at the Tiber. The frieze is a length of events, full of historical figures, but it has one section of blankness in the middle of the historical record. This section is called quello che non ricordo, ‘that which we do not remember’. It gestures toward that section of history that we should know, but don’t. The blank section of the frieze in fact arises from an accident. I suddenly realised that we had an extra twelve metres on the bank of the Tiber, and I’d run out of figures. It was too late to cut any new stencils, so we needed to put in . . . something.

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Wk: You scam artist!

But of course it also relates to the black square of Malevich, something that can be simply this black shape. And what I love is that Malevich’s black square doesn’t arise as some transcendental signifier in the world, but it comes out of second-hand use, because Malevich used a fragment of cloth plundered from a whimsical theatre costume which had a black square on it, and somebody happened to comment to him afterwards, “We love that black square.” So he said, “Okay, well, why don’t we make a painting just of a black square and change the direction of art?” So the inauthentic origins are to be celebrated.

And you justify the story in order to divert our thinking away from the blank in the wall-drawings on the Tiber. It is just as well, after all, that you never became a history lecturer. And so your son avenges himself on you by teaching history!

Lying has to do with inauthentic origins, and the difference, and I suppose the big difference, between the way one talks about a work when it’s finished and the mess that happens before in the preamble. Some of the work I do is trying to show the preamble to the work.

And in a way that’s the tension in the dialectic between the voices that are going to be on the edges of the conversation, with one voice constituting the coherence of the interpretation and the other defending the incoherence of the found image or feigned idea.

Yes, and it’s not to say that the work is only constituted by all the inauthenticities in its origin – and those would include the technique. I’ve got a good and a bad brush to work with, to paint a tree. Where a good brush will give you a controlled line, the bad brush gives you a speckle which suggests the randomness of foliage. So the bad brush suggests the markings of a tree. The bad brush makes the good tree. This can relate back to the drawing of the tree.

The power of the black square also comes out of the blackness of Indian ink and the way that ink sits on the paper. It’s a much

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Wk: blacker thing than a black charcoal block, for example. It’s much more obliterating. So we go back to Malevich with his black, but when we think of the Soviets we also go in a different direction, back to the blacking out of . . .

Censorship.

. . . of photographs. Soviet censorship was done with thick, black, printer’s ink.

And what is that called? What was that called? I remember a distinctive name.

Caviar.

Caviar.

It was known as caviar. So we’re back to the thick black printer’s ink, which I use for the woodcut. It is different from the liquid ink – the Chinese ink or Indian ink. That’s the same thing. In English we call it Chinese ink and the French call it Indian ink. No, the English call it Indian ink and the French call it Chinese ink and the Chinese just call it ink.

The English call it Indian ink?

And the French call it Chinese ink and the Chinese just call it ink. The woodblock print in fact is closer to the caviar, this thick sticky printer’s ink that is rolled on, that would have been rolled on the photos. So I’m saying that, yes, in the meaning of That Which We Do Not Remember the black has all these different moments of (you could say) inauthenticity. It is not simply negative; it is also experienced as a free block – the open space, the pleasures of the ink.

And in a way that’s where the authenticity is.

Well, in acknowledging those origins and the way that those things all are visible, are showing.

It’s not just acknowledging, or showing them in the work. So that it’s not just that the artist uses a series of devices to trick

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Wk: the audience, but that the audience is completely complicit in understanding the lie.

And I mentioned yesterday the Louvre experiment. What I’m thinking about particularly has to do with your Méliès works also. There is a celebration of a kind of double temporality. You find an image and then you black it out, and then you fake and film the recovery of the image.

Which Louvre one do you mean?

In the Louvre show, you’ve got those black squares that you had painted over previous drawings . . .

Oh, okay. Okay, so that was to excavate . . .

. . . and then you end up with a black square, yes.

But it starts here, with a drawing. Which I film. Then I paint over it. Then in order to excavate . . .

Yes, you’re excavating. So you play the film backwards.

So this is about archaeological excavation in which one starts with a black square, like That Which We Do Not Remember, and then bit by bit, by playing the film backwards, you find what you have forgotten. You rub out the black, you peel it away slowly, and underneath are fragments of memory or shards of pottery or bits of sculpture.

This is the aide-mémoire. But in fact . . .

What you’ve done is made by proceeding in the opposite direction.

Exactly.

You start with the drawing, and film while bit by bit you obliterate it with black printer’s ink, or in this case the black Chinese ink. This the audience can understand. Listen, you don’t have to be bright to understand that stuff; you’re simply running the film backwards, so that it seems as if you start with the black square

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jt: and clear it to reveal the painting. But nonetheless, something in our experience of unidirectional time becomes evident. The film is successful even to me, having made the film. For example, I really like the drawing that you see at the end of the film, and I went to look for it in all the drawers of the studio and could not find it and thought it had disappeared. And only afterwards, I realised – that messy dirty black sheet of paper, that is the drawing. I had forgotten that I had blackened over it. It survives only in the film. That’s the final piece.

That’s what remains.

And that’s what you always end up with. Your habitual body of work exists as the kind of drawing that you desire for a moment, but then you obliterate the things you want. What is that will to destroy these things? But really, look, I’m not nearly as selfdestructive or as careless as that. With a lot of the drawings, there are sometimes two versions, or I’m also aware of the possibility of another drawing as I am drawing. I observe myself making the drawing so I can go back and remake it, slightly differently, from out of what had been revealed the first time, and . . .

And then instead of obliterating the original, you demolish the copy?

No, sometimes I demolish the original but I would have remembered what it was, or I wouldn’t have arrived at it otherwise. Sometimes I make a copy that is made to be destroyed and it turns out a better drawing than the careful original I had made, because it is made less deliberately, with greater instinct for seeing and a less arch art.

The demands can arise from something outside of the drawing. Say, when you’re drawing for film, or drawing for theatre, using your drawing as if it is applied drawing (like applied maths), using the drawing skill in the service of a different vision: this often has revelations that arise out of the debased form.

That’s a lovely formulation: “in the service of a different vision”.

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Wk: Something else. Yes.

And this is the multimodal, multitechnology exploration that believes that you find a different answer with each of those journeys.

But also there are accidents . . .

For example, there’s a drawing that I need for a section on arithmetic in The Head & The Load. It shows us the bureaucracy of a war.

How many carriers are needed? How many people will die? What will they have died of? All the equipment you need to take.

And so it’s a drawing really like a blackboard, just with these different texts on it, of these different objects and numbers.

And in a strange way as a drawing, as a final drawing, it’s a good history-lesson drawing. But I would never have arrived there, and there would never have been a logic driving me to make it, simply as a drawing. Why would I draw a list of numbers, some random texts? The drawing emerged as a need out of the theatre work, but it says everything that a drawing might say about people, work, the war, numbers and bureaucracies.

You could not know that it would be a good drawing until you got there.

No, and I wouldn’t have thought to do it because all the logic and the pressure behind it had to do with the nature of the filming, how quickly it had to be done and how dense it would be. It is not shaped by the properly artistic questions. Not by, What does this sheet of paper need? but, rather, What is the length of time? What are the words that are being said on stage? How do these relate to the drawing? So I’m not sure that’s a side benefit of inauthentic origins but it’s part of it. That’s a strategy, then. The work gets made while I am solving something else.

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Wk: Finding these demands outside of the form is a strategy for arriving at things inside of the form.

What will it become, and what will that say when it has become?

I was working with a letter of John Chilembwe from the First World War. I began by thinking, Is there just someone reading it on stage? We tried it with the letter just being read straight on stage. We tried reading it with loud music underneath it, with quiet music underneath it. We tried it with a choir repeating the lines of the text.

What is that letter? What is the substance of the letter?

The substance of the letter is: ‘The Voice of the African Native in the Present War’, written by the Reverend John Chilembwe to the Nyasaland Times in late 1914. That is what it is called. In it he states the key paradox – the colonial paradox. It is the history of colonialism in one letter. He says, “We understand that we have been invited to shed our innocent blood in this world’s war which is now in progress throughout the wide world . . . We ask the Honourable government of our country which is known as Nyasaland, will there be any good prospects for the natives after the end of the war?”

He is saying, “In time of peace everything is for Europeans only. But in time of war . . . we are needed to . . . shed our blood in equality.”

And he’s asking, Will there be anything for us?

It’s not a pre-colonial revolt. It’s not an indigenous uprising. He’s educated, trained at a Baptist seminary in the United States. It’s an African elite, a modernised elite seeing that they can still not participate – even when they’ve done everything, jumped through the hoops. Even then there’s no end to the hoops to jump through, they will never be welcomed.

So it’s that. But how do we stage that letter to get its meaning? We’ve tried many, many different things and I think we’ve found a solution. There’s a shift between a piece of music and the

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Wk: words, and the music stops and the words are audible, and the music returns and is cut again—and a beautiful strange piece of archival sound gets repeated in different ways.

You were still telling us how you proceed, and that raises considerations about what does and does not get drawn.

But we were thinking about black squares.

Oh, ink and black squares.

Which is a metaphor for several activities: on the one hand the obliterating of knowledge, and on the other hand excavating; and identifying the perfect moment where both are possible, as if time both can and cannot move in two directions.

Okay. But also of course the question of what is there and not there in the excavation – what is and is not beneath the black square – is an idea in the Méliès films, with the self-portrait that is drawn, then is torn up. Somehow the artwork reconstitutes itself, remakes me, in an act of invisible mending, so that the drawn figure of me walks away from the picture. This can be repeated endlessly.

I wanted you to comment further on what you were saying, that the viewer always knows what’s going on.

Yes.

And then the viewer somehow fools herself. But it is remarkable in the Méliès, how mystifying it is, even though one could (hypothetically) work it out. There’s something in the kind of comic idiom of the Méliès pieces that completely beguiles your audience. Your audience does not know what’s happening: how you manage to pluck pages drifting through the air, and reconstitute them as a book, and things like that. There’s something inside the Chaplinesque idiom that takes us for a ride.

Okay, so that’s not pure luck. It is not accident. What is inside that illusion is a long rehearsal, as it were, in which we are trying to investigate the grammar of timing and action in each case, learning to read what happens with the camera running backwards.

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Wk: In the first film, Invisible Mending, I am a self-portrait that gets drawn and torn up and I then reconstitute myself. It had to do with learning how to reverse the way in which you tear a sheet of paper. That was the hardest thing, and that had to be learned. I had to not normally just tear a sheet of paper, but to tear it in a slightly unnatural way, so that when it is reversed it seems as if the hands are mending the paper. It becomes invisible, but only through artifice does it appear natural.

I don’t even begin to understand what you’re saying.

Normally you would just tear a sheet – so. But then if you run that backwards, that just looks wrong; it doesn’t look like mending. So, yes, we reverse the film, but the action of tearing itself actually had to be deliberate, not natural, so that it would read naturally as mending when reversed.

It’s not an act of ripping, but is a thousand little incremental tears.

So that when you run it in reverse it looks like you are repairing it diligently, properly, the way you would repair something. It is the pace of the activity, of the repair.

Gosh, how fascinating. This is an event as unseen that becomes seen.

And then with the book, when you throw it . . . and you are catching the sheets of paper, it’s how you throw the piece of paper. If you throw the piece of paper carelessly, easily, then when you reverse it the piece of paper comes up and your hand runs to meet it. That is not plausible. But if you throw the piece of paper, and pause with the hand in the air for a moment, and then you take the hand down, when you reverse the film, your hand goes up, it waits arrested, and then the piece of paper comes up to enter your hand.

Ah, gosh, that’s completely marvellous. So it is actually a grammar. You’re anticipating the flying page.

These are artifices. They are the kind of skills that one practises in preparation for that particular piece. In the same way that when you’ve got a bad paintbrush for the painting of the leaves of the tree, there’s a whole practising of how much ink goes on it,

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Wk: how hard do you press, what movements, in order to take advantage of that bad brush. It is not just a bad brush. There is a little wrist twist in order to give the swirl of the leaves, or the brush tip is at times just dropped on the page. How dry is the brush? All of those actions, which are, you know, the normal activities of an artist mastering whatever particular little technique they are working with. Not particularly difficult, but it’s not automatic.

No, but the interesting thing is . . .

The idea is not enough.

The idea is not enough.

The insight is not enough. The revelation is not enough.

So what’s great about this is that you’ve always been fairly dismissive of what you learned from Lecoq. It is without limit . . .

No, I’ve never been . . .

Yes, I know. That was carelessly articulated, because you ironise your poor skills as a would-be actor.

I’m not dismissive of Lecoq at all. I’m dismissive of my skill at using it.

I know, but what you are articulating here is how deeply embedded you are in a Lecoqian tradition.

In a Lecoqian tradition and in a tradition of practice, in such a way that musicians are expected to practise and . . .

Right, practice makes perfect.

Well, you know . . .

Endeavour, attention, regard.

And learning what it is you’re doing. P

endnote

Kentridge’s meditations and his aesthetic experiments hover between past and future, anticipation and recollection. The self looks contradictorily in both temporal directions, while attempting to locate itself in a hypothesised present – with a measure of accusation as part of the mix. This becomes an aesthetic as well as a moral enquiry: ‘What have I done? What have I not done?’ is akin to, ‘What have I drawn, or not drawn?’ Sins of commission and sins of omission. The lie and the line.

Kentridge’s philosophical work is produced through his aesthetic choices, in particular his use of the fugitive mark. His ‘signature’ film-making style is based on the filming of drawings in a constant state of flux as they are perpetually being erased, redrawn, supplemented.

Every presence is both a being and an event. Subjects are verbs, as objects are animated, and drawn marks appear and disappear, leaving jet trails in charcoal dust on his paper, signifying where characters and consciousnesses have shifted.

As a printmaker, too, Kentridge is constantly experimenting with the various ‘states’ of his prints. Contrary to popular conception, the print can be a fluid rather than a fixed and stable form. Kentridge reworks plates and manipulates the prints, overlaying brushstrokes on etched images, reworking and testing solutions as they become one of several possibilities. The ambiguities around the series and the singularity destabilise attempts to fix and authenticate uniqueness.

This engagement with printmaking and the multiple image is in part an impulse arising from Kentridge’s decades-long engagement with political art in the apartheid era, where the linocut print was integral to the agitprop image. Yet Kentridge’s art production has also sought to test the limits of a private vocabulary, with opaque references and puns, one-offs.

This exhibition allows the viewer to explore some of these textures of Kentridge’s mind’s eye, as he consumes the field that he has produced, commenting on what is yet to be drawn while attempting to hold on to that which has not been remembered.