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February 98
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CE:
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Hello
William could you begin with an introduction to yourself and your work?
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WK:
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I
am an artist. I live in Johannesburg. All of my work is about Johannesburg
in one form or another. My schools -- university, art school, all
the training I had has been here in Johannesburg - apart from my
year in Paris. Thematically I suppose I work with what's in the
air, which is to say a mixture of personal questions and the broader
social questions. Questions this year, questions last year, responsibility,
retribution, recrimination, before issues of what histories are
hidden in the landscape. Often they're fairly broad questions but
generally they arrive through quite a personal or particular starting
point. |
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CE:
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What
mediums do you generally work with?
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WK:
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Well
everything is drawings. Sometimes the drawings are primarily charcoal
on paper, but (occasionally) the drawings are simply two dimensional
drawings -- straight forward charcoal drawing on paper. Sometimes
I film those drawings in progress, stage-by-stage as the drawing
is done . . . the movement is adjusted and shifted and becomes
the basis for pieces that are finished as films. Two dimensions
moving through time.
In
the last few years I've also been working with HandSpring Puppet
Company - run by Basil Jones and Adrian Cola in Johannesburg -
which uses carved wooden figures in front of these animated films.
So there a drawing becomes one element of what ended up as a piece
of theater. But even in the end, [the work is] a piece of theater
and it's watched not in a gallery, but a theater. For me, it's
still a drawing an applied drawing that gets you to that end state.
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CE:
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Do you
work alone or do you collaborate on these drawings and films?
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WK
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With
the two dimensions and also the films, I work on my own. I work
with an editor -- a music editor . . . but the essential process
of drawing and constructing the film I do on my own. Whether it's
just a drawing or piece of animation -- and that's great but after
months alone in my studio, it's fantastic to work with ten other
people on a theater project. But equally, after a year of working
on a theater project it's fantastic to not be dependent on other
people for how or what one is doing. |
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PJ:
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Do
you rely on grants and other such funding?
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WK:
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No.
Up to now the films that I've made have been funded from the sales
of the drawings used in making the films. I've paid for them up
front and recouped the money when people bought the drawings from
me. In the last few years the Goodman Gallery has put the money
up for the two most recent films. The theater work is different.
It's on a different scale of funding required and that's been
a mixture of a local festival and some festivals in Germany providing
the money, and the extra money that was needed, about a quarter
to a third of the budget, Handspring Puppet Theater and I have
put in money that we made from the previous project.
It
would have been impossible to do those theater projects, the three
most recent ones, either relying on funding found in South Africa
or on us funding it ourselves, just because each project involves
a year of making a film, six months of carving the puppets, and
training procedures . . . for us it's been a very a fortunate
position that since we did the first play, "Vootsek"in
the early 1990's thereÕs not been a shortage of festivals or producers,
primarily festivals and producers. We do get some money from the
State, maybe ten per cent of the cost of the project, it's not
nothing but it wasn't the way the project got made.
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PJ:
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Could
you give us some background on Ubu and the Truth Commission?
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WK:
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Ubu
and the Truth Commission
was a collaboration between myself, HandSpring Puppet Company and
Jane Taylor. A writer, [she] initially came on as a producer. She'd
done a project on 'Fault Lines' which was looking at Truth and Reconciliation
-- the broader contexts. Because we were working in the same areas
she came to one of the earlier workshops for the production and
within a few days she knew she was going to be writing the script
[for] the whole play. I've also worked with Warrick Sony
and Brendan Jury [TransSky]. We did the music for Ubu. [Warrick]
also worked on the music for Faust, the previous production
as well as on some of the music for my earlier films. Angus Gibson,
one of the top documentary film makers here, has been the editor
of all the films that I've made. There is a core of all different
people around the country that I've worked with quite closely for
years. |
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CE:
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Could you
tell us about the production that you're working on now?
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WK:
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I'm
working on a production of Verdi's The Return of Ulysses.
I'm working with HandSpring Puppet Company again. Obviously [I am
not working] with a composer because the music's already written,
and obviously not with the writer because Librettos dead. This [production]
is different though -- this is a commission from the European Festival,
a festival in Brussels and Vienna. A production which we hope will
get to South Africa, but that's a separate question. For us it's
a fantastic terrain to work in and it will be ready in two months
time (May 1998). . . or not ready. It starts in Brussels and then
moves onto Vienna, Berlin, Zurich and Amsterdam. We hope in Johannesburg
next year. |
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CE:
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What
do you think the social responsibility of the artist is? |
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I
don't think there is a social responsibility for an artist. I
think it's their responsibility to work as well as they can and
as far as they can with what they're doing. Then I think the nature
of what emerges from the work will be much more complicated.
A
less precise question would be, 'is it an artist's responsibility
to predict a beautiful future'? Absolutely not! I don't think
there's a single core responsibility except to his or her work.
I am interested in political art, but precisely in political art
that denies such responsibility. In the long run you get work
which is: (A) more interesting (B) has a more interesting relationship
to the world around you and (C) in the long run, is more responsible
in terms of being part of an ongoing unlocking of what constitutes
society.
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PJ:
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Has your
work been critiqued abroad as a contemporary metaphor for this country?
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WK:
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Yes
. . . maybe a bit too much sometimes. You draw an iris and it's
seen as a metaphor for the end of Apartheid. Sometimes an iris
is an iris. You read a book and you bring to the act of reading
a huge amount of yourself. It's not an object that you respond
to neutrally. There's a complicated dialogue between your predictions,
your expectations, your hopes, things that you were thinking completely
independently of the work -- that together make a complicated
mesh of meaning and response. And so, for some people weÕre coming
out of South Africa and they hear the strains of Khosi Sikelela
playing in the background and there's a whole context which is
applied to the work and sometimes that pressure illuminates parts
of the work and sometimes it obliterates things that don't fit
into that pattern.
All
work that is done -- whether it is a play, or a piece of music
or a book is so dependent on an sympathetic viewer or listener
or audience. The best piece of work in the hands of an unsympathetic
audience dies and in the right context, completely ordinary mediocre
work soars. It has a power and potency which is unpredicted.
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PJ:
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What
do you think the future of South African Art will be?
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When
the cultural boycott was on we were a real hothouse. In other
words, you'd have something like your Festival of the Arts in
Grahamstown where there was nothing from outside South Africa.
Now there are two things that happen. On the one hand it means
that there is a real hothouse of pressure for things to emerge,
for things to grow. On the other, it is a very limited sort of
nutrition that people are . . . now that the cultural boycott
is no longer there, it is much easier to see much wider ranger
of work, as well as for South African work to be seen by more
people.
There
are casualties in people who defy that, people who needed that,
who needed the conditions and the structure and the story of apartheid
in order to work well . . . and other people who have blossomed.
So I think there was a short heyday. A short period when the outside
world was interested, very interested in South Africa as South
Africa because it was a exemplary moral tale of the late twentieth
century. That moment has obviously passed . . . which suits me
fine. For me the story is quite interesting: the basic moral fairy
story.
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PJ:
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Who
were some of the people in your life who actually inspired you to pursue
your own work?
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Well
the biggest influence was this man called Dumilia. By the time
I was a student he had already gone to New York. When I was an
adolescent - about fourteen or fifteen - he worked at the house
with Bill Ansley, the teacher that I had. I used to go there in
the evenings for art lessons and I'd see Dumilia working in the
house, working on large figurative charcoal drawings. That, for
me, was a revelation of what those drawings could be, what you
could do with that medium. He was very important.
There
are a couple of people who taught not in the fine arts field at
all. I learnt more about painting and drawing from Jaque Lecoque
who taught me theater, than I did from art teachers. In the same
way, I learnt more about the ways of making pictures [from] lessons
in politics. Particular teachers in the politics department, more
than particular people in the fine arts.
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PJ:
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Could
you share with us some of your thought about the Internet?
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I've
never found a comfortable way to read the Internet. Every search
engine that I've gone through is so filled with other noise .
. . garbage . . . it's always felt like picking up a very badly
published book. It takes a huge effort to look inside, to find
something worth reading. I'm always so put off by the cover page,
the contents page and the introduction . . . I generally close
the book before I get into chapter one.
I've
occasion³ally tried to look up specific bits of information and
my experience of it is it has been so badly out of date, more
out of date than the printed matter . . . it's got tons of information
of a kind that one does not need to know. I have not found a site
that makes me want to go back there and look at it again.
It's
been useful in terms of the galleries that I deal with , being
able to e mail images of my work backwards and forth. I know that
it has a functional, I know that for catalogues I'm working on
it's a very efficient way of sending information, checking it
and revising it. I think of it in terms of an instantaneous fax
machine. The principle of the speed with what the information
can move is good. I don't really know a lot of the other applications
though.
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PJ:
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What
are your thoughts on the most recent Johannesburg Biennale? |
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Here
in Johannesburg they'll get twenty-five thousand people. In Quan
Jun, Korea, a similar scale industrial city, they'll have a million
visitors. Biggest audience art event ever, bigger than Dokumenta
[Germany], three times the size of the Venice Biennale . . . I wasn't
there, . . . but I know that in Johannesburg the budget was twelve
or fourteen times the [Korea], and bear in mind, the cost of mounting
the exhibition was fairly similar. It meant that they had nine million
of their dollars that they could have spent on making the Biennale
a sexy place for people to go to. Whether that's advertisements
in every taxi, every bus and every bus shelter, every newspaper
. . . so that in the end there is this sort of saturation, saying
go see this about, and then the excitement, saying this is the most
exciting thing about town because this is where everyone is flocking
to creates a critical mass which then runs, where in Johannesburg
if you to the Biennale, it's well, why am I the stupid one who doesn't
know what's wrong? I'm still here, and everyone else seems to know
what's going on and they're not here'. There's this sense of feeling
-- it's a sense of getting weaker and weaker rather than stronger
and stronger as fewer people go. [The Johannesburg Biennale] never
reached a critical mass of people apart from the first days. |
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