Breaking down the wall

Interview, Sept, 1998 by Bell Hooks

BH: An intriguing aspect about your work is its immediacy: You use popular forms - cartoons or poster graphics - and defamiliarize them. At the same time the pain is more accessible: It becomes an intimate trauma. In the Installation Ubu Tells the Truth, a narrative of daily life unfolds that is ordinary and mundane, and then suddenly traumatic events happen, transforming the experience.

WK: A question I eventually ask is, How does one relate a private experience of a public trauma? For example, when we see images on television now, of people killed or starving, it's not that they aren't shocking, but that they fit into a sort of bank of images and are dulled. The hard part is to try to get back to the first sense of shock one had. When I first came across a set of photographs of the Sharpeville Massacre, I was six years old. It was a complete revelation: the world was constructed in a way that I had no idea of before. A complete shift happens the moment one sees such images: You become aware that the world is not as you thought it was. The hard part is to try to hold onto that sense of outrage because that is the truest response. All the other ways of living with it dilute and normalize.

BH: A willingness to receive the truth of Images has to be there as well. When I read about your childhood it was evident that actually witnessing cruel acts gave you a heightened awareness. Lots of other little white boys saw these things. What enables one person to resist and protest while many other people collude?

WK: A whole constellation of facts. For me it actually has do to with the house I grew up in. I was raised to be aware of the nature of the society we were living in. Kids I went to school with grew up in a world where hatred and terror were normalized. What are the things with which people blinded themselves to find all that acceptable?

BH: They have to construct a wall inside. Your work exposes the layers of these walls. For example, there is a recurring image of someone turning their back. Whether you are white or black, the demand of white supremacy and apartheid is always that one split oneself - to normalize. A white person like you, who resisted normalization, stands out.

WK: I always assumed that splitting was just the way one exists in the world.

BH: Ubu Tells the Truth has a dangerous playfulness; scenes constantly shift. A light moment suddenly gives way to terror. The piece is not very long, it's eight minutes, but the range of highs and lows you can go through looking at it is awesome. As I looked at it, I wondered what people see in that landscape.

WK: Location affects how the work is received. There are certain images in that piece that make immediate sense in South Africa but work in a very different way in America. For example, there is one moment in the video when you see a pig's head, and then a pair of Walkman headphones come onto the pig's head, and then the pig's head explodes. In America or in Europe, this may be seen as a generalized image of violence. In South Africa, it has specific references, describing the way a police hit squad killed a black lawyer. They did this by sending him a Walkman with booby-trapped headphones. He put the Walkman on, and as he switched it on, it blew his head off. When the truth came out, it was revealed that this device had first been tested on a pig. They got a pig's head and tested the headphones on it, so there were photographs of this pig's head blown up by these headphones. In South Africa, many people would know that exact story; yet even for people who don't know the real story, it comes out of something so specific - and is an unlikely image to have been invented from someone's head - that it startles.