The Sparring Partners: William Kentridge and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

0:04Welcome to Chanel Connects, the Venice Biennale edition. It's important to be free. So who was the fool who didn't recognize it all that time ago? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it is seduction. Oh, absolutely. Just another woman trying to survive. So who of them is lying? I wish that were the case. Well, let's face the terror of the new work then. And this is what art is so good at. I don't, do you prepare? No. No, no. In this season of Chanel Connects, we've taken up residence in Italy to go to the center of the art world. Listen in to the artists, curators, thinkers, and makers behind the Venice Biennale, the world's most important exhibition of contemporary art, now in its 60th edition.

0:49Each of our guests is focused on what matters most and what happens next. I'm Yana Peele, Global Head of Arts and Culture at Chanel. Thank you for connecting with us. Could you tell where my head was at when you found me? Me and you went to hell and got just to find peace In the words of poet Joseph Brodsky, Venice is eternity itself. In this episode, we connect with two friends and veterans of the Biennale, South African artist William Kentridge and free-thinking curator Carolyn Christophe Bakargev. As a storm swept in across the lagoon in Venice, they hunkered down for a conversation with editor, writer and curator Penny Martin.

1:33Here she is to set the scene.

1:42We're sitting here in a grand hall inlaid with every kind of marble and decorated with this cycle of paintings depicting the passage of the sun across the sky by Jacopo Guirana. Why don't we start by you telling me when and how it was that the two of you met? It was a long time ago, actually, in Italy. In Umbria. At a residency. William was, I guess, a young emerging artist. And I was a young emerging curator. And it was in a castle. And I had a small baby, a three or four months old baby in my arms, and visited your studio and was blown over. And we've been doing things ever since. Yes, we started with one small project that Carolyn had.

2:36I had one piece on it. And then she had another project and had a whole room to do a piece in. And then she wrote the book on the next exhibition. And then we did a whole large exhibition together, at which point Carolyn said, well, you understand now we've stopped working together. You know, you're going to have a different curator. I'm going to work with different artists. The same curators and artists can't get on. I thought she was very cavalier. in the ease with which she said that. But here we are, maybe another 20 years later and another five or six projects down the line with more coming.

3:13It's very particular to find a... You can think of a curator as someone who chooses the work and puts it up on the wall, but to understand a great curator who is also a provoker of the artist, not simply a receiver of finished work, but also a way of reinterpreting it and showing the artists things they hadn't seen in their own work before. I wonder what it was, now that you look back, about each other that made you want to work together. I think we share some things. And it is a form of love and esteem for change, for things that are not certain and fixed and finished and complete. I don't always agree with myself.

4:02I'll say something and then I'll say something else. And William, his work with erasure and drawing and redrawing, it broke open this idea of the modernist autonomous artwork. And I found that a relief. So I think we share that, no? What would you say? Yes, I mean, I think in very broad terms, you can either see the world as a series of facts of fixed things, or you can see all of those fixed things as simply being part of a process. So the table we're sitting at right here, yes, there's a fact, here's a wooden table in front of us. But you can also think of this as a part of a very monotonous process.

4:46This table is simply a moment between when this is simply planks, which were a tree, and when this table will become firewood and smoke and ashes. So I think it's that in the most immediate sense, as well as in broader ways, of understanding that works will change, that relationships between works will change. You're perhaps describing a kind of sparring partner, almost, where you can anticipate... I don't know what sparring means. From boxing. Fencing. Or fencing or boxing. Someone like you. Moving forward, moving back, moving forward, finding the... I think that's right. Really? Yes, because you would suggest a topic and I would say, well, I've got this piece that fits your topic perfectly.

5:27So you would make a movement, I would reply. And you would say, yes, I know that's perfect, but it's not right. Let's do something different. Maybe, but I don't see any violence in that. I mean, fencing sounds violent. It's a bit violence when you say, oh, I say, here's a perfect piece for you. And you say, yes, it's perfect, but it's wrong. Do I do that? Yes, you do. Oh, William. You do, you do, you do. So that brings me to the obvious next question, which is do you ever have a disagreement in this overall harmonious relationship? Yes, we do. Of course. We do. We do. Almost every idea that Carolyn had for the installation here, I resisted.

6:04I'd had in my head an image of a big screen, a projection, cinema seats, and trying to squash a whole cinema into a tiny room. And Carolyn said, oh no, I think we should rather have small screens and small chairs and keep it intimate rather than pretend that it's huge. And she said, of course, that's the way you made them. You made them to be seen as domestic things. You can't remember an iPad or your phone or your television screen, the way you would stream, watch a streaming service. So then my response is not, oh, let me defend my position to the end, but it's almost always, God, how stupid I am.

6:41And of course she's right. And if only I'd thought of that, then it would have been my idea. But it's not. But it is. It can be. Because my thinking always comes from your work. When I understood and saw the works, and they represent how subjectivity is constructed in a digital age, it's all about fragments and collage and rapid shifts from one email or WhatsApp or Instagram to another. And that condition of selfhood where you turn on your phone and you want to do one thing, but you end up doing three others, and then you have a hard time remembering what you wanted to do on the phone in the first place.

7:24That comes out in the works, in the way that the smooth digital editing of William's doppelganger and second self is in, and yet the rough cuts between one small scene and another. So you feel the era that we are in now. The idea to show the work on a small phone, as well as on a laptop, as well as on flat screens, doesn't come from another place. It comes from the structure and deep meaning in the works. So I don't find that as adversarial at all. No, no, it's not adversarial. I find that as trying to understand. Yes, but what it means is that you're one step ahead of me understanding what the work is.

8:09But almost every time I've done, work that's been interesting. Other people have shown me things that I was trying to deny in the work. So for example, with the animated films where there's an erasure, the charcoal is never perfectly erased. You have a gray smudge on the paper. And when I started, I would apologize. I would say, well, I'm sorry, I'm trying to get a better eraser. I'm trying to get better paper, different charcoal, so I can get a perfect erasure so that your frames don't have this messy trail. And it took other people outside of me to say, to stop complaining about your eraser in the paper.

8:46In fact, that's the interesting thing. It seems now obvious. So who was the fool who didn't recognize it all that time ago? It was me doing it but not seeing what was being done. But one can never understand in the time itself of experience, in general, in life. Yeah, but it's, I mean, it feels so... I didn't think, oh, what a good idea. Let's leave the trail. Let's show history. let show memory, it was always, God, how stupid I was not to have realised that. So I think there's a way in which the work needs to know more than the artist knows about the work. Otherwise, if you know everything, there's no real point in doing it.

9:24And it's very strong to have someone next to it who's also sensitive to the things that are there that the person making it doesn't see. Well, indeed, and for all that friendly, collaborative agreement, You have said in the past that you feel the most important person that a curator serves, the word that you used, is the artist. So more so than the market, more than the gallery, more than the viewer? Yes, absolutely. You see, art doesn't last only for the duration of a candle burning. It lasts forever. So in the long run, it's the painting by Caravaggio that lasts. It's not anything else. So the art system, what we call the art system, is very transient.

10:21And whenever I'm working, I'm constructing the past for the future. I'm never in our time at a dinner party. Never. I'm always seeing it as from 200 years from now. So to do that, you have to serve the artist. In the synopsis of your relationship that you gave just at the start, you took us on a kind of time-travelling, quick picture of your lives, your professional lives together. I think you mentioned a sort of moment of rupture where you tried it differently with another. You said, oh, it's time to have another curator. Let's change things up a bit. No, you know, that was a complete misunderstanding.

11:01this is actually the first time I'm going to say what I meant by that William I didn't mean I wasn't interested in your work anymore I thought now you've become famous you will be working with so many other curators I mustn't be on your back it actually had to do with serving the artist I wanted to let him go it's like a child when when you you can't just be there always you know It would oppress the work. The work has to be seen by different eyes, work with different curators. And in fact, that's what happened. That's exactly what happened. And now we're a little older and we can relax and do things together again.

11:42But William always told me, like you were being abandoned in a relationship or something. Absolutely. It's very strange. I read it as Carolyn saying, okay, we've done it. Now I turn my attention to this next younger batch of artists coming up. And in fact, I mean, Carolyn is a fantastic viewer of younger artists' work and always had an interest in seeing what new people are thinking. And even in this project, the way of shaping it is also saying the era we are in is an era of Instagram, of TikTok, of short digital media. And these are slow, long films compared to that. You can't forget that that's the world that we're in, which I do forget.

12:23I'm in the studio, it's the same studio for 40 years, I keep working away at it, in the hope that people outside of the studio, when you asked about the audience, the only way to work is to work in a way that feels best, that the work feels alive, for me and the people working with me around me, in the hope that it will also interest people outside. But if you start thinking on behalf of an audience, while making the work, for me it becomes impossible, because you always know, the audience is always different from what you expect. They know more and they know less than you predict. And then you start, there's a kind of inherent patronage in thinking, well, I know more than an audience so I can show them what they need to think.

13:03They're always a surprise. So I think that's the terror of a new body of work coming into the world. Yes, it seems okay. It's intrigued me for the years of making it. But will it have anything to say to people outside of the studio? Well, let's face the terror of the new work then. You're here in Venice presenting your exhibition, Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, which has been curated by Carolyn. Introduce us to the show. Yes. Imagine we're walking in there. It is an exhibition, but I think of it more as an installation of a series of films. There are nine films, nine half-hour films, that make a self-portrait as a coffee pot, and they were made to be shown on a kind of a streaming system.

13:49And so that, in fact, is one of the ways it will be seen. It will be streamed from the middle of the year in exactly that format. The films are all shot in the studio, in one studio, in my Johannesburg studio. And they're about the studio as a place of making, physical making, drawing, sculpting, tearing paper, physical making, but also a metaphoric space of making meaning. And the form of it is largely in the way we'd have a conversation, but it was made during COVID lockdown. So the conversation is always with myself in the film. I'd film half the conversation where I'm sitting now and try to remember what I'd said and then move around the table and sit where you're sitting now and then fill in the gaps and talk back to myself while trying to remember what did he say after that.

14:36And that's kind of the game of it. I read a quote where you called it a reflection on what might happen in the brain and in the studio of the artist today. What do you mean? Literally thinking of a studio as an enlarged head. So I mean very literally when you're thinking of different thoughts, all the different things that come into your head, an image, a memory, a dream, they sit in different physical areas of your brain. I'm not a neurologist or anatomist, but we know they go from an unconscious into the frontal cortex where you can hang on to conscious thoughts and your optical sight is somewhere back in there.

15:12And so there is a physical movement of neurons and of electrical impulses where a thought that's been sitting back here comes in here to consider it and it's altered by a thought that comes. So there's a physical movement. And on the studio, it's like that. It's just instead of five centimetres, it's five metres or 12 metres. And instead of just thoughts, there are pieces of paper on the wall in the studio. And you construct an image the way you would construct a thought from these different fragments being torn up and brought back together. So it's a very literal description of the head as an enlarged.

15:44And an exhibition is a kind of an enlarged or contracted studio also. And the studio has been replicated aspects of it at the space where the show takes place. Yes, absolutely. So the experience of the viewer is of being both inside the screen and outside the screen, because you're in the same space where the film was made. It's inside and out. It's very much like a game. That's the experience that you can do in an exhibition that you can't do. When you're just watching the film. Or in a film festival, yeah. You described the back and forth until you hit upon the agreed moment where you felt that you both trusted in the idea and each other to work on it.

16:26What was exciting to you, Carolyn? What made you want to do it? Ah, well, first I had just retired from my directorship at the Castello di Rivoli. Congratulations. Thank you so much. The last thing I wanted to do is curate another show immediately. But you don't say no to William Kentridge, if he calls, number one. I mean, I saw the works, and they're extraordinary. You know, the most radical things are funny, and William is really funny, and the works are funny. They speak about very serious, very, very serious things, and awareness of what happens in the world is always present in the background.

17:08Ethical questions always present, But he lightens it with a kind of joie that makes it possible to even think of certain horrors. I think that the idea of play, which you mentioned earlier, being able to play, is important. Because the way the films are made, they're not made with a script. There's no script written in advance. There's no shooting script. There's no list of scenes. First, I don't know what it is that we're going to do. I think, OK, I'm starting an episode. and, well, to stop having to think about it, I'll just draw a landscape. In the hope that in those hours of making the drawing, ideas can percolate, and usually they are.

17:48There's that sense of ongoing, one could call it a very slow improvisation, a four-year improvisation, which it took to make a... But playful, always playful, or sometimes playful. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, because when I tried to write, there was somewhere I tried to write serious texts, and they were unlistenable to. They sounded so pious. they sounded so pompous, so talking down to everyone. That some of them were filmed, and the ones that were filmed all ended on the editing floor. And the things that were quick throwaways and things like that are mostly the things that stayed in the... It didn't mean it was quick to do, because the animation and the drawing is slow, however you do it.

18:33But... But the fun. I mean, why you like Schvitter's Ursonate, and you're talking about the soldiers from Africa in First World War? This is this great poem of words without meaning that he wrote the time of the First World War and the years after. It's a Dada's poem. Fums povotar, tsa, u, pogifqui, e, the des, n, e, e, m, pif, til, v, tu, til, yu, ka, rakaderin, sekatarakaderin. It goes on like that for 20 minutes. and it was about language ceasing to mean anything. That's when those massacres and those deaths become possible. So there is a connection between the absurd and language falling apart and the violence.

19:17But to do that, you have to be open to what that is that Schvitas and the other Dardos were doing, the likeness of that. So it's a kind of a serious likeness or a light seriousness. The specificity of Venice interests me with regards to this, that you've participated in the Biennale before. What meaning does it have? Why come all the way here to do a collateral project? In this craziness of this opening week, a chance to reconnect and to see many, many people from art worlds and museums. And that, for me, is one of the pleasures. And also to have one's work together with both younger artists, but also with the astonishing works that are here in Venice that have so shaped on eyes, a Tiepolo ceiling, which even though you think, okay, I'm not making paintings like Tiepolo, I don't use those beautiful colours, but they're things somehow, and it'll be hard to put my finger on what it is that makes me come back and look at that ceiling every time I'm in Venice.

20:16You mentioned Tiepolo ceilings, but I believe that there's a go-to church for you here that you've never missed. There's the Church of the Rosary, Santa Maria della Rosario. And in my head, I see this Tiepolo painting being the full size of the nave. In fact, each time I go, I'm surprised, it's quite a small section. But what I loved was that there used to be, and I think there still is, a mirror at an angle on wheels that you could take and push down the nave, and then you could shrink that whole ceiling would come down into the size of the mirror in front of you. And I took this idea of the ceiling in the mirror.

20:52I made a project once, which was a projection on a ceiling like that, where we gave everybody a mirror. So you could either look up, crane your neck and look up to see the projection, or you could look into a mirror and then the projection came. And it made me understand then what that was like. That was a kind of metaphor of the cloud and the internet, where everybody has their own little device, but it's connected to some bigger imagined image of it. Here you make that imagined image physical. There is the projection on the ceiling. And then, of course, if you have writing the right way around, to read it you need to look up at the ceiling.

21:26but if we make the writing, the text, a mirror image on the ceiling, suddenly everybody turns around and reads their phone, reads the mirror. So that sense of being able to make people so aware of that journey from their private devices. So even though it's about Tiepolo and the ceiling centuries ago, it becomes a metaphoric way of thinking about what that relation is to huge images. And of course the phone is just a kind of, in this case, or the mirror is like an enlarged eye. Carolyn, can you help us see William's work through the visiting public in Venice's eyes? You're talking about perennial themes and you're talking about things that were important to you from the beginning and still are important to you.

22:12But what do you think they see that has changed and what do you think they see that has developed or moved on? my impression talking with many of the younger artists and curators in town is that they're fascinated to be honest by how we do things from another generation I mean we are 20th century people William, Mays and I am we're still living in the 21st century but we were formed our prime time was 20th century and it was pre-internet. And I think they're fascinated by the ability that William has to invent very simple, what I call in inverted commas, poor. Poor forms of image production. He just figures things out, like with a mirror, with a piece of paper, with something.

23:13At a very, very low cost, he will invent new ways of image production. Young people don't really feel that they can. I mean, they're looking for the next software, you know. And that has something to do also with the installation. I mean, there's a lot of digital art now and painting, traditional media, very traditional media going on. Because the mind-body divide that Descartes had done at the beginning of modernity, let's say, had been healed. And we had understood that the medium is the message, and it was very, very important to us in the late 20th century. Somehow that, with the screen, with online life, it's as if there's that split again.

24:06So I think they see us as dinosaurs that have something to say that might help to reach some better future. I think that's how they see us, and with benevolence towards us. For all that you say that, they're still tuning in on Instagram and about to watch you on movies. So maybe you have the best of both worlds. Maybe. What do you think? I suppose I'm 20th century completely in the sense of deeply analogue. Even if things are filmed on a digital camera and they're edited digitally, and there's a lot of, in fact, very sophisticated digital editing in these seemingly very simple films, The heart of them is the movement of the hand, the tearing, the making, the gluing, the ink, the splash of ink, the line of charcoal.

24:49So there's a... And it's very clear how things are made. It's very obvious and they're kind of very simple techniques. So there's a kind of an encouragement towards agency, to people saying, yes, you can do it. I'm not hiding my technique to show you'll never do this. It's to say, of course, one can. And so I think that's sometimes a support to artists. And also to talk about the blankness sometimes when you can't get something going and you have to rely on the work. That's also often a comfort and an encouragement to people who are in that position of wanting to make something but not knowing how to get that underway.

25:27underway. Well for two people that describe themselves so wedded to the analogue you seem uncommonly focused on the future which neatly brings us to the one question we're asking all our guests on Chanel Connects which is what are you most excited about for the future of art? I mean I know I will see many things by many different artists that are enormously exciting for me the test of an exhibition is you go in it makes you want to be back in your studio So I'm sure there will be a lot of that. But in terms of thinking of the future of art, it's not the way I work. What is either the next project I'm working on, or what is the next collaboration, or what is the drawing?

26:06And so that then, what is your next project? Oh, the next project is in fact a theatrical project, a kind of chamber opera about a ship's journey from Marseille to Martinique in 1941, in which Kerr and the ferryman of the dead can call up everyone he wants to put onto that ship, a duet between Josephine Bonaparte and Josephine Baker, Franz Fanon and Émile Caesaire, André Breton. So it's also... And so the excitement is the work with the collaborators, with the musicians, the dancers, the actors, who together with me will construct the whole piece. It's quite normal that an artist would not be thinking about what other artists of the future will do.

26:47I think if there isn't that focus on one's own work, it's not an artist. So, yes, me. Well, I have a feeling really big changes because I think most of the art world doesn't understand that they are a traditional art world. They are part of a past. Like when, you know, there was just about to be the French Revolution and there was the aristocracy that was surprised and thinking that a certain number of things were very bad taste. For example, reading on a weekly magazine a chapter of something, and then that becomes the novel. It becomes Dostoyevsky a century later. And similarly in art, I think when there is a new social class emerging, there is also a different concept of art emerging.

27:46And now we're in the shift to the digital world and that there's a very, very different universe of wealth with different kinds of zeros, totally different. And there are artists that are liked and understood by those people. And now we're in the break. So you have the traditional art world and the digital art world. But I believe that an artist like People, you know, Mike Winkelmann, whom I thought was an algorithm when he sold his everydays for whatever how many millions through Christie's I wanted to check I thought that's a machine, that's not a person so I called someone at Christie's and said I want to speak now when you've done documenta you can kind of speak with anybody so the next day I had the call and I realized not only was he not a machine he was also extremely intelligent and absorbing like mad So he taught me digital things and I taught him art history, including William Kentridge.