Jane Taylor
 

 

 

PJ:

Jane Taylor

We are here with Jane Taylor. If you could share some of your background with us . . .

 

 

JT:

 

For the last eleven years I have been teaching at the University of the Western Cape which is a so-called historically disadvantaged university established by the apartheid state to cater for a specific racially designated constituency in South Africa. And one of the consequences is that the University has no Art School; it has no Music School; it has no Fine Arts or Drama departments. I am in the English department, and because of the deficits in the other cultural spheres of the University, it means that we're allowed to do a lot of poaching. So I have worked a lot in interdisciplinary ways because of that kind of freedom.

In 1989 I went to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and did my Ph.D. on 18th Century Literature & Commodities and the impact of commodity culture on modernity. I have been working largely on projects centering around [the reinvention] of cultural practice in South Africa since the mid- 1980's. In 1987 I published a volume entitled From South Africa which was a University of Chicago publication which studied and documented the culture of resistance between 1976 and 1985. What occurred to us as we were documenting that body of visual work was how persistently one got images of a mass collective acting against a monolithic oppositional force and that was how Resistance Culture represented itself in the decade of the 1970's to the mid 80's.

I was interested in exploring what those representational practices were hiding, what other modes of representing oneself; what other kinds of imagery; what other kinds of desire were not being allowed to enter into the canvas because of the very strong political agenda. Perfectly necessary and vital political agenda for that era, but I tried to set up debates in cultural practice then trying to draw in other modes of being and other modes of representing oneself.

So in the early 90's I curated an exhibition called Displacements which was a body of works that went to the States, and looked at the relationship between portraiture and landscape as the two kind of parameters. Given that South African apartheid apparatuses had to try to legislate space and identity, it seemed that aesthetically the bookends of that field were portraiture and landscape. So that exhibition looked at how people situated and represented themselves in space.

In the mid 1990's, as a part of the process of the new constitutional development in the country, there was a process called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which is effectively a kind of war crimes tribunal to address gross human rights violations in the country. I thought if we could get artists to start exploring that terrain - how people violate each other; how people submit themselves to violation; what the ethics of representing violence and violation might be--to raise that whole set of questions within a South African context.

So I set up a series of cultural projects called Fault Lines . . . The Fault Lines project drew in a whole lot of other cultural practitioners and organizers and I got other people to curate different events as well to open up the issues around Truth and Reconciliation. There were art exhibitions and readings and a conference and also a theatre project . . . called Ubu and the Truth Commission which is still being performed by the Handspring Puppet Company and is directed by the visual artist, William Kentridge. The play uses a combination of puppetry, live performers, animation and original music. Behind the stage is a screen where both landscape projections may happen instead of a more conventional set, or where an internal landscape of the mental processes of the characters might be projected and enlarged on the screen behind them. William [created] the animations for that screen and because of the nature of this play we also added some archival documentary footage. So you are constantly getting whole range of different visual information.

For example, one of the puppets is a crocodile and the crocodile is Pere Ubu's pet, but it is also his shredding machine. When [Pere Ubu] is trying to hide documentation, he feeds it into the crocodile. Then you have images of what is inside the crocodile in animation sequences of torture happening on the screen intercut with documentary footage of scenes of mass resistance, police activity and so on. It is a very very rich visual.

For those who do not know who Ubu is, Jeret, at the end of last century, constructed a play called Ubu Ra which is a study of tyranny. The Ubu figure is a farcical grotesque representation of tyranny who goes around the world raping and plundering wherever he chooses to. The play is kind of anarchic exhilarated mad kind of mode and we don't really see the consequences of Ubu's actions.

What we've done with Ubu and the Truth Commission is taken that kind of a character, someone who feels that they can act in this kind of infantile and aggressive way, and have set them against documentary evidence coming out of the Truth Commission [in order] to put those domains of recklessness and responsibility in juxtaposition with one another.

 

 
PJ:

Do you feel that this work (Ubu and the Truth Commission) is targeted towards a specific audience?

 

 
JT:

I think, to some extent, that he is somewhat self-explanatory because he uses these self-justifying languages which one knows very well from every domain pathological behaviors in ourselves as well as the large scale pathological behaviors that one sees in political tyrants. What is interesting, the play had its world premiere in Weimar, which used to be part of East Germany. That audience found the play to be] extraordinarily disquieting, how much they thought the play to be about their own experience.

With their political past and all of these anxieties about collaboration and who collaborated . . . so I think while it's very specific to South Africa and the iconography; the images and many of the jokes are particular to our context. [Ubu and the Truth Commission] does situate itself in that new set of world questions of how we invent secular justice.

In reference to an earlier conversation with analogies to OJ Simpson) - It is not only in the arena of Bosnia, for example . . . that there is a crossover of people - a kind of global anxiety of not knowing what to do with people who act in ways that are completely outside the codes of inherited morality; and how to invent a secular justice system based upon principles outside of a moral given order. I think those are systems we are trying to reinvent at the end of this century and part of that process is gathering information. It is almost as if we need to get testimony from everywhere. We need to know what has happened to people even though we don't seem to know yet what to do with that information. It is as if we are holding that information in trust for some age that might be able to know how to dispense justice in a different way. Someone, who saw the play at Weimar, from Romania came up afterwards and was completely devastated because they thought that the play was absolutely about what had happened in Romania. So I think those structures of abuse are particular and universal at the same time.

 

 
PJ:

Do you feel that art has a sociopolitical role as catharsis?

 

 

 

JT:

I think that it is extremely important. If you are trying to reinvent theatre at the same time, I mean my commitment is as much to cultural and art practices as much as it is to any political or ethical dimension.

One of the reasons I worked with Fault Lines, I wanted to prove to the State that the arts are part of the development logic. That it is not just about housing, and sanitation and primary medical care, although those are obviously critical functions. But unless you pay attention to the imaginative capacity of a country, you can't reinvent that country. So really with Fault Lines, one of the things I was deliberately doing, was staging the arts as one of the arms of the transformation process. If you don't draw the artists into your political agenda, you are absolutely squandering one of the country's most imaginative resources.

So I am always interested in making people more interested in the arts. It's not just about preaching. You can't get people to pay to come and watch if you're just going to be chastising them and abusing them all evening. You can't do that. People will stay at home and watch movies on TV.

One of the other curious things about the Truth Commission, there is a special documentary program put together once a week by Max DuPris, a South African journalist, which documents the processes of the Truth Commission for the previous week. At one stage that [program] was being aired back-to-back with 'America's Funniest Home Videos'. I was so struck by the inappropriateness of that juxtaposition and started thinking, 'How does one develop or sustain an appropriate sense of grief or anger or outrage or whatever it is . . . if the information you are receiving is being given to you in these curious disjunctive packages where you are having to switch modes the whole time'? And that seems obviously so fundamental to modern identity and modern information systems that you receive information in this contradictory way.

So, again, part of what the play Ubu and the Truth Commission does is to put you in a context where it exploits that . . . you laugh with the violator. And in the next scene, (you) see a consequence of what he's done and feel for yourself that you've been responding inappropriately. So it's in that kind of volatile, dangerous crossing of responses that I think the audiences feel implicit at times, or complicit. Or their sympathies are being constantly moved backwards and forwards. I think that's very much how we experience our modern identity. We don't have the luxury of being able to sit in a place where we can arbitrate in a cool moral atmosphere. It's not available to us.

 

 

 
PJ:

Do you think that artists have a certain social responsibility (to their audience) to bring things to the front to in a way in which they can understand and work towards bettering the community?

 
JT:

 

That's how I work. That's what makes sense for me. And I am sure that it is as much determined by my situation as anything else. The only way that I can work is to work in that way in trying to shift audience responses, trying to - in myself as well - shift the way that I read information, and to allow contradictions to play inside me. I can't prescribe how anyone else should practice it. That's just all that I can do.

 

 

 

PJ:

Ubu is the first play you have written.

 
JT:
My work in the arts has been primarily in anthologizing and curating . . .

 

 

 
PJ:

Is their anyone who has inspired you to pursue theater work?

 

 

JT:

 

I did, as a sort of six year old, write plays. So there is obviously this kind of infantile desire to captivate and perform. And I have never outgrown it. So there is obviously something inside my personality which is located in that performance mode that I've been repressing with academia for years. Then, when I was putting together Fault Lines, the work I'd seen of HandSpring Puppet Company and William Kentridge , the two productions that they'd done, Vooseck and Faustus in Africa, were just astonishingly compelling pieces. It seemed natural for me to approach them and to ask them whether they would be interested in doing a play on the Truth Commission. I think in a way, I was very powerfully influenced by their aesthetic. But people who have seen all three of their productions now . .. say that there are interesting shifts just in terms of media between the three.

The first was most strongly dominated by the puppetry; the second was most strongly dominated by William Kentridge's animation; and this last one is, perhaps, the most integrated of the three, but the one in which language functions strongest. So those things are about the nature of the collaborative process and how the collaboration practice shifts.

 

 

 

PJ:

How did you financially produce this project? Did you receive government funding?

 

 

JT:

I am very happy to say at this point, all praise and thanks to the Netherlands government. They were the primary funder for the Fault Lines project and undertook the funding in total for the art exhibition. Then various different embassies - the Norwegians gave us a great deal of money, particularly for the reading event. Different embassies brought out writers and artists from the international community for us. For the theater production, there is a wonderful German producer, Tomas Pitts [who] had been the primary financier for the previous Handspring productions, he put in a substantial contribution toward the production costs. And then the rest is made up from grants from the state and independent funders.

 

 

 
PJ:

Do you think that with the recent changes in this country there is a need to educate the audience on the value of art?

 

 
JT:

When one has had no access to arts practice, they think that they have survived without it, and that's when you look at the way in which people negotiate their human relations you get the evidence of how people have not actually survived without it. Particularly now in the late 1990s, when you have modernist enterprises just going ahead without any consideration of how people might actually live and use their environments.

The city of Johannesburg is an exemplary case of town planning that has given almost no attention to how people might use that space. Almost no attention to public spaces. The only public spaces in Johannesburg are the shopping malls effectively. That obviously atomizes communities and makes people live in separate compartments. And the state still doesn't know how really to address that --how to reinvent the inner-city spaces so that people feel that they have a public sphere that is part of their own well being.

So it's in the consequences that you see that people have suffered the cost of not having an arts education. How you then invent in people a desire for the arts, how you make them realize - that's a very slow and ongoing process. But I think that South Africans have to learn is play. People have been so instrumentalized, both from the right and from the left. One of the curious features of both Calvinism and Marxism, both tend to represent the human being in terms of work and production capacities. I think that South Africans need to imagine for themselves again, what play means. In that sense of developing one's own potential and developing collective identities. And those things don't happen in the work place, they happen somewhere else. That's what the Arts need to contribute to this country.

 

 

 

PJ:

Do you think the media in this country is effectively promoting awareness and support for the arts?

 
JT:

There is very little sense of urgency for the arts agenda in this country. Obviously there are certain sites and specific constituencies that understand its significance and work to promote the arts. A paper, for example, like the Mail & Guardian has a considerable chunk of its attention devoted to contemporary arts, and the Sunday Independent has a serious kind of cultural agenda, but television in particular has almost vacated the cultural project of the country. This is obviously as much an economic issue as anything else and we are constantly being reminded how much easier it is and cheaper it is to buy a piece of canned television from the "First World" than it is to produce local but it just means that the task of reinventing television in this country gets shelved over and over again . There are some local radio initiatives which are taking culture more seriously. The irony is, when you came to this country in the 1980's, everybody knew that culture was at the forefront of the struggle. And everybody in the international arts community who had an image of South Africa - that image was from two different spheres - photojournalism and the Arts. Everyone had seen, for example, different the liner cut images of the people in the townships fighting against the tanks. That was because of the priority given to the cultural work in the country, but that has disintegrated completely.

The Arts collectives, almost all, have closed down due to lack of funding because when the new State came into power, the international community that had been channeling money into the arts communities in an atomized way through small collectives around the country, they all said, "Okay, the money will now all go through the Centralized State and to the reconstruction and development project". Of course, the moment you centralize money, all the priorities and agendas change. So most of the arts collectives have collapsed.

 

 
CE:

You have worked with students from Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois) and will soon be working with students from Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia) on cultural projects. Could you elaborate on the nature of these projects?

 

 
JT:

Okay. These projects are through a link with the University of the Western Cape. David Bang (Professor of English) has set up an exchange program. We bring out students from the universities and the students do a regional. They go to Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and have exposure to the academics in the various different fields in sociology, history, literary studies and cultural studies. They'll go and meet with people in different spheres of cultural practice . . . and also to the art galleries, the newspapers, etc. in each of those regions. They'll . . . tour of some of the invented landscapes of South Africa, the game reserves . . . Then we'll talk about the invented nature project of the country.

One of the things the Apartheid state held to be valuable was enclaved spaces of nature. Part, obviously, of inventing this kind of a completely natural domain is to exclude people from this domain. Now what's happened, there are huge land rights claims going going on with people who had been kicked out of these reserves wanting to have the access again to historical lands. So the program that comes here goes to meet people in these communities, talks with them about their land contest claims, but then also gets involved in quite important and complex about environmental concerns and how you negotiate the need to preserve elephant populations, water systems, all of those attributes of these naturalized enclaves and how you waive those against people's historical rights in the region. S

So the discussions we're having with these American students cross a whole range of different cultural and political sets of issues. And it is really for people to, from an "advanced" context like the United States, to look at a country trying to invent itself. To look again at the issues like what the constitution means, what landrights claims mean, what aesthetics are and how they link to political issues and so on . . . so that they can take those sets of questions home with them to open up debate about all sorts of domains that have become naturalized and taken for granted there.

 

 
CE:

Do you feel that collaboration in the arts has an importance?

 

 
JT:

Enormous. I personally, like very much, other people's work. I get enormous pleasure from seeing another imagination applied to the same set of questions that I am looking at. For me, the difference of a whole matrix of imaginations applied to the same project, that is an enormously privileging thing to watch. So the personal renewal I get from seeing talented people work together is inestimable. I think it is also instructive to learn to subordinate your project to some extent, that collaboration is compromise. I am a tremendous pragmatist ultimately. I am not governed by principle as much as I am by pragmatism.

 
PJ:

Who, in your eyes, are some of the most successful contemporary South African artists?

 

 
JT:

In terms of theatre, I would say the most exciting venture in the past couple of years that I've seen from the outside is by someone named Brett Bailey who has done two large productions, Zombie and Mumbo Jumbo. He takes circumstances out of the newspaper . . and explores the social and anthropological and cultural implications of that story. For example, the first piece, "Zombie". A busload of school children was killed traveling over a mountain pass a few years ago in South Africa. The local community, who were devastated by the catastrophe, had problems coming to terms with it. One of the ways in which they dealt with it was through the generation of legends. Like, the children were in fact not easy in their sleep - that they were being preyed upon and used as Zombies by various people in the community. Eventually (there was a huge witchhunt saga that arose), the children's graves all had huge concrete slabs applied to the top of them to put the community at rest. (Brett) explores that story and uses the witch finders and faith healers . . . within the traditional performance structures and puts those people on stage. . . and so transgresses in very unsettling ways - the boundaries of performance and lived religious ritual. (He's) doing very interesting and innovative things using traditional forms and more modern westernized theatre conventions.

 

 

 

PJ:

 

As your work is involved with the education of others, have you witnessed any changes in educational policy here that supports the idea of a reeducation in the values of art?

 
JT:
At the point of transformation when South Africa became independent in the early 1990's, there was an expressed commitment to bringin the arts into the schools, because black schools historically had no arts education. So part of the ideology of the new education was that it would make arts available. But in fact the reverse has happened. With the crisis in funding, teachers are being canceled everywhere and of course, the first to go at any school are the art teachers. So the situation actually is worse now than it was five years ago.

 

 

 

 

PJ:

Do you have any insight on how this situation can change?

 
JT:

Well, I think that part of what Fault Lines was trying to do, was to remind the State that the Arts are not separate from the other transformation procedures: that you can't have an adequate bridge builder if the bridge builder does not have an imagination; that you can't have a hospital designed without an understanding of human psychological needs, an understanding of what space means and what it is to be social. So I think each of those areas need to constantly remind the State that the imaginative capacity that gives a country its well being comes from the Arts. And you can't have transformation -- unless it's just about degradation -- without Art.

 

 
PJ:

What are some of your thoughts on the current state of art and its interaction with the Internet?

 

 

 

JT:

First, I would like to say that South Africa is just like many developing countries caught in that curious position where we have access to top technologies in certain domains, geographic areas, certain socioeconomic areas . . In other areas the Internet is just so remote from people's lived experience. So it's going to be a very asymmetrical influence in South Africa -- as it is everywhere. But I think exaggerated in cases like this one, where in the inner cities people will be able to communicate with the international community. And in the rural areas - unless someone really takes that on as a vision and says, 'Let's put an I-cafe in a rural community and see if it can transform people's imaginative possibilities' -- So I do think it's going to be unevenly received around the country. But (also) that it is an astonishingly inexpensive medium for instant international exchange. If you can just start making the resources available then it has the potential to enormously empowering and liberating in small collectives. My sense of frustration about the Internet is that many of the Internet artistic projects really have not utilized the reciprocity of space that the medium makes possible. Many of the Internet projects I have seen are really just books in space rather than on paper. I want to encourage more experimentation where people are collaborating from various geographic sites. Trying to push the limits of what the medium can do.

 

 
CE:

As we are now approaching the beginning of the next millennium, what do you see as important issues to focus on?

 

 

 

 

JT:

 

 

I am involved in a new project using the same basic team that worked on (Ubu and the Truth Commission), and curiously enough, it is a project on forgetting. There's been so much attention on the need to remember and document. I suppose this ties up to the question pertaining to the Internet, but I think subjectivity, centering around our psychological matrix, is premised around the very delicate processes of selection: what we remember; what we forget; what information we generate ourselves; and what information we receive from elsewhere. My sense is that we are so caught up in the processes of documenting everything we know about ourselves, the world - having all contact with all peoples at all times. There is a kind of a chaos -- a massive proliferation of information. The project that I am working on now on the process of forgetting is to retrieve some of that sense of how we are constructed by what we don't know. What we have lost, as much as by what we hold onto. So I suppose in some ways that is just a precautionary tale of how, as we reach the end of the millennium, we are so fixated with being in control of all information systems at all times.

I think the habits of individual production -- the processes, the quirks, the eccentricities of seeing something in a perverse way -- reinterprets it. Those things are at risk. If one is constantly always just putting down slabs of what one can get . . . I am sure that you have seen this in a lot of work -- that it has a kind of sameness. That people are clicking and mixing and sliding bits and pieces of received information and thinking that those are creative processes. They lose the perversity of a singular engagement with something where someone has the luxury to think about something in their own terms following their own kind of psychic history. So I am keen to promote that as well . . . the quiet processes of forgetting as well as the manic processes of remembering.