For the love of being… 1990-2015

As nature laments And expresses its pain and its plaint To a whispering fool, sophist Who uses mechanical art alone …

Jean de Meung

Paris 1561

For the love of being...

So be it.

I have nothing to tell you which hasn’t already been…

Monday 17 June 2013

Art Basel, the largest Modern and Contemporary Art show, has just closed its doors. Maman has gone back to Papa in Brussels and I am here at the appointment I made for myself to spend time with you, and to share with you my feelings, my doubts, my hopes and my deep joy of living.

Over the course of the few pages which follow I would like to share with you, in all sincerity, my passion for life, both of which make me who I am. I do not, of course, lay claim to the truth; no one would be so pretentious. In fact, the relationship with contemporary art which I have had the good fortune and the pleasure of developing, and that mainly in South Africa, is nothing more than a simple story of love emanating from the heart and the gut. It therefore only involves me and is but one of so many others made up of moments, meetings, events, impressions and reflections, without any didactic intentions or pretensions. Other people, far more erudite and better equipped to do so, can come to your aid in academic, historic, scientific or philosophical matters if the desire takes you to prolong our encounter.

Putting words and ideas onto paper like this is for me the simplest way to get to the approximate core of what I believe, to sketch its silhouette. This is the synthesis of what has been transmitted to me, through love, education and through the daily experience of living.

All has been given, entrusted to me. I have received everything. For several years I have felt the need to pass it on in turn. The loss of my brother, André, reminded me of the urgency, as the price of sorrow.

I dedicate this book to him. He did not have the time to talk to you… [ 299 ] ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Maman has been coming to the show for about twenty years. For the last twelve of them, I have been meeting up with her in Switzerland for this occasion in June and I hope before long to experience the same joy of sharing a common passion with Lynn, my wife, and Jordan and Camille, our children. They in all likelihood will one day take up the torch to perpetuate this fledgling tradition. I take this opportunity to thank them from the bottom of my heart for accepting and tolerating my isolation, which has made it possible for me to start talking to you and for having allowed me to meet up with Maman for the show at the beginning of every June for the last twelve years.

Collectors make the pilgrimage each year to this Bacchanalian feast of visual arts for a sensory tasting prepared by some three hundred galleries which attend.

The selection process is merciless. The politics of “ the art world ” alone rule, organise and impose a hierarchy in this oligarchy.

Today’s high priests sometimes make a furtive entrance. Grand dinners are then given in their honour to enable the learned well-to-do to spend a few privileged hours amongst fellow initiates with the greatest living masters of the agony and the ecstasy, these free-divers into the heart of our ill-being.

Part ONE

I

I make my appearance at the beginning of the second last year of “ the fifties ”, thanks to my parents and to the euphoria of the universal exhibition of Brussels in 1958. Maman suffers from mononucleosis during her pregnancy. The doctor advises her to remain on her back in order to have any chance of keeping me, which she does willingly. Her father, Achille, who has no one else any more at that time, suggests she lets nature take its course. For once, Maman does not listen to him, and takes this pregnancy to term. She thus gives me life for the second time. As a result of her illness, I am born with a cardiac malformation. Professor Blom operates on me at the Akademisch Ziekenhuis university hospital in Leyden and gives me life for the third time before the age of six. This operation is only possible at that time in South Africa and in Holland. For obvious reasons of economy and pure logic, my parents choose the Netherlands. It is very interesting to note the presence of South Africa in the options proposed for this open heart surgery. This is the very first time that this country presents itself as part of my destiny. This is its first gentle attempt at interference with my child’s heart.

I start my school career, like my brother Andre, close to home in a small local private catholic school, next to the church of the parish of Rosaire. I remember having been lucky enough to come first in class, for the first and only time in my life, in my second year of primary school. My friend, the pupil I dethrone in so doing, cannot cope with this insult and leaves the school. I am really hurt by this. Nonetheless, it is with real nostalgia that I remember Madame Roger, our teacher from the Congo, who enables me to accomplish this feat at that time. Thus Africa enters my life for the first time in the pragmatic sense, hand in hand with Madame Roger and her devotion to teaching and academics.

My brother and I share our room and our games until he starts university. He is profoundly good. His intelligence and his curiosity are insatiable. He has a voracious appetite for any kind of knowledge and does not hesitate to venture off the beaten track which he often considers far too comfortable. Listening to others becomes his default mode and will later take over his files and his office. Order burdens him. The combination of this curiosity and his sense of others makes him as surprising as he is unpredictable. He maintains an uncompromising idealism. He will never give up nor be able to accept the poverty of our condition and chooses thenceforth to always believe the best of everyone to

lessen his pain. Up until not long before his death he gives his ear to the most desperate by volunteering, amongst other things, on a night-time telephone helpline once a week. We are proud of one another and remain so. He departs surrounded by those who love him, prevented, thanks to the decline of his faculties, from being mentally present at his own demise. Andre will never see himself leave, or be aware of his departure.

He entrusts life to Augustin, Nicolas, Jerome and all of theirs to come. Thank you, Sophie, for having helped him in this.

As he leaves the church, the place he chooses to bid us goodbye, a spontaneous standing ovation sends him on his way and my tears flow. Born of sadness, they take shelter almost immediately in emotion and in pride. Thank you, Carine, for having loved him so much. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

I am twelve years old when the virus strikes. I remember the tramway and its smells of wet dog mixed with fetid emanations of the flesh. It allows me to wander from gallery to gallery in the centre of Brussels and to

shorten my journey as I dodge the wind, the rain and the storms.

At the time I am unaware of the deep, primordial, ancestral reasons for this mad journey, even though they are rooted in me, as if predestined, going back several generations.

It is during this time that I meet Andre Szabo. He is exhibiting some of his works of a moribund surrealism at the “ L’Ecuyer ” gallery on Avenue Louise. Owing my recent awakening to art, to this movement and more precisely to Rene Magritte’s masked apples and Salvador Dali’s melting watches, I am delighted to find him still in his prime, gliding along our pavements. Andre Szabo has a studio in “ rue de l’Arbre bénit ”, sheltered by the roof of a typical Brussels house. I visit from time to time. Each time he throws me the keys from the fourth floor so as not to have to climb up and down the stairs each time the bell rings. One Sunday morning he draws my portrait and, in the process, places a Rembrandt van Rijn-style hat on top of my thirteen year old boy›s hairstyle as his way of giving expression to my desire to be the sort of artist I will unfortunately never have the courage to become. I have just rediscovered this little portrait at my parents› home, with joy, tenderness and melancholy. [ 251 ] ( page number of the artwork ). It is

part of my initiation to this world which was about to envelop me.

André Szabo decides it is high time that I start attending the Sunday morning pictorial technique course at the academy. However, he wants me to remain as free as possible in the midst of this rather academic training. We make an appointment with André Lyre, the director of the fine arts academy of Bois-fort, during which André insists emphatically that I should be given total creative freedom. Monsieur Lyre confirms that this is possible. Almost every Sunday morning for two years and in complete freedom, I draw and paint apples, bottles, hands or funeral masks, oblivious to, or unaware of, the beautiful, voluptuous women undressing nearby so as to confront us with their proportions, the movement of their beauty or the curve of a breast. I have wonderful memories of this time as well as of the magnificent and very specific smell of the painters› studio which is added to the smell of hospitals at this exact time in my olfactory pantheon. Without any doubt, this period forms an integral part of the foundation of my future emotions.

At dinnertime one evening, in the midst of a family conversation, I talk about an exhibition which has particularly excited me. I mention the artist’s name and

Maman asks me to tell her about this man she does not know. With the insolence of youth I retort : ‘Maman, don’t tell me you don’t know him ; don’t tell me you’ve never heard of him.’ These words really arouse Maman’s interest and that evening she decides there and then that she will never let me take her by surprise like this again. I am unaware that I have just engendered forty years of passion. Maman immediately starts doing courses on contemporary art. She will continue to do so for over thirty years. Today her knowledge is immense.

Nevertheless Maman always remains discreet, reserved and quiet. She will only answer a question when addressed to her. She is invited by Herman Liebaerts to apply to become a member of the commission he heads up : the Commission for Art in Travel Infrastructure. This commission has to give its opinion on all art projects in the regional networks of Brussels. Maman courteously declines. She can’t see herself defending a work in public, addressing journalists or being criticised in the press for one or other of their choices. Maman chooses to remain private and I totally respect this decision. Nonetheless, her adventure in the discovery of contemporary art has allowed us to share a passion. What a privilege for a mother and for a son !

I play a lot of bridge and follow the instruction dispensed by the Jesuit Fathers at the College Saint

Michel from my fifth year at primary school. These two very different and yet complementary pursuits do wonders for my early learning. The foundation for the latter is secured by my parents’ attentive monitoring, by their love and by their example. I will always be grateful to them, to cite but one example, for having stood up to the head of the college with a moderation matched only by their firmness. He had called them to discuss a concern he had on my behalf. He tells them at the meeting, without any preamble, that the atmosphere at the tennis club we frequent is in strict contrast to the ethical views of the college they have chosen for my brother Andre and my-self. He asks my parents directly to consider removing us from this perverse and loose atmosphere. My parents respond by telling him they are extremely grateful for the quality and the quantity of the teaching given by the college between the hours of eight and five. However, in their opinion, it is also important, that we be exposed to other sounds, tastes and sights and that life should confront us with other angles, approaches and relationships, whether it be at the fine arts academy, on the tennis courts and football fields or around the bridge table. At the time, I am not aware of the importance of this parental determination and refusal. I do not realise the role this will play in

helping me get my sea legs to enable me to face the storms of life.

The choice of a college for the education of her sons takes precedence for Maman over the choice of her husband, our father, Papa. For this I will remain forever grateful to her. There is no doubt that the school and college years are seminal and essential. They give us a broad outline of ourselves and make us into the people we will become. University, on the other hand, for a limited number of us, delivers amongst other things a certain approximate knowledge of the manuals specific to our chosen or recommended sectors of activity, just as technical training serves as apprenticeship for artisans and those in services, agriculture or industry.

The deep foundations of the developing person, the core, are for their part determined by education, family, the socio-cultural milieu and circumstances. They are very often solidly anchored in us before the age of eighteen.

Thereafter this developing person will be able to grow and consolidate, find their place or their role within the mesh of our society in qualifying for a chosen field, provided they can gain access to it and maintain it.

The Jesuits, Greco-Latin Humanities and my failure in the finals of Rhetoric, as much as my family, my friends and my aspirations, all generously helped

to lay out the rough plan for my future. Art would be my passion, Architecture my profession‌ and being my reason for living.

II

The asteroid Chicxulub has just shattered the earth in the Gulf of Mexico. We are…. We are already in the process of becoming. We are sixty six million years ago.

This impact leaves a crater about two hundred kilometres in diameter and to the best of my knowledge precipitates one of the first, if not the first genocide on our planet. This catastrophe, coupled with the climate change caused by the volcanic activity at the time and the resulting release of vast quantities of sulphur and CO2, signs the definitive death warrant of the dinosaurs, eradicating them forever from our fauna. The milieu is no longer able to support their existence; it is no longer compatible with them. Chaos, in a constant state of flux, always ends up surviving, give or take a few victims.

Such is life.

None of us can at this stage foresee or realise the importance of this event. We are still in too premature a stage of our genetic evolutionary gestation. It remains, nonetheless, the key element in our prehistory which will one day enable ‘Little Foot’ [ 193 ] or the brothers of the Taung child [ 37 ] to aspire to assert their claim as dominant species and ‘First General Caretaker’ of

our planet Earth. This seize of power, this signing on, will take time. Day after day, almost sixty three million years separate the disappearance of the dinosaurs from the crowning of ‘Little Foot’, contemporary of Lucy, and the Taung child, five hundred thousand years later as new masters on our northern portion of the old rock.

An in-depth study by the French National Institute for Archaeological and Preventive Research ( INRAP ) and the University of the Witwatersrand was recently able to establish and conclude with more certainty, by examining the different traces in the surrounding environment, that ‘little foot’ goes back more than three million years. This study, along with the conclusions of Laurent Bruxelles of INRAP, facilitates a better understanding of the biped and allows us to situate the ‘cradle of humanity’ not in Ethiopia but in South Africa. ( source : L‘Express 19 March 2014 ) The Taung child disappears at an early age, preyed on by leopard or golden eagle, depending on the source, some two and a half million years before our era, if we use the birth of Christ as our chronological point of reference, as is customary for most of us in our small part of the globe.

It is more or less at this time that the Ples family finds itself in Sterkfontein.

It only takes a million years, give or take a few, for their progeny to learn to make fire. This new technical prowess is then quickly adapted to numerous uses.

Amongst other things, it enables them to protect themselves and to distance themselves, literally as much as figuratively, from other members of the animal kingdom.

Barely forty thousand years ago some amongst them, authentic precursors of our high priests, ambassadors interceding with a ‘Chaos of a Higher Order’, immortalise their talent. They draw, conceiving the desire to be known, to be seen by who knows what benevolent ‘Grand Architect’, on the walls of their caves in the cradle of humanity. They express, share and celebrate their shamanic trances as if interceding with some supreme authority to bring success to their hunting. His expertise, regardless of the realm of their request, of our quests, must be infinite, since such is our ignorance.

Fear of tomorrow or of others, fear of losing our tenuous hold on daily necessities, our environment as well as our joy of living, already urges us to intercede with one who is ‘outside the limits of our puny level of perception’ lest we lose ourselves, lest we lose our very reason for being.

So the high priests set about drawing with flare, painting on the bare rock whilst others invent our first Gods to calm the clan. They are watching over us. Do not fear‌ the rain will bless us and the next hunt will enable us to feed the clan.

These fears, arising from our ignorance about death, suffering, climatic, terrestrial or marine conditions, are the real mothers of our gods. It is essential, vital to calm the clan. A group can quickly become unmanageable if it remains without recourse. This fear of the unknown, fear of the other quickly induced us to name every thing and every being, to label them. This act of putting into boxes, putting into drawers, into files, pigeon holes, computer files reassures us and offers us the illusion of calm which we continue to crave. This act of naming or defining allows us to reassure ourselves and convince ourselves prematurely that we have made progress in our knowledge or in our levels of perception. However, the essential questions live on and remain fundamentally unanswered. This gulf remains infinite.

Amongst many other reasons for being, the animal scenes depicted in our rock paintings reveal this need to identify the other, whatever the species, so as to no longer fear them. We know them; we can recognise and identify them. By drawing the animal, cousin Ples

subjugates it in a sense. The hunt will now be easier and the clan will be spared from hunger. Furthermore, a new kind of “ distance ”, following on from the distance created by fire, is thus clearly affirmed and expressed.

The high priests that are our first artists henceforth accede to their extraordinary place in human society.

They are, to paraphrase Wiener, “ nothing less than a pure and simple necessity ”.

Already, in the cradle of humanity, art is political. It addresses the clan so to increase its chances of survival, to facilitate its permanence, and still today it continues to raise questions and makes us think, more than forty thousand years later.

The successors of the brothers and sisters of the Taung child and of the Ples family become the people we have recognised or defined as San, Hottentot or Bushman, hunter gatherers in this region for the vast majority of the time which separates them from our era.

It is only around the beginning of our era, approximately, that the good life on the southern tip of Africa starts to wane. Until that time over the course of four or five hundred centuries the San and their predecessors develop a vast knowledge of the flora and fauna around them. For over forty thousand years

they live in a state of harmonious imbalance with their environment. Some could call it Paradise, but this word has too many implications today for me to use it here.

What is certain is that they, alone, can claim to be the “ people of South Africa ” [ 258 ]. All those who follow them, regardless of race or origin, will only do so by migration, invasion, oppression, coups, struggles, war or strife.

Forty thousand peaceful years after the first rock paintings, the frugal and perfectly adequate “ modus vivendi ” of the little people of this part of the continent becomes exposed to a terrible new threat : socio-cultural interbreeding. Successive hybridisation will, on the one hand condemn the San to mix, integrate or to a large extent disappear, and on the other hand to give in to what we have jointly and too simplistically termed progress, allowing us to confront in small doses the fabulous and devastatingly sad realities of today. Only a few small groups of San still survive. Nevertheless, they remain one of the fourteen original groups of individuals from which every man currently present on our planet descends.

Our technological, medical, industrial and scientific progress is largely the result of this cross-breeding, further accelerated in our era by the immediate

access to information which the latest advances in communications technology have facilitated. Even the need to travel to attend a meeting, an interview or an exchange of ideas has all but become obsolete, although nothing can replace real human contact. What does it matter how fast we reach New York from Paris, Brussels or Johannesburg if we are not greeted with a smile on arrival ? …but the dwarf answered : “ No, something human is dearer to me than the wealth of the world. ” Grimm Tales Cross-breeding has had the effect of providing answers to so many unasked questions at the cost of a slow, progressive and profound merging of groups in a frenzy of consumerism fuelled by the dictates of a vulgar and totalitarian capitalism.

Each day we lose a little more of our identity and we become mired in a global mass, constantly searching for a socio-economic or political solution. This mass that I refer to is the mass of the “ entitled ”, those on welfare, spawned by populist, customer-driven politics ( practised throughout the world ), each day increasing our dependence on a system condemned to serve its own sentence : a total collapse.

Politicians, male and female, have only one obsession once in power: to be re-elected. This way they are able to guarantee their economic survival, their pseudo raison d’être, as well as their well-being and the preservation of their clan. Even if they lose power for a cycle and spend a term on the sidelines, an established rule of reciprocity ensures that, by tacit agreement, they will be given other positions to sustain this livelihood they have monopolised.

They will then occupy European posts, head up commissions, become Prefects, sit on the board of a parastatal company or be hired by the most powerful companies in the country as indispensible Machiavellian lobbyists.

This is a far cry from the one true DEMOCRACY, born in Greece, the source of its etymology : the “ power of the people ”. During the Athens era, the “ Bouleutai ” or council of five hundred, were elected by lottery. They could only be elected for two non-consecutive mandates, thereby excluding the possibility of making this their career. They were guided by the interest and long term future of the group and not by the hope of being reelected and remaining in power. Whenever those in charge of managing or organising a social system are able to be re-elected, they will work out exactly what to

do to ensure their re-election. They will quickly identify which people to “ buy ” so as to guarantee their own survival.

Which of our politicians or political parties have envisaged a new kind of society, be it in Johannesburg or Paris? Which of them has had or will have the courage to question the foundations of a system which allows their clan to carry on with impunity while wrecking our children’s future ? Indeed, which of them will cut the branch they sit on so that a fresh new society can blossom, in which “ being ” will be able to regain its noble place ?

Who else would dream of granting themselves such improbable economic latitude? Only our rulers can negotiate the debt spiral with such agility and impunity, never having to confront their bankers, creditors or judges. They neither seek nor receive psychological help to escape the bottomless pit they dig for themselves, puffed up by overconfident complacency and self importance. These well diggers from all parties, ministers and presidents alike, have bought our loyalty, with allocations, subsidies, sickness and disability insurance, birth incentives, free education and pensions. ( This list is obviously far from complete ). They do not have the slightest outline of an idea how to slow down this

runaway train without precipitating mass protests and upheaval in the streets. What are the masses waiting for ? Let them protest. Let them break free and learn to walk without crutches, like before. We need to regain our autonomy as a matter of urgency, to once again become responsible for and beholden to ourselves, society and the life which has been entrusted to us.

It is high time that we change direction. The systems have been exhausted and will be incapable of keeping their populist promises. It is time to put the horse before the cart again and to regain our humanity by getting rid of the poles propping up our dependence. It is time to replace the global responsibility vested in society or in those who govern it with our own. We must as a matter of urgency change “ What can society do for me? ” into “ What can I do for society? ” as JFK proposed over fifty years ago in his inaugural speech on becoming President of the United States. Let us forget our welfare mentality and let’s find within ourselves the individual resources and capacities to personally participate in the best possible future for man, with passion if this still resonates within our hearts. Let’s again learn how to be, before we learn slavishly to do so as to have….

Let us also learn day by day to practice goodness, compassion, tolerance and respect for others as well as

non-interference. Let’s begin to re-examine each of our gestures, our actions. Let’s assess them qualitatively.

Let’s forget the quantitative. This way great poverty lies.

As Saint Augustine advises, let’s learn to always want what we have been given and what we therefore already have.

Let us, as soon as possible, abandon this “ buffet ” mentality which has been ours for centuries. Most of us, confronted with a buffet, will help ourselves to a gigantic plateful, Gargantuan, dare I say Pantagruelian.

It›s free! Everything is free. Let›s eat and drink. Leaving a half full glass and a plate still laden, we go home hardly proud of ourselves to spend an uncomfortable night at least, or worse to contemplate the pieces of evidence of our indigestion.

Let us not treat life and its precious imbalance with its environment like our plate at the buffet table. The future of man, of humanity, of the life that has been entrusted to each and every one of us depends upon it.

Day after day our governments strive to diminish us, to make us dependent, to turn us into human wrecks, or flaccid molluscs, to the point of betraying ourselves three times before the cock crows. They think they can keep us in this state of “ systemic ” dependence.

They go as far as to perniciously use teaching to this end: inscribe, engrave, and anchor firmly within us and as soon as possible a belief in our enslavement, our incapacity and our dependence on the all-powerful system which they represent, as our only recourse.

They even have the audacity to try to mislead us under the false pretext that the eradication of a potential elite would lead to more equality. What nonsense ! What a lie ! What hypocrisy ! What a crime ! What treachery ! How vulgar ! How base !

They have the effrontery to summon us to the polls, to give us the impression of choice, the idea that we have any influence at all on the way our countries are governed, with an arrogance that is deeply ironic [Â 34Â ].

What a sham ! It is nothing of the sort. It is not by voting for the left, the centre or the right that anyone will bring about the deep-rooted change which our societies, and which all of us, so urgently need. Our constitutions must be altered to revert to true democracy and give humanity a slight chance of permanence, if we have not already at this stage passed the point of no return. Unfortunately in most countries such a change requires a two thirds majority and therefore a return to the polls. This vicious circle must be broken. We need to break it and to find our own Jacob’s ladder... A strike against the ballot is called for, or some similar action devised by the wisest

amongst us. The citizen’s strike is our first weapon. Let abstention carry the day and let the humanists of this world unite to draw up the new rules, the new principles which would give us a chance to once again cherish, respect and honour our human condition. These new principles should, amongst other things, recognize and take into account the latest changes and upheavals, be they ethical, technological, biological, medical or bio technological as well as the basic realities we face today such as our numbers, climatic turmoil and catastrophe, the vast disparity in resources and the depletion of our humus, to mention a few.

I cannot resist sharing with you in the following chapter some of the concepts which help me to greet each new day with joy.

III

The first of these concepts could be called “ Genius Vitae ” by analogy or reference to Bruno Zevi’s “ Genius Loci ”. Imagine if you took me to the room where you had spent most of your childhood.

This room would seem improbably rich in experience to you but might seem very ordinary to me. We are, however, dealing with the same walls. The same light caresses, illuminates or subdues the room. Yet your passion remains foreign to me. You radiate pleasure, melancholy or deep sadness. Either way, these walls have a unique richness for you. This comes from the combination of energies involved and not from the content. For the most part, you alone are able to access these energies in some way. You are in communication with your experience, with life, its breath and spirit.

Let us replace the walls of the room with the seasons of life. If we let ourselves be guided by the qualitative we will see that it is good and invigorating to be on the deck even in the midst of the storm.

This richness of space is very well described by Lao Tzu, a contemporary of Confucius, towards the end of the fifth century before Christ. He tells us: “ The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows. It is empty but it does not dry up. In movement it does not stop producing. The thirty spokes of a wheel have only one hub in common, yet it is exactly where there is nothing ( in the hollow ) that the effectiveness of the cart resides.

One fashions the clay in the form of a vase, yet it is exactly where there is nothing that the effectiveness of the vase resides. One hollows out doors and windows to build a house, yet it is exactly where there is nothing that the functionality of the house resides.

Thus we believe that material things benefit us, but true value resides where we perceive nothing. ” Let’s keep the nub of our lives safe, as deeply within ourselves as possible, so that it becomes the place where respect, tolerance, goodness, generosity, friendship and love find shelter. One good moment will follow another. We will begin to glow with the intense pleasure of living and attain the most profound joy of being.

Below I invite you to read a moving text from my friend, Kendell Geers. He sends it to me while preparing his first exhibition in China, “ END OF THE PARTY ”, which we will have the opportunity to revisit in due course.

“ Revolution is Over ( if you want it ) ” 19 March 2011 “ If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. ” William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell What does “ Revolution ” mean to you ? There are as many revolutions as there are people for the very cycle of life depends upon it. The grand utopian sociopolitical revolutions of history were based upon a Darwinian world view that placed “ man ” at the centre of the universe around which all else revolved. This was however a divided “ man ” for “ he ” conceived of “ himself ” as independent from the world “ he ” lived in. Even the terms that “ he ” used to speak of “ himself ” defined the entire species as male and “ he ”

even thought fit to define “ his ” counter sex as fe-MALE and wo-MAN. “ Man ” spoke of himself as the measure of all things, a force of nature unto itself. Since Darwin, this “ man ” has justified “ his ” actions in terms of survival, the survival of the fittest. Perhaps at the time of the so-called “ origin of the species ” it was necessary to defeat nature both within and without, to domesticate and castrate every animal and invade, destroy any and every rival, enemy, territory and perceived threat.

Perhaps that was a time in which rape, murder, mayhem, and every other form of opportunism could have been justified within the minds and imaginations of early man but even that I doubt for that early “ man ” would not have survived outside the cycles and revolutions of nature.

We have since multiplied as a species and now inhabit, in abundance and with excess, every corner of the planet. Our species has grown to the point that it is no longer sustainable and the same Darwinian logic of “ survival ” may yet be the very reason the species will not survive.

It is more than thirty years since John Lennon and Yoko Ono said WAR IS OVER ( If You Want It ).

Unfortunately declarations of war are always made by politicians in abuse of their positions of power through

the manipulation of their constituencies via means necessary. Most politicians rule through fear by taking advantage of and encouraging social, economic or cultural vulnerabilities and when expedient mobilize that fear into anger and call to arms.

War is not something that as individuals we have any say over, nor is this choice ours to make. If war be the domain of the political leadership, then its social antithesis is revolution. Historically revolutions, both social and industrial, germinate within the social network and grow out of popular discontent. The individual has as much of a voice under revolutionary conditions as the leadership that rises up from within the masses.

And yet, right now, in 2011, in Europe, the States, and in so many other countries of luxury existence, it could be declared that REVOLUTION IS OVER ( If You Want It ). Put more cynically Revolution is over BECAUSE you want it.

Revolution, unlike war, is something within our reach and something we can and do have control over. More importantly, Revolution, unlike war is something that is natural and defines the cycle of life.

The ancient Egyptians named their Gods according to

the Revolutionary Principles of nature, the cycles of life, death and rebirth. The Revolution of the earth around the sun, the moon around the earth and solar systems around the galaxy give rise to revolutions on every level from the second hand of the clock to the menstrual cycle to the changing of the seasons. Without these Revolutions, life on earth would cease to exist.

The rational cynic rooted in materialistic morality might disagree and argue that the social and industrial revolutions have nothing to do with the revolutions that make up the natural cycles of life. The self centered “ man is measure of all things ” logic of capitalism and rational determinism precludes a view of reality outside of the obvious. We live our lives according to a logic of instant gratification and WYSIWYG ( What You See Is What You Get ) without a moment’s consideration of consequence. As long as we are served our daily hamburger we don’t think about nor care where the hamburger came from, how it was processed, where the raw ingredients were grown or the impact it has upon our lifestyle and ultimately what its affect is upon the environment.

In the name of survival we have grown blinkers and surrendered our senses and sensitivities. More than three quarters of the world’s population live in

cities today and whilst their senses will no doubt be able to spot pick pockets in the crowd and silent trams around the corner, few would sense the absence of birds or understand the absence to be a sign of an approaching tsunami. Only very few local fisherman understood in 2004 that the absence of birds and other wildlife near the beaches was a sign to move on up to higher grounds. Many scientists and historians now acknowledge that the eruption of Icelandic volcano Laki on the 8th of June 1783 directly contributed to the French Revolution in 1789 and the ensuing Industrial Revolutions throughout Europe.

The massive crop failures, famine and harsh winters caused by a volcanic ash killed 6 million people and provided the impetus for change that resulted in the revolutions that we have defined the western world by ever since. As radiation continues streaming out of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant damaged in last week’s earthquake, we cannot but concede that our scientific revolutions are out of balance with the revolutions of nature.

Capitalism defines every individual as a consumer and therefore a target for advertising. The social, moral and political foundation upon which it can only succeed conceives of the individual as singular and unique, detached from the rest of society, not to mention totally

detached from any form of nature. We are coerced into consuming unnecessary goods through a sophisticated almost subliminal message of uniqueness that places the individual and his/her needs ( a.k.a. buying power ) above all else. This divides us from the world we live in as much as it divides us from ourselves.

At the end of their cold war against Communism in 1990, the capitalist “ Masters of the Universe ” set about rigorously colonising and invading the virgin emerging markets and sent in their best advertising agencies to sell Coca Cola, blue jeans and sneakers to their former political enemies as if their lives and freedom depended upon it. As one former Communist country after another conceded, capitulated or opened up their markets to the onslaught of designer lifestyles, so the memory of political utopias began to fade and within a generation it was simply business as usual.

Having defeated their old ideological enemies and transformed their countries into sweatshop factories, the captains of industry turned to face an even older enemy, the Moslems, unleashing a new cold war that pits “ profit ” against “ prophet“ .

In the modern cities, supermarkets overflow with abundance, as throughout the year, food from every

corner of the globe is available, from every season, seemingly healthy, fresh and full of life. Every taste, appetite and vanity is catered for and with very few social irregularities; everybody is content because everything seems possible. And if the fresh produce fails, or if you don’t feel yourself, there is always a plastic bottle of vitamins to pep you up, a box of Viagra to get you up and a Valium to pick you up. Every manner of spectacle and entertainment is channelled in and arrives directly on your lap via your Kindle, Ipad, Ipod, mobile phone, laptop, computer or television screen. Thinking, however, is an optional extra.

In the lands of luxury, revolution is impossible for nobody would dare to rock a boat for fear of falling off and getting wet. Very few Westerners still remember how to swim through the waters of life without the lifejacket and support of a service industry where everything, from books to music, to their food, comes to them directly and without effort. Downloading your every desire is now only a click away.

Every day billboards, television, internet, radio, posters and every other media assail our senses with adverts that program us to hate our bodies. In the name of so-called hygiene we now habitually deny and cloak our natural smells, odours, pheromones and scents

with deodorants, toothpaste, perfume and creams of every order. At the same time we shut down our senses of hearing, seeing, touch and even taste simply in order to filter out the noise and pollution of every sense that our cities generate. If it were not for that filter we would be too exhausted to get through the day. The direct consequence of this desensitization of the senses and self loathing is however the tragic condition the planet now faces.

Unable to respect our own bodies we have no hesitation in taking full advantage of whatever we desire without a moment’s consideration of either consequence or respect. We have indulged in lifestyles made possible only through the unwavering rape of resources and plunder of every corner on the globe. Whilst the first world prides itself on its socalled human rights, they have conveniently not acknowledged that the luxury lifestyle and excess of comfort that seems to follow these same rights hand in glove is at the cost of animal, mineral, vegetable and human rights elsewhere on the planet.

Out of sight out of mind, as long as you don’t see the children making your jeans in a third world sweat shop, or see the trees being cut to make space for the cattle to graze in order to be processed into your

hamburger, or the bees dying for from genetically modified crops that will become your croissant, your lifestyle seems justified. As long as the box has the label that reads “ BIO ” or “ ORGANIC ” you don’t care where the ink it was printed with comes from anymore than you care where your garbage is dumped once it is taken away from you in a huge iron truck driven by people you don’t know, have no desire to meet, much less respect. It is no coincidence that almost half of the world’s population is either overweight or even obese, whist the rest are either under nourished or starving to death.

Nothing less than a TOTAL REVOLUTION will be able to change our habits and restore nature to a regenerative condition. With thousands of species now on the brink of extinction and the climate on the brink of explosion, it may already be too late to re-link the chains of life in the fragile geo-political ecosystem. “ The total revolution to which Kendell invites us is the most demanding of all.

This total internal revolution within ourselves is the ultimate key, urgent and vital, to open the way towards hope for the survival and sustainability of our kind. Gandhi tells us: “ Become the change that you

want for the world ”. Pierre Rabhi, whom we will meet further on in these pages, adds : “ The real revolution is the one which gets us to transform ourselves in order to transform the world ” ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

The second concept which helps me each day is that of “ imbalance ”. I had the good fortune to see, and more importantly to hear, an interview with Ilya Prigogine on the Belgian television station, RTBF. For the first time the notion of “ imbalance ” which has since had a great influence on my life was graciously introduced to me.

Prigogine talks with great simplicity, a talent very often displayed by the most brilliant minds.

Ilya Prigogine is of Russian origin, born on the 25th of January 1917. During the revolution he and his family leave for Germany, fearing the Bolsheviks. Then, to escape the Nazis, they flee to Belgium where Ilya studies at the university in Brussels. He takes up politics and begins to study law. Wanting to understand how an accused person would behave, he studies psychology. To better understand the psychology and science of behaviour he comes up against the functioning of the human brain. All of this leads him to study biology, chemistry and biochemistry. In an effort to understand chemical

reactions he studies particle physics. From physics he goes on to astrophysics and cosmology. At this point Prigogine tackles the fundamental questions : matter, space, time and its unique meaning. Finally, to better understand the arrow of time he studies dissipative structures. In 1977, the year I turn eighteen, he receives the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his contribution to nonequilibrium thermodynamics and more particularly the theory of dissipative structures. After having co-founded the centre which bears his name at the University of Texas in Houston, he leaves us on the 28th of May 2003 at the age of 86.

I am giving you these details firstly out of respect, but also to confirm that we all have a history, a past, which is more or less difficult. Some of us however do not brandish it each time we need an excuse to dull the pain of our ineptitude and to appease our conscience while in the process blinding it even further.

Thus I discover that day for the first time that equilibrium is static as only death can be, if that ...

What a shock. My whole life up to this point had been organized according to the principle of “ equality ” both of equations and of beings, as taught to our children in Europe and in Africa. What a mistake. It would only be by the greatest of coincidences that one plus one could

possibly, sometimes and only for a brief moment, hope to equate to two. Everything around us and inside us is in fact in a precious state of imbalance and this thanks to the richness created by the Chaos, which as you probably know, is constantly generating its own structures.

Everything is nothing but imbalance. Perhaps we should use this hypothesis as a base upon which to reorganize our lives and our children’s education. In this interview Ilya Prigogine even talks about the creative energies of chaos. Creation is therefore never far off. Chaos is life..., and equilibrium fatal. He uses a very simple example to illustrate the creative energies of chaos. The growth of a tree is the result of a combination of the preconceived contained within its genetic code and its innumerable reactions to chaos so as to preserve the precious imbalance between its vegetal essence and its environment. Let me explain.

The tree reacts day and night as much to the shadow cast by a new building as to a poor summer with too much rain, to the presence of hearts engraved on its bark by lovers wanting to defy the inevitable as much as to the loss of a branch torn off by a child determined to recover his red ball. Amongst other things, these interactions and reactions together result in the gentle shade the tree affords us today as well as in the way the daylight is attenuated through its efforts for our great

enjoyment. We admire it and each tree in this world is unique. The great majority of us find them beautiful and our artists celebrate them even in their torment, when they are only stumps, or in their extreme old age.

The tree is. [ 260 ] No one would have been able to foresee the exact shape of the tree even if they had been able to observe it throughout the first seasons of its life. Its adult form is the result of the constant tension generated by “ a wonderful harmonious imbalance between the vegetal and its environment. ” [ 172 ] We must accept and welcome these imbalances and inequalities and learn to appreciate, savour and celebrate the richness of our differences. They form an intrinsic part of the very foundations upon which we must build our answers to the challenges of tomorrow.

It is as futile as it is presumptuous to try to fight them, reduce them or annihilate them. Let’s remain in a state of imbalance, vigilant and listening. Let’s become these trees as illustrated further.

Please excuse these moments of presumptuousness.

They are for the most part nothing more than a reflection

of the passion which I hope will not leave me until as late as possible, if at all. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

The third concept I would like to speak to you about is the ability to accurately assess the cut of our piece of fabric.

I think that the possibility of finding true happiness is closely linked to this ability. We cannot burden our souls, our spirits and our hearts with the pressures created by our own utopian ideas; the frog will never be as big as the cow. We have to be able to gauge all our different abilities with a certain acuity. We must learn to control our desires without stifling or losing them. We must know how to leave our pleasure before it leaves us, to avoid becoming the most recent victim of the Peter Principle, through our own weakness or the pull of the quantitative. Icarus chooses the wrong flight plan and Virgil reminds us of the riches of the happy medium: “ Aurea Mediocritas ” ( not to be confused with “ mediocrity ” ). Pierre Rabhi, meanwhile, invites us to “ Happy sobriety ”.

It is very difficult, at this point, not to quote Socrates: “ Gnothi seauton ”, know thyself. Nothing has changed,

the search continues at the group level as well as at the level of the individual, of each one of us. Our discovery, research, apprenticeship and our patient quest for self knowledge will show us the way.

Since we are talking about Socrates I will use the opportunity to share with you an image very close to the early part of the myth of the cave, which I came across recently. I do not know its origin but I find it useful to help us clearly, simply and effectively to appreciate the scale of our ignorance.

Let’s imagine an amoeba floating on the surface of a glass of water. Let’s dip a finger in this glass of water.

The amoeba will perceive the circumference of our finger and, at most, its disk cut by the flat surface of the water.

The single cell will forever remain ignorant of the rest of our finger dipped in the water, of our hand, our arm and the rest of our body. It will be unaware of the room in which we find ourselves dipping our finger into this glass of water, the friends who have accompanied us, the ray of sunlight timidly filtering through the window and of the deep sadness one of us is perhaps feeling. Let’s take the place of the amoeba for a moment. Let’s transpose ourselves into it. Now we can quickly imagine the scale of the quantity of levels of perception we are unable to penetrate. Why would it be different for us ? In accepting

this hypothesis it becomes very difficult not to accept the dizzying magnitude of our ignorance, its infinity. In coupling this infinity with our fear of the unknown, it quickly becomes as practical as it is tempting for man to dream up the “ divine ” solution, which of course he will do in his own much venerated image. “ He ” must exist because such is our need. He can only be like us but better. “ And God created man in his own image ” could and should read “ ... and man created God in his own image... ” We can thenceforth relieve ourselves of most of our responsibilities and attribute to Him the supreme responsibility for the origin and cause of everything we fear or do not know. ( One should note here that the major difference between Buddhism and the world’s other main religious traditions no doubt resides in the way our most fundamental identity is represented. The existence of a soul or of a self, such as is supported in different forms by Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and also Islam, is not only totally denied in Buddhism but this belief is even identified as being the source of all our suffering. The Buddhist path is thus first of all a process destined to teach us to recognize the essential lack of existence of the self...)

Those in power seize upon these religions created by man for man without the slightest hesitation. What a magnificent trump card for manipulation, what an ideal

Pygmalion. Moreover, because of the bias of religions, the other becomes the heathen, the heretic, and the infidel.

The barbarian is identified. It will now be very easy to fight him when the time comes if necessary, regardless of the real origin of this desire or of the invocation of this need. I am certain that George Bush would not disagree.

I do not believe in any of these Gods that we have variously assembled according to different regional geocultural specifics. I refute the very principle of these religions and I do not pardon their abuses. So many atrocities and barbaric acts have long been committed due to the simple fact of their existence, today as much as throughout the centuries.

The very fact of these religions obscures the light and forces us to walk with crutches as if infirm, at the heart of a core hypocrisy which often even has the audacity to claim exclusivity.

Nevertheless I believe with all my heart, all my spirit and with that part of my soul that I guard and that links me to a superior energy which we all form part of, each and every one of us: the smile of a child as much as the departure of a parent, the song of a bird as much as the epidemic, the brightness of the stars and the ferocious power of the tsunami, the grain of sand in

the desert and the infinity of the cosmos or the gaze that meets our eyes. Everything is. Everything has been, is and will be... I was never born and will never die. I am as we are. Everything has been in a permanent state of transformation since the “ Big Bang ” and even that was only the beginning of a short chapter in the book of eternity. I am only one of the humble guardians of the continuum, along with every other being. I have the improbable good fortune to be responsible for a minute fraction of life before the latter continues its eternal mutation. Allow me to call up two images to illustrate the foregoing, which will also remind us once again that we do not own anything, not even our lives.

The first of these images is very simple and easy to understand and accept : if we buy a Picasso painting it remains a Picasso and we become merely the guardian, the guarantor. We accept responsibility for its physical preservation against the ravages of time, to cite but one example.

For the second image, let us replace the tiny fraction of being which has been entrusted or transmitted to us with a property which becomes ours. Very often it has already been and will continue after our time. It will never be totally ours. We merely accept guardianship for a certain time and with pride before passing on this role.

In the same way we become guardians of being or of life and accept this responsibility. We do not possess either the latter or the house. They are both only minuscule parts of a whole in constant mutation. If one accepts this hypothesis it immediately follows that no one can make an assault on life by committing suicide. To do so is nothing more than simply resigning as concierge or protector, a personal choice which any one of us has the right to make. Life continues and nothing and nobody can stop it. Such is the force of chaos. It has been and will be. Let’s take care of our lives as Nelson Mandela urges us: “ You are the custodian of your own destiny ”. Every day let us add the small layers of love and respect for this minuscule part of life with which we are entrusted. Let’s learn to treat it with the dignity it deserves. Some people manage this and create a masterpiece. If we are to reclaim our humanity as many of us as possible must make this personal effort.

IV

I am my great grandfather Gustave van der Mersch as I am Camille’s daughter or great grandson. I am part of everything as is the leaf on the tree. I am a minute part of this superior energy. This is my soul that links me to you and to everything, unites us, connects us and gives us meaning. We are and will remain in a constant state of becoming. The past remains only the root of the future.

The survival of the human race and its best hope for the future within this fragile precious state of imbalance with its environment is our only reason for being. The rest was invented over the course of centuries to give us the responsibility we imagine is our due, given the rank to which we have presumptuously promoted ourselves.

Procreate and/or participate in the best possible future of the clan amidst the Chaos is our sole contract: ensure our own survival and help as much as possible, at our lowly level, to maintain the precious, fragile imbalances, born of an infinite chaos in constant mutation. Our daily task will always be to harmonise our frail condition with the symphony played by the grand orchestra.

We are for the most part preconditioned to procreate.

Our reaction to a good pair of voluptuous breasts or to well developed hips is nothing more than a yearning designed to help us recognise the potential of a good laying hen. The inverse exists with the fair sex. A young woman finds big shoulders, good for protecting the nest and the brood, very sexy.

We must however acknowledge the existence of homosexuality with tolerance and the necessary respect.

I imagine this probably results partly from a peculiarity in the “ preconditioning ” contained in the genetic code of the individual. Even so their contract is not reduced to nothing. They need only choose between the “ or ” and the “ and ” and cross out the unnecessary one in this contract of ours, as it is pointless in their case.

V

One day William Kentridge asks me to stop by the studio in Houghton, his essential studio, his ivory tower, his engine room. He has recently challenged himself to a self portrait. I have often shared with him my particular interest in this type of work. I am captivated by the merciless and deeply giving aspect of this baring of the soul of the artist, this intensely personal combat, man to man, unarmed and without special effects, alone with himself and the rest of the universe. I think that, for a self portrait to transport us in time, the artist must be able to accept these austere, demanding working conditions so as to be able to proclaim his vulnerability, the prize of his human condition, and make it ours.

So I accept William’s invitation with pleasure, as you can imagine. I arrive at around eleven in the morning, the time we have agreed on. William is putting the finishing touches to his presentation for the Louvre museum where he has been invited. The year is 2009. The exhibition “ 5 Themes ” will take place simultaneously at the “ Jeu de Paume ”, at the other end of the “ Tuileries ” gardens.

First of all we chat about our families and our daily challenges but we move quite quickly into the work

area per se of his studio and the heart of the matter.

Incidentally, I have had the good fortune and great pleasure of conceptualising this space with him. Pinned to the wall I see a self portrait that I cannot connect with. Ashamedly, I secretly hope it is not the one he wants to talk to me about. That is my first mistake so soon after eleven o’ clock. I mention nothing to William and we continue our conversation.

After a while I remind him that I have come to see the self portrait he has been working on. William walks towards his precious drawers. He delves in amongst various small packages before brandishing one of them in triumph. Here it is, he shouts happily. At the time I am surprised by his joy and by this small package he is holding in his hands. This will be my second mistake. “ This is what I want to show you “ . He carefully opens the small parcel and with difficulty starts trying to arrange the pages of a book on a table in some sort of order. I see him become somewhat agitated. He resorts to calling Anne, Linda, Lisa, Taryn or Natalie and asking them to be so kind as to show the image on one of the computer screens in the studio. The girls do so at once and this self portrait of William appears on the screen. I am immediately captivated and absorbed by this image.

As for William, he wanders off talking and again calls on

his team of women to help him reassemble the original image. [ 179 ] This wonderful drawing, executed page by page while on a journey, has a very particular quality of lightness: just a little charcoal dust arranged with talent and respect on 36 pages, the original order now random and reduced to not much more than an almost ubiquitous texture, a backdrop steeped in meaning.

William asks me if I remember Phaedo. The name means something to me but I can not quite place it for the moment. To help me in my mental searching he reminds me that Phaedo is a book by Plato. Its exact title is “ Phaedo: or Conversations on the Spirituality and Immortality of the Soul ”. Moreover, and to be more precise, the book is the French translation of Plato’s book. William tells me he chose the book with me in mind and I am amazed by this affectionate thoughtfulness on the part of the celebrated Maestro, identified by Time magazine as one of the most influential beings on the planet in its edition of 11 May 2009 and one who marked both the end of one century and the beginning of the next.

Thus, shortly before his exhibition at the greatest museum in France, William chooses a French

translation of a text in which Plato deliberates with his disciples on the death of Socrates, the taking of hemlock and liberation through wisdom, in order to realize his self portrait. What is more, he chooses a book on the immortality of the soul to create the shaded material upon which the sketch of William floats, like Pessoa’s handkerchief floating over Lisbon, at times flirting with the light, at times with the detail of his features, which he almost neglects within the continuum of humanist thought. What does it matter? William is.

He asks himself, questions the passage of time and perhaps already foresees his refusal of it. His eyes are fixed on the turning of this wheel which also holds the potential to become one of the instruments in the grand orchestra of the absurd. The wheel turns like a spinning wheel and life unfurls and races by. His soul soars.

I also cannot help noticing the intentional wink to Marcel Duchamp. William is contemplating the history of art, he questions it and he questions himself.

The tension in William’s gaze at this instrument, this wheel spinning the thread of life, quickly and inevitably becomes our own. His gaze is totally focused on it, even though his eyes do not even appear on Plato’s pages.

They are absent and it is precisely and to a large extent

this absence that universalises and immortalises this work. Perhaps William is already starting his “ Second Hand Reading ” with this work.

This masterpiece remains a work in progress.

William is. We are and will be. The strength of the soul is reinforced. Our humanity has just received an infinitesimal but subtle patina of love. This supplement for the soul that William extends to us helps us to converse with our own, to question it and little by little to become its respectful guardian.

The reason I am voluntarily ignoring chronological sequence is so that I can talk to you about the soul early on in these pages. I must share with you the deep emotion this self portrait of William stirs in me each time I have the immense pleasure of immersing myself in it. As I said earlier, I believe that the soul is common to everything and to everyone. I think it is the soul which unites us all to the very chaos from which we are engendered, not created, and which cradles us in its perpetual state of imbalance. It is the soul that offers us all this joy of being. It is up to us to recognise it, to start this intimate relationship with it so as to embrace our responsibility with all the respect this requires.

The word for soul in Latin is none other than “ anima ”

which means breath. Life blows breath into us all as we receive it and form part of it. Through it we are.

In choosing these pages of Plato, William in the process enlists this work in the continuum of thought and of humanity. This self portrait becomes the self portrait of each one of us, past, present or yet to come. Thanks to William’s priestly celebration, we in turn become disarmed and fragile, vulnerable both to ourselves and to the rest of the universe... Later I will talk about another of William’s self portraits in which, this time, he chooses to borrow from Ancient Greek syntax, using the same tools as these giants, these pillars of philosophy.

VI

Gustave van der Mersch is a born sculptor. He never achieves fame but he carries on sculpting till the end of his days. He can no longer see very well by then and places total confidence in his hands, in each of his fingers. He sculpts Andre my brother without knowing it. Shortly before giving up the spirit Gustave is guided by his sense of touch to create a barrister in his court gown. [ 3 ] Maman’s grandfather loves to spend hours endlessly dissecting and ruminating on the essential questions of life with his friends in Ghent, most of them artists, such as Georges Minne and many others. His wife, my great grandmother, Maman’s grandmother, reigns over a small delicatessen and general grocery store. She grows her business generously and with savoir-faire. She rewards her best clients’ children with beautiful colouring books at every tenth visit to the grocery store. She also quickly understands the principle or the privilege of home delivery. In very little time she succeeds in developing a small business delivering to most of Flanders.

Gustave never has money and unscrupulously digs in the till of the main store of his wife’s business. He is

never worried about the threat of being shamed. Their unspoken pact is sealed with love. With the proceeds of these small daily acts of petty theft he invites his artist friends to satisfy their hunger and, especially, to quench their thirst. It seems the challenges of the era can be analysed with so much more clarity when examined in the light of Bacchus. “ In Vino Veritas ” . Most of my artist friends will confirm this.

I am Gustave and I am his wife. I am their continuation. I become them and prolong them.

Maman is five years old when she loses her brother Jean-Pierre on Friday 13 July 1935. He is only three.

He suffers from whiplash while jumping on his bed. He was jumping for joy and experiencing a moment of pure ecstasy and carefree happiness.

Marie-Madeleine Van der Mersch, the first of my grandmothers I never knew and Maman’s mother, leaves us almost two years later on 29 April 1937. She never recovers from her grief at losing this child and passes away just after Easter in Madeira where she has gone for the quality of its iodised air and to cure her tuberculosis. Marie-Madeleine leaves us just before she is due to return to Belgium at the beginning of May, thus cutting short both her physical pain and her anguish.

The despair this causes her parents, her husband and Maman is immense. They must all learn to live again carrying the additional heavy burden of this new loss.

Ever since suffering these two deeply traumatic experiences, Maman has hated spring as much as she fears Easter. Her biorhythms are disturbed and go out of cycle, out of alignment. Each year she is unable to stop herself from reliving the shock of seeing this little basket of chocolate eggs arriving for her from Madeira with the bells.

Gustave takes refuge in his work. He moulds the clay, carves the wood, then the stone to create the series of models for this allegory of fleeting youth he is making for Marie-Madeleine, the daughter he has just lost.

Weighed down by a father’s grief, he remains unable to portray the smile on her face. The last sketch of this tombstone still stands watch over our nights in Saint Emilion. [ 2 ]

The final stele-like statue, the main part of the tombstone, is at Maman’s house. The area of the cemetery where Marie-Madeleine was buried has been demolished. Those in charge of the cemetery asked if Maman wanted to retrieve anything. So she returned to the grave to fetch this allegory of youth, wonderfully embellished today by the ravages of time and bad weather in the flat country of Jacques Brel, not far from the towers of Ghent. [ 1 ] Marie-Madeleine is and Easter passes.

Maman’s father remarries, this time with Jeanne.

They will have no more children. He manages Ghent’s harbor. Maman has just lost her brother and her mother.

She does not yet know that Andre, her son and my brother, will also leave us prematurely at the beginning of winter, taken by cancer of the brain without remission.

After losing Achille, Jeanne officially adopts Maman before leaving us in 1989 at the age of 92, having become the central support of our family without ever having been genetically involved*. Maman still often talks to her. She no longer talks to Marie-Madeleine nor to JeanPierre; she does not even talk to her father Achille, for whom she was everything. She talks to Jeanne and tries to communicate with Andre. She tells them about our day to day hopes and those of Augustin, Nicolas and

Jérôme, Andre’s three sons, as well as the more serious challenges each of us face. Maman is devout and cannot enter a church without lighting a few candles. She also often lights them at home, next to the photo of Jeanne. *This detail is important as it confirms that it is of course possible to participate in the survival of the clan or the genus without actually being involved in its procreation. It is probably up to us, in these circumstances, to find a way to do so.

On Papa’s side of the family no one talks much. They do what needs to be done. Papa’s father directs public transport in Ghent. He loses his wife Germaine, the second of my grandmothers I will never meet, to cancer at an early age and does not remarry. It is at his hands that I suffer the first real hurt of my life, this in Basel, at Donati’s, on the terrace overlooking the Rhine. Basel already... We have stopped en route to Interlaken on the “ Lac de Thoune ” to spend the holidays at Gunten, as we do almost every year during the golden sixties.

Time for dessert arrives. My parents find a “ Negress ” on the menu which they think I will like. This is the pretty name chosen by this Swiss Italian restaurant to describe a “ Dame Blanche ”. This image makes quite an impression on me and still to this day raises questions both for my memory and my reasoning.

The “ Negress ” arrives and I forget to say thank you. The poor thing has not even landed on the table yet when, at my grandfather’s orders, she returns to the kitchen she has just come from. One would think this was a young woman without the necessary documents being forced to return to her own country of origin. My dessert, my “ Négresse ”, my beautiful “ Dame Blanche ”, my White Lady... vanished.

I often think about this episode from my childhood.

I am six years old, I am in Basel and I am confronted with a linguistic racism that is as improbable as it is unforgivable. Without scruple or sensitivity to others, this naming of the dessert is supposed to come across as good-natured. This flippancy only aggravates the scale of the crime. The white “ Lady ” becomes a “ Negress ” depending on whether the vanilla ice cream or the chocolate dominates. Of course I am unaware that day that I will again be confronted with this disdain for others eighteen years later in South Africa, this time both in the spirit and in the letter of the law. In 1965 the discrimination present even here in Switzerland, champion of non-alignment, is illustrated with impunity, on the dessert menu of a bourgeois Basel restaurant.

I have just asked Maman to reserve a table on the terrace for next June when we will be at the fair. We

will go at lunchtime on the Wednesday or Thursday, at the time of the original crime, and I will definitely have a dessert. I hope that the vanilla ice cream covered in freshly melted chocolate is still on the menu but with a new name. I have promised myself I will remember to say thank you this time, almost forty years later.

Papa and my two grandfathers are engineers and my brother Andre is in second year of Law at the private Catholic faculty of Saint Louis in Brussels. The Jesuit fathers ask me what I want to study after my “ Rhetoric year ”. By chance I indicate my wish to continue my studies at the Solvay Institute at the University of Brussels. At that point I am in my final year of GrecoLatin humanities. The Jesuit fathers decide it will be impossible for me to pass my first year at Solvay and they will be very unhappy and distressed if their impeccable first year pass rate at the university is spoiled by my failure. In their opinion I do not have what it takes in Mathematics, Chemistry or Physics to succeed at Solvay.

Nevertheless they ask me to redo an exam in Greek in September. Of course they are setting me up for failure.

I go to see them and ask if they are serious, if they really want to force me to redo my whole year of rhetoric to get a better understanding of ancient Greek. Not at all, they reply. You will do a year of special Maths: 35 hours of Mathematics, one of Chemistry, one of Physics and two

hours of Religious Philosophy ( strange title for a course especially for a program of special Maths ) per week.

The goal is to allow me to catch up so that I can triumph in my first year at Solvay first time round.

They were one hundred percent right and I still thank them to this day. By the end of that “ special ” year I no longer have any desire to study the sciences.

Art has already permeated most of the blood that runs through my veins. I must find a direction which can incorporate both Gustave and his wife, art and the needs of society. Someone suggests: “ ... but why don’t you study Architecture? You might enjoy it “ , he adds.

I follow his advice and still rejoice in it. As luck would have it, because of the pretensions and stubbornness of the Jesuits, I have been redirected towards architecture.

This will become my profession, my business card. I will be an architect. I am.

My studies take place at the Saint Luc Superior Institute of Architecture, today attached to the Catholic University of Louvain La-Neuve. The school was started by the good fathers but their influence these days is much reduced. Only their ethics remain. The years go by quickly. Some great teachers leave a strong imprint on the clay of my twenties: Cosse, Pirlot, Serneels, Roberechts, Lassoie, Lacour, the Doyen brothers and

Vrankx ... and others. One detail stands out from the rest, as we leave for Vienna on a study trip. As evening falls I walk through the train with some friends, compartment after compartment, to meet up for some socialising in the bar of the restaurant compartment. It is just behind the locomotive and the first sleeper compartment. In the middle of the night the train loses its grip on the rails which have been destabilised by a mudslide. The rains are torrential. The train derails. The locomotive hits the right leg of a road bridge with full force and the entire length of the train ends up leaning against it. The restaurant compartment suddenly finds itself at the head of the convoy; it has just been catapulted there like the rest of us. The lecturers and the other students search for us. They step over the bodies of the deceased and many wounded and still do not find us. They see the firemen removing parts of bodies in agony from the mangled steel. Their groans are hardly blotted out by the noise of the Jaws of Life sawing through steel.

They find us. Our legs can no longer carry us, although it is only really fear that we are suffering from.

We emerge unscathed from this terrible accident. All the parents are informed. There are seven victims, the conductor of the train and six passengers asleep in the first sleeper compartment. The emergency services redirect us to our various destinations with a Teutonic

efficiency and we, for our part, arrive in Vienna exactly forty four minutes later than originally scheduled, not one minute more.

Thus it is that my need to talk late into the night gives me a fourth life.

This life has only just begun when it allows me to meet Michel Mouffe. He is finishing his Visual Arts studies at Saint Luc. To finance most of his studies Michel works at the Francois Villon, the great university tavern of the time. The Villon looks onto the cemetery of Ixelles. I often meet up with Mich there late at night.

This watering hole becomes my preferred last stop in my rounds. I know I will almost always be able to find a taxi driver starting his day there with a good cup of hot coffee. His first fare will then return me to the nest so I can at last fall into Morpheus’s arms.

Michel is a true painter. He loves paint, linseed oil, pigments, and the weft of the canvas. He loves its opaqueness as well as its transparency, its shininess and its reflections, its revelations and what is left unsaid.

He throws himself at it without restraint [ 222 ]. He questions it on a daily basis. The secret of the Flemish reclaims the astonishing splendour of its genesis at a time when too many artists have turned themselves

into arts and crafts manufacturers and strive for some sort of labelling, mistaking this for consecration. Koons sells like Louis Vuitton, Kapoor like Hermes and Hirst like Ralph Lauren. Michel on the other hand stays true, usually in conversation with his soul, to which he remains faithful. His canvases are relics, arranged in chapters, as the waves in the sea follow the rhythm of the tides.

Michel mostly stretches his canvases by hand before breathing life into them. To master them he invites the passage of time, today’s greatest challenge, to join them. In this way he gives his canvases a third and a fourth dimension. He provokes them into reacting and claiming a life of their own to enhance the battle. He invites his soul to join the debate and forces the canvas to contort itself. Layer by layer, Michel’s caresses reveal each new level of corrosion that has pre-existed in the painter’s gesture. The “ modulor ” and the proportions which give life to the unsaid put these paintings within the continuum of humanist experience. Michel takes his place in this continuum with the mature violence of a great wine. The precious imbalance is achieved and the cathedral is allowed to remain under construction.

Michel composes and the music comes to life. Its breath becomes a whisper and chaos arranges itself into

a symphony. I wish, no, I demand Venice for Michel.

The spirit of Belgium cannot help but grow from the extended effervescence of the Flemish secret.

Michel and I are also brothers in grief. He knows the pain of losing a brother prematurely too. One Sunday morning when Michel has gone off in search of some warm rolls, Gerald, his brother and my old classmate, leaves him in pursuit of a raison d’être.

Michel makes his life a masterpiece. He marries Natasha. She loves art and she loves him. All three of them are made for one another. She was born to art, lives art and understands Mich’s daily quest. She quickly tunes in to the spectrum of his breathing. Natasha and Michel give life to Mathilde then to Jeanne. They are wonderful and will without any doubt soon participate in our best possible future. Michel is. They will do me the honour and great kindness of asking me to be godfather to Jeanne as others have done with Alexia, Zoe, and Nicolas twice. I hope I will be able to give all of them some small reason for having made this choice.

Jeanne is determined and self-willed. She and Mathilde are already a continuation of Natasha and Michel and they offer us hope.

VII

The desire to leave becomes urgent. I want to go and build something and more especially to start a new phase in my life, to go where Papa and Maman have never set foot. Moreover, my Judeo-Christian education urges me to quickly find a way to settle my debt to society, which has educated me. At the end of my fourth year three other students join me and we form a small team who share this desire to leave. We draw up a proposal to undertake to draft together our final year thesis and St Luc gives us permission to do so. To this end we leave for Peru to study the problematic dynamics of shanty towns in and around Lima.

We stay for nearly three months. Unfortunately we do not see Machu Picchu. We have no time for tourism ( big mistake ) and in any case we think we will probably have to return very soon. The group is made up of Bruno Erpicum, Philippe Detailleur, Helly Baroudi, one of our numerous Lebanese friends, and me.

We complete a successful initial reconnaissance visit which enables us to put together a theoretical study in five volumes, earning us a “ cum laudae ”. Its title is “ When it is summer in Brussels, it is winter in Lima ”.

For the first time we are confronted with the problem of overpopulation in urban centres and the slums which are too often its by-product.

The vast majority of riches produced in the various regions of Peru are exported from the port of Callao in Lima. Unfortunately a very small portion of these takings return to the point of origin of these riches. The vast majority stays in Lima. It is the attraction of this wealth which, along with access to medicine, teaching and the hope of a job, draws all those who want to try their luck, hoping to benefit from the pseudo progress of our underdeveloped social systems.

It does not take long for us to realise that, even if by some miracle we could improve the living conditions in the slums, this would be the worst goal to follow. In fact improving the conditions would only make them more attractive. The snowball effect would do the rest.

But let everyone rest assured, we are humbly incapable of doing this. It is the daily experience of this kind of poverty that effectively teaches us to recycle newspapers, cases or crates of tomatoes, cool drink cans or old tyres, into precious building materials, so sought after and coveted. The principles regarding their use are not often covered by the university’s academic programme. We identify our only real hope. We must look in the direction

of decentralisation. Change both the way education is organised and the principles on which it is based, along with the criteria for perception and analysis, so that the attractions of rural life are once again given the recognition they deserve.

We need to undergo a deep change of mentality and of the way we think. We need to completely revise our teaching and its structures and models. Advances in information technology should make it possible for each and every person to have free access to knowledge.

I am sure it will soon be possible to undergo medical treatment by remote. Cities should then gradually start losing some of their attractiveness and this siren call should slowly fade away. Also, we urgently need to start placing a new value on arts and crafts as well as restructuring the agricultural economy which should bring a renewed interest in the earth and the rural environment. The Indian Sam Pitroda who believes in frugal, cheap innovation, profitable to the masses, tells us “ it’s a question of seeing how we can use all the knowledge ( available on the web ) to rethink the economy, education, health systems or government systems ”. And he adds “ The best brains work at solving the problems of the rich and not those of the poor. We must change perspective ”.

One story often comes to mind, regarding our quality of life.

Two American friends are on holiday in Greece. They sip their lemonade in the harbour. A fisherman, recently returned, mends his nets. Our two friends approach him and admire his dexterity. They start a conversation.

They question his “ modus Vivendi ”. They soon ask if he does not want to buy his brother in law’s boat or his cousin’s. That way he could start a small business. He could then consider joining up with another business with a similar profile, cutting production costs while increasing the company’s takings. If things go well and he repeats this operation several times he could probably think of listing the company. If he surrounds himself with the right people to help him and if the conditions are favourable he could sell everything at a high price.

An absolute dream: A wad of €, $ or £ ... The fisherman asks them what he would do with all that money. They reply immediately that he could retire, buy himself a beautiful boat and sail the Mediterranean.

The native smiles and asks them in broken English, enriched with a racy Hellenism: “ In your opinion, what do you think I did today ? ”

Our two friends retire and spend several days pondering on the passing of their days and on the meaning of their lives. Nevertheless they take the plane back home and quickly become reintegrated into the system. The latter is not unknown to them and therefore does not hold much fear for them. Their greatest terror lies in one question: “ what if the system ended tomorrow? ” How can we expect to begin our internal revolution that is so urgently needed while we are struggling to hold onto the railings of a Titanic that is gradually but inexorably descending into the abyss…

We finish our final year of Architecture. The day we receive our diplomas, Mr Serneels, our Director, embellishes the occasion with a speech. During the course of this he asks us, amongst other things, to remember to sign up for unemployment benefits the following Monday without fail. Indeed, in Belgium in 1983, it takes six months to qualify for the first monthly payment.

This is probably the last fundamental reason which cements our desire to leave so as to avoid falling into the trap of this system which is as pernicious as it is demeaning.

The Peruvian adventure is unfortunately severely compromised. At the end of our final year at university President Belaunde, an architect, is no longer president of Peru and Orrego, also an architect, is no longer Mayor of Lima. They have been defeated in the last elections.

We had been invited to work at the municipality of Lima and the European Community had promised to help us in this venture by way of subsidies. The mayor of Lima had indeed been interested in the conclusions reached in our study, but is no longer running the city. He could therefore no longer support us in this regard at the time we would have been ready to join his administration.

I am very disconsolate at the time.

To keep ourselves afloat while waiting for an eventual, much wished for, departure, we conceive, design and bring about a minor transformation in an existing shop. At the cocktail party to celebrate the launch of this enterprise in its renovated premises, we happen to hear a group of guests talking. One of them declares, loudly enough for us to hear: “ … they are crying out for architects in South Africa! ”.

Bruno and I exchange glances. It only takes about ten days for us to land in Johannesburg. I arrive first, on 11 February 1984 and Bruno and Sybille, his girlfriend

at the time, who will become his wife, join me a few days later.

Part TWO

VIII

After three days spent in great comfort at the Carlton, a smart hotel in the centre of Johannesburg in 1984, and a gift from my parents so that I can get myself organised without having to worry about accommodation for my first few nights, I check into the Chelsea Hotel in Hillbrow on a half board basis. Bruno and Sybille are staying with Patrice, a cousin of his. Patrice is a surgeon at Baragwanath Hospital. He specialises in prenatal surgery. Working at Bara is fantastic training for him. The type of operation he has to perform there is very rare in Belgium and usually referred to the top specialists, whereas in Soweto everyone trusts him and is happy to include him in the team of surgeons.

He is at the hospital operating for between twelve and fourteen hours a day. The experience he gains there is irreplaceable.

Patrice explains that they work such long hours and there is so much need that they have to force themselves to stop for tea. They have to keep going to help the neverending queue of patients needing attention. During an evening meal he shares with us the harsh reality he is confronted with and that he is trying, with difficulty, to accept: if a patient is not able to last long enough

for a doctor to drink his cup of tea, he probably has no chance of survival. It is critical to ensure that the medical teams have the strength to keep going so that they can keep up with the interminable demand.

Orange, green, blue, blue, orange, green, blue, blue, orange,.. the walls of my room are intermittently lit up for most of the night. The hotel’s nightclub provides the pulsing beat for my crazy nights, in competition with Morpheus, and the neon lights add the staccato flashes of colour still firmly etched in my memory today. Daniel Buren and James Turrell in collaboration long before their respective exhibitions at the Guggenheim in New York! I only spend six weeks at the Chelsea. This brings to an end the nocturnal “ son et lumière ” show of my youth.

I find work within a few days via a recruitment agency. I am lucky. I am an architect and I come from Europe. I am a sought after commodity at that time.

Nevertheless one job succeeds another at quite a pace.

The first one lasts two weeks, the second a month at S. Margoles, and the third six months at MLH. Bill Birrer manages the whole team with an iron fist. He is working on the Super Block for Standard Bank in Johannesburg’s CBD. Professor Mallows is no longer working but often drops in on us unexpectedly. He is a wonderful man.

The Prof’s aura remains strongly felt in the agency long after his departure. Prof is.

My parents make their first sub-Saharan trip to visit me and find me jobless. I am spending a long weekend with them in the Cape when I receive a call from Serge whom I have met through Patrice. Serge is a Belgian architect working in the Building Survey department of the Johannesburg Municipality. Serge is calling because he believes an architectural studio in Greenside is looking for someone. I call this architectural practice from Cape Town and am given an appointment for the middle of the following week. My interview with Manfred Hermer goes well and he calls Rodney Grosskopff so that he can meet me, evaluate me and give his opinion.

I am heading for the door, wondering about the chances of my having convinced them, when Manfred calls me back. He explains that they are looking for someone with solid experience, those words I so fear, but‌ that they are prepared to give me a chance. I rejoice. I start work on 1 November 1984. My parents can go back to Brussels in peace. Thanks to Serge, his attentive ear and his generosity, I am employed again. I do not know at the time that I will never leave this new professional family of mine.

Expatriates bump elbows in Johannesburg. Mostly, like me, they are getting to know the capital. They often meet up at night. Laurence and Emile are amongst them. We start up a friendship which will still be going strong thirty years later and which will survive our later separation. They return to Europe for a few years, like nearly all the other expatriates in our little group, to start a family and so that Emile can build a career to support them.

As he has done me the kindness of introducing me to MLH, I return the favour with “ Manfred Hermer and Grosskopff ” where he works for a while before returning to Europe. They have two children, Sophie and Reginald, in whom they are continued. Emile is an exceptionally intelligent man whose speed of thought exceeds by far the speed with which he talks. I am pleased and privileged to have learned to listen to him. I am expecting them to visit me at the end of August, here in Saint Emilion where I am writing to you. It always gives me huge pleasure to see them, so I am greatly looking forward to the hours we will be able to spend together.

Bruno works in town with Jummy Graff, a cousin of Manfred’s. He, like most in the office, is mainly challenged by residential projects. He only stays in South Africa

for a few years before returning to Belgium to build a fantastic career, still focused on the residential. He is still the willing and very talented man I knew. Our friendship has waned due to time and distance but our mutual respect remains steadfast.

Before long Rodney and Monica Grosskopff take me under their wing and often include me in their Sunday family lunches. They are endlessly kind to me and try as much as possible to introduce me to the South African way of life so that I can become part of it. Maybe Rodney treats me a bit like the son he never has with Monica, who will leave us prematurely. Later he will marry Eileen and her two sons, David and Ryan, will enter his life.

Each time I have lunch or dinner at Monica and Rod’s my eyes are drawn to a statue, a plaster cast of Rodney’s, which reminds me a little of the realm of the soul that I so deeply miss. I feel good with it. It becomes a real comfort blanket for me. It watches over my first steps in this country at the dawn of its recent transformation. In it the agony and the ecstasy unite with force to become the price of our regained humanity.

Its title is “ Risen ” [ 141 ]. Man, once again victorious, resplendent and master of himself, comes at that price.

I will later ask Rodney to have a few bronzes cast before he retires from our architectural practice. One of them

is still with me here, which somehow allows Rodney to still watch over me. We offer another edition of “ Risen ” to Nedcor for their collection and Turiya will call upon poetry to share with us the latest chapter of this story [ 257 ].

As a young man Rodney has the opportunity to work with several artists who get together to draw, paint or sculpt: Bill Ainsley [ 4 ], Dumile Feni, Armstrong and a few others. This is what he says to me one evening while reminiscing to the pleasant sounds of ice clinking in a glass of good whisky: “ After I qualified as an architect I decided that I really ought to know something about art, and sculpture in particular, so I signed up at the Johannesburg Technical College in an evening class.

There they taught us the rudimentary techniques of sculpture, and we were given projects to work on but very little by way of art training. My architectural studies had, I suppose, given me some training and a degree of art appreciation.

I was also fortunate to round off an informal art education by having one of the senior architects in the office, Alexander Munro Hodge, take a shine to me, and he and his wife felt it their duty to give me some culture. In

consequence they took Monica, my wife, and I, both from the southern suburbs, under their wings and showered us in art appreciation - art of every sort. They took us to the theatre, we studied art and artists with them and their friends, we read Shakespeare or some poetry and listened to classical music.

Whereas the training at Tech may have been thin, the other students were a good influence, in particular Michael Armstrong, who was an art teacher himself, but more importantly the brother of Geoffrey Armstrong, an up and coming young artist. There was also a fragile little girl called Lettie Gardiner; the two of them were friends with Bill Ainslie, at that time a very sought after art teacher. They invited me to come along to his weekend workshops. Well, I could not afford art lessons, I was earning 80 Rand a month and married, with two other jobs on the side.

‘No’, Lettie said over a sandwich at the Greek café next to the Tech, ‘We meet on Saturday afternoons in his back yard and hang out, working on our sculptures.’

Well, it took a week or two for me to pluck up the courage and I went. It was something I’d not seen before; Bill and Feka Ainslie shared a home with Mike and Myra Kamstra, a massive Parktown mansion but sadly falling

into disrepair, at 6 Jubilee Road. It was destined to be demolished to make place for the new Teachers Training College. The backyard was festooned with buildings, staff quarters, garages, storerooms and a massive carriage house, with one end open, which is where we ‘worked’.

I was very intimidated. I knew only Lettie and Michael.

There was no tuition as such, also no organisation that one could see. We each found something to sit on, cut-off logs, up-ended paint tins, throw-away rickety chairs. We sat on our own and worked away, rather like toddlers in a sand pit, at whatever took our interest, without much interaction with those around us. People brought along bits and pieces of material and equipment.

There was, however, one big difference - there were some black artists. In my whole university career I had never sat in a class with a black person, and neither did I find them at Tech.

During the war, when my father ‘went up north’, my mother, sister and I went to live with my aunt who ran a trading station at Cebe in the Transkei. There all my friends were black and so, whereas the government of the day had strange, even criminally immoral ideas, I thank God I had none of their prejudices and related very well with my new chums.

One very shy bloke was working quietly in one corner.

I would have been less than human not to be intensely fascinated by what he was doing. His drawings had a frightening Goyaesque imagery yet his sculpture had serenity and a gentleness about it and still it carried his unique handwriting. He was working on a bust of Albert LuthuIi which, with a few bold strokes, carried the essence of ‘Ubuntu’ without losing its strength. At the same time, he was setting up the structure of a man riding a donkey which was almost comical in that the man was so large and the donkey so small. It later became known as ‘The Messenger’. Mslaba Zwelidumile Mxagasi Feni, was his name. We called him Dumile.

I had come completely unprepared - no materials, no tools, not that anyone else had much more. Dumile beckoned me over to sit near him. He gave me an unburnt brick which I carved into a figure somewhat reminiscent of Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore but falling far short of both of them. From then on we were friends. He never ever commented on my work or anyone else’s that I can recall, neither did he speak much about his work or his philosophy. At one time he leaned over and traced his finger over my brick and smiled.

There was another bloke working in another corner, Ben Macala, an angry man who was very happy to

talk about his work. He made nice little figures, usually musicians; they were fun, which belied the fact that he was happy to argue about everything. We all thought that he was probably the one amongst us who would really succeed. Nowadays, with the advent of ‘Conceptual Art’ it is vital that an artist be able to vocalise about his work; indeed it is an integral part of the work. At that time, the work was expected to speak for itself; certainly Dumile believed that. Ben was different.

At about three o’clock Bill Ainslie arrived with a tray of tea. Bill always looked like a boy, a blonde ‘Prince Valiant’ hairstyle and a face wreathed in smiles. When he came close you could see the wisdom in his eyes, and the crow’s feet of compassion. It was the first time I had met him. Everyone was very comfortable with him.

There was no posturing, just quiet discussion. He had an amazing ability to talk about complex art philosophy and imagery in conversational terms.

I grew to love these chats, as did many others. We frequently had ‘visitors’, usually other artists, many of whom had already been ‘recognised’ - Sydney Kumalo, Lucas Sithole, Louis Maqhubela who had just won a competition, Artists Of Fame and Promise, with his ‘Denial of Peter’, Julian Motau, Ephraim Ngatane, Esrom

Legae who was ‘making his mark’. On one occasion we had Athol Fugard the famous South African playwright.

They nosed around our ‘studio’ sat on our logs, drank tea and talked, often not about art. I think they really came to see what Dumile was up to but we loved it.

A while after I joined Lucky Sibiya joined us, a happy smiling fellow. He loved to engrave things. When he started with us he used mainly pieces of broken calabashes, a bit like the Ostraca of the early Greeks.

He would cut through the outer skin and colour the soft pith below. After a while he went on to whole calabashes - I bought the first one he made - then went onto ostrich eggs and bone.

I would never rise to the potential of Dumile and the others but I had a place in this group. My place in the building industry meant that I had access to materials which I got from Coronation Brick and Tile. They gave me unburnt clay, which was already worked and had a nice gritty texture. Most of the work we produced was from this clay. I also found timber and wire and steel offcuts.

Ben Arnold joined us. He loved the smooth and gentle interactions of their planes, very Brancusi-like. He loved the clay I brought along.

Dumile won the Oppenheimer Award to visit and work in Britain. That was the last time I saw him. Sadly he died young but only after becoming one of South Africa’s greatest artists. Lucky Sibiya became recognised and received some good commissions. I think particularly of his mural in the Standard Bank Head Office. He also died young.

I lost track of Ben Macala, but the little piece he made for me still brings a smile to my lips. Whenever I see Ben Arnold’s work it seems to be in the clay I brought by the car boot full and I wonder why he did not progress any further.

Bill Ainslie remains forever one of the greatest art teachers and a very good artist himself, even though he too was killed in a motor accident. ” I will later learn that even William, during his formative years, spent time at Bill Ainsley’s. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Just like me, Rodney carefully nurtures this “ art under the skin ” virus like a precious treasure. In 1971 Linda Goodman even devotes an exhibition to him in her gallery. This interest in art is probably what unites us the most. To show the extent of the infection this virus

can cause, let me share a detail from the beginning of Monica and Rodney’s life together. The young lovers do not have a thing to their names when they decide to buy a small Walter Battiss painting on credit, long before giving any thought to buying a house one day, much to the despair of Monica’s parents [ 8 ].

It is to Rodney that I owe everything I have been able to achieve in South Africa, since I arrived here.

He opens the doors to his country. He teaches me just about everything and places immense trust in me. I will never be able to thank him enough.

IX

At this stage, the “ Bag Factory ” is already sheltering artists in need of a studio as much as they are searching for a circle of influence. I hear that they are having an open day the following weekend and I go along, accompanied by Monica and Rodney. This is where I meet Pat. He has just left his job at the SABC to concentrate fully on his life as an artist. Kagiso Patrick Mautloa is seven years older than me. He assimilates the city through its masks, its openings, its cracks. He absorbs its underlying light which, like a network, lends it meaning. He speaks in few words, managing to gently reveal the city’s struggling energies and to celebrate them. During his wandering Pat observes, perceives, absorbs and digests. He shares his watchful insights, these charred lands, and prepares the country of his children. He is a high priest although he does not know it. With “ Brazier ” [ 206 ] he confronts us, he confronts me. The brazier is above all the main source of heat for those who stay in town for the night, be they workers or simply dropouts on the fringes of society, who scarcely dare to harbour a secret hope for its transformation [ 215 ]. The ferocity of the flames is barely perceptible from the outside, as it would be from Paris, London

or New York. There is not much about it in the press.

Nevertheless a small closed window exists, which one only needs to open to discover the intensity of this rage in flames, of this liberation movement. Through the joins in the brazier the true energy of this change, and of the struggle for it, crackles and cries silently. Small ember particles appear to rise from the fire. The shell, the packaging, the frame of our society cracks open and reveals itself. The fire will not go out. We can join it. “ Yes, we can… ” This visual poem of Pat’s allows us to acknowledge the universality of our realities and our challenges through the scars of apartheid. This work invites us to act as well as to be. “ Brazier ” is the first South African work of art to enter my life, after my Sunday assignations with “ Risen ”: the beginning of a new journey in my adopted country, a country deep in transformation.

Perhaps Pat’s invitation can be read even more easily in the next work. Here, with great talent, he plays with different layers of meaning while continuing to raise questions [ 210 ]. The room is dark. The layout of the house is sober. It rests on a street name plaque. To preserve anonymity, the letters are sufficiently erased, nearly illegible, although their fundamental “ raison d’être ” remains clearly identifiable.

Only a few clues confirm the existence of this street, which could be any street, universal in nature. The small plots of land in the drought and aridity of the township are represented by vinyl tiles, their glued side facing us.

As in a portrait from the renaissance, the landscape in the background is very revealing. In small cracks we find the roaring fire, this same furnace, the one where minerals are transformed into precious metals and the one burning for freedom in Soweto or Alexandra.

The limits are precise and defined. The rough steel of a township fence pole expresses the lower limit while the African sky opens onto infinity. We only need to desire liberty and to want it for a long time, as my father so often says: “ You can if you want to, as long as you want to for long enough ”.

We are free to withdraw and shut ourselves away in the dark room like the adolescent resting peacefully, depicted by Zwelethu Mthethwa in “ Being Cosy ” [ 225 ], or to go out to meet life standing tall and free under the limitless sky. The vantage point is ours to choose: to “ be ”, or not to aspire to it.

The window, omnipresent in Pat’s work, opens here on each of our paths, on the intimacy of our own journey. This window should never be closed. It is up to

us to determine the width of its opening, in our attempt to “ be ”.

The window for Pat becomes a simple orthogonal and permeable construction. It lets in the unseen, the other side, soberly, as if signalling the reality of its presence.

It opens onto the soul [ 211 ].

In Settlement [ 207 ], he juxtaposes the township homes with simplicity while referring, in an almost childlike, offhand way, to the boxlike orthogonality of the place. To this aim he recovers these wood chunks, leftovers of a sculpture by Joachim Schönfeld, and places them sparingly. However, outside of the principal frame, of the system, within its lower margin, Pat whispers the possibility of a degree of freedom. These few chunks are a reference both to freedom and to a more rural, more vernacular settlement. The latter is so much better suited to soothing the effects of the imbalance originating from chaos.

The fence of the township is oversized so as to emphasise the severity of the right angles which are so overpowering in the overall layout.

It is André who finds this small wonder at Trent Read’s “ Read Contemporary Gallery ” and shows it to me before buying it for me. Trent is Marc Read’s brother

and André is mine. He is just finishing his first trip to see me here in Johannesburg.

I often go to see Trent after office hours. I feel good there. I meet Warren Siebrits who works at the gallery.

I also meet Jack Ginsberg, who is passionate about books on artists. It is also there that I discover Kendell.

We will get back to this.

Kagiso Pat Mautloa is invited to Holland for a period of six months for a residency. He is not very happy there.

He misses his home and family terribly. Like many of his predecessors he expresses his dearest wish by painting it. As if he were in the heart of his cave, he becomes his own high priest. He takes a small format of paper, as if to confirm its precious nature, and paints a bowl of porridge and a milk bottle [ 208 ]. These are the only two elements emerging from the darkness. They are the two “ tangibles ” which remind him of the moment of getting up in the morning at home, surrounded by his loved ones, his most intense desire at the time. While he paints, he sees them, probably talks to them and often embraces them.

On his return to Alexandra, at the end of the six months of residency, Pat is reunited with his family and no longer needs his painting to make himself feel

close to, or to connect himself to them. He frames it (the frame is often part of Pat’s work, not unlike Irma Stern) and offers it to me as a present. I am deeply touched.

With this gesture Pat in a sense associates me with his intimate family, with the personal reality of his life and of his being.

During his long walks in the city, Pat observes the men sleeping in the dormitories which have been created to house the migrant workers. Only men are allowed and women are strictly denied access. The workers have to furnish proof of their qualification, 10.A. or 10.B., to be able to make use of this shelter for the night at a very low rate. They have to provide their own bedding, should they require it. The mattress consists only of a simple concrete slab, the principal aggregate of which is austerity.

Pat sees them through the misted or wet windows after a late afternoon storm. Thinking of them, he produces this work, exceptional for its rough precision, this very distinctive oil on canvas [ 209 ]: This time the canvas is ripped, torn into tatters and fills just about every notch of a printer’s tray. The bodies huddle up. Their work is hard and to go home is unthinkable. Some of the beds are free. I hope that nothing serious has happened to their occupants. They might have gone home any way

and are not yet back. The structure relaxes the canvas, welcomes it, loves it and contains it. Line by line, the printer prepares the narrative, the track of their story, of their journey, of their hopes and challenges. Some of the most respected figures in the black community, both yesterday and today, started their active life using these dormitories, these “ hostels ”.

During one of my visits to Pat at the Bag Factory, I notice a beautiful artwork of his. I ask him if it is already sold. He indicates that it is not. It is one of the works that will be exhibited at the Goodman Gallery. I ask him to kindly indicate my interest in the work to Mrs. Goodman (I did not yet know Linda) and to ask her to let me have a reserve on it. I come to the opening of the exhibition with Manfred and Rodney, having asked them for a loan just in case I have the opportunity to buy Pat’s triptych. I also want their approval in principle, to reassure myself in a way that I have not completely lost my mind. This question does not have the time to arise.

Arriving in front of the triptych, I immediately notice the red dot indicating that it is sold. Alarmed, helpless and furious, I talk to Pat who confirms having informed the gallery of my interest. He suggests I approach the owner of the gallery directly, the boss, “ Madame ” (the nickname given to her by the artists). She is short with her answer: “ Yes, the triptych is sold. The National

Gallery bought it and who are you? ” I am mortified.

This would be my first dispute with Linda. There would be many more, in Johannesburg, Cape Town and even Basel, during the course of our otherwise predominantly friendly relationship.

Having said that, Linda fully deserves the reputation she has earned with bravura. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has done as much for art in South Africa at such a critical, crucial time. Her extraordinary commitment, along with that of Kendell, has contributed to the internationalisation of our artistic expression in the field of visual arts. She has taken part in the Basel Art Fair since 1981. That year she occupied a small portion of the Friedman Gallery from London, prior to having her own stand since 1982. Liza Esser, “ Mademoiselle ”, and very close to becoming “ Madame II ”, took over the Goodman Gallery in 2008. She has continued this commitment, so necessary for our artists, with the invaluable help of Neil Dundas, devoted to the Gallery since 1982, of Kirsty, and of the entire team which surrounds them today. William Kentridge, Kendell Geers, David Goldblatt, Mikhael Subotsky, Minnette Vari, Willem Boshoff, Penny Siopis, Gerhard Marx and many others are all indebted to Linda for the opportunity to have their work shown, year after year, to the interested gaze of the world’s most serious collectors. It is also partly thanks to her that they have

been able to support themselves through their art, without having to resort to other means to subsist, such as teaching our young children that by mixing blue and yellow, the colours of Vermeer, one obtains the green of the leaves on our trees in summer.

Bravo Linda and thank you‌.

X

Rodney introduces me to his great friend Richard Epstein, who lives in Forest Town. Richard is Rodney’s insurance broker and without doubt his best friend.

They often see each other over weekends. They make a ritual out of their Sunday morning walk around Zoo Lake, the history of which they recount to me. It is probably the genius loci of this public park which makes me continue, for the rest of my time in South Africa, to want to be close to and if possible to live near to this place, beacon of hope and of memories.

The area around Zoo Lake, which originally formed part of the farm Braamfontein along the Parktownspruit, is bought by Hermann Eckstein with a view to prospecting and mining ore. This endeavour rapidly fails and Eckstein covers the greater part of the land with trees, mainly Eucalyptus. This wood is used in preference to steel for the consolidation of mine galleries, which is the reason it is in such demand in Johannesburg at the time. In fact, in the event of a structural weakening of a mine gallery, the eucalyptus starts “ singing ” and in this way miners are warned of the danger and the need to immediately evacuate that part of the mine. He gives

the property the name “ Sachsenwald ” as a tribute to Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, not long after the death of Hermann Eckstein, his former partners bequeath about eighty hectares of it in perpetuity to the people of Johannesburg, of all races. The administration of the area and the liberty to build the Hermann Eckstein Park as well as the Johannesburg Zoo is assigned to the municipality of Johannesburg. The remaining area of Sachsenwald is developed into housing and becomes the suburbs Saxonwold and Forest Town, names far more politically correct, given the rise of Nazism in Germany.

The buildings formerly occupied by an equestrian regiment have been transformed and today house the war museum.

After the Chelsea I rent various cottages, small living areas, usually attached to a house or situated alongside or adjacent to it. It is in one of them that I surprise a gang of burglars in action one evening on returning home. I take fright and leave immediately to avoid a confrontation or any kind of violence. I tell my friends, amongst them the Belgian Consul General and Madame Van Mighem. They invite me to come and sleep at the consular residence for a few days. Thanks to their kindness I spend three weeks there, during which time

I reflect on the possibility of staying in South Africa.

After numerous nights of procrastination I make my decision and go to talk to Rodney. I am going to leave.

I do not want to risk being injured or losing my life for a trifle by staying in Johannesburg any longer. Rodney understands and lets me know how disappointed he is.

He tells me he had visions of us going quite far together and that he had already started sketching out his plans for my future. These few words from Rodney convince me to change my decision and to opt to stay on with him and the team. I stay. From then on I undertake to live as vigilantly as possible and to be careful not to undermine my decision. Too much analysis could result in paralysis. Any way, we can all take the wrong route from time to time. This is usually not too serious. If we mistakenly take the path to the left instead of the road to the right, we will realise this and change direction while continuing to move forwards. It is only immobility that is fundamentally harmful and sometimes even fatal. It interrupts the movement so necessary for maintaining the rhythm of our precious imbalance.

Richard Epstein gambles a lot. He plays Belote and bridge. I join them over weekends for the walk, bridge, or both. On Thursdays and Saturdays he bets on the horse races. He sometimes also goes to the casino and gambles with his life. It is on one of these weekends that

Richard will leave us prematurely, as a result of a car accident in circumstances somewhat similar to those which took the life of Jackson Pollock. Swept away by a life lived according to the dictates of a fatal flaw played out at the limits of conscience, they choose to follow the siren song, welding death to life and reintegrating with the chaos to which they, like us, like everyone and everything, ultimately belong. [ 242, 36 ]

Jack Ginsberg lives not far from Richard. He resides in the heart of a miniature birch forest, tucked away amongst his books. Jack is especially passionate, as I mentioned earlier, about artists’s books. He collects them avidly. He also surrounds himself with South African art.

He supports South African art like a veritable collector, patron and philanthropist over a period of 45 years.

I often meet him at galleries. After a few encounters, having diagnosed my virus and the advanced state of its infection, Jack invites me home. Of course the time I spend with him is very enriching. At his home I find, amongst others, a major work by Willem Boschoff which fascinates me : “ 370 DAY PROJECT ”.

Before telling you about this work, and since Jack knows Willem so well, I would like to hand over to him

so that he can share with us the speech he delivers at the opening of the mid-career retrospective on Willem’s work at the Standard Bank Art Gallery, which we were lucky enough to renovate. This is probably the simplest, and without a doubt the most honest, way to introduce Willem to you: “ I have been asked to make this opening address a personal reminiscence, as the catalogue by the curator, Warren Siebrits, is extremely comprehensive and contains, among other things, an extraordinary indepth interview with the artist. I urge you all to buy a catalogue which will give you the scholarly perspective this address will not.

During the 1970s I lived in Parktown Mansions situated between Wits and Parktown Boys High School.

I had a few friends who taught there at the time and they often mentioned their colleague, a remarkable Art and RI teacher who, at that time, was known to all of them as Willie Boshoff. He was single minded about all he did, and respected by the boys. He studied the bible with a cabalistic intensity and committed large parts of it to memory and there have subsequently been many artworks where this influence is apparent. The innovative teaching methods he developed at that time, which included music and wordplay, were to become

legendary in his subsequent posts at Wits Technikon. You will have to take my word for it that photographs from the time show Willem as clean-shaven with short back and sides in jacket and tie. He would have had no problem in passing through immigration control at any airport unlike some of his more recent experiences! Although we had friends in common, I only met Willem just before his first exhibition in 1981(2?) at Natalie Knight’s Gallery and his subsequent artist-in-residence at the Johannesburg Art Gallery soon thereafter. [According to Willem the JAG show preceded the Natalie Knight exhibition.] Natalie had exhibited KUBUS (Willem’s first multiple which is on exhibit here) and this was the first work of his I acquired.

I got his telephone number, phoned him to tell him how much I liked his work and we soon became friends. I identified a kindred spirit when I first saw his library but it was only when I spotted a copy of Dewey’s Decimal Classification on a shelf that I recognised a fellow bibliophile (the polite word) or bibliomaniac (the more accurate term). Willem already had the indexing bug and was to carry this theme into many works. The number of dictionaries on his shelves indicated a fascination with words and the English language which I shared.

Although Willem has always been fascinated with words and language, I feel somewhat responsible for his subsequent infatuation because I originally lent

him my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED) on CD ROM which he soon replaced with a copy of his own. Now, there have always been an eccentric group of people who enjoy reading dictionaries, but Willem seemed to regard the OED as a poem about everything.

More recently, I swopped my 25 volume printed edition of the OED for an artwork, so now he has both the printed and electronic versions to engage and to distract him!

Willem not only dipped into the OED for fun, following meanings and synonyms where they might lead, as most aficionados do, (rather like surfing the internet) but was also determined to read the OED from beginning to end and compile various lists of words in categories which he found interesting or curious. His Blind Alphabet (still an ongoing project and part of which is exhibited here) arose from a listing of all the words in the OED (not excluding obsolete words) which have three-dimensional or sculptural qualities which he then interpreted in wood. Several of Willem’s specialised dictionaries which resulted from this close reading will soon be published in letterpress editions under the imprint of Mark Attwood’s Artists’ Press in White River. If one thinks of a single word to describe Willem, the word that immediately comes to mind is “ obsessive ”, a trait to be celebrated in an artist. But as a single word does not do justice, a few alternatives which would also fit the crossword

puzzle are: disciplined, tenacious, determined, resolute, passionate, indomitable or single-minded.

Another attribute of Willem’s is his absolute inability to refuse anyone asking for help or advice. At one time it seemed that the inundation by Matric students who had decided to “ do ” their project on Willem would put an end to any further art-making! Even after the recent publication

by David Krut of the monograph on Willem in the Taxi series, he could still not bring himself to say no, even while hopefully referring all-comers to the book itself.

Willem has a remarkable mind, not only because he has a photographic memory which in itself can be unsettling, but because his mind never stops devising new projects. When you see that faraway look in his eye, you should know that a new work is gestating. On a trip to Honderklipbaai on the West Coast some years ago with Willem, Anel and the kids, I discovered that I had just seven spaces available in my memory for the botanical names of trees. When I learnt the eighth, it knocked out the first ! Willem, on the other hand, knew not only the botanical name of every tree we encountered but also their common names in several languages, and the attributes of their wood. Of course, Anel and I teased him that we couldn’t refute him anyway owing to our ignorance and that he was probably just making it all up. But he wasn’t. His deep interest in botany and

the Linnean taxonomy of plants has resulted in many powerful conceptual works, his 370 Day Project perhaps being the most extraordinary in its audacity and scope.

Although I said I would not be giving an academic analysis of Willem’s work, I would like to tell you why I think his art has become so widely admired both here and abroad. Another of the books which Willem used extensively for teaching was Lucy Lippard’s “ Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object ” published in the early 1970s. This work is one of the most influential on conceptual art and, incidentally, in the history of the artists’ book. The early model of conceptual art, to which Lippard contributed, is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work often takes precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.

Willem’s work differs somewhat from this norm in that the work resulting from his concept is always infused with an aesthetic sensibility and latterly with socio-political insights, an idea expanded on by Lippard.

The exquisite work you will see in the exhibition results from more than a consummate handling of his materials such as wood, metal and stone - its conceptual nature is almost just an added bonus. Who, for example, apart perhaps from a land artist, has ever used sand in art to the brilliant effect Willem has? Sol Le Witt has stated

that in conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work and when an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand - and this certainly applies to Willem’s work. Le Witt goes on to say that the execution is often a perfunctory affair – which is never the case with Willem’s work. For with Willem we are never just left with the concept; there is also the resulting beautifully crafted and executed masterpiece. Unlike some of the early avant-garde conceptualists, the art object is never discarded in favor of the documentation.

Even in an installation piece such as INDEX ON (B) REACHINGS, the divination work which was the highlight of the Urban Futures exhibition at Museum Africa in 2000, and where the installation was one of the most complex ever attempted in this country, the fact that, between installations, we are left only with the documentation does not detract from its presence at the time. The same applies to WRITING IN THE SAND, his 2000 Havana Biennale piece.

While words, letters and language invariably inform the concept, the resulting work stands on its own. Even a lettrist piece (such as KLEINPEN or KYK AFRIKAANS) which is in effect a documented concept, results in a work much more than a document – often painstakingly

produced over an extended period. The result here is a consummate drawing even when it is handwritten or typewritten.

Finally, I would like to extend our appreciation to the Standard Bank for their really magnificent sponsorship of the fine arts, and in particular to Mandie [van der Spuy] and the staff of this Gallery for their dedication in presenting a succession of superb exhibitions in this space. Sponsorship of the fine arts is, in many ways, the most demanding for Corporates, and does not always result in the kudos from other types of sponsorship.

But, I would like to assure the Standard Bank that their continuing commitment has not gone unnoticed by the growing art community. I would also like to commend and congratulate Warren Siebrits for his insightful and sensitive handling of a very complicated curatorial task.

His passion for the project shows at every point in the exhibition, and his catalogue marks another milestone in his continuing documentation of contemporary South African art. And special thanks to the Standard Bank for their generosity in funding the catalogue.

To conclude, I recently had an email from Penny Enslin, one of those colleagues of Willem’s at Parktown Boys High and now professor of Education at Glasgow University, saying that in the 1970s it was apparent to all

that Willem would go places. She meant it metaphorically, and as you will see from this exhibition, she was spot on.

I now have great pleasure in declaring this exhibition open. ” © Jack M. Ginsberg 25/9/2007

I can now tell you about the emotion I experience on first discovering “ 370 Day Project ”. [ 18 ] Over the course of many years, Willem collects and assembles a vast quantity of species of wood, all different, all found in South Africa, even if some of them are not indigenous. He catalogues them according to a strict system, which he describes as follows: “ I compiled the list of the species, the person from whom the wood was obtained and the places where it was found. I also recorded the date on which the wood was processed, not only on the list but on the block of wood concerned. Other important information on the list of woods used was also clearly classified. ”

At the same time he throws himself into keeping a journal covering the 370 days mentioned in the title of the work. To this end he creates his own personal written language. The type of symbol changes according to whether it is used to describe duties or sacrifices to be carried out or the evaluation thereof. He accomplishes these tasks on a daily basis, assigning a specific section to each part of the day. He cuts into the wood samples to engrave his symbols and recovers most of the chips that are left. He collects them in the secret drawers of his work in its closed form or position. It is also there that he keeps the two diaries filled with personal notes: “ I would finish each completed sculpture block carefully, use a hammer to punch in the date of that particular day on the reverse side, and polish the work with a cotton cloth I kept in a plastic bag.

After I had put away the work file with everything inside, I would perform a mental exercise reflecting on the experiences of the day. I would think of a summarizing slogan, saying or appropriate thought, and write it in the diary below the planning notes I had made in the morning. ” He starts this project on his birthday on 12 September 1982, and finishes this series of daily ritual

acts on his father’s birthday on 16 September 1983. The loop comes full circle. When the work is finished Willem contacts the galleries but not one of them will accept it. Times are hard for a young artist and the money is dwindling fast. Jack decides to try to help Willem. As the work represents a perfect link between the world of books and the world of sculpture, two of his passions, Jack manages to convince his father to lend Willem a sum of money for a period of three years during which Jack will do his utmost to sell the work. The three years pass, the work is still unsold and Jack becomes its lucky custodian for life. Without realising it, Jack has just discovered his true role, which he will never abandon, that of patron.

Allow me to share with you here a short passage from what Willem says about this work in his Afrikaans thesis “ Die ontwikkeling en toepassing van visuele letterkundige verskynsels in die samestelling van kunstwerke, beeldhoukuns en grafiese kuns deur Willem Hendrick Adriaan Boshoff ” as translated by Warren Siebrits in the superb catalogue produced by Standard Bank “ Willem Boshoff – word forms and language shapes 1975 – 2007 ” : “ The work of making 370 DAY PROJECT was mentally and physically demanding, because it progressed slowly

and required a great deal of thought. To counter the mental exhaustion and also to make myself sufficiently fit to keep up the pace of the project while coping with my normal duties, I would jog 32 kilometers daily, running early in the morning and late in the afternoon. This exercise regime coupled with the discipline required for 370 DAY PROJECT, enabled me to win a silver medal in the 87-kilometer Comrades Marathon that year.

Orthodox versions of meditative practice go hand in hand with a certain idea of space and time. Medieval saints, for instance, regarded lengthy abstinence from contact with “ this world ” as ideal for spiritual growth. Antonius ( 251 – 356 AD ) was a Greek orthodox patriarch whose sayings were regarded with much respect in the fifth century, and continue to enjoy a prominent place in the patriarchal pronouncements of the orthodox churches.

He recommended a reclusive life in the wild, together with the strengthening of the inner life through prayer and meditation, as a way to triumph over the weakness of the flesh.

While I was working on 370 DAY PROJECT, I too compiled “ sayings ”. However, I followed a routine of self reclusion that was very different from that of the medieval hermit priests. I heeded the Sermon on the Mount, in which the listeners are advised to pray in an inner room, behind closed doors, and the idea that

the word “ meditation ” means to retire to the middle or “ medi ” of oneself, but reasoned that the inner room is a space within a person to which he or she can retire anywhere, not only in the wild or behind closed doors. I thought of the project as a kind of key to lock or unlock the doors of that inner room.

I recorded the central ideas that the project stimulated in me at the end of each inner room session ( that is at the end of each day’s work ). Although I took care not to change the nature of the medieval idea of internal contemplation, I enlarged the conceptual context by proposing that the fullest strengthening of the inner life can be achieved through meditation. ” This conceptual sculpture is, or was, part of the syllabus for the final year of school in South Africa.

Jack has the elegance, kindness and generosity to offer wide-eyed late adolescents the opportunity to admire the work at his home, along with innumerable other cultural and historical treasures. The work even travels to an exhibition in Germany where the rigorous efficiency of the Teutonic spirit is so suited to its appraisal and admiration.

After my visit to Jack I am very keen to meet this high priest and Warren arranges for us to meet at the artist’s

home, in his house which also serves as his studio.

As soon as I arrive, I notice a magnificent carpenter’s workbench. It belonged to his father, a woodworker.

Willem’s love of wood precedes him. As a small boy he often watched his father working at it, caressing it, tirelessly.

Ever since that first visit I am fascinated by five works. The first is his father’s workbench, precursor to his story. The four others are “ Tafel Boek ”, “ Library Cards ”, “ Verskeur ” and “ Kubus ”.

Willem is living at Brighton Court on the corner of Quartz and Ockerse in Hillbrow when he starts working on “ Tafel Boek ” [ 21 ]. He spends four years working very long hours to finish this work. During this time he gets married. With his legendary smile, animated face and considerable humour, he tells me that he conceived this work partly thanks to the cramped nature of his working and living quarters at the time. Indeed this book opens and closes according to the rhythms of his life. Willem creates it out of wood in memory and in honour of this resource which has been used for centuries to make pages for our books, repository of most of our knowledge, and to make the cross on which Christ dies. “ Tafel Boek ” is a tomb, the tomb of the book in an era in which knowledge is transmitted and

distributed electronically. The latter, however, can be opened page by page in a precise order passed on to those who keep watch over it and maintain it, giving access to the networks of our cities, our societies, our bodies and our organs, our entrails and our viscera… It is on opening the tomb that the light appears, the light of Willem’s genius, the light of his love, the light of the resurrection, of the perpetual rebirth of the hope which has its roots in the wisdom of our fathers. Willem takes enormous pleasure in seeing his children play on the surface of the table, the cover of the book when closed.

Through his profound love of wood, regenerating this passion he learned from his father, Willem is able to offer it as a play area for his children before passing it on to us to help us believe in our potential. Everything becomes possible to anyone who opens the book.

Willem moves with his first wife to Noverna Court, at the corner of Paul Nel and Claim. That is where he develops the first models for “ Kubus ” [ 26 ]. This time, the work will be produced in aluminium, with industrialisation and technology coming to the fore. It is when the cube is closed, that the city is, that it is resolved and becomes a platonic form. It is the sum of knowledge, of the six sides that elevate the whole to the next level thanks to the contribution, coexistence and commitment of the 27 elements it contains (3x3x3). This

is how one gets to Plato and his contemporaries. Today this cube can be held in the palm of one’s hand, and the book, current repository of thought, is transmitted on our laptops, tablets, telephones or electronic books.

The 27 elements suddenly become 19 683 (27x27x27), before in turn becoming 7 625 597 484 987 (19 683 X 19 683 X 19 683) barely moments later, and so on… A new renaissance beckons to us and the overpopulated state of our rock calls for our attention. Where are our wise men? What has happened to our fathers, the Koi San? What has become of them and of the thirteen other tribes from which we are all descended ?

In 1981, during its first exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in September, the initial cube is stolen. Taking a severe blow from human nature, Willem decides to fight it and get the better of it. He decides to create an edition of fifty of these cubes, all identical. As a precaution he only makes forty of them as if to safeguard the remaining ten which may reveal themselves to the world in the future, after an eventual Apocalypse, if this can no longer be avoided.

When I first see “ Verskeur ” [ 23 ] the idea of a conversation between Willem and Denmark comes to mind. Like Denmark, in this work Willem tries to give meaning to society’s waste, our waste. Denmark

primarily sanctifies the obsolescence of content, of printed matter, by giving it life again in another form which has now become unreadable to our gaze. ( We will come back to this “ reading ” when we continue our conversation on “ the inner world of Minnette ” via a meditation somewhat similar to Buddhist meditation. ) Here Willem tackles the subject of the obsolescence to which our current consumer society disdainfully assigns all kinds of used stationery. For a period of twelve months in 1978 Willem collects bits and pieces of paper and cardboard destined for the waste dump or, today, for recycling. He tears them as if to facilitate their digestion. It is this action of tearing that gives the work its title. The bits of paper thus saved from the refuse bring together a number of links between him and this society: a tomato carton, an expired chequebook, an invitation to an exhibition and its envelope, a letter, a post-it, a worthless stamp, and many others… united, they seem to form a strange, distinctive kind of personal diary.

Willem processes them and to this end positions each of them on its side, as the jeweller sets each diamond. He respects them, one after the other, one as much as the other, gradually recomposing the bark of the trees to which they owe their existence, the trees of Prigogine or of Peynet’s lovers, those wonderful magnificent sentinels which bear witness to our lives. Here Willem leads us

backwards through the production channels of excessive overconsumption and perhaps invites us to envisage the potential which a decrease in consumption might offer.

Furthermore, the battle against deforestation depends both directly and intrinsically on the evolution of our behaviour.

The obsolescence of the simple gesture of the librarian which Johan Vermeer would have found so pleasing is meticulously and rigorously celebrated in Willem’s “ Library Cards ” [ 22 ] . His sense of discretion compels him to preserve the anonymity of thousands of readers whose names are spelled out in these lines of cards. He enshrouds them forever with great respect and creates a sort of monochrome work whose richness and abundance of colour is gently revealed in the rhythm of our movement sideways. The internal richness becomes kinetic. Even the little prince had to keep coming and going repeatedly to have the slightest chance of taming the fox. The same applies to anyone wanting to enter the space of random colour that Willem portrays in his “ Library Cards ”. The richness of this apparent monochromatism resembles that which Michel flees from in his work. It has the same abundance and depth.

The colours emanate at a different pace according to the personal rhythms of each person in pursuit of their own freedom. Moreover, once the names have

been reassigned their anonymity, the genus and ethnic groups disappear so as to regroup, merged, fused into a rainbow, in the specific form and structure arising from our chaos, so deeply wished for by our beloved Madiba.

Willem often exchanges his high priest’s robes to don the druid’s robe. This is how he regularly expresses himself in recent years. “ The druid is a traditional seer, an elder with acute powers of discernment regarding the well-being of individuals and of society. He shares charms and talismans. ” It is this druid that I find in his “ Cubiculum ” at Art Basel in 2009 [ 31 ]. Willem’s performance is a fabulous success. Many people ask me for news of him at subsequent fairs in Basel. They also want to know if he is planning to return to the fair, or if there is anything of his for sale at Liza’s. Unfortunately Willem is one of the very rare artists who can exhibit to the who’s who of collectors assembled in Basel without having anything whatsoever to sell which, on its own, is probably one of his greatest achievements.

Let me hand over to Willem here so that he can share with us and explain his debut as a druid. “ Druids and Gnostics are inherently from an oral tradition. I take my cue from the arch-druid who was crucified for what he said, not for what he wrote.

In my younger years I was ridiculously religious – to the extent that I went into full time preaching on the streets of Johannesburg and other South African cities.

At the end of this phase, in my early thirties, without realising it, I fell prey to a rotten spell of lead poisoning ( also called plumbism, colica Pictonum or saturnism ) and was then subjected to twenty years of intense pain and discomfort. Driven to distraction, I came to the inevitable conclusion that God is a fiction, but that He is nevertheless real. If you ask me today whether I believe in God or not, my answer is unequivocally : “ Yes, of course I do ” and then again in the same breath : “ No, I certainly don’t.

Years ago I had all but memorised the entire New Testament and while poisoned, I was on a quest to understand every word in the more-than-twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. I felt I had a keen grasp on where the notion of God came from. I also set myself the impossible task to know every plant on earth by its botanical name and to tell it apart from all other plants. Not being able to sleep at night, I managed to write about fifteen dictionaries and transformed some of them in art installations. While raising a family, I kept a stoic, Spartan, monk-like way of life and to cope with the neuropathic discomfort ; I made more artworks than anyone I knew. Working and red wine were my painkillers – pills did not work. When I worked, my head

went somewhere else and I did not feel the bloody hurt. I had never drunk a drop of alcohol till I was thirty six and thereafter I felt compelled to drink all the wine produced in the Cape, literally. At the end of this time I could no longer walk and the doctors, especially the specialists, told me to cut down on my lifestyle. I should be thankful for having led a “ great ” life and that it was time to stop - I was getting old.

In 2005, Dr. Derrick Wilton, a wise and wisened old medical specialist took a snippet of my hair for testing.

He phoned back with the somber result that I had been poisoned. I had to see him immediately!

It turned out that I had an inordinate amount of lead poison in my system – not merely the small amount of heavy metal poison we all have from exhaust fumes and factories. My excessive level of poisoning caused intense neuropathy and pain. I had contracted the problem by not wearing a mask when sanding down piles of antique wooden doors and windows some twenty years before and I should have been dead already.

In 2006 I received a few months of chelation treatment to remove the lead. During weekly sessions EDTA ( Ethylene Diamine Tetra Acetic ) was administered

by syringe, accompanied by a torrid drip of hydrogen peroxide at the end which I was left dizzy and miserable.

At about this time I read some books on druids. Even though we don’t know a great deal about them, I thought that my lifestyle was to a great extent similar to theirs.

Their name “ Druid ” is from an old Greek source “ drus ” , ( tree ). A “ dryad ”, as found in folklore and Greek mythology, is a nymph inhabiting the forest, or tree, especially an oak tree and also derives from “ drus ”. My father was a carpenter and I had worked with wood all my life. Furthermore, I had spent many years studying trees and plants and I was able to identify most of our local flora as well as a large number of universal species.

I had taken three massive “ gardens ” of plant words on exhibitions to a number of countries. I lived a little like a reclusive monk studying dictionaries, religion, philosophy, anthropology, botany, music and art. I imagined the druids as not necessarily religious, but knowing the secret of why people were devoted to religion. Druids occupied a position where they were able to marry the “ sciences ” of agriculture, healing, the stars, seasons, psychology, the weather and so on… Like me, they had studied many methods of divination and had figured out why augurs were successful in making insightful pronouncements.

The suspicious Romans where so afraid of druids that, in the year 70 AD, they killed all of them. It should also be

noted that they tried to kill the arch-druid 70 years earlier when, under the rule of Cesar Augustus, they killed all two year old babies.

In my books I came across some information indicating that in order for one to become a druid, one has to go through the near-death experience. I noticed that this was also true for the African Sangomas and Inyangas.

In a project entitled “ INDEX OF (B)REACHINGS ”, I had carefully studied divination as practiced by the ancient Greeks and today’s African healers and sages, and I believe that they are somewhat aligned with the druids.

The word Inyanga literally means “ man of trees ”. I took note of the fact that these all had to face death and then come back to life and I thought of my own escape. Maybe I was a silly old druid after all or perhaps just a little druid.

The chelating treatment drew to an end, and I began to surface from my misery – badly battered, but alive.

The lead was gone, but it had caused untold damage; my legs, in particular, continued to be extremely painful from neuropathy, but the rest of my body saw a great change.

I felt renewed and exhilarated to the extent that I became acutely aware of the colours, shapes and textures of the world around me. Everything looked so new, it was as if I could see it for the first time. I had spent many years

practicing different forms of meditation and it felt as if I now meditated for the very first time. I walked on water and I soared above the clouds. Life was distinctly grand.

As time went on, the sense of incredible sight and awareness increased. I was reminded of the fact that druids are seers. Paradoxically I was attracted to splendour and awe in the dust and muck on pavements and walls, so I started photographing it. I also, slowly at first, discovered that I could walk again and I began to venture on slow druidic walks.

My first druid walks were undertaken at the Nirox artist residency in the Cradle of Humankind, west of Johannesburg. It was wintertime in 2007 and the stems of the trees were exposed. I discovered signs of intense suffering in the “ Celtis ” trees. They are of the elm family ( Ulmacae ). The elm trees had been blighted in Europe

by Dutch Elm disease and I felt strangely attracted to be with Ptelea, the tragic nymph of the elms. My first druid walks made me see signs of abuse of the bodies of the Celtis trees that filled me with a sense of grief. I photographed what looked like sexual abuse and genital mutilation.

More druid walks seemed to bring me in touch with the very spirit of things. In September of 2008, I stayed in

New-York, at the apartment of the Ampersand Foundation ( started by Jack ), a city block away from Ground Zero.

I moved about slowly and carefully around the streets of that beleaguered precinct to see if I could find tell-tales of the disaster that happened seven years earlier. I felt led by the rather timid nymph residing in lower Manhattan.

The nymph of a city is called a “ poliad ” and the one I sought out appeared overcome with a sense of numbness and desolation. After recording the impression of gloom visible in the cracks in the road and the debris stuck on the lamp-posts, I decided that it was time to share what was happening to me.

In 2009, after more druid walks and druid musings, the Basel Art Fair committee gave me permission to set up my cubicle as part of Art Unlimited. ” It is this druid who has the great kindness and emotional intelligence to give me a very special gift for my birthday in 2002. This present could not come from anyone other than him. On this day he gives me three little stones of different sizes [ 24 ]. The biggest, which is beige coloured, has been carved by the wind, the medium sized black one has been carved by water. As for the smallest brown one, the sharpest of the three, it has been carved by man. The tool is made, as is the weapon, and the daily choice remains ours. These three

small stones of Willem’s make me think of Tom Thumb.

They help me find my path.

Willem loves Gaia [ 27 ], he loves the earth, the humus of our country, passionately. He shares his journey with us through this country he loves so much, by collecting small samples of its numerous types of soil before cataloguing them in alphabetical order. As this itinerant collection takes place before the 1994 elections, twenty years ago already, the provinces are still listed by the names they had at the time. The richness and diversity of our regions explode in these little pharmaceutical bottles which contrast so strongly on their shelves with those of Damien Hirst.

To fill these 190 bottles and catalogue them with his habitual strictness and rigour, Willem celebrates his second marriage, to Anel (10 December 1988 ), by taking her on a walk of some ten thousand kilometres within the borders of his homeland. This must surely be a reliable proof of his passion and his love both for his wife and for the country of his ancestors.

Gaia is a word in Ancient Greek, which means “ the earth ”.

According to Hesiod’s Theogony, Chaos, which denotes the fault or the gaping void, and which precedes

the origin of the world and of the Gods, first of all engenders Gaia, the earth, goddess with the large chest, mother earth, and unwavering source of all immortals who inhabit the snowy summits of Olympus. Next Chaos begets Tartarus, the abyss, the unfathomable depths and Love, the most handsome of the immortals who suffuses the Gods and men with his languor.

If Hesiod does not expand on the nature of Chaos, Ovid on the other hand describes it in his Metamorphoses as a “ shapeless and confused mass which was still no more than an inert weight, a heap of all the disparate germs of elements of things unlinked ”. This rough shapeless mass is characterised by two principal elements: the bottomless abyss in which one falls endlessly: Earth which appears next, offers a stable base, radically opposed to Chaos the space where there is no possibility of orientation, where one falls in all directions.

Let me insert a few lines here about the way my perception or understanding of chaos has evolved.

Having first signified the absolute void, chaos becomes this shapeless mass, this unrelated everything. Towards the end of the Quattrocento, Christine de Pisan defines

our friend as a “ state of confusion of the elements which preceded the organisation of the world ”, while in the sixteenth century Phlippe Desportes describes it in his Elegies as “ all manner of confusion, of disorder ”. We thus evolve from a notion of nothingness to one of an ensemble of elements in total disarray or confusion.

Chaos! A total mess!

In the era of Galileo, the doctor and chemist Van Helmont creates the word “ Gas ” based on the ancient Greek word. He tells us: “ I have given this vapour the name gas because it is hardly distinguishable from the Chaos of ancient times. ” He had discovered that air is composed of two parts.

As for the ancient Chinese, they are quick to recognise the link between chaos and order. The union of the Yin and the Yang creates the universe but an excess of either one of them leads back to the initial chaos.

In chaos theory and dynamical systems theory, conservative or dissipative, the latter is still continuing to evolve. The idea that certain structures emerge or appear from chaos is becoming accepted. If we now bring together a lot of different phenomena, which for the most part can be described scientifically, these all

collide and all we are left with is an immense ensemble of actions and reactions. Through the “ butterfly effect ”, the whole is thus on the one hand continually reacting or mutating and on the other hand condemned to survive, since nothing is ever created or destroyed, if we are to believe Lavoisier. It is this Chaos that I feel in the depths of my being, like life itself. This Chaos, which initially appeared to me to be nothing, today becomes the opposite, an absolute totality.

So I think that I am nothing more, nothing less than a simple anecdote of this Chaos, of this immense chain of actions and reactions, prior to these becoming new actions resulting in new reactions, prior to these becoming…. and so be it. Only imbalance remains permanent.

By the same logic, the beginning and the end are linked. And I try to fully appreciate and respect this circle and to love it with all my might. I choose to stop trying to leave it, to escape it or flee. I believe that perhaps the joy of being comes at this price. I have chosen humility and do not claim to be more than this anecdotal element of a chaos that I am part of. I also believe that to want, desire, claim, or aspire to a better hereafter can only lead us to denigrate or ignore the beauty of our lives while waiting or hoping for better days in that hereafter.

I would rather be happy with and concentrate on the here and now, which are nothing other than an infinitesimal part of everywhere and always, before “ disolving like sugar in a cup of eternity ”, Pierre Alechinsky’s fabulous wish.

This is why I dare to imagine that the Big Bang is nothing but a reaction to the action which preceded it and that the circle, of course, guarantees its own continuity.

For the same reasons I believe we will never find a limit to this universe which has no need of it and which, without any doubt as far as I am concerned, supports many other forms of life. No, we are not the chosen or elected people any more than the dinosaurs were or those that come after us will be ….in the continuum of this universal evolution.

I have had the great privilege of living with four of these works of Willem’s as well as with his magnificent gift. Very sadly for me, I have to part with two of them when Lynn and I decide to marry. We need to move to a new house and work on renovating it to create our family home. The painful sacrifice of the departure of these works helps finance the renovations without exposing our new family to too much debt. I sorely miss living with these seminal works of Willem’s. Choices have a price. Lynn and I now live happily as a family

with Jordan and Camille in a house they adore. I am also comforted by the thought that one of these works is now loved and cared for, under the watchful eye of Gordon Schachat and Clive Kellner. It is part of the Gordon Schachat Collection, and will probably one day find itself in a museum or a foundation where it will be discovered and appreciated by a large number of people.

I had hoped that this passing of the flame would be beneficial to all, although I could never have imagined the potential magnitude of these positive developments.

It is partly through living with this work, Tafel Boek, that Gordon, a great collector of modern South African art, becomes increasingly interested in contemporary South African art and decides to become really involved in promoting it and to become one of its key ambassadors.

XI

It is Saturday morning and I have just finished watching an extract of a television program on You Tube, “ On n’est pas couché ”, in which Fabrice Luchini, true to form, launches a tirade as scathing as it is relentless.

It is heavy stuff … In another vignette, to the right of my screen, I notice Zaz, the young singer whose heart is in the right place, with talent to match. As I enjoy her music and she often puts me in a good mood, I of course decide to watch her. Before singing, in another extract from this same program she talks, inter alia, about Pierre Rabhi. I have never heard of him.

I do some research on the internet and find to my great joy that everything I am speaking to you about falls within the scope of his thoughts and beliefs. I am overjoyed to meet a brother or a cousin I did not know I had. This is how I discover the “ Colibris ” movement, created in 2007 at his instigation, which has as its mission to inspire, unite and support all those who are helping to build a new blueprint for society. This movement becomes a growing force which proposes, and aims to produce and expand on, a different type of agriculture, of economy, of education, of urbanism,

and of governance, as well as a new relationship with ourselves, with others and with nature.

Let me share with you a quick overview of the broad outline of his thinking, happily accepting the risk of a certain degree of redundancy. This is no accident.

Certain things can be repeated more than once in slightly different forms, and often benefit from so doing.

And then, all this brings us back to Gaia, so recently visited with that other druid, Willem.

Pierre Rabhi shares the seriousness of the moment with us by intuitively modulating the tone of his voice.

We have lost our relationship with nature. We live today in a society that is inorganic and technical, taking shelter in “ soilless ” towns. Most do not even have the bare essentials while a very small minority have unlimited resources. During the post-war economic boom there was an explosion of prosperity. The wheels of industry have turned four hundred percent and have ravaged the earth. Today we are collapsing under a plethora of consumer goods, but are we happy? The real question is: Does the way our societies are organised correspond with the nature of man?

Nomadic people would only transport the bare essentials, while we today try to make up for our

insecurity by continually trying to fill a never-ending lack, a bottomless emptiness. Everything revolves around what we do not have. Sobriety on the other hand gives a sense of real and lasting well-being. Moreover, it rapidly acquires a moral or ethical dimension.

Appreciation, satisfaction and well-being cannot be bought but are nonetheless the real treasure. Confucius tells us: “ Contentment brings happiness, even in poverty; Discontent brings poverty even in wealth ”. Saint Augustin later adds : “ Happiness is continuing to desire what one already has ”, as I have already mentioned earlier in these pages.

It is time to reconsider, to call into question our ideologies based on never-ending growth. We need to start with the education of our children and with town and country planning. We need to rediscover the value of manual work and to understand nature. Let’s commit to cutting back. Let’s downplay economic criteria and instead place value on natural or human criteria.

Human has the same roots as humid and humus. The earth is sacred.

We are all compromised, myself included; let’s not deny it. There is no shame. We are driven to this by the way the world is currently organised. However, we therefore all share responsibility. We must organise

ourselves so we can free ourselves from dependence on multinationals. Sobriety could facilitate this, just as a vastly simplified way of life would help us find the way back to a real solidarity.

Society’s transformation depends, without doubt, on the initial transformation of the individual. We are raising prodigies but they are too rarely inspired by a profound moral or ethical intelligence. Technology can never replace the human element. The initiatory journey, the internal route, is a good starting point. Education can help us on this journey by allowing us to refuse to participate in the formatting of individuals to become mere cogs in our current social systems.

We need to enter a transition phase. We must get the ball rolling, take the first step. Given the ultimatum we have made for ourselves the need for change is a matter of unprecedented urgency. Let’s not be afraid to approach our mistakes with a certain humility and modesty. Let’s not be afraid to recognise them. Let’s protest against stupidity and fight it. Politics is not, never has been and never shall be reserved for members of the “ clubs ”. Each of our actions is political, like the rebellion of our consciences. The urgency is both absolute and collective! Let us rediscover the relationship

between humans and nature. Every civil society project is a drop of water which helps to extinguish the fire.

We cannot wait for politicians to take charge of this task, hoping thus to free ourselves of our responsibilities.

They have unfortunately reduced to the extreme their own room to manoeuvre.

Let’s learn to listen to the intelligence or the good sense of the illiterate peasant whose wisdom is transmitted by oral tradition. Much of it, of real and paramount value, has been lost through their marginalisation. This was inevitable. They are not on the same side as those who pillage and destroy. They are not part of the same clan. Moreover, they have the courage, the audacity or the wisdom to have no interest in democracy or in our concept of growth. Even these are perhaps already obsolete or superfluous.

XII

Following my research on Pierre Rabhi I am dismayed to see a poignant documentary by Coline Serreau, LOCAL SOLUTIONS FOR GLOBAL DISORDER, which speaks to all of us. Here is what some of our current contemporary world experts in agriculture and agronomy are telling us:

Dominique Guillet, founder of Kokopelli, an association which promotes the liberation of seed and humus and which, since 1999, has been committed to the protection of alimentary biodiversity and the production and distribution of agro-ecological seeds. “ The second world war wiped out the FrancoGermanic farming community, massacred at the front.

Millions of farmers died. On top of that the subsequent discovery of the synthesis of ammonia enabled the making of bombs during the war and synthetic fertilisers afterwards. Mustard gas gave birth to insecticides. With the Marshall Plan in 1948 the United States started delivering tractors, the logical sequel to tanks. Western agriculture today is an agriculture based on war. ”

Vandana Shiva. Physician. Science PhD. India.

Alternative Novel Prize 2013. She heads up an association which protects small Indian farmers. “ Pesticides are a product of war, fertilisers as well.

The concept of agriculture as war against the planet stems from war itself. This must be rejected as an aberration from the last century. We must start this new century by rediscovering the continuity of ancient wisdom which has been teaching us how to live with the earth since time immemorial. ”

Ana Primavesi. Doctor of Agronomy. Brazil. “ All conventional agriculture today is based on an alliance between two parties: agriculture and industry which, as a result of the Second World War, has enormous stocks of poison supposedly designed for killing the enemy. When the war was over, since there were no more enemies to kill, Professor Bulloch had a fantastic idea. He said: “ Agriculture buys practically nothing from industry other than an occasional tractor… nothing worth mentioning. So, this is what we are going to do. We will do a deal: Agriculture will buy powerful machines, chemical

fertilisers and pesticides from industry. The latter will pocket the rewards while agriculture will make a loss, but government will use part of the tax receipts to bail out agriculture. ” And that is what happened, resulting in today’s famous subsidies. These worked more or less for “ first world ” countries which possessed industries.

Here on the other hand ( in Brazil ) they obviously could not work. We had no industry. So we had to start importing machines and chemical products, paying on credit to import them at interest rates of 20 to 25%. It was practically an open vein allowing all the wealth of the Third World to flow towards the First World. For us it was no progress at all, but for them it was. The American economy, for example, has been in deficit in recent years, but its people have lived well thanks to the Third World which had to pay, pay and keep on paying… ”

Philippe

Desbrosses.

Farmer, Doctor of Environmental Sciences. President of the National Commission for the A/B Label at the French Ministry of Agriculture since 2007. “ At the end of the war in ’46 or ’47 nobody knew how much manure should be put in the ground because it was an element which passed directly from the cowshed

to the earth and, since it had no commercial value, it did not appear in the national accounts. We ended up finding the information in the accounts of Shell Petroleum which was looking to recycle its nitrate factories after the war so as to start producing agricultural nitrate. They wanted to know the size of such a market market. This is how it was established that France used to return some 120 million tons of manure to its land each year. Today this figure is not even thirty million. Nobody questions the consequences of this disappearance of an element which nourishes the soil’s bacteria and allows plants to grow without chemical fertilisers, pesticides and the rest of the artillery. ”

Joao Pedro Stedile. National Coordinator of Brazil’s MST Movement (movement of the landless). “ Our generation is faced with a huge dilemma because capitalism, currently dominated by financial institutions and multinationals, has imposed an agriculture whose primary goal is not to produce food.

Their aim it to produce goods or commodities to make money. They have become looters of nature. They take from nature anything that can turn a profit. They exploit water and land and they apply production industry

principles to agriculture, with the aim of selling farmers industrial quantities of fertilisers and pesticides, as well as ever bigger machines which eliminate the need for manual labour while appropriating drinking water resources for massive irrigation. There is no future for this “ green revolution ”, which is in fact the capitalist industrial model applied to agriculture. Furthermore, it endangers life on the planet by destroying the earth’s microbiology and poisoning foods. The worst is that these poisons are indestructible. They either enter the soil or the water or your stomach. In addition, the monoculture imposed by the multinationals and the big landowners destroys biodiversity. ”

Vandana Shiva. “ The green revolution received a Nobel Peace Prize on the grounds that the new technology linked with biology would bring prosperity and that this would bring peace. It was called “ the green revolution ” as an alternative to the red revolution coming out of China. The Americans said: “ spread chemical products and you will have an alternative to communism. ” Literally! Take up these chemical products against communism. ”

Dominique Guillet. “ The green revolution was green because of the colour of the dollar above all else. They made a lot of dollars out of the green revolution but it was terrifying for people living in the third world; the green revolution destroyed the soil, destroyed the water and destroyed the grass. Biodiversity was also destroyed. In India, for example, before the green revolution there were two hundred thousand varieties of rice, whereas after forty years of green revolution only fifty remain; five times ten, that’s all! The social fabric of India was destroyed because Indian agriculture was a female agriculture. This was turned into a male agriculture with harvests which have a value at a regional, national or international level whereas before, India’s female agriculture was first and foremost there to feed the family. ”

Serge Latouche. Economist. Professor at the University of Paris Sud. “ The economy in the modern sense, the capitalist, trading, etc. economy …, is a guy thing. I’m convinced of it. I’ve been able to see through my study of economics that it isn’t completely by chance that there are very few women in economics and in industry. It’s almost a

caricature in Africa, for example: everything of substance in life, which keeps Africa going, comes from the women who cultivate the earth because it is they who are fertile; they provide all the basic necessities. But as soon as a modern plantation is created, the men take over. ” Devider Sharma. India. Agronomist Engineer, journalist, writer. “ Forty years ago, the so-called green revolution was adopted. And today, we have the highest suicide rate of farmers in the world. Every hour two farmers commit suicide in India, victims in some way or another of the debt spiral ”. “ They commit suicide by drinking pesticides which kill them because of the debt incurred, just as they killed the earth… ”

One after the other over the course of three hours, these experts and scientists, joined by yet others, bring us their alarming message. They warn us of the urgency of our current situation and tell us about various initiatives.

The earth is dead and even the floods we are currently experiencing are a result of the lack of porosity of this dead earth. Water can no longer penetrate it.

Every minute sees another farmer leave his farm in Europe. In India, six hundred million poor people are chased from the towns after having been chased away from agricultural life. Eight hundred and fifty million Africans want to leave for Europe or elsewhere because we have destroyed the reason for which they might have remained in Africa. Everywhere the numbers of idle and despondent youth are growing and multiplying. The crisis we are facing could end in violence and the taking up of arms.

Agriculture today, although called modern, is all organised around and derived from a fossil resource, oil, which is condemned to extinction. What will happen when it is gone? Our land will be dead. We no longer nourish it; we nourish plants and animals directly.

Livestock and plantations occur in separate regions today. For fifty years we have been killing off perennial agriculture which was based on a balance between livestock, crops and forest. If we remove chemistry nothing more will happen. The soil is dead. We are already living in a virtual desert. It is very difficult to make something “ live ”, whereas anyone can kill.

It is devastating to note that the more a country destroys its environment the more its GDP increases. Yet again it is a case of the all-powerful system plundering

the earth and sacrificing our children’s future once and for all. In the most prosperous states in India from the point of view of financial growth, thirty five million female foetuses were killed. The commercialisation of society creates new atrocities for the female gender.

The profound value a woman represents as an eternal pillar of society is immediately lost in a commercialised society.

Depriving the population of the most important and necessary element for survival, its grain, its seeds, is nothing less than an act of barbarism and terrorism committed without reservations by the agro-alimentary multinationals.

Nevertheless, the current system is increasingly being called into question. Fortunately, organisations, associations and groups are being formed and are working together to completely change the way in which our global agriculture is organised. More and more people are proving that it is possible to take action and, hopefully, one day to reclaim the age-old sustainability of the agriculture of our ancestors.

An Indian farmer who was the champion of modern agricultural methods in his region, winning all the prizes, one day becomes aware of the disaster, of the

loser he has become. He decides to turn his back on modern agriculture and debt. He owns and looks after 18 000 square metres of land on which 480 trees have pride of place. Every year he plants a few dozen more.

On this land he produces enough food for the year for fifteen people. He also manages to sell fifteen tons of fruit, ten thousand coconuts, two tons of vegetables and four tons of grain each year. He provides his own seed and produces his own fertiliser. He depends on no one and wastes nothing. He collects rainwater, in which he breeds around four hundred fish. He tells us that the roots of the trees improve the penetration of water while the falling leaves fertilise the soil. Of course he could sell his trees, pocket the money and dangerously affect the precious cycle of sustainability which reigns over his 18 000 square metres. He respects his trees like gods. They produce fruit which drop and become a rich fertiliser.

Without incurring any expense he receives ten tons of this precious fertiliser each year and the trees are still there. It is a matter of “ agro-forestry ”. It guarantees good soil rich in humus and with a heavenly smell. His animals transform the biomass into fertiliser.

We have to rediscover the ancient agricultural knowhow. We must take part in the resistance at the risk of being treated like Don Quixote. The time is not far off when those who have been part of the change will be

thanked profusely. For instance, we need to urgently reinstate soil microbiology into the syllabus for students of agronomic engineering.

Even though the soil in Africa is exposed to extreme amounts of sunshine, it is possible to work it, to prepare it and to reintroduce bacteriology. “ Earth and Humanism ” can fertilise the arid land of Africa! One must be able to work it while at the same time respecting it. Like women, the earth can no longer be violated.

Earth must go back to being a tender couscous and must no longer look and feel like concrete. Plants have grown in the forest without fertiliser since the beginning of time. It is through being ploughed that the earth loses its life. Let us hand the earth over to microbiology. This could progressively bring the earth back to life. Let us cover the soil with straw to retain humidity. Plantations will get through this protective blanket. Let us not be afraid to sacrifice one harvest to give back to the earth as nourishment. It can take up to two years to give the soil a good biological preparation.

In the Ukraine a farmer practices ecological farming methods on between thirty and six thousand hectares ( so this type of farming is possible on a grand scale ).

To do this, he follows three principles: • No ploughing but rather surface preparation of the land • Supply of organic fertiliser and biomass • Crop rotation Each year his livestock provides seventy thousand tons of fertiliser. The animal and the vegetable are always closely linked in the running of his farm.

One essential solution for safeguarding the planet must be to stop the exodus from rural areas. We must create attractive living conditions to keep people in the villages. We have spoken of the advantages of developments in technology which will soon facilitate the distribution of education and primary medical care outside of urban centres. The global population has the right and the duty to feed itself. This sense of duty needs to become deeply integrated into all levels of the population through education. This notion forms an integral part of life’s learning, of learning to be.

In another part of India, a young farmer cultivates his garden bio-dynamically in the shape of a Mandala.

The whole system is in the form of a spiral. At its heart

he plants vegetables and flowers which radiate energy throughout the garden. He practices poly-culture, assembling many different species and varieties. Some plants are good partners and manage to get along and help one another in the same space. I immediately think of Veronique and Christian, whom you will hear about later. When I introduce them to you, you will easily see why they come to mind in this chapter. In 1925 Rudolph Steiner was already recommending that plantations be organised according to bio-dynamic principles, so this way of thinking or doing things is certainly not new.

Cultivating one’s garden today is both a political act and an act of resistance. Everyone who is able to, should do so. A new civilisation is in the making. We are approaching the era of the new Noah’s ark. The consumer does not realise his power. Let’s recover the nascent power within each of us and let’s boycott the products of multinationals; they could collapse within a few seasons.

The earth is female and fertile. Let us respect her like our mother, our wife or our daughters, like all women…

Part THREE

XIII

It is thanks to Mr Julius Smilg that I am able to grow quite quickly in our architectural practice. Mr Smilg is blind. He owns a building in Hillbrow which he wants to redevelop to provide a new suite of offices for his accounting firm, amongst other things. Mr Smilg spends his holiday every year in December in the same corner suite at the Beacon Island hotel in Plettenberg Bay. He throws the windows wide open to listen to the sea and the birdsong mingled with the sounds of children’s games. This is his way of tasting the music of life.

Manfred and Rodney ask my opinion on what solution to propose to Mr Smilg who is fixated on the idea of a box of reflective glass. This type of façade treatment is very much in vogue at the time. I start working on the project and suggest cutting or carving the surface of the glass box like a diamond. In this way the reflections would be almost random like the sparkle on the polished surface of the latter. This is not an easy idea to sell to a blind person who, moreover, has always been the sole decision maker in this company which even bears his name. I make a mock-up and we manage to sell the idea, the concept, which he approves with his finger

tips. I will never forget them. They enable Julius Smilg to decipher our mock-up. After this meeting, Manfred and Rodney ask me to manage these renovations. My grasp of English is decidedly limited. I am nervous. We quickly finish the interior renovations of the two last floors so that the firm of accountants can become operational in the building as soon as possible. From then on, the weekly meetings take place in the partners’ boardroom and breakfast room. Mr Smilg’s secretary helps guide him to the meetings. I get into the habit of taking him back afterwards. On one occasion he arrives very late and somewhat irritated. I ask him if I should start at the beginning again or if he would prefer me to continue with the agenda for the site meeting. At that point, as his sole response to my question, Mr Smilg gives full vent to his vocal chords, expressing his dissatisfaction without leaving a shadow of a doubt in the room. At the end of his sermon he asks me to carry on from where I left off. After the meeting, scared stiff, I stand up and offer to lead him back to his office. On the way, as soon as we are out of earshot of the boardroom, he reassures me that his tirade had nothing at all to do with me, but explains that he had chosen our weekly meeting as the most effective forum in which to express and make public his irritation.

I later learn that Manfred and Rodney asked Mr Smilg about my site management abilities and that he very kindly gave the thumbs up to indicate his favourable opinion. Unbeknownst to me, my career was taking shape.

Sometime later Arlene, who has joined the firm, and I are busy with an office project managed by Ampros for the pension fund of AECI, a large South African company. Arlene has worked by my side since my early days with Rodney and Manfred, where she started at the same time as my friend Emile. She has stayed with me ever since. She is my little sister and she looks after me. I would be lost without her. Ulf Eser of Ampros asks a member of his team, Phil Garbitt, to follow the project on a daily basis and to be in charge of project management. We finish the project without incident, on time and on budget and we celebrate the roof wetting generously. As this event is winding down, Phil and I leave for a last drink at Roxy’s in Melville. Later in the evening we decide to put an end to our libations and leave. Phil is going to drive me home. We walk up Main Road towards his car. A nurse, agitated, in a hurry and probably late for her shift, loses concentration for a fraction of a second in her little car and hits both of us.

Phil, hit hard from behind, remains in a coma for five days before leaving us. I spend several days in the city’s

public hospital before being transferred to the Park Lane Clinic, where a doctor friend, Gordon Cohen, is director. Barney Hurwitz, the main shareholder of Clinic Holdings, is one of our clients and owns the Park Lane as well as about fifteen other private hospitals at the time. The drugs make me hallucinate. The bones in my left arm have been fused together and the main artery reconnected during the course of a very long operation at the Johannesburg General Hospital straight after the accident. I have just started my fifth life. Phil lives with a partner and is responsible for five children. Tragically, he leaves us while I, a bachelor with no children, am spared. Why ? I am still tortured by our stupidity and by this injustice. I feel deeply sorry for his partner and for the five children for whom emptiness and absence have taken the place of the father.

Ever since this drama and at the risk of not always being understood, I have lost almost all desire to attend roof wetting parties and force myself to make only an occasional brief appearance. These evenings too often end dangerously and always give me the shivers. I have been told of too many accidents.

Maman arrives after a few days and her presence brings me a certain peace of mind. Arlene has looked after me until her arrival. Bruno, my childhood friend,

comes to take over from her and we spend the December holiday season together. In January I return to work with my arm in a sling.

Princess Diana dies in Paris with her friend at the time, Dodi al Fayed. She will never be queen and her lover’s father will never be a subject of the British crown.

We are working from our new offices in Arnold Road in Rosebank, our little factory which we built and where we occupy the top floor and the overlooking mezzanine.

Just before we move Manfred tells me that, for private reasons, the practice could possibly split into two. He asks me what I would do if this were to happen and whether I would follow him, or go off with Rodney. The Jesuits come to my aid in a flash and I tell Manfred that, should the hypothesis become a reality, I would give him my response immediately. Fortunately this never happens.

As I said before, I often visit Trent at the time on my way home after a long day’s work as an architect. His gallery is in Rosebank, as is our office now that we have left Greenside. I have the good fortune to come across a young artist, ten years my junior, and to develop an interest in his work. One installation in particular attracts my attention at one of his first exhibitions at

the Everard Read Contemporary Gallery. It consists of a small plastic bag containing an exhibit, a piece of evidence recovered from a crime scene [ 88 ]. It contains a torn poster of the Mona Lisa. At the time I am unaware that I have in front of me four of the main elements of the artist’s handwriting : the violence, the history of art, the sex , and the ready-made.

Kendell is 24 or 25 and has a diploma in Fine Art from Wits, the university in Johannesburg.

After leaving Brixton I buy and resell two houses in Westdene in quick succession, before building my own house for the first time on Lower Park Drive opposite Zoo Lake. It is Monica who helps me find this place which was once the property of Hendrik Verwoerd, long before belonging to the Van Reenen family. They very kindly allow me to build three stories in front of their house on the section of land they have subdivided. I build two structures which interact to cater for my days and my nights: one is black and the other white. As you can see, I am already full of hope. My home, imbued with the passionate energy of youth, subsequently undergoes a transformation to house the Alliance Francaise at YvesAlain Corporeau’s instigation. He is helped by my friend Jean-Luc Limacher who obtains for us the relevant rights needed for a place of instruction. Jean-Luc and his wife

Michele are French. They arrived in South Africa at more or less the same time as I did, with Aude-Marie who was born shortly before their arrival in Johannesburg. They soon give her a little brother Lucien. I watch them grow and become a bit like their uncle in Africa, even though our political views are vastly different at the beginning of our friendship. These will evolve on both sides.

Our friendship involves inter alia the sharing of many Sunday lunches which become something of a family ritual. The Sunday roast chicken in Johannesburg takes on an emphasised importance while distance prevents us from sharing this special day with our own families in Montbeliard and Brussels respectively. The years go by. Aude-Marie marries Shaun and gives Michele and Jean-Luc two wonderful grandchildren. Lucien goes on to marry Nathalie. They are inseparable and today form a veritable clan with Jean-Luc filling the role of patriarch superbly since the death of Michele’s father.

After this Sunday digression, we return to the Read Contemporary Gallery. Warren Siebrits works there. He hears that part of my house is to be used as a cottage until such time as I may possibly extend my family in Africa. He wants to rent this cottage. He is determined to. I tell him repeatedly that he would be crazy to do this and that it would be ridiculous to spend most of his salary at Trent’s on paying his rent. Nothing will

make him change his mind. Warren and his music move into the cottage. So I meet Candice Breitz, Warren’s girlfriend at the time. Warren is surrounded by records, books and a few artworks. His night life is intense. One Sunday morning while doing some gardening at around six thirty (I love getting up early), I meet Warren, who has just got home. He is with his friend, Kendell Geers.

They have just been to a Rave party. This is the first time I meet Kendell properly, after having seen him briefly when he was awarded the “ Vita Art Now ” at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG).

Within a few weeks the three of us have become almost inseparable. We see each other often. I am still a bachelor but I can get by in the kitchen. We spend evenings, nights solving the problems of the world, particularly the world of art, around a bowl of soup and a few simple dishes, helped along with numerous bottles of wine. All three of us are inspired by art. Our discussions between artist, apprentice dealer and passionate novice art lover make up a more or less equilateral triangle. The house keeps bohemian hours. Belinda Blignaut replaces Candice. I will never understand Belinda’s infatuation with trash at the time. It is the era when grunge is taking over from punk. The large red door of the house is always open. A large percentage of the artistic generation of the time passes through: Kendell obviously but also Kagiso

Patrick Mautloa, Minnette Vari, Steven Hobbs, Willem Boshoff, Joachim Schonfeld, Clive Kellner‌ Even my friend Denmark joins our group during his trips to South Africa, as well as Edouardo Villa on a few rare occasions.

Kendell and Joachim go off to the Venice biennale on a reconnaissance mission. On his return Kendell decides to commit body and soul to seeing South African artistic expression make a re-appearance on the world stage. He understands that to do so it is essential to bring some of the art world’s new wave elite to Johannesburg.

He becomes passionately involved in organising the first contemporary art biennale in Johannesburg. It is an exhilarating time of madness. My house takes part in the action. Philippe Parreno and Thomas Hirschhorn stay there, amongst others. Janine Antoni and Rirkrit Tiravanija come to meet us for dinner with Christian Boltanski, always rushing between airports and chasing the clock. Of course it is Rirkrit who does the cooking.

The biennale is a fantastic success for those who are interested in contemporary art, although it attracts fewer visitors than a single rugby match at Ellis Park, a sad observation or statistic. It will however facilitate the fledgling appearance of South African artists on the global art scene and will create the opportunities and contacts essential for their respective careers.

Bertrand Lavier has a remarkable little piece on show which is etched in my memory. He presents us with a refrigerator door on a Perspex pedestal. He calls on us, forces us, to drastically reconsider the way we look at kitchen utensils and other everyday objects commonly used in African countries, displaying them as a curio, as was the Hottentot Venus. Exoticism, arrogance and condescension of attitude are swept away. Bravo Monsieur Lavier!

At the same biennale, with Warren’s help, Belinda delivers a powerful performance, an acoustic conceptual work [ 13 ]. She puts up a small poster on Johannesburg’s street poles. In the poster she offers herself, a semi nude woman, accompanied by a first name and a telephone number, like so many other advertisements selling telephonic services to anonymous wankers. The voices of those who are unable to resist her invitation become her medium. She records each of their messages, one after the other and presents them for us to listen to at the biennale. In this way Belinda conducts an acid test of the sick perversity of the human race while offering herself, tied up with the same type of magnetic tape as that on which their messages are recorded, for whatever solitary pleasures her provocative vulnerability may awaken or arouse in them. Only their voices are on show… Their visual anonymity remains fully respected.

During the second and last biennale in Johannesburg to date, my next house on the hills of Forest Town is abuzz with a similar excitement thanks to Okwui Enwezor and France Culture, amongst others, who join in our festivities.

XIV

Kendell has an intelligence which is as fertile as his sensitivity. Both are sharpened and honed like the blades of Razor Wire.

Kendell is born into a world upside down. He looks at it, observes it, from the southern tip of Africa. His mother is a cabaret artist and his father changes jobs frequently. Kendell spends many of his holidays at the home of his uncle who works for the police in the south of Johannesburg. He is born on the side of the oppressors.

He is born on the side of those who, unable to control the rebellious masses fighting for their freedom, decide to segregate themselves by surrounding themselves with this same Razor Wire. This becomes in a sense the trade mark of his clan, of the clan from which he emerges, as he explains in “ THE PERVERSITY OF MY BIRTH, THE BIRTH OF MY PERVERSITY ” in 1995, from which the following is an extract: “ I am guilty ! I cannot hide my guilt as it is written all over my face. I was born guilty without being given the option. As a white man ( presumably heterosexual ) born into a working class Afrikaans family I was precisely that being for whom Apartheid had been invented. My life

as Jacobus Hermanus Pieter Geers was scripted by my father, my grandfather and my great-grandfather before them, all of whom had been Jacobus Hermanus Pieter Geers a.k.a. “ Koos ” In 1982 I ran away from home to become Kendell Geers. I ran away from something that at 15 I did not yet know the name of. My education, morality, family values, religion and life in general had been very carefully constructed to prevent me from ever knowing. I did not know my mother as she had already run away from my father when I was 5. My flight was not from him but from what he represented, namely patriarchal bigotry and intolerance. I ran away to fight for my freedom of expression, a crime for which I was later imprisoned, it being my curse that I have always asked too many questions. I had no idea at the time that my own private struggle may have been related to that of the Freedom Fighters in their struggle against Apartheid.

The system was so perfect, so seamless in masking its own construction, that there were even those people who believed it was an integral and unchangeable part of their moral reality. I had no part in the construction of Apartheid, nor even in its maintenance but I remain guilty simply for having been born what I was. At university my extra-curriculum activities exposed me to the most awful atrocities that were being committed to maintain the ideological and economic privileges that Apartheid had

bestowed upon white people like myself. But by then it was already falling apart. During my first year, 1985, a State of Emergency was declared which gave the police the right to detain anybody whom they considered a security risk for up to 180 days without trial, the power to search any place or person at any time without a warrant, the right to censor the media, restrict public access to information, in short a euphemism for Martial Law. It is only necessary to resort to such extreme measures when all else has failed. It was the South African regime’s last ditch attempt to hold together their utopian dream which was crumbling all around them as a result of both internal and external political as well as economic pressures. My enrolment at Wits University was in part an attempt to postpone a compulsory 2 year military conscription. The only legal alternative being 6 years in a civilian jail or of course fleeing into exile, an option I was forced to accept 4 years later once I had completed my degree. My real education was however not in the Hallowed Halls and Ivory Towers of the Academy, but on the streets where survival became my mother and violence my father. The political “ unrest ” of the 1970’s and 1980’s degenerated in the 1990’s into opportunistic crime and vandalism until Johannesburg came of age in 1994 as the most violent city in the world, a city where art begins as life ends. ”

It is this first-hand knowledge of our ill-being which undoubtedly serves as the most genuine certificate of authenticity of his artistic language. His childhood is studded with several life-changing events which probably help him to find, identify and develop his medium. His childhood distress is written in his own blood. There lies the pain of an entire population, the pain of the victims of man’s baser nature, of his inhumanity.

In June 1976 the events in Soweto and the death of Hector Pietersen leave the country in turmoil. However they make no impression on the family, which celebrates Jacobus Hermanus Pieter Geers’ birthday - before he changes everything including his name and, in 1993, his birth date - by taking him to an amusement park to see the baby “ krokodil ”. He will latch onto this Polaroid a few years later and use it retroactively to illustrate his journey, with a salute to Warhol en route [ 72 ]. We will get back to this picture shortly.

At Leondale primary school he receives corporal punishment, with his father’s approval. Worse still, his father encourages this corporal punishment, as evidenced by a letter the latter receives from the headmaster of the school. Kendell transforms this letter into a “ ready-made ” in 1998 at the very beginning of his career [ 74 ]. The same applies, at around the same

time, to his grandfather’s certificate of death by suicide [ 73 ]. The violence ingrained in him since childhood kindles and fosters the artist in him. It will always be his ink, his medium, his muse… These first two works of his, seminal in the extreme, are the Big Bang which detonates his artistic career, like the Molotov cocktail of the revolution he urges us to join.

When the time comes to go to university, he applies to study medicine at Wits University in Johannesburg.

As his second option he ticks “ Fine Arts ”. Kendell is accepted by both faculties. He decides to listen to his inner self and follows his instinct. He starts university in 1985 as if entering a novitiate, training to become a high priest. He has no choice. He has to cleanse his blood.

Still in 1988, alarmed by the situation both locally and globally, Kendell ponders, analyses, dissects and scrutinises himself from every angle. In his soul searching quest to understand our human condition he fathoms the depths of the deepest abyss. He opens the box, which can no longer keep him locked up nor contain him. Kendell escapes and leaves us these different sides of his face as the person about to die leaves a letter, in one of his first self portraits [ 75 ]. It is in this same year, 1988, that he leaves us that other self portrait,

the crocodile Polaroid taken by his parents twelve years earlier in June 1976, which I previously mentioned to you [Â 72Â ]. He launches it at us, crying out his need for a rebirth for himself, for the country into which he was first born, and maybe even for the majority of us. The choice is not his to make. As a novice in the priesthood, he tackles the local context head on and exalts it to help us identify, reject and annihilate it.

Kendell finishes his studies at Wits and goes to London in 1989, then to the United States to continue his military service in voluntary exile. It is out of the question for him to undergo the humiliation of rejoining the ranks from which he wants to escape and be born again. He becomes assistant to Richard Prince in the United States and produces two extremely powerful works, amongst others. What quickly fascinates me about Kendell is his amazing talent as an alchemist.

He manages to engender meaning, to make sense out of very little or almost nothing. Here for the first time he takes on the system, our consumerism and its greatest proponent, its absolute champion: the United States of America. He tackles the orgy of excess vulgarly displayed in the pages of the New York Times, marking them with his felt tip with the patience of a monk. These pages are full of the weapons of our enslavement by, and to, the system, temptations that are both sad and mundane,

one next to the other. Page after page his felt tip fervently marks them, to condemn them and sometimes to control them. “ THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD ”.

He is already a high priest, he is already political, he is. This is a masterpiece of unprecedented strength, a powerful cry of alarm. [ 77 ] The other work he creates at this time in several editions, is a series of post cards sharing the same effigy, each realised on a variety of “ Found Objects ”.

In them he removes the face from the Statue of Liberty.

He goes further than Kazimir Malevitch. He hollows out the square, he makes it disappear 13 years before 9/11; he cuts out and removes the face of the United States with four small strokes of the cutter. With this gesture Kendell invites us to resist the temptation to gradually lose whatever humanity we still have by letting ourselves be enslaved by the tyranny of capitalism taken to excess. He touches our soul. Like a high priest, he speaks to the group, he awakens the genre. Let’s leave the enslaved and docile herd. Liberty is no more. Maybe she never was more than a decoy, a lure, or a mirage.

The urgency intensifies. The myth collapses while it unravels. The American dream becomes a nightmare while the brainwashing steam of capitalism runs out … [ 76, 78 ]

It is more or less in the same period that I discover the work of William Kentridge for the first time. He lives in Houghton in a big house, his childhood home. He is happy there and works tirelessly. He spends many hours in what must once have been the family room. It has paneled walls. His parents live in London. William works on these films, image after image [ 155 ]. He is four years older than me. He does not share our bohemian lifestyle. He is married and already a father. We like each other and gradually develop a mutual respect.

This quickly turns into respectful admiration on my part. I take Rodney with me to his house. We have the good fortune to see one of his big irises that day [ 154 ].

The stroke, the gesture, the movement, the brush is precise, powerful and passionate. Shapes and colours part, separate, give way. They tear each other apart.

William holds them back for a moment, conducting the orchestra of this musical tragedy with precision. To calm the fervour of overexcited dreamers and ardent fans William says one day: “ You draw an iris and it is seen as a metaphor for the end of apartheid. Sometimes an iris is an iris. ” I must state that, for my part, I can no longer see sunflowers without thinking of Vincent Van Gogh, poppies without being reminded of Andy Warhol or water lilies without seeing Claude Monet appear in the

sunrise. I am convinced that it is the whole oeuvre of each of these artists that springs to mind if I so much as catch a hint of the fragrance of these flowers. I imagine all the irises of the world choosing their Little Prince ; “ …and for them you will become unique in the world, [ William ! ] ” They offer themselves to you and become yours. You simply knew how to love them. It is the intensity and violence of this love that is contained in the act of your drawing.

I return to Brussels with a heart full of emotion.

In between rain showers I take up my mad rush from tramway to tramway, gallery to gallery. William has given me a copy of his first five films for this trip. I exuberantly tell all the gallery owners I meet that they should very seriously consider offering William an exhibition, that he is an artist they should definitely contact and follow.

My impassioned speeches are in vain. On the last day I hand over the cassette to the gallery owner who seems the most likely to possibly contact him, asking him to take his time. Two years later Maman will retrieve the cassette. As is often the case I will have fought for nothing. Nevertheless, Don Quixote will not give up…

During this period my friend Denmark develops a close friendship with Thea Soggot and often comes to visit her in Johannesburg, giving me the opportunity

to see him. I have a true and rare feeling for his work.

Denmark feeds on and thrives on obsolete information; he digests and processes it daily, respectfully, with the diligence of a monk. He imbues it with meaning to nourish the collective soul. He too is a great alchemist.

As if in response to my admiration for his work, I am fortunate to be given the opportunity to watch over, and care for a very powerful piece. Here Denmark, special messenger of the heart, feeds on the meaning of the struggle, the energy of an entire people behind their mentor. He wants somehow to be a part of the profound joy as well as participate in the surrounding ambient effervescence. With the aid of four clamps he presses a slice of history, upon which the construction of a new South Africa rests, between two concrete form plates [ 60 ]. He proffers a new table made of steel upon which the hope of the people can find its support. He compresses three years’ worth of editions of the Weekly Mail, between the release of Nelson Mandela and his inauguration as president of South Africa [ 140 ].

Denmark preserves these moments of hope whose fragility he knows and expresses. Indeed this slice of history, this distillation of hope is only held together with the rather tenuous support of four clamps acting as guarantors of the structural integrity of its unity, the unity of the people, of the rainbow nation. If the latter

were to fade or dissolve, if the colours each decided to emphasise their own importance, the construction would weaken and hope would be the first and main victim.

Unfortunately the unity and the hope will not last.

I think Mandela should never have become President.

Presidents come and go. Nelson Mandela should have remained above the fray of day to day politics, conserving the function of fundamental and essential guide to the newly acquired freedom. In this way he would perhaps have been able to follow his dreams, only confronting the realities of our sorry condition once today’s generation had already been put in place: our children, his children, all of those born free after the end of apartheid. Sadly, Nelson Mandela becomes the departing President too soon, the ex, leaving the country in the hands of too small a group, too greedy for power, control and money, some of whom will even have the gall to dare to criticise him. Today the new South Africa still does not have the necessary maturity to be able to manage without its mentor. It is much too young to entertain the dream of a European style democracy, even if the latter itself is in urgent need of revision. Nobody can copy a system of civilisation with impunity; if it is to be sound in its foundation, it has to be constructed day by day, generation after

generation, having hatched in a nest built twig by twig, with the common effort and the common suffering of an entire people. It has to be the fruit of indigenous realities culturally spiced with constant and diverse interbreeding over several millennia. There lies the sole real foundation of our future system of civilisation.

It takes a little more than a century after the fall of Rome before the idle kings are chased away from enjoying the fruits of the empire. In South Africa the loss of power of the “ Nats ” after the end of apartheid and the ensuing freedom so long and so deeply wished for, unfortunately create a giant vacuum. It is this gaping rift that many will exploit. History too often repeats itself…

Let’s hope that this remake, soon to be over, comes to an end peacefully.

Let’s hope that some of today’s youth, freed from the yoke of apartheid, carried by education and restrained by the requisite wisdom, will be blessed enough to take over the running of the country without incident and begin the real South African renaissance. The end of the lazy king’s period is in sight. Even Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the other great sage, who presided over the Truth and Reconciliation Commission scrupulously and with sensitivity, is sickened and deeply saddened to see what the ANC has come to today. Intoxicated by their almost

absolute power, our leaders will soon learn the price of this inebriation when morning comes. A successful fight for freedom does not automatically confer the talents necessary for running a country even if the keys of power are, too often and almost as a matter of course, handed over to the heroes of the struggle.

We must avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

We need to fundamentally change our education to free tomorrow’s individual from his dependence on the system, to allow him to search within himself and find the solutions to his problems. He needs to be able to regain his dignity and believe in his own resources.

Let’s create courses in happiness for all, regardless of their age. This is the most precious, most sought after commodity in this world. Let’s help ourselves to find it, to recognise it, to get used to it and to live it. Let’s learn to be.

In most countries the system is designed to ensure its own survival by increasing our dependence upon it a little more each day. Let’s go into rehabilitation. It is high time. Let’s begin the tough withdrawal process.

Running a country by buying our votes with the money of our heirs can only condemn them to ruin.

Europe today is suffering - and probably will continue to

for generations - the effects of having distributed social security cover since the Second World War as if the state’s coffers were inexhaustible and a steady growth could absolve and erase everything. ( This in fact is why governments have been complaining for years about the lack of growth which has led to the so called “ crisis ” to which they cling as if, once invoked, it could serve as some sort of excuse. This crisis they talk of is systemic.

The only reason why growth has become so necessary on their watch is that it is the only way they will be able to repay the interest on the debt they themselves created in order to buy votes. “ Panem et circenses ”. The Romans gave the people bread and games. The current powers that be, for their part, offer us a travesty of democracy adorned and spiced with benefits, covers, indemnities, allocations… ) The degree of suffering, the price of our freedom, will be the same as that of withdrawal from any other habit : desperate. Let’s avoid bowing our heads down and demanding similar crutches; let’s rather walk towards real freedom, our own, heads held high. Let’s no longer allow our governments the use of their destructive weapons and let’s insist that a genuine humanist education of the highest order become the one unique commodity accessible to all. Let’s watch, hear and take inspiration from those, like Arvind Gupta in India, who are transforming education throughout the

world. Education will become the only true source of our happiness and our freedom and will show the way to an unexpected future.

In the past certain governments maintained the highest level of ignorance tolerable in order to reduce the potential risks of revolution which often emanate from young university intellectuals. Let’s demand the opposite. Let’s demand an elite education for all, as Raphael Enthoven exhorts us. Let’s demand a humanist education, with at least half the curriculum devoted to self-discovery and learning to be. This education, alone, could facilitate an awakening of our essential revolution, our indispensable insurrection and internal uprising and could enable us to access and reconquer our humanity.

The new, the second renaissance comes at this price and there is a massive amount of work to be done.

This renaissance could even be African. It’s up to us to want it in the long term… As I’ve already said, my father repeatedly tells me: “ my son, you can if you want to as long as you want to for long enough ”. Let’s prepare the twenty-second century as of today. Let’s dare to build our dreams. “ It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, but because we do not dare that they are difficult ”. Seneca.

But it is time to get back to my friend Denmark.

His visits continue and our friendship grows. He works in Johannesburg during these trips, like a monk who does not let travel interrupt his daily ritual. Like most of my artist friends, Denmark needs to work as most of us need to breath, eat or drink. He cannot do without it.

Without his work he is lost and cannot be.

While here in Johannesburg, amongst other works he creates a very powerful piece with half a book, two clamps and two bits of plank [Â 63Â ]. The book is battered and nameless; the binding has been ripped off. A horrible punishment ! The printed matter has thus been stripped of its title, its name, its identity, the acknowledgement of its existence; flayed alive, it lies exposed to us. This kind of torture challenges me and reminds me, amongst others, of the crimes committed by the Holy Inquisition in the name of God, or even of the clitoridectomy. This ancestral practice, still alive and well today, continues to be practised and respected in certain parts of the globe. How could we have fallen to such depths? Who gave us the right to tarnish the name of God, custom or ritual, as if to protect and indemnify ourselves against the worst atrocities, the most ignominious acts, which remain mostly unpunished. Denmark fires back at us with this Cross formed simply by his hands and his day to day work tools as well as an impactful and

articulate sobriety. He loves the wood of these planks and transcends it so as to test us, in turn. This cross quickly becomes a monk’s hair shirt. Opposite my bed, it watches over me and questions me. I can therefore sleep peacefully, in the knowledge that my soul’s tension, as well as its attention are both assured.

The method of inventing dangers subject to the “ barbarisation ” of others, excuse the neologism, is still rife and remains unpunished. I cannot understand, to give but one example, why president Bush has not been called before an international court of justice for crimes committed by the west in the name of the socalled freedom of the people and, supposedly, to prevent the chosen and designated enemy from using weapons of mass destruction which have yet to be found. A few films and then leave… What untenable impunity!

Denmark has a special place in my heart. We see each other very rarely but the channel of communication remains open. I know that he is and this delights me.

He remains true to himself as few artists are still able to in the art world today. He keeps his promises, always.

I call him on the telephone to talk about this crucifixion he has created in Johannesburg. He tells me that the other half of the book at the heart of this work

is at his home, a metre above his head as he speaks to me. It is the other half of the book like the missing piece of a broken bucket. Once again I admire his trust.

Thank you.

I am leaving soon to visit him.

My friend remains respectful of life, inspired by his passion to be, so present in his work. Through his work he experiences a relationship with the latter which is as demanding as it is intransigent and uncompromising.

At the same hour every day this rigorous implacable face to face awaits him.

So, I move out of my house at Zoo Lake when it becomes the Alliance Francaise of Johannesburg. In an attempt to safeguard the spirit of the place the new owners build an area intended for exhibitions. I organise their first real exhibition for them: a conversation between Willem Boshoff and Denmark. These two druids pass by each other in the night. The word, its etymology and its literal meaning, medium of one of them, once published quickly becomes obsolete and reduced to printed matter and thus becomes the medium of the other. This joust has not been repeated since, although it is probably worth revisiting today, twenty years later. Who knows,

this second conversation could see light of day in the years to come. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

With Nelson Mandela freed in 1990, Kendell can return home without fear of imprisonment for having refused to serve his time in the army. On his return he decides to cleanse his blood. However, he faces the facts : The more he washes himself, the more he is covered in blood. Nevertheless he emerges from this baptism like a new man. “ Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi ” [ 79 ] is the Latin motto which will become the title of his exhibition at Marian Goodman’s gallery in Paris, ten years later in January 2000. ( This gallery should not be confused with the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, although this confusion would prove very fortunate for some ).

Kendell is born. Kendell is.

XV

The health of Nelson Mandela, our Madiba, is fading as I write to you, although he is feeling slightly better and is able to celebrate his birthday for the ninety fifth time. The city of Detroit declares bankruptcy. King Albert II of Belgium will abdicate tomorrow in favour of his son Philippe who will become Philippe the First of Belgium. Apartheid and separatism in Belgium are identifiable and isolated challenges. The consequences of the bankruptcy in Detroit, however, will profoundly affect the entire planet. The credibility and financial stability of big cities have just collapsed. The sovereign states will follow suit. The public authorities will then finally risk facing accountability. Panic will take over the good ship Earth. As a straightforward consequence religions will experience an upsurge and Andre Malraux will be proved right. The welfare state will be abolished.

The revolution will be global. The human element will be our only recourse, our sole saviour. Even money will lose its omnipotence before disappearing completely and the qualitative will be condemned to triumph.

Let’s avoid the cataclysm and let’s rather precipitate solutions.

The second humanist renaissance must find support in recent technological achievements. It must master them and offer to each and every person, and I stress the word “ offer ”, immediate access to the total body of knowledge of the human race. I share the views of singer Natalie Dessay when she affirms : “ Culture and education are the only ramparts against barbarism. ” Why not tax the large IT companies globally by getting them to distribute tablets to all schoolchildren around the world? Governments, for their part, could commit to adapting teaching in their countries to this new technology and to installing internet connections in every school initially, and eventually throughout the territory. Let’s call for Phuthuma Nhleko or Alan KnottCraig to be minister of education and let’s give one of them the mission of realising this profound transformation of our obsolete education system.

Let’s train our educators without delay so that they can become assistants to the best teachers the globe has to offer in the different disciplines. Let’s include courses on how to access the joy of living in the syllabus at all levels of education, and let’s remind our teachers to become the older brothers, older sisters, grandparents, uncles and aunts from whom our children will gain wisdom.

Let’s not waste any more time. Let’s not sacrifice future

generations. We do not have the right. Let’s entrust the task of preparing for a potential African Renaissance to our highest achievers. “ Why not the best ”? Perhaps the time has come to no longer accept that the positions of greatest responsibility in our twenty first century society are left to the heavyweights of our political parties to allocate as they see fit.

If we want to ensure an equal distribution of opportunities in South Africa, as everywhere else for that matter, and ensure a real and profound transformation, education alone remains the one absolute priority.

Arthur Kamp tells us: “ South Africa should spend its tax revenues effectively on improving its education system rather than on improving the level of consumption ” and Burger adds: “ This will do more to increase productivity and growth ( and in this way reduce inequality and poverty ) in the long term than any increase in taxes could achieve. ” It is totally absurd to want to standardise the quantity or the quality of education to one level. Let’s all learn how to catch our own fish instead of expecting and demanding to be given them. Let’s lift the moorings…

The welfare state is no more, the dream has run out of steam; the game is over. Let’s say goodbye to utopia.

The well-being of the people cannot and never could be doled out by the government. The latter can only organise and coordinate each person’s efforts towards a better future for mankind. Just to do this successfully would already be fantastic. Coal would then be delivered to the power stations ( before this type of extremely polluting fossil energy is replaced ) and text books would be in the school bags of our schoolchildren.

The situation is similar in the case of couples. The Dalai Lama tells us in “ The Joy of Living and Dying in Peace ”: “ …For in reality our happiness is in our hands; the responsibility rests on our own shoulders; we cannot simply wait for someone to bring us happiness. To experience it, one must identify its causes and cultivate them, as one must identify the causes of suffering to eliminate them. When one knows which practices one should continue and which should be left behind, joy comes naturally… ”. One person’s happiness cannot be delivered by another. On the other hand a fantastic couple can emerge from two beings who are able to share their happiness while watching their love grow day by day through this act of sharing.

I think that each partner in a successful couple needs to patiently construct her or his own happiness so as to be able to share it, although it is more than

healthy for spouses or partners to share some of their search. The same applies to the whole of humanity and we have the means at our disposal today to do this.

The people have been fooled. A state of confusion and misrepresentation has been the order of the day for too long. Too many of us in recent years have confused the right to vote with the right to allocations, to payment, in a sense, for our votes. Political parties in all countries have been quick to maintain this confusion, thus increasing our dependence.

Governments are not and cannot be responsible for job creation. As previously mentioned, Madiba reminds us whenever the occasion arises “ You are the custodian of your own destiny, ”. Let’s stop shirking and handing over our responsibilities and let’s rather get to work.

Let’s not direct our search according to the lifestyle we aspire to or believe is our right. Let’s identify our strongest aptitudes within ourselves and, once ascertained, let’s sow this fertile earth with our hard work. Let’s add to that our hearts, generosity and passion. The harvests will be better than we could imagine. “ It is the ground we lack the least ”, said Jean de la Fontaine in “ The Labourer and his Children ”, referring to the image of cultivating the earth. Let’s concentrate on doing what

we can that is best for the group, for mankind; let’s contribute as much as we can to its best possible future.

Let’s refuse to take part in the vain and empty pursuit of “ having ” and let’s rather aspire to “ being ”.

XVI

Madiba is still with us, Chris Froome has won the Tour de France, Philippe has taken the oath as the new King of Belgium and Kate has given birth to a probable heir to the British throne.

Maman, Papa and Monique, his sister, have just left after spending twelve days with me in Saint Emilion.

They used the opportunity presented by our current geographical proximity to visit me in this privileged and magical setting from which I chose to start writing to you. Even Andre smiled on us. His photo slipped from its normal vertical position in its frame as if to alert us to his presence amongst us by adopting a new oblique position. Papa knows he is old and that depresses him greatly whereas Maman wants to know what awaits her in the hereafter‌ She would dearly love to stay in contact forever with her loved ones. Monique is in excellent health and still very fit. She accompanies me each morning on my brisk walks around Saint Emilion.

We enjoy the fresh morning air. Indeed, later in the day the temperatures are not ashamed sometimes to reach 38 degrees Celsius. Monique lost her husband, Julien, some twenty years ago and has managed to reorganise her life harmoniously since being widowed. She is from

the same stock as Papa and says nothing, or very little.

Monique has two children, Pascale and Jean, and has carried a terrible burden since Julien’s departure : her son, Jean, descended into a state of total unsparing dependence from which he has not emerged. She will never leave him. Monique, like her son in fact, has remained in remarkably good health and both of them manage to live with this millstone, as does Pascale. Like Papa, Monique carefully manages her daily life. This sober management makes it possible for both of them to weather the storms and to live each day with respect.

This wisdom gives them a formidable strength.

Maman is very fearful of what is coming for her and Papa. She sees the end approaching and is not looking forward to the last stretch of road to be covered; the last part of this life, this moment, this journey, during which most of us will discover humility. She has started the process of degeneration but there is still no sign of profound degradation nor of fatal decline. She often tells me she would like to dissolve in the crowd. She hopes to see Jean Pierre, Marie Madeleine, Jeanne, Achille and Andre again. She knows she will join them but, like all of us, does not know how this will happen, nor the price to be paid for this journey.

Maman and Papa are lucky to still be here for one another despite their respective 84 and 85 years. Each day that passes brings a lonely future closer for one of them, that awful illness that deeply affects too many people and sometimes for a very long time. For a solitary person, even “ being ” can become painful, or worse, superfluous.

I share with Maman what I have been able to deduce to the best of my limited ability, given the ignorance of our human condition. This is an opportunity for me to tell her and you about Gerhard Marx. I meet him while he is working with William on preparations for their sculpture, “ The World on its Hind Legs ” [ 176 ]. We have selected this work for the atrium of Nedcor phase II. Because of this, I already feel a kind of connection with his work when I come nose to nose with his friend the hare at Liza’s gallery in Basel [ 199 ]. I am blown away, bowled over. Albrecht Durer revisited 510 years later. On my return to Johannesburg I have lunch with Gerhard who tells me about their relationship. In fact the hare shares the privilege of having become one of his special friends. He first meets it in a long corridor leading to the office of one of his best friends, the director of the Museum of Natural History. Each time he visits him at his workplace he and the hare look at one another in the eye. Little by little he tames it, like the Little Prince

tames the fox. After numerous visits the hare becomes essential to Gerhard. He takes a chance and asks his friend if he can take it home for a few days. He starts by getting it settled comfortably in its new environment, his studio, and continues to build their relationship gradually. He often works with organic elements which are part of his space or living quarters, the hare’s new environment. With great caution, he decides to love this hare a little, as - you will remember - William loves the iris. He gives himself over totally and, to ensure and celebrate the sustainability of their rapport, he inlays small pieces of plant matter from his everyday life. He offers it his flowers down to their roots. He chooses them for it, selecting them almost religiously. He chooses and composes his palette, barefoot in his garden in the early morning dew. He is.

Gerhard is working with Joni Brenner [ 37 ]and Karel Nel on a fantastic exhibition: “ Life of Bone ”. This show takes place at the Origins Centre. In parallel, a magnificent book sees the light of day: “ LIFE OF BONE Art Meets Science ” … “ which is a digest of numerous engagements amongst a small group of artists and fellow academics, for whom bones are the evidence and symbols of hominid evolution, genetic bifurcations which have resulted in global genetic variety, and of man’s oftentimes questionable ethical responses to others who

are seen as not-the-same. These interactions, often prompted by the close looking and thinking that results from the art-making process, have given rise to questions about consciousness, the significance of the awareness of past and future, symbolic behaviour and our role in the wholesale destruction of life on this planet. ” At this point Gerhard moves into the third dimension.

To express himself through his work he chooses neither clay nor plaster, marble, wood or steel. He assembles the same types of element from his favourite palette, cautiously and meticulously. This time, to create these beings, he gathers small bits of branch and twigs collected along the way as he walks. To ensure the duration of these loving communions, Gerhard chooses to cast these life torsos in bronze. He begins with man, the individual, the “ self ”, the “ I ” [ 201 ]. He soon feels the need to enlist this work, this being, in a more global continuum. The Madonna appears, the mother and child entwined, as he encounters them within himself [ 202 ].

The child connects with the Mother who only becomes such through and for him. We have grafted ourselves in this way to ensure our survival and transfer life to our family tree since time immemorial. This mutation is ours. [ 203 ]

We are the leaf on the tree which transmits life to us, enabling it to harvest the chlorophyll, oxygen or light to help its growth. The leaf connects the tree to chaos and to the precious fragile imbalance of the environment. The tree cannot live without the leaf as the mother cannot be without the child. In autumn the leaf fades and disappears, dissolves into the chaos, but the tree, life, remains. The leaf is already developing within the seed, within the tree. It comes into bud, loves and protects the fruit or the seed, then crumples and dies at the end of the season. It only exists from, through and for the tree which “ is ” before, during and after the season of our life. We are only simple grafts on the tree of life, which we pass on. We are carriers of life, its humble vectors.

I believe that the spirit which animates us, excuse the tautology, is nothing other than an infinitesimal part of the pure and total energy which is part of, and thus perpetuates, the universal continuum, and which gives us the sense of being by entrusting part of this energy to us. Nothing is by itself.

Begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father… Enough said. This phrase is wonderful as long as we are at liberty to choose which Father it refers to and to communicate with or relate to him if we so desire.

He will be different for each person. Please forgive me but I, for my part, will stay with the energy of chaos in constant mutation, imbalance and love. Soul, Animal, Love share the same roots in French, Ame, Animal, Amour. They all come from breath in Latin: “ Anima ”, which brings me back to other roots, Gerhard’s ones.

Gerhard almost takes root in the chaos of life to evoke a furtive anonymous self portrait [ 200 ] and defy death [ 195, 204 ], with only his garden as artillery. Like the artists of the cave paintings he intercedes. Like them he sketches the wild animal so as to no longer fear it.

He names it, defines it as well as he can with the help of small elements from the surrounding chaos. While the ancestors of the San prepared the first pigments in their caves, Gerhard revisits his palette, resolutely choosing twigs and roots to commune with the world of death, as if to help us transform our fears into hopes of liberation and restoration to the vastness and universal eternity of life. He confronts death for us. He subdues it for us. We must learn to withdraw, to make way, if we are to hope to be able to pass on. I will get back to this theme later when I talk to you about William’s other self portrait…

Buddhist thinking even goes a lot further than this.

It goes as far as denying the existence of “ self ”. Here is

what Nicholas Vreeland says about it in the preface to “ The Art of Buddhism ”: “ The Buddhist way is in fact first and foremost a process designed to teach us to recognise the essential non-existence of the self, while forcing us to help others to admit this as well. However, it is obvious that the fact of limiting oneself to a simple intellectual recognition of the non-existence of an intrinsic self does not free us from our problems, far from it. This is why we have to develop a greater depth of spirit by broadening our understanding of its nature on the one hand, and supporting it by meditation and the study of logic on the other. For this profound spirit to transform into the omniscient spirit of a Buddha, really capable of guiding others towards enlightenment, it must be inspired by a much broader motivation than a simple desire than our own personal internal peace. ” It often occurs to me that Buddhist thinking could definitely help those who choose to commit to their quest and their search and could ease the way for their voluntary entry into the continuum of chaos, ignoring the ‘self’ in the process. I have a great respect for it.

XVII

During the period in which I live next to Zoo Lake, I meet Stephen Hobbs who is doing his last year of a BAFA Honours degree at Wits and Minnette Vari who has just completed the same course in Pretoria. Today they are both graduates in Fine Art. I am still deeply moved by one of the works Stephen presents to the board of examiners at the end of his course [Â 147Â ]. The piece is of an exceptional maturity and gravity for a young student, already such a complete artist. He uses a sheet of steel 30 centimetres square.

He pierces it in the centre and at its four corners so that threaded rods can pass through. He positions the sheet on the four corner threaded rods with the help of nuts to maintain a precarious balance. He penetrates the centre of the sheet with a much shorter fifth threaded rod kept in position by the same method.

The day before his exam, in the early evening, Stephen places a block of ice on the sheet of steel resting in its precious and fragile state of imbalance. It is November and the temperature is around 25 degrees Celsius at dawn in Johannesburg at this time of year.

The block of ice, still frozen in the early evening, gives

up and starts to melt. The water this generates changes its composition, evolves and runs gently down one of the corner threaded rod. It spirals drop by drop similarly following the thread of the central stem. From time to time the drops break up in the night as they hit the ground and meet their destiny.

The next day, the day of the exam, the water has evaporated with the first light of dawn. All that remains is a possible imprint… The pedestal, for its part, sole witness to this disappearance, remains in a thoughtprovoking attitude.

Often in the evening I am seized by a bold desire to reproduce this operation, and this quickly becomes an early evening ritual in this spot with its ever-changing history in Parkview opposite Zoo Lake at the corner of Kerry Road and Lower Park Drive. I watch the central drops falling like a Kamikaze and the imprint forming and developing with a recurrence born of the topography of the floor of my place. The ephemeral beauty of these drops fascinates me while their inherent fragility makes me tense. This is the price of the imprint. Marion Hansel confirms this in her letters to her son in “ Clouds ”, one of her films : “ Before your birth I was carefree. The moment you were born, anxiety arose. Is this the price to pay to watch you live? ”

Water is. Its state changes by voluntary intervention to first form a block of ice which is individual and identifiable. With time, ambient temperature and twilight, the ice, in its precious imbalance, gently melts along the threaded stems and gives life momentarily to a few doomed drops. All that remains is this imprint in the eternal chaos before it too follows a similar evolution.

Some will disappear quickly, others will continue like Leonardo, Pablo, Andy or Madiba, Gandhi, Socrates, Plato, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus Christ ( may some of you forgive me ), Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Marx, Anne Franck or Mother Theresa, to mention but a few.

The work, the block of ice which was once on its pedestal, no longer exists in the morning and only continues because of the imprint it leaves. It was the same for Mozart’s symphonies which officers of the SS could not erase from the heads of doomed Jewish prisoners.

Without a trace works run the risk of being relegated to oblivion. However, the imprint can even sometimes begin long before the work is created, or can even pre-date it as with Christo and Jeanne-Claude who produce drawings, collages and a model to finance the implementation of these projects and stop the moment they are completed. A large part of the imprint thus

precedes the accomplishment as with the “ Running Fence ” [ 40 ] in 1974, fifteen years before the fall of the Berlin wall and twenty years before the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa [ 140 ].

The reason I am writing these pages to you today is probably, in essence, so that I can add my modest energy, my small share of love to the transferring of these precious traces : to let others experience the imprints which these works have left on my soul, to share my passion, to help popularise the privilege and to invite you to breathe in the joy of living which is mine and which so many artists have helped me find by lighting up the path which led me there.

During this same period Stephen burns an account book, a “ found object ” [ 148 ]. This burnt book becomes a piece of art and takes on meaning when he presents it in a glass case. He celebrates the obsolescence of most of our daily gestures, the Kafkaesque absurdity of so many of our actions till and including our own return to ashes. Stephen celebrates this burnt account book and gives it that extra touch of soul which will, for a brief moment, leave an imprint.

Minnette Vari is beautiful, very beautiful, too beautiful.

The creation of a self-portrait from a photo [ 265 ] is one of the exercises students must perform in their first year of Fine Art at the University of Pretoria. It is only an exercise in graphic reproduction aimed at teaching them to master the proportions of the different elements which unite to make up the whole. Choosing a type of pointillism as technique, Minnette draws herself through the eyes of “ the other ” for the first time, offering herself to us. Her beauty is present but her gaze is absent. She does not want to be beautiful to us and this exercise disturbs and bothers her. She escapes from it. The drawing is filled with this absence.

Minnette is seen but does not want to surrender. Eyes wide open, she flees our gaze. With the characteristic modesty of the unsaid, Minnette offers us a glimpse of her ill-being, already apparent in 1987 in her first year at university. She flees this Barbie doll beauty of a princess which some envy her and which others delight in. Everyone nevertheless encourages it.

From 1989 onwards bodies start to move. They are precursors to her real desire to introduce and include movement in her work. Her kinetic sense is emerging.

Bodies become free ; they defy the laws of gravity as if to confirm their escape. They appear light, ephemeral, bathing joyfully in complete freedom between ecstasy and agony in the vastness of chaos. [ 261, 262, 263 ]

Five years later a little bird comes to rest on top of her skull [ 266 ]. It twitters warbles and promises to never leave her. This iconography has its roots in Minnette’s cultural heritage. She takes hold of it and it comforts her. This little bird will have several roles. [ 272, 282, 283, 285 ] It is her small voice, her other. It is a messenger, William’s megaphone and one of the first virtuosos of maintaining the imbalance as Louis Olivier will remind me a few years later [ 231, 232 ]. It comes from her past and is intimately involved in her future. It connects her to the before and to the after. It is her soul. “ Birds connect us timelessly as far back as the dinosaurs ” she tells me one evening. Minnette depicts it and gives it a place with her in the painting, on her as if to distract us and divert our attention. With this gesture Minnette proclaims to us that her real beauty is not physical but internal. It is to this end that she sends us this little bird, messenger of her most intimate self.

Minnette asks us to not only look at her with our eyes. She reminds me of Romy Schneider’s made-up face in Andrzej Zulawski’s “ L’important c’est d’aimer ” : “ …no photos; please don’t take any photos. I can play other roles, you know…, I am an artist. ” [ 273 ]

Minnette takes the beauty of this body of hers and uses it in her digital videos; she grabs hold of it, stages it, harnesses it, denies it and makes it become ours. With information technology she is able to distort this body and reduce it to a constantly changing living material which she moulds, cuts, sculpts and morphs so as to tell her story bit by bit and to proclaim our own, our hybridisation, the extent to which we are all one, sharing the same condition, and to celebrate our fragile eternity.

Harald Szeemann, curator of the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2001, decides to show “ Mirage ” at the entrance to the Italian pavilion in 1999 as well as “ REM ” and “ Oracle ” at the Arsenal in 2001. Minnette does not stop there. The art world claims her and she gives herself to it. In 2003 “ Chimera ” draws an enthusiastic response from “ Art Unlimited ” at the Basel Art Fair. There are countless accolades bringing tears to my eyes. A year later the new “ Kunst-Museum ” in Lucerne designed by Jean Nouvel devotes a large “ solo show ” exhibition to her work. Minnette is part of the new artistic movement of a South Africa poignantly emerging from the shadow and isolation to which it had been relegated by the appalling system of apartheid.

Sadly, the conservative attitudes are reversed and she is often not forgiven for the whiteness of her femininity. [ 270 ] In REM Minnette invites us to share in her own particular state of consciousness, her trance which becomes our trance and which she succeeds in purging from her soul to the benefit of our senses which this work awakens. [ 277 ] Let me hand the floor over to her and, straight afterwards, to Dan Wyllie, writer and poet from Zimbabwe.

Minnette tells us:

“ Night sounds of the Karoo: crickets, bats, occasional gusts of wind, an owl calling. Onto an uneven stone or concrete structure, or the exterior of a building, is projected a figure moving in dreamlike slow motion, as if weightless, treading on air. It is the figure of a woman, a ritual huntress, a Venus of Willendorf - changing her position and shape while all around her other creatures slowly appear and then dissolve again into darkness. Other human figures become visible: half-distorted, blurring away and reappearing. These figures go through familiar motions:

walk- ing, meeting, fighting, moving objects around. The image resembles a Bushman rock painting: a tableau of human and animal figures and various objects engaging in a flow of relationships: the hunter and the hunted, the shaman and the devotees, adversaries in combat, the arrival of Europeans in their awkward cattle drawn wagons. Despite their hallucinatory appearance, some images also seem strangely contemporary: scenes of modern warfare appear, present-day vehicles move about, people engaging in familiar late twentieth century actions. On the projection surface, all the different images appear as dream-objects in a landscape of apprehensive expectation. Throughout, the central figure performs her slow, rolling, trancelike dance, asleep and dreaming.

REM (rapid eye movement) is a physiological state during sleep most associated with dreaming. The blood flow to the brain increases, breathing and heartbeats become irregular, the hands and face start to twitch and voluntary muscle controls are lost. REM Sleep is often called the ‘Dream State’. This is the most active state of the sleep process. REM dreams are vivid, filled with physical and emotional energy. During this time the mind is at its most active as the subconscious deals with all the informa- tion, memories, neuroses, fears and emotions archived during wakefulness. Some scientists refer to

REM as a third level of consciousness that allows us to relive life experiences.

The figure is that of the artist, filmed while asleep. The phases where she was the most restless were selected, edited together and made to play in slow motion. All around her, images of historical and contemporary Southern Africa unfold: taken from post cards, newspapers and books, historical, geographical and political images of the last century: a hundred years of great change. The work engages the hopes and fears of those who have lived through the turmoil of an infamous history and now have to find the best possible future. It refers to the Aboriginal Dream Time, a time suspended between yesterday and forever - but projects this into a much anticipated and imagined tomorrow (the 21st Century).

REM can also be seen as a warning or omen communicated through a dream against the hubris of nations turning away from history in myopic negation.

Therefore it is also a call for calm reflection and deliberation. REM questions our perception of reality and whether our actions sometimes take their cue from a primordial unconscious rather than from waking consciousness. On a bigger scale, the figure represents that of the earth itself: a life in free fall, a fertile body full

of dormant and diverse potential, entering an uncertain age, spiralling into an unknown destiny. ” © Minnette Vari.

As for Dan Wylie, he writes the following poem between 1990 and 1995: Winter Solstice I On this longest night of the year, I am thought’s hermaphrodite, half present, half dreamt.

In this unreal world, all windows dissolve.

Sleep flounders between two stars: orphaned halves of a press-stud.

Not knowing myself distresses the shadows of leaves.

I have admitted to my faults, and still I am astonished to find myself sad!

Obsessed with truth, my heart wrestles to conquer its cage.

To the south, an accumulating storm accepts itself in spasms.

Content with duality, wood-owls confer: Who? You. Who? You. II Discovered by cold, I am restless beneath these layers of rational wool.

Rhomboids of insomniac light are frozen to the walls.

Out in the real world, the wind is all bluster and muscle: my every half-awakening dream is torn by the shriek of a loosened latch.

On this the longest night of the year, the lumbar ache of loneliness is as integral to my being as tinnitus is to hearing.

Eventually I rise, and pacify the latch.

In our mutual nudity, a streetlight laughs aloud.

Serene as a child in the traffic of her dreams, the intuitive moon negotiates clouds.

III At Newgrange, four thousand years gone, shamans, astrologers, shaggy warriors, slaves, wrestled massive boulders into place, built a tunnel, a chamber, laid out chiefs’ ashes, and nestled beneath a mound their reverence, that acceptable dread.

Four thousand years on, this one winter dawn, the sun still spikes the dark, horizon to tomb, and gilds again the ethereal scabbards of the dead.

And here, the same sun, this identical dawn, tips over the trees, lances through an airbrick, lights roofbeam after beam, without shame, like a blade.

Š Dan Wylie, Zimbabwean-born writer and poet.

This poem was written between 1990 and 1995 (exact date not available)

After 25 years I am still fascinated by the inner world of Minnette Vari. I know the breadth of her talent and yet still remain eager for her knives, her brushes and the experience of her soul. [ 267 ] During all this time Minnette has offered us her doubts, her vertigo, her hopes and her fears, as if pregnant with our own. Fertile, she carries them with her as she probes the depths of her being. She vomits to ease her malaise and inebriates herself with ink, with oil and with pixels. She gives free reign to her inner trance.

She often calls her warbling accomplice to nest in her curls. On a regular basis over the last few years, she has called upon her grandfather the entomologist, who she invites to join her on certain stages of the journey so as to rediscover the strength of her roots while she adjusts her spinning wheel [ 279, 286, 287 ]. The latter turns and spins away to the rhythm of ecstasy and to the cadence of agony. The moths circle around but cannot resist the light, the flame of the candle, like the fire in the cave. Wise Athena, the owl whose right eye contains the Moon and whose left holds the Sun, watches over with intelligence and clairvoyance [ 287 ].

While she protects us, she extends the olive branch to us. Minnette continues her descent, gnawing at her soul, as she pursues her obsessive search, persisting in her quest to encapsulate the essence of the nature of

being. “ Life and death merge. There is neither evolution nor destination. There is only being ” ( Albert Einstein ) . I even had the privilege to be invited to meet with this intense fusion sculpturally expressed by Jane Alexander as later by Wim Botha. [ 6, 36 ] Minnette has just lost her mother and is learning wisely to deal with this absence. She cares for and cares about her father and brother, as and when they allow her to do so. However, she takes refuge from time to time in the ongoing pursuit of her ballad.

For several years she has been working on “ Out of Time ”, without having precisely identified the finality of her opus [ 289 ]. She lets her art speak for itself and draws the energy for this from the depths of her being which guides her body, her arm, her wrist, her fingers, her brushes, her pens and her knives. Each day the paper and the canvas offer up their nakedness to this core being. It is here that she comes face to face with herself.

When I want to enter into communication with a work of art, I start by giving it a long hard look. I scrutinise it and question it. I let it envelop me and I probe it. I then throw myself into it, guided by two approaches, that of reason and that of the soul. In the

first of these approaches I situate the work within the limited scope of the entirety of my experience, in the process subjecting my own analytical reading of it to an uncompromising intellectual critique, a product of my Jesuit education. In the second I let my soul go to meet the work, to dance with its energy. Now I can close my eyes and try to observe it with all the cells in my body.

I enter then slowly but with certain intensity the world of meditation where one seeks to allow the soul a brief encounter, a rich moment of love.

I think Minnette surrenders herself now to allow her soul to come to meet us within the weft of her vellum, her canvases and her screens. It is her soul that guides her gestures which invite and hold our attention at first.

The magic of alchemy does the rest, if we allow it to do so, once our eyes are closed. The optical nerve can then take some well earned rest so that the rhythmic trance of ebb and flow, mimicking somehow the “ mascaret ” of the stream, can begin. It is this back and forth between the work and the observer that releases the rare spirituality of these moments of love.

No matter the time of day, I am eager to throw myself into “ Out of Time ” and to find Minnette in the perpetual motion of the continuum of her soul and this way ease the search for mine.

This will be the first time that I dare to cross the barrier, albeit with great caution, which has always prevented me from engaging with the movement of her pixels. It is the slowness with which they emerge in this particular work which convinces me to take the plunge into their universe in search of “ being “ . I am confident that Minnette will guide me. I hope, however, that she will allow me to surround myself with her original drawings which will, I am sure, serve as precious buoys to guide and reassure me as I make this perilous voyage towards the abyss.

“ The spirit is never born. The spirit will never cease.

There was never a time when it wasn’t there. Beginning and end are only dreams ”. Sioux proverb

XVIII

Over the course of these years my love for art continues to grow, as does Kendell’s determination and my admiration and respect for his work. As I told you, not so long ago, Kendell washes himself in his own blood to set himself free and re-emerge victoriously from the placenta of his origins into a new life. The country is vibrant at the time. We are in the no man’s land, the transition period, in the midst of negotiations. The spectacle is out on the streets, on the asphalt, and art is discussed in small groups in an emerging cafe society reminiscent of the glory days of Saint Germain des Pres.

Kendell uses this same bitumen to produce a new self portrait, somewhat evocative of Byzantine iconography [ 80 ]. Here, however, the icon is surrounded by bitumen rather than gold from our mines. The icon is made up of four photocopies to confirm and celebrate the death of Jacobus Hermanus Pieters. These banal and bureaucratic photocopies unite to show off the handsome young man, educated, alert and healthy, prototype of the system which created him and which he should be ready to serve. This is the Geers who is dead. The joins in the photocopies consciously connect the eye ( quick nod to Luis Bunuel ), nose, mouth and ears. Kendell’s

senses remain keenly present and begin to resist. It is at this point that he hangs up his gloves [ 82 ]. He does not want to create any more images himself, or add to the existing iconography. Nothing more is needed. So be it.

From now on he will call on what is most refined, most erudite in the human race to question us : the history of art.

The latter becomes his street, where his battles take place; this is where he rebels and revolts. At this point he produces a few other self portraits to proclaim his rebirth, to confirm his existence, to affirm that it is possible for him and for us to survive and, who knows, even to be. He registers his DNA, his handprint [ 90 ], like the fingerprint he leaves on this Picasso print belonging to Linda Givon’s mother [ 101 ], amongst many others.

Of course these works pose many questions and are laden with significance. Unfortunately I cannot linger on each of these works now, but perhaps I will do so in years to come. This is the first time I have ventured to tell you about my friends and in so doing I am trying to concentrate more on the human element in each of them.

There is violence everywhere which encircles Kendell.

He is outraged by it. He absorbs and ingests it, feeds on it and offers it back to us. He creates “ Brick ” [ 102 ].

“ Art gives us no answers, it only asks questions ”. This is the message on the cigarette packs produced by Philip Morris, the sponsor of Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992 which was directed by the late larger than life Jan Hoet.

Kendell’s “ Brick ” is filled with the ultimate violence : death. A woman and her five children die and are reduced to a paragraph, a news item. The brick, placed on the floor, is itself marked as in a crime scene - ours, that of our conscience which has been anaesthetised.

And in order to read this news item we have to kneel down as if to remind us that even our rituals are tainted with hypocrisy.

Moreover, this brick, both building material and deadly weapon, confirms the risks inherent in our frailty, challenges our ineptitude and exposes our pathetic weakness. Nothing but pain… Shortly afterwards Kendell throws the brick at the institutional window as others throw stones into a pond or set the cat among the pigeons. He reveals what most of us pretend not to see because we do not want to look.

A brick such as this one is sometimes attached to a cord and used to cause potentially fatal motor accidents.

It is hung from a bridge over the oncoming traffic speeding along the motorway. At this precise moment it becomes part of the vocabulary of terrorism. The dice is

thrown, leaving it to chance to choose its victims in the name of the struggle for freedom or some such pretext.

I will get back to this brick later when I tell you about “ Hanging Piece ” at Art Unlimited in Basel.

In 1994 I leave for Paris with Kendell. “ A Problem for the Head of the Family ” [ 86 ] is part of an exhibition organised by Jean-Yves Jouannais at the “ Galerie de l’Esplanade ” at “ la Defense ”. These are heady days.

Saint Germain des Pres becomes our stamping ground.

To be exact, it is at La Palette in rue de Seine that we often meet up to continue our discussions about life over the first coffee of the day and late into the night. That same year Kendell takes part in the Havana Biennial, the Sacred Art Biennale in Italy and an anti apartheid exhibition in Holland. Unwittingly, he starts the process of his internationalisation.

Lynn and I receive LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU as a wedding present from Kendell - the first electronic virus causing large scale destruction. Gift/poison… The treachery of the images persists and continues to dance the farandole. [ 104, 99, 100 ] Gradually it becomes clear to Kendell that he must leave. He has no choice but to resurface in Europe,

source of his dis-ease. “ He wants to go and implode the white cube ”. This is what he says about it: “ Art and Culture were intrinsic components of the Colonial project and thus were at the time expressions of Christian ideologies. This dogma later developed in South Africa as what became known as Christian National Education, my education, forming one of the corner-stones of classic Apartheid. In rejecting Colonialism and its project Apartheid, I thus have no option but to also reject every element of its ideological and hegemonic machinery including its morality, art and the culture, which I guess makes me guilty all over again.

Today around the world that very same Christian Moral Order and the art traditions it spawned is collapsing upon itself, unable or unwilling to make the transition into the late twentieth century and effectively resist the growing opposition from among others, Islam, Atheism and a general ethical breakdown. But Colonialism was, in the terms it set for itself, an overwhelming success. For every individual born within a former colony there exists a European point of reference. This is particularly true for art as the White Cube Gallery has itself in the twentieth century colonised the space of art. Survival in Africa became a matter of adjusting to change as traditional practices and beliefs were eroded and subverted. Objects, images and ideologies

from the European continent were recontextualised and assimilated into African Culture. This assimilation was neither neat nor without considerable pain and left Africa in a state somewhere between what it once was and Europe, being simultaneously both and yet neither.

In the urban centres Bongo Drums have been replaced

by Ghetto Blasters playing Rap or Jazz Music, assegais or spears have been replaced by AK 47’S and leather loin cloths replaced by Armani suits. It is impossible to turn back the clock and as much damage is being caused today by academics, nostalgists and apologists who are trying very hard to hold back development in Africa in order that it reverts to (in their imaginations at least) the romantic utopian paradise they think it once was. Africa has, to date, never produced an historically acknowledged international artist and never will for as long as current conditions persist. Cheri Samba and Frederick Bruly Bouabre have most notably enjoyed relative European success in the last decades but I would argue that their success is more in terms of their ethnicity in relation to contemporary European politics than as a result of their work. The economic and political state within the African continent precludes not only the White Cube Gallery but also the entire Institution of Art. The Art that was produced has historically been for a foreign tourist market, an economic force

that unavoidably influenced the nature of the work produced. As a result of this and earlier Colonial interventions, African artists saw (and see) themselves through European eyes identifying more with Picasso or Matisse’s perceptions of African culture than with their own historical heritage. This is in part due to the fact that the conception of Art as we understood it has never really existed within Africa. The traditional artifacts that we now call African Art were never produced as an end in their own right but were always connected to a ritual, ceremony, dance, belief or superstition. The meaning of the ritual would determine both the aesthetic and form of the object. Thus if an evil spirit was to be evoked the mask would embody the personality traits of that spirit.

It was produced to be worn during a specific dance and thus only really had meaning and value in relation to, if not only at the time of, that performance. In today’s very lucrative African Art market the difference between an authentic artifact and a curio or fake is a matter of “ patina, ” in other words whether the object in question was actually “ used ” in a ritual or performance or not.

Traditionally the artifacts would have been destroyed, buried, burnt or abandoned after the ritual was complete. Those which were stored until the following year were stored out of sight and certainly not for public contemplation. It was the missionaries and explorers

who originally returned to Europe with these objects as proof of and as souvenirs from their travels. The most important and comprehensive collections of African art have always been in Europe or the United States. The idea of collecting and displaying, in museum conditions, such artifacts is alien to African culture where all the collecting was done “ in the mouth ” in terms of the oral tradition. Histories, myths, legends, beliefs, information, taboos and so forth were all passed on verbally from one generation to the next. One of the first colonial interventions was the introduction of written language. The Bible was translated and simultaneously transcribed into the indigenous languages and then used to teach people how to “ read and write ”, a process that at the same time conveniently converted the pupils to Christianity. This “ education ” effectively destroyed thousands of years of oral cultural history.

In Europe the White Cube Gallery specifically and the Institution of Art in general grew out of a conceptual shift in emphasis that began at the time of the Renaissance and was refined during the Industrial Revolution.

While the production of artifacts or images for religious, educational or decorative purposes has always been and will remain an integral element of every culture, Art has become a highly specialised discipline particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was not

always so, being born in the form of public monuments and large scale commissions like the Sistine Chapel, providing the masses with ( propagandistic ) information.

It was not Art in today’s terms but rather cultural manifestations, the difference being one of conception and intention in relation to historical determination. In order that these expressions successfully communicated with those masses for whom they were produced they needed to be, without exception, visually accessible and at the same time reinforce beliefs of the patron and commissioner who in turn represented the dominant moral ( religious ) and economic institutions of the time.

In this regard pre-renaissance Western Art functioned in similar terms as traditional African Art. The invention of the printing press (1440) and later of photography liberated the work of art from this didactic function and the artist was as a result granted increasingly more freedom of expression. In the 20th century particularly the proliferation of the mass media liberated the artist to that degree where that freedom was complete and unrestricted. The development of Modernism and the “ Avant-Garde ” was precisely dependant on and in relation to development in Information Distribution Technology and the mass media alleviating Art from the need to be a ) accessible to the masses b ) didactic c ) morally affirmatory d ) representational and e )

entertaining. Today works of Art need not possess any meaning beyond the fact of their own existence. Art created the White Cube Gallery into which it escaped and from where it cloned critics, curators, collectors and further artists to protect itself from life and from the Spectacle the mass media was inventing to in turn protect itself. Art developed as a result in a highly specialised language spoken by and known only to its initiates. That new language was limited by the fact that the conception of Art as it had originally developed remained unchallenged. Contemporary Artists continue to, on the whole, produce pictures and sculptures according to formal and aesthetic canons and principles that have their origins in the Renaissance ; the only real difference being that contemporary artists can be more critical, if not subversive in relation to the institutions that support it. That apparent freedom remains however an illusion since Art has become so isolated from life with its over-specialised and over-sophisticated languages that any critique becomes idealistic and irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. What Art once was has since been replaced in the Society of the Spectacle, by Steven Spielberg, Michael Jackson, MTV, Times Square, Nintendo, Vogue Magazine and so forth.

Art as we know it is exhausted, finished, the project complete, over and out. For some time now there has

been talk of the “ death of painting, ” of the “ crisis in art, ” but these warnings have gone unheeded.

Every time another canvas is stretched, every time another nostalgic painting is produced, the Institution congratulates itself and declares the crisis over. But simultaneously Diesel Jeans, Benetton, Calvin Klein, Coke-a-Cola, British Airways and so forth produce another visually more appealing commercial, Microsoft releases another version of Windows, France tests another Atom Bomb, CNN creates another war and the support for Contemporary Art gets even smaller.

The Spectacle is built upon a surplus of images and capital that artists cannot compete with, even at their most successful. In the last 20 years the most creative and talented potential artists have become aesthetic refugees in the fields of advertising, cinema, television or some other manifestation of spectacular culture.

What the Catholic Church was during the Renaissance the Spectacle is today. Artists have as a result been reduced to stylists chasing their own and each other’s tails in a never ending circle of narcissistic indulgence. ”

Before leaving, Kendell signs his curriculum vitae [ 70 ], which still remains active today and continues

its slow mutation, and produces a last self portrait on South African soil.

In this “ Curriculum Vitae ” he of course relates the main points which continue to form, develop, change and transform his being. He seeks out the source of his ill-being, and of ours. He devours our different cultures, ingests the history of art, consumes the history of man, proclaims our mistakes and admits our deviations. Through this process of assimilation he is able to continue to be and he invites us to a similar rebirth. Persisting with his own continuing education he finds the necessary tools to go on his search as if in quest of fire. It is in the depths of our being that he looks for the source of the flame. He goes in search of an in depth understanding of our guilt so as to free us from it. Man has become his own Gorgon. We have become our own monsters. He chooses to work so as to encourage us to tame the wild beast. He tries to identify it, to understand it and domesticate it, so that we can once again live side by side with it. He comes to terms with our guilt to free us from it. Later he will express in his manifesto [ 71 ] some of the routes he takes to try to attain this freedom, in search of his own ongoing rebirth, and to experience fully the profound and intense joy of being. He urges us all to undertake

this search for ourselves and to perhaps conceive our own form of manifesto.

It is both interesting and disturbing for me to realise that it is precisely the education I received from the Jesuit Fathers which, in its own time, has allowed me to free myself of all religion and all Judeo Christian guilt. At the age of thirty-three, I finally break through the low skies surrounding the towers of Ghent to stand up like Little Foot and realise, on the one hand, and fully accept, on the other, the fact that I have two feet without judging necessary to ask you firstly for any forgiveness.

To tell you about “ Self Portrait ( original destroyed on flight TW800 ) ” [ 97 ], I am going to hand over to Christine Macel, Curator for Contemporary Art at the National Museum of Modern Art – Centre Pompidou – Paris. This is what she says in “ My Tongue in Your Cheek ”, in 2002: “ This danger of breaking up is central to the work “ Self-Portrait ”, a fragment of a bottle of Heineken, a beer imported from Holland – like the artist’s family.

Supposedly having burst on flight TW800 in the unexplained explosion over Long Island in 1996, the piece of broken bottle was chosen by the artist to

constitute his self portrait. “ Self-Portrait ” reminds us that today, as in Baudrillard’s analysis, terror, “ the ecstatic form of violence ”, has replaced alienation. It recalls the political reality in which the terrorist takes hostage and thus verifies the historical loss of the scene of exchange, of the rule of exchange and of the social contract. But it also symbolises the individual reality in a civilisation in which psychosis and personality disorders have replaced neuroses. “ Self-Portrait ” goes beyond the allusion to terrorism and the impossible search for the true facts, and appears to represent the breaking up which threatens the cohesion of the being. The artist here identifies with a fragment which supposedly partially survived destruction or death by explosion, which “ T.W. (CV) ” admirably confirms. This touches on a reality which is one of incompleteness but at the same time expels this reality through which the object maintains the cohesion of the being. This dialectical movement runs through his entire oeuvre, as if the “ Tabula Rasa ” were the “ Sine Qua Non ” condition for a possible re-creation, to continue the metaphor of the rebirth of the Phoenix. ” ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

After a few years I am promoted to the position of associate, a newly created position in the practice. I will remain the only associate for a while. So I am very surprised on returning from holidays at the beginning of January when Karen, Rodney’s eldest daughter, asks me if I am aware of the proposed meeting with the new partners. This surprise quickly turns to rage.

Manfred, who intends to retire, wants to introduce a Jewish allegiance to the practice, as this is the religion of most of our clients at the time. Neither Rodney nor I are Jewish and Manfred fears this lack might prove problematic.

I immediately arrange a few interviews for myself and quickly realise that the choice is mine. Outraged by these “ parachute drops ”, I consider leaving the firm.

Papa however, drawing on his considerable resources of wisdom, advises me to think carefully and perhaps bide my time: “ How can you hope to one day assume command of the crew if you abandon ship ? You can only make that happen by remaining on the deck, especially when the sea is rough, so as to perhaps one day earn the trust of the whole crew and of the South African property market. ” Papa is right of course and I listen to him. The two other partners do not put up much resistance when things become a little difficult. They leave the ship in a hurry. Nature always wins in the

end. It is just a matter of time. With Rodney’s support I thus become his only partner.

With the path to my career aspirations now clearly visible, I work like a madman. I live at top speed.

The years fly past as do the projects. Thanks to Theo Rutstein’s kindness, we meet Alan Knott-Craig. The cell phone industry is in its embryonic stages. Its success will be ours. We gain the trust of Alan and Vodacom becomes the first corporate client to give us a largescale project. One follows another. We will build over two hundred thousand square metres for Vodacom.

Recently our team even created the first building in South Africa to receive six stars for its performance in terms of sustainable development.

Around the same time Ulf Eser, who has left us since, returns to the company. Two years earlier we had been invited to enter and had won a competition to design a new tower for Nedcor, the Nedbank group, in the Central Business District of Johannesburg. The project had been aborted as had the desire of the bank’s board of directors to continue expanding in the centre of this city born of gold mines. This sentiment was shared by most of the big companies in the city centre. To my sad surprise we find ourselves competing again on the new site that Nedcor has bought in Sandton. This time

there are only four firms of architects competing. We win this one too with a concept of Twin Towers connected at their base and overlooking a big park along Rivonia Road open to the public. We want to achieve a winwin between the well-being of employees and visitors to the Bank and the town’s environment. The park would have been open to the public but managed privately.

Ulf takes us to meet Richard Laubser, CEO of Nedbank and introduces us quickly in the lift. Laubser asks him what we do. Architects, he replies. “ What do we need them for…? ” asks Laubser and my stomach falls to the ground floor.

Richard Laubser looks at our scale model and exclaims: “ This is exactly what I do not want ”. The model catches up with me, this time in the lower basement. “ I want a classical low rise building around a private garden for the Bank only! You have two weeks to convince me on how you would address this brief. Should you fail, you will simply lose the project. Am I clear? ” We work nights to finally find a solution to develop these surface areas while staying within the limits of ten floors maximum. Our idea is to group most of the building around an internal atrium wall. The latter could also be used for multiple purposes. Moreover, it could help save on façade covering and waterproofing

costs during construction as well as on air-conditioning during the future life of the building. We win his trust and the project remains ours.

The team consolidates. Xavier Huyberechts and Nicolas Verrayer join us and work with us. Both of them also come from the Saint-Luc Ă Bruxelles School of Architecture, and thus share an identical training to mine. We understand each other very quickly and very well. We have to manage Vodacom and Nedcor simultaneously. The two projects will be well received by our clients and we thus succeed in proving to the property market for the first time that we can deliver several large scale projects simultaneously and that we can be counted on from now onwards.

Sensing the wind in our sails, I take the opportunity of a team trip to Paris to ask Peter Hibbit who is in charge of the Property Department at the bank to dedicate a very small part of the budget to art. I manage to convince Peter and we decide to include art in the very fabric of the building to anchor it in its context and its era and in so doing to enable the Bank to fulfil part of its social responsibility. They agree.

We form a committee to select commissions and we invite artists to choose their field of intervention and to

come up with a proposal. We are lucky to work on these commissions with William Kentridge, Willem Boshoff, Karel Nel and Penny Siopis. We opt to add the works of Kay Hassan, Kagiso Patrick Mautloa, Antie van der Merwe and Kendell Geers, to name a few. The second phase of building will continue without Laubser who will have left the bank in the interim with commissions to Minnette, William and Gerhard Marx, and Wim Botha.

To accompany them and continue this celebration of the winds of change we will choose the works of Robin Rhode, Santu Mofokeng, David Goldblatt and Rodney Grosskopff. This is a wonderful adventure for me. I manage to combine both my passion and my profession to mutual benefit. The two continue to work hand in hand.

Our committee for the first phase consists of Mrs Bongi Dlomo and Mrs Julia Charlton and Misters Peter Joubert who chairs the committee, Peter Hibbit, Willem Kruger, Monna Mokoena and me. We commit to the process of commissioning these works with William, Willem, Karel and Penny, enjoyably and assured of success. Willem decides to work on the actual paving on the floor of the atrium. “ Windfall ” is the title of his installation in which he randomly combines the names of winds with banking terms from various eras and sources by engraving them on granite plaques with a

variety of different shapes. These form an integral part of the paving, like fallen leaves in stormy conditions, whether climatic or economic in these uncertain times.

Penny, for her part, decides to delve into the bank’s history, assembling a vast amount of memorabilia associated with it since its creation. She combines them all as a kind of potpourri in a large display in the conference reception area. The history of the bank and the evolution of the country are evidently intimately linked right from the conception of the Neederlandse Bank in South Africa.

Karel’s proposal involves the creation of three panels. The central panel is the infinity symbol made up of a huge number of South African coins condemned to disuse [ 227 ]. The two other panels are presented as display cases offering the visitor a look at a small part of the artist’s private collection bringing together African units of payment. All the currencies displayed on the three panels are or will become obsolete and only have value for the historian or collector. Two kinds of society come face to face on these three panels and there does not seem to be any correlation. The complexity of our cultural and social mix and the so called “ levels ” of our “ evolutions ” remain at the heart of our day to day

challenges. Let’s hope that before long they will form the solid foundations of our children’s universe.

William wants to use the large glass façade of the lower atrium with its daylight as a screen for one of his “ shadow processions ”. This presents an opportunity for him to create in our central walkway his first urban scale sculptures in bronze [ 175 ]. We meet several times at his then studio on the ground floor of the family home in Houghton to discuss the scale and optimal visual rapports between the work and its viewers moving along our walkway or on the different floors. William wants to create the different characters in several layers somewhat like the articulated puppets used in Chinese shadow plays. This laminated construction will only be seen by the viewer in rare moments of proximity to the work. He shows me his models and we imagine them in procession in the atrium. We construct a pedestal for this powerful yet harmless procession, obviously in the style of the building to avoid any possible confusion with William’s intervention. This ensures that his procession achieves the desired and necessary height against the illuminated background created by the large window as the atrium’s final punctuation.

Given the scale of the proposed commissions, we decide to do a presentation to the President of the Bank,

Mr Liebenberg, former Minister of Finance and his CEO, Mr Richard Laubser. The proposals are presented by the artists and accepted without any problem. Only William has to change one of his characters. The latter carries an entanglement of scrap iron with a chair on top. They do not want William’s piece to provoke mirth amongst the Bank’s personnel and are concerned that “ the man with the chair ” may become confused with the Chairman.

Also, Richard asks me – in William’s presence – if there is not a risk that this bronze colour could clash with the colour chosen for the building’s metal joinery. William does not flinch, while I concentrate on rescuing us from this embarrassing situation and convincing Richard of the absence of this risk from an architectural point of view. Richard is reassured and adds that in any case the bronze can always be painted later should the need arise. As neither William, a mature and highly intelligent artist, nor any other member of the committee can find anything to say to add to the debate, the presentation is declared complete. We thus receive the blessing of the supreme authorities of the Bank and can now start organising the implementation of the various interventions and commissions.

I must tell you that this bronze of William’s, “ The Bridge ”, in the atrium of the Nedcor building, is the first of an edition of three and that it is agreed between

William and the Bank that the other two will not be sold in South Africa.

In this manner the bank gives William the opportunity to test his work in bronze on a city scale for the first time. Seven years later I will be lucky enough to continue such an adventure with Minnette, Wim Botha, William and Gerhard, Santu Mofokeng, David Goldblatt, Mikhael Subotsky and Robin Rhode for the second phase of Nedcor. Here the winds of change will be celebrated as will the upheavals caused by the growth potential of new regions emerging on the giant chessboard of finance and the economy. This global storm will bend Pierneef’s trees as portrayed by Wim, breaking the frame of conservatism when it rushes into the atrium of this second and final phase [ 35 ].

New ways of thinking are called for. A few years later Wim will justly receive the Helgaard Steyn Prize for this magnificent sculptural work. This Prize is only awarded every four years.

For our part, we will continue with our commitment to supporting artistic expression according to the same process with Marco Cianfanelli for the atrium of Standard Bank in Rosebank [ 42 ] and for ABSA in the heart of the Central Business District.

I think that the two phases of Nedcor in Sandton, Standard Bank in Rosebank as well as its Leadership College in Morningside, and ABSA/Barclays in the CBD gave us an incredible, fantastic and extremely rare opportunity to celebrate some of our artists and, through them, the eras and contexts in which these buildings were constructed. I hereby thank these three of our esteemed clients for the confidence they showed in us, in particular, by agreeing to accompany us on these adventures.

Unfortunately, the management and conservation of a corporate collection can be a difficult, painful and sometimes thankless task, as I will discover, years later, when the modest and talented Turiya Noluthando Mgadlela entrusts me with hers. [Â 257Â ]

Part FOUR

XIX

So I leave Zoo Lake and find a fantastic place to build my boat, my island, my cloud. The upper deck on the ridge juts out over the street by more than sixteen meters. The view of the northern suburbs is intoxicating.

Better still, 6 Epping Road can accommodate Michel Mouffe’s “ Les Cavaliers Rouges ”, which I arrange to have sent over from Brussels to enhance my days and a good portion of my nights [ 222 ]. With some delay I finally outgrow my adolescence in this house in Forest Town. I operate at two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour : my days and my nights are a blur of bohemian drunkenness, architecture, friends, girls, parties, gambling and the sad and hollow emptiness of the day after [ 301 ].

Twice a week at six in the morning Elsa comes to my house to try to put together the pieces of a life in tatters. It is a thankless task but Elsa, recommended to me by my friend Pat Dambe, one of the founders of Kaya FM, perseveres. During the course of the year she more or less succeeds in reconnecting my body and my soul.

I am ready. I am forty one and I understand for the first time that happiness does not come from anyone else but that if I choose to love a little more each day, the

love which is lying dormant inside me will find its polar opposite and perhaps together we will then be able to discover and share our joy of being. I meet Lynn at this precise moment and at the perfect time in relation to my body clock. The needle of the compass shows the direction. My freedom and ability to love react. Luckily we did not meet each other earlier. We would have loved each other in passing, a fleeting affair, a brief fling. As fate would have it, I am free and available for her. Of course given my age I am a hardened bachelor, just like her brother Vaughan. I spend a year with Lynn and we get on fantastically. She has a little boy, Jordan, who is eighteen months old when I meet him and become part of his life. His early years become, partly, my responsibility, my pride and my joy. Lynn, Jordan and I embark on a journey together. The trial period is a catastrophe but our desire to live together wins over and the trial, which is both superfluous and useless, is forgotten. I ask Lynn to marry me and she accepts. I don’t yet know how lucky I am. Lynn becomes my first and only wife, my partner, the love of my life and the mother of my children.

She does not have an easy job. I take up a lot of space. We decide to move so that we can live together in a more child-friendly house. For a year we rent the house of a friend of Lynn’s and subsequently mine, Camilla, in

Parkhurst, while I work on designing our future home.

There, amongst other things, I watch the twin towers fall on 11 September with Jordan. Camilla is married to Alain and they have two children, Thalia and Damien.

We are still friends today, even after having been their tenants.

Arlene, Rodney and I have bought four properties in Westcliff, bordering Jan Smuts Avenue, with financial help from Bruno, Emile and Jean-Marc, another Belgian friend I met in Johannesburg. We want to rezone the properties to enable us to build office blocks around a big traffic circle which we propose to establish at the intersection of Jan Smuts Avenue and The Valley Road.

This badly managed intersection has been plagued by countless traffic accidents. In addition the surrounding properties are in urgent need of love and an injection of new investment. In the course of our negotiations with Flo Bird and other members of the Westcliff/Parktown Heritage Trust we agree to keep the existing houses and we decide to occupy these properties ourselves rather than put them on the market. With Lynn and Jordan’s input, renovations begin on “ Blou Bos Krans ”, the house vacated by Sheila Camerer and her husband. We rename it Blue Bush Hill to underscore its place in a new South Africa. We respect the writing and vocabulary of this old Lady but infuse a new style of living far better adapted

to our contemporary era. The house was originally built on rock. It, too, offers a magnificent view of the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. The house dates back to 1911 and was occupied for a period by Sir Frederick Spencer Lister shortly after its construction. The latter was born in England where he became a doctor in 1905 before coming to the Transvaal to work for Premier Diamond Mines from 1907 to 1912 and for Rand Gold Mines from 1912 to 1917. He conducted research in bacteriology and notably helped many miners who developed pneumonia.

It is for this research and for all the good he did that he was honoured with a knighthood in 1920. It is also because of this historical interest that a blue ceramic medallion graces the entrance to the path created to provide access to the three residential properties.

The Nedcor offices are soon completed and occupied.

I sometimes like to have lunch there. During one of these lunches I meet Greg Barnes who asks if I can spare a half hour after lunch to do a quick tour of the building with him. I take pleasure in acting as his accidental guide.

He uses this opportunity to ask my advice on a property investment he wants to make. After a further quick analysis of the pros and cons of the offer, Greg decides not to pursue this option. I ask if he would consider joining us in our “ Westcliff ” project. He decides to put his trust in us and becomes our partner, along with

Lizette, his wife. He brings an exceptional understanding of finance, administration and good governance to our creativity. Thanks to their trust I am thus able to fairly reimburse my three Belgian friends who have entrusted their money to us and have all become more or less anxious to recover their loans.

Greg and I had met several years earlier. Our offices were moving from Arnold Road to the corner of Bolton Road and Fourth Avenue in Parkwood. Greg was a partner at Theta, a dynamic group of young financial entrepreneurs. Theta bought our little factory in Arnold Road. Greg left Theta shortly afterwards when the company decided to start taking an active interest in micro-lending. It was out of the question as far as Greg was concerned to be involved in any way with this type of activity. He sold his share to Gordon Schachat. Theta went on to become African Bank with Gordon as its president.

Greg and Lizette have been with us for fifteen years.

Amongst other things they have brought us discipline and sound judgment which were quite simply lacking.

At the beginning of April 2003 we return from a wonderful Easter holiday spent with them in their house in Plett. Lynn and I make love in the early afternoon and

I tell her of the firm conviction that has come over me: “ We have just made a child. I believe it; more than that, I’m certain. ” Mothers’ Day is approaching and I decide to give Lynn a pregnancy test. I have a good feeling and luckily I am not mistaken. The test is positive and Camille is promised to us. Jordan will have a little sister six years his junior. We are over the moon. Camille is born nine months later on 12 January 2004.

In August of the same year, the combination of my many excesses and a good sixty unfiltered Gitanes or Gauloises a day catch up with me. On returning from my first meeting to discuss the transformation and renovation of the Standard Bank Art Gallery, I suffer a double thrombosis. Once again I survive by the skin of my teeth. Willem had convinced Mandie van der Spuy and the arts committee of the Bank to recommend me to the decision-makers of this financial institution, and I thank him here in passing. As a result of this incident, Dr Giampaolo opens the door to my sixth life. I have to learn all over again how to write on a line and to choose adequate words to convey my thoughts in writing. Andre and Maman come over to help me find my feet again ; intellectually, this time around. I go back to work in January. In the interim the project management at the gallery is masterfully handled by Bridget, to whom I offer my thanks here again.

Like Icarus, I fell.

I understand that I will never be able to steer the ship again and that if I want to be able to experience the joy of seeing my children grow up, I will have to change my modus vivendi radically. Moreover, Jordan comes home from school one afternoon and tells us, as if reporting on a random cricket match, that the parents of one of his classmates were brutally mistreated and violently abused over the weekend and that his sister was raped several times. He talks about these atrocities as if they were a simple news item. This daily violence, which has become so commonplace it is no longer remarkable, is the price one pays for living nowadays in Johannesburg.

Lynn and I decide it is time for us to move and to show our children that this violence is not part of daily life everywhere and that there are countries where this epidemic has not yet struck.

Xavier has been keeping things in the office on course during my convalescence. I ask him if he feels ready to replace me. He hesitates out of humility. I assure him I have complete confidence in his ability as well as his aptitude and that he will make an excellent new Senior Partner. In deciding to move I also find a way to distance myself and be involved in the life of our

architectural practice in a new way. I definitely make his task easier this way and allow him to grow rapidly in his new responsibilities. Xavier surrounds himself with Bridget, Rodney’s youngest daughter, Louise who worked with me on the Vodacom projects and Andrew.

They will become the three new partners under Xavier, later joined by Naina and Philippe. They have all managed to reach centre stage, each in their own way.

They make up a fantastic team with diverse talents. The future of the architectural practice is assured. It can proceed with its transformation and development and a new chapter in its history can begin.

My escape from the daily pressures of the office allows the new partners to discover and test the breadth of their resources. They give new life to the company.

It becomes more efficient and delivers on all aspects of our profession with passion. Grosskopff, Lombart and Huyberechts will even be recognised as best mediumsized architectural practice in the country in 2013. (The medium size of the practice refers to the limited number of partners rather than the type of projects realised.)

The adventure continues and the firm will celebrate its seventieth anniversary next year.

To turn my new way of working into reality and for the other reasons mentioned above, we need to go away.

My desire that my children and Lynn should learn French, my maternal language, is unashamedly part of the equation. I look forward to being able to share my roots, my cultural origins and our local European form of humanism with them. Also, once they understand French there is much I will be able to share more easily with them, like stories of my childhood memories or even that feeling of guilt, no longer present today, but instilled in me through generations of family and whose origin is lost among the towers that dominate the low heavy skyline of Ghent.

Lynn does not wish to move to Belgium or live in Brussels, although from a logistic point of view this solution would be by far the most simple. We therefore decide to choose a place which is virgin territory for all four of us. Lynn is absolutely right. She comes home one evening and tells me she has heard that there are many English-speakers in the area of Bordeaux.

The decision is made and we leave a few days later to explore the Bordeaux region, basing ourselves in Saint Emilion. Lynn has heard that this village is wonderful and my vague childhood memories seem to confirm this information.

Over the course of these years, Kendell becomes more universal, confronts man and gradually returns

to his origins. Several galleries in Europe join Linda in supporting his journey. Stephen Friedman gives Kendell a platform for his work in London while Yvon Lambert replaces Marian Goodman in Paris. In Tuscany, Galleria Continua, conceived, managed and supported by Lorenzo, Mario and Maurizio, invites him to be part of their stable in San Gimignano, the Moulin near Paris and Beijing where their activities take place.

Rodolphe Janssen represents him in Brussels. Kendell is everywhere. His solo exhibitions are welcomed in Munich, Trente, Mexico, Lyon, Salamanca, Newcastle, Ghent, Aspen, Cincinnati, Rome, Zurich, Vienna, Cape Town, etc‌ He takes part in the Venice Biennale as well as Documenta in Kassel. Furthermore Kendell’s work becomes widely present in many public and prestigious private collections. In the midst of this whirlwind Kendell manages to put down roots. He meets Cendrine, beautiful, tender, gentle and so strong. They settle in Brussels, in Belgium, this great European battlefield. Its improbably anonymous position as capital of everywhere in the country of nowhere secures its selection as the venue for the debates of the European Commission.

This is where I usually find the Geers, at their home in rue des Fabriques. Like Andre Szabo they live under the rooftops and I climb the stairs with the same bouquet of joy and anguish. Kendell remains explosive by nature

and yet so vulnerable due to his deep sensitivity.

Kendell and Cendrine give birth to Vladdka and Isidor and choose the French Lycee Jean Monet for them for purely logistical reasons coupled with a great desire to be free. If they decide to lift the moorings of their barge on the canal and move elsewhere, Vladdka and Isidor would be able to attend another French lycee anywhere in the world. They could continue the same school curriculum regardless of their country of residence. It would even be possible for them to come back to South Africa for a few years. Kendell could perhaps become directly and intimately involved this time in the rebirth of the country of his childhood. Perhaps this is their shared destiny, even if neither of them realise it now.

I try to follow Kendell’s journey with a brother’s love, to the best of my ability. I rejoice in his successes and am moved to tears to see him reach the highest echelons of the international art scene. He is gradually becoming incorporated into the history of art, assimilated and offered in turn, to the cannibals of tomorrow.

Kendell’s ongoing discourse finds expression in widely differing forms and scales. However, the tension and extreme fragility of the fibres of his being and of his gut are expressed with particular precision in the works which require the most economic implementation. While

integrating and prolonging his discourse and his calling, his alchemy culminates for instance in: “ Les Larmes d’Eros 12 (ou 14) ” [ 113, 117 ], “ Foiled 31 ” [ 122 ], “ Kemunnos XV111 ” [ 125 ] and “ Kaput Mortuum XV1 ” [ 127 ] to name only a few. Here we see the effect of the strategy of the terrorist which he uses relentlessly, with force and precision, as he did in “ After Liberty ” [ 76, 78 ], or in “ Title Withheld ( Small Change ) ”, a magnificent bombshell which challenges South Africa’s biggest banking institutions using just a few coins. I cannot resist telling you what this work led to.

Having been invited to take part in an art competition, Kendell sends in a few coins with the instruction that they be placed on the floor in a completely random manner. Once in place these coins immediately begin to work. Whoever enters the room and sees them lying there immediately feels uncomfortable looking at them.

He immediately wonders “ did anyone see me glance at them, or worse, plan maybe to pick them up ? ” The viewer is immediately invaded by Judeo-Christian guilt and even looking at them seems wrong and almost impossible if he wants to leave the museum with his head held high. He turns away, preferring to escape without asking questions, just as many of us choose the alternative of flight in most conflict situations.

Maybe someone might for a brief moment think that the

idea of pocketing these coins had crossed his mind. To avoid any risk of possible guilt, of sinning in thought as Christians say, flight offers the best solution.

However, a fellow artist, free of our constraints, grabs the coins and uses them to quench his thirst and drink to Kendell’s and our health. In a quandary, the organisers hastily replace the coins. Kendell arrives and declares to those in charge of the event that the coins on show are not his and demands that they reinstate his work. As proof Kendell produces a transfer copy of the coins he had used to create his submission to the art competition. Their predicament continues.

A few days later Kendell sends them a letter of demand giving them the choice between returning his work or reimbursing him for its value, which is, needless to say, a lot higher than that of the coins. The legal advisors of the financial institution in question recommend that, in the absence of any other option, the organisers pay for the work. Kendell tells me he received a cheque which he has never cashed to this day.

A few months later Kendell is invited to exhibit this work at another event sponsored by a different banking institution. This time the organisers ask if the coins can be fixed to the ground in some way, glued, or maybe

encased in a glass display. Kendell refuses. The work would lose its power, implicit in the unspoken, as well as its meaning. “ Small Change ” will not be exhibited.

The biggest financial institutions can be put to the test with a few coins coupled with the artist’s alchemy.

Bravo… The weakness of the world’s banking system will be exposed much more dramatically in the years that follow and will deeply affect a very large number of victims.

To fully share with you my unconditional admiration and respect for Kendell’s work I have to tell you about his exhibition in Beijing and the installation “ Hanging Piece ” [ 128 ] in Basel in June 2012. I promised I would get back to these so let me again ignore chronological sequence and do so now.

His exhibition at the Galleria Continua in Beijing is scheduled for March 2011. He visits the space a few months before the time to look the place over on more than one level. The moment is rich with intensity. He is invited to officiate there. He is free to go to China in priestly garb. Not everyone shares this opportunity.

Like the actors in Samuel Beckett’s play, in “ Fin de Partie ” ( Endgame ) Kendell cries out to us to take urgent note of what is left unsaid in his work. Humanity

is approaching the end of the game of chess it has been playing with itself, and here comes up against its most formidable opponent which it knows so well. To make us place ourselves on this chessboard Kendell presents us with a vigorous image of dystopia, warning us yet again here in Beijing of the enemy we have made of ourselves.

China has witnessed us taking our capitalist industrial revolution to the extreme and has followed suit, this time on a scale worthy of the Dragon itself. The buffet will soon be over. It is time to leave the party voluntarily before we are thrown out. The “ Praying Wheels ” [ 118, 119, 120 ] of our societies based on fossil fuels are imploding, the feast of the apocalypse is in full swing, the fireworks are ablaze and Tintin’s words are smothered [ 124 ]. Let’s not just resign ourselves to becoming the “ Left Over People ” of our tired out systems, dying slowly, victims condemned to their own “ auto-da-fe ”. Let’s stamp out hatred, let love triumph and let all the willing Don Quixottes come forward, mounted on their Rocinantes, ready for a fantastic triumphant ride. Remember, the revolution Kendell urges us to join is the most sober of all. This profound and exacting internal revolution alone will allow man to rediscover the honour of his humanity and to fulfil his unique contract: to contribute to the best possible future for man and ensure the survival of the human race. “ Sine qua non ”.

Here is what he has to say about it: “ The revolution that we need to think about is the cycle of life. The revolution of the moon around the earth, the earth around the sun, the changing of the seasons, the evolution of life and death in human beings - - these are all revolutions. Only in addressing the revolution within, will we be better able to respect ourselves, and only after respecting ourselves can we learn to respect the people around us. ” In this same conversation with Jerome Sans, talking about the mirror installed on the floor for this exhibition, Kendell continues with these words : “ There are a number of reasons why I decided to make the visitors to my exhibition at the Bejing Continua Gallery walk on a mirrored floor. Perhaps the most banal is that it fascinates me that in the West, the mirror has become a symbol of self-loathing. We look into the mirror every morning, and we hate what we see. We hate the way we smell, the wrinkles on our face, and our bodies; and in response capitalist industry has spawned the snake oil antidotes of the cosmetic and fashion industries. Ironically, once again, crude oil is recycled and mixed with perfumes into day creams, night creams, moisturisers, lipsticks, anti-wrinkle, anti-cellulite, anti

aging snake oils promising to reverse the natural cycles of life and arrest our self image. Deodorants and perfumes are marketed by an unrelenting, unethical advertising industry that creates the problem only in order to sell you their solution. Let’s face it, the fashion and advertising face of capitalism is based on a spirit of self-loathing, a tradition and strategy they inherited from the Catholic Church.

The second important thing about the mirror is that it’s a very literal translation of the ancient alchemists who were living in balance with nature, with their mantra “ as above, so below ”. Quantum physicists living around the world today are arriving at the same conclusions that the ancient alchemists, gurus, prophets, and spiritual leaders have been speaking about for centuries – that the macrocosm and the microcosm live within each other, that changes in one affects change in the other. Revolution within our bodies, is connected to the revolution outside our bodies, and when you create changes within yourself, you also affect similar changes in the world outside vice versa ”.

He continues, on the subject of “ Paying Wheels ”: “ It is beautiful irony that in most instances, these oil drums are transformed into receptacles of fire, the

barbeques of the working classes, the winter hearth and the stoves of the indigent. The quantum physicists today now all agree that everything is connected, everything is interrelated and that every thought has a consequence.

Your intention changes the result of the experiment. I use the mirror as a visceral embodiment of the idea that we are all interconnected, that there is no individual me and you, and that we are all living together. ” It fascinates me to realise the extent to which everything continues inevitably to add up and cross check.

In June 2012, buoyed by the energy and support of the galleries which sustain him, Kendell is invited to install “ Hanging Piece ” in Basel, a work which he conceived in 1993. As each visitor to Art Unlimited enters the exhibition hall they are, as it were, invited to walk through the installation of “ Bricks ”, through the dangers we permanently create both for others and for ourselves.

I was going to talk to you about them, but let me rather leave that to him. This is what he says about them on 11 June 2012: “ 1993 was one of the most volatile in the history of South Africa. A period of transition, it was punctuated

by the fears and hopes of a country in transformation, a moment of intense anticipation. Apartheid and its constitution had officially been disbanded in February 1990 but until the results of the first democratic election in April 1994 were in, nothing was certain. The old National Party, the architects of Apartheid, believed that they could change their spots and even get re-elected to lead the Post-Apartheid government and so made no attempt to lead the country for fear that their actions might later be held against them. In the wings, political parties from every extreme, every ideology and every political persuasion all believed they stood a chance. All hell broke loose as the country attempted to grapple with the birth of democracy on soil that for so many generations before had been stained with blood and our imaginations clouded by psychological warfare.

Belonging to the wrong political party, in the wrong place, at the wrong time was reason enough to be killed.

On the 19 July 1993, gunmen wielding AK47s stopped a minibus in the early hours of the morning, demanding to see each person’s political party cards. The gunmen were from the African National Congress (A.N.C.) party and in roadside executions eliminated every member of the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (I.F.P.). That very day I joined both the A.N.C. and I.F.P. and over the next six months infiltrated and joined every single serious

political party, from the neo-nazi Afrikaaner Weerstands Beweegen (A.W.B.) to the black consciousness Pan African Congress (P.A.C.) whose motto “ one settler one bullet ” should in theory have been reason to have me executed.

It would take me another six months to complete the performative work “ Untitled (ANC, AVF, AWB, CP, DP, IFP, NP, PAC, SACP) ” that, by its nature, was impossible to document.

Across the country violence flared up as the A.W.B. planted car bombs in busy city centres. The I.F.P. threw members of the A.N.C off trains commuting between Soweto and Johannesburg. On the 28 March 1993 Nelson Mandela instructed his supporters to use force, if necessary to defend the A.N.C. head quarters against a protest of 20 000 I.F.P. members, killing 19 people.

On the 10 April 1993, Communist leader Chris Hani was murdered in front of his home by renegade Polish immigrant Janusz Walus.

This was context in which I made “ Hanging Piece, ” in a country being ripped to pieces and in which peace was hanging in the balance. The work was originally produced for an exhibition in Durban, a popular holiday city on the warm Indian Ocean. Growing up, my dysfunctional working class family would join thousands of other white South Africans every year on

their 600 kilometre pilgrimage to Durban for Christmas and Easter holidays. It was the playground of endless sandy beaches, fun fairs, candy floss and the veritable stick candy. Durban’s South Beach was world famous for its waves and attracted the world’s best surfers from across the globe in their search for the perfect wave.

This was however, a pleasure reserved for “ Whites Only ” and the police were never far away to ensure no breach of any laws upon their sacred white sands.

Even as a child I found it rather ironic that black people were denied access to the very same beaches where the most racist white people would spend hours trying to darken the colour of their skin. The laws of race were as strict as the laws of decency for that was the backbone of the Christian Fascism known as Apartheid. I vividly remember the police handcuffing topless German tourists on the beach with as much passion as they did black South Africans protesting their right to enjoy the same sand, sun and ocean as their white countrymen.

Once through the towering Drakensberg Mountains, the N3 freeway between Johannesburg and Durban opens up and winds its way through the beautiful green hills and valleys of the former Zulu empire. It was here, that militant young Anti-Apartheid freedom fighters would suspend rocks and bricks from bridges in the

dark of night hanging at the height of the speeding car windscreens. It was a very effective weapon given that drivers would inevitably speed up in anticipation of that last stretch of road before holiday bliss. A piece of string and a twenty cent brick were as effective weapons on the fight for freedom as the state’s million dollar military engineered tanks and jets.

In reflection upon the American dominance of late twentieth century art history woven together with the socio-political realities confronting South Africa. I had been working with the brick as a motif since 1988 in works like “ Brick, ” “ Title Withheld (Brick), ” “ 2 Objects Suspended, ” “ Hung, ” “ Suspended, ” and “ Title Withheld (Vitrine). ” In itself, the clay brick is nothing more than fired earth and yet at the same time charged with connotation, allusion and symbolism. In a museum or gallery it obviously quoted Carl Andre but at the same time, it was also a powerful political symbol representing the aspirations of millions of homeless black South Africans living in shantytown shacks that would blow down with every storm. In the hands of a young militant it was a missile to be thrown in the faces of the white establishment whereas in a gallery or museum it was an icon of the Avant Garde. The complex and contradictory cultural, social and political connotations of the brick were well illustrated by a full page newspaper advertisement

that the old National Party ran that year in which 2 bricks were reproduced, one broken, the other not, asking the question “ Are you a builder or a breaker? ”

The bricks of “ Hanging Piece ” are suspended at regular intervals throughout the installation, caught in motion, midway between heaven and hell, a shoulder’s width apart. They are pregnant in anticipation, neither builders nor breakers, neither weapons nor walls, frozen in their fall. The red ropes they hang from are like the fuses of dynamite sticks or the Chinese red string of fate predetermining our destinies.

The world has changed since 1993, as have I, and whilst “ Hanging Piece ” drew inspiration from a very specific context, the installation is no less relevant today. Back then I believed in politics as a strategy and method of transformation where I no longer do for the world’s leaders have demonstrated that they would rather bail out banks than make any effort to save the planet from a total melt down. Today I am convinced that the cold war political materialism of protesting with a brick in the hand is empty without something more to believe in for a revolution without love is bankrupt. The planet stands

today at a crossroads, similar to that where South Africa stood in 1993 as profit wages its war against prophets.

We have denied, for too long now, our own nature and raped the planet of its natural resources, harvesting it to the brink of collapse. In the far northern reaches of Ilulissat, a town in Greenland, the sun sets for good on November 29 every year and doesn’t rise again until January 13. Or at least that was the case until 2011.

This year, to the shock of locals, sunlight broke over the horizon on January 11, two days ahead of schedule.

For some, this is due to a shift in the earth’s axis or rotation, whilst for others, it is the consequence of global warming as the melting ice has caused the horizon to sink. Either way, the planet is changing as a direct result of our persistent presence. The aggressive “ Survival of the Fittest ” approach towards nature and ourselves may once have served the needs of our species but that is no longer the case, for if we do not find a way to live more gently and in greater harmony with the planet and all the life it supports, we are unlikely as a species to survive at all.

The bricks in “ Hanging Piece ” are caught midfall, locked in between the natural laws of gravity and the delight of

human engineering. Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of quantum nature, along with strong interaction, electromagnetic and weak forces. I love the metaphor of quantum physics, for the single electron, proton or quark, is not unlike a work of art. In themselves and alone, they are seemingly inconsequent and insignificant, but in context they perform like the ripples that are caused by the fall of a brick as it drops into the pool of our imagination, creating waves of consciousness that continue to slowly ebb and flow, backward and forwards until they have touched every boundary and limit. Where, in 1993, I conceived of “ Hanging Piece ” as a cultural weapon, I now think of it more as the revolutionary embodiment of the alchemical mantra, “ as above, so below, ” a magical talisman between the future and the past.

The clay bricks, fired from the very same “ prima materia ” that according to the Bible, we were created from, hang motionless and in harmony. Suspended on red chords, like spiritualised veins from heaven, they are at peace in a passive meditation. Once the viewer enters into their domain, this changes for they begin to swing, backwards and forwards, marking the passing of human presence.

Once in motion, they are animated into something potentially threatening, something likely to hit somebody in the face or stomach if you push too hard. It is not

however the first person passing through that is likely to get hit by a swinging brick but those that follow. The more aggressive and assertive the first person moves through the space, the more likely their successors are going to get hurt, a very poetic embodiment of the condition of our planet today as we try to defuse the climatic time bombs created by the short sightedness of our ancestors. ” ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Every year as the festive season approaches I ask Kendell if he has an artwork for me. This is my way of supporting him while indulging myself at the same time.

Then one year, in 1998, Kendell replies in the negative for the first time. He has no work which he would recommend to me to purchase. He advises me instead to find out about an artist called Robin Rhode who could probably help me accomplish my Christmas ritual in his place. Robin is South African too and describes himself as a “ working-class bushie artist ” in an interview with Kathryn Smith in November 1999. She talks about his modus operandi as follows: “ His first two years at art school were hell until he read an article in Frieze Magazine featuring the works of Kendell Geers, Stephen Hobbs and Wayne Barker. He felt a sense of kinship with Geers’ aesthetic terrorism… ”

Doing a quick search on the subject I come across a performance he had realised at the Galerie Rembrandt van Rijn. I start corresponding with him and he agrees to recreate and document “ Bicycle ” [ 235 ] on a wall in Germany, the country he has moved to, at the end of 1998. He sends me 12 slides of his performance in an A4 format, with an A3 size which I give to my Mother for Christmas, of the bicycle on its own on this Berlin wall [ 236 ]. “ Bicycle ” has its source in an initiation rite from high school. The seniors draw a bike on one of the walls in the changing rooms. They tell the juniors to get on it and start pedaling, shouting “ Ry die fokken bike ”, to humiliate them and make them feel stupid, childish and incompetent. In this work, it is Robin who challenges himself to ride his own drawing of a bicycle.

When Robin is a child, not having a bike is a sign of a dysfunctional family, like not being “ one of the guys ”. His parents decide to move to Johannesburg and leave Robin’s bicycle behind. It becomes his icon, symbolising his position as outsider, as “ persona non grata ”. Also, like Kendell he recognises the street as his territory. Following his male instinct, he marks it by urinating in the urinal he has drawn on the wall, all the while thanking Marcel.

On returning from the war, brave survivors of combat were given a farm as payment for their service, if they were white. Coloureds, on the other hand, were rewarded with a bicycle.

In an act of defiance Robin accomplishes his own initiation rite within the realms of the history of art. To do this he invades the street, this territory he presides over, scene of this childhood games. Another high priest is born.

I will talk about Robin’s “ aesthetics of the desire ” further on in these pages.

XX

We arrive in Saint Emilion in November 2007 and stay in a small furnished apartment at the Logis du Roy chez Pierre Choukroun, having made the reservation on the internet. We visit several houses a day. They are either too big or too isolated and many of them are dilapidated and need to be completely renovated by the potential new owners. This challenge might have interested us if the timing had been different but under the circumstances we can’t allow ourselves to be tempted. Time is passing by and we need to find somewhere to live. Most of all we want to get Camille and Jordan into a school. We are concerned that if we return from this trip empty handed our move may come back for discussion at the table. Furthermore the viability of the Bordeaux idea itself could be revisited. By chance we see photos of a house that attracts our attention at a real estate agency in Libourne. Surprisingly, the house is in the village of Saint Emilion itself where we are staying. After three hours of discussion with the agent proposing all the properties which could possibly match our profile, this house remains at the top of the list for both Lynn and me. The agent calls the owners and arranges for us to see the house that evening. They are happy living there

with their three children but have decided for obvious financial reasons to consolidate their winemaking business and the family home in one place.

We are charmed the moment we enter. The children are seated at the table in the kitchen by the fire, about to tuck into pasta with truffles. Lynn and I exchange some conspiratorial glances. We both immediately know what the other is thinking. We rapidly become sure that the house, especially with its position in the heart of the village of Saint Emilion, is fantastic and could do a lot more than just suit us. Saint Emilion and its vineyards are a Unesco World Heritage Site and its Genius Loci is clearly perceptible and omnipresent. We negotiate a bit on the price while keeping an eye on the clock, and return to Johannesburg, having signed the provisional sales agreement and registered our children at the “ Saint Valery ” school right next to the town hall in Saint Emilion. Everything has worked out perfectly. To crown it all I need not worry about leaving Lynn, Camille and Jordan in the village during my almost monthly trips to Johannesburg, which remains the centre of my professional life.

We move in August 2008 and rent a “ gîte ” till the end of the year from Christophe Floriot, the electrician, one of the artisans helping us with the renovations.

During this period I try to get the house ready for us. I know I can rely on my friends’ artworks to give it that extra bit of soul we have become used to. Jordan and Camille start attending the village school. French school terms do not correspond to ours. The summer holidays are much longer. It would take an enormous amount of courage to attempt to overcome the inertia that has set in and challenge the socio-cultural heritage. When Jules Ferry made school compulsory in France, the French population accepted on condition that children could return home to the farms to help with the harvests. Very few children still take part in the harvest today, but the custom has remained, even as rural depopulation sadly continues.

Camille starts in September in the first year of nursery school, before being quickly promoted to first year of proper school while Jordan starts the CM2, a pivotal year before middle “ collège ”, with Aline Roman, the head of the school. Neither Jordan nor Camille speak French and they are thrown directly into total immersion.

The school goes out of its way to welcome them and help them to adapt. The results will be fantastic.

Lynn quickly establishes a new network as well as new points of reference. She immerses herself completely in her role as pivot of the family, smoothly coordinating

our adaptation to this new cultural, climatic, linguistic, social and operational environment. Lynn loves our time at the gite. We realise how precious this time is, living very closely together, on top of or underneath each other. The children are happy. Maman is. I sense that we are successfully managing this delicate operation of changing both continent and season. Tim, a very close friend, has more or less the same experiences and similar joys in Tuscany.

The previous owners of our recently acquired house give me a list of local artisans and I start on the building operations while staying in contact with the office via courier and Skype. I rapidly start to really enjoy working with the artisans of the area, like Christian Ferrie, Bernard Penchaud and his two brothers, Christophe Foliot, Bertrand Borderie, Damien Agrafel and his Papa, to name but a few. Let me take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to them here in these lines. For the most part they operate alone or in a very small team. They are remarkably efficient and show a real respect for and love of a job well done, witness their own.

I try to respect the essence of the house while adapting it to our lifestyle. I often ask for the advice of my various new friends to reassure myself that it conforms

and is in keeping with local practice. I try to find out the origins and the reasons for their way of doing things. The house is situated in a listed protected sector. Everything has to be approved by the architect of the monuments of France. The local artisans and authorities are all there to help us, even the municipal police, directed by Frederic Ferry, who closes off the road when this measure becomes necessary to facilitate our building operations. We make a great team. I have to admit that the fact that French is my maternal language is a great help and that this challenge for others who do not hold this precious trump card could prove epic, disastrous or both.

Not far from the house I find an internet cafĂŠ which promptly becomes my international headquarters. Every morning I am there in front of the computer. This is where I meet Coco who drinks his beer there and Alain Vauthier his coffee. The three of us are often in conversation : Coco, the municipal street sweeper having his morning beer, Alain Vauthier checking the latest news and me with my eyes glued to the computer screen. Coco is a municipal technician in the public health department responsible for keeping the city streets clean, Alain Vauthier owns Chateau Ausone, a Premier Grand Cru Classe A in the Saint Emilion wine classification, and I come from elsewhere, from far away, from down south. I think these uncomplicated social relationships are easier at the scale

of a village. We will all need one another sooner or later and we all know it. It becomes second nature to respect the other person’s work or time. This way of living is amazingly effective and rewarding.

Lynn enrols in a Pilates and fitness programme which takes place on the first floor in an ancient arcaded building without air-conditioning overlooking the marketplace in Libourne. She makes great friends there, most coming from completely different backgrounds.

This mixture of race, age, culture, background and social standing is wonderful to experience. Sue Johnson-Hill takes Lynn under her wing. For some thirty years Sue and her husband Alan have owned a fantastic wine estate 35 kilometres from Saint Emilion, Chateau Meaume at Maransin. They bend over backwards to introduce us to their friends, mostly English speaking, each one more welcoming, prestigious, experienced or interesting than the next. The fact that we are accepted so easily and with such generosity and thoughtfulness is probably due to two main reasons : Lynn’s radiant beauty and the fact that neither of us are in France to work. We pose no threat as potential competition in any field, neither for them nor anyone else, so everyone is happy to speak freely and openly with us on all subjects.

It is in this way that we discover the ancestral relationship between Aquitaine, the region in which Saint Emilion is situated, and the English crown. This probably explains why people from Commonwealth countries feel so at ease and at home here. To understand the source of this feeling one must go back as far as Eleanor of Aquitaine.

She is probably the only woman to have become queen of France and subsequently queen of England, through the sharing of her bed and her successive marriages. I often wonder if it is to the cooks of Aquitaine who served in her court that we owe the use of culinary terms such as “ pork ” or “ beef ”, which are no longer called “ pig ” or “ cow ” the moment they are associated with cuisine.

However, I also have to confess that my dearly beloved mother-in-law, Nana to Camille and Jordan, uses every possible opportunity to point out that she seems to remember it was “ the Brits ” who put French wine “ on the world’s map ”, to use her exact words.

Undoubtedly the biggest stumbling block for anyone deciding to spend part of their time in France is both the complexity and number of administrative formalities in force. These formalities as well as the terrifying number of civil servants in place to administer them seriously hamper the creation of assets or services as well as any entrepreneurial spirit. Emmanuel, a friend of Jordan’s aged fifteen, declares loftily from the already rather

morose, disillusioned viewpoint of his youth: “ I think it’s become almost impossible to become successful in France, even if one manages to start something ”. The state, the system intervenes everywhere. Its pernicious strength lies in being “ inescapable ”. More than half of the country’s active population works either directly or indirectly for the state. The same proportion of this active French population remains therefore assured of their job, their thirteenth and fourteenth cheques, their paid leave, their seniority bonus or their pension unless they make a “ faute grave ”.

These privileges cannot be kept up by countries which want to leave the vicious circle and look to their future.

The bureaucratic machine has grown heavier year after year, from one government to the next, both right-wing and left-wing, since the end of the Second World War. If one adds to that the weight of the hypothetical, so-called interest on debt repayment, unemployment benefits and all the various distributions, allocations, compensations and subsidies, mass bankruptcy quickly becomes the only logical fate. The prospect of another revolution grows daily.

By Christmas 2008 the house is, so to speak, ready to welcome us. We move in and begin a wonderful new period in our lives. Lynn even tells me these were some of

the best years of her life, despite my monthly to and fro migration between our two continents [ 303 ]. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

The history of Saint Emilion dates back to the arrival of the hermit Emilian in these parts, his name later changing to Emilion due to the Gascon influence. He is en route to Saint Jacques de Compostelle when he stops at a hollowed out valley forming a small amphitheatre, a place destined by its very nature to nurture life. [ 302 ]. He dies on 6 January 767. Today Saint Emilion is one of the few remaining examples of a medieval town in Aquitaine.

This delicious combination of village by virtue of its size and cosmopolitan town by virtue of its aura - acquired through the ages - as headquarters of the winemaking activities of the region, lends a unique character to this jewel of our universal heritage. In an age where sustainable development has become one of our most serious concerns, I marvel at man’s genius in creating such a harmonious relationship with his environment.

I am amazed at the fantastic transformation that can be achieved by bringing together a creeper, clay-limestone soil, a bit of rain, enough sunshine, and a lot of savoirfaire, effort and love. The combination of these elements has allowed the region to develop this nectar which is

appreciated and celebrated throughout the world and by the most demanding amongst us. It has created a sustainable economic activity for the region, which regenerates itself each year according to the rhythm of the seasons and of our lives. This small medieval town is on the world map and, as I said earlier, the territory of its jurisdiction and its landscapes have been listed as a World Heritage Site since 5 December 1999. The heart of man and the exceptional terroir have been complicit for centuries in their mutual love of the juice of this divine fruit. Added to that, man has strived through the ages to use the same calcareous rock to build the city, so this illustrious terroir has even made its mark in the beauty of the city itself.

This is thus a real example of our ability to turn a challenge into an opportunity while maintaining the precious and fragile imbalance between man and his environment. This is achieved here through the love, dedication and respect of many successive generations.

I am sure that man will soon find and develop the means to do away with the chemical products that are still used in wine making, thereby rendering this imbalance even more precious. Vines have existed in this area as far back as Gallo-Roman times. In some places furrows were simply hollowed out in the rock itself and filled with fertile soil suitable for the planting of vines. Love

and savoir-faire then assumed most of the responsibility for the process, generously assisted by the benevolent climate.

I am convinced that the vast expanses of the Karoo, to name but one region of South Africa, could and should be seriously considered from a different perspective. It should be possible to cultivate them with care and respect to create new types of employment and a far better alternative to the gutters of Hillbrow.

Perhaps we should pay attention to Pierre Rabhi’s recommendations in this regard. The area offers space, wind, light and sun in abundance. Also, by means of an astute combination of ancient wisdom and recent developments in sustainable farming, we should be able to facilitate certain types of plantation. We need to rediscover the terrain around us as well as our own gardens to appreciate fully and in a new light all the potential riches they offer us. I am convinced that it must be possible to successfully undertake such an endeavour. Even though this journey might not prove easy in the short term, it could in the long term provide real freedom for the people of our country instead of condemning them to a state of dependence in an urban environment, which I have discussed in the preceding pages. To successfully combat the temptation to do what is easiest and requires the least effort, we need

a profound change of mentality. To achieve this new system of values and priorities will require a real and assiduous political will, a major change in education and the commitment and effort of all concerned. It is time to convert the rumours of an African renaissance into the reality we so desire. A new chapter can and must begin.

XXI

Please forgive me for taking a bit of a detour here.

I want to tell you about the misinterpretation of the word “ evolution ” that I have been living with for years. These days for most of us the word “ evolution ” seems to have acquired a connotation closely linked with the notion of progress. This is found in common definitions such as “ progressive passage from one state to another ” or “ gradual change in which concepts and processes are modified ”. The words “ progressive ” and “ gradual ” do not actually give any indication as to degree or unit of measurement. These terms are only there to confirm that the movement from one state to the other requires a certain amount of time even if the number of intermediary stages remains imperceptible.

My misinterpretation of the word “ evolution ” – and perhaps this is true for most of us – stems from our own presumptuousness. We see ourselves as the golden standard, simply deciding that everything that preceded us is obviously “ under evolved ” in comparison with the wonderwork that we have become today through the evolution of the human race. I think it would be a good idea to look at the etymology of the word. It comes from

the Latin “ evolutio ” meaning the action of unwinding or taking place. We are at the heart of this unwinding.

This brings us back to the continuous unwinding of chaos in constant mutation and immediately wipes out this absurd, arbitrary and erroneous idea that evolution is synonymous with any notion of progress. A long period of evolution separates us from the caveman and from the peaceful era of the San people. However, it would be complete nonsense to think that we have become more “ evolved ” than they were. These days we manage our feeble human condition very differently but we are still only trying to ensure the survival of the species. That is all. It is with great humility that I am forced to admit that, should the need arise, I would not be able to survive for very long in the Sterkfontein caves or the Kalahari desert. Hunger, thirst, cold and heat, to name but a few of the more obvious threats, would soon put an end to my prospects of survival and my existence would be terminated. Is this proof of our evolution? How pathetic is this evolution of ours, which leaves us unable to fulfil even the most basic clause of our primordial contract: to survive and ensure the survival of the species. “ Man is the unhappiest of the animals because he alone is not content with his fate and wants to escape the circle in which nature has confined all his faculties. ”

Erasmus. What is more, most of what we strive for has to do with self sufficiency and individual access to comfort and services, entertainment and pleasure. We want to be able to do everything ourselves and especially not have to depend on anyone. Is this evolution? Like some sad form of masturbation. We are heading at full speed towards total solitude which will be one of the inevitable results of our aspirations. We are isolating ourselves in bubbles and becoming more independent by the day.

Even our altruism is dying and our generosity now takes the form of a monthly, quarterly or annual bank transfer which buys us a clear conscience at a good price. We also have the option of dulling or anaesthetising our conscience, as people once atoned for their guilt or their sins by buying an indulgence, these days by paying fines to the state. Similarly without spending much we could atone for a tiny part of our collective shame while behind the steering wheel of our car at some or other intersection where the lights have changed to red, hastily dispensing a few coins. It never crosses our minds that these coins condemn the person asking for them to an ever increasing state of abject dependence at these same traffic lights or upon the system which allows this to happen. What really matters is not knowing how to do things, but knowing why we do them. The danger does not reside in the fantastic progress we have made

in many different fields, which I applaud with deep admiration and great respect, but rather in what we do with this progress. It is in the ethics of the thing that the oracle resides.

Real camaraderie and companionship is becoming a thing of the past and our own children have replaced the pleasure of spending time together with a dependence on instant gratification which has become sacrosanct and omnipresent and which erodes social interaction rather than facilitating it. They are becoming obsessed with the “ selfie ” which is really a cry of despair from a youth no longer able to believe in their own existence and their own worth unless this is proved to them by instantly appearing on the web. The descent toward the abyss continues amidst ever present despair. Today seventy five percent of family units in the city centre in Brussels consists of a single person. The chasm keeps growing, ready to swallow us.

Here I have to quote Bruel and La Fouine. I recommend you watch “ Maux d’enfants ” on You Tube Vevo. Talented as they are, they are much better able to convey the problems and dangers that our children face, never mind ourselves.

Patrick Bruel You come home early, earlier than before You switch on your computer, you wait They’re all there behind the screen Again, it’s not your day You read anyway, you lower your head This has to stop These words thrown out just to see From behind the keyboard, will show Which child comes to power Alone in his room, a kid laughs To make the others laugh with him And today it’s your turn Dry your eyes, look at me It hurts me more than you When your eyes ask me “ Why? ” We repeat what we hear Looking for a place in the wind But these are only children’s problems

For a girl who says no For a boy who likes another boy For some stupid remark Because in the school grounds It’s not only balls being thrown It’s not only fun and games Who’s pathetic, who’s a dog For a jacket, or a laptop It’s so easy to destroy someone Lift your head up, look at me It hurts me more than you.

La Fouine (Yeah, Fouiny Babe) There are plenty of them, these virtual thugs They’re as young as 13, already trying to be sensual The walls don’t have ears they have Bluetooth ADSL And the one who’s the cruelest calls the shots Comments are cries for help, sometimes words are tears Keyboards let fire, computers are weapons “ Mom, I’m staying in my room, Mom I’m not hungry

Mom I’ve caused pain but it’s as short as a refrain ” Love on the net, you don’t even know who you’re seeing Private posts, no need to talk I love you by SMS and I miss you by email You liked me on twitter and you broke up on BBM When I was small we didn’t have a computer We played football and talked for hours You are alone in front of the screen, even on holidays Tell me who you’re surfing with, I’ll tell you who you’re dealing with.

Patrick Bruel Why? Ask them They don’t know, they think they’re cool Playing at war, playing adult games, Lift your head up, talk, I’m listening Change the direction of the wind Hate slips and slides, into the baggage When you should still be reading picture books (Yeah, how to look up from my keyboard?)

Dry your eyes, look at me

(Open an account , log on if you want to talk to me) I’ve got so much more to tell you (Papa I’m running out of time, I’m online) When your eyes ask “ Where are we going? ” (I’m busy in my room, you know, move ) Nowhere if you won’t talk about it La Fouine How many remained silent today?

How many more will there be?

It is partly to all this that Kendell is saying “ stop ” when he shows us his hand blocking our way as if to warn us of the abyss towards which we are heading [ 107 ]. He halts us, protecting us from danger and directs us away from this crime scene in which the human race could lose its way. In showing his handprint - or perhaps it is ours, our very first drawing - he reminds us of our own fundamental humanity, as incontrovertible proof of his existence, of our belonging. The print Kendell offers us is of an open hand, a hand that invites, shares, offers, helps or guides. A hand that touches, caresses or embraces. A hand which receives, exchanges, plants,

harvests or nourishes. The hand of a midwife welcoming us to the human race and delivering us to life just as the hand of the parent will one day close our eyes when the season is over. This is the hand that Kendell extends to us to alert us to the dangers for which we should be prepared and for which we are responsible. Maybe it’s not too late? Perhaps there is still time for hatred to be erased and for emotional bankruptcy and intolerance to be banished fore452ver. Let consumerism, fanaticism and racism give way to thrift, tolerance and sharing.

Let kindness, goodness and respect – both for ourselves and for others - triumph. Let love, which is the ultimate renewable energy, become our most precious asset. “ Yes we can ”. Thank you Papa for reminding me so often: “ We can as long as we want to for long enough… ”

XXII

Our neighbours, Veronique and Christian, are blessed with a knowledge of fauna and flora comparable with that of the San. When I first met them I had fallen from on high, from the pedestal on which, in my carelessness, arrogance and ignorance, I had placed myself. I took them for simple people, far too quickly and with no evidence to support that view. What escaped me was the sophistication as well as the wisdom and generosity of this simplicity. Amongst other things they are passionate about everything that grows. They take great care of their little vegetable garden, even though the latter might appear a bit haphazard at first glance.

This appearance does not result from neglect but comes rather from an understanding of the different types of vegetables and their families, their preferences, their friends and their needs. Veronique and Christian always try to look after the wellbeing of these, their real friends, playmates of their daughter Alice since her early childhood. Alice was born in wonderland and they share these wonders with us, introducing us as if to their nearest and dearest, and visiting them before and after work every day. Veronique works in one of the restaurants in the central square of Saint Emilion next

to the monolithic church and Christian works with and loves wood, just like Willem’s father.

I can’t resist introducing you, in turn, to some of their dearest friends: Borage which enhances their omelettes and salads, aids digestion and imparts confidence and boldness in matters of love; Comfrey which speeds up the healing of Alice’s fractures and cuts; Agastache which releases a strong fragrance of aniseed, liquorice, mint and bergamot when rubbed; Bergamot whose fresh leaves and petals can be used to add flavour to crudités and salads and whose dried leaves are used for herbal teas and white wine based aperitifs as well as to treat nausea, flatulence and insomnia; Navelwort or Wall Pennywort, otherwise known as the Verbena of the Aztecs, this natural sweetener for fruit salads is also used for coughs and any other lung problems; Jiaogulan or indigo plant; and to conclude this non exhaustive introduction, Tansy whose leaves are used to repel ants, fleas, moths and bugs or to make an excellent worming powder.

Lynn has just phoned to let me know that Camille has a small project to do at Kingsmead, her new school, on a painter from the past. As she was lucky enough to spend several hours at his house in Delft, she chooses Jan Vermeer, whose paintings are one of the glories of

the Dutch Golden Age. In the process she learns that he died young after having had fifteen children by his wife, four of whom died at birth. I help her to appreciate his talent for expressing on canvas the sense of benediction in the way daylight caresses interiors, familiar daily scenes which he chooses to paint with love and respect.

Jan Vermeer finds glory in painting his family and those close to him going about the simplest tasks. Vermeer’s brush instills life into a jug, a tablecloth, stone floors or furniture. His canvases lend significance to the tasks of the Milkmaid and the Lacemaker. He infuses our daily life with a great sense of dignity. Almost three centuries later Khalil Gibran tells us: “ your daily life is your temple and your religion ”. Jan Vermeer understood this as does Andre Clements when he paints “ load-bearing landscape ” and gives meaning to palettes [ 53 ].

Camille is very enthusiastic about this school project and gives it her all, not realising that, in so doing, she is inviting Vermeer into her life. He will never leave. All the love she is investing in this task will ensure that this seventeenth century artist becomes unique in the world for her, my daughter. She will delight in finding him in some of the world’s great museums and in sharing him, in turn, with her children and grandchildren.

She is planting the seed of this relationship. Without realising it she is busy creating a rich foundation for

what will become a timeless rapport. The girl with a pearl earring and the milkmaid will become her older sisters or her slightly older friends. If one day she visits the Mauritshuis in The Hague or the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam with her children or her grandchildren, she will stand in line with a smile on her face waiting to see them again and or course to hear their news. She will be fully aware of her privilege as she will have been its custodian for so long.

XXIII

In December 2012 I receive an email with an image of a young African face [ 184 ]. I am immediately transfixed by its features but I try to ignore it. It is so far removed from my daily preoccupations, and yet so close…

Certainly at first glance I am struck by the “ Pathos ” the work exudes. It could easily summon the six letters which make up the word “ UNICEF ” and call to mind similar illustrations on cards we send with wishes for the new year, full of paternalistic pity, keeping the limits of our conscience alive by artificial respiration.

Our western intellect is wary of “ Pathos ” arising from some other unfamiliar type of context. Anselm Kiefer is more likely to be accepted than Benon Lutaaya who will probably not be accorded the same privilege. Benon is the young artist behind this child’s face, so similar to those I see so often at traffic intersections when the light turns red.

Even when I go to sleep it continues to challenge me.

After three nights have passed since it first appeared, I decide to turn down the volume on my Judeo Christian

way of thinking and give myself a chance to look at this portrait free from the restraint of my own preconceptions.

After much reflection I ask myself: if the street has been part of Benon’s universe since early childhood, who gives me the right or the audacity to express the slightest doubt as to the integrity of this work, be it artistic, moral or intellectual, given that it is my own integrity and my most profound personal perceptions that it challenges in presenting itself to me? What sort of misanthropist would I be to ignore or condemn his “ Memories ”, the title he gives to this work?

Back in Johannesburg I go to the gallery where the face is exhibited to meet and spend some quality time with it. It’s a collage. I want to understand it. I’m impatient to find out the origin of the elements the artist uses, mostly printed. I contact Benon, stop off at the Bag Factory and we go off to have lunch together.

Benon comes from Uganda. Raised by his grandmother, his gogo, and isolated from brothers and sisters, it is in the streets of Kampala that he produces his first canvas and makes his real friends. His playmates are mostly street kids.

Almost miraculously, he hears about the Bag Factory. He finishes studying art in Uganda at the

University of Kyambogo in Kampala and quickly decides to leave for Johannesburg. He wants to become an artist, to become a high priest. He is given a six months residency at the Bag Factory before he manages to convince the management of the organisation to keep him on indefinitely under this roof which has sheltered so many of our South African artists.

The Bag Factory is a hangar which has served as the most important breeding ground for artists in Johannesburg since 1991, thanks to Robert Loder. Let me name some of the artists who have their studio there during this era. In 1991 David Koloane, Pat Mautloa and Sam Mhlengethwa move in and become, if you like, the founding artists of the Bag Factory; they are followed, amongst many others, by Deborah Bell, Penny Siopis and Belinda Blignaut in 1992, Kay Hassan in 1994, Durant Sihlale and Kendell Geers in 1995, Hentie van der Merwe and Wayne Barker in 1997, Johan Thom in 2005, Tracey Rose in 2007 and Benon Lutaaya in 2011.

The Bag Factory is currently managed by Sara Hallett.

Make sure you visit it. This place was the incubator for my adventure into the heart of Johannesburg’s art scene and many of its most important artists were nurtured there.

Let’s get back to Benon. After lunch we return to his studio. Benon exudes compassion and is consumed by art. He often arrives at the studio very early in the morning and sometimes forgets to eat. He needs and wants to “ be art ”. He is smitten…

The floor of his studio is strewn with newspaper and pages from magazines. They enable him to wipe his brushes while nurturing and storing his colours as if to save them for better days or for worse days. At this point they are transformed into the rich and fabulous palette of his collages. Thrift acquires eloquence. Benon channels the challenges which the imbalance and his inner tensions pose and transforms them like the alchemist or the high priest. His precious piece of the evolving chaos can now find traction as if by chance in all this randomness. Influenced by his youth spent in the company of Kampala’s street children, his true friends, his network, he transcends the excrement and waste of his own act of painting and transforms them into this powerful palette [ 185 ]. This respectful and economical use of his own pigments adds additional coherence to Benon’s work. This is the way he has chosen to participate in this potential African renaissance. To seek to regain the “ human ” contained in the word “ humanity ”, to get back to the essence of man, this in part is his quest.

Benon is undoubtedly also busy with his own quest.

He has already come face to face with his talent, his own worst enemy, subtly tempting him. The battle promises to be intense [ 186, 194 ].

For my part I try to remain attentive and alert to Benon’s concerns so as to be able to warn him at any moment of potential pitfalls in his prolific output, aimed at certain Judeo Christian individuals, amongst others.

These people seek to atone for the sins of the north western portion of our globe while wallowing in their own outmoded misery which hovers dangerously close to vulgarity.

I can’t wait to see him in September when I will already have started this long letter I have promised myself to write to you. I will use the occasion to ask him to do a portrait of “ Little Foot ”, the oldest of our brothers [ 193 ].

Part FIVE

XXIV

The man with the most brilliant intellect that I have been lucky enough to meet, before we became friends, is without a doubt Jonathan Jawno. Each time we have the pleasure of having lunch together I prepare a mental list of subjects I want to tackle. I assume he does something similar. Before our conversation is sidetracked by the dishes in front of us, most of the questions approached have already been answered simply, leaving little room for further deliberation which would probably be completely superfluous anyway. Jonathan accords very little importance to matters emotional or sentimental so as to avoid blurring his clarity of vision regarding the choices he makes and the directions he chooses, as well as his responses to my doubts. He applies this same logic during our lunches, cutting through the Gordian knots of our contemporary existence with dazzling speed.

A few years ago, still a bachelor at the time, Jonathan reveals to me his interest in discovering and gaining a better understanding of this strange thing called art in which he sees me revelling. He wants to secure his soul before he loses it.

I am overjoyed.

Life, however, does not allow him the leisure to become deeply involved in the bohemian lifestyle of some of my friends. Soon thereafter, Jonny loses his mother and in the depths of his mourning discovers the moorings offered by faith. He meets Natanya, who will become the mother of their five children and he chooses to follow other high priests. Nevertheless, through our friendship he remains connected to the local art scene and to those contemporaries chosen by time and by our embryonic Afro-Renaissance post-apartheid culture to be cherished and engraved in the memories of generations to come. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

I first meet Tim, another friend who will become close, during the time of his discussions with Old Mutual regarding the challenge that the space between the Rosebank Mall, the Woolworths arcade and the Mews represents. He wants to persuade Ian Watt, who looks after property for the insurance company, to join these three different commercial entities into one. He has a remarkable understanding of the city, enriched by several years spent at the Johannesburg Municipality with my friend Jean-Luc as well as a clear vision of the urban transformations necessary in today’s socio-

economic environment. We get on well and become friends. Tim even does me the honour of asking me to be his witness when he marries Nicola. Like Benon, a large part of his being is made up of compassion which he tries to integrate within his day to day activities.

We have been working together with mutual pleasure for over twenty years, along with his partners, Robert and Norman.

Setting out on his own voyage of discovery, Tim decides to take up brushes, pigments, linseed oil and desiccant so as to increase his capacity to love. Tim takes painting courses in Tuscany, near Florence where he lives with the Medicis, the Farnese, Michelangelo as well as his own family and devotes numerous hours to this late apprenticeship. Magnanimously, he gives me his first painting which I christen “ Down to just about nothing ” [ 217 ]. I am reluctant to accept it but cannot refuse for fear of denying him this genuine pleasure and showing a lack of respect for this gesture of true friendship. I hang his painting next to my bed, above my bedside table, leaving it rough and unadorned as he gave it to me. The can of Coke is open and the few coins refuse to disclose their value or their country of origin.

They are scattered on a marble shelf, the only element of traditional luxury, in the random order he imposed

on them as he took them out of his pocket. The fizzy drink and these few coins are the sole protagonists in this modern day still life.

The Coke can is tall and slender as designed by the marketing team of this great American brand of mainly carbonated refreshments: the idea is that the drinker should identify with the elegant shape of the container.

There is no way of telling if it is full or empty although the chances in favour of this last hypothesis are limited.

In fact, if it were empty, it would probably no longer have pride of place on this marble shelf next to these coins. Perhaps they are the change its purchase has generated. These two simple elements of our consumer society represent the dream of millions of children. They represent something to eat that they could easily choose with these coins and a refreshment that celebrates their belonging to a “ civilised ” world of Technicolor or even 3D cinema, mobile phones and big cars; the magic of the dream. It is Tim’s compassion that emanates from the “ claro oscuro ” of the painting: this dream, this Coca-Cola and these few coins that he would like to be able to give to all the children in the world in their own currency. It would be wonderful to be able to take this personality trait of Tim’s, all this compassion mixed with generosity, and distribute it to elicit a smile of pleasure

from the world’s children. This painting is a prayer, and Tim an unwitting high priest.

More pragmatically, Tim is trying to find certain mechanisms within our consumer systems to use in the service of compassion. I wish him great success in this initiative and hope it brings wonderful dreams to the children of the planet.

In addition to Tim and Jonny, I make two other real friends who are just as religious. It often astonishes me that we can have such good discussions and compare notes on the mysteries of life, but I understand now that it is my passion for art which allows us to remain close despite my categorical refusal of any religion. Art has probably become some sort of a replacement for religion for me, my own spiritual guide. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

These two other friends with a deep faith are Michael in Saint Emilion and Garry in South Africa, although the latter has also in recent years started spending time in this town in Aquitaine. Let me introduce you to them.

Michael is married to Synthia and they have a daughter Tatiana, three years older than Camille. He

was born in England where he received a typical British aristocratic or upper middle class college education.

Wanting to escape a future where everything is already laid out for him, Michael decides to leave for the United Sates where he meets Synthia, of Mexican descent. They start a family sharing a common and enduring faith. On the strength of a few years of research, they come to settle near to Saint Emilion. Their mission is to try to help practising Christian families free themselves from certain oppressive burdens arising from the Catholic religion, of which Saint Emilion is without doubt a bastion. Synthia and Michael’s relationship with “ God ” is much more personal. It is free of the hierarchical hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. They encourage us to join them in freedom of spirit, along with all men of good will. Synthia and Michael believe that, by dying on the cross, Jesus paid with his life to rescue man from the human condition and with this gesture of immense generosity showed us what it means to love. In return they have decided to give their lives in service of what they know would please “ God ”: to love others more than themselves and show them how much “ God ” values each and every one of their personal relationships with him. This in any event is what I understand from what Michael takes great joy in explaining to me when we see each other in Saint Emilion. The need to personalise and

precisely identify “ God ” is the biggest source of discord between us and what separates us, a bit like with Tim, Jonny and Garry. If this deliberate choice is part of what makes them the exceptional beings I have the good fortune to know, what does it matter, as long as love, compassion, generosity and tolerance are part of the mix. The latter is often missing in conversations I have with others who have a theistic faith. This perception too often becomes their truth and anyone who dares to not share it is automatically relegated to a state of ignorance, barbarism, lack of faith or heresy. Synthia and Michael are not of this sort. We have therefore been able to remain friends. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

As for Garry, he is part of our extended family.

His sister Liz is married to Paul, Lynn’s brother. Garry marries Shirley and they have two brilliant daughters, Louise and Emma. They are all born in the “ Church of Christ, Scientist ” founded by Mary Baker Eddy. In 1875 she published “ Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures ”, the latest edition of which was published twenty two years later in 1907. It is currently published in 18 languages, including Braille.

Let me introduce you to a few lines which Garry has kindly sent me. This is an extract sent by Mary Baker Eddy at the age of 85 to the Independent newspaper in November 1906: “ What we love determines what we are. I love the prosperity of Zion, be it promoted by Catholic, by Protestant or by Christian Science, which anoints with Truth, opening the eyes of the blind and healing the sick. I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art. The divine Principle ( a synonym for God in Eddy’s work ) of Christian Science will ultimately be seen to control both religion and art in unity and harmony. God is Spirit and “ they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth ”. If, as the Scriptures declare, God, Spirit is infinite, matter and material sense are null, and there are no vertebrata, mollusca or radiata ”.

Given that I refuse all religion for the reasons previously cited, you will understand that I don’t share Garry’s faith. Neither can I accept any appropriation of a universal truth we will never be able to grasp, regardless of our religious customs, nor can I for instance accept the use of the word “ control ” which I can’t equate with God in any type or form of religion. Nevertheless, certain aspects seem irrefutable to me: of course I believe that

art is very close to religion, both human attempts to communicate spiritually with the BEING of which we all form part, as much through the agony as through the ecstasy of our human condition. This extra bit of soul which can fill our lives cannot and should not be dependent on our different beliefs which, by their very nature, give rise to the differences and, very quickly, the tensions between us. We are part of the BEING, we ARE. BEING is everything, EVERYTHING IS! Those of us who so desire are free to choose from the variety of tools created by man for man according to their geo-cultural specificity even though these will sadly too often be used for geo-political ends. Tolerance will, one day soon I hope, enable us to see through the false importance we place on the tool and concentrate on facing the fundamental. “ The good that a man does is the one thing needful and the sole proof of rightness ”. Mary Baker Eddy wrote these wonderful words which are so fundamentally true, but it could equally have been the Pope, the Dalai Lama, a rabbi or an ayatollah. Who cares about the wine as long as we are drunk with living, the joy of being “ here ” and “ now ”, since these are so much part of “ everywhere ” and “ always ”.

Garry and Shirley have found this joy of living and the paths they chose to get there are theirs alone. This search for being has led them from Shirley’s childhood right into the bowels of our planet. Life’s chaotic forces brought them to this place amongst some of the oldest rock formations on earth, close to Barberton. A stream runs through it, passing by a majestic rocky spur. This place chosen and loved with passion is slowly becoming, if not their paradise, then at least their wonderful purgatory.

Garry, who dislikes risk, does not ask me to have a look at the land before he buys it. He probably would have done so had it been any other piece of land. Only his loved ones have this privilege. Who cares about risk when it’s a question of being. Moreover, when it comes to building a home for them Garry miraculously finds the only entrepreneur in the region who loves a challenge and agrees to accept this one and build this shelter for Shirley, Garry and their loved ones. They find each other so that this place can become, can exist, lost in its origins, lost like paradise. This shelter only exists through love; it is another Taj Mahal. Garry doesn’t wait for Shirley to depart before offering it to her. Klipspringer was Shirley’s nickname as a child on her parents’ farm.

It is also the name the previous owner gave this place before Garry bought it. Love guides Garry and he is. He

defies all the material challenges that cross his path and they are many. His love wins through. Little by little Klipspringer receives this trace of love, this trace of being. The place develops its own strength like the mountains which surround it, respectful and serene.

Klipspringer’s “ Genius Loci ” will be forever enriched with a new layer of love, an extra bit of soul. Nicator ( Klipspringer’s new name ) is born and welcomes them in its nest [ 300 ].

Before the end of this chapter I have to confess that, for my part, just like sister Anne in Claudel’s play, I don’t see anything coming. I am deeply and serenely content in my pantheistic belief which remains at peace and seeks to convert no one. I also believe firmly in tolerance and in love: “ Wisdom does not come from reason, but from love ”, Andre Gide.

While taking a figurative stroll through the very diverse types of pantheism I come across numerous friends of the human kind: the Stoics like Zeno showing us the doors of “ Veritas et Falsitas ” in the library of the Escorial in Madrid, are pantheists, as is the Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. I also meet with the Taoists of Lao Tseu. The latter always speaks of the Tao with respect and reverence. The Tao te Ching never speaks of a transcendent God but of a state of being

underlying everything. Zhuangzi insists even more on the pantheistic content of Taoism by telling us : “ The Heavens and I were created together and all things together with myself are one ”. When one of his disciples asks him where the Tao is to be found, he replies that it can be found in the ant, in grass, in a clay tile and even in excrement: “ Not one thing exists without Tao in the same way as it is absent nowhere ”.

Continuing with my wanderings I even come across aspects of Buddhism such as Anatman or impermanence.

The first leads us to wisdom by refusing the existence of an autonomous self within us. What we think of as “ ourselves ”, our personality, our ego, is only a very temporary thing created momentarily by five components or aggregates ( Skandhas ): physical form, feelings or emotions, perception or reason, mental attitudes such as habits, prejudice, predispositions or willpower, and finally conscience. These change constantly according to their interaction with their environment or milieu. This is why, such as we are, our permanent “ self ” cannot exist since it comes from these five components which are in a constant state of mutation and reaction.

As for impermanence, it shows us or confirms that nothing stays the same permanently. Everything is in a state of constant flux. Everything occurs and

disappears. We all grow and change, cultures change, people live, get old and die, the seasons pass and beliefs change, our human relationships evolve and each atom of the universe is permanently changing and renewing itself. Moreover, everything is interconnected and each thing affects every other thing. Each thing is, because of the other things. Everything occurs, resulting in other things. Each thing emanates from the emanation of others. Each thing is interdependent on all other things.

If one thing changes, everything is affected.

In the course of this journey I come across far more brilliant minds than my own, such as Goethe, Beethoven, Mahler, Debussy, Spinoza, Jung, Hegel, Einstein or Peter Rich to name but a few, while remembering Giordano Bruno, burnt alive on 17 February 1600 for his pantheist views, formally accused of atheism and heresy by the inquisition.

XXV

In 2001 Leon Botha who is working at the time for the Kuwaiti Alshaya family, the biggest distributor and retailer in the Arab world, invites us to take part in a restricted competition for the concept and design of a multiple use tower in Kuwait city. The site is on the remains of the ancient outer wall of the town. Our proposal is a contemporary celebration for Kuwait city, a door to its own future, symbolised by its remaining permanently open. By incorporating local cultural and historical references we manage to win the competition and begin work on the project which will, however, eventually be aborted in the storm of the world’s economic crisis. Indeed the latter affects us all in one way or another, even the most fortunate.

Nevertheless this experience leaves a profound mark in the sand of my memory for the two reasons I now want to share with you.

The first of these memories is the rather sad failure of one of our opponents, probably the strongest and most prestigious of the contestants in the competition.

He starts his presentation to the Alshaya family with an apology for its poor technical quality from an IT point

of view. Unfortunately, he informs them, his equipment was stolen the day before upon his arrival at the airport.

After this unfortunate and inappropriate introduction none of the family members listen any longer to this foreigner who has just insulted the people of Kuwait.

Theft is not something this proud country is used to.

This unintentional insult immediately removes any chance of his project being selected. The decision will go in favour of one of the other three contestants who are more respectful in their eyes. Ever since that day I always try to find out as much as possible about my audience or the potential clients our presentations are aimed at. Decisions are often taken as a result of a few minor details far removed from the more practical aspects of the topic in question.

The other memory etched in my mind is this niggling twinge of discomfort which flares up from time to time to remind me to use kindness and tact in all forms of human contact while dealing with others.

Since my birth, different groups of people have acted as servants to a much smaller section of the population of Brussels in which I was lucky enough to grow up. In my early years it was the Flemish, quickly replaced by the Spanish and the Portuguese. They were followed by the people of the Maghreb, who were more

recently succeeded by Eastern Europeans. Each in turn performed the tasks that the more privileged amongst us would not deign to consider as suitable employment, in the service of others. When I arrived in South Africa it seemed that a section of the existing population had been destined by fate, history and an unacceptable type of discrimination to perform this same type of task, misguidedly seen as inferior. Here in Kuwait city and for the very first time I am the one who is ignored, who one would not invite home and with whom one would not think of sharing a meal. Everyone in the conference room in this hotel speaks English. Some can even express themselves admirably in the language of Moliere. The discussions which follow, however, are all conducted in local Arabic interrupted only occasionally by a question addressed to me in English, the language of the infidel. Immediately after my brief replies, the discussions continue unabated in Arabic. I am being paid to do a job, nothing more, nothing less. It is my turn to be hurt by the lack of courtesy, discrimination and absence of respect. I must simply remain at their disposal‌ Still, the negligible nature of this indignity makes me ashamed and seems ridiculously minor in comparison with what has been endured for centuries by a succession of less privileged people for whom this lack of respect is a daily occurrence and will no doubt

continue to be for generations to come. Here again, education is our only hope if we are to change this sort of behaviour. We need to learn again how to respect and celebrate familiar everyday tasks, as Jan Vermeer understood so well before his premature death, and to respect others as well as ourselves. Every task performed in the interests of man’s best future and of maintaining the precious imbalance with his environment is a benediction. This revolution within ourselves, this rediscovery of a humanism worthy of the name, can wait no longer. And it needs to be part of a symbiotic relationship within parameters that are both regional and universal.

It is also very interesting to note that it only took around twenty years after the end of apartheid for most of the service in restaurants in Johannesburg, be it waiters and waitresses or kitchen staff, to be performed by foreigners. The gracious smiles that welcome us now are often from Zimbabwe, Malawi or even the Republic of Congo, if not from Central or Eastern Europe. These people are still able to recognise the value of performing everyday tasks in the service of others, this precious benediction.

XXVI

While buying gouaches for Camille in Rosebank I pick up a copy of Art Times on the counter of Herbert Evans’ Art Shop in the Rosebank Mews. Paging through it while standing in the queue at the till I come across an image on a black background with the face of Julius Malema replacing that of Marat in David’s famous painting. Intrigued, I decide to research the artist who produced this work. This is how I meet Andre Clements and later his wife Jeanne. This clever plagiarism pleases me. Indeed I have often compared the historic transformations effected by the French revolution with the liberation of South Africa from the scourge of apartheid [ 47 ].

The struggle against apartheid caused much less bloodshed without affecting the outcome of the revolt or the importance of the change for the majority of the population, although this sadly still has a long way to go. The extraordinary Truth and Reconciliation Commission will contribute a more dignified chapter to history than the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Terror.

Nevertheless the first faltering steps of the new powers are very similar and in both countries the deepest layers of the population experienced very little real change.

Royalty and the French court have been replaced by today’s “ Grandes Ecoles ” with their own type of rule. They successfully control the routes to power, annihilating just about all alternatives. Democracy remains an illusion and the people remain disarmed [ 51 ]. This term “ democracy ” is so hackneyed that most of us let ourselves be fooled into equating it with “ republican values ” or “ respect for human rights ”. What nonsense! The last presidential election in France bears comparison with a grotesque example of “ Vaudeville ” theatre! This stand-in president is only elected because the person who should have governed is suffering from a terrible disease somewhat reminiscent of JFK. He is not elected for his ideas or even for the ideas of his party but simply by basing his entire campaign on denigrating the conduct and juvenile behaviour of his predecessor. His election in the socialist primaries is secured by defeating his former partner with whom he has four children and whom he met in the lecture halls of the Ecole Nationale de l’Administration. They graduate as members of the Voltaire class, with amongst others Michel Sapin, minister of finance and public accounts and Dominique de Villepin, a former prime minister. This very private club is organised in such a way that all forms of election only decide which club will lead the championship.

Players in other clubs will then find themselves heading

up commissions, becoming prefects or sub-prefects, or fulfilling some European function, as I explained earlier, while they wait for their club to get its turn at the top of the first division in the new season.

This choice of ruler does not exist in South Africa either where the “ Afrocatie ” and comrades from exile or prison during the struggle divide up the reins of a steadily weakening power as they see fit. Perhaps the inevitable break-up of the ANC will open the way to a more democratic society even if unacceptable and vulgar populism is lying in wait.

It is time we demanded to be able to choose our rulers rather than ratify the nominations decided on by the patriarchs of the parties. Where are the proposals for a new type of society? Let’s demand the only right and the only duty which is fundamentally ours, the right and the duty to be. Let’s free ourselves from this unhealthy state of dependence which has turned us into incompetent molluscs. Let’s go in search of our lost backbone and our future and let’s abandon forever the mentality of entitlement, fostered variously according to electoral need.

Please excuse this diversion and let me return to Andre Clements and his wife Jeanne who tells me one

day: “ the arts are the mirror enabling us to dance with Medusa ”. From a very young age Jeanne has been conscious of the multidimensional nature of reality.

She spends a lot of time learning about nature and at the age of ten starts pushing the boundaries of her world in search of any evidence, clues or signs of magic, shamanism, mystic religious experiences and alternative ways of seeing or approaching reality. This route leads her to discover trances, sound healing, bards and healers. Healing through sound is achieved by accessing the power behind silence. Jeanne and Andre both confront the impossible complexity of the universe through fusion and distillation or rendering rather than from the far more usual viewpoint of simple reductionism. In a sense Andre is to South African photography what the impressionists are to French painting. He captures the fleetingness of being, trying to approach its essence without wanting to contain or appropriate it, define or limit it [ 45, 46 ]. Armed with his lenses and his brushes, he shows this same respect in crossing the void that separates him from being, from chaos, and from life [ 48 ]. Andre’s pixels and palette merge and work together in small touches to intone the symphony of life. Moreover, this merging of mediums finds a parallel in Bordeaux, in the work of Jonathan Hindson, a South African at pains to retrieve

his nationality after his family’s exile to the Gironde during the days of apartheid [ 146 ].

My mother-in-law Daphne, with whom I love to deliberate, has just finished reading “ Dance to a Dolphin’s Song ” by Horace Dobbs. Here is an extract from it which relates to events very similar to something that might resonate with Jeanne: “ … In Australia, however, my mind was opened to other aspects of our existence that were not quantifiable.

I was encouraged in this direction by Lyall Watson, with whom I shared a pleasant day at his home in Ireland, and by the work of Laurence and Lorne Blair who spent ten years exploring the Indonesian Archipelago. At Long Horuk, the Blairs made contact with a semi - nomadic community of mystics and dreams wanderers and met Nanyet, the philosopher and shaman of the community, who possessed the healing touch. He told them about “ Aping ”, a global tribal consciousness that binds all tribes and creatures together as one. Nanyet attempted to link the two British explorers with the “ Aping ” through tongue chanting in unison with the fifty men, women and children who crouched with them on the floor of a long house in the glimmer of a single oil lamp.

The Blair’s book, “ Ring of Fire ”, tells how Nanyet placed the palm of his hand on Laurence’s scalp and induced a warm current to trickle through his head and his spine. The book concludes with an account of “ Dynamo Jack ” , a healer and manipulator of unseen energies, who could send a powerful electrical pulse through a man’s arm, could push a chopstick through a plank of wood and set fire to a piece of newspaper without a match, using energy he gathered from the earth and the sky ”.

I am amazed yet again to see how everything is interrelated and seems to cross check and match up, as much in the preceding lines and the pages I am writing as in the reference to David’s painting: “ The Death of Marat ” or “ Marat’s Last Breath ”, the title David himself gives this canvas that he paints for the Convention. Today the painting is in Brussels where I was able to see it for the first time at a young age.

It made a big impression on me when I took my first faltering steps around the galleries and museums of the city of my birth and felt my first adolescent emotions.

Interestingly, this is the town in which Kendell chooses to pursue his career in the heart of Europe and in which William creates his mythical production of Mozart’s Magic Flute for the Theatre de la Monnaie.

Jacques Louis David is French and also lives through a revolution.

This painting forms part of the collection of the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique (Royal Fine Arts Museums of Belgium) to which it was bequeathed

by Jules David, its last private owner. Marat and David are French and Charlotte Corday is a sympathiser of the “ Girondins ” as this group is called because some of its main protagonists come from the Bordeaux region.

Some eminent members of this group such as Gadet or Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud are from Saint Emilion to be exact. Vergniaud will become one of the most brilliant orators of the era of the French Revolution. In fact the road in which our house is situated and where I sit writing this, is named after him for reasons of respect as well as historical significance. Furthermore, while studying law at the “ Facultés Saint Louis ” where Jordan will probably follow him, my late brother Andre, a great lover of theatre, acted in Peter Weiss’ famous play “ Marat – Sade ” inspired by this historic event.

This oil on canvas by Jacques Louis David was painted in 1793. There are later versions in the Louvre in Paris, in Versailles, Dijon and Reims. For me in a way the painting will play an extraordinary role like some kind of intercontinental common thread.

In Johannesburg it is Kendell who is the first to seize upon it like a “ found object ” in 1992, in an art history textbook. Many elements of his palette are assembled here : we are witnessing the “ scene of a crime ” committed by a “ woman ” during the “ revolution ”, drawn from the “ History of Art ” [ 85 ]. The woman, however, is missing from the picture. For David it was a matter of celebrating Marat as the convention had precisely requested. Charlotte’s name only appears in the note Marat holds in his left hand as he takes his last breath.

Marie Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont is the third child of a Norman gentleman. She receives a superior education at a convent in Caen. She is interested in philosophy and is open to new ideas while still keeping her faith. She will regard her execution as a self sacrifice, a logical and accepted consequence of her crime.

On the morning of 13 July 1793 she writes to Marat twice. The text of the second note is as follows: “ I wrote to you this morning, Marat. Did you receive my letter? I don’t believe you did as I was turned away at your door.

I hope you will agree to meet me. I repeat, I have come from Caen. I have secrets of the utmost importance to tell you regarding the safety of the Republic. Moreover I am

being persecuted in the cause of liberty; I am ill-fated; this should be enough to deserve your protection. ” Then Charlotte Corday pockets the note and goes to No. 20 rue des Cordeliers where Marat lives. On the way she slips a kitchen knife with an ebony handle bought that same morning into her youthful, budding bodice.

Her carriage stops in front of Marat’s house at 19:00.

Alphonse de Lamartine recounts what happens next in the second volume of his “ History of the Girondins ”: “ She alighted from the carriage on the opposite side of the road from the Marat home. The light was starting to fade, especially in this part of town darkened by the tall houses and narrow roads. The woman at the door at first refused to allow this young stranger to enter the courtyard. The latter however insisted and managed to go up a few stairs while the concierge called out to her in vain. Hearing the noise, Marat’s mistress halfopened the door and barred the stranger from entering the apartment. This altercation between the two women, one begging to be let in to talk to the friend of the people, the other persisting in blocking her way, was overheard

by Marat. From the interrupted explanations he deduced that the visitor was the one from whom he had received

two letters that day. In a loud imperious voice he ordered her to be let in.

Whether through jealousy or defiance, Albertine Marat obeyed with disgust. She let the young woman into the small room where Marat was to be found and left the door into the corridor half open when she left so she could hear her brother’s slightest word or movement.

The room was dimly lit, as Marat was taking a bath.

Although forced to rest his body because of his poor physical health, he denied any rest to his soul. A roughly planed plank placed across the bath tub was covered in papers, opened letters and sheets of paper on which he had started writing.

Charlotte avoids looking at him for fear of betraying the horror she feels at seeing him. Standing with her eyes lowered and her arms hanging at her sides near the bath tub, she waits for Marat to question her on the situation in Normandy. She replies briefly with the specific detail she assumes will be of interest to the journalist. He then asks her for the names of the deputies hiding in Caen.

She dictates them to him. He notes them and when he has finished writing them down, in the tone of a man about to exact vengeance, says: “ Good! Within a week they will all go to the guillotine! ”

At these words, as if Charlotte’s soul was waiting for one last sign before resolving to strike the blow, she pulls the knife from her breast and, with superhuman force, plunges it up to the handle into Marat’s heart. Charlotte removes the bloody knife from the victim’s body in the same movement and drops it at her feet. “ Help me! my dear friend! help me! ” Marat cries and dies instantly. ” It is Marat’s mistress, Simone Evrard, who grabs hold of Charlotte Corday. She is arrested, protected from the crowd and led to the prison at the abbey. When she is searched a letter is found addressed to the French people explaining the reasons for her action. This in fact takes the form of a political speech from which I must read you a short extract. You will notice how the words “ people of France ” could very easily be replaced by the words “ South Africans ” and be just as relevant two hundred and twenty years later: “ For how long, oh unhappy people of France, will you enjoy and tolerate disorder and division? For too long now dissidents and villains have been putting their own ambition ahead of the general interest: why wipe yourselves out, victims of their fury, so that the tyranny they desire can be established on the ruins of France? … We are working towards our own ruin with more zeal and energy than we ever put into conquering our own freedom! Oh people

of France, before much longer nothing will remain of you other than the memory of your existence ! ” Charlotte will die, executed, on 17 July 1793.

Kendell takes this moment of extreme revolutionary passion, this criminal sacrifice perpetrated by Charlotte the Kamikaze. This is an act of terrorism comparable with today’s suicide attacks perpetrated too often in the supposed name of religious fundamentalism. Kendell plunges into the heart of the history of art and rips it apart to feed off it. Our cannibalism is revealed and put on display. The method is restrained. The image is made up of photocopies of pictures from a textbook on the History of Art for beginners, which have been enlarged as if to offer proof of their origin. Our collective memory and academic aestheticism are being questioned, interrogated and even challenged. Kendell has already decided to abstain from participating in the creation of a surplus of images. Referring to this, Hazel Friedman writes in her critique of Kendell’s “ Threshold ” exhibition for The Star newspaper of 25 May 1993: “ But like it or not, this artist is one of the few to make his mark on the secret life of art, without merely adding to it. ” Kendell is …

Many years later, as I mentioned earlier, Andre Clements seizes on this painting to show us, in the blink of an eye, the redundancy of history.

This evening Veronique and Christian have invited us to dinner before our departure for Johannesburg where we have decided to return so that Camille and Jordan can see more of their Papa. This way I will no longer have to spend two weeks each month alternating between Johannesburg and Saint Emilion. Veronique and Christian have been preparing this dinner for nearly eight months. This is when they harvested the seeds which would later be planted in their garden and lovingly tended as they grew into vegetables and fruit with which we would be treated. Of course they invite some of their best friends to the table, as I mentioned earlier: Borage, Comfrey, Agastache, Bergamot, Navelwort, Verbena of the Aztecs, etc‌. This morning Veronique picked and washed them. This evening she prepares them on the spot for our great enjoyment, a true example of great gastronomic generosity.

While having our aperitif we enter Christian’s workshop quietly, out of respect. As I told you, he loves wood, its texture, its grain and its intrinsic nature. He follows these when he carves this great friend two and a half metres high and four by sixty centimetres in

width and depth, for his own pleasure. We are drawn in, admiring this Totem to life which deftly manages to convey both strength and gentleness [ 39 ]. The work dates back to 1993 when Christian was able to move this piece of wine press into his studio. That alone was already a monumental task. Christian rescues this mass of holm oak, some three hundred years old. He saves it from decay and transforms it into a “ capable block ” of tenderness and love. He finds it at “ la Merlandie ” on the edge of the forest of the Double not far from the demarcation line between the France of Marshal Petain and that of General De Gaulle, between Monpont-Menestrol and Ste Foy la Grande, this bastion of Protestantism in the region. I don’t know if some inhabitants of this region found themselves in South Africa with the Huguenots who left France after the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, but this would not surprise me. Day after day and sometimes into the night, Christian caresses this mass of vegetable matter, carving and chiselling it to give it life again, ensuring its part in the continuum as well as his own. The oak is reborn and Christian is radiant …

Towards the end of the meal, as much out of real interest as out of kindness, they ask me to explain what I have been telling you for weeks. As I have just done with you, I share with them my last few days spent

with Charlotte. At this precise moment I discover, to my astonishment, that the skull of this woman who perpetrated this revolutionary act of terrorism, the celebration of which has followed me all my life since the autumn of my childhood, is in fact close by. A gentleman whose name I will withhold out of respect for his anonymity bought it at a public auction in Belgium as a gift of love for his wife, the mother of his three children [Â 57Â ]. This gesture of love so close to the rue Vergniaud no doubt also helps to inspire the waltz of the continuum, in which I continue to revel.

XXVII

I have just returned from a fabulous weekend spent with Lynn, Sarah and Dean in the bush near to Welgevonden. Sarah and Dean invited us to celebrate Lynn’s first half century. They own a five star B & B in Parkwood which they run with flair and distinction. We have become very close friends. We all understand each other perfectly and enjoy calling a spade a spade. “ What you see is what you get! ” During our stay at the Bush Lodge, I was able to finish reading William’s six “ Drawing Lessons ”.

William had very kindly asked his team to make me a copy of the six lectures he gave at Harvard in 2012 as part of the programme for the prestigious Norton Lectures. What a treat, what a gift: my wife, my friends, the bush and William at the top of his form.

Only my parents and my children were absent from this moment of grace as, of course, was Andre and all those who have left us or are still to come.

In these six lessons William dissects for us with clinical precision his need and his desire to work.

His “ modus operandi ” for creating in the studio flirts with the creative forces of chaos. He draws

sustenance from these forces and makes them his accomplice. His alchemy takes place in the heart of this studio in Houghton.

I promised to tell you about another of William’s self-portraits and this is the ideal moment to do so.

In fact, reading the six Drawing Lessons gave me a new perspective on it. However I would still like to share my first impressions, which this personal illumination of his neither condemns, nor contradicts, nor erases [ 180 ].

The very first reading is factual. Different extracts from a “ Flip Book ” are assembled and presented to us in a new way. They are made up of small groups of drawings sketched on printed pages with information on the most diverse range of subjects: “ Air cooling, waxes for leather, dissections of a hot air oven, pumps and siphons, electricity and storage, photography, water cooling ” followed by “ ancient Greek and sentence construction, syntax, grammar ” or “ dialects ” and finally “ extraction of silver ”. Even if these pages were chosen primarily as a support medium for William to make his mark upon, they nonetheless deal with very precise topics.

The first series of topics offers a few rudimentary descriptions of different types of technology designed

principally for household use. These in a way deal with fundamentals which might be useful for Dad the handyman wanting to look after the wellbeing of his loved ones (concern for the best possible future of the clan). Photography insinuates itself into this group to help the good family man immortalise or prolong certain happy family moments, a practice which I’m sure most of us share.

Through exposure, and in accordance with certain photographic principles, day gradually gives way to night before again returning, like the seasons or succeeding generations. Six different tonalities of grey follow one after another. Here is what William says about these in “ that which is not drawn ” during his conversations with Rosalind C. Morris: “ Yes, I think it is. Sometimes a sheet of grey paper is very beautiful, and you ask yourself: ” Why don’t you just leave it as a sheet of grey paper ? For some artists that’s enough-they can leave it at that, and the sheet of paper is pregnant with whatever one wants to project onto it as a viewer. The tone, the grey, a memory of fog, of things lost, of things irretrievable and so forth. But I am interested in what one can pull out of that, and it would be difficult for me to be otherwise. Sometimes a sheet of paper will end up as

a grey mess, after drawings have happened and then been erased and erased and erased. But it’s been through a journey, and it is only important if you see that journey or at least know that there has been a very specific journey that’s ended on this grey paper, even if it’s no longer visible.

The grey of the paper is not the same as the initial gloom of grey dust on an otherwise white or neutral sheet of paper, which is often how the drawings beginwith a large rag dipped in charcoal dust and wiped across a sheet of paper. What happens when you have this big grey smudge on the sheet is that you do both construction and archaeology at once; you feel both the black charcoal as it draws on it, and the eraser as it pushes things away. One is looking back towards the white paper and outwards into darkness, and the act of grey lifts the sheet of paper to a halfway stage off the table. Then you can work backwards and upwards. Which is to say, again but slightly differently, that I’m interested in indeterminacy as a starting point but not as an end point. ” William Kentridge & Rosalind conversations – Seagull Books – P 73.

C.

Morris

–

So I imagine that these grey tints in turn depict our innumerable comings and goings between darkness and light and vice versa: our journey.

The next group of pages selected as a medium for William’s creativity offers a few essential tools necessary for gaining access to the wisdom of the ancient Greek philosophers via their original writings.

The liberating words themselves are written on a treatise on the extraction of silver ( the precious metal ).

The disorder, the randomness of the printed media selected is not solely the result of the creative forces of chaos. William’s humanism shares this responsibility.

He seizes these pages with consummate and fantastically random precision. As if defying pure chance, he selects them from the huge amount of printed information in the ancient books at his disposal at this precise moment in his studio. He uses them to create his silhouette in a “ flip book ”. He only gives us a few clues. These are transmitted by the optic nerve to our brain which automatically analyses these skilful scribbles and in a flash chooses to recognise William: the white shirt, black pants, general body shape and the greying crown centred on both sides just above the temple. That is all it takes. The essence is sketched.

This factual reading continues. To reflect his image in this flip book William projects himself in a series of movements which he breaks down image by image before putting them together again in sequence. In this way he creates a series of self portraits which reflect the very essence of his art, self-portraits in motion ( a wink to our very earliest movies ). The drawings follow one another, transform themselves, play with time and with space, and William is.

Finally, to conclude this factual reading, as I indicated earlier two groups of liberating words appear.

The first, at the beginning of the second horizontal line is “ WANTING TO HOLD ” while the second “ NEEDING TO LET GO ” appears on the antepenultimate page of the composition, according to the Indo-European method of reading. The substance of the background on these pages is assured by texts on the extraction of a rare and precious metal, Silver, which was indispensible in the early days of photography. The French term “ argentique ” from “ argent ” (silver) was even created to differentiate between traditional and digital photography.

William reassembles these pages, these sequences of the flip book. He positions them orthogonally on a sheet of paper, so as to give a new form to the trace.

This, precisely, is the self-portrait that I wanted to tell you about. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Second reading. I am receptive to a sense of the whole and to those parts of its various elements that I have been able to glimpse, by chance or due to all the love I’ve received, and I digest them, day by day. William is three years older than me. We are therefore more or less contemporaries. Besides, we have the love of ancient Greek in common. Recently both of us entered the same season of our journey, the Indian summer or perhaps even the beginning of autumn. As much by choice as to safeguard and perpetuate the precious imbalance that exists between the human race and chaos, we need to start refining this tiny fragment of life that love created in us, and perhaps attempt to get a sense of it. The time has come for us to prepare with the greatest of care to distil the essence of all the information we have received, seasoning it with the flavours of the experiences we have acquired since childhood. We need to complete the route and finish our task: chew on it and digest it all, present it in appetising and edible portions, to try to offer a tiny layer of humanism to the clan who, let’s hope, is on a quest to rediscover its humanity.

The first days of this season are illuminated in a variety of different ways, for William and for me, for us and for most of our contemporaries. We are compelled to sit up and take note. William is invited to give a series of lectures at Harvard while I lose Andre, my only and unique brother, shortly after having received life once again at the hands of Doctor Giampaolo following my double thrombosis.

William accepts the invitation and I undertake to write to you.

With love and within the continuum of this humanist philosophy, William sketches himself grasping the essence of all he has digested and throwing it, as if relieving himself of a burden so as to continue his waltz with life. Socrates attains wisdom and gets ready to take the hemlock. We arrive at the antepenultimate page: “ NEEDING TO LET GO ”. The symphony continues.

Give, give everything and give yourself in order to be.

William’s art draws us in, like the crowd in Piaf’s “ La Foule ”. Silver, the precious metal, “ l’argentique ” of photography, of the black box, becomes the matter, the grey tint on which he decides to project himself at the moment of the throw. At this point, liberated, he comes to the penultimate page where “ the index of syntax ” starts, bringing together definitions of the tools of

ancient Greek philosophy. The silver autumn can begin.

William reaches the fire in the cave and savours the joy of being. William is. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

It is the sixth Drawing Lesson which opens my eyes and offers me a third discovery, a third reading of this work. William starts by telling us a story from his childhood. He is eight years old. His father, Sydney, is taking him and his sister to Port Elizabeth by train.

To pass the time and reduce both its scale and his children’s perception of it, Sydney starts reading them a story from a book of Greek myths for children. The story he chooses is that of Perseus.

Acrisius, king of Argos, has a very beautiful daughter named Danae. The king wants to know how long he will live and asks the oracle. The oracle does not give him the answer he desires but tells him he will be killed by his grandson. Terrified by these words, Acrisius decides to lock his daughter Danae in a dungeon from then on to prevent her from having children. Zeus however, disguised in a shower of rain, manages to seep between two stones in the wall of the dungeon and seduce Danae.

Zeus inseminates Danae and she has his son, Perseus.

Acrisius’ brother Polydectes, who is madly in love with Danae, wants to make her his concubine. He is worried that Perseus, his nephew, will object. He sends him on a suicide mission to get him out of the way or eliminate him for good. Polydectes asks Perseus to attack the Gorgon Medusa. Sydney shows his children the picture of the Gorgon in the book of Greek legends without dwelling on it so as not to shock them. Amongst other features, she has snakes growing out of her head instead of hair and anyone who looks at her becomes petrified.

Equipped with wings on his ankles, a concave shield and an cloak of invisibility, Perseus manages to kill the Gorgon Medusa by staring at her reflection in his shield.

In this cunning way he succeeds in overcoming the Gorgon without looking at her directly and thus avoids being petrified.

Subsequently, saddened by his mother’s relationship with Polydectes, Perseus decides to return to Argos to reassure his grandfather, affirm his love for him and convince him that he will never kill him, thus contradicting the words of the oracle. En route he hears of a pentathlon competition taking place on a small island. Perseus, who has grown into a handsome, strong and powerful man, decides to take part, unable to resist the temptation to prove himself. If he wins he

will give his grandfather Acrisius the laurel wreath as proof of his love.

At the same time, Acrisius, still terrified by the oracle, flees Argos disguised in rags. He takes refuge for a while on a small island. By pure chance the island is the one on which the competition is taking place. He decides to attend it as a distraction, choosing to appear in public disguised as a poor old man. Perseus, meanwhile, is focused on the events in the pentathlon. The beautiful discus throwing event finally arrives…

Perseus takes the discus in his left hand, makes a few moves to limber up, transfers it to his right hand, begins a slow rotation, picks up speed and, with a magnificent surge of strength, throws the discus with such force that it crashes into the public outside the stadium and kills a poor old man.

On hearing these words, William, who is eight years old at the time, remember, is outraged. Why didn’t Acrisius sit in the next seat, to the right or the left? Why didn’t Acrisius decide to take refuge on another island?

Why did Perseus decide to prove himself one more time?

Why didn’t both of them read the end of the story in this book of myths? All this could have been avoided. It’s absurd. Everything seems to have conspired to make

the inevitable happen. Once thrown, the discus cannot be recalled…

William recites this Nostos to us, this poem of homecoming in which the arc of the discus returns to its source. The discus is thrown at birth and we await “ Il Ritorno ” just as Ulysses did in Homer’s “ The Iliad and the Odyssey ”, Antoine de St Exupery’s Little Prince or the young Spanish shepherd in Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist. In “ The Return of Ulysses ” William had, moreover, already touched on this theme of the intimate relationship between man and his destiny.

Shortly thereafter, in this sixth Drawing Lesson, William recites a Ghanaian aphorism before giving us a foretaste of his “ Refusal of Time ” and making way for the music of the chaos of our lives. “ He that fled his fate, a journey of sixty years. While he was going, it awaited him seated next to the gutter and it said: “ Come, let us eat, my dear friend ” and when he asked “ Who is it? ” it said “ Am I not thy fate? ” It is the discus that William throws. It is in this movement that he sketches, outlines, offers himself.

Wisely, he goes to meet his destiny. He invites it. He is free now, free to be. It is in “ doing ” and in “ making ” that he continues to free himself, a little more each day

of this beautiful autumn. One day the leaf will fall, but those magnificent trees on that hill in Houghton will continue to grow peacefully and life will pursue its slow transformation. The light of day, softened by the foliage, will still offer up its beauty and, who knows, maybe even the joy of being. “ What is important is neither the archer, nor the arc, nor the arrow, nor the target. … What is important is the path ”. Antoine de Saint Exupery.

XXVIII

I often think of the story of the portrait of Doctor Rey by Vincent van Gogh. Between 7 and 17 January 1889 he paints the portrait of this doctor in Arles to thank him for having treated him after the epileptic fit or moment of insanity during which he cut off his ear.

Vincent van Gogh wants to offer him what he can as he is unable to pay him. The doctor and his family find this portrait completely ridiculous and use it to plug a hole in the wire netting of the chicken run, before putting it away in an attic ten years later.

The painter Charles Camoin meets Doctor Rey who tells him about the painting. He buys it without any problem and deposits it with a merchant in Marseilles.

After a few weeks, as the painting has not been sold, the merchant sends it to someone in Paris who finds a buyer for it at 150 Francs. Subsequently the canvas goes to Cassirer in Berlin and the Galerie Druet in Paris which sells the portrait to the collector Stchoukine for 4 600 Francs. During the Russian Revolution the painting is confiscated and assigned to the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow before being transferred to the Pushkin Museum where it is on display today.

So, I think that a work of art has its own fate, in a way, and that, like us, it follows its own destiny. With the passage of time it acquires different indispensible strata of love which act as a catalyst and combine to affirm its slow and fragile revelation. First, the work of art is usually presented to the circle of friends of the initial buyers. Of course they must watch over it and ensure it survives and does not suffer too much harm from the brutal assaults of humidity, light, fire, vandalism, clumsiness or children’s games and so forth.

To this end they can of course place the work in a secure environment where it is protected from these dangers, but also, sadly, where others will not see it. The buyer must love and passionately engage with the work that the artist entrusted to him through the sale. At that stage, the artwork often spends time in a carefully selected space to seal the passing of responsibility. Thereafter, the buyer must engage in a real relationship with the work, talk to it and especially talk to others about it, share his privilege, share the pleasure of their relationship, let his love be known. In order to be able to grow and become emancipated, the work must, in turn, accept its “ popularisation ” as the price of fame. The work must become available as a sort of cultural feeding ground for as many of us as possible through publication and exhibitions, at the risk of many hazardous journeys. A

work can only very rarely and probably at the cost of fulfilling these conditions hope to achieve the status of masterpiece and a place in the history of art. It is only when it belongs to the greatest number of us, to the universal body of knowledge, even in very rare cases to the collective memory of humanity, that it will attain the height of its glory. As a result of this pilgrimage of love it will become part of the journey of the human race for a while… Its trace will “ be ”.

The work becomes a magic reflection of the state of humanity of our race at the time of its creation. It becomes far more profoundly part of history than the election of a deputy, the nomination of a minister of finance or even the choice of a prime minister. How many of us today could name even one minister in their respective countries from the era of Velasquez, Vermeer, Durer, Giotto, Bach, Vivaldi or Mozart? It is from an accumulation of love that the work earns its stripes. This love, however, is often channelled by the scholars of the moment and by our current systems of communication. Here again we must learn to use our own eyes and ears again and free them from the heavy yoke of manipulation that tries to control them. Forgive me; I’m getting carried away yet again….

XXIX

I have just spent a few days in Brussels seeing my parents. I took advantage of the opportunity to see Nico as well as Kendell, Michel and Denmark. Nico, Katja and their four children are coming to spend the festive season with us in South Africa where they were so happy for six years some twelve years ago. They will enjoy a wonderful trip with their children Max and Vicky, born in Africa, and Louis and Juliette, before joining us for a few days leading up to New Year’s Eve, at Nyala Lodge next to Klaserie near the Kruger Park.

Carine, Almaz, Kwame and Xavier will also be part of this great reunion of friends which none of us would want to miss. On our return from the bush, Nico and his family will stay with us in Johannesburg for a few days to experience the changes the city has undergone since they left it in 2001.

Michel is in top form. He is painting. His gallery in Anvers supports him along with his three Graces, Natasha, Mathilde and Jeanne. Maman and I spend a wonderful Sunday afternoon with the four of them.

Michel’s masterpiece with Natasha is definitely the blossoming of their two daughters as they start to become women. They are wickedly beautiful and very at

ease with themselves and with our appraisal. Mathilde is going to Barcelona to study photography, in which she already shows instinctual flair, and digital arts. She will also improve her Spanish and Catalan language skills.

Jeanne on the other hand has just started Poetry and Rhetoric, as the two last years of secondary education at college are called in Belgium, having passed the previous two last June. Jeanne is blessed with amazing willpower. Her determination never wavers. Next year she will start the “ Cours Florent ” which will open its doors in Brussels as if to receive her. She will complete the two following years in Paris before finishing her studies in the United States. The programme is in place and Jeanne is set to become an actress. What a start in life ! Go well you two. I will take pleasure in watching you make your way through the maze of existence.

The following day, Monday, Maman and I take the train to Marbehan where Mark (Denmark) is waiting to take us to Prouvy where he lives with his wife Lieve and their daughter Lynn, back from China in the midst of her brilliant career. Prouvy is also where he works day after day to lend some new life to printed matter which he imbues with reborn meaning. With monastic passion and huge respect for the obsolete he continues his daily digestion. Like Benon and Willem he takes printed matter, annihilates the language or “ the divine

curse ” as Kendell calls it and places it on his altar with the utmost care to sanctify it. He respects it as much as he earns and draws self respect from it. He gives it his life, hour after hour, year in year out. He loves it.

This love and respect as well as Mark’s rigorous work ethic elicits an extraordinary show of confidence from the Trappist monks of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance at the abbey of Orval. Five of them, a monk and four novices, walk to Prouvy through the thick forests separating the abbey from the village and from Mark’s studio. After what one imagines must have been much deep reflection, the abbey decides to entrust Mark with several parcels of old daily prayer books which have come to the end of their useful life, anticipating fairly precisely the new respectful breath of life with which Mark’s rigour and vision will infuse them. This is a gesture of great intensity and generosity, as is the work Denmark does each day.

Around midday we sit down to lunch in their home, with Lieve who has prepared a wonderful courgette and broccoli soup. This is followed by her homemade bread, ideal accompaniment for the local charcuterie, after which she serves us coffee and chocolates, Belgian of course. Their house looks out onto fields like the lateral facade of the Beyeler Foundation. Here too the cows

busy themselves with the daily ritual of transforming the grass they graze into nourishment for future generations, for the survival of their species. The walls of the house exude sobriety and thrift. Everything here becomes naturally worthy of respect. Economy of word and gesture are accompanied by today’s tastes, flavours and fragrances although so foreign and so removed from them. Pierre Rabhi would feel at home here.

Soberness feels just right in Lieve and Mark’s home.

Time passes slowly and everything naturally takes on a rich simplicity. Being is everywhere. Material things have been carefully assessed and tailored meticulously and with great subtlety to suit the desired purpose in accordance with the seasons of life. Here “ having ” has long since left the table to make place for “ being ” which was gently tapping at the door. Lieve and Mark have found a way to welcome it with joy.

The time we spend with them is wonderful and leaves us feeling inspired by so much fundamental intelligence.

The words I am writing race by and I suddenly discover a superb way to illustrate them. Everything seems to add up and cross-check again. Mark and Lieve have a great talent for living. Notwithstanding, they continue to practice “ being ” tirelessly every day, year in, year out. Their only child Lynn grabs the torch with both hands and takes it across the planet with flare and

panache but cherishes each moment spent at home in Prouvy, where she can replenish her resources at the very heart of life that is hers, that is theirs.

Before leaving for Brussels where Nico is waiting to have dinner with me at Brasseries Georges, we return to the studio with their champion truffle hound Fax, a Lagotto Romagnolo. Mark shows us a magnificent work where words and wine are married, adding a little extra soul to the barrel by leaving their respective traces entangled, intertwined, even penetrating the flesh of the oak itself. I am going to try to help Mark exhibit this work somewhere in the Bordeaux region where it will be so at home and much appreciated [Â 65Â ].

XXX

I often talk about the process of becoming, of our slow transformation within the precious imbalance of the continuum at the heart of an eternal chaos, and of love. I tell you about never having been born and never leaving. I tell you about being Gustave and Irma, or Camille’s granddaughter or great granddaughter. As for Willem, it is his lineage that he offers us in the self portrait he agrees to do with the help of his daughter Karen [ 32 ]. With great restraint and modesty we share the privilege Karen has granted us and enter the half light of the beginning of time at the heart of Willem’s family abode. Gradually our pupils adapt so we can experience the serenity of the place. Like a reed, the family tree bends to withstand the forces of chaos and to continue life. The verb becomes a tool here in the service of an ever present humanism. Even the roots of the Phoenix canariensis contort themselves to adapt to the random challenges and to provide a place for life to nestle. Today they sketch a cycle whose origin is lost, if - by some incredible twist of fate and as if to contradict or correct me - there ever was one. It is this cycle that everything watches over and protects. Armed with the vigour of wisdom they unite here to protect the “ genius

loci � which nourishes Willem and becomes one of his essential resources.

William, too, offers me a wonderful illustration of all this during one of my visits to him at the studio. While we are having lunch together with most of his team I start talking to him about opera, about the flute I think.

He reminds me that the Kantor is very close to him and that in a way he is still looking for the Kantorovitch in himself. I remember then that, when I left the room to wash my hands before lunch, I noticed the official article from 1912 confirming his great grandfather’s change of name.

The rabbi of Vryheid in Natal, Sachna Zaiv Kantorovich, requests and receives permission to change his name to Reverend Wolf Kentridge. He is from Lithuania but has immigrated to South Africa after a short stay in England. At the dawn of the twentieth century, before leaving us on 18 August 1918, he accepts a new position in Harrismith where he still rests in peace.

He is continued through his son Morris, a South African advocate who joins the Labour Party. He is elected to parliament and represents a district of Johannesburg from 1920 until his retirement in 1958. He is the

champion of the workers’ cause during the strikes of 1922 and will even do time in prison as a result. He remains at the head of the Labour Party until it loses its influence after a pact with the Nationalists. In 1932 he joins Smuts’ United Party and works on structuring the progress of industrial legislation. He is one of the main orators in parliament in 1930 who protest Hertzog’s proposed laws against Jewish immigration. During the Nazi era he also works to combat the activities of proNazi South African agitators. His memoir “ I Recall ” is published in 1959 when William is four years old and already in the process of becoming. His presence has been looming and being honed for generations.

This preparation for the coming to this world of the genius that Johannesburg has the pleasure and the incredible luck to provide a home for is finally refined and put into place with the birth of Sydney, his father, in 1922. He is admitted as an advocate of the Supreme Court of South Africa in 1949 and quickly becomes the defence lawyer of choice for political causes. He defends Nelson Mandela amongst others and, after the death of the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement as a result of police brutality, he represents the family of Stephen Biko. In 1984 Sydney is appointed “ Queen’s Counsel ”.

On 28 April 1955 Sydney Kentridge and his wife Felicia Geffen welcome William to this world. Theirs will be the wonderful task of fine-tuning his education before letting him fly with his own wings and carry on their legacy in the same way as Morris, Wolf and their respective wives, not to mention all those who foreshadowed them in turn. It is only through them that William can be with Anne Stanwix his wife at his side, before inviting in turn their children to continue their legacy in tune with the rhythm of the seasons of life.

In the light of this astonishing lineage, how could we not see the obvious: it is Sydney, Morris, Wolf, along with their wives and all those who preceded them that we are applauding as much as William each time we are overcome with emotion when he challenges us, throwing open our windows to the light of the chaos of the universe. They are.

XXXI

It would be very difficult to change the system according to which more or less all our societies are organised. Our inertia is its greatest ally and our innate enemy.

On a political level, voting for others offers no solution.

It is irrelevant who is in power in the current system.

It is the system itself which needs to be completely reexamined. The debts of France or the United Sates will not be reduced nor the morale of the French boosted because the president calls his ex-partner, mother of his four children and former college mate to join his new government. We need to call upon and install the best and wisest administrators and leaders for sufficiently long, but not renewable, periods in office. As soon as there is the possibility of re-election the system goes off the rails and fails. Empty promises for a hypothetical tomorrow are made to entice us and buy our votes for a further term. Then the race for growth at all costs is on, with the sole aim of trying to repay the interest on the national debt that the politicians have created and used without scruple to maintain power, whilst we labour under the misapprehension that they are acting in the best interests of their supposedly beloved country. We

are duped into believing they are acting in good faith with governance beyond reproach. This growth they are looking for is in no way destined for our well being.

Unfortunately, even the taxes anticipated in the event of an up-turn would need to be used to pay some of the interest they have run up, unforgivably, and mostly not in any way for our benefit. If a private individual acted in this way he would end up in prison. On top of that they boast about this growth giving a boost to the national economy which they alone are guilty of having asphyxiated by a slow process of strangulation.

Nonsense! Lies! What will it take for them to throw in the towel, admit their cowardice and their mistakes and call on wiser men and women to come to their aid and to our assistance? How much longer are our politicians going to continue to betray us? I would almost go so far as to call for them to be tried for treason and for a complete revision of our national systems of management.

A period of stagnation could provide some solutions but the public debt cannot be reduced by following this sensible course. Sooner or later it will be necessary to erase national debts worldwide, or at least restructure them, in order to find a real lasting economic solution.

This would be tantamount to deciding it is preferable to suffer a bad bout of flu rather than the aftermath of a head-on collision at high speed.

Politicians and religious leaders have become generous providers of crutches, without which we have sadly become unable to walk with our heads held high or find the resources within us to do this, to believe in ourselves. Like addicts in withdrawal we have become incapable of freeing ourselves from our dependence on the system. Our crutches have become indispensible to us and we have become as helpless as we are pathetic.

The world is riddled with poverty and misery not far from each of our doorsteps.

The education system in place today and fed to our youth subjects them to a form of real in-depth brainwashing. To compound the problem, we ourselves send them these same poisoned messages from a very early age: the red car or Barbie’s wardrobe or, worse still, domination and submission by force in the jungle recreated in an instant [ 216 ]. Enslavement to the system has begun and repeated intravenous injections will take care of the rest. As long as the education system requires us to recite ad nauseam that all men are equal and that one plus one equals two, we will have no chance of going in search of ourselves and of developing our own resources on the one hand and celebrating our diverse talents on the other.

Let’s demand access to an education free of utopian nonsense and lies. Let’s stop transferring or abandoning our responsibilities. Let’s refuse to believe that God is merciful because we can’t be, or all powerful and that most of the responsibility is therefore his. Let’s no longer accept levelling in education; it is absurd. Let’s not be ashamed of our differences but rather recognise and celebrate them. Let’s add the concept of essential DUTIES to that of human RIGHTS without delay. Let’s grow and develop so we can participate in man’s best possible future in the midst of this wonderful imbalance.

Happiness resides within us and not in luxury or sensual pleasure. Let us furthermore listen to Seneca when he tells us “ real wisdom consists not in deviating from nature but in moulding our conduct according to her laws and model. ” Well-being ” defines itself so well: it is nothing more than “ being well ”. It is high time that education frees itself from political power and addresses what really matters. Let’s learn to BE, take responsibility for our destiny, invite it to dance, become HUMAN again. Let’s burn our crutches and take our place as the offspring of “ Little Foot ”, walking upright, heads held high, arms and hearts open. That is our responsibility. In the words of Frederic Lenoir: “ living is an art ” as confirmed brilliantly by Erich Fromm in “ The Art of Being ”. It is up to us to learn from our

earliest childhood how to practice it with talent. “ Every man is an artist ” Joseph Beuys.

In “ The Voice of Eternal Wisdom ” Khalil Gibran says: “ Man’s worth lies in his knowledge and in his actions, not in his colour, creed, race or his ancestry. For remember, my friend, the son of the shepherd who has knowledge is worth more to a nation than the heir to the throne, if he is ignorant. Knowledge is the true mark of nobility, no matter who your father is, regardless of your race. Knowledge is the only treasure that tyrants cannot destroy … The real wealth of a nation lies neither in its gold nor in its money, but in its education, its wisdom and the righteousness of its sons. ” There is an urgent need to devote a minimum of 50% of our children’s education to learning to “ BE ” and to drastically reduce learning to “ DO ” so as to “ HAVE ”. I have no real knowledge of the world of education and can only call on the wise men and women in all countries to address this almost global situation without delay and come to our aid. “ When I was little, my mother told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down

“ happy ”. They told me I didn’t understand the question and I told them they didn’t understand life ”.

John Lennon

XXXII

As you leave the Louvre, if you walk through that magic place that is the Jardin des Tuileries towards the Place de la Concorde, you will find two wonderful little museums. Like sentry boxes they stand guard over the square or the Ferris wheel that overlooks it for the enjoyment of tourists, lovers or those lucky enough to be both simultaneously. These wonderful little museums are the Orangerie and the Jeu de Paume. Both have been completely renovated within the framework of their outer shell which was left in place. The main challenge in the case of the Orangerie was to ensure that natural light would reach Claude Monet’s water lilies in the basement. The transformation of the Jeu de Paume after the departure of the impressionists for the Gare d’Orsay, behind the hands of the clock, was aimed at creating a neutral space for temporary exhibitions of Contemporary Art. In fact, one of the artists showcased there in 2010 was William, whose beautiful exhibition, “ Five Themes ”, took place at the same time as and in parallel with his invitation from the Louvre to intervene in a few areas within the prestigious galleries of this prestigious museum. The bookshop at the Jeu de Paume remains a compulsory visit for my wife and me

each time the opportunity arises to walk the streets of Paris, something no longer conceivable for me without my wife.

It is in this place with its incredible cultural and geographical position that the work of Santu Mofokeng is celebrated in 2011. The retrospective “ Santu Mofokeng, Chasing Shadows, 30 years of photographic essays ” takes place here from 24 May to 25 September 2011 as part of its travel programme. It is organised by the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp, the Kunsthalle in Bern and the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, with the collaboration of the French Institute. It is a remarkable undertaking, somewhat comparable to the retrospective devoted to the work of David Goldblatt at the MACBA in Barcelona some years earlier. We in Johannesburg don’t always realise the magnitude of what our artists achieve and the extent to which they are sought after and acclaimed by museums across the world.

Two of Santu’s photographs affect me particularly.

Both are taken at Birkenau. He travels there alone. It is one of the places he wants to grasp, absorb, feel and then deliver to us once he has digested it artistically.

He interrogates the place with his eyes. He relives both the before and after of this crime of history. He knows

this kind of human faced barbarity, he recognises it.

As a high priest he assumes control of it to ensure that the clan will be able to conquer this wild animal with a human head.

The first photograph [ 218 ] shows the final waiting area of those condemned to the gas chambers. Some amongst us had granted themselves the right to condemn them to a horrific death because of their so-called genetic inferiority or their opinions, a crime shared inter-alia between Jews, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners and those reviled simply for being considered inferior in some way or other. In this plantation of birches they await their turn to die in small groups with the efficiency and speed of an assembly line, and without having faced any court of justice. The sap of these trees is filled with their anguish. They remember. They grow randomly, far into the distance, as if rejecting any absurd authority. Nobody and nothing can stop life. Santu shows us a picture of this numberless group walking slowly and deferentially towards a new tomorrow. From the depths of this atrocity he manages to celebrate life.

He has come this far in trying to understand, as the caveman arrives at the light of the fire. He goes back to his loved ones to reassure them, to reassure us all: the failings of humanity are real but its victims do not disappear. They live on in us. It is their trace, the

trace left by all the victims of discrimination that Santu entrusts to us. This is his extraordinary, deeply personal way of participating in the duty of remembering, which all of us share.

The second photograph [Â 219Â ] is of the aftermath.

The gaping hole, the communal recipient of the ashes, now holds up a mirror formed by a thin film on the surface of the water. We cannot pretend to be the amoeba I spoke about earlier and each of us, in our own way, understands what this hole means. This photo is taken from the perspective of the aftermath. Water has replaced the ashes. Only the poles supporting the demarcation between these and the living, erected like sentinels to our ignominy, punctuate the landscape today like a scar. Day in, day out, they stand testimony to one of the paroxysms of horror of which the human race has shown itself capable and for which humanity must take responsibility. Santu shows us an aspect, a point of view the victims did not have the chance to examine. Only death has this privilege. Today the regime has joined the victims in the kingdom of Hades, drowned in the waters of the Styx, river of mortal hatred. Poles similar to these were used in South Africa to support the barbed wire fences or razor-wires erected to segregate the people of African origin. Today the more privileged members of the population use the same means to fence in and

protect their turf from the dregs of society produced by the failure of the old regime, as if this might remove the scourge they represent, but which actually perpetuates it.

At Birkenau the poles no longer support barbed wire. Their ignominious reason for existing has disappeared. Let’s hope we will soon be able to celebrate the obsolescence of the scars that mar our own country.

Let’s hope a new day will dawn and that the benevolent light of renewal will bathe our landscapes in serenity.

In her lecture “ The shock of experience: Santu Mofokeng and Claude Cahun ”, Griselda Pollock tells us: “ The poetry of Santu Mofokeng’s images reminds me of the question that torments European artists as they try to formulate a response to the drama of Auschwitz: Is it ethical to respond to the horror with poetry? Theodor Adorno who posed this question replied in the negative. He denounced all forms of art claiming to offer the slightest comfort to the culture which gave rise to Auschwitz. However, he also suggested that only art, conscious, critical and complex as it is, could give voice to suffering. The paradox was the essence. In his art Mofokeng captures this paradox with images of extreme precision. ”

XXXIII

My perception of the world as it was taught to me was shaken little by little, until it fell apart. The mirror shattered. The game of cards collapsed. The points of reference taught at school, reinforced by family conviction, socio cultural context and the environment created by the press and other western media turned out to be biased. I had been cloistered, probably like most of us.

Papa and maman always talked with the greatest respect and a profound admiration for the United States of America, our liberators at the end of the Second World War, the great superpower watching over the world today. I also believe that it is probably mainly due to them that I was able to live in a free Europe. As time went by rumours started circulating and doubts set in. My parents never disclosed to me that the United States may have supplied fuel for Hitler’s armies before deciding the opportune moment to intervene had arrived.

They never told me that Standard Oil New Jersey ( the EXXON of today, one of the sponsors of the George Bush campaign ) supplied fuel for the tanks, vehicles, planes and ships of the German army which, having sealed the fate of Poland, went on to defeat Holland and Belgium

between 10 and 18 May 1940. Even less did they tell me that without this fuel these two countries would perhaps not have been attacked and conquered. No one ever thought to tell me that, in sacrificing their sons on our beaches to liberate us, the Americans were opening up new markets for their consumer goods. Europe was on its knees and the Third Reich was running out of steam. This was too good an opportunity. They would be able to generously contaminate Europe with the American dream in a very short time. Cars, transistors, televisions, frigidaires and all manner of electrical household appliances, super heroes, nylon stockings and plastic curlers‌ Europe discovers and is quickly in thrall to money and the easy life, not to mention life on credit. The golden sixties, driven by a fury of Rock and Roll, will seal the habit.

No one on the old continent ever told me that the future wife of Prince Rainier of Monaco might have found it difficult to find a husband in the United States because of her relationships with many of Hollywood’s leading actors. No one dared to shatter the image of this fairytale princess. They even hid from me that it was Aristotle Onassis who supposedly introduced her to Rainier when he was looking to acquire a 50 percent share in the casinos of the principality. The Grimaldis must perpetuate the dream at all costs, even if Princess

Stephanie has, subsequently, taken some liberties with her lineage. And the circus continues; the show must go on.

No one told me about JFK’s heightened libido nor of the arguments he had with his brother over Marilyn’s favours before she managed to swallow all the pills that had been given to her. Jacqueline Bouvier, for her part, worn out by her husband’s amorous adventures, apparently wanted a divorce. As happy photos of the model family have always been an indispensible part of presidential campaigns in the very heart of Puritanism, the Kennedys could obviously not risk a divorce. They too had a dream, especially Rose. With her husband at her side she apparently persuaded Jackie, the daughter of a hard-drinking philanderer, to hang on, rewarding her on the birth of each child as agreed. Despite everything, the dream would be shattered by others.

Later, Jackie’s second husband, Aristotle apparently repudiated her after the death of his son, convinced that she was the bearer of the curse that had already decimated the Kennedy clan, far worse than anything that could be delivered by all the black cats on earth in an extraordinary general meeting organised by Lucifer.

On Sunday 21 August 1983 Aquino arrives in Manila after a voluntary exile of three years in Boston.

Rolando Galman aims his gun at him as he disembarks from the aeroplane and is immediately gunned down by several bodyguards. Aquino dies from a bullet in the back fired at point-blank range, as the autopsy shows.

Galman will, however, remain the official assassin, and most people are of the same opinion, just as Lee Harvey Oswald will remain the one who assassinated JFK twenty years earlier in Dallas on 22 November 1963. He was able that day, with only one bullet and unbelievable accuracy, to hit John Fitzgerald Kennedy several times in succession and take his life before his own was taken

by Jack Ruby.

We will only ever know what some people want us to know about it. They cannot, without revealing their own cowardice, hide behind the farcically simplistic hypothesis that it is not always in everyone’s best interests to know the truth. These same people will even call on “ reasons of state security ” to protect themselves if need be. We’ve had enough paternalism. Let’s stop being taken in by claims that apartheid is, still to this day, uniquely responsible for crime and corruption, as well as the lack of efficiency in the maintenance and upgrading of infrastructure or delivery of public services.

Enough ! The only promise we want to hear today is that all administrators will be held accountable. Long live true democracy !

The super heroes are tired to the point of exhaustion.

Perhaps today Superman languishes alone in bars searching for his faded glory at the bottom of a bottle of Johnny Walker. The American dream is dying and the super heroes are probably tempted to sell off their costumes which could always be recycled, given their bright colours and comic appeal, to amuse the youth at suburban masked balls.

It is with great joy that I notice of late a sense of awakening and listening in Jordan. A few days ago he confides: “ Papa, you know you often tell me that information is presented through different kaleidoscopes depending on where in the world we happen to be. I often see examples of what you tell me ”. I am delighted he already has the eyes of his heart open and alert. I hope they will remain so.

XXXIV

The way the system has evolved and corporations have developed has oriented many in Europe - and today guides a large part of the South African population to unite as labour organisations to fight for or retain all manner of rights and social security cover. Very often the sacrosanct defence of acquired rights takes precedence over the survival of the company and the primary purpose and raison d’être of a profession.

About twelve years ago, Peter Rich, as Professor of Architecture at Wits University in Johannesburg, for whom I have the utmost admiration and respect, asks if I would give a few hours of lectures to his students.

He values my experience as an architect in the real, practical world of construction with the imperatives and realities of the real estate market. I think we have a mutual appreciation for each other as people.

Although I am unable to commit to regular class times I tell him I can certainly make myself available to give about ten hours of lectures and to answer questions on the practical aspects of our profession. He plans to submit this idea or proposal at the following meeting of lecturers in the architectural department at Wits. Two weeks later he tells me sadly that our proposal has been

refused almost unanimously. I understand that this is due to the simple fact that I would have been paid for the hours of instruction that other lecturers would have to forgo. The fact that I have offered to do so free of charge only serves to aggravate the vigour of their refusal. No one other than Peter takes the time to find out if the students, the architects of tomorrow, might benefit in some way from Peter’s proposal. That is not the point of the discussion. Sadly, acquired rights yet again take priority.

Unfortunately the promises of our politicians and public authorities have never been accompanied by the essential warning: “ …as long as economic, national, regional, provincial, urban and communal circumstances permit ”. All acquired rights become a new Rubicon which those in power will certainly never cross by backing down. So they try to cloud the issue, unable to find solutions for the consequences of the downturn after the former “ growth ” period when the promises were made. They all dig in their heels and stand their ground and the country suffers as a result. Nothing will give… Let’s learn to show the same intransigence when we are called on to demonstrate a rigour of our own.

If we decide to centre our priorities on education and to renew the system, teachers will obviously have to agree

to adapt to the new methods. Our future depends on it.

If each one of them decides to fight to keep the current situation and “ modus operandi ” of public instruction, stagnation followed by suffocation and paralysis will be the result. The only possible alternative to achieve a quality education, other than home schooling, will remain that of private schooling, reserved for the most affluent in our society. This is the real source of inequality: access to the best possible education is not available to all. It is essential that the public school should become a quality alternative accessible to all, even if some current teachers lose their jobs as a result.

If the state cannot find new roles for them to perform, it will have to support them financially. If not the current teachers, it will be the generations to come which will be sacrificed. Let’s clean the Augean stables! Let’s give our sons and daughters their rights: to learn to “ be ” and to have access to knowledge so they can assume their responsibilities and participate in turn in the best possible future for mankind.

Unfortunately, the pupils of tomorrow cannot vote, while the state education employees can… Only those who do not govern the “ res publica ” guided (or obsessed) by their re-election, but rather by the interests of the nation, will willingly risk losing the teachers’ voice so as to build the future of the country and its youth.

Let me digress again and return to my friend Peter Rich, the “ African lion ”, that other great champion of humanism.

His mother has a brother, Louis, a young and talented architect, who dies prematurely of brain cancer at the age of 29. Louis had worked in the offices of Gordon Leith and of Kallenbach, Gandhi’s architect, and Furner. His body now lies in a plain and simple unmarked grave in a cemetery in Edinburgh.

Peter is born with a twin sister on 20 March 1955.

Sadly, she does not survive. His parents cherish the idea that Peter should follow in Louis’ footsteps. He is not really a child just like all others. He draws cow-boys starting with their feet. Since early childhood the word “ architect ” has special connotations for Peter, a bit like “ alchemist ”. He is full of respect for the title and what it represents, even if only through pure naiveté.

Peter has difficulties at school. From a very young age he becomes the artist, the dreamer and the clown: “ the Joker ”. He learns to turn challenges into opportunities and to work hard and exercise self discipline. This helps him greatly. At the age of twelve he loses his father in an accident during which he damages the nerves in his wrist. This slight physical handicap only makes him

more determined. He throws himself into athletics. He does the sixth best time in the world in the four hundred metre hurdles in an Olympic year but does not take part in the Games. South Africa does not participate and Peter supports the boycott. He becomes part of the opposition to the system. Through sport he is able to shift to a higher gear.

At high school his art teacher, Hunter Nesbitt, plays a critical role in Peter’s education. With his fantastic teaching ability he introduces Peter to art and to one of its disciplines, architecture. Mr Nesbitt’s chalk drawings on the blackboard show Peter the magic of drawing architectural designs in plans and sections to register space and also convey idea and spirit. When Peter experiences these shapes and spaces 55 years later, whether it be at Hagia Sophia, St Marc’s Cathedral, Notre Dame or the cathedral of Chartres, Mr Nesbitt’s plans and sections come back to him vividly, clear as a bell and with the speed of a tidal wave. The quality of these graphic representations stands the test of time exceptionally well. Today’s computers probably take us to the third dimension too quickly, before we have had the opportunity to fully grasp the relationship between the plan and a cross-section.

Peter meets Diane Margaret Prosser Jones, his future wife, when he is nineteen years old and she is sixteen. He has to choose where to channel his energy so as to make time for their developing love. Diane quickly becomes the anchor and discipline to the epicurean in Peter. Later she will also become his muse when he is fighting to retain his creative autonomy. He relinquishes sport and devotes himself to architecture, reinforcing his parents’ wish.

Like me, he is convinced that he must devote himself to developing his strengths rather than to limiting his weaknesses. He is fortunate to learn a lot from older students. It is the sixties and the time of surrealism as well as of the riots which are already starting to threaten utopia. Peter wonders why Africa is totally absent from his syllabus.

His meeting with Pancho Guedes makes a huge impact on him. As he discovers art his life begins to transform. He becomes interested in the works of Walter Battiss and Alexis Preller. As an architect he enjoys Africa and chooses to work there while others elect to leave for London, Paris or New York. He is interested in man and finds richness in the ordinary. He seeks to understand “ Africanism ” through its languages. He builds his home with an eye to the cultural mix in which he is immersed. Today he and Diane spend their time adding small touches of love to their garden and sculpting it

into terraces as they learned from Jackson Hlungwani.

In Africa the heart of a vulture can still be devoured for purposes of divining.

Peter builds his career on what he learns in Africa and, at the turn of the millennium, nearly loses his life in a terrible car accident. The warning bell goes off. It is time to put all his energy into his work, as a matter of urgency. The time for spiritual awakening arrives. “ Out of faith comes destiny ”. In 2009 he submits to the World Architecture Festival the project he has completed at Mapungubwe on the banks of the Limpopo where Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa meet. There are 27 projects submitted in the “ Culture ” section. There are fifteen different sections. Peter wins in his section and thus enters the final phase of the competition for “ World Building of the Year ” [ 241 ]. Peter and his team win the title. The “ African Lion ” is born. Peter is.

Since then, amongst other honorary titles Peter has received, he has become a “ Fellow ” of the University of Cambridge and he sits on the most prestigious panels.

He works for several learned clients around the world and today concentrates his astonishing energy on a fabulous project in the Serengeti near Ngoro Ngoro.

His dream is to create a “ Cathedral of Silence ” there, a celebration of this global cradle of humanity in the

heart of Africa overlooking the first footprints of bipeds, of hominid “ erectus ”, captured in the lava dating back three million six hundred thousand years. He wants it to celebrate the Rift Valley in its entirety, from Antarctica to Israel, as well as every single archaeological site where the origins of man have been discovered. He chooses to use only man and mechanical means to tell this story, to avoid problems of technology becoming obsolete. He will confine himself to artists. Amongst many others there will even be puppeteers to recount our epic. They will certainly tell us about sites such as Blombos where motifs and paint samples dating back 70 000 and 150 000 years respectively have been found, the earliest evidence of artistic or cultural activity in the world. So it has been a hundred and fifty centuries since the first artists became “ an oracle, a priest, more than a priest, a sort of spokesman for the ‘innate nature’ of things, a telephone from the beyond ” to paraphrase Nietzsche in “ The Genealogy of Morality ” of 1887.

Peter also wants the intelligence of plant life, the source of nourishment which is partly responsible for the development of our brain, to be part of the celebration and to this end surrounds himself with those best able and most inclined to help with this. His “ Learnt in Translation ” exhibition is seen on several different continents and one of the big publishing houses is even

considering producing a book on his work. However, he wants to remain free so as to be as effective as possible.

So he works with a very small team and has learned to surround himself with the necessary orchestras which he calls on to direct different segments of his version of the symphony of life.

I am grateful to Africa for having introduced me to Peter Rich, this fabulous African humanist. He is one of the people who have led me to believe that the second renaissance could be African. Like Peter, let’s let our dreams build our tomorrows‌.

Diane and Peter participate in the continuous miracle of life through their three sons, Robert, Rogan and Thomas, two of whom are architects.

XXXV

It was Kendell who sent me Robin Rhode. This time he asks me to meet Bianca Bondi. She lives in Paris but is South African by birth. After finishing school at Roedean she studies art at the University of the Witwatersrand for two years before leaving for Paris where she spends five years studying Fine Arts. On 3 January 2014 Lynn and I have the pleasure of meeting her when she comes to us for lunch. Of all the works she shows us, “ la rue Moret ” catches our attention particularly [ 17 ]. Let me hand over to Bianca right here so she can share her adventure in this street of Paris as she did with such passion during our lunch:

“ If we continue to speak the same language we are going to reproduce the same story ”. This sentence of Luce Irigaray’s is found on page 205 of his book “ This Sex Which is Not One ” published in Paris by Editions de Minuit in 1977. “ La rue Moret is a soup of collected words from the inhabitants of la Rue Moret, Paris. On the night of December 16, 2013, the soup was to be consumed by

visiting guests, (artists, art thinkers, curators...) at a dinner party held at the art space, Treize, 24 rue Moret.

La Rue Moret, is a 200m street in Paris’s 11th arrondissement. It has been described by the people who live there as a phantom street, because it appears completely misplaced. Whether one is passing by during the day, or the night, half the street will always appear deserted. La Rue Moret is completely eclectic. Currently it is home to mainly Senegalese and Moroccan cuisine, roughly five Muslim bookshops/perfumeries, and a dense immigrant population. Each end of the street is met with its own Muslim run French bakery. This same street is simultaneously the home of Paris’ trendy wine bar, Chez Josephine, the tattoo shop Le Sphinx, an alternative record shop, two authentic period vintage shops that themselves have been around for a couple of decades, and two contemporary alternative art spaces, Glassbox and Treize. Day or night, gangs of underage drug peddlers, and prostitutes entertain the sidewalks.

In the same street, small groups of women in niqabs, the odd skater, and Paris’ art fag, hipster crowd. The lines and lives co habit but rarely intersect beyond necessity.

It is important that art integrates with the present at the conception of its idea, that it touches the truth in order to obtain its patina, in order to create and play out its own version of events.

Using the opening quote as a reference point, I set out to meet the people who live and work in the Rue Moret.

I wanted to catch a glimpse of the streets’ undercurrent through conversations with those who know it and feed off it. And I wanted to collect their words. Once a certain familiarity was established, I asked for the words these people no longer wanted to hear, I wanted words that they felt should disappear from language, words they wished they’d never heard spoken or words that made them anxious. I wanted their fears. And I explained my ritual to them. I asked for words in any language, I did not need to understand them, only to feel the sincerity inherent in them. I pushed for words that I felt resonate within me.

I was given oils and religious booklets as gifts; I was also dismissed and told that I would interrupt the balance of order by removing the negative from language. I was told that Art won’t save me but Allah might, and very often I received conversations and encounters in the guise of a word. I was ignored to my face, I was spoken about as if not present. I was given shivers. And sometimes, I was scared. I shared a drink with a man who has lived there for 46 years, the glass served by his friend, 32 years in Rue Moret, and counting. Neither one had a negative thing to share, no anxiety to offer up, no fears, although they did have a cousin...

After an extended period of time spent in Rue Moret, of drinking, collecting, people watching, and approaching, I had finally narrowed down a list of 12 words (a word for each invited dinner guest). The words I kept were simple fears and relatable anxieties, unwanted lexicon that I had felt pass through me as they were finally pronounced.

These words were then translated into strips of fresh pasta, spelt out and re created with the aim of being ingested through a ritual of sympathetic experience. The soup wherein these words brewed is a basic Bloody Mary soup whose ingredients were selected for the intrinsic values they are said to possess. The importance of each added element lies in its value with regards to the desired result. What remains of the experience, is the description of what went into the soup; the collected words, the list of ingredients, activated by the accidental spilling of the soup itself. �

Bianca Bondi 2013.

This work is full of the poetry we previously encountered in the photographs of Santu. It too has great strength even if it is constructed, day after day, from simple elements of life which would have pleased Johan Vermeer. For this soup shared by the residents of the rue Moret and the intellectuals of the art world, Bianca engaged physically, even perhaps taking a few

risks, to test her own limits in meeting neighbours, most of them foreigners, who have lost both their ability and desire to communicate. This atrophy comes about slyly and almost unconsciously through the intolerance and contempt that socio-cultural regression generates.

Bianca challenges language, that “ Divine Spell ” dear to Kendell. She destabilises the tower of Babel to bring us to “ here ” and “ always ”. She invites us to listen to “ the other ” attentively and physically which will enable us to take our first steps in the territory of love and in its own way to open the doors to being. She has already entered the priesthood. “ There are none so deaf as those who will not hear ”.

Fourteenth century proverb.

Lynn and I sincerely hope to see Bianca again in August in Saint Emilion when she brings us an edition of the recipe for her soup “ Rue Moret ”.

XXXVI

The beautiful and poignant exhibition “ Rise and Fall of Apartheid ” has just opened in Johannesburg, at Museum Africa in Mary Fitzgerald Square. The exhibition was organised by Okwui Enwezor. It was on at “ Haus der Kunst ” at the same time as the Kendell retrospective curated by Clive Kellner. For “ Rise and Fall of Apartheid ” Okwui conceived the excellent idea of bringing Sir Sydney Kentridge and William together for a discussion of these tumultuous years in the history of the country which adopted me: a moment of great beauty.

After the opening cocktail, Lynn and I attend the dinner which Liza is kindly hosting at Mastrantonio, mainly in honour of the ICP, the International Centre of Photography in New York, and of Okwui. I am delighted to see Okwui again. It is almost three years since I last saw him. Towards the end of the dinner we start a conversation which is unfortunately interrupted unexpectedly. I want to talk to him about a new work of Minnette’s, amongst other things. We will pick up this conversation again in Basel, maybe this summer if he is there, or at his home in Munich on one of my next visits.

I see David Goldblatt amongst the many artists who have been invited. He is without any doubt the most respected South African photographer today. He was born in 1930 to Eli Goldblatt and Olga Light, both of whom arrived in South Africa as children with their parents who were fleeing the persecution of Jewish communities in Lithuania.

At the end of the dinner David Goldblatt and his wife are about to leave. I approach them, greet them and ask him the question I have been dying to ask for quite some time but have never had the nerve to do.

This time I take the plunge: “ Could you ever conceive of the idea of doing a self portrait? This work of the artist is my greatest passion. I think I understood from your daughter that you would probably answer this request in the negative. Nevertheless, I’m taking the chance of asking you, even if you are unlikely to be tempted by the idea or have any real interest in it. ” Here we are, thanks to David, re-immersed in the process of recognising the essential lack of existence of the self.

David Goldblatt does not contradict his daughter Brenda in his reply but does leave me a glimmer of hope.

In fact he seems to remember that in his carefree youth back in 1967, 47 years ago, he was toying with the end of a roll of film. If his memory serves him correctly, he

allowed himself a moment of youthful frivolity and took a self portrait, furtive as the blink of an eye, using only the end of a roll of film left over after a day of shooting.

Of course his memory is both reliable and accurate.

I speak to Liza, then Neil and finally Nikki contacts me before being replaced by Bronwyn. The gallery has found the much desired photograph. I am over the moon. It is a “ silver gelatine on fibre based paper ” edition [ 133 ].

Nikki goes on maternity leave immediately after offering me this moment of rare joy. It is very rare to find an original work dating back almost half a century by a great contemporary artist, a master of contemporary photography that the world has honoured with the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography and the Grand Prix International Henri Cartier-Bresson to name but two of many awards…

As his hands are occupied holding the camera for this shot, it is the mullion that he chooses to interpose between himself and the camera for protection that day.

He does not want to risk having his soul stolen. Thirty five years later on Christmas day of 2002, Augusto Mokinda, Ze Jano and Ze Ndala will use their arms to cover their chest and protect their heart, soul, and spirit from David’s lens even though they pose for the

photograph, while Fernando Augusto Luta does his washing in the same water they choose to swim in.

Unaware of the danger, they swim in the water in a disused asbestos mine shaft [ 136 ].

The second level of protection is in the choice of subject. It is not David Goldblatt that he is photographing, but rather his reflection. As if to confirm the nature of the subject, we are faced with a splitting of the image around his hair.

His eyes, like William’s, are missing from the photo. His right eye is closed and the left one, which we can tell is open by the movement of his eyebrows, is masked by the upper part of the camera. Even the lens becomes blurred. This mechanical part, which so often immortalises what he is looking at, fades as at dusk behind the horizontal slat of the window.

It is humanity or the absence of humanity, its weaknesses and the helplessness of its condition that David has shown us in his photographs for many years.

In this one it is man, the human being, who in the same way, probes and questions himself. For me, this picture sums up the work of this great artist. It shows us a view of humanity diving inwards. David calls on his soul and becomes this high priest who connects us to our own

souls, which bring us together and unite us, both to ourselves and to the chaos, to life and to “ being ”. Here, in a way, David sacrifices himself to do this and in turn gives himself up to the merciless eye of his own lens. This man who apprehends human nature so deeply turns it towards himself here with the same intensity, the same concentration that is so revealing. The warm blood of life circulates, pulses and expresses itself forcefully in the front of his face. His hands submit willingly and with precision to the intelligence in man’s heart; they prolong the flesh of his face while offering themselves to the human in us, and David is.

Towards the end of last year I found a small masterpiece of David’s [ 135 ], a photograph that comes very close to the surrealism that accompanied my childhood dreams. David took it in about 1977, ten years after this small self portrait, from the top of a mine dump in the south of Johannesburg. The dump is what has been left over from the mining activity that gave birth to this metropolis whose silhouette forms the horizon of this apocalyptic vision. This arid, sad reminder of the exploitation of our planet’s riches by its principal predator has been scarred by repeated gusts of wind. This is probably one of the dumps that have been re-exploited by our civilisation of vultures. Today most of these dumps have disappeared. Our civilisation runs

the risk of following suit at any moment, as Graeme Williams [ 291 ] warns us, by continuing to neglect, to abuse and destroy its precious and fragile imbalance, a little more each day. The “ Commedia dell’Arte ” will no longer be screened at the Top Star Drive-in… ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

In 2013 back at Herbert Evans in the Mews in Rosebank I again pick up the latest edition of Art News, as I do nearly every time I have the chance. This time I am enthralled and astonished by a masterpiece by Mikhael Subotzky. In 2012, 45 years after David, he produces a fantastic “ self portrait with the help of an optometrist ”.

Realising that this work has already celebrated its first anniversary I am not expecting a positive reply when I phone the gallery. I am staggered when they tell me that the second of five editions is still available. What luck, what joy, what a pleasure! I buy it on the spot. The work has a stunning simplicity and in the preceding pages you have come to know how passionate I am about self portraits.

Maman and I first come across his work in Basel, back in Linda’s era. The following year Maman cannot resist giving me a C Print of Mikhael’s in which, like a snail’s spiral, the interior façade of Ponte City brings us

back to the continuing evolution and slow transformation of our societies to safeguard the immense riches as well as the underlying tension of the imbalance between humanity and its environment [ 247 ]. Added to this, Rodney was in a way responsible for this icon long before I arrived in South Africa. Mikhael’s visual acuity also encapsulates for us the extreme sluggishness of the transformation of our South African society on the beach at Hout Bay [ 248 ]. In 2005 more than ten years after Nelson Mandela’s swearing in, it is still the same people who cavort in the waves while others pick up the algae so that our beaches can regain their pristine state for our sunbathing pleasure.

This time [ 249 ] Mikhael shows us his intrinsic self, the hymen of his artistic vision, the backdrop to his eyes, the biometric recognition of his profound identity and his raison d’être. I am speaking of his retinas. It is the images that they collect both before and after these have been digested, that gradually day by day produce the trace he will leave, for us all. Mikhael invites us to just simply look and finally see with perfect clarity.

He offers us his retinas to help our own to wake up to the new dawn. They are as fertile as a pair of breasts and as deliciously juicy as a blood orange. In addition, in keeping with the logic of the optometrist, they tease and provoke us with just two initials: the “ R ” on the

left and the “ L ” on the right. They stand present like two sentinels, an integral part of our essential defence system, to ensure that our minds remain alert despite the constant media onslaught. The treachery of images blurs our vision, leading us astray like the siren song.

Speaking of eyes and looking reminds me of another story. Imagine you are lost in the desert; imagine the gnawing hunger pains; imagine as the light fades you start hallucinating from hunger. Imagine being swallowed by darkness and devoured by hunger. Desperate, you grope about, searching for something to satiate you. At last you manage to find something to eat, shortly before stumbling upon a source of light. This allows you to examine what you have been eating and you realise you have been feeding on excrement. Overcome with nausea you find yourself faced with the most terrible choice: leave the light and carry on eating or bask in the light and die of hunger. The choice remains ours …

XXXVII

It’s now twelve months that I’ve been talking to you whenever the opportunity arises.

Madiba has left us, Hollande is sinking, Zuma, reelected, is not doing well, Marine Le Pen is taking the lead in French politics and The Netherlands has just annihilated Spain 5-1 in Brazil where the football world cup, the global “ panem et circences ”, has just kicked off amidst fierce protests. Syria, Iraq and the Ukraine are tearing themselves apart and a number of conflicts are brewing on the African continent while the B.R.I.C.S. countries are already facing social conflict spawned by their rapid growth. The trees in Westcliff have just shed their leaves, while France is feeling the first foretaste of a summer which promises to be hot.

My bag is packed and I leave for Basel this evening.

I will be there alone, without Maman for the first time and not yet with Lynn, Jordan and Camille, nor with Augustin, Nicolas or Jerome. I wish to start to unveil Maman’s inevitable future absence while I anticipate the pleasure of acting as guide to the others very soon.

Maman, too, has been afflicted with cancer this year. She is recovering from a big operation after three

initial sessions of chemotherapy. The doctors wanted to reduce the size of her gorgon before cutting it out.

She will start another session of chemotherapy at the beginning of July to try to anaesthetise what remains of the ferocious beast and will join us in Saint Emilion with Monique and Papa for a week at the end of August.

Papa and Maman will return in December to celebrate Christmas with us, as will my sister-in-law Carine, my three nephews and their partners. Apart from Andre who will be greatly missed, our whole clan will be together to enjoy the warmth of a family gathering before the new year begins. There can be no better way to recharge one’s batteries.

In tune with my promise to myself I will bid you goodbye from Basel. This year it is Mikhael’s turn to be celebrated at Art Unlimited. I will be there from tomorrow afternoon in time for the dinner in his honour hosted

by Liza. On Wednesday I will have lunch with Helene Mairlot, who looks after relations with collectors from Benelux for Art Basel. As you know, Maman has booked a table on the terrace at Donati’s so I can say thank you to life when the vanilla ice cream covered in creamy hot chocolate is served for dessert. Once this duty has been fulfilled, and having talked to you for a year, who knows, my life might well take off in new directions.

My two flights go by without a hitch. I manage to sleep quite well in economy class thanks to the amount of practice I have had over the last few years. I have developed a technique which allows me to get enough rest to cope with the day ahead. I skip dinner and only drink water until the morning. I send myself into a sort of semi-comatose state and in this way manage to get five or six hours of something approaching sleep. This technique is not particularly courteous towards my neighbours and I apologise here to all those who have travelled next to me, but this way of dealing with air travel suits me perfectly. I have also quite often noticed fellow passengers nearby acting in much the same way, like me enjoying the few coveted seats in economy class usually given to frequent flyers.

In the plane taking me from Paris to Basel I come across an article on Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller in Le Figaro. He has for some years now been disgusted by the use of the term “ primitive arts ” and demands that they be given back their original names rather than be lumped together in an ill-defined group. After writing his latest study of the creations of the Karo Batak people of Indonesia he confessed to having accomplished “ a very small step for humanity but an enormous step for himself ”. I understand this.

Just before I left Johannesburg Peter Rich shared with me a message from Jean Paul Sartre to all of us: “ One who begins his inquiry with facts will never arrive at essences ”. I am increasingly attracted to the origins and the essence of our human species. I want to pursue my own recovery, escape from myself, go back, become a child again, love and give of myself so that I can continue to be. Everything seems to click into place and the orchestra plays its grand symphony against the backdrop of Chaos organising its evanescent structures.

In Basel I take my place on the terrace at the Hotel Euler where Maman and I meet every year. The first to arrive waits for the other. Today I am not expecting her and will instead spend this time with you. Maman went to the clinic this morning for a check up to see how her illness is evolving. She will not let up on monitoring her Gorgon. With the help of Papa, the doctors and all the hospital staff accompanying her on this stretch of the journey she is regaining her health little by little and will hopefully be able to spend a while longer with us. She is happy to know that I am here on this terrace which, at times, becomes ours. I talk to her on the phone as well so that in a way she can be here at the table. Lynn, for her part, confirms that all is well with her and Camille in Johannesburg and with Jordan at Hilton, his college near Pietermaritzburg. Daphne is coming for dinner in

Westcliff to complete this picture of Madonna through the ages. I have been very spoiled in life to have such wonderful women as mother, wife, and daughter and even my mother-in-law with whom I am privileged to have a great relationship. I think both of us always tend to look towards the positive and are on a very similar wavelength. In addition we both love to debate and discuss.

It is 16 June. I can’t help but reflect on it. This is the day Hector Pieterson died in 1976. Remember June 1976. Madiba wanted to turn it into a public holiday to help and encourage us to remember. This is why South Africa celebrates Youth Day on 16 June every year.

Having left my bags in my little hotel room I attend the opening of Art Unlimited where Liza proposes the simultaneous screening of a group of four videos, Mikhael’s “ Moses and Griffiths ”. In them Moses Lamani gives tours of Grahamstown through the 19th century “ camera obscura ” at the Observatory Museum while Griffiths Sokuyeka conducts similar visits to the 1820 Settlers Monument in the same town. This monument to the British language and culture in South Africa is inspired to a large degree by Louis Kahn. Mikhael asks both men in turn to give him a more personal tour and to talk about their own lives in this town and about

their places of work. The four narrations are projected simultaneously after having been edited to ensure their audibility. In the midst of these, a new dialogue takes shape: that of the unsaid, celebrated by Mikhael. This develops from within this conversation and shares the centre of the space with spectators who choose to listen.

After returning to the hotel to freshen up I take myself off to the dinner where I meet Jeremy Wafer, Els Barents, who runs the photographic museum in Amsterdam, and Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, who will look after William’s retrospective in the Far East. Also present are Serge Tiroche who consults for a fund in Israel that invests in contemporary art, Italian collectors and of course Kirsty, Neil, Damon and Liza, glorious despite the fatigue. As it is Philip’s birthday, a Chinese collector Yan Bing gives him a magnum of delicious Bordeaux which he feels obliged to share with us. At around eleven after much conversation on a wide range of topics we decide to retire for a few good hours of sleep. For the next two or three days we will be busy with our own personal agendas but will remain interconnected through our passion and our networks and, obviously, the butterfly.

XXXVIII

Wednesday, 12:30. I meet Helene in the Collectors Lounge on the top floor of the building that hosts the fair. It has recently received a makeover and a new look thanks to an intervention by Herzog & de Meuron. We quickly escape from the crowd and its constant brouhaha and I find myself, again, jumping from one tram to another but this time beneath a radiant sky in Basel. The trams here are extremely well organised, plentiful and punctual, at least for the duration of the fair. We alight right in front of Donati’s where a table for two awaits us on the terrace. This bourgeois restaurant has become a must in the city and the “ who’s who ” is there in abundance. Helene wants to introduce me to the President of UBS, the bank which is the main sponsor of the fair but, fortunately for me, he has just left. I certainly have not come to Donati’s to engage in public relations.

Helene is also suffering from cancer, very similar to the type Maman has. As Helene has known her for many years we talk about her and about their common illness. Helene seems every bit as strong as Maman, which makes me very happy.

We talk about her life while deciding what to order. We choose a Dolcetto d’Alba to accompany the meal, a perfect light wine for lunch. Helene phones Marina Mottin, a colleague of hers who has just been chosen to look after the relations with

African collectors. I am delighted by this new development and the opportunity to meet her and I take advantage of the direction our conversation has taken. I suggest that Helene make a proposal to the executive committee to consider extending and confirming their commitment to Africa by offering the Goodman Gallery a place on the ground floor with the most established galleries. I remind her that the gallery has been represented in Basel for thirty three years and that this support alone deserves recognition. Besides, this would allow the fair to welcome one or more other African galleries, from other countries on the continent of course, to take their place on the first floor. We even surprise ourselves by going as far as imagining the possible birth of an African Beyeler Foundation. Such a powerful initiative would give a fantastic boost to the so-called “ primitive ” arts which need to shake off that label as Mr Barbier-Mueller has just reminded us.

Our lunch is perfect and our waiter is astounded by my kindness. Nobody has ever thanked him so sincerely and so profusely every time the opportunity presented itself.

He does not know that I am settling a debt with forty nine years of interest, not counting the years to come. I am saying thank you to each and every person and to the life that we have been given. Today, true to my promise, I proclaim my immense gratitude and my gigantic joy of living. Sadly, I can’t do this with the dessert course because “ she ” has fortunately

disappeared from the menu and, with a bit of luck, gone back to her wonderful continent, from which we all originate.

That afternoon Helene phones to tell me she wants to introduce me to Guy Verstraete, an industrialist from Kortrijk deeply infected with the same virus as me. I accept with pleasure and meet them for dinner. Guy is dignified and straightforward and radiates wisdom. Our meeting is wonderfully fortuitous. We have an enjoyable evening and realise that our paths run parallel even if the scale of our interventions is far from comparable. Guy also had a Jesuit education and hopes to finish his book by the end of the year.

I feel as if I must be dreaming. He is passionate and excitable, inspired by desire, curiosity and a strong will to follow the spiritual quests and aspirations of our species through art.

In his opinion, and in mine, the adjective “ contemporary ” is doomed, condemned to obsolescence since now meets with always and here gets lost in the universe.

I look forward greatly to seeing Guy again the next time we visit the heart of Europe.

On the way back to my small hotel, a friend of Helene’s, Michel Renchon, reminds me of Salvador Dali’s reply to the question “ Imagine the Louvre is on fire; what would you save? ” Without the slightest hesitation the Spaniard replies “ the fire ”.

Voila! The time has come for us as well. The day I earmarked to say goodbye to you has arrived. I am about to leave the hotel so as to do this decently and with dignity in the most intense, beautiful and sacred temple I know.

XXXVIII

All the components that make up the Beyeler Foundation make it the one place on the planet where every cell of my body seems to become entranced. The setting is pastoral. We are in Riehen, a small village in the verdant suburbs around Basel. We are surrounded by fields of freshly mown hay where cows seek shelter from the rays of Phoebus under the low branches of majestic trees and birds flit about. I am sure I even saw a few pairs of “ Pihis ” amongst them. Like us they are afraid of getting lost and travel together like this, in pairs, the moment they take off from Guillaume Apollinaire’s fingers. Here imbalance reaches a natural state of paroxysm, fragile, filled with peace, love, tranquillity, serenity and continuity.

This is the sanctuary in which Ernst Beyeler asks Renzo Piano to build a shelter for his collection and for the exhibitions organised here by his Foundation for over twenty years. Art, which is my passion, architecture, my profession, humanism, my backbone, all come together here with immeasurable generosity. Each one celebrates the other two. Birdsong mingles with the gentle rustling of Calder’s tireless mobile. The landscape and the gardens disappear in the tranquillity of the small

pond as if inviting us to meditate when we enter this sanctuary bathed in a light infused with intelligence, heart and spirit. Claude Monet’s water lilies beckon, as does Alberto Giacometti’s “ l’homme qui marche ”, each morning and forever. I am overcome: Gerhard Richter is currently officiating here. At the moment of consecration this fabulous high priest transforms immanence into Chaos and the fleeting becomes eternal. The “ genius loci ”, already so intense, is again enriched with yet another small layer of love.

In 1998, as autumn gives way to winter, early one Wednesday morning Maman takes the train at the Gare du Midi in Brussels. She is going to Riehen for the day and will return the following day. A hundred and seventy eight trees in the Foundation’s grounds have been wrapped, packed and strapped down by Christo and Jeanne Claude. Maman has a very precise wish which accompanies her on this trip. As she arrives in the village she begins to discern these witnesses to our times and then sees them more clearly as she enters the grounds of the Foundation. They are all there, present and majestic, to welcome her, their delicacy defying the forces of gravity with virtuosity. Brute strength is tinged with tenderness and transparency softens these “ blocs capables ”. These notes from the grand symphony of Chaos are filled with wisdom, intelligence, gentleness

and love. Then the heavens burst open, in answer, without any doubt, to Maman’s precious wish. The sky is lit up with a pristine pointillism as gentle snowflakes emphasise the infinitely delicate light of this afternoon in Basel. The vigour of Chaos withdraws to take shelter, for a brief moment, as if protected by the extraordinary power of the silence. Imbalance embraces ecstasy.

This profound love of snow has been imprinted in me since the age of twenty four. That year the Cannes Film Festival honours Japanese cinema by awarding the Palme d’Or to “ Narayama Bushiko ” by Shohei Imamura, with a scenario based on and inspired by the short stories of Shichiro Fukazawa, “ Tohoku no Zummutachi ” and “ Etudes a propos des chansons de Narayama ”. Sixtynine year old Orin-yan knows that her time has come, in accordance with the tradition of her village in the region of Shinshu, a mountainous province somewhat removed from provincial Japan in 1860. In the coming weeks Orin must go to the top of Narayama, the mountain of oak trees, to await her death. By staying in her village any longer she risks affecting its precious imbalance. The village has difficulty subsisting on farming in this harsh terrain. She will soon become a non productive mouth to feed in this microcosm. Her son Tatsuhei, a widower and father of two children, is vigorously opposed to her departure. In order to convince him that she must leave

urgently, Orin breaks all her upper teeth on the stony edge of the village well. Tatsuhei agrees to follow the tradition and decides to take his mother to that other version of the elephant graveyard. He puts his mother on his shoulders and sets out with her on this final part of her journey. Having guided and carried his mother to the top of the mountain and having left her there, he takes to his heels and descends as fast as he can.

Although he has left his mother behind she remains with him, beside the lake of his tears. The immense disorder of things decides to intervene, without delay or deliberation. The astonished villagers watch Tatsuhei enter the village at top speed to be reunited with his two children, overjoyed and shouting at the top of his voice “ It’s snowing, it’s snowing… ”*** *** the cold will soften Orin’s suffering during her departure.

It is here in this sanctuary in the country of the Leontopodium Nivale, better known as the Edelweiss, that magnificent flower that grows at between 1800 and 3000 metres, that I want to bid you goodbye. Perhaps we will meet again in a decade or so, if you and I have the courage, the desire and the energy for it.

Before anything else, I want to thank you from the depths of my being for reading these pages, of course, but especially for the attention you have given to the works of all those who officiate in our midst, while they continue to evolve, for our sake. They have opened the eyes of my soul and lit up my path as I go in search of being. It is to them, and to those I acknowledge in the following paragraph, that I owe this pure pleasure of being which continues tirelessly to inspire, rework and fine tune the broad outline sketch of my trajectory.

I thank Maman and Papa, Lynn and Daphne, the widow of Vincent who entrusted his daughter to me and whom I never had the opportunity to meet or to embrace.

I thank Camille and Jordan and all those who precede us as well as those who will follow. I thank Andre whom we miss, Carine and Sophie who loved him, and Augustin, Nicolas and Jerome, his three sons. I thank our families and all our friends. I thank our teachers, our doctors and all those who work for man’s best future and to safeguard the precious imbalance within the eternal Chaos. Without them I would not have experienced the immense pleasure and real privilege of being able to talk to you and share with you my joy of being.

In addition I must thank all those who helped me with the realisation of these pages, with the presentation

of the works of art and the construction of the website.

I refer of course to John Hodgkiss who left us far too soon, but also to Leanne Engelberg and Andre Clements, not forgetting Lyn Bisset who devoted a considerable amount of time to translating the spirit of my prose into English phraseology. Finally I have to thank my friend Jonathan from the deepest of my heart for his unbelievable level of trust as for his never-ending and essential support.

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Epilogue

Back in Johannesburg I recover my natural rhythm encompassing family pleasures, professional challenges, real estate projects and artistic blessings.

Minnette crosses some troubled waters and on the distant shore sees “ out of time ” calling her loudly and welcoming her with tenderness.

Willem completes the self portrait acknowledging his lineage whose contribution he willingly accepts.

In it we meet his essential being, an offshoot of his father and his grandfather, brought together through the lens of one of his offspring, his daughter Karen.

Everything seems to focus and crystallise around a plant or vegetable source which accepts our gaze with humility and reserve. Even the light whispers. They all find themselves in a state of impermanence as it was in the very beginning. Here everywhere becomes nowhere and now becomes forever.

William is preparing to present his latest film “ Second Hand Reading ” at the Joburg Art Fair, amongst several other projects of course.

I was fortunate to see it in Basel and it once again confirms that he is without doubt one of the greatest scribes

of the human soul. His profound wisdom of heart and of spirit come together here in a waltz that restores immanence to the state of “ being ”; Albert Einstein spoke of how important it is to never stop questioning, and William continues his ballad.

In August Kendell spent a few days in the city of his two births. At the opening of this same fair in Sandton he will present “ Resistance/Movement ”, an incredibly powerful yet essentially vulnerable performance in motion, a specific and effective adaptation of “ Ritual/Resist ” [ 93 ] which was recently produced in Brussels and Paris. Two men and two women are engaged in a martial arts vanity contest. None of them can see any of the others but all four are fighting with their own image reflected in a square mirror, a symbol of all things in balance, the four elements, the four directions and the four corners of the earth, the four evangelists, the four seasons and the four noble truths. The instructions are simple: keep the mirror afloat, suspended in time and space by pressure alone. For my part I see them engaged in a process of self discovery and realisation of the possibility to go in search of their lost humanity, each supported unconditionally by the others. It is this mutual self apprenticeship that safeguards the continuity of our precious imbalance

and the survival of the race; unless, of course, everything is an illusion…

Next weekend Robin will return from Berlin with Sabinah and their children and will stay for nearly four weeks. I look forward to seeing them and sharing a Sunday family meal with him and his intimate clan.

I promised to get back to the aesthetics of desire in Robin’s work and “ Moon Stamp ” presents the ideal occasion [ 240 ]. It was in Saint Emilion that I experienced a very personal viewing of this work which I will now tell you about.

The artist borrows the Kafkaesque universe of our civil service. He takes its principal tools: the rubber stamp and its ink pad. He magnifies them to show that he has carefully conceived and constructed them to offer them to mankind, to the human race.

They are far too big for one of us. It is as a team, in a pack that we must reconstruct and fertilise our desire for freedom, our desire to take back our rightful humanity and to at last become masters of our bipedalism.

Like the artists of our first cave paintings, inspired by a poetic vision comparable to that of Antoine de Saint Exupery, Robin the priest officiates

amongst us all. With our help he seizes the rubber stamp and addresses the clan, delivering his political message of hope and love. He transcends the wall of the cave which he elevates into a celestial vault and on it stamps the face of the moon. With this one stamp Robin shatters our limitations and cuts through our chains.

I love you to the moon and back‌ Distance evaporates and our freedom is affirmed and can reign supreme. Nothing more separates our levels of perception which already now interlace, collide and unite to celebrate our joy of being.

Robin’s children will have a bicycle!

Quo vadis… ?

Stars Budding branch Of dawn In the pulp of the night The seeds of dreams Ferment On the vine of life The sky awakens To the juices Of insomnia Undulating worlds Harvest Planets bearing fruit Chaos welcomes The spirit’s Red grapes Branch of dawn Enchant The pulp of my life

François Querre

This book was written in French and translated by Lyn Bisset following the recommendation of Mandie van der Spuy 500 numbered copies were printed.

The final layout and the printing was done by “ One Thread ” It was released on the 15 of February 2015 …

The pictures at the head of each part were taken at the opening of the Johannesburg Art Fair

By Ryan Hitchcock during the perforrmance “ Resistance Movement ” Kendell Geers Date: 2014 Medium: Documentation of performance at Johannesburg Art Fair 2013 Dimensions: Variable