William Kentridge and Judith Butler: Video Art and Social Intervention: Forms of Life

Shannon Jackson: Hello, everyone. Welcome. [laughing] Well, I'm the least distinguished person on this stage, but thanks for that. It's a sign we're revving up, right? My name is Shannon Jackson and it's a privilege to welcome you to BAMPFA and to this event, "Forms of Life: A Conversation with William Kentridge and Judith Butler," sitting inside our large public lecture course that opens, as many of you know, every Thursday to the public with distinguished visitors including these two. Our capa

city to teach this huge course with varieties of undergraduates, to have all of these speakers, to have this incredible venue management here at BAMPFA, all happens because of a generous donation from the Kramlich Art Foundation, allowing us--okay. Let's do--you stole it. You anticipated where I was going, because we are so indebted for the ability here to advance that Foundation's mission in education, research, and public engagement in the field of time-based media art. As a part of that gener

osity, also the Kramlich Collection has loaned a range of works that have been curated in an exhibition entitled "Out of Africa" by BAMPFA's own director, Julie Rodrigues Widholm who is here below. We hope--whoo--we hope you'll get a chance to see that and re-experience it over the next several weeks. You also see William's work on the outdoor screen which is a fabulous placement. So I also absolutely want to acknowledge before you entirely finished clapping the incredible work of the BAMPFA sta

ff together with the Kramlich Art Foundation and Kramlich Collection for all they're doing together and separately to enrich our lives today and beyond. So now, a full clap. Okay, around about 1988, 1989, a South African artist, designer, and theater maker was contemplating a shift in his practice. Already known for a compelling--his compelling charcoal drawings, he tried experiments that would allow viewers and himself to experience the temporal provisional elements of his artistic process. He

developed a series of stories and characters reckoning with the legacies of apartheid South Africa, rendering them as serial photos that tracked slight adjustments in every charcoal-based image. Those charcoal-smudged narratives were collected eventually as nine drawings for projection, a body of work that would bring William Kentridge to international attention. Expanding from this animating vocabulary, he would go on to expand his oath, creating films, video, installations, drawings, tapestrie

s, photographs, theater, dance, music, and operas that have appeared in major international theaters and major international museums throughout the world, including but definitely not limited to MoMA in New York and the Met in New York, Royal Academy in London, and the Barbican in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris and Châtelet in Paris, Document in Germany, the Venice Biennale, The Broad in L.A. and of course, now, stands to offer the West Coast premiere of "SYBIL" here at our own Cal Performances.

Around 1988, 1989, an untenured assistant professor of philosophy at George Washington University was gathering their thoughts about the social construction of gender. Those thoughts, everybody, were first published in a theater journal and eventually cohered into a book published in 1990 entitled, "Gender Trouble," a book that launched the international career of Judith Butler, a book whose thinking would fundamentally alter and define a range of fields from philosophy to gender studies and go

on from queer theory to esthetics, from a re-thinking of human rights research to a re-thinking of the understanding of how we even understand the value of the humanities writ large. Judith eventually moved to Berkeley where they also worked as a rock star teacher, an impossibly productive mentor, a campus leader, and a prolific author whose thoughts have expanded to a range of global sites of conflict and produced a range of transformative publications including but not limited to "Bodies That

Matter," "The Psychic Life of Power," "Excitable Speech," "Precarious Life," "The Force of Non Violence," "What World is This," and so, so much more. Poised as we are, to welcome these two in conversation, I thought it might be helpful to share some words that they wrote about these early projects around 1988, 1989. Here's Kentridge on what he calls the "thick time of nine drawings for projection." "Everything can be saved. Everything is provisional. A prior action is rescued by that which follo

ws. A drawing abandoned is revived by the next drawing. A first image, phrase or idea would justify itself in the unfolding of images, connections, and ideas spawned in the work as it progressed. The imperfect erasures of the successive stages of each drawing become a record of the progress of an idea and a record of the passage of time. The smudges of erasure thicken time in the film." And here is Butler on the constitution of the self: "Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency

from which various acts proceed. Rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time. An identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. A constituted temporality. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts and in the possibility of a different kind of repeating." Today we have the chance to conside

r whether and how the successive stages of Kentridge's "Thick Time" might square with the social temporality of Butler's "Conceptions of Self and Society," along with many other questions and kinships in each of their commitments, locally and globally, politically and esthetically, to different types of repeating. Please help me welcome these two into conversation. Judith Butler and Williams Kentridge. [audience applauding] Shannon: All righty, thank you. And Judith and William, thank you so muc

h for being here. Before--without asking your approval, because we needed to make a marketing deadline, I titled this event "Forms of Life," thinking that there could be some kinship there, thinking deeply about esthetics and about the types of lives all of you--both of you are so interested in. And so, William, I thought perhaps you might meditate with us a little bit about form and life, and the types of forms you make in order to represent or develop different kinds of liveliness. William Ken

tridge: Good, thank you, and it's wonderful being in conversation with you, Judith. And intimidating. Those two terms, form and life, are not two words that would ever enter my thoughts when I'm in the studio. So I'll pause them slightly and talk rather about mediums and techniques as a form and life may be the result and what it shows. So I'm interested always in the--in a kind of migration of images from one medium to another, from an etching to a drawing to a film to a performance, back out i

nto an etching or a drawing, in which there are two things. There's both, obviously, a provisionality of form that had--can shift and change. But also in what you learn when you move from one to another and also the way a drawing might spark an idea for a performance which might spark an idea for a whole series of video, or something of that nature. So maybe to give an--just show a couple of things to show one thing--one way of thinking about this. These are some images, if I can find them here.

If we've got to wake this whole machine up. Shannon: Yeah, good to get it waking, actually. William: Okay, these are some movements of a project which started as a series of etchings. They were etchings based on Alfred Jarry's "Ubu," written in 1896 and this, in fact, was a series of etchings done at the centenary of his writing of the play, and it's a--the white drawings that you can see here with the spiral in the belly are very much versions of Jarry's own representation of Ubu who's the sel

f-pitying tyrant, sort of a child's depiction of this schoolteacher but, in fact, is an extremely powerful depiction of this combination of brutality and self-defensiveness that we find very much in the world today. And so this--these used a mixture of Jarry's image of the--of Ubu drawn with a spiral in his belly and then images made with a thumbprint in the soft ground of an etching, an etching plate. And while working on these, I thought it would be interesting to maybe work with those white l

ines as a projection so one could work with an actor in front of a screen and this is a fragment of a theater performance that came out of it, projection with the white lines-- And then, for me in terms of different forms, this became this--turned into this puppet theater performance and Jarry got mixed together with evidence from the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" in Johannesburg. So we had this burlesque of Jarry and we had the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" and in the theater pi

ece there was a lot of--a mixture of very crude drawing and archival material, as a way of thinking about the history of South Africa. The "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" was set up to examine human rights abuses in the apartheid era. So it went from etching into theater performance into a video installation. Speaker 1: [speaking foreign language] [gun firing] ♪♪♪ [gun firing] ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ William: And then it ended up as another series of enlarged drawings. That's one, just as a kind of an

example of, I don't know if those are forms that are shifting but certainly different languages all around the same figure. Sorry for a long answer to your question. Judith Butler: That's what you're supposed to do. That was the right thing. William: Okay. Judith: First of all, let me just say how pleased and honored I am to be here and I thank Shannon for gathering us once again and I thank BAMPFA for collecting us as well, really wonderful to be here, especially in its new and expansive life.

I really appreciate that. I--form and life and forms of life. Well, you know, I immediately think of Wittgenstein. I know you have an interest in Wittgenstein too, but he had this great line that he wrote, "We speak. We utter words and only later get a sense of their life." So we may think we're deliberately putting a form to words, but actually, the words emerge, what we find ourselves speaking or later realize we have spoken and then something comes alive in the course of that speaking that w

e maybe didn't expect or could not have predicted, which I think is the unpredictable is, I think, very important to William's way of making. I--so I think that maybe forms emerge in the middle of a process if they're living forms. Or a formal experimentation produces an inadvertent sense of aliveness, maybe, which is a slightly different idea than the one that Wittgenstein was interested in. But I found this from William in a published conversation. You wrote the following, sorry. "Cézanne had

this idea of reducing the physical world as an artist into basic forms," right? So the idea that you could distill the physical world into its form and then you had art. Into the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone. And so art from Cézanne onwards for many decades was about this kind of reductive form of taking the world and simplifying it onto the page. I, at a certain point, and this has to do with growing up in South Africa, where Formalism, capital 'F,' kept on bumping up against the world ar

ound us," hello, "and said, 'Well, what if we take those forms of Cézanne and put them back out into the world and send them to work?' So the cone," which you describe, "became very simple became the megaphone that's in many, many works, and the sphere that he described became a sphere back in the world, in other words, it becomes a planet. It becomes the world itself. So in a way, the image of the world--the image of the world on its hind legs is a way of putting that tradition of Modernism, ca

pital 'M,' back into a different context and there is something about," as soon as you put a pair of dividers next to anything or a pair of scissors, you immediately have a set of walking legs. There's a kind of irresistible anthropomorphism we have, in this case turning the sphere into a walking object." Now, I just loved that. But it also suggested to me, you know, what is it to put a form back into the world, to let it become a sphere, a planet, to have walking legs, to become some sort of an

thropomorphic figure, that is illusory but also telling. And also, I guess I want to add, what happens when the form starts speaking back or producing a kind of life form that one never intended? So it's one thing to do that deliberately. It's another thing to find that whatever it is one has unleashed into the world has a life of its own and comes back to affect and transform you. So, yeah, those are my thoughts. William: Just following a little bit from there, what you're saying about what if

it comes back and talks to you. That's always kind of the hope with a drawing or an animation that it knows more than you do. That it will--that it is smarter in some sense, that you find--you suddenly recognize collections. You do a drawing and suddenly you understand how it has to progress. And very often, the thought is not, "Oh, how clever I have been," but rather, "How stupid I am not to have understood that from the beginning, that the drawing had to tell me what it needed, how it had to--

how it had to proceed." So, giving the image the benefit of the doubt, or the impulse the benefit of the doubt, and then seeing where it leads and also, I guess, learning its grammar, how does one, if you get that spark which you recognize, how does that actually get pushed and rekindled and the spark become a sustainable fire? Judith: Yeah, I think that all this is right but I think maybe there's another sense of the form, the technique, and the medium of life-giving or life-assuming images. An

imation is obviously another name for a kind of life-givingness. Which is that your work is clearly situated in South Africa and in a horrific struggle against apartheid and lasting damage from that atrocious regime, and yet you are--you're constantly bringing forth or showing--see, out here I don't know. Do I say, "You bring forth images from the apartheid regime"? Do I say that images from the apartheid regime continue? Like, they are--they repeat, they resound, they're not finished, their irr

itability, their compulsive repetition, is not done? So although apartheid has come to an end tyrannically peaking, it continues in other ways, kind of pulsing through ordinary life. You give form to that repetitiousness. William: Yes, I think that it's two ways. There's a way in which those images, that history, sits inside, in my case, my 68 years of living through South African history from earlier childhood memories to now, so those images of the photographs of sharp velocity in my head, eve

n those from 1960. So, redoing them or revisiting them, all those images coming back, in the one hand of saying they're still inside me as in individually, personally there. But they're also there as a kind of marker for things that should not be forgotten, you know, things that do disappear so quickly and so easily, historic. I mean, it's always the shock of how quickly things are either naturalized or disappear in memory. And so, sometimes, marking, even if they're just a lot of the landscapes

or marking a, "Here, this happened. This we should still know." I mean, all monuments in a way are understanding that our memory is no good and we have to find some physical way of putting the memory into the concrete, out of our own heads. So I think the repetition is--'cause it is, there are so many images that keep getting repeated and I sometimes think it's really--it's a lack of imagination, for sure, that there aren't new images. But I also sometimes think of them as, like-- stock charact

ers that are there in the cupboard to come out and the rhinoceros is called into service endlessly to perform the next role. Judith: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Shannon: If I could just amplify a little bit on there because I think you've edged into this conversation about the world around us, and what it means to be making forms or mediums or using techniques that involves urgent content, and both of you, I think are often engaging in contexts of, you know, where there's legacies of violence, if not pres

ent violence, where there's contexts of human rights abuse, et cetera. And at the same time, both of you have, I don't want to say--I could say, oblique roundabout provisional commitment to I would just sort of say, a less productive articulation about political action and the need for political action, even as you both keep continuing. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that since it's sometimes some of the--those urgent questions about esthetics and politics are certainly th

ings that we talk about a lot at Berkeley but are always kind of confounded by at the same time. Judith: That's a big question. I wonder what counts as reductive in your thinking. I mean, if everything we write or say or make has to be immediately justified for its political impact, then we may misunderstand how impact actually takes shape. If something turns out to have an effect in the world very often is quite--it happens quite regardless of what one actually intends. So there has to be a cer

tain kind of humility. You know, you write something, you imagine it will have some transformative effect on the world, but actually, it just gets shelved somewhere. And then the thing you wrote that you didn't spend any time with, it's like, "Oh, my God, everybody's reading this thing. I didn't even edit it," you know? So, you know, I think there has to be a certain kind of humility and sometimes work intersects with the moment and then fades and you know what? That also has to be okay. I think

the transient character of work is part of its aliveness, even its pertinence and also its destiny to become forgotten. So that's also been interesting for me, as somebody who started--who's kind of launched into a public eye in my 30s and really to understand what was happening, you know, that was the moment. There was a moment, or there's the, I guess, the '90s. I knew he was wearing black so I did my '90s lesbian imitation once again. So--but I--but you know, the fact that it has a certain k

ind of life for other people, that it resonates, that it gets taken up and taken forward in ways that one never expected is all good, but that's not something that lends itself to the language of justification. William: No, no, finish. Judith: It's just if it's--if I make something and then I justify it for what I take its political impact to be, I'm pretending, like, I can foresee what that impact is. And the joke is we speak, we utter words and later--we only later get a sense of their life. W

illiam: Just to give an example of what you're describing, when I started out in theater I worked with a student theater group and it was a kind of--theater group and we did a lot of work with trade unions and, as smart, privileged students, we decided what it was that--you know, as white students, what it was that African trade unionists needed to understand of the world. So they were quite didactic plays and we used to sometimes perform them on a flat-bed truck in the middle of a stadium where

there was a trade union meeting happening, and there was one we were doing it where my job at that one was to stand at the back of the crowd and to wave a flag if people couldn't hear what was being said. And the actors were acting their heart out on the truck and the audience was sort of watching and then someone in the audience started playing a trumpet and, within two minutes, the entire audience was circling around outside, following the trumpet and this kind of absurd piece of theater was

happening on its own with no one watching. And for me, that was a very--you know, it showed me a kind of, I suppose, in one sense, what you're describing as the bad faith of saying, "I can say what someone else knows or needs to understand or will understand," and you're doing it on behalf of someone else. However earnest you are, there's a kind of patronizing sense of greater knowledge and you're going to bring your enlightenment. So that's when I stopped with that and I stopped doing the poste

rs I'd been making for unions and when I came back to it some years later, came back to drawing a couple of years later, it was absolutely with the sin of saying, "The only way I can work it if it makes sense to me and is interesting to me and to maybe the people who I'm working with, the editors or other collaborators, maybe it will have an interest for other people in the world. And in a strange, odd way, that's when the work kind of took off and found its life in a broader way, in the way tha

t we kind of hoped the first pieces would work. Shannon: Maybe we could get a little bit more about work in the air. I wonder whether you might want to share a little bit about "Sybil" or the other thing I know we wanted to think about is "Looking at a Tree." Judith: Do you happen to have a procession? William: All the things that you need, I don't have a procession. I'm just trying to think, I'm quickly trying to go through my hard drive and think what's in the--inside the computer. No. Shannon

: Somebody who works on every medium, we sort of assume we've got something in there. Maybe we could think about "Sybil" if you want to think about--tell us a little bit about the genealogy that's led up to it and the different manifestations it takes and some who were lucky enough to see the performance might have a teaser. William: I mean, I can certainly show you something. Let me find that. William: This is "Sybil," just to give a very, very brief introduction. There's a story that you would

go to the Sybil with your question and you would leave your question at the mouth of her cave and you would go back to collect your answer but as you arrived at the cave there would always be a wind that would blow the leaves around on which she had written the answer. So that you never knew if the leaf or the fate you were picking up was your fate or someone else's. So it connected to Alexander Calder's idea of turning mobiles which had been part of the pre-history of this project. And let's j

ust show you a fragment here. William: It's part of an Alexander Calder project that drove off or that preceded the project we did. So the idea we were responding to the Calder with things that--and those were sculptures of mine that also turned. But instead of allowing them to keep the abstract form that the Alexander Calder's did, there was a sense, as I said, of putting this back out into the world to work. So there's a moment of coherence as an image comes together, and then it disintegrates

into this random mess. So these were all thoughts behind the Sybil, and then, of course, the idea of leaves as pages. William: So that you think of the leaves of the Sybil as pages of a book which can be gathered together into predictions written on the pages of a book. So this is a drawing which is a mixture of pages and tree. ♪♪♪ William: And this is--these are bits of the workshop of--where we had the actress trying to find the form of her shadows in the book as half of the book, so we'd hav

e a projection of the book and her shadow on it. These were sort of human mobiles like the Calder. But it also refers to kind of ecstatic turning and twirling of dervishes and other spaces where evolution and--becomes part of the way one works and many other different elements that came into it, a sense of these were making the wrong decision or the right decision. Is the chair you're going to sit in the one that collapses, if you know that one of them is the wrong chair. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ William

: Gives you a sense of the piece. Judith: I saw the animation called "Sybil." And I thought it was stunning, quite frankly. But it's a--it seems to be the Oxford English Dictionary that's--whose pages are turning at an impossibly quick pace, and so you can't actually read the dictionary. And usually when you open a dictionary, you're looking for this or that word, or--but in this case, it's flipping way too quickly to be read although you catch a word or something here and there. And the figure

turns, rotates, and that also becomes somewhat metamorphic in the sense that she becomes a tree or an abstraction, an aura, then returns into a human body but also a human body who's rotating impossibly quickly. So there is--right, so I appreciated the metamorphic character but also are those figures emerging from the text, are they blocking the text, are they in tension with the text, and then suddenly-- ♪♪♪ William: Sorry, just move this out the way. Judith: No, but also voice. There we have i

t. And then these, not words, but fragments, almost aphorisms or fragments of wisdom, again, there they are: "LOVE will paralyze the joints." I thought that was probably true. "THE SMELL OF THE NECK." We can all swoon to that one. "15 minutes on the soft shoulder," yes, during COVID, yes, that would have been really good. "Something has been POSTPONED." In other words, these resonate so profoundly and it's funny because you're, I mean, the text is the background. It's not the elucidation of what

's happening, it's not working as a caption. It's not working as a commentary. It's actually working as a background that occasionally produces something or emerges into the foreground, so we're not sure how to think about image and text in light of the background, foreground distinction. It certainly is not an illustrated text. [laughing] It's like, here's the text, here's the illustration. Oh, this is the text that's going to tell you what's happening with the illustration. No, we're turning t

hat as well, which I found amazing. We're lost. There's not a definitive trajectory but being lost is not that bad because it turns out that it resonates with this sense of an unknown fate that you talk about and you write about and that's in some of these works. In fact, there seem to be sort of three terms, one is destination, one is fate, and then there's a third which is something like passage or trajectory. I don't know whether you can talk to us a little bit about that. William: I think th

e--well, to talk first a little bit about the text and then about trajectory. I'm always interested in, well, I suppose what often holds one when one is to go back onstage. When one's listening to someone talk and either it's a foreign language so which you half understand or it's a conversation in a restaurant where there's an enormous noise level and so you're struggling to hear, one of the things that does is it pushes you into an act of listening and construction of possible meaning. So the

word you don't hear is not just accepted, "I didn't hear that one," always tries to jump over that to find what it could have been as if they had said. You know, you understand the seven words of French and that word you've never seen before but those you understand, so it could be--it could be this word, could be that word. So there's a sense of being complicit in the construction of meaning. And I think with these phrases which you--which aren't really explained, they're half there, some of th

em were--some of them are there, half of a phrase which might make sense totally overall, but which is not. What that does, you either switch off because it's--oh, they're just words and letters that don't mean anything. I'm out of it. But the hope is to catch you at the edge of that is what could that mean? What is that? What is that 15--it's not saying, "He leant his head on his shoulder for 15 minutes." It's just called 15 minutes on the soft shoulder and is that an invitation? Judith: Well,

I just said, "Yes." William: Yes. And the phrase which actually follows it, 15 minutes on the soft shoulder, the phrase that follows us, "It is not enough." And then the next phrase is, "But it is not nothing." Judith: But it is not nothing. William: So the phrases try to work at the edge of forcing you to, it's like when you're about to eat something and your salivary glands go and you take it away. You felt that they're already--to try to get language to work something in that way with us. And

obviously, the music and the singing gives so much extra resonance and power to the words than they have just by themselves. Judith: But the words are fragmented. Visually, the dictionary words are fragmented and then you give us these bits of--there's pathos and comedy in the phrases you--the fragments you give us, and then in waiting for Sybil it seems to me there's a lot of pages that are being strewn about. It's like, "Enough already with the text." William: It's also people looking for it

and no, this isn't my fate. I don't want that one. Nah, no good. Judith: You know, putting it against the head and-- William: And what's on that one, say? Judith: Tearing it up like, "Enough with--" you know. William: That's what the-- Judith: Yeah, or maybe that's not the place to look to find, you know, the question of how best to live. I'd like to-- William: 'Cause there are some phrases that have an actual history, so there's one of the phrases, "Beware of insects with moustaches." And that

comes from, in fact, from a Yevtushenko poem and I just thought it was a crazy line. This was explained to me that when Soviet dissidents were taken to psychiatric hospitals, one of the standard questions was "Do you see insects with moustaches?" So it had a whole kind of pre-history. I'd read it as this kind of absurd phrase, you know, "Resist the third martini" is, like, from someone else's phrase which became a rift in a whole series of things one had to resist. It's a mixture of, in this cas

e, phrases from different posts, usually in translation. Some proverbs, some fragments from Ecclesiastes, from all different sources that then get, literally, placed on the table and shuffled to see what is a direction they see, how do they gather, what things seem to gather together? And these are always working if, as a non-writer, that I need to work it. Judith: Well, I think repeating things, especially enigmatic things that, you know, text or sounds or gestures, that one does not understand

, repeating them is a way of trying to make sense and also in figuring out how to inhabit them, in a way, I know--hope you don't mind, I won't be doing this for the rest of the time, but you did write that you had training as a mime, which you said was fundamental in thinking about the origin of a movement or gesture. And you wrote, "It's the heart of it, what is needed, what is not needed. And learning to think through the body, rather than thinking psychologically." Okay, I'm not sure we have

to make the distinction but I'll let you make it. You know--go ahead. William: To give an example of how that can work. If you're in the Anglo-Saxon world--and you're at theater school, you start from the text and you analyze the text and your performance comes from the text outwards. But you could do an exercise--we do an exercise where you say, "Okay, well, just think different kinds of tension you have in your body," and you can specify those and you can practice them like scales from complet

ely relaxed to--no energy at all, to just completely relaxed, to a neutral movement, to movement that has an impulse, to movement that has passion, to a rictus of tension. And you--you stay in level 3 and you always stay in level 2, and you've got a whole performance and a comedy that happens just from a kind of saying, "Think only about the tension in your body and hold on to it against the invitation from someone else to relax with them or not." So that's a way of thinking through the body whi

ch provokes a kind of psychological performance and you're watching it. Are you the--are you in level 2, you're very relaxed with your friends and someone bumps you and then you're suddenly in level 6 or level 5, and then can relax back into 2, so that's what I kind--I think that's what I meant by saying one could start from the body. And if I'm teaching drawing, or drawing with and also say, "Just think what is the--are you drawing from your whole body? Are you drawing from the shoulder or from

the elbow or the wrist or the knuckles?" Judith: Well, I couldn't possibly take part in that particular exercise because I have no tension in my body. I sit in the shrink's office like this, depending on language to give me, like, insight into in, you know, final insight into my wretched psyche. No, really. Shannon: And yet that's not actually how you always think, Judith. Judith: But it's not. I'm just, no-- Shannon: I'll often proto behaviorism in your work as well. Judith: I'm defeating my l

anguage with my posture. I totally agree, no. Anyway, you did--you do say there and this has to do with construction and just how deliberate we can be, and maybe it takes us back to where we began. You write, you know allowing the body rather than the head to lead you in the studio means allowing a lot of leeway to your arm, your hand. It means giving an image the benefit of the doubt, seeing what the image means at the end, and then you talk about a kind of ambiguity between making and followin

g which I like because I also am trying to upend always of thinking about agency and passivity. So you have--you write, "This is the artist's project needing the fragments, even delighting in them in the project of wresting meaning from them. The meaning is always a construction, comma, a projection, comma, not an edifice." God, that was great. "Something to be made not simply found. There is always a radical incoherence and radical instability. All certainty--all certainties can only be held to

gether by a text, a threat, an army, a fatwa, a sermon that holds the fragments in its iron grip." So I just see you as kind of moving against the iron grip of things which might--you're take us back to the question of politics, a kind of anti-dogma, right? Yeah, non-reductive and anti-dogma, but also this idea of both making and following, like putting something into motion and then following it, or putting into motion and following it at the same time. William: Example of. Having this at--in i

ts most immediate and direct--it's one of the things nice about a studio, is that there's usually a way or for me it's always essential to find the physical way in which these kinds of ideas can be either tested or discovered. Because it doesn't have to start--if you're a writer, you need to start with a word somewhere. From interrogating words, that's also more difficult, whereas in the studio where a smudge of charcoal, you know it's starting from mess, and you have to try to see what can be r

escued from that-- from that mess. And then follow the conversation between the drawing and yourself, as it progresses. Shannon: Thinking about other types of drawing and also as previewed here, I know, Judith, you were really struck I think it was when you were at The Broad or more recently about the "Looking at Trees" series, and it's, I think it is also interesting, we saw, you know, these sort of transformations and we've seen in other places where birds transform into clouds and people tran

sform into trees. In talking to you in advance, Judith, you were almost thinking about this as an alternative type of landscape rendering, landscape painting, and I wonder if we can think a little bit more about what's going on with trees. Judith: Well, I had a couple of thoughts, I mean, we already saw how the human form morphs into the tree and then the tree morphs into the human form, and William has talked about what seems to be an ineluctable anthropomorphism when it comes to natural object

s or even machines. There's one piece that was at The Broad where a machine is in the middle of the room, like, literally breathing. So, I think at the same time you were--you give us a way to criticize the anthropocentric way of thinking because these are all animated, so life is not a human property alone. And there is an interconnection and a metamorphic interrelationality among objects, technologies, animals, trees, humans. They are--they're all put in a series of relationships to one anothe

r. So although the anthropomorphism is inevitable or ineluctable, I think, is the word you use, it also takes itself apart in the sense that we find a whole set of relationships that are disconcerting and also fecund. I noticed during the lockdown, at least those of us who live in Berkeley, we took a lot of walks. People everywhere took walks, I can imagine in Johannesburg where you walk, and of course, the trees became the objects. People stopped before trees or they saw trees for the first tim

e. And the trees in this region are actually quite stunning between the madrones and the oaks and are the redwoods, just to name a few. And then the Museum of Modern Art had an exhibition during the lockdown where people could come and it was basically local artists taking pictures of trees in their neighborhood as they had been walking along. And we all were having the same experience. But I felt very grateful for the tree and, in particular, the photographs of trees or the sketches of trees. I

t was as if I could for a moment loan out my own mind to the object in order to then receive my mind back from the object in a regenerated form. And I missed going to museums. I missed going to art. I felt that I was actually suffering, you know, at a sensorial level that was really horrific. But the trees were oddly, like, reanimating and so it's as if they breathed some kind of life into me. I found myself having an object relation with trees, you know? William: So the tree started because of

the qualities of Chinese or Japanese calligraphic brushes. That if you look after your brushes well, you can keep a beautifully fine point and you know how to wash them and do that property and so, your brushes keep a very fine point. But if, as in my studio, the--after a short while, the brushes start losing their point and they spread out and you think you're doing the fine line but you get five uneven parallel lines. And that randomness of those marks is what started the idea of these ink dra

wings of trees because of the way--it's always a question in art, how does one represent the myriad leaves of a tree? Either by drawing them or schematizing them. You always have to reduce it in one form or another. So is there something about the roughness of the bad brush that made the trees happen? But then once the tree started growing and started happening, and they grow 'cause they're on many different sheets of paper and so you can say, "This one looks too thin, or too fat," we can edit,

we can--it needs to shift out further to the side, it can happen in that form. Then obviously, one has what is the sense of the tree? And there's firstly, there's the pleasure of the way they meet that drawing halfway, the way the bad brush and the idea of tree come together. But there are also other things of the length of the life of a tree. The tree is--should be so much older than we can be. And when a tree dies young, at 50 years old, 60 years old, it's kind of shocking. But it was also pro

voked by a story a friend of mine from Sweden has who is a ship builder. He makes small boats that he sails in. And he was working on a piece of carpentry for me and we were in Berlin and he had to get some more wood and he said, "Oh, I hope I don't get German wood." And I said, "What's wrong with German wood?" He said, "It all has so much shrapnel in it, that the tree 70 years after the end of the Second World War still are, and particularly all the grand old oaks in the forest, are so riddled

with shrapnel that destroys the saws when you're sawing them. But the idea of a tree holding that history and that, as that tree grows older, so the Second World War gets swallowed more and more inside it. So it's not exactly anthropomorphic but it's not divorced from our sense of ourselves and memory and tree as body. Judith: It seems to me that you also work with animals in a way that raises this issue, like, what's the social history of the animal, but also what's the struggle with anthropomo

rphism. So, in the panther sketch from 2003 and then the panther animation more recently, you show a panther inside of a cage who's going round and round and round. And you know that it comes from Rilke's poem, "The Panther," and I was struck because you relate a story about having to craft the fifth of your Norton lectures at Harvard and you were nervous that you had absolutely nothing new to say, and you were pacing around your studio, I believe, round and round and I thought, "Oh, there's the

panther again." And you, you know, you had some coffee, you made a sketch of the coffee machine, you had a couple of fragments of text coming through your mind and you put them down and you then told the story of that pacing and that circling round and round as part of the introduction to the lecture itself, which I really appreciated because it was almost as if, through movement and embodiment, you were generating thought, right? And it was in relationship to the objects, it was--but also ther

e was an animal imagery. Like, were you caged, having to give a lecture, you know? Here you've been working in all these medium and you're, "Oh my God," it was just different media and now that, you know, you have to, like, stand up at Harvard and give a lecture. It's like, "Oy vey." William: Oy vey. It is. I mean, the pacing around the studio or the circling of the studio, by now I've realized is kind of an inevitable part of the--I used to think of it just as procrastination, you know, circlin

g and not quite getting down to it, and not quite--then I kind of calmed myself, self-soothing, describing it as productive procrastination. All the thoughts, the kind of peripheral thinking going on while one is circling, but it is also kind of an avoidance. So the Rilke "Panther" which has the line in it about, I should remember the poem but I don't. So the panther is behind the bars till in front of him it seems that there are only bars and behind the bars the world exists no more. And it's j

ust silent-- as he's pacing, like a dance of strength around a center where a mighty will was put to sleep. Judith: Yes. William: So that sense of circling a center one could never quite get to. You know, by now it has the associations of the radiation at the edge of a black hole, the strings of information that circle, but that preamble to a drawing or to working, I always think it's a bit like, as you're speaking, you're trusting that your tongue and your brain and everything will make the wor

ds come out and they'll be kind of a grammatical--you don't rehearse the words as you say them, in general. But there must be something that's churning, a flywheel that's going in your head, keeping it all--I thought of it in that terms. Judith: Yes, I understand that. I mean, there's--I mean, obviously, there's the rotating figure in "Sybil" and then that becomes metamorphic, right? So it rotates until it changes, and then it changes back. So there is a generative metamorphic character to that

rotation, which is maybe like the panther, but the panther is also an interesting figure only because I believe Rilke encountered it in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in about 1902 or so and it was when the garden contained so-called exotic animals in cages, which, you know, was absolutely horrific. They still have a zoo, but they claim now that it's kinder. I don't know if that's true. Let's hope it's true. But I was thinking that that going round in circles is futility and capture and cagedne

ss and yet it also has this other side which is whirling and generative and a kind of quick-paced metamorphosis. Similarly, I remember, we don't have to show these, but I remember seeing the procession. I think I saw it in London where people are going--they're moving forward and they're also turning. It looks like forced migration, it looks like a number of black South Africans who have been expelled or, you know, displaced because of violence. At the same time, there's a kind of choreography.

There's intense misery and then there is a kind of joyfulness so the procession, it's not a death march. It kind of could be, but then it's a parade, and maybe even a demonstration or a dance. And, you know, you have the ability to hold those extremes of suffering and joy together in ways that I think crack us open and give us a way to become emotionally more capacious in relation to our world, so. William: In the "More Sweetly Play the Dance," which stupidly I don't--I don't want to spend 20 mi

nutes trying to track it down through wormholes here. But it's a large processional piece and it was filmed in my studio in Johannesburg and we did every actor or the participants did many different things. There is a tradition in South African certain Christian churches of a kind of singing and praying which involves a circling and a turning within the circle, so each person is turning and revolving as they circle. And that was one of the things that we had, so it's moving altogether but the gr

oup is turning and each individual is also turning. And that put me in mind of the medieval conundrum of the plague when a lot of the form of the dance of death where you had medieval--by many different artists where you're like Holbein's famous dance of death where you would have the figure of death accompanying everybody from the pope to the bishop to the rich merchant to the peasant to the child, being subject to death carrying them off in the plague. And a big memento mori. But you also had

the tradition that--or the myth that if everybody in your village gathered and danced in the town square and didn't stop dancing, the plague would go from the previous village which it had decimated, would bypass your village if you're all dancing, and go on to the next village. So the dance in that also becomes a resistance to that and the life force, if there's that amount of energy in you, how can something like the plague greet you or land on you, that your energy is going to keep it at bay.

So, both of those things were there--were there in that. Judith: It seems like there's repetition, rotation, and procession, right? So, sometimes one is going somewhere, but it's unclear where. William: It is, and I think that's 'cause of the open-endedness of where--I mean, a lot of my friends said, "Why don't you show where they're going?" You know, my Communist Party friends in Johannesburg say, "Ya, I love the piece, but you need to show where they're going." And I said, "If there was such

a clear answer, yes, then maybe, but to give any, say, 'This is where it's going to end up,' one needs to hold on to the idea of--and it gives agency, in fact, to say there isn't a set ending. It has to do with energy, human will, all of those things as to which way you push it. In South Africa at the moment, you know, in the calamitous state the way the situation is, but nonetheless, there are still as long--as well as the pessimistic outlook ahead, there's also an optimistic one. There are fan

tastic projects being done by different people that are still there and they don't become of no value because there are also destructive things happening. So, to have the open-endedness of where that procession will go wasn't only an easy answer. May also have been that. Judith: Shannon, I would like to pull you in for a minute. Shannon: What? No, we don't have to. Judith: No, seriously, because I think what William just said opens up the importance of collaboration. I can't think of anything he

's done that hasn't been collaborative and one of the problems I had with thinking about gender in the early years was that people thought, "Oh, this is a highly individualistic operation," but actually, gender is never individualistic. It's always with or for or around others. They may or may not be immediately present, but it's a social event. Maybe more so now than before. But I'm just thinking about what is the importance of collaboration and it's--I mean, there are human collaborators in va

rious choreographies and puppetry and some of the dance forms that you're describing, the movement forms, but there's also a collaboration among objects and animals and technologies and humans in ways that are unexpected. Shannon: And that's also a revised idea of collaboration, as opposed to I am an individuated artist who has a signature who will now collaborate with another individuated artist who has his or her or their signature. And instead, it's kind of sometimes it often seems to me that

these types of projects that William makes and the types of projects that I like the most are revealing tacit collaboration that's already there, that it's already a kind of ensemble that a charcoal drawing that in 1988 was hung on a wall was already a social event and you developed forms and techniques and processes in media to reveal that tacit status. I am mindful that we might have questions brewing from the audience but I'm also mindful that when it comes to where things are going, that Wi

lliam suggested that he might actually share the next project that is so exciting in its various dimensions, so perhaps we could get a little taste, William, of the next one? William: We can. It doesn't come direct--I mean, it's very much a collaborative project in the sense that it's working with a team of singers, dancers, actors, editors, to put together a theatrical piece that is gradually taking shape. We used at the beginning a physical form, a language of it, which I'll just have to jump

out of this and I can-- William: So, this was at--piece it comes out of. This is a--it came out of the idea of working with these cardboard heads that actors or singers would hold in front to be the character. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ William: And Shostakovich himself, which is done with these cardboard heads inside a cardboard set. We discovered halfway through the pleasures of what it was to actually swap heads, for the different performers to have it and--but we were working with a South African group

, I'm working with a South Johannesburg group of performers. And thought the film was great, but it would be wonderful to do a live performance. So what we're working on now is a live performance but finding something that's a connection between the world that we had here and a connection to Africa, which we're doing through the 1920s art movement of Négritude which was an anti-colonial movement that started in Paris and included great people like Aimé Cesaire, the great poet of the last century

, and through him, Frantz Fanon later on, figures who are still very important in politics in South Africa. This is another starting point, kind of, a Mayakovsky play. These are all the odd starting points of the project we are working on. This was a piece done at the Center for the Less Good Idea, which is an art center in Johannesburg in which I was part of the new project, collaborators in it. [singing in foreign language] [singing in foreign language] [singing in foreign language] William: T

his was also an improvisation from the Center of Schubert. This is pre-COVID as you'll see. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ William: But this is a 3-minute introduction to the new project. We did a workshop for 8 days in Johannesburg and there was a story if a ship that went from Marseille to Martinique which was a French colony, which had on it, on that journey, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist; Andre Breton, the surrealist writer; Wifredo Lam, a Cuban artist; Anna Seghers, a novelist; Victor Serge, a Communist

novelist, but also on that journey, so it's a journey a year before had been Cesaire himself, two years before him, well, a year and a half before had been Trotsky getting to Mexico, and it's about a movement from constructivism to surrealism and this is its world. We don't know what it is yet. So this is three minutes from the workshop. Speaker 2: History counts its skeletons in round numbers: a thousand and one remains a thousand, as though that one never existed. ♪♪♪ William: So--largely has

a chorus of women as its central musical focus, and it allows many different people onto the boat. That's Murray--that's Josephine Bonaparte, Napoleon's wife, who came from Martinique who's allowed on the boat, so it has references to other journeys across the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean. We're not quite sure who this figure is but we rather like it as being part of the ship that's come alive. There's a poet, Léon Damas and his texts are part of it. That's the two Josephine B's: Josep

hine Bonaparte and Josephine Baker, that have a duet on the boat. And those two, of course, we recognize: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and the French Bourgeoisie on board the ship. So we found a lot of the visual language to work with, projections of the ship being a railing that people can look at phrases. Suzanne, Suzanne, the night our sister-- In fact, the founders of the--movement so Suzanne becomes the central figure in the piece. They have a short walk-on role. They're left over from the

last project. And of course, Stalin has to chase Trotsky across the--and the Breton, Andre Breton, because he had two very nice French actors, we decided we'd have twins 'cause we just had two heads. That's the bonus of it. Shannon: When I heard a description of the project last night, I could not wait to teach it. There is so much to teach in what's coming here and also this alternative history making. So, I'm mindful that the audience which has been, I know, rapt by the thoughts and ideas of

these two. I wonder if there are a few questions brewing before we adjourn? And if you do have a question brewing, it'll help the ushers as well as me if you just raise your hand and we can get a mic to people as quickly as possible. speaker 3: Is it--oh, okay, cool. I think my good question because you guys talked a lot about collaboration within identities, within art work. I was wondering if you thought if anything you create or any theories that you publish, if any of them could actually be

considered new or if you are just giving form to all of these different, I guess, things you've interacted with before? Judith: Well, I can say, at least in my early work that I was living in a world in which people were doing gender differently or new kinds of political claims who are emerging about gender and sexuality, about other issues related to the body. And that I was simply registering what I was taking in from a world, but the--when we talk about registering what's happening in the wor

ld, you're already talking about a kind of weird form-giving activity, right? You receive what's happening, you're living in that world, you're breathing it in, you're part of it, you're acting in it, you're being acted on by it, and then something emerges from you. It's not new. I think people make a mistake when they imagine somebody wrote a theory and then that theory had an effect on the world and then there were new things in the world because people read the theory. It's like, "No, it does

n't work that way." The theory is registering some movement, so maybe it distills it or animates it in some way that is distinctive or maybe not easily replicable, maybe partially replicable, but the idea of the radically new is probably a mistake. At least, that's how I think about it now. William: Yeah, I mean, I would say very similar. You know, the charcoal animation, I make no claims to being the person who invented that. Working with flat cardboard masks, I'm sure people have done that man

y, many times in the past. So if you start with that as your question, you kind of--you're doomed to failure. One has to work with what is it--what things quicken your pulse as you watch them in front of you or whether it's outside in the world or on the wall in a studio. And I'd never thought of the term "registering" them, but I will now. Speaker 2: Wonderful, thank you. Speaker 3: Another question? Yes, here. Anyone else have one? Shannon: Just--usher is complete. Okay, I'll help there and Ke

n and--can you guys--sorry. Speaker 4: I can speak out loud. Shannon: We have to get you on a recording. Okay, I'm going to pass here while you pass the microphone there. Speaker 3: And we'll just get some. Shannon: Thank you. Speaker 4: Well, this has been incredible. And the first time I saw your work, William, was at LACMA, and I almost fainted, I was so excited. And taught your films to all my students ever after. My question is a little bit off topic, but I'd love to hear what you think. I

was reading about the demise of liberal arts and schools canceling English and French and God knows what else, and I wondered if you could speak to that, and especially as I have some conversations with younger people, they're getting into this college as vocational, like, it's so expensive and people need to get a job and everybody should be an engineer, I don't know, but I wondered if you could speak to that and what to say to these people that might help them understand what some of us all kn

ow but don't really know how to talk about it anymore. William: I mean, it's a--in South Africa, there's a generational thing, so when, in my family's case, when Jews emigrated to South Africa from Lithuania, turn of the--beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th century, a lot were uneducated, very poor, and there was a huge pressure for their children to excel and to get a real profession, as my father and his father did. Once that was done, there was much less pressure on the next genera

tion to feel they had to get a paying profession. And so in my case, there was no pressure from my family, "Oh, you need to get a real job." They were happy to watch whatever happened. But if, for example--since the ending of Apartheid, there's now a black middle class in South Africa that is growing up that is one generation old, but there is still enormous pressure if you're getting out of poverty into the middle class, there are so many uncles and aunts and family that rely on you as the savi

or of this extended family that the pressure to get a paying job is enormous. Not to say that there aren't thousands and thousands of young black artists and dancers in South Africa, but it takes a real act of will to push through all the other pressures around you. And I suppose that makes it so that it's not just a luxury. In some ways, it's completely vital, as we know it. It's--and, you know, one has to find what are the mechanisms where that can be helped through scholarships, through other

institutions, through informal undertakings that can make that happen. But I would also thought--I mean, I'm not in the academy, I'm not in the university, but just anecdotally, it seems that so many people who go into high-paying jobs after university have come from the humanities and not only from computer science. But I'm the wrong person to be asking. Shannon: Judith, do you want to--you have some thoughts on this one. Judith: Well, I think, in fact, people rely on the humanities all the ti

me. They think it's dispensable but they absolutely rely on it. And it's our way of making sense of the world and of also adjudicating values that are not necessarily market values or--and thinking about, I mean, as of today--today I was thinking, you know, William's work has us thinking about time, thick time, as he calls it in one piece, in a way that it's not really about progress, neither is it about being predetermined in some way, but it's living with radical uncertainty about what comes n

ext. And I think that not only resonates with, say, post apartheid regimes and their continuing difficulty caught as South Africa is between a new Liberal push and to call to reconstruct the university in ways that will get rid of the colonial past. You know, what is the path? What is the path forward? We have a critique of progress because progress understood as technological innovation alone has destroyed the earth. At the same time, we need certain kinds of technologies to be healthy and well

and even to make the kind of art that William makes. How do we find our way in between determinism and old ideas of progress that turn out to be forms of destruction? I think we're all living in those times. I don't know anyone who's not thinking or feeling that problem. It's that is the problem that the humanities thinks about. Nobody who teaches a novel doesn't teach time. No one who teaches painting doesn't think about how this is put together, what sense is being made, what world is being r

efracted, what world is being intimated as a possible potential. These, you know, our ethics, our sense of survival of living on and of living together, all depend on our being able to think with our senses and for that we need the arts. So it's really true. It's really true. So it's never been more urgent. And that is, obviously, not being countenanced by those who think that such programs are dispensable, but it is our job to make that public case. So those of us who are in the academy need to

step out. We need to step out and make it clear and speak in another language and, you know,, shorten your sentences, Butler, and you know, the whole thing. The whole thing. Shannon: Thank you. Maybe we'll take a last question up here in the back, which I know it's cued up. Thank you so much to ushers for passing it. Yeah. Speaker 5: Can you guys--perfect, okay. My question is, it's more of a comment and then a question. In regards to when you guys had the discourse about, like, the psychology

and how that relates to physical form coming about, the way that I've always thought about it in regards to theater and performance is that, in our daily real lives, it's that our emotions and our thoughts give rise to the physical forms. But that in performance it's kind of the other way around where we use the physical forms to then give rise to, like, the psychology and the thoughts that you were talking about. What is your take on that? Is that something that you agree with in regards to the

art that you create? William: I think by and large, yes. There's a way in the studio with, if you're working with charcoal or sculpture or something like that. The big questions disappear at the door. Obviously, there's an impulse, there's something that causes you to work on a project. But once you're in the middle of it, it gets so broken down into is this market too heavy? Is this movement too fast on the stage? You enter a kind of world in which you leave those big questions out in the hope

that at the end they will reinscribe themselves and be there in what you have made. But you can't say, "Is this a sad mark I'm making? Is this mark sad enough? Is it--even if it comes out of a situation or a thought of grief over something, you can't be saying, "I can't make the mark because I'm not weeping. Only when I'm weeping can I make the mark." There's a sense of joy in making whatever the subject is and only when you step back and maybe you step back every 10 minutes that you might reen

gage with that. Judith: I think, obviously, we bring something to the forms we make and yet the forms articulate something else that links us to the world and produces new ways of seeing and feeling that are somewhat unpredictable, so there's a yielding to form that has to happen in order to derive the benefits from form. And the yielding, I think, is also a sense that something is unfolding here. I can't tell you what it is, but I'm in the midst of the unfolding and I'm yielding to what will fi

nally transform me or connect me with something I don't know how to feel without this. So I don't know if that answers your question. I think it probably doesn't, but it's the only--it's the only way I know how to think about it. Shannon: It seems like it's not either cartesian volition or pure behaviorism. There's some sort of tangle of sitting betwixt and between consciousness and action and also, I think, to use a phrase you just brought up earlier, what it means to think with the senses, and

I would say that these two have really helped us think deeply with the senses, think about what it means to think with the senses across forms, mediums, techniques, ideas, sites, all throughout the world. And I hope that you'll help me thank them for their incredible thoughts today and for all their time with us today. [audience applauding]