Portrait with Keys
by Ivan Vladislavic
(Umuzi)
Portrait with Keys is an exercise in cut-up, a chronicle of the alarmed city that is Johannesburg. Its keynotes are alarms, keys, locks, books, memories, memorabilia and walks — and to each of these constituents of life in the metropolis, Vladislavic brings his characteristic wryness of reflection and acuity of insight.
Cast in 138 pieces of text, self–contained but part of a running narrative, commentary and thesis, the book offers 138 propositions on its subtitle: Joburg & what-what. In that, it brings to mind, startlingly, the brilliance of Guy Debord, who most certainly would have appreciated Vladislavic’s philosophic and usefully solipsistic ruminations on Johannesburg, and being and living there.
Debord (1931 to 1994) was the theoretician behind the now commonplace phrase “the society of the spectacle“. Published in November 1967 in Paris, The Society of the Spectacle offered 221 theses critiquing the alienation and commodification of consumer capitalism. Six months later, those theses were the chief articles of faith sparking and sustaining the events of May 1968 in France and the worldwide student-led revolts of that miraculous month.
Portrait with Keys will not spark such upheaval but it will undoubtedly lead to a revaluation of what it means to be in Jo’burg. It offers thoughts on how change has brought both alienation and accommodation to the citizens and denizens of Jo’burg — or, more specifically, to the eastern quarters of the city, Kensington and Troyeville, which are Vladislavic’s stamping grounds.
He stomps around a good deal, detailing some favourite routes. There are his perambulations down Kitchener Avenue, accumulating telling detail of social change and survival mechanisms. There is his insistent interrogation of life on the street as well as the shattering denouement of life encountered below the crumbling pavements.
As intellectuals carefully devising means of understanding the world, it is always illuminating to watch Vladislavic and Debord at work. For Debord it was, as he put it, “the study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”. Debord developed and elaborated his theory through a search for what he called “The ‘North-West Passage’ of the geography of real life”. That psychogeographic passageway ran as a systematic drift through the city past and present: a dérive, as Debord’s Lettrist International (LI) called it.
The dérive was a surrender to the promise of the city, a willingness to be diverted by it: real-life detours in the footsteps of which would follow Debord’s elegant, precise prose that had been deliberately reworked, re-imagined and rethought, to emerge utterly revivified. Even the most casual reading of Vladislavic’s 138 texts will discern many of the same effects. Vladislavic is always willing to seek what underlies the banal, the profound, the inexplicable. He gives himself over to the potential, mysteries and miseries of Jo’burg. The discomfort of personal relationships in this city is articulated in his failed acquaintance with a supermarket security guard. Elsewhere, he finds books abandoned on the pavement, or in animal welfare shops; he is ever alert to the diversions that might lie in a pile of rubbish, and to what that might tell about Jo’burg.
Of all the passageways Vladislavic discovers on his real-life detours, perhaps none is as telling as the unlocked door leading from the Harry Hofmeyer underground parking garage into the subterranean heart of the Johannesburg Public Library. For once in the book, there are no alarms, no keys and no security. Perhaps the doors of learning are indeed open to all.
And there is more. Isidore Isou of the Letterists, forerunners to the LI, invented the collage-like genre of détournement, in which existing materials are cut up and put together to create an entirely new work. This is part of what Vladislavic does. Among others, his esteemed tale of the gorilla lock intersperses the narrative, as do accounts of the portent of keys (see, for example, the extract on this page), and the comfort — if not always the safety — of objects. House alarms, for instance, yield only ambiguous comfort: one is safe only when they do not go off.
The sense of people and place in Vladislavic’s finest work — The Restless Supermarket and The Exploded View, for instance — are evidence of personal witness and reflection. In Portrait with Keys, those are at their starkest, but at times also their most playful: what Vladislavic offers is a truly exploded view, and a post-mortem of the effects of such blasts (the book’s cover is key, too, showing the implosion of Van Eck House in 1983).
Vladislavic is the poet of social change in Jo’burg, showing in minutely considered detail the effects of transformation on individuals. In The Restless Supermarket, such passageways to comprehension are hewn by the novel’s proofreader protagonist — anti-hero, really — Aubrey Tearle. Distinctly disgruntled, Tearle is the obverse of Vladislavic the narrator and chronicler of Portrait with Keys, for Vladislavic here is determinedly gruntled. His drift through Jo’burg bestows on him, and his readers, the insight that “we will never be ourselves anywhere else”.
Portrait with K eys: An extract
# 84
“Do you mind if I take a picture of your keys?” the journalist from Sweden asks.
We are chatting in the garden, under the pagoda tree, and the bunch is lying on the table between us. The table top is sprinkled with soft, pale blossoms like tiny dropped handkerchiefs.
“Not at all.”
She aims the camera, stands up into a better angle, wrings the lens and presses the shutter. So much for the candid shot, now for something posed. She jangles the keys at arm’s length, as if shaking water off them, puts them down again near an edge where the blossoms are thickest. Shifts the foot of a wine glass into the frame, then out again.
“Such enormous collections of keys! I’ve never seen anything like it. In Sweden, only a janitor would need this.”
A tribe of turnkeys.
“I think I’ve got four keys on my ring at home — and that includes the bicycle lock.You’ve got dozens here.” She fans them out with her forefinger, flips over the immobilizer jack for the car, takes another shot. They shame me now, lying there like the keys to my psyche, a feeler gauge for every insecurity. “How do you keep track of them all?”
The first principle of key management is to separate working groups on interlocking rings. Coming and going through the front: streetdoor deadlock,Yale, security gate (outside), front-door deadlock, Yale. Coming and going through the back: back-gate padlock, back-door deadlock,Yale, security gate (inside). Coming and going by car: garage door, car door, steering lock, immobilizer, ignition. Miscellaneous: window lock, cellar door, postbox.
I have threaded them onto the rings with their profiles facing in the same direction, like a dressed file of soldiers. Their noses and chins are familiar to my fingertips, I can find them in the dark.
“Only seventeen, by the way.” I’ve been totting them up in my head.
“Well, that’s not too bad then,” she says.
# 85
Genpei Akasegawa’s most beautiful sculpture is A Collection of End Bits of Lead from a Mechanical Pencil, a small and delicate china bowl containing a frittering of pencil leads, none of them more than five millimetres long. These are the stubs that were too short to be gripped by the mechanism of the propelling pencil with which he draws and so had to be ejected. If you look closely you can see — or imagine — the flat edge at one end and the rounded edge at the other where the lead pressed against the paper, a contour that captures the size of the hand that held the pencil, the strokes it preferred to make, its chosen paths across the page, unique as a brush stroke. What this bowl of leavings represents is time spent, work done, measured against an insignificant deficit.
(Of course, I cannot be sure that this sculpture is evidence of an actual process. It is presented as the accumulated labour of years, but it may have been manufactured in ten minutes, which is all you would need to snap ten cases of unused pencil leads into fragments. I take the artist at his word.)
This sculpture could be a companion to my own Autobiography, and that may be a good part of its appeal, for nothing is more pleasing than the echo of one’s own voice, even if it is no longer clear which is the voice and which the echo. Autobiography is a shallow wooden box resembling a picture frame, containing 392 pencil stubs (at the last count). The pencils that these stubs commemorate were used and sharpened down to nine or ten centimetres, and then inserted in a pencil extender made from a joint of bamboo that grows outside my window, and used and sharpened again until there was nothing left for the sharpener to pare. None of the stubs is more than two and a half centimetres long. If you look through the glass front of the box, the stubs form a layer ten centimetres deep, like the leaves and twigs fallen beneath a tree in the woods. Ten years of tinder. Shake the box and you will see the different colours of the shafts. The six-sided barrel of a pencil lends itself to stripes, and so you will see dog-ends of red and black mainly, the ubiquitous Staedtler, but also blue and and gold Faber-Castell and solid green government issue. There is very little lettering left, most of it scoured off in the sharpening, just here and there an “astell” or an “HB” at the chewable end of the stub.