Artist William Kentridge’s solo retrospective at Cape Town’s South African National Gallery has somewhat removed his early subject matter from its original habitat — the industrial wastelands of the Highveld.
The retrospective is accompanied by a United States-produced catalogue simply called William Kentridge (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago). Reading the catalogue, written by major US art critics, one becomes aware of just how central Johannesburg is to the work of the artist.
But Kentridge is more than just a product of the city. Today he is the country’s major fine art export. But what is it that Kentridge is conveying? From his studio in Houghton there emanates a steady flow of flickering animations created in charcoal.
In the German documentary Drawing the Passing (David Krut Publishing), directed by Maria Ann Tappeiner and Reinhard Wulf, one gets a good look at Kentridge’s painstaking process. This entails an almost obsessive system of sketching, shooting a frame of film, rubbing out and re-sketching. In the documentary he notes that it takes four to six months to shoot four to nine minutes of animation.
This holiday the Cape celebrates no fewer than three showings of Kentridge’s works. While the exhibitions at the South African National Gallery and at the South African Jewish Museum will focus on his drawing and animation, the Spier Summer Arts Festival will show Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company’s Confessions of Zeno. With music by Kevin Volans and a libretto by Kentridge favourite Jane Taylor, according to press releases the production “explores the worlds of work and erotic pleasure that sustained the lives of the modern European bourgeoisie in the years before the outbreak of World War I”.
So, international conflict and the fall of the gentry are issues dealt with in Kentridge’s most recent work. They are historical issues not too distant from those being dealt with on the political stage of the world, today.
I was wondering about the big question, of whether September 11 changed your working life?
No. I don’t think so. September 11 does mark a different period in the way politics is done in the world — making the bourgeoisie at risk everywhere they are. That is something that will slowly come to have sense. But as Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher, said — one has to take the single line if one wants to understand September 11.
It comes from [the movie] Matrix in which one guy says: “Welcome to the desert of the real.”
But then surely you would argue that you have always been living in the “desert of the real”.
It’s not a sudden, new thought. Americans suddenly felt vulnerable. People who were middle class suddenly felt vulnerable. South Africans understand they are vulnerable; it’s not a new thought to us.
But culturally, haven’t we started to employ a different language since September 11?
I don’t see how that in itself makes for a new language or demands a new language.
Are you still putting apartheid to death? Are you still working within the idiom of apartheid?
I don’t think so. I don’t know if there is a specific idiom of apartheid. Don’t forget that Zeno came out of South Africa and it was obviously shaped and formed by this. The major experience of this was of apartheid. But there are other ones — 300, or 5 000 years of a particular history, I’m sure. I’m sure that there will be work that comes out of here, out of the immediate politics and social conditions now. But whether apartheid is a necessary word for describing it …
Well, colonialism? The signifiers are colonial, told from a postcolonial perspective.
The way of drawing?
The sense of repulsion.
That may well be there but that was not the idea. The idea was to work with Trieste in 1914, the beginning of World War I. Of course since it’s done and been seen in America the sense is, “Oh God this is about the war in Iraq!” — that’s about to happen. The one thing I’m very aware of, that I’ve become more and more aware of is the way in which, when we look at anything, we meet it halfway. That it’s our own anticipation. We are programmed to recognise things and we recognise things that we are already thinking about and already know. We bring a lot of ourselves to things we look at — at any object, in terms of what it reminds us.
Then my question would be: don’t you tend to wallow in a kind of nostalgia?
You mean, for objects taken from the past? One has to look at specific cases and specific things. The music is old music. Some of it is music written now. But some of it is old music. So in Zeno there is a piece of an Italian folk song from the 1920s. So it does have a reference to a different type of music from a different era. There are a lot of objects that are old, outmoded objects. So there is nostalgia.
There is nostalgia in the drawing back towards childhood, in what it used to be, for me. There are a lot of touchstones that come from a very early stage which are talismanic objects.
But there are two other points. The one is about objects that call to be drawn. There’s something about Bakelite and charcoal that meet halfway. But there’s also something about a manual switchboard — connecting wires of a manual switchboard — that makes visible what now happens through invisible processes of transistors and cellphones.
So, let’s put it this way: are you nostalgic for apartheid? Or, rather, are you nostalgic for anti-apartheid?
No. I don’t think that without apartheid I’m suddenly stuck without subject matter. If you take the political possibilities of transformation in the world — if you took that out then I’d be kind of dry-mouthed. Then there would be a sense of an important part of what I’m interested in disappearing. In Zeno, for example, which is the story of bourgeoisie anxiety — he is giving up smoking — is his father going to die? Is he going to marry the right woman? How does he resolve the relationship with his wife and his mistress?
It ends with the outbreak of World War I, which does two things. And this is why I think that the politics is important: On the one hand that gives the context and scale to the bourgeoisie anxiety, the petty bourgeoisie anxiety. Now you’ve got these concerns and the whole world’s exploding.
But on the other hand the whole of World War I is also a metaphor for the war inside him. He himself, kind of, can swallow that war. So the sense in which the outside world and the large questions can get incorporated would be a way of describing the small battles we all have.
So for example in South Africa we are struck with the phenomenon of the extraordinary amount of premature mortality. People dying long
before assumptions of what it means to be alive get reached. People die in their 20s, people die when they’re young. Is that about apartheid? Apartheid may well have a play in the shape of what has happened, but the questions of how one deals with this different sense of mortality — death in its current form in South Africa —seem to be interesting. And it’s more interesting than whether it is or isn’t about apartheid.
Well the president seems to think it is about apartheid.
Well it may be. But that argument isn’t an apartheid question or a post-apartheid question. Or pre- and post-colonial rather than apartheid question. It doesn’t interest me as much as trying to grapple with that phenomenon — to find out how one would picture it. At the moment you’re having the success you are. One often sees your name next to that of Marlene Dumas when South African art comes up.
But is the perception correct that Africans are still the B team? Even given the success of Okwi Enwezor?
We may be the B team but we have to remember that there’s a C, D, and F team also.
So we are the B team?
Well. We’re not a team in so far as if they have an exhibition from Africa it gets designated as a particular geographic thing rather than art of this tendency or that tendency in the world.
And when you sell — don’t you get B team prices?
I don’t think so. I mean, the prices are outrageously high.
Are you prepared to be a wanker like Damien Hirst and tell us the highest price you’ve got for a work — like a million for his anatomical model?
No. No. It’s not on that scale.
So you don’t think that in the market of world art it is considered that, “he comes from that place so we don’t have to pay this kind of money for it?” When you say “no” are you being self-deprecating?
No, the anomalies of the art market have an an illogical irrationality. In the case of Damien Hirst, or young British artists, there’s an extraordinary, particular hype — in English institutions like the Saatchis, wanting to pay enormous sums for them.
Doesn’t that say something? That they don’t have the same attitude towards art that doesn’t come from their place?
In Britain I would say that’s the case. In America and in parts of New York, certainly in the galleries I’ve had work in, in New York, there are a lot of artists from a lot of parts of the world in that gallery. In the Marian Goodman Gallery. In no possible sense is it a B Team gallery. It’s possibly the leading gallery in New York —from Gerhard Richter outwards.
So do they give you an apartment in New York?
No, they sell the work and give me my percentage of it.
So what are you doing in New York at the moment?
I’m giving my children an opportunity of spending six months in a calm, rational city.
Is New York calm and rational?
Compared to Johannesburg! The public transport works, their parks work, there are public spaces. It’s not a life determined by the shopping mall and your own garden.
So you’re not on a formal fellowship?
I’m connected to Columbia University but that’s just because I wanted to spend six months in New York and this is a way of doing it.
What does “connected” mean?
I’m an artist in residence — they give me a studio and I talk to students about what I’m doing.
Every day?
No, once.
Has Enwezor changed the way of thinking; broken barriers down?
I think he did that more in terms of African art with the Johannesburg Biennale that he curated than with Documenta. That was a big breakthrough for a number of artists and I also benefited from the first Johannesburg Biennale. In fact a number of South African artists benefited — not from Okwi’s inclusion but from the number of curators that came to see what he was doing here. So I’m one of maybe seven or eight local artists who are doing just fine overseas.
In New York at the moment Claudette Schreuders has an exhibition that just opened, Karel Nel’s got one, Simon Stone had a big show in London.
So what is the status of art from Africa?
I think there are tiny corners of what we could consider contemporary art from parts of Africa. But the whole structure has to do with schools, with artists, with people who want to buy it, with museums who want to show it, with an audience that wants to go to galleries. It does kind of feed itself when it reaches a critical mass. In New York on a Saturday it’s like the Rand Show — people walking around Chelsea seeing what’s on show.
You have just returned from watching the total eclipse. How was it for you?
I was up in a village [in the Kruger National Park] right in the very centre of the path of the eclipse. We caught glimpses of the sun, which was remarkable — seeing a shadow come in front of the sun.
But what was completely and utterly astonishing — it didn’t matter that it was overcast — was the way that in about two seconds, or in half a second it goes from an afternoon twilight light, such as you would have had here, to a pitch dark night.
Did you feel insignificant, like a speck in the universe?
No I kind of had a sense the night before as we watched the sunset it was a bit like, the sun’s going down tonight and it has no idea what a big klap is in store for it the next morning.
The William Kentridge show at the South African National Gallery runs until March 23. A selection of his drawings runs at the South African Jewish Museum until mid-February. Confessions of Zeno shows at the Spier Summer Arts Festival on February 6, 7 and 8.