This document provides biographical information about South African artist William Kentridge and discusses three of his projects in Johannesburg: 1) A 1978 mural he painted with friends in Bertrams, Johannesburg which depicted figures and was discussed in an anti-apartheid book. 2) Two books he collaborated on with anthropologist Rosalind Morris that explore ambiguity in his work. 3) His upcoming film project "Danse Macabre" which will premiere in Amsterdam and incorporates music by a brass band from Sebokeng. The document also discusses Kentridge's optimism about South Africa's future and commitment to politically engaged art.

1. November 2014 ADVERTISEMENT
DrawingsmadeforthefilmSecond-handReading,2013,andusedinthebook2ndHandReading,publishedbyFourthwallBooks,2014
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE
THREE PROJECTS IN
JOHANNESBURG

2. 2 ADVERTISEMENT November 2014 William Kentridge Three Projects in Johannesburg
Sean O’Toole
‘O
h my god,where did you
find that?” exclaims
William 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
shirtlessinthephoto; hehas asvelte
physiqueandblackhair.Stillapaint-
ing student under Bill Ainslie at the
Johannesburg Art Foundation, the
photo shows him staring intently at
a man while drawing his form in
blacklinesontoawhitegaragewall.
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

3. 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 Muizen­berg wearing a black
­Homburg­hat and a three-piece,
pinstriped suit. Of interest, the art-
ist’s first known print, a linocut
made in 1976, re­creates 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
sound­track 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
Nun­nery, 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
aboutourworkcomeaftertheevent.”
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 Diary
November 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 Metro­politan 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

4. 4 ADVERTISEMENT November 2014 William Kentridge Three Projects in Johannesburg
A
bout ten months ago, I
telephoned my father
to say that I had been
invited to deliver this
seriesoflectures.
‘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 STUPIDITY
FINDING THE DRAWING TWICE
GEOLOGICAL AUTOCHTHONY
I added them to drawings I was
making.
AGAINST ARGUMENT (BUT
NOT THIS ONE)
A UNIVERSAL ARCHIVE
LESSONS FROM TYPEWRITERS
DIALECTICS FOR 9 YEAR-OLDS
THE OVER-DETERMINED IMAGE
A PRE-HISTORY OF RELATIVITY
THE FULL-STOP SWALLOWS
THE SENTENCE
I painted them in alizarin crim-
son watercolour, on pages of a 1735
Francis­can liturgical tract (I was in
Rome).
IN PRAISE OF MISTRANSLATION
MEETING THE WORLD HALFWAY
POEMS I USED TO KNOW
CIRCLING THE STUDIO
PICASSO ON SAFARI
VIVA LINOCUT VIVA!
WHAT I LEARNT AT SUPPER
TORSCHLUSSPANIK
Beating 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
madethirteenyearsago.The­section
I will show is approximately 5 min-
utes long.
[Show film SHADOW PROCESSION]
Concerning Shadows
Let us begin in 360 BCE. Here is
­Plato, writing in the voice of Socra-
tes, in his book The Republic.
[ExtractfromPlato’sRepublic(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
­b­eing 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 ­meta­­phors,
arethepivotalaxesofques­tionsboth
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 lessons
Drawing Lesson One
IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS

5. Three Projects in Johannesburg William Kentridge November 2014 ADVERTISEMENT 5
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
interro­gator’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 I
As 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-
tweenthewords—thedeviceswhich
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:
touch­­ing 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 con­nec­
tion can be discovered and ­dis­card­­-
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

6. 6 ADVERTISEMENT November 2014 William Kentridge Three Projects in Johannesburg
Excerpts from the text by
Rosalind C. Morris
B
efore 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
under­ground’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
Wit­watersrand 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

7. Three Projects in Johannesburg William Kentridge November 2014 ADVERTISEMENT 7
The lobby of the Mercure Hotel,
Kassel,Germany,June 5,2012,6:43pm.
Meg Koerner
T
he 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-
cinatedbythislatenineteenth-cen-
tury moment­when 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 stories
Your work on The Refusal of Time
spanned a few years, meeting
­often­in New York, then later
also with other collaborators in
Johannes­­burg. 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 hole
It 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 Gap
WK: 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 Time
An interview with Peter Galison and ­William Kentridge

8. 8 ADVERTISEMENT November 2014 William Kentridge Three Projects in Johannesburg
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: THREE PROJECTS IN JOHANNESBURG
The refusal of time
A collaboration with Philip Miller,
Catherine Meyburgh, Dada Masilo
and Peter Galison
Drawings: east rand
­proprietary mines
cash book
tapestries
A collaboration with the
Stephens Tapestry Studio
Johannesburg Art Gallery
Opening 9 November 2014 at 16h00
Closes 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 17h00
King George St, between Wolmarans & Noord St,
Joubert Park, Johannesburg
P +27 (0)11 725 3130/80/52
F +27 (0)11 720 6000
tinym@joburg.org.za
Gallery Hours: Tuesday to Friday, 09h30 to 17h30
Saturday, 09h30 to 16h00
163 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood, Johannesburg
P +27 (0)11 788 1113
F +27 (0)11 788 9887
jhb@goodman-gallery.com, www.goodman-gallery.com
Wits Art Museum
Opening 18 November 2014 at 18h00 for 18h30
Closes 15 December 2014
RSVP: nomasonto.baloyi@wits.ac.za
Museum Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 10h00 to 16h00
Cnr of Bertha (Ext of Jan Smuts Ave) and Jorissen Streets
Braamfontein, Johannesburg
P +27 (0)11 717 1365
info.wam@wits.ac.za
www.wits.ac.za/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