Phone Tag: Interview with Bronwyn Katz

Posted on October 27, 2019 by Linnea

*Driekopsieland (Île à trois têtes)* (2019). Mild steel, wire, steel wool, steel pot scourers, cardboard. Installation view at Biennale de Lyon, Lyon

Bronwyn Katz is a South African artist who frequently turns to metal, found metals, and other objects to consider structures of place and language. These resonant and unruly materials bring specificity and context to the minimalist forms. In this Phone Tag interview, Bronwyn describes her family connection to metalwork, the importance of sustaining networks, and how the different environments of Capetown and Johannesburg shape her practice.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

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Linnea West: You mentioned that you are recently back from a project in Lyon. What were you working on there, and what are you working on now?

Bronwyn Katz: Currently I’m working in my studio. I’m preparing work for a solo show at Peres Projects in Berlin. While I was in Lyon, I was preparing work for the Biennale. I spent three weeks there preparing the work for the Biennale.

LW: Were you in Lyon for so long because you were making work there, or because it just takes that long to install, or…?

BK: For the Biennale it was important that all of the artists make new works. Most of the works that were on show were new works created specifically for the Biennale. It was also important for the Biennale that we collaborate with local factories and local artisans. Many of the artists ended up producing the work from start to finish in Lyon.

LW: What did you make?

BK: I created an installation out of wire and steel wool. The installation is called Driekopsieland. Basically, it’s a continuation of work that I’ve done before, but on a larger scale. I was trying to also shift some of my previous thoughts and ideas about what I was making. Most of the work that I made for the Biennale is very similar to work that I made earlier, where I was working with the idea of language, language formation, and the possibility of creating an alternative language with material. Also sounds. I created sounds.

For the Biennale, using the same material, I was still interested in the sound but also in trying to create a landscape. I was also reflecting upon the fact that the Biennale was being held at an old washing machine factory, and so I wanted to create a type of metal landscape. The installation looks like a fuzzy cactus metal forest, and the wire extends from nine meters up so that it begins to look like a type of water source or rainfall.

LW: That sounds amazing. The first image on your website is of some sculptures made out of steel wool. When I first looked at those, I didn’t know what that material was, and it almost looks like it could be soft instead of sharp. Why do you like working with steel wool? Where does that interest come from?

BK: I think I’m generally interested in metal. Growing up, my father was a metal worker. He made gates and burglar bars, and I’ve always had a relationship with metal. I think that the work comes out the way it comes out, because I try to find alternative, quirky ways of working with the material. Instead of spending time welding a large structure, I’m more attracted to softer metals and also found metal.

*Untitled, notes on perception (i)* (2018). Wire and rope from used beds. 186 x 250 x 23 cm, 186 x 127 x 5 cm. Image courtesy of André Morin and the Palais de Tokyo

LW: That’s sounds like it has been an interesting influence. I wonder who else or what else influences how you work now?

BK: I’m not sure. I’m very influenced by my community that I grew up in, but also the community of artists that I practice with currently—my network basically. Also what’s happening in the country, in South Africa, but also the rest of the world. It’s difficult to point out one specific thing. It’s more about the way I’m living at the time, how the city works, or just what is around me and the space that I’m living in. So many things. I think place would be the number one influence on the work.

LW: You mentioned working in a community of artists. Is that a community in Johannesburg? What’s that art scene like?

BK: I’d say it’s a community between Johannesburg and Cape Town. I spent a lot of time in Cape Town. I studied in Cape Town. After studying, I spent two extra years in Cape Town. Most of my community is in Cape Town. Now, having moved to Jo’burg, I’ve been able to broaden my network and expand my community.

In Cape Town, I was part of iQhiya, a collective of 11 women. We all met at university, at different stages of university, and we decided to come together as a network to support each other’s practices. When I speak about a community or network, that was a very structured community-network.

In Jo’burg it is more fluid. There are artists in similar positions of their career that I’m engaging with. I’ve also recently joined a reading group called the Lessor Violence reading group. Just being able to share ideas with people on a regular basis is important for my practice.

LW: Absolutely. I’m interested in this collective in Cape Town that you were part of. You mentioned that it was 11 women. Is it a coincidence that they all happen to be women, or was it specifically women coming together?

BK: It was very specific. Like I said, at the time we were all studying together but at different stages. We were all black women students at the university, and the way that we were taught about art, the art world or just who was able to have a successful career or who was acknowledged within the institution… it was almost never a black woman. Coming together, we wanted to create that space where we give each other the attention and support that we were not finding within the university.

*Droom boek* (2017). Salvaged bed springs and mattress. 180 x 150 cm

LW: It’s wonderful to make spaces like that. When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

BK: I’m not sure.

[laughter]

LW: Do you think of yourself as an artist?

BK: I do, but I can’t think of a point where I didn’t think I was an artist or a point where I started to think that I was an artist. I’m not answering your question well. [laughs]

LW: Well, one of the things it seems to me, from the outside, is that you’re younger and you’ve already been quite successful. That you have galleries in different places, and you’re showing work all over. Maybe you haven’t had to wrestle as much with that identity because you’ve been able to show work.

BK: I agree with you. I was on a residency just outside of Jo’burg with an older artist a few years ago, and she was telling me every five years she had to make a decision to continue being an artist. In my career, this is something I haven’t experienced because my career has been so short. Maybe that’s a question for the future.

*Untitled, notes on perception (iii)* (2018). Wire. Image courtesy of André Morin and the Palais de Tokyo

LW: Do you have a studio? What is an ideal day like in your studio?

BK: Yes, I do have a studio. An ideal day is me waking up on time, going to studio, maybe reading for a bit, working on a project I’ve been working on, and hopefully somehow magically discover a breakthrough.

[laughter]

Or discover something that I haven’t seen in my work before or just lean something from the material. I think most days, I go to studio and I try and find something that I haven’t found yet. The ideal day would be finding something that I’m looking for.

LW: You mentioned that you recently moved to Johannesburg. Do you think it’s important for an artist to be in a big city where there are galleries where you can see art, where you can make connections but where it’s often expensive or chaotic, or better to be somewhere smaller or quieter, where it’s a little easier to make?

BK: Basically, this is my second time coming back to Johannesburg. I lived in Johannesburg in 2017 for a few months. I had moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg to test out how it would feel to live in the city. Then in February this year, I moved back to Johannesburg. I would say that there is a lot going on in Cape Town, in terms of cultural institutions. My gallery, for example, is not in Johannesburg; It is only in Cape Town. I don’t know if you’ve ever been, but the cities are on opposite ends [of South Africa], and they’re very different from each other.

My main reason for moving out of Cape Town was that Cape Town is a very expensive place to live, because it’s a tourist destination. It’s a lot cheaper to live as an artist in Johannesburg, especially in the center of the city. Most of the center has moved to other parts and the center has sort of been abandoned. The center is poor in Johannesburg, whereas in Cape Town the center is very wealthy. The poor in Cape Town are outside of the center, pushed out far outside of the center. It’s much more affordable to live in Jo’burg, and I would say it’s much more interesting to live in Jo’burg as well. I think Cape Town has the potential of becoming a bubble. There can be a disconnect from what’s actually happening in the rest of country.

But in comparison to a place like Kimberly, which is a smaller city, where I’m from, that’s a different aspect of your question. I think it would be very hard at this stage of my career to live in a place like Kimberly where there is no art market. I think that maybe at a later stage of my career, that would be possible, but at such an early stage of my career I think it’s important that I live in either Cape Town or Jo’burg. And for the way that I wish my practice to grow, Jo’burg makes more sense.

LW: That makes sense. It was great speaking with you—thank you!

BK: Thank you.

Self-fashioning in Apartheid-era Studio Portraits on view at the Walther Collection

Posted on August 6, 2016 by Linnea

S. J. Moodley, Untitled (Family Portrait), 1974

For a women to style herself both in traditional male clothing and then sedate, proper female attire in the same photo shoot plays on gender boundaries even today; I did a double-take on finding such portraits in an exhibition of South African photography from the 1970s. The selection of black-and-white photography currently up at the Walther Collection Project Space, “Who I Am: Rediscovered Portraits from Apartheid South Africa,” features insightful works taken by Singarum Jeevaruthnam “Kitty” Moodley in the 1970s and 80s. Kitty’s studio portraits allowed his subjects to model themselves as they wanted to be seen, exposing their hopes and aspirations. Implicitly they offer insight into the complexity of this particular context: the 1970s South African city of Pietermaritzburg and lives of some of its “non-white” citizens. Under Apartheid, these middle and working class people were classified as African, Indian, or Coloured–a legal status that would be reflected in the ID booklets that everyone was required to carry. Kitty, politically active and opposed to Apartheid, earned his living partially from ID photos, even as his studio became a place for political discussion and the modeling of more complex images of self.

S. J. Moodley, Untitled (Three Men Dancing in a Line), 1975

Kitty’s vernacular photography transcends the sometimes stilted atmosphere of the studio. Boys dance ecstatically in modern dress; a female stands like an unsmiling statue in traditional clothing. The popularity of photography studios at the time in South Africa recalls the initial emergence of photography in the West, with Nadar’s studio in Paris and the fad of carte-de-visite. There is an informality and vitality to the rapidly shot images that was impossible 100 years prior, but these images similarly circulated in the private domain. Here, images were also served specific social purposes, such as the family album or a token for a boyfriend working in a distant city. What is on view is a self-fashioning that is perhaps fictional but not coerced; rather it presents how subjects wanted to see themselves. At some level though, cut off as we are from the subjects and place, we can only wonder as to an individual’s motivations.

S. J. Moodley, Untitled (Woman Wearing Zulu Beadwork and Holding an Umbrella), ca. 1982.

S. J. Moodley, Untitled (Woman Wearing Zulu Beadwork and Holding Umbrella), ca. 1982

Why did the unknown young woman want to be photographed in both traditional and men’s clothing? In the image above, the women dresses in a skirted outfit featuring Zulu beadwork, according to what would have been customary in her tribe. In the image below, she wears pants and poses next to a floral arrangement. In both her bare feet contrast with European umbrella. Kitty’s studio had a minimal backdrop of curtains, and a few props that reappear from portrait to portrait, such as the umbrella or a telephone. Commercial European goods served as synechdotes for modernity to the sitters who chose to use them. These two photos, like the abandon of the dancing boys, suggest the playfulness that was found in Kitty’s studio.

A newfound appreciation for African studio photography and vernacular photography brings these prints into an art context for the first time. Their history is fascinating and reflects the racist system that they were created under: a local museum curator bought the negatives of Kitty’s studio after his death, and then threw away a wide selection because it portrayed Africans not wearing traditional, ethnographically acceptable ways of dress and ornamentation but rather as individuals freely embracing modernity in different ways. An intern saved them in a garage until they were bought by the current New York-based owner.

S. J. Moodley, Untitled (Woman Wearing Zulu Beadwork and Men’s Pants), ca. 1982

Seeing the works complicates our idea of the desirability of European modernity or what modernity looked like in South Africa: sitters appear not only equally comfortable in traditional garb and European dress, but consciously using them as signifiers. As Okwui Enwezor writes elsewhere about the work of Malian photographer Seydou Keïta: “the image is, above all, to be read as a pictorial sign of various representational intentions of the sitters rather than the objective, detached, autonomous practice of the photographer alone” (Events of Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, 2010, p. 33). This kind of freedom of self-fashioning would have been rare for the middle and working class patrons whose social lives were structured around the racist limitations of Apartheid. The contradictions inherent to these photographs, unlike those of “art photography,” are not shaped purely by an artist’s vision but are the result of a complex place and time, one that we have fascinating access to here. The collaboration of the photographer and the sitter gave private voice, and now documentary access to the viewer, of a changing South African identity which struggled with the movement away from colonialism, racism, and surveillance.

“Who I Am: Rediscovered Portraits from Apartheid South Africa” is up at the Walther Collection Project Space at 526 W. 26th St, Suite 718 through September 3.

Music, Migration, & Revolution: William Kentridge at Marian Goodman Gallery

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Linnea

Installation view of More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Two film installations by William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance and Notes Toward a Model Opera, are currently on view at Marian Goodman Gallery and well worth a trek into midtown. Black-and-white animation drawn by hand and painstakingly constructed–so recognizable as the artist’s aesthetic–here gets a jolt of music, filmed actors, and, in the latter, color. The artist’s layered, complex approach to film here speaks to the broader sociopolitical contexts of migration and revolution.

Installation Detail, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Across a set of screens running the length of a room, disparate characters form a jangly, disconcerting procession in More Sweetly Play the Dance. Walking, dancing, limping, or strutting, these largely silhouetted forms brings a macabre energy to what resembles a funeral procession with the weird energy of a brass band propelling it. In addition to musicians, there are dancers in traditional African dress and people on medical drips. Kentridge’s trademark charcoal stop-motion animations form the backdrop for the silhouetted characters, who are like shadows on a forced march. The work functions not as a representation of a specific funeral as much as metaphor for the forces of migration. It feels apt to the current refugee crisis, and Kentridge, born in 1955 in Johannesburg to liberal Jewish parents who were active anti-apartheid attorneys, does not shy away from the sociopolitical. Indeed, meditations on subjects like apartheid in his native South Africa have appeared in his non-linear narratives with a beautiful obliqueness.

Installation view, detail, Notes Toward a Model Opera, 2015

Notes Toward a Model Opera takes China’s cultural revolution as its subject matter, keying off of Madame Mao’s Eight Model Revolutionary Operas–what was allowed as popular entertainment in China during Mao’s reign. Kentridge reckons with the promise of this historical moment in China with a flurry of political slogans from the failed revolution, maps, and documentary photographs of deprivation against which figures proclaim, dance, or sing in the foreground. Images such as a bird drawn in charcoal flying across all three screens act as momentary pauses in this rush of imagery.

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Notes Toward a Model Opera implicates a contemporary South Africa and revolution writ large in addition to China’s cultural revolution through a multivalent set of signs. The same dancer from More Sweetly Play the Dance, the noted South African ballerina Dada Masilo, appears here with a rifle in pointe shoes, dancing in front of maps with China characters and slogans in English. Her costume suggests a military uniform and her gestures suggests combat as much as ballet. Text and image, English and Chinese, live dancer and documentary photo, merge in and out to a changing soundtrack. The great promises of the revolution are presented as a cacophony of paper fragments and chants. Instead of complete, as Madame Mao made her operas, Kentridge’s work remains open-ended–only “Notes”–as if acknowledging the impossibility of ever completing the utopian project of cultural revolution.

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The exhibition is on view at Marian Goodman gallery through February 20, 2016.