William Kentridge and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev In conversation autumn 1998 In pressPLAY, contemporary artists in converstion Phaidon, London, 2005.

. C. Christov-Bakargiev Youve often said that everything you do is drawing, and that you see drawing as a model of knowledge. William Kentridge What does it mean to say that something is a drawing as opposed to a fundamentally different form, such as a photograph? First of all, arriving at the image is a process, not a frozen moment. Drawing for me is about fluidity. There may be a vague sense of what youre going to draw but things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought. It does not arrive instantly like a photograph. The uncertain and imprecise way of constructinga drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning. What ends in clarity does not begin that way. C. Christov-Bakargiev Your charcoal drawings and prints since the late 1970s; the animated films and videos which began a decade later; as well as your theatre and opera productions as actor, set designer and director, have been infromed by your growing up in South Africa under apartheid. They have dealt with subjugation and emancipation, guilt and confession, trauma and healting through memory. How has belonging to a family of prominent lawyers1 commited to the defence of the abused affected your work? William Kentridge There are three separate things: themes or subject matter in my work; my South African background; my family background. The themes in my work do not really constitute its starting point, which is always the desire to draw. It can become a self-centred reflection of whatever is around that interests me rather than great issues that have to be answered objectively. Rather than saying, like Lenin, What is to be done?, my engagement is politically concerned but distanced. One contradiction in the south African situation is the oscillation space between a violent, abnormal world outside and a parallel, comfortable world from wich it is viewed. C. Christov-Bakargiev You have spoken of the modernist houses in the suburbs of Johannesburg which were the basis, in the animated film WEIGHING... and WANTING (1998), of your depictionof the house of Soho Eckstein, the pinstripe-suited businessman who is one of the principal characters in your films. You also told me that this image in the film relates to a modernist houde in Sergei Eisensteins film The General Line (1929). Your work seems to convey both nostalgia for Modernism and a sense of relief that is over. William Kentridge You once described this as a temporal space which becomes a methaphor for geographic space. These images dont suggest my wish to live in a different time and place, closer to the centre, although there is an element of this. The nostalgia in the work is connected with moments of childhood that one tries to reclaim as a touchstone for authentic experience. When I draw a telephone, the automatic assumption is that Im going to draw an old Bakelite phone from the 1950s, not a 1990s cellphone. However, the lines of comunication from the phones in the recent films, like Stereoscope (1998-1999), are contemporary even though the instruments are old.

William Kentridge is the grandson of three prominent attorneys and son of one of South fricas most distinguished antiapartheid lawyers, Sidney Kentridge.

C. Christov-Bakargiev On one hand your style of drawing is reminiscent of the early twentiethcentury German Expressionism of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and others. On the other hand, you freely explore new media and techniques, from video installation to chalk drawing (on the landscape or onto walls) to projections onto buildings and drawings made with fire, as in your collaboration with Doris Bloom for the first Johannesburg Biennale, Memory and Geography (1995). A similar juxtaposition of traditional technique and playful experimentation occurs when you bring a finished drawing to an exhibition space an extend it directly onto the wall, dirtying and smudging the white cube of the European or North American Museum. One of the most hilarious examples of this almost anarchic attitude is (Ubu Procession, 1999) a large white chalk drawing on a black background, reminiscent of a roll of film scratched to make a primitive form of animation, depicting a monstrous figure based on the French playwright Alfred Jarrys character Ubu (Ubu Roi, 1869), that you placed irreverently along the horizontal axis of Richard Meiers new pristine white Museu dArt Contemporani, Barcelona, in 1999. Could your origins on the so-called cultural periphery explain this mix of traditional and contemporary, Eurocentric art history and a different, non-linear history? William Kentridge Much of what was contemporary in Europe and America during the 1960s and 1970s seemed distant and incomprehensible to me. Images become familiar from exhibitions and publications but the impulses behind the work did not make the transcontinental jump to South Africa. The art that seemed most immediate and local dated from the early twentieth century, when there still seemed to be hope for political struggle rather than a world exhausted by war and failure. I rebember thinking that one had to look backwards evevif quaintness was the price one paid. C. Christov-Bakargiev Ever since your early films, such as Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989), your work has addressed the nature of human emotion. Your films often evoke pathos through their imagery tecniques (such as imperfect erasure), and classical jazz soundtracks. They refer to the public sphere as well as to the intimately private. As Okwui Enwezor2 has noted, they could be considered post-Holocaust works. The Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno stated in 1949 that after that after Auschwitz there could be no more lyric poetry. You have stated, Alas, there is lyric poetry, because of the dulling of memory, which is both a failure and a blessing. What is this relationship between forgetting and remembering? Is there a connection between this retrieval from memory and the retrieval of a possibility for figurative art, after the non-figurative Conceptual and Minimal art of the 1960s and 1970s? William Kentridge Adornos much-quoted proclamation3 of the end of lyric poetry was directly followed by his assertion that literature must resist this veredict; that it wasnow in art alone that suffering could still find its voice, without immediately being betrayed by it. Mu statement meant something slightly different: I referred to times dulling of memory and intense passion. This allows other, less bleak, more lyrical moments to surface.

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Okwui Enwezor was Artistic Director of the Johannesburg Biennial, 1997. Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society (1949), Prism, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussetts, 1981, p. 34.