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WILLIAM KENTRIDGE THREE PROJECTS IN JOHANNESBURG

2 ADVERTISEMENT November 2014 william kentriDge THREE PROJECTS IN JOHANNESBURG

Sean O’Toole

‘Oh my god, where did you find that?” exclaims Will iam Kentridge. Dressed in work wear, a

blue button shirt and shorts, the grey-haired artist is seated on the stoep at his Houghton home and studio looking at a copy of a photo I just handed him. Kentridge is 23 and shirtless in the photo; he has a svelte physique and black hair. Still a paint-ing student under Bill Ainslie at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, the photo shows him staring intently at a man while drawing his form in black lines onto a white garage wall.

It is a Sunday in 1978. Kentridge, together with a group of friends living communally in a house in Bertrams, a tumbledown suburb in central Johannesburg, are painting a mural together. Spanning the length of an entire garage wall, the mural depicts eight figures and a flying dog set against a simple green landscape and cloudless blue sky. Vaguely suggestive of Kentridge’s silhouett-ed processional figures, the mural includes Kentridge’s study of Sam-son, purportedly a local drunk and abortionist, seated on his haunches bearing a spade.

“I was still thinking of myself as a painter, not really as an artist,” offers Kentridge by way of context. “I was doing art while waiting to see what I would be when I grew up — and what South Africa would be when it transformed.”

Transformation also explains how this youthful photo of Kentridge came to be published. In 1987, curator Steven Sack, who together with Kentridge and a group of socially-engaged Wits students collectively founded the avant- garde Junction Avenue Theatre Company, participated in an anti- apartheid cultural festival and conference in Amsterdam. His presentation included a brief discussion of the mural.

Later published in the book Culture in Another South Africa

(1989), Sack writes how all the participants gathered in a semi- circle around the completed mural and held a seated discussion “on issues relating to culture and politics”.

Kentridge laughs when I read this description to him: “Jesus. Okay … at that age.” It is not cynicism he is expressing, just surprise. If any-thing, Kentridge has remained remarkably true to the 1978 scene depicted in the photo. Drawing and theatre remain the two anchors of his ongoing practice; he continues to work collectively, albeit under the umbrella of his very recognisable name; and politics remains an abiding interest.

“I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings,” Kentridge stated in 1996 while in Australia, during the heady period of his inter-national uptake. “An art (and a poli-tics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.”

I ask Kentridge, now 59, what he sees when he looks at that young man in the photo, who only a few years earlier had been a junior mayor of Johannesburg. Was he an optimist? Is the artist an optimist now? “By nature I am an optimist,” responds Kentridge.

He could have left it there. South Africa’s most celebrated living artist

is still hopeful and full of confi-dence. It is a tidy quotation. Instead, and in a rehearsal of his manner as an artist and thinker, he allows ambiguity and contradiction to subtly disassemble the sureness of his statement.

The artist tells me how he is often asked if he is optimistic or pessimis-tic about South Africa. “I think one has to understand that both futures unroll at the same time,” he says. “Fence-sitting, encompassing both possibilities, is in fact the most accurate representation of where the country is. To be only a pessimist — to say it has all gone to the dogs, that it is all corrupt — seems an incorrect description of it. But to say these are minor problems and every-thing is fine is also incorrect.”

He applies the same dispassion to his own life. “Innately, I am stuck, in that both of those things — pessi-

mism and optimism — seem possi-ble. It is not even that one oscillates between the two.”

Kentridge segues into talking about a new film he is working on, an eight-channel video projection that includes scenes of silhouetted figures moving in procession across a stage. Under the working title of Danse Macabre, the work, which in-cludes music by a Sebokeng based brass band, will be premièred in Amsterdam early next year.

“Different elements are starting to come together and I think it will come together okay,” elaborates Kentridge. “But there are long periods during and after the filming where it seems the work could only be a disaster. Steering it away from what seems to be disaster and find-ing something usable or viable as you turn is one of the tasks and pleasures of being an artist.”

Confessions of an optimist

In July 1975, Clement Green-berg, an American who in his day was one of the foremost critics of art and a champion of flatness in painting, visited South Africa to judge an art competition as well as deliver a series of lectures.

“Regrettably, his introductory appearance was not a great success,” wrote Esmé Berman in 2010. “Although eminently articulate, Clem lacked the charismatic vocal skills required to captivate the crowded auditorium.”

Kentridge remembers it differently. “I think he was drunk the entire time he was here, certainly when he gave his public lecture.”

The artist’s father, Sydney Kentridge, a defence lawyer for Nelson Mandela, invited the art critic to dinner at his home one evening. Greenberg asked the 20-year-old Kentridge about his interest in art.

He told him about his interest in political art. “He said one sentence: ‘Just worry about the art, politics will take care of

itself.’ At the time I thought what a rubbish, conservative, formalist, American under-standing.’ But it is more or less what I would say to artists if I had to talk to them now.

The imperatives of what you take from the outside world into your work will filter through: the work will show who you are, and if there is a political interest in you, that will come through in your work. But to start with a political manifesto is a very bad way of approaching art, at least for me temperamentally it is.”

ClEmENT GREENBERG, KENTRIdGE ANd POlITICS

william kentridge in his studio, 2003

william kentridge in 1978, outlining a figure for a mural painting in bertrams, Johannesburg

THREE PROJECTS IN JOHANNESBURG william kentriDge November 2014 ADVERTISEMENT 3

This silvery description of his process, one that ennobles pessi-mism, might seem at odds with rote perceptions of Kentridge as the all-conquering master of Houghton ridge. It is, however, also entirely in keeping with the artist’s method, which since the mid-1980s, after a brief commitment to Paris and act-ing, has made doubt, uncertainty and fitful peregrination around the studio a cornerstone of his artistic practice.

Remarking on the role of doubt in coming to grips with Kentridge’s multi-dimensional output, Rosalind Morris, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, writes: “Kentridge’s art is never reducible to the order of the statement. It makes of ambiguity and plurality a virtue; it recoils from bombast and confi-dent self-knowledge, from debate and the violence of mere negation.”

This concise appraisal appears early on in That which is not Drawn, a book co-authored by the artist. Published by Seagull Books in Calcutta, the book is largely com-posed of a conversation between Kentridge and Morris. It also in-cludes a number of Kentridge’s statements, crisp aphorisms that have become a hallmark of his mature work. They are positioned as visual interludes.

“The image announces who it is”, reads one example. Another winks, “The smell of old books; bring the air freshener.”

Kentridge and Morris reprise their role as collaborators in Accounts and Drawings from Under-ground: East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, 1906, also published by Seagull. Released to coincide with Kentridge’s new exhibition at the Goodman Gallery, the book is framed around a 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation. Where Kentridge uses it as a substrate for his new land-scape drawings, Morris here looks past Kentridge’s images to the ledger itself, mining its quotidian entries for narrative.

Seagull’s publisher Naveen Kishore is also a theatre maker. This may explain his Kentridge crush. His publishing house is also behind a new book by the artist’s younger brother, Matthew Kentridge. The Soho Chronicles recapitulates the narrative behind Kentridge’s career-defining ten animated short films, which the artist began in 1989. Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris is notable for its sombre processional scenes and the first animated appearance of Soho Eckstein, described by the younger Kentridge as “a choleric, block-faced, pin-striped urban titan, obsessed with power and acquisi-tion and contemptuous of the poor”.

The book also offers fragments of biographical commentary. The art-ist’s Lithuanian-born grandfather, Morris Kentridge (who Anglicised his surname, Kantrovich), was a progressive lawyer and United Party MP for Troyeville. His grand-children would often pore over a photo of him seated on a deckchair in Muizen berg wearing a black Homburg hat and a three-piece, pinstriped suit. Of interest, the art-

ist’s first known print, a linocut made in 1976, re creates this exact family photo in stark expressionist tones.

Although most of the books with Kentridge’s name on the spine tend to be about the artist and his work, there is a growing list of books by the artist. They typically place narrative in abeyance. Produced by Johannesburg publisher Fourthwall Books, 2nd Hand Reading is an example of this. Based on a 2013 “flipbook” film, Second-hand Read-ing – it featured a Neo Muyanga sound track and was exhibited last year by the artist’s New York dealer, Marian Goodman (no relation to the Goodman Gallery) — the book is Kentridge’s most ambitious flipbook to date. It clocks in at 800 pages.

Similar to his filmmaking, which started early, in his teens according to Kentridge, with a camera belong to a friend’s dad, the artist’s first flipbook dates back to the 1970s when he was a 20-year-old African studies and politics student at Wits. This university is an important lo-cale in Kentridge’s early biography.

Take the theatre company he

cofounded in the year of the Sowe-to rebellion. Established in The Nun nery, Junction Avenue’s radical theatre owed as much to the uni-versity’s febrile intellectual culture in the 1970s as it did music hall, unionist theatre and Brecht. For instance, the 1978 production Randlords and Rotgut, directed by Malcolm Purkey — also one of the muralists from that day in 1978 — directly quotes social historian Charles van Onselen.

Kentridge, however, tends to downplay the academy — if not Wits — as a source of inspiration for his

work. During the first of his six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 2012, Ken-tridge repeatedly emphasised his provenance as someone whose thinking is a product of the “neces-sary stupidity” of the studio.

Six Drawing Lessons, another new Kentridge book compiling his lectures, underscores this point graphically. Lavishly illustrated and artfully interfered with, the book early on includes a bold statement in red uppercase: “Remember you are an artist, not a scholar.”

The offer to follow in the footsteps of a who’s who of twentieth century arts and letters — T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, Nadine Gordimer and Orhan Pamuk, to name a few — got Kentridge doubting himself more than usual. Initially he thought about ignoring his own work, in keeping with the original scholarly tone of the lectures. He started re-searching Titian and Michelangelo, amongst his favourite artists.

“But then I realised this was insane: I was basing the lectures on what I could glean from Wikipedia. I said stop.” Kentridge chuckles. “Start from something that you can talk about. Don’t try to turn your-self into a half-baked scholar. That was a huge relief.”

Kentridge is a nimble thinker and an elegant writer. He revealed as much in the 1980s, at a 1986 lecture in Grahamstown and a 1988 essay in the defunct literary magazine Stet. The latter is worth revisiting. In his short essay Kentridge tackles the colonial legacy of Pierneef and Preller. Even then, a year after winning the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, he cast doubt on the role of artist as speaker.

“Artists’ words or thoughts about their work must be accepted with caution,” wrote Kentridge. “Not be-cause we are dumb or inarticulate, but because these pronouncements about our work come after the event.”

It is a useful statement to write

out on a piece of paper and carry as a bookmark in Six Drawing Lessons. An intellectually ranging and sometimes argumentative engage-ment with his practice, the book is a celebration of making and the studio’s centrality in this. At one point Kentridge refers to his studio as a “compression chamber”, a place where images are both conjured and invoked, as well as adjudicated. The latter verb is fitting: Kentridge was born into an illustrious legal family.

Six Drawing Lessons operates as a biography, but not in a self- aggrandising kind of way. “I be-came an artist,” offers Kentridge, “because I realised I needed a field in which the construction of fic-tional authorities and imagined quotes would be a cause for cele-bration, rather than rustication and disgrace.” It is an effortless state-ment of intent by an artist whose highly visible work hides its self-doubting and fretful method.

THE KENTRIdGE dIARyNovember kicks off with a busy roster of Johannesburg openings, including the first local showing of The Refusal of Time, a mixed- media installation commissioned for dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, on show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (9 November).

There is an exhibition of landscape drawings at Goodman Gallery (15 November) and showcase of his tapestries at the Wits Art Museum (18 November).

Between these two events, Wits Theatre is hosting a talk by Kentridge and Mark Solms, a

neuropsychologist who briefly studied art at Wits (16 November).

Also in November, Kentridge’s production of Schubert’s Winterreise opens at the Lincoln Center; it follows on an earlier October showing at Carnegie Hall of Paper Music, a cine-concert featuring a selection of Kentridge films scored by Philip Miller.

In December Kentridge will receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cape Town.

Highlights from 2015 include

Kentridge’s production of composer Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, in a co-production of the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam (June 2015), later at the Metro politan Opera in New York (November 2015); and a new survey of Kentridge’s work at the Ullens Center for Contem-porary Art in Beijing (June 2015).

Looking further to 2016, London’s Whitechapel Gallery will host a survey exhibition — a long overdue return after the brouhaha whipped by his 1999 show at the Serpentine Gallery.

Drawing for the film Johannesburg, 2nd greatest city after paris, 1989


About ten months ago, I telephoned my father to say that I had been invited to deliver this series of lectures.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘do you have anything to say?’

‘But you understand it is a great honour to be asked to give the Norton lectures.’

‘Indeed,’ he said, ‘and now you have that honour. You don’t have to accept.’

But it seems the decision has been made, and here we are, and the six lectures that follow will be an at-tempt to answer that first question.

On the first day I started thinking about the lectures, I made a note, a caution to myself, which I repeat today:

REMEMBER YOU ARE AN ARTIST NOT A SCHOLAR.BUT AVOID A SIX HOUR PARADE OF IGNORANCE.Notes like this one are an essential

part of the preparation process. I listed every thought I had ever had, or remembered someone else hav-ing. I divided them by six. In many different ways, as if in their different arrangements some new thought would emerge. I wrote them on pieces of paper and pinned them to the walls of the studio.

A NECESSARY STUPIDITYFINDING THE DRAWING TWICEGEOLOGICAL AUTOCHTHONYI added them to drawings I was

making. AGAINST ARGUMENT (BUT NOT THIS ONE)A UNIVERSAL ARCHIVELESSONS FROM TYPEWRITERSDIALECTICS FOR 9 YEAR-OLDSTHE OVER-DETERMINED IMAGEA PRE-HISTORY OF RELATIVITYTHE FULL-STOP SWALLOWS THE SENTENCEI painted them in alizarin crim-

son watercolour, on pages of a 1735 Francis can liturgical tract (I was in Rome).

IN PRAISE OF MISTRANSLATIONMEETING THE WORLD HALFWAYPOEMS I USED TO KNOWCIRCLING THE STUDIOPICASSO ON SAFARIVIVA LINOCUT VIVA! WHAT I LEARNT AT SUPPERTORSCHLUSSPANIKBeating into my head the need to

find a connection between the

activity I practiced, drawing, and the words of the lecture.

At the beginning, let it be said that these lectures will move forwards and backwards through the studio. I hope they are not only a description of the work I have done over the last 30 years, but to start away from that would be folly.

This is about a necessary move-ment from image to idea. We will start each lecture either with a short film or with an extract form a larger piece of work I have made, both to show the images I am thinking about when talking, or to which the lectures refer, but also, and impor-

tantly, to state the primacy of the image and the making of the image, in the thinking behind the construc-tion of the lecture. This primacy is literal. The works I will show some-times come from a decade ago, and the thinking about them sometimes six months ago.

We start today with a part of a film made thirteen years ago. The section I will show is approximately 5 min-utes long.

[Show film SHADOW PROCESSION]

Concerning ShadowsLet us begin in 360 BCE. Here is Plato, writing in the voice of Socra-tes, in his book The Republic.

[Extract from Plato’s Republic (from p. 317 in Penguin Classics edition)]

‘Imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave. In this chamber are men who have been prisoners there since they were children, their legs and necks b eing so fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them runs a road, in front of which a curtain-wall has been

built, like the screen at puppet shows between the operators and their audience, above which they show their puppets.’

‘I see.’‘Imagine further that there are

men carrying all sorts of gear along behind the curtain-wall, projecting above it and including figures of men and animals made of wood and stone and all sorts of other materials, and that some of these men, as you would expect, are talking and some not.’

‘An odd picture and an odd sort of prisoner.’

This text, which is worth reading in its extended form, is not just the cen-tre point for this lecture, but also the

starting point for a line we will follow through the series of lectures. The questions it provokes, its meta phors, are the pivotal axes of ques tions both political and aesthetic. However, at this point, let us simply note the presence of prisoners in the story.

The film that I showed an extract of at the beginning of this lecture, Shadow Procession, was made in 1999 for the Istanbul Biennale. It was to be shown in the underground Yerebatan cistern of the city. It uses a technique of jointed paper pup-pets moved frame by frame under the camera. The torn pieces of paper are joined with twists of wire. Its

origins are in puppet theatre, using flat cut-out figures either as silhou-ettes in front of the screen, or as shadows cast onto the screen.

The paper characters in Shadow Procession formed on the one

hand an inventory of people on the move. A man walking while reading, miners carrying a broken city, pensioners carried in a wheelbar-row. An inventory of specific people seen in newspapers and the news, or on the streets of Johannesburg.

I think my interest in processions started with seeing the Goya image, Procession of the Holy Office and Pilgrimage to San Isidiro — the crowd moving from the depths of the

picture plane toward us. But the film was about amplitude rather than the specific nature of a particular jour-ney and the question of shadows was posed in practical terms. How to achieve an image; not a thought. Shadows and movement. A cata-logue of people on the move. I was interested in how roughly a figure could be torn, and still be understood; how crudely it could be moved, and still have coherence as a moving, specific person.

We will come to the question of destination later in the series

of lectures. Here, suffice it to say that

Six drawing lessonsdRAwING lESSON ONEIN PRAISE OF SHADOWS


when making the film, I could not find a destination that felt possible. The procession could not end with a fête galante on the island of Cythera of Watteau, nor could it arrive at a civic state, nor at a collective farm. We have reached a point where all destinations, all bright lights, arouse mistrust. The light at the end of the tunnel turns too quickly into the interro gator’s spotlight.

From his allegory of shadows seen in a cave, Plato sets out the ethi-

cal imperative of the philosopher. The man who has seen the light and apprehended the understanding that follows from it, has a duty to return to the cave, to unshackle those in darkness and to bring them up from the cave into the light. If necessary, this must be done with force. The nexus of enlightenment, emancipation and violence emerg-es. Our agenda has been set.

In words Alas drown IAs the medium of these lectures is not charcoal, but talking, perhaps we should pause here for a moment, with some remarks on the discipline itself. There are the words them-selves, and their syntax and gram-mar and their relation to the outside world. But there is also the discipline of the medium, that which is in be-

tween the words — the devices which one uses to either pin the words more closely to the world outside, or to encourage the listener to make the connection, to convince them of what I say. In Plato we see this clear-ly, in the form of the rhetorical ques-tions and prompted answers.

But there are many other things that happen in the gaps and spaces, most importantly the …… the…. hesitation.

The dramatic um… um… um…The uncertain UM, the pause

before the certainty of the final statement.

Or… or….Mock uncertainty, the pause before

the clarity of the final statement.Or… or…. Mock uncertainty hiding real un-

certainty.And a series of accompanying

gestures, unspoken, which are not there in the text (though in truth some of them are here in my notes), but which are an essential part of what the performance, or conversa-tion or talking or lecture is.

Emphasising this, precise point, the raised finger.

Gathering consensus, whilst let-ting thoughts expand, gathering further examples, the circling finger.

The adjustment of the sleeve, the removal of the watch.

A small but important point being made — the thumb and forefinger circle.

The open-handed tapping of the podium.

The collar tug.The one hand in the pocket.The double-handed tossing of the

salad. The dovening, leaning for-ward to the notes. The shaking of the dice for emphasis.

A demonstration of other possi-bilities, the windscreen wiper wrist.

The apparent losing of the place in the notes.

The real losing of the place in the notes.

The open-handed, sincere sim-plicity.

The weighing of words with an open hand.

The removal of the glasses for a frank look. Their replacement. Their almost-replacement, the held gesture.

This complex combination: touch ing the nose, stroking the hair, the collar tug and the finger twirl, to take us through a complex question.

A separation of the tangential action from the essential thought. The more extreme the action, the purer the thought.

(This catalogue of extra-verbal explanations is derived from a lecture I observed by Mr. Jacques Rancière.)

What is the belief? That all these words, their grammar, their argu-ment, the conscious or unconscious performance of gestures of convic-tion — is the belief that from all these truth will be distilled?

The belief that all can be stripped bare and evaluated, everything that is designed to hide a false con nec-tion can be discovered and dis card - ed. The belief that from the morass surrounding and including the words, we can extract the logical, the justified inference, the truth; and that the rational, the good, the philosopher, the judge will prevail.

This is extracted from the book Six Drawing Lessons by William Kentridge, published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2014


Excerpts from the text by RoSAlIND C. MoRRIS

Before me sits a large book, bound in flocked c a r a m e l - c o l o u r e d l e a t h e r , t h e t i t l e embossed in gold and set

into a red rectangle surrounded by tooled scroll that betrays the book’s origins in an Italian craftsman’s shop, some time toward the end of the nineteenth century. The title in the red rectangle reads: ‘East Rand Proprietary Mines, Central Admin-istration. Mine Cash.’ There is a neat line (also gold) between ‘Central Administration’ and ‘Mine Cash.’ A horizon of sorts, this line is also a miniature glyph that evokes the dream-image of gold mining: above the horizon is the corpora-tion, below lies the wealth that sus-tains it.

Or so the myth of mining would have us believe. But, as every miner knows, the wealth underground is not simply brought into the light. It is made — by working in the earth, though not on the land, despite the metaphors that can make mining seem like a mere reaping of the under ground’s fruit. That labour is more often than not invisible, iron-ically hidden in the bright penum-bra of the gold bar, or the dazzling glitter of a necklace, the aura of a royal scepter and crown. The ques-tion is: how to illuminate what can be so easily secreted in the light of day? How to look for shadow, to read the trace?

Open the book. The structure of the register is

like a scaffolding or a skeleton within the page itself: a latticework of red and blue lines making rows and columns that enable the double- entry account. What is writ-ten there both depends upon and floats above that structure. Nota-tions of costs and expenditures are inscribed with remarkable detail, in a variety of inks — more or less blue, brown or black — by a small number of different hands. You can recognise the fluid cursive lines of one writer, the scratching haste of another; they are the signature marks of frontier functionaries whose names we have now forgot-ten. But these marks are also the traces of a fastidious, legally self-conscious writing machine, an assemblage of many people, many lines of authority, and many struc-tures of decision-making.

In general, I read the writing on this book, William Kentridge draws the writing on this book. Or rather, he draws on the book, the pages disassembled for that purpose.

The Cash Book is our intertext. Nonetheless, the landscapes that emerge for Kentridge do so by vir-tue of associations and thought processes only tenuously bound to the words that dissolve beneath his charcoal and become what they are when meaning is exhausted: lines, marks, traces. The page is his medi-um, and it is mine, but different spirits are conjured there. His is the order of the visible, mine the say-able. And at the same time, his is

the order of the invisible, mine the unsaid.

Mine the unsaid. That is my task here. To read from the meticulous but oblique references and calcula-tions on these pages, the broader histories and narratives that make them possible.

The Cash Book commences in February 1906, the balance from January ‘carried forward.’ For un-known reasons, it contains ac-counts for only alternate months. Somewhere, we surmise, there is another Cash Book, ‘Number 1,’ and the rest of 1906: January, March, May, July, September, and Novem-ber. Perhaps the division of the Cash Book into two books, numbers one and two, protected the compa-ny against the loss of records in the event of fire or some other catastro-phe. Perhaps, there are also other copies elsewhere, in which all the months are integrated. Perhaps the different ‘Cash Books’ were kept by different clerks as a check against mendacity, subterfuge, and the sleight of accounting hand which

makes of the accountant a thief. We don’t know. But the idea that there might be, somewhere, anoth-er place where months are kept, provides a compelling allegory for the yearning that must have afflict-ed those many migrant labourers who are counted and accounted in this often-times opaque register. For them, the memory of those places left behind, and the dream of those to which they might return at contract’s end, must have been as if in another, parallel time.

In 1906, South Africa became the world’s top producer of gold, a rank it held for more than a century, un-til 2008. 1906 was, nonetheless, the beginning of the third great depres-sion of the young industrial econo-my, and one that threatened the entire fabric of what was, following the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, a fragile emergent na-tion. The Transvaal, the site of the Wit watersrand and the gold mines, was then still a colony, having been annexed by Britain in 1900, though it would become a province within

the new Union of South Africa in 1910. In the Cash Book, it appears in the references to the “Prisons Department” of “The Government of Transvaal,” which supplied convict labour to the mines and recompensed warders, and “over-seers” but not the prisoners they supervised.

To read an archival document requires that one constantly shift focus. At first, it is the page that comes into view. Then, one focuses on a word that will not relinquish its meaning, its malformed letters written in haste, smudged or sullied by a splash of ink or coffee. Even-tually, the script disappears and sense emerges from its stubbornly material medium. But then, after the estrangement of language, the long histories of use, of etymologi-cal transformation and mishearing seem to clamour for recognition. As when one contemplates the word, “oversight.”

By virtue of a strange inversion within the English language, the word ‘oversee’ quickly becomes its

opposite. Oversight can imply a failure of discernment as much as scrupulous supervision. And, in retrospect, every crisis seems to have been a matter of oversight, a failure to see. Each of the depres-sions (1890-91, 1896-7 and 1906-7) in South Africa was dominated by a particular crisis in the mining sec-tor, the first a crisis of technology, the second a crisis of capital, and the third a crisis of labour, linked partly to a crisis in technology. Each had a political element, and each was also related to develop-ments and processes in other parts of the world. Complicating the pic-ture is the fact that each of these crises appeared, initially, in the guise of another.

Reading and rereading the Cash Book allows one to recover some of the elements that have otherwise vanished in the mythic history of the gold mines as the foundation of the nation, and to thereby escape the illusions in which crises attired themselves. What was common sense at the time now seems mys-terious or improbable, or simply forgettable. So we must rediscover the ordinary, to borrow a phrase from Njabulo Ndebele1. It is a task not unlike that of redisovering the comet named Holmes, which van-ished from earthly vision in the year of the Cash Book, 1906. Comet was the name of an ERPM mine, and like all comets, it enters and departs the horizon of visibility only periodically, leaving mere dust in its wake. But, then, dust is the stuff of history and the archivist’s purest element.

1. Njabulo Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994 [1991].

Accounts and Drawings from Underground

This is an extract from the book Accounts and Drawings from Underground: East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, 1906 by William Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris, published by Seagull Books , Calcutta


The lobby of the Mercure Hotel, Kassel, Germany, June 5, 2012, 6:43pm. MEg KoERNER

The Refusal of Time, now on view at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, premiered at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012. It has since

been presented in many museums around the world, from the Metro-politan Museum in New York to EMMA in Finland and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paolo in Brazil.

The installation is essentially the same in each venue: Five black and white films run simultaneously on three walls of a large rectangular space. At one end, the “elephant,” or “breathing machine” — a monumen-tal, accordion-like automaton — pumps continuously. Silver mega-phones broadcast music and voices from each corner of the room. The music and soundscape is by Philip Miller, editing by Catherine Mey-burgh, and choreography by Dada Masilo; Peter Galison was drama-turge. The breathing machine was designed and made by Sabine Theunissen and Jonas Lundquist.

Give us back our sun What inspired you to work together?

Peter galison: We were both fas-cinated by this late nineteenth-cen-tury moment when technologies hadn’t sunk their structure into chips and black boxes. We were in-terested in the notion of embodied ideas, of abstract things worked out in the material world.

William Kentridge: There are certain objects I have come to as someone making drawings, objects that meet the drawing half way. If you take an old Bakelite telephone, its blackness is already half way to being a charcoal drawing. There is a set of associations that come from old, manual, mechanical switch-board telephones: if you think of a switchboard, there is a cord that would connect the caller and the re-ceiver, and the representation of it looks like a black line drawn across the holes of the switchboard. In my case, of drawing and animation, something that is now perhaps in-visible — connecting people across phone lines across continents — is rendered in a very visible way, and may even be a description of an ob-solete process. Even if one is talking about contemporary phenomena, very often an older representation is a better way of drawing it.

Pg: Another theme that pervades our work before we were collaborat-ing and something we were deter-mined to look at together was the colonial moment in the late 19th century. Even the idea of the colo-nial powers stringing these cables across the globe — at a moment when they didn’t have electric lights, they were creating a machine that literally encircled the earth,

that went across the oceans and up into the mountains to try to send signals to coordinate clocks. There was something tremendously mov-ing and disturbing about this.

WK: For me it was also a question of what is it in us that so natural-ises, as if it has always been there, a hundred year history of coordi-nated time zones? When you talk about a resistance like “give us back our sun”, it is not that if you had your noon three minutes different than Paris you would suddenly be a liberated person, but the assump-tion of that structure as a given was a surprise.

Telling storiesYour work on The Refusal of Time spanned a few years, meeting often in New York, then later also with other collaborators in Johannes burg. How did it work?

Pg: We would trade stories back and forth.

WK: I’ll tell you a story. A German scientist, Felix Eberty, finding that the speed of light was fixed and was not instantaneous, worked out that everything that had been seen on earth was moving out from earth at

the speed of light. Instead of hav-ing space as a vacuum, he described it as suffused with images of every-thing that had happened on earth. So, if you were 2000 light years away, in his terms you could see the Crucifixion, or if you were 500 light years away, you could see Dürer making his Melencolia print. I was intrigued with that, with the idea of this archive of images that was spreading out into a space now filled with images.

Pg: Another story was about the enormous problem that had been

holding Einstein up from finishing the theory of relativity: how to synchronise clocks. When people are doing the most abstract kind of thinking, they are actually hands in the dirt, doing something very practical.

WK: And it is more than that. It is not that people who are doing abstract things need to find a meta-phor to explain them to lesser mortals who can’t have that degree of abstract clarity. It is from the metaphors, from the imperfect metaphors, that the ideas emerge which become the basis of the rigorous abstract science as well.

Pg: For example, there was a sys-tem of pumping time pneumatical-ly under the streets of Paris. Air was the most efficient way to jar a clock at a distance, to advance by a min-ute, to set itself. We think of time as the most abstract thing, connected to mortality and fate, and yet here it is being pumped and marketed underneath the streets of Paris.

So he tells you that story...WK: So he tells me that story and

I think, right, in Kassel, there was the famous Joseph Beuys honey pump, where he pumps honey

around Kassel as an idea of social cohesion, I think that was his meta-phor, so I thought let’s have a literal pump, we’ll have a compressor and we are going to pump compressed air, and we are going to send it into two tubas...

The elephant in the room WK: The “elephant” comes from

Dickens’ Hard Times, where he talks about the industrial machines in the factory in the 19th century. He talks about them “moving up and down, like the movement of the head of an

elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” Endlessly just moving up and down. It has to do with that relentless nature of what industrial society is.

Even though you don’t spell out what your work means, you are willing to say, here is every-thing that I do, this is what motivates me... You have been circling around an answer to: Why become an artist? And even, what is the meaning of life?

WK: The main thing I have always thought about, that I forgot to talk about, was Freudian repression. Can’t have been just by chance.

What was it — what Freudian repression did you forget to talk about?

WK: About what it is, what is this manic need to circle round and round the studio forever? To be working and making? I always used to know what it was about and I had forgotten about it. It is about trying to keep this massive depression away, it is about this black darkness descending.

Confronting the black holeIt is oddly comforting, isn’t it, if time is only a construct? Because it is all about avoiding death, right? Is that what this piece is about?

WK: It ends up there. It starts with: is a black hole the end of time? But as soon as you start saying, right, well let’s start having things disappear into a black hole, it is an immediate jump to that being, as it were, a metaphorical description of death. Is any trace left when you are gone? Is there any information, attributes of you that still float around the edge? What is the balance between the finality of death and the continuation of attri-butes of people afterwards?

Pg: One of the debates of modern physics is whether information dis-appears in a black hole….There is a giant black hole in the middle of our galaxy, and eventually everything will end up in it. Will there be some-thing left? The side that wants to

believe there is something left be-hind seems to have won, because of the development of string theory. It means that all of the information that falls into that hole would leave something on the surface — a kind of holographic image of the thing that had fallen into it. If that is so, then some trace of memory remains. We can’t live forever, but the idea that there might be some trace, some little thing, coded information at the quantum level that survives, I think is what made that debate so passionate among physicists.

It is like they are fighting for their lives.

Pg: They are fighting for their existence, they are fighting against the absoluteness of death.

WK: So that became clear, that one of the elements of the project was black holes, and there was a pro-cession going into the black hole...

You’re in it, right?WK: I am in it, eating soup.

mind the GapWK: The ecstatic moment with

Dada [Masilo] dancing — which in some ways is the moment of suc-cess of the resistance to time: time is going backwards, the papers are going, there is a suspension — came from not having worked it out in advance, but having allowed the material, in this case the costume, the materials at hand, to take a part in it, to provoke, to suggest, to allow ideas to unfold.

You resist the notion of absolute knowledge — for you there is no room for the idea “you are either with us or against us.” You like to bring attention to the grey area...

WK: Yes. If you make a perfect translation of something — you understand what each word means from German to English, and you can say, it is fine, it is efficient. But there is not a provocation from you as the reader to make any leaps or jumps to try to fill in the gaps. It is in those leaps and jumps where we feel our human energy of making sense of the world.

The Refusal of TimeAn interview with Peter Galison and William Kentridge


WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: THREE PROJECTS IN JOHANNESBURG

THE REfUSAL Of TIMEA collaboration with Philip Miller, Catherine Meyburgh, Dada Masilo and Peter Galison

DRAWINGS: EAST RAND PROPRIETARy MINES CASH BOOK

TAPESTRIESA collaboration with the Stephens Tapestry Studio

Johannesburg Art Gallery

Opening 9 November 2014 at 16h00Closes 1 february 2015

Goodman Gallery Johannesburg

Opening 15 November 2014 at 11h00 Closes 20 December 2015

Attend a conversation between Rosalind C Morris and William Kentridge followed by the launch of their book Accounts and Drawings from Underground: East Rand Pro-prietary Mines Cash Book, 1906 on 15 November at 16h00.

Gallery Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10h00 to 17h00King George St, between Wolmarans & Noord St, Joubert Park, JohannesburgP +27 (0)11 725 3130/80/52f +27 (0)11 720 [email protected]

Gallery Hours: Tuesday to friday, 09h30 to 17h30Saturday, 09h30 to 16h00163 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood, JohannesburgP +27 (0)11 788 1113f +27 (0)11 788 [email protected], www.goodman-gallery.com

Wits Art Museum

Opening 18 November 2014 at 18h00 for 18h30Closes 15 December 2014

RSVP: [email protected]

Museum Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 10h00 to 16h00Cnr of Bertha (Ext of Jan Smuts Ave) and Jorissen Streets Braamfontein, JohannesburgP +27 (0)11 717 [email protected]/wam

wits art museum will host an exhibition of approxi-mately 20 tapestries and related work, marking 24 years of collaboration between william kentridge and the weaving studio of marguerite stephens. the tapestries are created by stephens and weavers from swaziland. making the tapestries entails translating drawings of modest scale to the expansive dimensions of these wall hangings, which could be seen either as a form of permanent projection or a mural which can be rolled up and put under one’s arm.

the transformation from collage drawings is reached via thousands of decisions about each pixel — each line of warp and weft is a deci-sion about which colour sits next to the one that came before it and which one follows it — a slow accumu-lation of the image into the materials of weaving.

porter series: nord-polar karte, 2003-5, tapestry

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