Interview: William Kentridge

William Kentridge: Fragments for Georges Méliès – Black Box / Chambre Noire at Malmö Konsthall

The exhibition is very impressive. How do you feel about this show?

I feel great. I feel a bit guilty because I had not realized that it was taking over the entire Konsthall. When it was done in Stockholm, it was just two rooms really – Black box and the other. So when I walked in, I thought that maybe I should have sent them some more work, but I love the generous spaces. I have only been here once before, but the Konsthall has a very strong reputation so I am happy to be part of the program. It also feels right because both pieces were made in Sweden; in that sense that 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès were made and first shown in Visby on Gotland, and Black Box was made with technicians from Stockholm physically right next to the Moderna Museet. So it kind of felt right.

William Kentridge: Journey to the Moon (still), 2003.

The title of 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès & Journey to the Moon alludes to the French film pioneer Georges Méliès (1861-1938) and in particular his film ‘Voyage dans la lune’ (1902). Can you tell more about your fascination of Méliès?

I first heard of him, just before I started the project, when someone sent me a DVD of his films. I thought, ‘How can I not have seen his films?’ I feel so close to the man. I understand the sensibility so well because the essential thing about Georges Méliès is that he was a film maker, but he was also the actor and the artist who painted the back drops. So his works are part of film, but also part of the tradition of the artist in the studio. What is it the artist does in his studio? What are the ridiculous activities one does day after day? His are the ridiculous activities of a stage conteur, but the strange activity of walking back and forwards in front of the walls in ones studio is how a lot of artists spend much of their time. So that was one point of contact. The second, was a very handsome obvious technology; done with extraordinary skill. I thought that I would simply copy some of the techniques that he used in his films - to make my films. But I actually could not match the physical dexterity and skill he had in working in the very crude cinematic medium. In one way the history of cinema is not a continuation of the history of photography as it is generally seen. It is a continuation of the history transformations; the performance of transformations. In the 19th century you would have had that in theatre sets, scenic effects, and in the vaudeville performances of stage magicians who could make someone, appear and disappear. That was the way in which Méliès would make his film as kind of a stage conteur. So his films were about transformation, and that is also very much what animation is also about: a drawing able to change from one object to another.

William Kentridge: Balancing Act (still), 2003.		William Kentridge: Balancing Act (still), 2003.		William Kentridge: Balancing Act (still), 2003.

Méliès’ film describes a journey into the unknown. Which role does the travel play in 7 Fragments?

The French film is about someone going to the colonies. The moon was like an African colony in Méliès’ film. In my case, I was not sure where I was going to go, but I discovered that the studio became my rocket ship, and I was never able to get out of that damn rocket ship - even if I wanted to get out. In the end it became like all the other fragments of me stuck in the studio. I ended up not going anywhere.

William Kentridge: Untitled (drawing for Black Box/Chambre Noire), 2005.

Photo: John Hodgkiss

Black Box/Chambre Noire was commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim

Africa and African colonial history seems to be the leitmotif in many of your other works like Black Box/Chambre Noire. Can you tell more about that?

It is not so much Africa in itself, but the weight of Europe on Africa that concerns me. How I am and so many aspects of South Africa are made out of this wait. It is sometimes positive, but very often destructive of Europe on Africa. The colonialism was very strong in the 19th century, but after the independence of the colonies in the 1960’ies Europe pretended not to have anything to do with Africa. However, it is coming back now. I think the question of the interconnectedness with Europe and the former colonies is still a very interesting one.

The work was commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim. How did you prepare?

The way these projects work is that you get an invitation to do a piece in the space in Berlin. What you are really given is the space and the opportunity to do what ever you have to do. So they certainly did not come and ask me to do a piece about German history. This was the piece that I wanted to do if it was shown in Berlin.

At the time you were working on another project?

Yes, I had been working on the ‘Magic Flute’ which is a piece that looks very much on the heyday of German enlightenment. Mozart wrote the opera in 1791 when the perfectibility of the word still seemed possible through rationality. Black Box looks on the other end of German enlightenment, of the project of bringing light into darkness, as the project of colonialism was described in itself. We will understand the destruction that this arrogance brought, the arrogance assuming that one knew what was best for everyone else, which is one of the arrogances of the enlightenment.

Do you find any parallels to this notion of enlightenment today?

In many parts of the world it is a combination of the assumption of all knowledge combined the monopoly for the power of violence. So if you decide that we know what is best for e.g. Iraq, we will impose it on them. In which case whatever the virtues of the original thought were, for instance democracy, if it is brought in the same arrogant way, if it was brought with the force of the rifle, with the front of a gun, all you are left with is violence. Whatever aims you may have had in some part of your mind disappear into the violence with which it was brought. It is the same with a lot of colonial history. There were a lot of people in different parts of the world who had the best hopes and wishes for the parts of the world they were colonizing, but the process itself and the arrogance implicit in the use of force in those colonies is in the end what is left. The damage done by this process is still very much what we live with today. So I think that the questions that Mozart’s opera asks in 1791 and that are present in German Southwest Africa in 1904 have not left and are still very much the questions that we have to deal with in 2007.

William Kentridge: Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2005.

The setting for Black Box is a mechanical theatre. The play is initiated by a megaphone coming onto the stage announcing a ‘Trauerarbeit’. Why Trauerarbeit?

I think the term, which is the Freudian term for the work of grief, is in a way saying, ‘what is the work needing to be done?’ in order to deal with not just the memory, but the legacy of the histories that have been played out in South Africa. In this case looking at Namibia, but in my own case talking about South Africa. Black Box is a way of looking one country across.

The question and process of reconciliation with the past is something that you have been dealing much with recently in South Africa for instance in the Truth Commission?

The country has been dealing with it, certainly. I have also worked with this subject in some theatre pieces and some of the films. But most of my work, including Black Box’, is a very practical work. It is not concerned with the big issues. What is the projection? How big does it need to be? Does this mechanical figure move and what is it moving like? In the hope that in the end the larger issues will be dealt with. So the work is around those larger issues, and the hope is that in the end they do get addressed by the peace, but the do not get addressed by me addressing this question directly.

So is it important to have an awareness of your history?

The central thing is to know if you are living in a world of static fact, or if you are living in a world of transformation. You can either see the world as a collection of facts, or you can understand all facts as being moments of the processes in transformation. Show me a fact, and I will show you one moment of something that is transformed from one thing to something else, whether it is a personality, a historical moment or a political circumstance or object in the room. I suppose animation even more than in film. Animation is a process of understanding the world not as facts, but as 25 frames a second. It is in its very nature provisional at all stages.

William Kentridge: Invisible Mending (still), 2003.

In your animations and many of your other works you mainly tend to use black, white, and a few other colours. Why have you chosen this aesthetic strategy?

Firstly, I have not chosen. It chose me in the sense that I started of at art school being a painter, and it was such an unbearable relief when I started doing etchings and found a form in which it was legitimate to not use colour. I found that I could think in a different way. I could work in a different way. From that I went back to drawing and found that drawing did not have to be a preparation for painting, the way it was thought of in the 1970’ies when I was doing this, but could be what I did. So it had to do not with a moral decision, or a decision about colours. It had to do with what materials I could think in, and what materials I was at sea with. And so it has largely been drawings and monochromatic media that have worked for me.

William Kentridge: Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2005.

In spite of the serious topics that you are dealing with for instance in Black Box you seem to have a playful approach to your work.

Yes, there is playfulness in the sense that most of the images arrive out of playing. Not starting with a problem and trying to solve it in a rational way, but starting with an impulse and allowing that impulse to reveal to you what the possibilities are within it. For example in Black Box there is the figure of a Herero woman in fact simply made out of a 19th century egg whisk which is a wire spring with a wooden handle used for beating cream or eggs. It simply has a cloth taped to it with masking tape and a little black silhouette torn out of black paper as a head. That is kind of a quick improvisation of a figure that can stand on the stage. The play is in seeing, what are the possibilities offered by the very minimal means. What happen if we move the figure quickly? What happens if we move the figure slowly, if it bends or if it moves in a hard way? What happen if it is slid from the back or the front? So in that sense it is allowing the object, which is being improvised, to show its possibilities. That is only possible if you do not start off with a clear sense of what is going to be; if you allow playfulness. Play is the word that you would generally use for defining the circumstance that you are half in control, but the game itself is half in control.

Can you tell more about this way of addressing the subject?

Yes, my experience is not to go to the subject directly, but to have a sense of the terrain in which it happens. But then to rely on all the things that you do not know, but you do know. All the things that you are not aware of knowing. That would primarily be through recognition. You may for example think, ‘what did Stalin look like?’ It is a hard thing to draw Stalin just from ones head. How big was his moustache? What was the shape of his head? Did he have a round nose or a square nose? Did his eye brown go flat or did they go up at the sides? It is hard to know that, but it is very easy to recognize. So there is a category of recognition that we have within us, which is obviously something that we know, but it is very different from describing analytically what that will be. So the strategy of work, the strategy of arriving at a subject, is allowing that category of recognition to flourish. You may not know how to make a Herero woman move slowly and weep over her lost family, but when the string slowly makes that spring move in slow motion with that piece of cloth; you recognize it and hold on to it. That is my strategy for work and explains why a lot of the work is done with very crude paper cut outs with very minimal schematic representations. You have some torn pieces of black paper, but when you move them frame by frame you absolutely see and recognize the activity of someone beating someone else. That is a good category for someone who does not have a good visual imagination. If you asked me draw somebody beating someone else, I would struggle, but I can recognize it when I am doing it with the torn pieces of paper.

Do you have any comments on what the contemporary art has to offer today?

The theme of contemporary art today is gigantic. There is conservative painting, traditional painting, figurative realists, conceptual work, the play of ideas, and the remarkably skilled manipulation of different media. I think that work that works best in whatever field – whether it is painting video or sculpture - is the work, which gives one a sense of energy and the possibility of making connections. Not to say that you automatically think, ‘oh, I could have done that,’ but the sense of saying, ‘yes, that is the way that I can understand the world being constructed.’ There is a lot of work that does do that. But it is often difficult to see it because of the noise around the art scene, which we obviously we are a part of, but not entirely responsible for. •