The Form of Life in the Studio

Zach Blas seeks to draw out questions of materiality and sociality embedded in studio-space in his response to William Kentridge's "Life in the Studio".

During his 4th Drawing Lesson on “Life in the Studio,” William Kentridge stated that an idea is never enough--one must experiment, make, do. It is through experimentation, Kentridge continues, that one reaches unexpected meanings and new possibilities. But to experiment, the studio must first be a “safe space” for uncertainty. 

Image taken by Matthew Omelsky

Kentridge’s presentation brings forth a series of questions about when experimentation and uncertainty close down or reduce in the artistic process. If the studio is the location of experimentation for Kentridge, the presentation is not quite that. Kentridge works mostly from a site of certainty: he reads and consults a notebook, and there is a visual presentation timed to sync with his words (perhaps operated/advanced by an assistant?). In short, there is a precision at work that is at odds with “life in the studio.” Of course, there is room for a bit of uncertainty in the presentation--but not much. And no questions are taken at the end, which makes the event feel more like a performance than a talk, lecture, or lesson.

What is the studio for Kentridge? In theory, it’s a place of irrational action, where utopia can be found and one can walk in contemplation; the studio is receptive to what might be considered non-knowledge, like stupidity and silliness. The studio is also a materials repository, where paint and paper can be thrown and a multitude of photographic equipment is at one’s disposal. The studio is not a gallery or storage container for finished works but rather a repetitive testing area. In the end, it’s a rather idyllic place for creative research, discovery, and the production of the new.

In practice, (Kentridge’s) studio is more complicated. Of course, it must exist in a specific location, such as a gentrified / gentrifying area that brings along issues of race, class, and displacement. The studio must also be supported by various economic factors to exist as such: a wealthy art career permits the existence of staff and assistants, materials and production equipment, as well as the time needed in the studio to actualize its promise. While the artist studio can conceptually be a laboratory for creative experimentation, it does not exist outside of economic conditions that always bring forth questions of labor, exploitation, alienation, and reification. I won’t say the studio is a factory (although, with some contemporary artists it is exactly that), but the studio unavoidably incorporates aspects of the factory.

Importantly, I am not accusing Kentridge of anything. I am just taking his idea of the studio and pushing it further.

My question is this: if Kentridge himself said the idea is never enough in artistic life, is “life in the studio,” as presented by Kentridge, more idea than practice? That is, does “life in the studio,” as a model for artistic practice, put forth certain assumptions about artistic production, life, ability, desire, and politics as well as avoid other material conditions of existence? I have already mentioned the economic issues that often remain invisible yet are absolutely necessary for the studio to exist as such, which reminds us that not all artists can / will have studios. However, not all artists want Kentridge’s life in the studio; that model of artistic production--bound within a permanent and enclosed space--is abandoned for something else, such as a street, community, or public site.

Following Kentridge’s description of the artistic process, perhaps today it is crucial to experiment, that is, make uncertain and new, life in the studio. What would this be? To start, paints, papers, pre-cinematic devices, and other common art materials are done away with. What constitutes a material can be experimented with; maybe the presentation, the seminar room, and forms of the public itself become materials. Today, such experimental practices are most visible in art known as social practice, which dramatically shifts the idea of the studio. Examples include autonomous, artist-run schools like The Public School, Women on Waves’ abortion clinic on a ship, and Toro Lab’s community interventions in Tijuana.

In short, life in the studio, as formulated by Kentridge, is the pre-condition to artistic production. It is like Foucault’s episteme or Ranciere’s distribution of the sensible. The form of the studio sets the conditions for what is possible as artistic production.

Thus, life in the studio is a form that must be constantly fractured, re-invented, so as not to stagnate and disappear into the art world. The life in the studio requires many forms, and it is through the many that the artist becomes practical and experimental. 

Zach Blas is a PhD student in Literature, Information Science + Information Studies, Visual Studies at Duke University

We can all be messiah individually if we give up our self-preserving sense

Kelly Gillespie introduces Neo Muyanga

Johannesburg is a city that still produces messiahs at high frequency. Preachers of gospels both spiritual and secular saturate the air with their messages, promising salvation and liberation from all possible imaginable oppressions. Money, power, sex, love, life, death – the holy people of Jozi can tell you all about it. Academic travellers most likely meet those belonging to the genres of cab drivers and drunkards in bars on 7th Street in Melville. Stories shared during coffee breaks revealed that JWTC participants were no strangers to these phenomena. But this blog does not dawdle with peripheral prophets. Hadn’t we members of academia come to Johannesburg secretly expecting to meet a real contemporary messiah, if not a club of messiahs? Was the purpose of our congregation not sharing bits and pieces of the messianic curricula that guide our own professional practices? After all, we had gathered in Johannesburg to raise the question of the futures of nature. The devils of oil capitalism, climate change politics and racist nature conservation discourses hunt us day and night.

After a week of pondering the futures of nature, the 2012 JWTC was ready for a serious messiah. The messiah we encountered on the evening of the seventh workshop day was Addis Shembe. We met her at the Dance Factory in Newtown. Addis is the main figure in Neo Muyanga’s brilliant operetta “The Flower of Shembe” (http://neomuyanga.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/the-flower-of-shembe-run-in-joburg/). The play narrates the story of a girl born as “a new-messiah-in-the-making”, the trials and tribulations she encounters and how she comes to terms with her own destiny. After having resolved seven trials and returned home to participate as a war general in the liberation of her people from the rule of a cruel dictator, Addis speaks:

“contrary to popular belief

the problem is not

choice

but our immutable instinct

for self-preservation

the very fact, our glory,

makes it impossible for us to love”

(From the libretto of “The Flower of Shembe)

Neo Muyanga and members of his NeoSong Company had introduced “The Flower of Shembe” to us in a JWTC session moderated by Liz Gunner before we went to see the show. According to the composer, the operetta is a story about hope, joy and love. It is also a story that engages with spirituality, politics, youth and leadership. Asked by Liz Gunner whether there was a need for a new messiah today, Neo Muyanga answered that we live in cynical times and offered the following proposal: “we can all be messiah individually if we give up our self-preserving sense.”

Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks that “[a] man who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language.” At the JWTC we discussed the epistemologies needed for practicing theory and criticism from the South. How does it come about that many academics these days take to writing about art? Are artists our new messiahs? Or is writing about art our way to be messiah individually? “The Flower of Shembe” is a story told in many languages that are brought together most eloquently. There are languages of the body, languages of movement, languages of music and languages of the visual. “The Flower of Shembe” is told in Sesotho, Maskanda, fashion design, Zulu, painting, English, dance, flowers, Opera, sculpture, animation short film (select listing with no particular order).

Being a historian of flowers and rather illiterate in matters of music and dance, I will end this blog with few sentences about the language of flowers used in the operetta and offer my own comment in the language of flowers. Flowers are present in the play in various forms. “Addis” means “flower” in Amharic. The stage setting contains beautiful huge metal flowers. The poster and libretto for “The Flower of Shembe” feature a painting of Addis with a protea on her forehead (http://neomuyanga.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/image.jpg). The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus named the protea after the Greek god Proteus, the sea-god who changes his appearance constantly as to remain unseen by those who would approach him to use his gift of future telling. Linnaeus chose the name due to the many different forms in which the flower appeared. The plant also symbolically lives up to its name, as numerous meanings were attached to it, shifting according to time and space. Dictionaries of the “Language of Flowers” that fascinated 19th century Europe associate the protea with the meaning “courage”. The protea was prominently adopted by white settlers as a symbol of their South Africa and in 1976 the Protea cynaroides was officially declared the national flower. The new democratic South Africa holds on to it as a truly protean symbol. Due to their longevity, proteas and other fynbos plants have for long been popular as grave decoration. But the protea also has a history that reaches back before the flower represented death or nationalism. As Frieda Shenton’s mother in Zoë Wicomb’s short story “A Trip to the Gifberge” says: “Only fools and cowards would hand them over to the Boers. Those who put their stamp on things may see in it their own histories and hopes. But a bush is a bush; it doesn’t become what people think they turn it into. We know who lived in these mountains when the Europeans were still shivering in their own country. What they think of the veld and its flowers is of no interest to me.” (Zoë Wicomb, You can’t get lost in Cape Town (Roggebaai: Umuzi, 2008), 189)

In the Language of flowers my blog about “The Flower of Shembe” looks like this:

(Concept: Melanie Boehi, Flower arrangement: Karin Bachmann, Photographer: Jayne Batzofin)

Translation drawn together from numerous Language of flowers’ dictionaries:

arum lilies   magnificence

blue iris       faith, hope, wisdom, eloquence

protea         courage, diversity

red rose      love

strelitzia      faithfulness, joyfulness, paradise


Melanie Boehi
University of Basel

JWTC seen from Pakistan

This year, the JWTC July Workshop hosted its first participant from Pakistan. Zahra Hussein studied architecture at Goldsmiths College, London, with Eyal Weizman. She went back to Pakistan where she is conducting a research on drone attacks, architecture and the law. She speaks to The Blog.

You attended your first session of the JWTC. How did you hear about the JWTC and what are the reasons that led you to apply to the 2012 Session?

I met Professor Achille Mbembe last year in London where he came to deliver a lecture at Birbeck College. I introduced myself and told him about my work. I was then conducting research on the architecture of counter-insurgency in Pakistan. He showed great interest in my research and, after further intellectual exchange, I learnt about his and his colleagues work especially regarding the JWTC. Learning more about the JWTC, it immediately became clear to me which to me that this

platform presented an alternative intellectual position removed from the ordinary East-West dichotomy that is so dominant in South Asia.

What are the events in this year's program that you enjoyed the most and why?

I really liked how the art shows were made part of the intellectual rationale of the workshop and curated. They were not conceived of as an illustration of theory. They were themselves instances of theory, modes of discourse and argumentation in their own right. They also made for lively viewing and constituted a powerful counterpoint to the entire experience. The first morning, we were taken for a tour of Johannesburg. The introduction to this major Southern Hemispheric city laid out information in a particular sequence and connected the historical strands to form a complete picture for the audience.

You were coming to Johannesburg for the first time. What are the features of the city that have been the most striking for you?

Johannesburg is, in a word, awesome. It is unlike many cities in Pakistan and yet, here and there, there are so many parallels. The fast evolution of the city and the social energy it generates - all of this is quite simply astounding. Of very particular interest is the fact that this peculiar city is very much constituted by what lies beneath its soil. The various forms of spatial segregations, whether based on class, race or otherwise, can still be mapped out easily. I was particularly interested in how segregation and security now morph into each other.

You just completed an important research on the architecture of counter-insurgency in Pakistan. What does the theme "Futures of Nature" may add to your topic?

Natural and climatic disasters present an intriguing parallel to (counter) insurgencies. They both affect and are themselves affected by space. They are both forms of agency. So while the titles of both topics might seem somewhat unrelated, there are actually many interweaving threads of inquiry linking them.

What are you currently working on and why?

I am currently involved with the Centre for Research Architecture. This is a fully-funded European Research Council project. We are doing research on the ways in which human rights are played out in the realm of architecture and the law. Alongside other things, we are currently looking at the drone attacks in Northwest Pakistan. Typically we examine situations (human rights violations) in which there is a high degree of spatial complexity due to a variety of factors (access to the space geographically, complex micro-infrastructures, diffusion of munitions used in perpetrating the violation etc.). We then map and model these situations in order to re-create a chain of events in relationship to a set of legal questions.

Liquid Modernities: On Kim Anno Water City, Durban 2012, Goethe Institute

Photograph #1: A suit-clad young man stares at the camera, his back turned on the ocean, the water, timeless, boundless, unidentifiable. The viewer knows that the invisible city behind the beach is Durban, but she can’t see it. “Watching,” 2012.

Photograph #2: The frame captures the profiles of two suit-clad young men staring towards the ocean, facing the water, timeless, boundless, unidentifiable. This time, the city has entered the frame, the backs of the two men turned against the urban landscape of Durban. “Two Men Facing East,” 2012.

Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity alerts us to the frantic rhythms of the present, the modern solids that have now turned into liquids, moving freely and formlessly from one vessel to another (Polity, 2000). What happens, however, when liquidity stops being a metaphor and becomes a natural threat? What happens when an exhausted, abused and overstretched modernity melts nature’s solids into water? Water Cities happen. Liquid modernity is the projected, almost apocalyptic future of a failed modernity.

 When Bauman described deterritorialization and the dissolution of boundaries brought forth by modernity in its late, liquid form, the borders he had in mind were not coastal ones. However, the young “actors” –as the artist calls them– in Kim Anno’s work are faced with the very real watershed of Bauman’s liquid modernity: a menacing, mobile, watery border, anticipated in the form of a natural disaster –discursive, and at the same time, potentially factual.

Similarly, the young actors in the two photographs described above gaze either towards, or against the liquid future ahead of them and, respectively, the present and past of their lives in the cities they live in. But Kim Anno’s work challenges precisely this other invisible border marked by the opposite directions of the two men’s gaze: the border between future and past, between the event and the mundane, between disaster and the everyday, between, even, the liquid and the urban, water and earth.   

So how do we imagine Water Cities? What will, if, everyday life be like? Together with the young actors she captured with her camera, Kim Anno devised a new beach game, a water sport: one ball, a few bodies and water. Water, the quintessence of the everyday in the port cities faced with the threat of sea level rise, acquires a peculiar quality: it embodies the looming anticipation of disaster, the potentiality of another everyday, dystopic, bleak and excessively liquid. Yet the photographs and videos maintain an uncannily peaceful and mundane leisurely quality. To paraphrase the artist herself: “Even in the eve of disaster we remain humans, we need to play, to move on.” In “Donna,” 2012, a young actress, is flipping through the magazine “artsouthafrica” while floating on water; in “Bed,” 2012, we see a liquid still life, once again blurring the boundaries between the future and the past, the everyday and the eventful. A floating mattress, a dress on top, a cushion, a necklace.

The actors wear suits, ambiguously corporate and businesslike as if to mirror the failed modernity that induced the natural disaster of sea level rise. Yet, the suits are further evidence of the quality of the everyday that Kim Anno tries to capture with her art: life goes on, the young actors in Water Cities still have to go to work after the event, while engaging in some play in between. “Who is it that will be affected” (by the disaster?), asks Kim Anno.

“Hidden” somewhere in the photographs and installation, lies a commentary on the role of the nation state in handling natural disaster. Or, rather, the failure, as the artist believes, of the nation state in preventing climate change or managing a disaster partly caused by its politics. “Raising no man’s flag,” 2012, in the water, the newly acquired (or lost, depending on one’s respective) territory of the Water City. No man’s flags, artificial ironic symbols of non-nations that point to a fellow viewer’s observation, the fact that is, “… that it is because of the environment, rather than human matters that we need to think beyond the nation state.”  

Installation #1: A projection of young actors, suit clad, playing the new water sport of the Water City. The value of leisure. At the front, a floating paper city, alluding to the moment of its transformation into a Water City. As if the wave washed away the artifacts of the everyday: buildings, a car, a chair, a lighthouse, a ball. Is it the same ball they used for their game? “Water City, Durban,” 2012.

Alexios Tsigkas