A Conversation between Jane Taylor and William Kentridge

guide

Brief notes on the exhibits by William Kentridge and Jane Taylor

caviar

That Which We Do Not Remember, 2017 Woodcut print

William kentridge Let me describe the process briefly. On one table you have the wooden block, carved with all its indentations and raised surfaces. On another table you have a slab of glass and a square of black ink rolled in different directions by the heavy rubber roller which is used to transfer the ink on to the block of wood. The block of wood usually has many light areas; only certain raised sections are inked and then impressed when you print the image. You’re not so much aware of the thickness, the stickiness, of the ink, the mess and weight of the ink, as of the image that is represented in the print: the tree, the man, the people in the boat, the widows walking across the landscape.

But:

Nonetheless there’s something miraculous about the solidness and stickiness, the desire of the roller for the ink and the glass. That closeness. And the black square of That Which We Do Not Remember was made as a way of recording that pleasure of the stickiness of the ink, of the plain blackness. Yes, there are elements cut out and a trolley put underneath and some highlights that show the different grains of the wood, but essentially it’s the blackness of a rolled-up piece of ink.

The black square itself obviously has different histories, from the costume designs that Malevich made, as well as the famous painting Black Square that happened to come out of Malevich plundering bits of cloth from old costumes, one of which had a black square on it. It’s interesting to note the inauthentic origin even of that iconic image. And also to recall the use of printer’s ink to obliterate images, to force a disremembering of people, to cover over people who were no longer personae gratae in the Soviet Union and whose very names and memories needed to be destroyed. The blackness of the ink arose from the instruction that individual people should become part of that which we do not remember.

jane taylor And: those people, that process, the putting over the thick printer’s ink, which was known as ‘caviar’ in the Soviet times; the Black Square of Malevich; the costume designed for the theatre performances he was involved with – all, all sit somewhere inside the black ink. And those are the parts that we do remember. All the other parts, like the information that’s dropped into a black hole, we can only regret and know what we do not know.

The process is a compound one, in so many ways. The image arises from a double collage.

There’s a collage of the wood blocks, because there is an arrangement of the wood blocks that make the image, situating the different kinds of wood grains. There are seven or eight different woods used in the wood blocks. This is the first collage.

And the second collage is the collage of the sheets of paper that have been printed with the wood blocks, and their collage is not the same as the shapes and collage of the wood blocks underneath. The whole piece is edited with bits of the print being pulled out further, fragments from other prints being dropped in, and this then being traced on to a sheet of acetate to make a masterplan that I use to print the edition in the same pattern as the original improvised collage. P

The memory archive is much on our minds, caught as we are in a reiteration of our crimes and misdemeanours, both unaware and aware of That Which We Do Not Remember.

There is a pivotal work of memory, often understated, and that is the work of forgetting. We often misrepresent what it is that memory does. It holds, and it lets go.

Kentridge describes in the conversation section of this catalogue how the image of That Which We Do Not Remember comes to be one of the motifs drawn by him on the bank of the Tiber in Rome. P

LINE, HOLD STILL!

What Will Come (has already come), 2007 Anamorphic film

William kentridge

jane taylor A drawing reflected in a cylindrical mirror is inherently unstable.

A straight line drawn on a sheet of paper is turned into a parabola in the reflection. But it is an unreliable one. As your viewing distance to the cylindrical mirror changes, the parabola changes, getting a deeper or shallower curve. In order to draw what appears as a straight line on the mirror, a corresponding curve must be drawn on the sheet of paper. But the line cannot hold its rigidity. Move your head, and the straight line bends.

There is only one point from which the reflection is straight. Lift or lower your head and the line bends either at its edge or in the centre. Viewing becomes a balancing act. It gets worse, or better. The drawing on the paper sits firmly in its two dimensions. The reflection gets a quality of depth. The reflection is not on the surface of the mirror, but inside of its surface, varying in its apparent depth according to the focal distance. Marks closer to the bottom of the mirror are closer to the surface of the mirror (appear in the foreground), those at the edge of the paper appear further away, somewhere in the centre of the cylinder. A drawing of a landscape presents its own depth.

The mirror condenses the marks. A bean-shaped extended head on the paper becomes a conventionally proportioned head in the reflection: the marks in the extended drawing are condensed in the reflection. Midtones become richer. A whole new way of drawing has to be learned. Or rather it presents itself, inviting the artist to learn and revel in its grammar. P

Always, the Kentridge line is on the move. P

self-Portrait in tHe tHird Person

Ubu drawing (Cartographer), 1997 Drawing

William kentridge

jane taylor The Ubu projects, Ubu Tells the Truth and Ubu & the Truth Commission, arose out of a collision between two projects, one of which had to do with a live dancer and animated projections, and a separate project with Handspring Puppet Company about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which used the recorded archival evidence of witnesses from that commission. The two projects overlapped and I ran out of time and so the two were smashed together in the hope that the burlesque of Ubu and the archival images and texts from the Truth Commission would magnify rather than reduce each other.

For the series of eight Ubu etchings I needed a double image which used the convention of Jarry’s original drawings of Ubu (the pointed head, the round belly with a spiral on it); but I also needed something more fleshy and visceral. For that visceral element, the ball of my hand, my thumb or fingerprint served as a mark on the soft ground of the etching plate. The crinkles and marks of my thumbprint became the crinkles of an aged and damaged flesh in the Ubu character. P

It is worth noting that at roughly this moment of Kentridge’s creative output, in his Soho films the figure of the worldly Soho Eckstein becomes increasingly identified with the artist, and the blithe young man, Felix Teitelbaum, with whom the artist had been identified in the early films, exits the scene.

In the Ubu project Kentridge inserts himself into the frame of forensic investigation, implicating himself through the fingerprint which is also the mark with which he undertakes these ironised ‘self-portraits in the third person’. As artist and image he is both accuser and accused.

The cartographer is aligned with the project of empire, but also with Mercator’s projections, with perspectival arts, with modes of figuration. P

self-Portrait in tHe fourtH Person

Ubu drawing (Drawing Man), 1997 Drawing

William kentridge

jane taylor For the actual positions and drawings of the fleshy Ubu in these double prints, I needed a reference. I used photographs of myself doing the most ridiculous series of acts. These were not acts made by me, but as made by Ubu: riding a bicycle naked, doing a large gestural drawing while standing naked in the studio. These were things that were impossible for me to do, but very easy for that idiot who was performing Ubu. These photographs became the references for the fleshy fingerprint drawings of the character Ubu.

Long after the etchings were made, a series of large-scale quick drawings were made with ink, with bitumen, with turpentine, with charcoal dust, with pastel, with a bicycle riding over the surface of the paper – in order to produce a kind of enlarged finger-print of marks across the flesh of Ubu. In others there was sometimes literally a beating of the paper with a rope dipped in either ink or charcoal dust to make the body of Ubu out of the history of damage done to the piece of paper. So essentially the piece of paper is damaged with these series of marks and abrasions and acts, and then the figure is outlined in black paint, giving rise to the figure of Ubu as a shape filled with these markings. P

The art historian Joseph Leo Koerner has recently written about Kentridge’s art. One of Koerner’s celebrated studies is of Dürer and the moment of self-portraiture in German art. It is worth considering the Kentridge moments of self-portraiture in relation to Dürer’s great portrait of himself as Christ. Here we have, as it were, Kentridge as fallen man, if not anti-Christ. P

sometimes, sometimes not

Four Paper Heads, 2007 Three-dimensional lithographs

William kentridge What is evident here is the shift between drawing and sculpture, between a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional object. The Four Heads were dull portraits. Each one is made of two heads slotted into each other and the portrait is primarily drawn. It’s a two-dimensional form; two drawings interlinked and crossed into each other, so it’s somewhere between paper sculpture and sculpture and a series of lithographs. In fact, they were drawn on lithographic stone or lithographic plates and printed and stuck on to cardboard and stuck together.

And they’re a mixture. They’re play between sculpture and drawing, but they’re also play between a portrait – given in the drawings of the features of a face, the eye, the ear, the hair, the mouth – and texts which are printed and part of the lithographic image of the head. “Could anyone be so much like me? Awful”, was one of the texts which was made at the time of my production of Shostakovich’s Nose. In fact, what we had done was use leftover texts made for The Nose.

In some ways they arise out of the transformer figures in Confessions of Zeno, an image that shifts. You shift a shadow ninety degrees and your hand (which is the shape of a hand), when turned by ninety degrees, becomes a rather fat bubbly single line. Just that action of twisting your wrist changes something from a fat line to a clear hand. This is also the case if you have two shadows pasted to one stick at ninety degrees to one another. Revolve the stick, and you can get two different images; one shadow puppet that makes two very different figures. P

jane taylor Kentridge had worked in these idioms in the opera we had developed (Confessions of Zeno). Kentridge notes that his early sculptural experiments were informed by his admiration for Giacometti. What has always intrigued me is that when Kentridge began to make sculptures, his early experiments were in the form of shadows, figures that are fundamentally two-dimensional. In such terms he was setting himself an impossible task, to make three-dimensional works out of two-dimensional images. I ask him about the quandary.

This is his instructive response:

I’m not a sculptor. I’m really not a sculptor. I’ve made a lot of sculpture, but it’s made as a drawing. Sometimes extruding something into space, sometimes working with the flatness of it, sometimes with the illusion of coherence of an image and allowing it to find itself. But I am not carving and not ‘finding something inside’ the material. I am not using a chisel the way I would use an eraser, where you can cut something off and repair it. The tact of a sculptor is always to be approaching the figure, and to stop when he reaches it. P

long-term draWing

Self-portrait, 1998 Diptych drawing

William kentridge You can’t escape who you are. Whatever the subject, in the end it is a reflection of yourself, your desires and fears. The ostensible self-portrait is only the most obvious exemplar. The geography of the head, the relation of nose to eyes and ears, the geometries of facial recognition are what we think of when we imagine a portrait. (And I am really not good at this. I always am drawn to watching the pavement portraitists making their quick – and often accurate – likenesses, trying to see how they get the proportions right.) My drawings often correspond to the description of a portrait as “a drawing of a face in which there is something wrong with the mouth”.¹

But the self-portrait is there also in the tentativeness of the drawing, or its decisive certainty, its arrogance, its beautiful marks. To paraphrase Graham Greene, “love of mark is love of self”.

Looking more widely, the self-portrait is also there in the subjects the artist chooses over the decades – and the negative self-portrait in the subjects avoided. A self-portrait of coffee pots and rhinoceroses. And the open space of that which is not drawn. P

1

John Singer Sargent is quoted as having said, “A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth,” and also, “Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend.”

jane taylor In the collection of drawings published as Everyone Their Own Projector, Kentridge includes a profile self-portrait, which is bounded by the two statements: “you Will find no neW landS / you Will find no other SeaS”. This double concession situates the hubristic being (in Freud’s terms, the bolstered ego of “His Majesty the Baby”) in relation to the reality principle. It simultaneously locates Kentridge as an heir to a colonial tradition, whether accepted or not, in which the grand imperative to voyage and conquer is at least in part constitutive of the self. Here ambition wrestles with an innate self of inevitable limitations, potential failure.

In recent works Kentridge has taken himself as his subject matter. However, here he is generally making antiheroic figures, crossed by ambiguity, very often expressed through multiples or doubles. P

You Will find no neW lands

Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008 Artist’s book

William kentridge All I could remember were seven things I had forgotten. As if thoughts could spin a barbed-wire cocoon of calm. It had to do with . . . It had to do with Reliable anti-futurists. Refuse the three-point perspective. Follow the minutes of a long hour. A biography becomes a series of dots. Here it ended further. P

jane taylor In an early experiment Kentridge generated a cycle of drawings, many of which were deployed on the recto and verso pages of a book to suggest the double-sided figure of a man and his nose, as two aspects of one being. This inaugurated a particular mode of inventiveness within the book form for Kentridge, and his exuberant embrace of the double image (as explored in the stereoscopic experiments) continued to flourish. The dialogue between left- and right-hand pages has a contrapuntal playfulness.

Kentridge provides me with the following notes on the book:

This was one of the first books I made where I tried to find the balance between something you read and something you look at. There are drawings and there is a text that floats across the book, not as a coherent argument, but at the edges of being a coherent argument. The book was published by Captures, an imprint of Éditions Valérie Cudel, a French publisher of artists’ books. They do about two books a year. I also did the Cyclopedia of Drawing with Captures, which is the second flip book that I had made. P

Preamble

Parcours d’atelier, 2007 Drawing

William kentridge

jane taylor You have the drawing, the fact of the drawing, and you have the making of the drawing. And the drawing itself is a record of the history of its making. All the damage, marks, destructions, whatever is done to the sheet of paper is more or less visible and present in the final image of the drawing, but can be reconstructed as the history of the making of the drawing.

But there is also a preamble to the making of the drawing, which is invisible on the drawing. This has to do with the gathering of the energy for the beginning of the mark of the drawing. With me, that’s circling the studio. Many laps walking around the studio trying to gather the energy in the muscles, in the impulse before the paper is touched. It’s the circling and the gathering of energy interrupted by procrastinations – by looking at the e-mail, by choosing which piece of music to listen to, by making a cup of tea, by putting the cat out, by changing the music, by checking the e-mail once more – until there is a circling and a gathering and an energy arrives for the first impulse to be made. And from that first impulse, the drawing becomes visible.

With Parcours d’atelier, what I wanted to show was all the invisible drawing that is there before the first mark is made, the thought before the first word is spoken. No, more than that. The incoherent darting around to different fragments of thought that leap from one idea to another before they are stilled into the practice of the words in your head, before the word is spoken. P

This process is not knowable from outside, except by its traces, the works of art. P

tHe neW era

Telegrams from the Nose, 2007 Nine drawings

William kentridge

jane taylor A man wakes up to find that he has lost his nose. Nikolai Gogol writes a short story about the man’s attempts to find the missing proboscis and to reattach it to his face. Gogol considers the story that he has just recounted, concluding that it is a strange and improbable tale. Not only is it very odd for a nose to disappear from a man’s face, only to reappear baked inside a loaf of bread, but it’s even more absurd to imagine that he could persuade the newspaper to let him take out an advertisement looking for his nose. This is not about money. It is about the impropriety of the newspaper and advertisements for lost noses. “Why do authors write stories like this?” Gogol asks. “It’s no good for the country, although in truth it does no harm either. But why write about it? Such things may happen, but they do not happen often.” P

In working toward his 2010 production of Shostakovich’s The Nose (for the New York Met), Kentridge engaged in an almost endless exploration of visual languages, seeking to find a way to represent the human nose as a character on what is physically one of the world’s largest stages.

The drawings find ways of exploring various modernist text forms, figure the visual field of censorship and comment on modernity and Soviet media idioms. P

tHe over–determined brancH

The Over–determined Branch, 2013 Drawing

William kentridge The book demands its meaning. Burying earth in earth. Flavouring water with water. Ink over ink. Even as I read the poem, I miss the poem.

The gathering together of a dictionary. A page of the dictionary comes towards you, but what comes is not only the words and the meaning of the words, but the image of the Victorians in the garden shed and their index cards upon which they are gathering their meanings. People around the world, readers around the world, send in the etymologies on the index cards to become part of the vast project of making the dictionary.² Specific entries reach you, but there is also a flowering and enleafing of the trunks and branches that flow through the brain, of associations, phrases, thoughts, memories that were neither there in the pages, nor present in your head before the pages.

A dictionary is not the same size as a head, although it is quite close, and the thousands of pages in the dictionary do not even begin to match the uncountable number of thoughts, associations, flashes of ideas that zoom around inside the head. But nonetheless there is something of the weight and pages enclosed within the covers of a dictionary that has an association with the memories, the thoughts, the knowledges of different kinds, that we have inside our heads. And the drawings on the different pages of the book do not try to give a map of the way they think, but rather put a marker for the processes, unpredictability and marvels of association that we produce in our heads all the time. P

2

Simon Winchester’s book The Surgeon of Crowthorne recounts the making of the Oxford English Dictionary by means of countless Victorian voluntary public contributions.

jane taylor Kentridge mails me a note: “‘Even as I read the poem, I miss the poem’ was sparked by a fabulous haiku by Basho which maybe you could find, about while walking in Kyoto, I miss Kyoto.”

Even in Kyoto –Hearing the cuckoo’s cry –

I long for Kyoto P

tHe same but different

The Hope in the Charcoal Cloud, 2014 Drawing

William kentridge The pages of a book are like the frames of a film: four hundred pages for a good book, a thousand pages for a long book. Not quite the same as the hundred and fifty thousand frames for a hundred-minute film, but nonetheless dividing a large project into a discrete number of individual images or frames that can be looked at by themselves.

When one is looking at a film, the frames themselves disappear, and if one does an animation on a clear sheet of paper, the support of the film also disappears and what you see is the subject moving: the person lifting his arm, walking across a field. But if one is drawing on the pages of a book like a dictionary, or any book which has pages each of which is slightly different even though their form is the same, you become aware of the flickering of the frame in the background. You’re made aware that the movement is constructed by these fragments, which signal the passage of time.

The different flickering changes of the pages as each frame goes past (and in fact each page is held for two frames – that is to say for a twelfth of a second, and not a twenty-fifth of a second as it would be if one turned a page on every frame) also have within them an anxiety for what we have missed.

What was that last page? What was that last page? What was that last page? – Even as the next one has come, and gone, and passed.

jane taylor The anxiety is not dissimilar from the panic of hours, days, minutes, months disappearing so irrevocably. One walks through the world but walking with you are all those invisible things around you: anxieties, desires, thoughts, wishes for what one would be or who one is, like the texts flickering behind the figures on the pages of the book.

Yes, I know that is there, but really it’s also about the shape, the font, the columns of text, the tooth of the paper, being held by the odd words of the dictionary that jump out at you while you’re in the process of drawing:

ogee, obloid, omphaloS, ovoid . . . P

Kentridge invites me to add words to the potentially infinite list, but I conjure up only three:

odiferouS, obfuScating, oink. P

groWing a tree

2nd Hand Reading, 2013 Ink drawing

William kentridge

jane taylor To live with a tree for fifty years is a sign of privilege and surplus. To not need the tree for either wood or fire is a luxury. When I was nine years old we planted some white stinkwoods in the garden, two white stinkwood trees in the garden. All my childhood I waited for the trees to grow, to be strong enough to hold a hammock. They refused. Twenty years later I returned to live in the house with my family and the tree was mature. Fifteen years later, the trees were magnificent. And then one of them was struck by lightning and died. The shock, not just the hole in the shade canopy, the gap in the garden, but rather the shaking of the belief that a tree is a gift for future generations or – if not for future generations – then at least for other people . . . Its lifespan should be so much longer. How could the tree die before me? No. If the tree could die, how vulnerable are we or am I?

I’d really meant to write about the making of the tree page by page, growing it from the trunk up, filling the branches with paper leaves and with the marks of the bad brush, the ink in the bark: a tree you could disassemble into its pages and hide in a library, like hiding a book in a forest. P

Kentridge has a deep sense of the matter of his artistic practice, and so the paper and the charcoal are both in a substantial way (literally so) present for him in tree. It is thus rather striking to observe the teasing out of thought, as Kentridge considers his material resources.

Johannesburg is by repute the largest human-made forest in the world, with over ten million trees. This reputation serves to register the massive asymmetries of wealth and ease within a city built on mine labour, with sprawling townships that are marked for their treelessness. It is striking that the tree (as paper, as charcoal, as wood, as organic presence) is so powerful in Kentridge’s sensibility, and integral to his creative endeavour. P

Poems i used to KnoW i

Receiver, 2005 Book of Wislawa Szymborska poems and William Kentridge etchings

four a.m.

The hour between night and day. The hour between toss and turn. The hour of thirty-year-olds.

The hour swept clean for roosters’ crowing. The hour when the earth takes back its warm embrace. The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars. The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace.

Empty hour. Hollow. Vain. Rock bottom of all the other hours.

No one feels fine at four a.m. If ants feel fine at four a.m., we’re happy for the ants. And let five a.m. come if we’ve got to go on living.

—Wislawa Szymborska³ P

3

Szymborska, Wislawa. Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997: translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. New York, 1998: p 9.

Poems i used to KnoW ii

Seven additional unbound prints for Receiver, 2005 Etchings

William kentridge A book is often understood to be a support for its content, whether image or text, or both. It is in these terms both material and immaterial.

And: materially, books classically arise as the embedding of ideas in the matter of paper and ink. Many books, particularly artists’ books, have particular emphases on some or other of these elements. With the standard press, the starting point is the typeface and, more than that, the metal typeface hitting the paper, the letterpress printing, the hot lead casting of the typefaces, the rooms and rooms of rows and drawers of letters waiting to be used.

Dieu Donné, the publisher and collaborator on Receiver, is a paper mill – and it is from the idea of the paper that the book was to develop. What kind of paper, what thickness, what kind of images can be on it? This then became a question of considering what thought, what series of images or texts, might relate to that paper, might in fact arise from that paper.

With Receiver we were working with the wonderful printer Randy Hemminghaus and the impossible paper of abaca, which in some ways is the enemy of etching. It’s hard, it’s unabsorbent, all the things that you don’t want a sheet of paper to have if it’s going to record all the finest details of the plate. In this case, the book is a battle between the printmaker and the paper in forcing the paper to accept the fineness of the line without destroying it. And in fact many, many copies of each print did destroy the paper. And it’s a testament to the tact of the papermaker and of the printer who enabled us to print etchings on these hard but semi-transparent abaca sheets of paper.

jane taylor And then of course comes the question of what the book will be about, what images will be there, what the meaning of them together will be. But with Receiver, Szymborska’s poems are vital. The etchings that I’ve made have their place there, but when handling the book it becomes about the question of the nature of these objects we have been so tied to for so many centuries. It is about the nature of the book itself.

What is the difference between reading and looking? Does one read an image in the same way one reads a poem? There is some evidence that these habits are culturally specific and the way a picture is read in the West is informed by the ways in which we read text, but that this is not universal. When one reads a poem, does one also allow one’s eye to jump back to different lines and phrases within the poem as a secondary reading?

All of the images in the catalogue are deeply mediated, translated (as it were) because of changes in context, scale, media. In this instance the particular shift arises because of the difference in paper, an often invisible support. P

Kentridge notes that the book was made as a gift to his wife, Anne, as Szymborska is her favourite poet. The images were made especially for the book, but not the poems. So it was not a collaboration as such, but rather “both of us bringing work to it”. P

Panic Picnic

Walking Man, 2000 Linocut print

William kentridge

jane taylor A man takes the only job he can find: that of a watchdog. In the end he becomes that dog, with his speech finally giving way to barking. This nightmare/dream is from an agitprop piece of theatre in which I performed, back in the 1980s. (I played the boss in a pinstripesuit.)

Here, by analogy, is the man carrying the tree, who becomes the tree. My references, too, are also surely from Ovid’s exploration of the panic that accompanies all metamorphoses. Trying to escape a husband’s murderous rage, a woman turns into a bird and flies away. Daphne, fleeing the attentions of Apollo, turns into a laurel tree.

And of course Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane.

I thought of none of these connections while making the linocut, but I presume all were there in some antechamber of the brain, watching my blindness. P

Several years ago, when I was working with Kentridge on making a new opera, Confessions of Zeno, based on a novel by Italo Svevo, we committed ourselves to making dream figures that were shadow puppets that stalked the horizon of our primary character’s mental landscape. Several of the figures were prototransformers, figures who had two distinct profiles and could switch from one to another within an elegant and pretty easy swivel of the puppet from one profile to another, changing from innocent figure to bizarre conglomerate. At some point these dreamscapes were historically grounded, as WWI entered the frame of the work and persons and trees began to merge into one another, stalking across the landscape. These figures in some ways gave rise to Kentridge’s experiments in two- and three-dimensional forms, with figures that read as one thing in a particular frame, and as something else if read from ninety degrees. P

calcium carbonate

Learning the Flute, 2003 Projection on blackboard

William kentridge

jane taylor A blackboard, a stick of chalk. The materials are enough to set everything in motion. Dots of white on black. The night sky. The swipe of a cloth. The luminous grey of the nebula in Orion, the haze of the Milky Way. Join the dots and you have constellations. Not necessarily the impossible constellations of the Greeks, but contemporary images waiting to be seen in the sky (a boot, a spade, a primus stove – these, in the theatre production of Woyzeck; the first time I had made these constellations). In the Zauberflöte there are constellations of Isis, of Anubis, of the sphinx. Draw an ellipse and you have both a school geometry lesson and the orbit of a planet. Set the drawings in motion (draw, rub out, redraw, rub out, redraw . . .). Fit the perigee and apogee to the crescendos and diminuendos of the voice and the singer moves all the heavens . . . P

. . . and our souls. The conjunctions of cosmic and the aural sublime meet one another, declaiming the mathematical necessity in composition.

The earliest flutes are made from bone. A flute that is 35,000 to 40,000 years old was found about a decade ago, in a trove of human detritus in a cave, Hohle Fels, just north of the Danube Valley (near to where the earliest Homo sapiens would have crossed to Europe from Africa). This flute is broken off at one end, but has five finger-holes, apparently carved by stone tools. These various bone flutes have afforded the cave the status of a World Heritage Site.

DNA has been extracted from human femur bone fragments from the Hohle Fels cave. P

vieW-master

Drawing for Preparing the Flute, 2005 Tondo drawing

William kentridge The images I recall would have been the size of the nail of my baby finger now, although I suppose for a child they would have been the size of a child’s thumb-nail.

I am thinking of a miniature series of images put into a plastic View-Master – in fact they were made of Bakelite, in my memory. There was a trigger one would depress to advance the images, and in astonishing three-dimensionality we would have whole worlds revealed to us.

The circular drawing for Learning The Flute is a miniature of the large projection, but it is also an enlargement from that minute scale of the View-Master in which I imagined people performing on theatre stages who had been shrunk down to even smaller figures that would fit into a gramophone to play the music on records. These are illusions from my childhood.

A tondo is always disconcerting. We lose the certainty of a horizon line, the edge of a frame that gives us the clarity of what’s up and what’s down, and one can set the world spinning by imagining or actually setting the tondo or circular drawing in motion. So it is a movement, a sky map, a printed book, or it has a circular sky map turning, as in the night sky for the ‘Queen of the Night’ aria in The Magic Flute. Or it shows different windows into the world which one sees either in a stereoscopic View-Master slide or in the different windows that make up the circular drawing for the image in The Magic Flute. P

jane taylor Kentridge has in various ways explored strategies for representing the danse macabre of the human being moving through time and space. The tondo is a space/time compression of the alternative strategy to the ‘Progress’ form deployed in several recent works. The tondo has the advantage of hypothetical infinity, as the pursuit has no delimited end. The image is in the form used by Kentridge in his theatre work, with drawings arrayed around a disc that is spun and filmed in order to create visual dynamism or, in certain cases, the illusion of movement or passage.

His Refusal of Time and his What Will Come (has already come) are both structured simultaneously inside a scrutiny of linear/ historical time as well as the reiterative temporality of trauma’s repetitions and regression. Many of his works seem to be seeking to manage both of these operations at once. This motif will be addressed in the comments below on Tide Table.

An early experiment with figures trapped pacing back and forth inside a closed form can be found in Medicine Chest, a film that represents the shelves of the medicine cabinet as miniature horizons which do not release their captives. P

PaPer tHeatre

Drawing for Preparing the Flute, 2005 Drawing

William kentridge A model has been made of a theatrical stage and a drawing is done to fit the model. From this drawing a canvas painting is done, a theatre backdrop forty times the size of the original drawing, fifteen metres wide rather than eighty centimetres wide. But the paper drawing is the original and, in a way, the miniature theatre with which I have worked in my studio is the original. The painted canvas backdrop is the copy – a rather bloated copy. The singers feel like bloated enlargements of the paper cut-out figures that I have been moving around inside the model. One is caught between wanting to see the model as a miniature version of the stage production (which is a model of the huge world) and, when we do see the huge world, imagining it as an enlargement of the stage show (which is itself an inflated studio toy theatre).

The drawing is a drawing in itself, but it is an applied drawing, a drawing made in the service of what it will become as it is bastardised into the large painted backdrop on the stage. Its position is indeterminate: on the one hand absolutely the original – on the other hand, simply a preparatory and necessary stage in something that will be achieved on stage. But of course, the stage production is finished and gone; even the model is no longer there, and what remains is the original drawing, eighty centimetres wide. P

jane taylor Kentridge here thinks aloud about the relation between the work of art and the applied work of art, in a sense asking himself about the distinction he is making between the two. There is a substantial discussion of these questions in the final third of the ‘conversation’ pages in this catalogue. There he considers his often rather enigmatic drawings that are constituted out of bureaucratic lists – names of the dead, or lists of supplies. These textual inscriptions provide evidence of what the archive has shown: that the compelling trace of a human tragedy is as likely to be held in an accounting record or a bill of sale as in a drawing of human beings in human pursuits. Such documents are necessary for the colonial endeavour and in the pursuit of capital accumulation. Kentridge also meditates on those drawings that he generates as ‘seconds’ – rough disposables that originate as working copies of finished drawings. These looser versions are understood by Kentridge to be produced in order to be sacrificed to the time arts of his film-making (where a drawing will be ‘covered over’ or ‘ruined ‘ in some way). However, on occasion, these rough versions end up providing him with greater aesthetic joy, as they are less arch than the originals as works; and so in the end, on occasion, the first drawing will be the one sacrificed to the film-maker, and the duplicate will step up to become the elevated drawing. P

catcHing neutrinos

Bird Catching, from The Magic Flute, 2006 Suite of ten etchings

William kentridge An etching is the record of damage done. It leaves the traces of the damage done to the copper plate. Every abrasure, every line etched into it, every biting bitten into the copper by an acid is there, it is held, and will be released as evidence when the print is made.

In a way, the etching is a hard negative; a negative in copper, rather than the familiar chemical processing of a photographic negative to make the positive print. Here there is the inking, the hand-wiping, the dampening of the paper, and the sending of the paper through the press. This reveals not the tonal opposite of the negative, but rather the mirror opposite of the negative plate. It’s a kind of alchemy of copper: catching the time of the hand with the burin or engraving tool or dry-point needle that was used to gouge into the copper, to leave a mark of damage. Everything is held in the copper. Whether it is Papageno jumping to catch birds or the birds in flight, it is about capturing time, the time of making, in the copper.

The birds are all taken from the pages of Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa, an ornithological guidebook that shows that one can most effectively capture the bird as species in a watercolour rather than a photograph. Any photograph will represent the bird as an individual, with its own tail feathers, its own curious cap of inky black markings, its own beak. The photographs give the detail of the specific individual, but not the generic character of the bird group, which is where the drawings succeed.

But still, I wish these were better portraits of birds. P

jane taylor For some years Kentridge has been engaged with making portraits of birds. One significant hyperrealist work, almost forensic in its observation, was a massively upscaled drawing of a dead dove that had been found in the garden. In recent years Kentridge has made several bird portraits of varying wit and elegance, often with rapid but deft brushstrokes and marks that gesture toward classes of birds but that resist the imperative to be any individual one. More recently much of his attention has been diverted from the bird study to the exploration of birds in flight. One might postulate that classification and migration have been folded into a single question of the fixing of identity.

Other Faces is a recent film that develops these enquiries through looking at the autobiography in relation to lineage, mobility, generation and geography. It uses the flight of birds as a key metaphor for ‘the fugitive’, with regard both to memory and person. P

even noW

Drawing for Woyzeck on the Highveld, 1992 Drawing

William kentridge “If we ever get to heaven, we’d have to help make the thunder.” Büchner was writing about the desperation of poverty in 1837. Woyzeck on the Highveld was made in 1992 and Büchner’s equation of poverty, desperation and ‘the bleakness of life becoming the bleakness of landscape’ held true. The question of doing the production was a question of trying to make sense of the continuity rather than the differences between the military world of Prussia and the industrial and (almost) postindustrial world of South Africa.

It is an unredeemed landscape. One has a sense in Johannesburg of the mine-owners living in the leafy suburbs with a lush softness around them; that the world they have created and upon which their leafiness depends is this bleak world of civil engineering, dry grass and harsh light. For them, the inside of a factory is where the work is done that generates the surplus they demand, and from which they can retreat, but for the people working there, the Woyzecks, this is all their world from which there is no escape. |The burnt dry landscape is their world.

I started calling myself an artist in my thirties when I discovered not just the necessity but the pleasure of drawing the landscape just to the south of Johannesburg, to the south of the leafy suburb I lived in. And also when I discovered the pleasure of a soft chamois leather dipped into charcoal dust and wiped across the white surface of the paper, leaving not just a train of dark charcoal grit on the paper but also of a darkening sky above a light horizon. P

jane taylor Woyzeck on the Highveld was Kentridge’s first collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, and it precipitated an ongoing endeavour in mutual provocation that has lasted for decades. One of the important disclosures that arose from this inaugural joint venture was the discovery that a landscape drawn and filmed by Kentridge can, in the puppet theatre, function in several ways at once. Most significantly, it can provide a ‘virtual set’ if it is filmed and projected on to the back wall of the puppet theatre. In this sense it provides the illusion of a literal, three-dimensional space within which the action can be dramatised. At the same time, with the incremental supplement of various signifying details, the landscape as drawn could include various elements that might allude to a texture of mood or provide a symbolic and metaphoric subtext of a scene, or even suggest the inner landscape of a character, providing an environment within which the thought and affective universe of the puppet might be represented. P

all tHat WalK

Nose 1 (Scissors), 2007 Bronze

William kentridge the general: In Gogol’s short story and in Shostakovich’s opera the need of Kovalyov is to find his nose and the need of the nose is to stay absent, to abscond. In order to abscond, what the nose needs are legs. It does not need arms, it does not need a back. And the legs – in the scale model – are anything that has the principle of propulsion and ambulatory movement inside them. So every pair of scissors, every set of geometrical compasses, every calliper, every pair of secateurs has in their pivot, in the centre, the possibility of legs walking. And if you turn a pair of scissors upside down or work with a pair of secateurs, it’s not that one has to imagine them as legs; the idea of legs arises from within the secateurs. It doesn’t take great imagination to see the pair of scissors as a pair of legs. It takes an act of blindness to not see them as a pair of legs.

the Specific: But to put a nose on stage one needs a nose that a person can hide inside in order to move about, so a small retroussé snub nose would not work. One needs a nose with a certain heft. For this I used a good Ashkenazi Jewish nose, I suppose a self-portrait, the nose as a self-portrait. One can do a self-portrait in many different forms. This would be ‘nose as self-portrait’ but one could as easily make a ‘coffee pot as self-portrait’. Or a self-portrait of all the objects one has drawn or made and a negative self-portrait in all those, in the gaps left, seeing oneself in the gaps left of all the objects not drawn and subjects not completed. So if the nose walking is a self-portrait, then I suppose the legs have to, in one sense or another, also be a portrait of my legs, in which case the rather thin handles of a pair of pliers or tin snips seem more appropriate than the moulded and shaped and fat legs of a pair of secateurs.

jane taylor The books on which the nose stands (the sculpture-stand) are a kind of miniature plinth, and because a lot of the work on the opera The Nose started with a theatrical model, many of the household objects used in that theatrical model – say, the bottom half of a moka coffee pot as the base for a table – in fact became the model for what was enlarged on stage. So the coffee table we had on stage was simply an enlargement of the moka coffee pot we’d used in the model. There’s always a shrinking and expansion, and it’s difficult to say which is primary and which is secondary. Is the stage the primary and the model the secondary, although the coffee pot and the thin legs of the pair of tin snips are the actual primary? Are the thin legs of the tin snips trying to copy my legs or are my legs longing to be the tin snips? P

Irresistible anthropomorphism. So that is your practice? P

tHe Passionate absurd

I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008 Installation of eight projections

William kentridge I have named these scenes ‘the passionate absurd’ – and I mean, not ‘absurd’ in the sense of a joke, a folly, or the ridiculous, but rather to invoke a logic that has gone awry, where the rules of logic cease to apply.

I have quoted from the plenary session in which Stalin’s sometime favourite, Bukharin, is having to battle for his life against the accusations of the Central Committee, much as others had in prior years battled to save themselves from Bukharin’s ideological violence. Ironically, Bukharin is caught up within his own mistrust of language. To the Party’s insistence that he should be thrown into prison, he can respond only with the plea, “Comrades, I am speaking sincerely.” Their rejoinder is “Oh, we accuse you sincerely.”

He asks of Stalin, “But Comrade Stalin, I need to know, when you said I was guilty, did you really think I was guilty or were you being strategic?”

Here a lie is acceptable if it is in the service of something else, such as, in this instance, the Party. The grim court records include the note, at several points, “Laughter in the room”, leaving a linguistic trace of the ethos of vicious factional fighting and character assassination.

I am conscious on reflection here of the use of grotesque cartoons in Ubu & the Truth Commission as one means of considering textures of meaning behind the Truth Commission hearings. One brings these things into a dialogue not in order that they cancel each other out but so that the juxtaposition will amplify the meanings implicit in both.

In working on Ubu & the Truth Commission we were committed to exploring how closely one could bring the grotesque and the serious into a productive collision through art. Because of the strange discomfort of the absurdity of the cartoon drawings, one could somehow observe the archival images with greater clarity. P

jane taylor Shostakovich’s opera The Nose is the composer’s response to the violent absurdity of the times in which he lived, and is at the same time a tribute to the comic genius of Gogol. Kentridge situates his interpretation precisely within his own world historical context while deploying the archive of Stalin’s notorious show trials that oversaw the purging and execution of countless political opponents. Bukharin was a Bolshevik and a significant ideologue, and his Imperialism and World Economy influenced Lenin, even though Bukharin would come to be regarded with some suspicion by Lenin for his links with the European Left and his antistatism. Bukharin contributed to Stalin’s paper of great significance for South African history, Marxism and the National Question. He had worked closely with Lenin and Trotsky, and his Bolshevik convictions gave him a leading place as editor of Pravda – the party media instrument that terrorised Shostakovich for much of his career, which Stalin would use to accuse the composer of ‘formalism’.

Over the years Bukharin moved from his position as a leftist economic theorist to the right, becoming aligned with Stalinist economic policies. He rose to become General Secretary of the executive committee of the Comintern and was aligned against Trotsky; however, he deviated from Stalin’s position on forced collectivisation, and wrote of the brutalising damage done to communists involved in the slaughter of the kulaks: “They are no longer human beings. They have truly become the cogs in a terrible machine.”⁴ Ultimately Bukharin was outmanoeuvred and his shifts in ideology were used against him. Personal documents and tapped conversations provided evidence in a grim and often grotesque show trial, that turned on a fine-grained interpretation of sincerity. He was executed in 1938. The characterisation of Bukharin as the type of ‘the nose’ suggests the mortal intimacy of the Stalinism regime. P

4

Nicolaevsky, Boris. Power and the Soviet Elite. New York, 1965: pp 18-19.

a draWing as big as tHe World

Drawing for 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, 2003 Collage drawing

William kentridge Borges writes about the ambitious geographer who wanted such an accurate map of the world that it was drawn at a scale of one-toone, ultimately covering every object with a map that matches it in size. The drawing for the Méliès films is a real-scale drawing. In other words, it is not a drawing of the theatre set, of the backdrop to the projection; rather, it is the backdrop for the making of the film, with chairs drawn to an exact scale as a virtual copy of real chairs. The marks are not representations of a drawing used in the film, but are the actual sheets of paper that we used in the film, which hover between being drawings in themselves and the film – that is, a record of the film which can itself vary in scale when shown, depending on the size of the projection. It has thus far never been projected at full scale; it’s always been shown considerably smaller – almost as if one has to expand the screen to the size of a room in order to make the film, and then contract it back down again, back into the insides of the camera, and from there into the insides of the projector, and then back on to the projected surface of the screen or wall.

It’s rather like an enlargement of those old backdrops that people would stand in front of in order to have their photographs taken, or the more archaic costume cut-outs in the photographer’s studio, with a space for the photographed subject to position their head in order to be photographed within some other world or context. My mimicry was of my studio and my spaceship as one thing. It was as if I drew the context (the inside of the spaceship) and then stood in front of it, in order to be inside the spaceship. This was done at the scale of myself. Drawing my studio and putting drawings on my wall, to resemble a studio with drawings on the wall, reminded me of the Borgesian endeavour. Here is a one-to-one scale-drawing of the studio placed into the studio in order to remind myself that I am in the studio, and that the journey to the moon doesn’t need to step beyond the bounds of the studio itself. P

jane taylor Kentridge has often noted that he constantly reworks questions that he has explored elsewhere. The photographer’s studio backdrop is a significant element in the film Other Faces, when bystanders posing for a street photographer observe an episode of road rage as two drivers whose cars have collided engage in robust verbal sparring, each of them contesting for their right to dominate the road. i am nothing & Should be everything is flashed across the screen, as if a cosmic conflict is under way.⁵

The onlookers stand posing in front of the taut screens of cloth that constitute two-dimensional ‘figures’ of alternate worlds, contesting realities. P

5

This is a quotation from Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

i film mY eigHt-Year-old son

7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, 2003 Installation of nine film projections

William kentridge

jane taylor I film my eight-year-old son. He takes some pencils, some sheets of paper and a jar of black ink. With a sweep of his arm he throws the ink across the studio. It runs down the wall, and the throws the pencils over his shoulder. He tears the sheets of paper and scatters them.

We run this film in reverse. And there is a utopian return to perfection. The papers reconstruct themselves. Without looking, he catches all the pencils as they arrive above his shoulder. He does not drop one. In the jar he catches the ink. He does not spill a drop. The wall is pristine. My son’s joy at his skill is overflowing. “Can I do it again?” he asks. “Yes,” I say, “but first we have to pick up the paper, gather the pencils and clean the wall.” P

While Kentridge was working toward his production of Mozart’s Magic Flute, he produced his 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, an exploration of the creative act which was also a meditation on the buffo comedy that enabled his interpretation of the birdcatcher, Papageno, in the opera.

In The Magic Flute the circling motif of a nucleus inside an atom is analogous to the spiralling spheres of the planets. This is a question of scale. In the Day for Night tribute to Méliès’s film oeuvre, a column of ants is induced by Kentridge to follow sugar trails, and is filmed; the film is then digitally flipped into the negative, so that the ants can become pulsing white micro-organisms dancing as constellations in an infinite night sky.

The meditation on the inversions of dark/light and day/night involves cinematic questions, certainly, about the classic cinema trick of filming in the day and changing the light values in order for a scene to read as night; however, within the context of Kentridge’s production of Mozart’s Magic Flute, it is also a meditation on the goods and evils of the Enlightenment (and its colonial legacies), which provides a filter for interpreting the opera’s contest between the Queen of the Night and Sarastro.

This battle is composed by Mozart as a contest between two vocal ranges pushed to the extreme: at the high end the soprano has to cope with F6 and at the low end Sarastro must manage F2. P

time in tHe greY Pages

Second-hand Reading, 2013 Flip-book film

William kentridge 6 jane taylor This film is in a technical dialogue with my long-term exploration of the history of film and animation. It appears at a glance to be a filmed version of a flip book, with pages being rapidly ‘flipped’ to reveal various images of the figure of a man in perpetual agitated movement back and forth across the page, at times loping, at times pacing or running. The figure remains trapped always within the margins of each page, and never stepping into the gutter (as it were). The work is technically not a flip book but is made through projecting drawings of a pacing figure on to filmed pages of a book being turned, rather than figures actually being drawn on these pages. ⁶

One’s experience is like that of viewing a flip book, but it is also like a zoetrope because it’s one action that repeats itself again and again endlessly with a kind of circular form, that spirals the man back and forth without his ever escaping any one single page. This is suggestive for me of Borges’s Book of Sand, a book which ostensibly

has neither beginning nor ending. P

The introductory conversation in this catalogue (page 18) discusses how Secondhand Reading arose in response to an invitation to consider a commission. That prompt arose from a curator giving Kentridge an oral account of a historical political prisoner who died incarcerated in a castle, and who had spent his years pacing back and forth. He was expecting his imminent release by a brother, though it was that brother who was ultimately responsible for his prolonged captivity. In some terms, the ‘second-hand reading’ might describe the oral report given to Kentridge, or it might suggest the status of the trapped figure who is making his

way through the book via an act of pacing, while we register this as an act of reading. The circular form discussed is a film, and thus a linear work that extends across time, but it is also in a dialogue with Kentridge’s tondo works, such as his drawing for Preparing the Flute. P

counting stitcHes

Tableau des Finances et du Commerce de la partie Françoise de S. Domingue, 2011 Tapestry

William kentridge

jane taylor Tapestry is a digital art. An image is divided precisely into an array of decisions, so many thousand across its width, so many thousand along its length. An X and Y axis of warp and weft, locating every decision precisely. Every line or shape in the initial drawing is mapped against the crossing of the threads. Every gesture in the drawing is tamed into a series of exact moments. Does the line start at this thread or the next? The indecision of the artist, every smudge of line, must be resolved into ‘here it stops, here it changes’. A new bobbin of a different coloured thread must be used from this point.

History repeats itself: weaving led the way to digital control. The punch cards of early computers (so I am told) were based on punch cards used to control the heddles of eighteenth-century textile looms.

A tapestry is the opposite of a charcoal smudge or the blending of oil paint, the opposite of the indeterminacy of a glaze or varnish.

It feels closest to a digital video projection, which itself is a movable mural. The digital scale is not determined by the drawing on which it is based but is able to expand or contract (in each weaving of the drawing) according to the wall or screen it will inhabit. P

Half-tones: does the eye see an infinity of them or, as language theorists like to tell us, do we see those colours that are available to us in language? Peter Hoeg plays with this conceit in Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, which introduces us to an astonishing array of definitions and descriptions of the frozen vapour. Are there only so many threads of distinct colour? P

“ translated from tHe czecH bY J carraWaY”

Eight Figures, 2010 Drawing for linocut print

William kentridge

jane taylor In the province of H, in the last century, a company of itinerant actors plied their trade between the villages surrounding the town of L. They rehearsed and performed the grand histories, the local scandals, the familiar fake folk tales of the region. But then their performances grew too familiar, the stories too often repeated, the tired gestures and the histrionic groans too predictable. The audiences dwindled. In one village they were chased out by boys throwing stones and the village dogs barking. They were reduced to performing for themselves, staying in a barn, fed by the charity of a farmer, stepping on and off the carpet that was their stage to be both audience and performer. In the end the only story was their story, the story of the company stepping on and off the carpet.

Stop!!!!! Stop.

This is why I am an artist and not a writer.

I don’t know who the figures are. The windmill lady came from a drawing done on the West Coast of South Africa, looking at a windmill. Some of the figures come from work on the Shostakovich opera The Nose. That is Tatlin’s Monument that one of the men is carryingaway. It is a gathering of figures from different projects, performers from different plays on stage together, ready to move from village to village . . .

Stop!!!!! Stop. P

There is an obstinate return of known characters (familiars) who populate the Kentridge landscape. This would not be surprising to Freud, who was resolved in his understanding that everyone new that we encounter takes on the old jacket and familiar boots of the family member. Relations, however invigorating and inventive, are necessarily given the task of acting out familiar roles. It is no surprise then that the figures here have appeared before, and that they carry off the detritus from tasks previously undertaken, and that they stride forth as shadows of a past event within a perpetual present. P

soHo on tHe beacH

Tide Table, 2003 Animated charcoal-drawing film

William kentridge

jane taylor There are at least four generations in the film. The founding image is my grandfather in his homburg and pinstripe suit on a deckchair on Muizenberg beach. Next to him is my father at eight years of age with his primary-school cap on his head and his brother sitting beside him. Now, after I’d made Tide Table, I realised of course I’d already drawn the man in the deckchair in an early linocut based on my grandfather from that family photo – and in fact my memory was wrong. The deckchair had the pinstripes, not the suit of the man sitting in it.

By the time I made Tide Table I was a similar age to my grandfather in the photo. I was slightly younger, but my son was more or less the same age my father was in that photograph. So in the film I and my grandfather are, in a way, mixed together, and my son becomes an image of a younger self rather than necessarily a son – even though the reference is back to my father. There is a compression of time with us playing different roles: my grandfather, my father, myself, and my son. The boy skipping stones on the beach is my father, but in making the drawings for the film I had my son staging the scene.

But my son, Sam, is left–handed, and my father is right-handed, and I too am right-handed. The older self throws a stone right-handed, the old Soho throws a stone right-handed, but his younger self throws the stone left-handed. This was a detail that my brother noticed when he watched the film and wrote about it. He was watching the film more closely than I ever did.

That’s something that people watching the film can perhaps look out for. P

Kentridge’s recent meditations on Time have agitated the distinctions between historical time and cosmic time, as two orders of logic. This film is grounded very distinctly in the context of the emergent AIDS crisis of the Mbeki presidency: however, it also charts the reiterative oceanic rise and fall, with a memorable image that conflates the cyclical movement of wave action with a graph of the stock market’s rise and fall. P

Harlequin

Semaphore, from The Refusal of Time, 2011 Kinetic sculpture

William kentridge Hector Berlioz, the composer, wrote a short story describing a conductor who had an orchestra dispersed amongst several villages across the hills, and he conducted this orchestra using an oversized mechanical telegraph machine, the kind of semaphore machine that was used in the days before electric telegraphy, in order to send either military or other messages from hilltop to hilltop. Our semaphore machine is an enlargement of the human body. The body, instead of being one metre eighty high, is maybe three or four metres high. The arms, instead of simply having the width of one-and-a-half metres, have a three- or four-metre width, so that things which would be invisible to the human eye across a large distance can still be seen.

In the original design there’s a correlation between the movements of the operator and the movements of the large arms at the top of the semaphore. Lift your left arm and the left arm of the semaphore goes up. When making the semaphore machine for Refusal of Time, we did an inversion so that when your left arm goes up, the right arm of the semaphore goes up; if you dip your left shoulder, on the semaphore machine the left shoulder goes up. This has the effect of making the combination of operator and machine into a commedia dell’arte performer; where there’s a counteraction between the hips and the shoulders when everything is on the diagonal, when you drop your shoulder and lift your knee. I suspect this is largely not seen by the audience and it certainly made the operation of the machine very counterintuitive for the performers on stage.

jane taylor I would describe this as a failed machine. Not that it didn’t work – no, it did its work reliably – but that strange stylised dance I wanted to be visible between the operator and the machine was, I think, largely unseen by the audience. Attention was captured by many other things on the stage at the time it was being used. It stands in the exhibition as a kind of apology, sent into the corner. It should have a dunce cap on its head. P

The elision that Kentridge makes between human form and machine is integral to his aesthetic query. There is a mystical materialism at work here, and it informs the work with puppets, as well as the Small Bellows kinetic sculpture. In many of the self-portraits we get the sense that Kentridge is puzzling over the strange automaton – or performing bear – that is himself. P

a Pneumatic sigH

Small Bellows, 2011 Kinetic sculpture

William kentridge

jane taylor We were considering making something that’s between an instrument and a machine and ‘a human clock’. The human clock would engage in the action of breathing and the beatingof the heart. These are both ways of keeping the body alive and of measuring out time. We wanted a synthesis. Not a sewing machine meeting an umbrella on an operating table (the classic surrealist formulation, with several separate parts) but, say, a drill turning a small accordion or concertina that breathes in and out, with an ear trumpet that amplifies the sound of the breath of the contracting and expanding bellows.

It is not just a device: it is a kind of portrait, it’s a person. In terms of height and scale and proportions, it settles easily into a person. There’s a head – his breathing head that turns and looks and breathes. (But that is a description arising from my trying to rescue it, trying to get it to make sense, though it was not made with that idea. It was perhaps the pleasure of the sound of the breathing, which is kind of human.) I am not wanting to ‘give it human lines’, yet I am interested in you saying to yourself, “Isn’t it curious how it sounds like a human being?” Then you think about its scale. Yet it is also a useless machine. P

There are several previous versions of this same humanising effect of breath explored in Kentridge’s oeuvre across various media. Kentridge’s long and deep exploration of puppetry, which arose in the first instance through his work with Handspring Puppet Company, has given rise to a substantial consideration of the persuasive performance power of the regularised pulsing of breath within a body. This is something of a mantra for Handspring too. During his production of the Monteverdi opera Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, the action of the narrative is structured as a dreamscape arising from the mind of the returned Ulysses, who dreams his past adventures and travels. The character of Ulysses is performed by a recumbent puppet, who lies at the fore-edge of the stage, asleep.

In order for that figure to be asleep rather than a lump of inert matter, the puppet has to be kept animated, through a gentle breathing action, across the arc of the opera. In some senses, this is economic folly, but that is the power of the choice. The rather profligate decision to ‘breathe’ the puppet is saturated with meaning. Not only do we experience the figure as sensate, but we also intuit the antirationalist economy of the activity. It is seemingly gainless expenditure, and that situates the sustaining of the puppet beyond a relation of utility.

Kentridge situates himself very precisely within an experimentalism that registers the intersection of the human and the technical, and his interest in early modern aesthetics and the history of science pushes the threshold of that intersection between the human and technology about as far back as the origin of species.

There is a manifestly meaningful life-support machine that breathes and strokes out time in the film History of the Main Complaint, and the recent performance of The Head & the Load stages the intersection of the colonial subject with machineries of great scale and grandiloquence. The demands of these objects on stage become ever more and more immense. As Kentridge notes, “We’re talking much longer about the object and taking forever.” P