Breaking down the wall

Interview, Sept, 1998 by Bell Hooks

The South African artist William Kentridge maps the tumultuous recent history of his country. In the process, he achieves something nearly impossible: political art that is authentic but never boring

Even though I knew William Kentridge was from South Africa before I first saw his work a few years ago, I never tried to find out the color of his skin. If I had my way, I would first experience the work of any artist without knowing any background details like race or gender or nationality. Just for a moment I would like my relationship to the work to be all that matters.

Kentridge was born in Johannesburg in 1955 and still lives there. At the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, where his piece Ubu Tells the Truth can currently be seen as part of an exhibit of artists on the shortlist for the Hugo Boss Prize, Kentridge is described as "an actor, director, and designer for theater, as well as a printmaker and maker of animated films, documentaries, and fictional films."

Kentridge established himself in the early '80s with his posterlike prints. Some of the strongest of them are both very simple in style and sparse in imagery but evoke an immense intensity of thought and feeling. They have the witty humor that's there in almost all of the artist's work, even when he's working with excruciatingly painful material - images of tortured, lynched bodies, for instance.

Kentridge's work is defiant not just in the way It calls attention to the state terrorism that was the heart and soul of apartheid in South Africa; it is daring because It requires individuals to look beyond the cruelty of the state to an Inner landscape where we all wrestle with issues of power, of right and wrong, of domination and submission. The piece on view at the Guggenheim fuses these Inner and outer landscapes. It consists of a film where structures of pain are revealed in subtle, simple, black-and-white Images, contrasted with graphic documentary footage of violence: black bodies being slaughtered, black bodies in resistance.

As a white male raised in a progressive household informed by Jewish life in the diaspora, William Kentridge chose not to avert his gaze. With his art he bears witness, investigating not only the politics of cruelty as they manifest in structures of white supremacist domination but as they play themselves out in the realm of desire, of play and partnership, of working relationships. Acknowledging that we are always more than our pain, he moves through complex emotional layers from the tragic to the mundane as a way of finding new and different meanings.

BELL HOOKS: The U.S. tried to construct an image of South Africa as a racialized regime of state terrorism, even while the mind-set of South African white supremacy appropriated much of its tenor and structure from the Jim Crow laws of the U.S. It's important for us here to interrogate the received image of South Africa as somehow the embodiment of a monstrous white supremacy that is different from the white supremacy in other parts of the world.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: One of the immediate differences between white supremacy in South Africa and that of other places is, in South Africa it was codified and legislated. Much of what would exist in other parts of the world as prejudice became law here. And that has been much easier to tackle head-on. There were clear statutes saying where certain people could or couldn't live, and in a sense, that made the battle lines quite clear. But the general point you're making, I think, is right. In many ways, South Africa fascinated many people around the world because the moral questions were simplified.

BH: Anyone who grew up in the U.S. under Southern racial apartheid knows that our own forms of state terrorism kept racial segregation in place. I grew up in a small Southern town where there were certain places black folks couldn't go. In fact, one of the lingering memories of my childhood is of this place that made wonderful hamburgers, but we knew black people would not be served there. And when we walked by as children, those burgers smelled so delicious, and the smell awakened longing, but as a black person you could not satisfy this desire. What's Interesting about the U.S. is, people have so quickly forgotten the intensity of that legislated apartheid here.

WK: That forgetting is already happening in South Africa, too. The system in South Africa is only four or five years old, and memory is gone. In many cases, it's already difficult to hang on to what we were. There is sort of a willful amnesia, a refusal to accept accountability, that comes from the naturalization of outrageous systems in the world. But I'm more interested in the question of historical memory - of what happens when people forget so quickly. For example, in the area where I used to live there was a whites-only swimming pool. The laws changed. It became a mixed swimming pool, and within about a month, it wasn't that everyone forgot the fact that it used to be segregated but that it was hard to actually remember what our experience was like when it was a whites-only pool.