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Jane
Taylor
We
are here with
Jane Taylor. If you could share some of your background with us .
. .
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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.
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PJ:
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Do you
feel that this work (Ubu and the Truth Commission) is targeted
towards a specific audience?
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JT:
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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.
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PJ:
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Do you
feel that art has a sociopolitical role as catharsis?
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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.
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PJ:
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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?
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JT:
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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. |
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Ubu
is the first play you have written.
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JT:
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My work in
the arts has been primarily in anthologizing and curating . . .
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PJ:
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Is
their anyone who has inspired you to pursue theater work?
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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.
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How
did you financially produce this project? Did you receive government
funding?
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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.
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PJ:
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Do
you think that with the recent changes in this country there is a need
to educate the audience on the value of art?
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JT:
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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.
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Do
you think the media in this country is effectively promoting awareness
and support for the arts?
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JT:
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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.
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CE:
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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?
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JT:
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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.
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CE:
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Do you
feel that collaboration in the arts has an importance?
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JT:
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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.
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PJ:
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Who, in
your eyes, are some of the most successful contemporary South African
artists?
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JT:
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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.
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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?
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JT:
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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.
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Do
you have any insight on how this situation can change?
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JT:
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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.
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PJ:
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What
are some of your thoughts on the current state of art and its interaction
with the Internet?
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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. |
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CE:
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As we are
now approaching the beginning of the next millennium, what do you see
as important issues to focus on?
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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.
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