William Kentridge: That Which I Have Drawn

To begin In preparation for these lectures, I made a list of projects, drawings, films, installations and performances I could use as the spine of these talks—each lecture having a project, to be used both as a reference to what I was talking about, and also as raw material with which to think. Thinking in cardboard, or breath, or ink, or charcoal, or gesture. I wrote down all the projects I’ve done over the last ten years. But then the list expanded from a list of specific films and installations and theatre productions to a larger list of all the things I had drawn in my forty-seven years in the studio. I have drawn: AN ACACIA TREE, A PAPINO, TWO LOVERS, A PINSTRIPED SUIT, A MAN IN A PINSTRIPED SUIT, A COFFEE-POT, ANOTHER COFFEE-POT, THIRTY-EIGHT RHINOCERI. A list many pages long. A self-portrait in the third person One can make a self-portrait out of these objects, these drawings, everything that emerges in pencil or charcoal; or rather one can’t escape these being a self-portrait of the longue durée, in the way the books you have read also become one’s biography; the shelves with particular, familiar volumes being another kind of likeness. One is aware of the shelves filled with the books one has read, the books one always means to read, and the ever-larger collection of books one knows one will never read, but one still wants on the shelves. There is the visual memory of the shelves of books, but also an intimation of the weight, the heft of all the words in them. I am skeptical of Kindle-reading, or reading on screens, and writing, too. The changeability of the screens makes me mistrust them. I mistrust the slipperiness of the screen, because the slipperiness of a screen becomes a slippage of memory. Marginal notes don’t find a purchase, the way they do in a book. A phrase a third of the way down the left-hand page, three-fifths of the way through the book—these disappear on the screen. I also mistrust what I write on a screen. I write these notes with a fountain pen. It is more difficult to escape your own stupidity or confront it. (Much of this series of lectures will be trying to find a defense of this evident stupidity.) If one can make a biography out of what one has drawn, one can also make a negative biography, a description of the self by everything that is outside it, by that which has not been drawn. More about the fountain pen: it pushes thinking farther up the arm, not just your knuckles working on a keyboard; at least an elbow, a change of pressure that comes from the shoulder. The possibility of uncertain thought, where the speed of the pen outruns the fine control in the effort to write as fast as one thinks, and one gains a productive illegibility. Did I write, SIGHS OF REPENTANCE or SIGNS OF REPENTANCE? MAYHEM AND SLAUGHTER may also be MAYHEM AND LAUGHTER. But if one can make a biography out of what one has drawn, one can also make a negative biography, a description of the self by everything that is outside it, by that which has not been drawn. That which I have drawn: AN ANGEL WRITING, A CROWD IN A LANDSCAPE, A COW IN THE WAVES, A TAPE RECORDER, THE UNION BUILDINGS IN PRETORIA, ANOTHER RHINOCEROS, A CHAISE LONGUE, A SIDE OF BEEF, MARCUS AURELIUS AND A GARIBALDI, THE FALLS OF AN AFRICAN RIVER. That which I have not drawn: THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND, A PHOTOSTAT MACHINE, A BEEF WELLINGTON, DON BRADMAN, A FULL ENGLISH BREAKFAST, A SPANISH GALLEON, A WEIMARANER, AN ELECTRIC TOASTER, THE MOONS OF SATURN. I’ve never drawn a hippopotamus—in fact I realize I have. I’ve never drawn sunrise over Cairo. But I have drawn: AN IRIS, A MAN ON A BICYCLE, A TELEPHONE EXCHANGE, A BOWL OF PEONIES, A MINE HEADGEAR, A ROMAN QUINQUEREME, A TOAST RACK, A WILDEBEEST, AN AMPERSAND, THE WORLD ON ITS HIND LEGS, MY WIFE IN THE BATH, GOETHE IN ITALY. I have not drawn: WAGNER…IN FACT, I HAVE DRAWN WAGNER, A COACH-AND-FOUR, THE YORKSHIRE MOORS, EMMA, LADY HAMILTON, YORKSHIRE PUDDING AND ROAST BEEF, THE JOHANNESBURG CITY HALL, KENNETH KAUNDA, A RHODODENDRON, A MASS SPECTROMETER, A GRAPEFRUIT. What is of us, and what is not? Where to find our edge? This is another theme of these talks: What is me and what is the world beyond me? And particularly, what are the negotiations that happen at this border, the meeting point where the world comes towards us, and we go out to meet it? In this regard, we can think of a drawing as a membrane, a vibrating tympanum. On one side, the world comes onto the membrane. I draw a tree. The world comes towards us with this tree. And at the same time, we project onto it not just all the trees inside us, but all the associations that the image of a tree throws up: memories of specific trees, the mulberry tree in my childhood garden, the two white stinkwoods planted in expectation of the hammock that would one day hang between them. And other less immediate associations: shade, fallen leaves, strange fruit hanging, three trees on a hilltop. The shade of a family tree Let us look at a tree: an oak, say (though I have not drawn an oak tree, I have drawn many oak leaves)—a very English tree for someone coming from Johannesburg, where our indigenous trees are generally short and spiky. The green of a great oak tree. These trees are enticing, unbelievably enticing, the green of deciduous trees, of European deciduous trees. I realize that since this lecture was written I have drawn oak trees. The Quercus alba that is the tree of Orpheus (this for a production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo), but also English oak trees in Johannesburg—all of which are dying because of an infestation of shot-borer beetle. One by one the great trees are killed, the suburban greenness collapsing. When I was seven or eight, we went on a family picnic for my sister’s birthday to a pleasure resort outside Johannesburg, Henley-on-Klip—a rare short stretch of river with willow trees, reeds, the rowing boat, an afternoon messing about in a boat. There were boiled eggs. There was salt in twists of wax paper. My father’s sleeves rolled up at the oars of the rowing boat. My mother spitting cherry pips with me and my sister. The deep reverberating pleasure (a memory sixty years old) was not just the water, the dappled light, the cosy domesticity of the family, of the rowing boat, but also a sense of rightness. This was how it was meant to be. My grandfather on my mother’s side had given me a book (Great Landscapes) in which there was an image of a painting by John Constable. Huge shady trees, a river, dappled light. This is where we were, in this painting of Constable, in this English idyll of rivers, trees, shade; in “this other Eden”; “this sceptred isle,” “this green and pleasant land.” (The chronology is out; the book came after the picnic, but the later book also constructs the memory of the earlier event.) How did we get there? Goose My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a chazzan in the synagogue (and I presume his father, too). His name was Woolf Kantorovich. He came from Lithuania to South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, around the time of the South African War, fought by the English to gain control of the immensely rich gold fields of Johannesburg. Most Jews in South Africa came from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia—escaping pogroms and the restrictions on their lives imposed by Czarist Russia, and attracted to South Africa by reports of newfound wealth. They also hoped to find a place where Jews would not be the lowest rung of the social ladder. In 1908, his son—my grandfather, my father’s father—went into politics. And so, to help him, the Reverend Kantorovich from Lithuania changed his name to this very English-sounding “Kentridge.” It wasn’t that Judaism or Jewishness was expunged. I had a secular Jewish childhood—holidays celebrated, a Bris, a Bar Mitzvah. But it was that I was bifurcated: the Jewishness circling the Englishness, or the Englishness circling the Jewishness. Some years ago, I read a report of an Elizabethan English cookbook in which it sp…

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William Kentridge: That Which I Have Drawn