Monsieur Yves' garden

I recently wrote a piece on the fire sale – read auction – of Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection. Then, a few weeks later, all quite unexpectedly, I ended up visiting the Majorelle Garden in Marrakech, where the late fashion designer’s ashes were scattered following his death in 2008.

Located a short walk out the old city, along the wide boulevards of the French colonial district, the Majorelle Garden is prickly place. Literally. It is filled with hardy shrubs and cacti. Established by the French painter Jacques Majorelle in 1924, the garden has been open to the public since 1947. Monsieur Yves and his partner Pierre Bergé acquired the garden, which includes a defiantly blue modernist villa amidst the greenery, in 1980. 

Walking around the raked garden, pausing to look at the graffiti on the thick bamboo stems, listening to Mark Coetzee speak of his encounters with Monsieur Yves at a breakfast deli in Paris in the 1990s, smiling too at the remembered recollection of Bergé describing his lover as “a man of exceptional intelligence practicing the trade of an imbecile", I found my mind wandering off elsewhere. 

Earlier this year, over lunch in Kloof Street, Lin Sampson complained to me that a lot of newspaper journalism nowadays is shorthand for what already exists on the internet. There was little if any personal experience or insight contained in these cut ‘n’ paste pieces. Perhaps the piece I wrote on Monsieur Yves for the Sunday Times was a case in point. 

Sitting in the garden, looking at the unembellished memorial column erected in his honour, I was reminded of the unavoidable honesty attached to a personal encounter. I never met Monsieur Yves.

Anyway, here is the piece I wrote:

It’s his myopic blue eyes I want to see, nothing else. Trawling the vast image archive online that responds to the entry “Yves Saint Laurent”, I find myself oddly frustrated. It’s those thick-framed glasses: they feature in almost every picture of the Algerian-born Frenchman, a shield to the enquiring gaze of the world.

There they are, framing his coy reserve as he faces the world, fresh faced, 21, the newly appointed head of the House of Dior. And there they are again, behind the scenes at a 1970 Paris catwalk show, Monsieur Yves further sporting a raffish silk scarf and tight-fitting safari jacket.

And so it continues, my ambition thwarted by the endless pictures of the sartorially composed couturier in, you guessed it, glasses. The more frantically I search, the more I find myself getting lost in the smoky after burn of a life well lived – one in which he always seemed to be wearing glasses. Then suddenly, yes, no, could it be?

It is a Polaroid portrait of Monsieur Yves by Mister Warhol. It was taken in June 1972. He is wearing a dinner jacket, yellow polka dot bowtie and vertically striped shirt. More importantly, he is barefaced, without glasses. But, for all their nakedness, his eyes remain obscure, lost in the imperfection of an aging Polaroid. Damn.

Of course, I know that Monsieur Yves had shockingly blue eyes. Why all this fuss? Call me foolish, but I want to study them for clues. After all, these were the eyes that helped put together one of the twentieth century’s great art collections.

In an art world prone to hype, where tags like “highly important” are used to puff second-rate collections, Monsieur Yves’s collection truly deserved the accolade important. Amassed without the aid of an advisor, his only confidante his lifelong business partner and lover, Pierre Bergé, the pair’s Paris residences were the stuff of legend.

Paintings by Picasso and Matisse hung in close proximity to collectable crystals and silver decorative ware, also an armchair by Eileen Gray, the later an audacious Art Deco masterpiece. So jam-packed were the pair’s separate residences, they hung a Monet painting in the toilet of one.

The collection, which included a rare African inspired sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, was the outcome of half century’s activity. Started in the late 1950s, when Monsieur Yves first met the older Bergé, it gained manic fervour in the 1970s when Opium become the biggest selling perfume brand in the world.

More than mere trophies, the pieces in the collection held together their tumultuous personal relationship while also giving Monsieur Yves great creative inspiration. Take his 1965 Fall collection, its shift dresses inspired by the minimalist grids of his Mondrian canvases.

Fashion observer Suzy Menkes, writing in the New York Times shortly after the inimitable couturier’s death from cancer in June 2008, summed up the audacity of Monsieur Yves’ collection at his Rue de Babylone apartment as follows: “It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. Incredible art on the wall and you had to resist the urge to gape.”

For decades, however, it was only an elite few who gaped. Death changed all this, Bergé opting to sell the pair’s collection shortly after his lover’s passing.

“The second I knew that Yves was ill, condemned, I knew I would sell everything,” Bergé told the London Telegraph newspaper in January, a few weeks before auction house Christie’s hosted a three-day, 733-lot sale of the pair’s collection of rare art and unusual antiquities.

The collecting world gasped.

“One of the most remarkable ensembles of fine and decorative arts created in the twentieth century,” gushed the Financial Times at the time of the collection’s display at the Grand Palais in Paris. “This happens once every 100 years,” offered Japanese collector Misako Takuku to Agence France-Press. “It’s like a dream.”

2009 has been a terrible year for the art world, even locally. Drought and famine are the more commonly used metaphors, not dreams. All of which made the outcome of the Paris sale that much more dizzying. Records, records, records.

Monsieur Yves’ two beloved Mondrians, one an austere composition in grey, the other a geometrical symphony of blue, yellow and white, fetched R242 million and R162-million respectively (all prices include buyer’s premium). The early Brancusi wood sculpture sold for R328 million. Gray’s unusual “dragon” chair collected a whopping R246 million. All prices that make paupers of the Tretchikoff adoring bidders turned out at the Kebble auction in May.

The headline grabbing final tally for the sale, R4.2 billion (373,935,500 Euro), the biggest-grossing auction of a private collection ever, wasn’t achieved without some effort. Seating had to be arranged for more than 1,000 buyers, 100 telephone lines had to be installed, and eight auctioneers prepped for their marathon shifts. According to one report, a small airport north of Paris witnessed a 35% increase in traffic as bidders arrived in private jets.

The great dispersal of Monsieur Yves’ things is not over yet. Over four days in November, Christie’s, in association with Bergé’s auction house, will be hosting a second sale of personal effects. Almost 1200 items (jewelled pendants, lamps, candle holders, a leather Eames chair, black 2007 Mercedes Benz S Class 350L and Tiffany Studios lamp, to name but a few) will go under the hammer. The sale is expected to achieve a moderate R45 million. (The four day sale eventually netted €8,990,212, including buyer’s premium.)

Perhaps the most striking feature of the auction is the photographic record of the late designers Normandy getaway, Château Gabriel à Bénerville. Built on 74 acre estate by an American family in 1874, the home was styled to evoke the aura of French novelist Marcel Proust’s classic book, À la recherche du temps perdu (translated both as In Search of Lost Time and Remembrance of Things Past.)

“This is my haven between two storms,” said Monsieur Yves of his opulent hideaway, the bricks and mortar of which now belong to a Russian. “I come here to rebuild my strength.” Which no doubt involved taking off those character-defining glasses.

Monday morning coffee in Marrakech

Writing a review of Alf Kumalo’s photobook, Through my Lens, an uneven collection of historical photographs, it suddenly struck me. Tenses matter in photography. Photography, it would seem to me, is about a perennial past tense. It can never articulate a future tense, and only tenuously claim to speak of a present tense. Thinking this, I found myself wondering to what extent photography is, unavoidably, about denying death. Death exists in the perpetual future tense – it will happen, until it does happen. It’s a muddled thought, admittedly. Needs refinement.

Incidentally, I write this while sitting in a riad in Marrakech. My visit here prompted a colleague to send me a note about Paul Bowles: “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

 To extend on Bowles, how many times will I get to sip the dark coffee served by shy cook in a Marrakechi riad on a Monday morning? Not many. I’m going to enjoy the limitless finality of this morning’s coffee.

“Who is ever quite without his landscape?”

An old man, his bottom jaw clenched and slightly proud, is seated in a chair beneath a leafless tree. His pale blue eyes are focussed on a book, a novel. A cup of tea steams on a table next to him. It is a clear Highveld afternoon, winter but warm. But for the occasional whir of a helicopter, the intermittent cooing of doves, it is quiet. Then a familiar noise, followed by a feminine voice: “Rob, telephone.” The voice becomes a figure as it emerges from a single-storey residence. Wearing a pastel apron, the woman pads across the tawny lawns and hands the old painter a telephone handset.

“Sean, oh god yes, no I’m a very bad bastard. I’m sorry, I was supposed to ring you at least three hours ago.”

“It’s not a problem,” I tell Robert Hodgins.

“Well it is a problem because I hate breaking my word. Um, I know it’s quite sentimental and Boy Scout-ish, but never mind. Listen dear boy, when would you like to come?”

“I can’t come through because I’m in Cape Town,” I respond.

“Oh I see. Well, ask Business Day if they are willing to fly me down to the Cape.”

“I know what their answer will be.”

“I have a feeling I know too,” he chuckles. “Alright, perhaps you could go ahead with the interview now. What’s this piece about?”

“Um, its basically about you being South Africa’s preeminent living painter,” I offer coyly. The painter chuckles again.

Of course, I share the old man’s cynical disregard for these sort of glib one-liners but I’m trying to set the scene here, bear with me. This is a story about painter Robert Hodgins, a man working in a practice increasingly given over to self-doubt and worry, never mind the headline grabbing billionaire art collectors and their lust for oil on canvas. Over the last hundred or so years, painting’s prominence has steadily been eroded, to the point where it now struggles to define its place in the dispersed field of contemporary art production.

For some, this necessarily casts doubts on the place and status of Hodgins. What, to put it crassly, makes this old boy and his abstracted figurative paintings of stifled executives, clenched old molls, tight-lipped warhorses and sun-drenched rakes so special? What indeed. The short answer: his laconic brevity and acuity as a painter, added to which there is his simple goodness and grace as a human. None of which was a given at the start of it all. Some biography.

“I was born in England, 27 June 1920 – the illegitimate son of a working woman, by a Canadian who lingered in London from Wold War One, was a married parent back home, and wasn’t interested in further fatherhood,” Hodgins pithily introduces himself in his eponymous monograph from 2002. Soon banished to an orphanage, he found a modicum of under-age happiness in the countryside, with a family that wanted to adopt him. At age ten, Mother Hodgins interceded, so it was back to London. Four years later, this sensitive, literate youth was again uprooted, yanked out of school – because learning was an affectation and cash paid the shared bills.

“I had a very lonely childhood with few friends and a completely philistine background,” Hodgins succinctly described his youth to me during a 2007 interview. Books, he added, were his only refuge. “I quite early on at school discovered literature, which was my first form of discovery of art, something which entranced me, that was quite pointless, quite useless.”

His first job was as a delivery boy for a newsagent in Soho. Two and half years later he found a job answering phones. At age 18 his great-uncle in South Africa offered him a means of escape. Once in Cape Town, the London youth worked as an insurance clerk. It was a brief reprieve. In late 1940, Hodgins, now a matriculant, joined the army transport division. He didn’t have it all that hard during the war. In the deserts of Egypt, he was introduced to modern English poetry, Auden in particular.

“Who is ever quite without his landscape?” wrote Auden in 1937. It is a rhetorical question, perhaps, but one that helpfully explains why Hodgins opted to stay in England after the war. London, after all, was home, and home, as Auden wrote, is “the centre where the three or four things/ that happen to a man do happen”. Back in the “grey block”, as Hodgins has described London, he took up a job teaching art at an East End school.

For many years Hodgins buttered his bread, sugared his tea and paid his rent with the help of teaching cheques. First in London, then later, after studying painting at Goldsmiths, followed by another boat trip to South Africa, in Pretoria, at the old technical college. He joined the staff there in 1954, Pretoria introducing the immigrant painter to cheap good food, clothes, cigarettes and wine. Immigrant painter? Well yes. Hodgins’ art is all about that awkward sense of a frail, receding cultural memory encountering and engaging, in an excitedly cautious manner, the nuances and complexities of an adopted culture. But I’m jumping far ahead of myself here.

In 1966, having established himself as a painter on the scene, Hodgins putting on his first show at Johannesburg’s Lidchi Gallery in 1956, he took up a position at Wits teaching life drawing. This little distraction would keep him busy for 17 years. I ask Hodgins, the man seated in the warm winter sunlight, if teaching ever stifled his ambitions and abilities as a painter

“No, no, no,” he blurts out emphatically. “I said at my doctorate at Wits that I owe a great deal to the students. One ex-student said, ‘So tell me what?’ I couldn’t pin it down, but I think the fact is that you’re surrounded by people who are taking art seriously. It is not a reinforcement, but it allows an interplay, like two rugby fans who take rugby seriously. No I mean it. I don’t scorn rugby fans, although I can’t see what all the fuss is, but I can see that to really, really love rugby you have to know what rugby is about. Well, to really love art, you’ve got to be serious about it.

“Teaching art is a very interesting experience. I loved it, I must say. I am very glad that Wits was so nasty to me, well not Wits but the head of the department, Alan Crump. He was so nasty to me that he made me leave. I am very glad he did, he didn’t realise what a favour he did to me.” A favour? Well, in hindsight yes, but when Hodgins left Wits in the early 1980s he was a retiree with a paintbrush and a modest track record. Hardly a promising prospect, really.

I ask the painter about the big holes in his CV. After an intense burst of activity in the late 1950s when, for example, he showed alongside Alexis Preller at the Pretoria Art Museum, he seemed to go nowhere before announcing himself as a serious proposition with a roguish gallery of military figures, in the mid-1980s.
“Ja but you know, one thing that perhaps you don’t remember or don’t even know is that up to I suppose the middle or late 1980s, there was quite a lot of small galleries, in particular the gallery attached to the Market Theatre, where one was always in a big group show with people who have now become very interesting, like Paul Stopforth, William Kentridge, you know, and you popped in and out of those.

“One was constantly showing, and because it wasn’t terribly remunerative, you didn’t make much money out of it, you had to earn your living doing teaching or something else. Because of all that one went on painting, but first you didn’t have all the time to paint and secondly there wasn’t that big excitement about South African art there is now, even in South Africa. You were painter, you exhibited; you were a sculptor, you exhibited, bada-bada-bada.”

I wonder out loud if this slower working pace, particularly when compared with his routine now of almost one solo exhibition a year, had an adverse effect on his evolution as a painter. After all, repetition breads rigour, and rigour is the measure of a practicing artist.

“I’m not sure about that, Sean,” he muses. “No I must say I think you are right. I think in those early days I was making paintings, now I am a painter.”
One bit of biography that has always intrigued me about Hodgins, and perhaps stems naturally from his affinity for writing, is his not so brief detour into art criticism. In the late 1950s Hodgins ditched his Pretoria teaching job, working for four years as an arts journalist for a magazine called Newscheck.

“I was perfectly willing to see whether I could perform as a writer, as I wasn’t bad,” he says without any sense of immodesty. The mood of the times also played its part in this decision.

“In the sixties and even in the seventies, there were about three people earning their living as painters. I mean three reputable people, not people who were churning out comforting little pictures of the Malay quarter, I’m not talking about them, I am talking about people who were trying to advance themselves and advance their work,” he says, mentioning the names Walter Battiss and Alexis Preller. When he did paint, it was almost as a hobbyist. “So in the sixties, I don’t think I was yet a professional artist, I was a professional amateur.”

One person who witnessed firsthand Hodgins transformation from hesitant amateur into unstoppable professional is Neil Dundas, a curator at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery.
“I first met Rob in the old Goodman Gallery at Hyde Park, around May 1983 when I was still rather new to the art world and the gallery,” says Dundas, whose insights into the painter are illuminating, notwithstanding the commercial relationship.

“I worked quite closely with him from 1984 onward, for his own solo exhibitions as well as Wits group shows, and collaborations with printers, ceramists and, of course, Deborah Bell and William Kentridge,” he explains. “I was always particularly struck by the way in which he was able to deal with social horrors, ugly aspects of human frailty, random violence and political venality without a judgmental stance. Rather he enjoyed the actual process of painting onto the canvas, teasing shapes out of clay, experimenting with effects on a plate, and allowed that evident skill and pleasure to add the humane touch to the subject.”

The result of all this spry activity is an oeuvre that, in the view of dealer Warren Siebrits, rarely disappoints. “There’s almost no such thing as a bad Hodgins,” Siebrits is quoted in Art South Africa. “And he’s probably the most important living South African painter.”

Not everyone necessarily agrees with this assessment. A rival Cape Town dealer once told me that Stanley Pinker, a contemporary of Hodgins, is far more adroit as a painter. And then there’s the matter of Nigerian curator and tastemaker Okwui Enwezor’s stinging aside in a 1996 Frieze magazine review: “I cannot imagine that paintings such as Hodgins’ – which look like Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon on a very bad day – represent the best of what could be seen in Johannesburg during 1995. These pictures… are formalism gone awry. They snuggle into a psychic space no larger than a one rand coin.”

Funnily enough, the novel Hodgins was reading when I called anticipated this part of our conversation.

“I am just reading a book by Julian Barnes, who quotes Sibelius: ‘You will notice there are no statues of critics in any town of France.’ Don’t you like that?” He laughs raucously. But, truthfully, what does the old man make of his critics?
“Sweetie,” he says, injecting a bit of camp into his occasional routine of speaking epigrammatically, “I have hardly ever been criticised by somebody terribly intelligent.”

The book on his lap also anticipates another, slightly less frivolous concern: “It is quite a long book. The author is only 60 and he is thinking about death. Here I am knocking 90, shouldn’t I be adjusting myself to this thought?”

“Then again you have rather more prosaic concerns about 90 because you have deadlines to deliver for next year’s big exhibition,” I respond.

“Yes, theoretically, but if I fall down dead in that deadline, tough. The gallery will have to make do with what they’ve got, won’t they. I hope it is not happening. I have this great ambition to be 100, and be the first South African 100-year-old painter who starts a new painting in their centenary year.”

But that is next year.

“I am now going to get off my butt, the shadows are coming in, the sunset is coming on slowly,” says Hodgins. “I am now going to my studio to put some Windsor red on a new painting.”

An abandoned spark of the world’s lusty fires

In the early 1970s Prakash Jadhav, then a baggage handler at Mumbai airport, wrote a poem that startled filmmaker Amar Kanwar when he read it many years later, in 2001. Taking its name from a well-known and congested Mumbai landmark, Under Dadar Bridge is a poem of mourning, notionally at least. A fatherless son recalls his dead mother, a prostitute. ‘The three bricks of the sacrificial fire she used to light have sooty ornamental marks,’ it begins. ‘She has left the ruined sculpture of her relics under Dadar Bridge.’ Written in the Marathi idiom, spoken by Mumbai’s homeless Dalit underclass, Jadhav’s poem is more than just an elegiac record of absence. Like Kanwar’s films, it is fired by incendiary need to interrogate an impoverished reality.

‘Poison-drunk and restless,’ the son at one point demands of his mother: ‘Hey ma, tell me my religion. Who am I? What am I? Hindu or Muslim?’ It is not an idle question in India. Her response is blunt: ‘You are an abandoned spark of the world’s lusty fires.’ Unsatisfied, the son impetuously pushes for more. ‘Who was he? Who’s my father?’ In a moment of observational grace, Jadhav records in words – much in the way Kanwar does in moving images – the intimate gestures that mark the unsaid: ‘Scraping and scratching at the VD sores that traced the world’s map on her flower-like breasts, shrivelled during the malaria epidemic, she would answer: ‘He was some swine or other!’’

Under Dadar Bridge directly inspired Kanwar to make A Night of Prophecy (2002), an episodic visual compendium of Indian protest poetry that premiered at documenta 11 in 2002. Kanwar however only briefly images Jadhav in his film, which, to borrow from the eccentrically brilliant Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, proposes the griot as ‘a messenger of one’s time, a visionary and the creator of the future’. In his typically dissociative style Kanwar shows Jadhav seated in his home, hair neatly combed, blue work shirt open to the belly. The edit suddenly cuts to the famous bridge. A young man is walking, his passage marked by the streaking lights of passing cars. Kanwar slows and rewinds the scene, a technique repeated throughout his oeuvre. Back again to Jadhav, who exhibits his handwriting to the camera. It is a cryptic moment. According to Kanwar, Jadhav was promoted to a clerical position after strike placards featuring his verse caught the eye of an alert boss. But you are not expected to know this.

In a film that uses poetry and song to elliptically trace the fault lines of contemporary India, defined by Kanwar as caste, class, religion and nationality, Jadhav’s brief appearance is without fanfare. There is no voiceover to locate his significance within the emerging Dalit literary tradition, no exegesis of a life. Eschewing the didactic literalism so much a part of contemporary documentary filmmaking, Kanwar chooses only to show the poet as he wearily cups his hand around his neck. That’s it, no cant, just an elderly man seated in the quiet half-light of his slum dwelling. The film then cuts to a quotidian scene around the bridge, a translation of Jadhav’s poem scrolling vertically across the screen. This miniscule sequence, in many ways, distils Kanwar’s style; it describes in précis form his approach to archiving the intimate moods, complex shades and fragmented gestures underlying the conflicts marring the Indian subcontinent. ‘Speaking in multiplicity,’ he concisely defines it.

Seated in Kanwar’s tiny studio, a retrofitted servant’s quarter located up a narrow flight of stairs in a Saket, a residential colony in South Delhi, I ask the heavily bearded filmmaker how he found Jadhav. Kanwar’s answer is uncomplicated: it took time, three trips to Mumbai, and some footwork with a literature activist. The negotiations that followed were equally complex, involving Jadhav’s wife and sons, Kanwar having to explain who he was, what he did, and why. The why was easy: ‘I told them I can’t get over his poem, that I am a public school kid from another world. I couldn’t explain what the poem did to me, just that it had never left me, which is why I was there.’

An unpretentious and oftentimes self-reflexive conversationalist, Kanwar is also a cigarette smoking contrarian, his allusive thinking modulated by an unapologetic laugh. ‘How much detail do you want?’ he asks when it becomes clear that my interest in his biography predates his art world debut in 2002, in Basel.

Born into a family that carries with it the scar of India’s seismic delineation in 1947, the year his mother and father separately fled Punjab during the Partition, Kanwar grew up in a military home, his father a naval officer. (The uniformed military figure is a distinctive presence throughout his films, although this has less to do with personal biography than the subject matter of his work: social and political conflict.) The lesser achieving younger brother, academically at least, after finishing school he enrolled in a history degree at Delhi University (1982-4). The small-scale conflicts in the politically engaged history department energised the South Delhi suburbanite: ‘I got absolutely and completely socially, publically, politically aware and involved.’

Two events in 1984 sharpened the focus of Kanwar’s activism, which is ongoing. On October 31 Indira Ghandi was assassinated. Kanwar witnessed firsthand the retaliatory violence. With the history department shut down in protest, he spent most of his time doing relief work with affected families. In a manner that would later inform his filmmaking process, he simply ‘hung out’ with victims, listening. During this brief hiatus, on December 3, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal leaked toxic fumes into the atmosphere, killing over 2000 people. ‘In many ways a lot of things happened for me that turned things around in those two months,’ he says.

I ask if he was aligned to any political organisations at the time. His answer is terse and immediate: ‘No… I just kept getting involved in various civil rights–, environmental–, political–, or anti-violence groups, as an individual.’ He describes his ideological position as having been ‘outside established left traditions but politically liberal and left leaning’. It is a space he continues to occupy, both as a human rights activist and filmmaker: in many senses Kanwar is radical humanist, first and foremost a libertarian, then left.

After completing his studies, he travelled to central India, to research alcoholism in a coal mining region. ‘It opened up a whole country beyond my existence.’ This is not a frivolous statement. In his subsequent quests to describe the histories of Indian conflict, the prophetic possibilities of poetry, the suffering of woman, even the grotesquery of the Burmese junta, Kanwar has succeeded in retrieving marginal, dispossessed and exiled subjects from a totalising image oblivion. In the compelling, interwoven narratives that comprise his 19-channel projection The Torn First Pages (2004-8), dedicated to a Mandaly book dealer imprisoned for sedition and shown for the first time in full at Munich’s Haus der Kunst last year, he achieves this by focussing, minutely, on Burma’s forgotten people. The three-part installation introduces the viewer to Sitt Nyein Aye, an exiled Burmese painter, Tin Moe, a dissident Burmese poet, also Ma Win Maw Oo, a Burmese high school student shot dead by soldiers in the 1988 uprising.

But film came later. If nothing else, Kanwar’s stint as a researcher made him realise he had no attraction to becoming ‘a university type of intellectual guy, which I found distasteful and tiresome’. With ironic detachment, he says he decided on film because it offered a study pursuit with ‘peaceful examinations’. Perhaps, but his choice of film school was anything but arbitrary or neutral. Founded by renowned Canadian documentary filmmaker James Beveridge, the Mass Communications Research Centre at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University was a hotbed of activist filmmaking. Beveridge, however, was old and nearing retirement when Kanwar entered film school in 1985; Kanwar also had no interest in the becoming a ‘film buff’. After graduating in 1987, he made two documentary films then promptly decided to quit film. ‘I found filmmaking to be a very absurd profession,’ he offers. Partly, it was the expense, a one-hour videocassette tape costing as much as a month’s salary. He returned to the research project in the coal-mining region.

‘It is tiresome to talk about myself,’ sighs Kanwar. Tiresome because he knows there is a tacit expectation that this talk will offer insight into the nature of his work, its methodology; that it will flesh out irrelevant details, like his influences. The latter issue, he says, has increasingly become a point of irritation, particularly as his work gets travelled to global art destinations: Basel, in 2002 and 2007, the Whitney Museum, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Paris, Stockholm, the list grows. ‘I find it very difficult to answer, and I also resist categorisation.’ He tentatively offers Andrei Tarkovsky’s name, then pulls back. ‘There are several filmmakers that I like, but there is a lot of 15^th and 16^th century Indian poetry that has been totally fascinating and inspiring and an influence.’

Kanwar’s biography might not be a reliable guide through his work, but it is not without relevance. During a long and ‘demoralising’ period spent making the sort of documentary films his current practice shuns, Kanwar produced a film for the Tibetan government in exile, Earth as Witness (1994). It was different from anything he had done before, the total control he had negotiated allowing him to experiment with narrative techniques. He describes the film as ‘an important turning point.’ Three years later he released A Season Outside (1997).

Episodic and journeying, A Season Outside records his attempt to make sense of Punjab’s violent history, and by extension India’s. Kanwar overlays onto his raw images of exaggerated military pageantry, recorded at the Wagah border, a near continuous narration. Early on, he highlights his biographical interest in the story. Seen in the context of his later work, this probing, argumentative film is a remarkable statement of intent: ‘I have a compass which keeps spinning me into zones of conflict,’ he declares at one point.

Narrative construction aside, A Season Outside was important in other ways. An immersive filmmaker, Kanwar extensively travelled his film, A Season Outside shown at schools and in villages, to rich and poor alike. Why? ‘It is easy to get appreciated, but it is not easy to extract criticism. I went around pushing and looking for it. For me, that journey was hugely rewarding. I met a lot of audiences who argued, explained, criticised and appreciated, who told me what they felt and why they felt.’

Years later, this activist cum indie filmmaking ethic would allow him to broker the trust of a rural community while making The Lightning Testimonies (2007), an exploration of India’s history of sexual violence, available both as a continuous film and eight-channel projected installation. Initially sceptical of his intentions, Kanwar responded by hosting a screening of his work. ‘I ended up showing silent films, abstract films, single shot films, some of my films that I show in parts of installations, as well as old work, in an open field at night, on a television with people sitting on the ground. They saw all of it: my early Burma work, A Season Outside. Nobody said anything. The next morning I was asked, simply, ‘What do I want to do?’’

This statement contains more than just quaint anecdote. ‘If you are not politically or socially engaged or connected with a community or a process, with some degree of depth and calmness, you cannot produce work,’ argues Kanwar. The filmmaker’s ethical stance, which he says is based on ‘comprehension and compassion’, is not the only reason I have highlighted his story of the screening in the field. A metonymic image-maker, Kanwar’s films are driven by an internal logic that aims to connect with audiences experientially, rather than bludgeon them intellectually, as is so often the case with socially engaged documentary films. Editing and narrative construction are central to this process.

Particularly in his projected installations, where his narratives are displayed as a constellation of auditory and visual fragments, Kanwar’s aim is to fashion an experiential space that might prompt ‘revelations, of different kinds, for different individuals’. He achieves by acknowledging multiplicity – ‘the need for multiple vocabularies to be able represent, tell, reflect, understand, communicate or even explore reality’. Elsewhere during our day-long conversation, he rationalises this need for multiplicity as follows: ‘Life is so full of so many layers and so many concurrent, simultaneously existing trajectories that at times you run into a situation where you want to tell a story that becomes infinitely richer if you are able to reveal its multiplicity.’

Form, despite its centrality to his idiosyncratic visual language, turns out to be another frustrating topic of conversation for Kanwar. ‘My motivation for doing this is the content of the film, not the methodology of its form,’ he humphs. Kanwar’s contrarian manner and, at times, allusive positions remind of Allan Sekula, whose notion of ‘poly-seriality’ is not that far off Kanwar’s aesthetic/formalist principle of ‘multiplicity’. More fundamentally, both practitioners share an ideologically engaged vision that pits itself against the ‘indifference, callousness and mendacity’ of the neo-liberal state, to quote Sekula. In his short film The Face (2005), later incorporated into The Torn First Pages, Kanwar achieves this by contextually capturing the image of General Than Shwe, the secretive head of the Burmese junta. Kanwar secretly filmed ‘this creep’ at Ghandi’s burial place, Than Shwe shown scattering flowers across the non-violence advocate’s grave. Tellingly, the general was on an official, state sanctioned visit to India, Burma an expedient proxy for political manoeuvring by India as it turns east and faces down China.

The totalising and often essentialist senses in which we (the west) understand these two emerging superpowers, be it politically, economically and/or culturally, plays right into Kanwar’s hand. ‘The great Indian growth – and the great Chinese growth – has been accompanied by severe destruction within these countries: destruction of natural resources, cultural traditions, music, food, habitat, species, a whole range of things that have had to be destroyed for this boom to ever have existed.’ For any artist to feel flattered in this context, Kanwar empathically states, is ridiculous, absurd, silly. It is point sorely missed in most long-distance appraisals of India’s art boom, highlighting why Kanwar’s politically poetical films are essential viewing.

The Cowboys of Kayes

It is about half after five, the relentless sun finally yielding. A ragtag grouping of men, most of them in their early twenties, one with a big scar on his neck, chat amiably amongst themselves as they wait for things to get started.

On the other side of the dusty enclosure, also languidly congregated in a group, are their opponents, a brutish lot by all accounts. They have a habit of scarring their adversaries.

Standing amongst the group nearest me is the Ivorian footballer Didier Drogba. Other big names include Thierry Henry and Argentine Lionel Messi, both from FC Barcelona, also the Fredi Kanouté, the French-born Malian striker. The genius Brazilian midfielder Ronaldinho is here too; he is in high spirits.

But it is not soccer these Malian youths, all residents of Kayes, reputedly Africa’s hottest town, are set to play. Wearing cheap plastic sandals and sports jerseys announcing their football heroes, they are misiminena, cowboys in the local Bambara language.

Football and cows might not quite define all that there is to know about Kayes, but each is central to this rather forgettable market town crowded along the banks of the Senegal River. By day, every other youth transporting vegetables, selling hay bales or fixing truck tyres wears a football shirt. At night, the brightest lights in town radiate from the local soccer stadium.

Named after the Wolof command for “come here”, which used to be how locals beckoned the ferryman before the French and their bridges made it easier to cross the river, cows are also central to Kayes’ largely agrarian economy.

Approaching town from the Malian capital of Bamako in the east, vast herds of cattle can be seen grazing the fenceless landscapes. Amongst the breeds there is the humpless N’Dama, brought to West Africa by migrating pastoralists 9000 years ago. But it is the heavier, meatier White Fulani and Gobra, distinguished by their impressive lyre-shaped horns and bulging humps, that keep the cowboys busy.

Every afternoon at about six thirty, when the barometer dips just below thirty, Drogba, Henry and a whole phalanx of attacking footballers will accompany these impressive cattle, tethered by heel and horn, two-by-two down the national road. Coaxed with guttural chants, the cattle will be goaded, beaten, sometimes even wheeled in carts across the old iron bridge spanning the Senegal River.

“Where are they taking them?” I curiously asked my interpreter when I first saw them pass the hotel. I was in Kayes for a week without much to do, which perhaps explains my curiosity.

“To pasture,” he replied. In a manner of speaking he was right. The square, cement-clad building where the cows are guided is not so much menacing as obvious: it is an abattoir.

Disappointed by this grim endpoint, I resolved to find out where the cows came from, rather than linger on where they are gutted, filleted and shipped off in parts.

The next evening, after another all-day siesta, Kayes grinding to a halt when the sun is at its highest and meanest, I trace the route walked by the cowboys, in reverse.

I walk past the sprawling eastern market where Cheick Coulibaly, 52, a trucker and fan of James Brown told of how he had stowed away illegally on a ship bound for France, three times. “The French are racists,” he quipped in fluent English, drawing on his cigarette. “There will be more riots.”

As the ramshackle buildings and market stalls thin out east of town, near the cemetery, I see a man herding a group of goats down a side street. I follow him.

It is about four thirty when I arrive at the market, the cement wall surrounding the cattle enclosure marked with graffiti reading “Long live the playboys”. Slowly the playboys in football gear begin to arrive. I chat with two of them.

Sadio Traore, 23, wears a shirt with the name of Egyptian footballer Mido emblazoned on its back. He shows me the thick welt in his neck. Seated next to him is Marye Dembele, 32. He holds out his right arm: it has a long scar running up its length. Old war wounds, they explain, occupational risks.

A passerby laughs and says something in Bambara: “They do this job because they are poor,” my interpreter translates.

There is little to doubt this unsolicited bit of wisdom. The cowboys work two shifts, the first starting at five and ending around midnight. It involves getting the cows to the abattoir for slaughter. The average wage is R45 per day.

The job of slaughtering the cattle on the late shift, from midnight to morning, is more lucrative, paying R90 per day.

Sometime after the call to afternoon prayers, the action around the cattle enclosure begins to ratchet up. Seydou Lah, 67, and Kalidouh Kaleluyatasai, 69, arrive. They are to the Kaidi market what Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan are to English football, the big guns. Lah, a former cowboy himself, is cattle trader, Kaleluyatasai president of the local cattle dealers association. Both wear the flowing robes, known locally known as boubous.

“A good cow is a fat cow,” explains Lah after dispensing a handful of grubby, cellotaped notes amongst the cowboys. Weight, he says, not necessarily region or breed determines value.

Some of the cows have come as far as 250km, from neighbouring Mauritania, to be sold at the market, founded in 1988. A cosmopolitan trader who identifies himself only as an “intellectual” and “storyteller” (in English) explains the economics. He will pay cattle farmers between R350-R450 per cow, selling them on at the market for anywhere between R1700-R4450.

As I gather these statistics, a young girl selling three bruised mangoes and tiny packets of peanuts threads her way through the traders, cowboys and spectators. To the great delight of the would-be cowboys seated on the walls, who whoop and cheer, Ronaldinho kicks off the the day's round-up by riding an incensed cow.

Wielding thick blue ropes, his teammates get to work. The cows kick and grunt. Even when roped around a rear heel, they are hard to subdue. A mottled bull is corned, and then escapes. What was, minutes before, a scene of Islamic restraint and composure is now a vast dust cloud of serious intent and circumspection. Great horns are wielded like spears and Ronaldinho is no longer smiling.

For a brief few minutes, man and beats are equal again.

Paradox Security Systems

The old neighbourhood, Pretoria, down a dusty road in the very new ‘burbs out east. A stop sign. Below it, attached to the slanted pole that holds the stop sign falteringly in place, two advertising banners. “TAR SURFACE 072 1509616” reads the one, its crummy hand lettering now almost a generic species of type that one day soon will appear in your MS Word font list as “Africa New Bold”.

But it is not this banner that catches my eye. It's the other one. It reads: “Two White Guys Life Protection Systems”.

Bullet point declarations aside, the banner includes a name, a telephone number, a website reference and a cryptic logo that reads “Paradox Security Systems”. Mindful of Terry Eagleton’s not entirely unfunny warning about cultural theory’s decline into banality and triviality, this in his 2003 book After Theory, I am not going to exercise too much effort on decoding the significance of the advertising banner way out east and north of everywhere.

But, and I suppose this is important, would that hoarding strike you as more or less strange were it not plastic cable tied to stop sign along an untarred road in an area where bushveld is tenuously holding out against suburban kikuyu? How would it look staple gunned to a tree along William Nicol Drive? Tied to a palisade fence in Greenside? Attached to a lamppost in Claremont? And what if the “two white guys” decided to become “two Indian gentlemen”, “four Coloured women”, “eight Tsonga teenagers”, “thirteen lucky Zimbabweans”, “lots of Chinese”, or simply “one angry Samoan”, how would that change things?

Later, at home, I ask the internet to tell me more.

“As a young, Pretoria-based start-up company, and operating in a highly competitive environment, we must differentiate ourselves.”

I click through to another page.

“We are independent Security Solution providers. Not being affiliated to any given armed response means that we can offer a bespoke security solution to match your exact requirements, circumstances and risk profile. We will not push you into ‘whatever system we happen to be selling this month.’ You have the freedom to negotiate your own armed response contract, should you so desire.”

Desire? I desire an answer.

When did a security solution become a proper noun? Security Solution. The only other “solution” I know that is routinely transcribed in capital letters is prefixed by the word “final” and narrated through place names like Belsen. To my mind, there is no equivalence between the insecurity of living in a criminally hazardous country and inhabiting a state that has criminalised your very life because of your religious persuasions. None.

In Praise of Public Amenities

“Is it kya-old?” asks the fat girl with dark hair. She has a tummy like a veteran beer drinker.

“No,” says her friend, already in the pool.

After a bit of dilly-dallying, the big girl with the stomach lurches towards the edge of the rectangular expanse, her toes curling over the rim. She stares at its rippled surface.

“1-2-3!” the girl in the pool counts. Splash.

“Look at my hair!” the fat girl screeches as she emerges through the meniscus of wet.

I am watching this. So too is the twentysomething lifesaver with a tribal tattoo on his right arm. Difference between him and me is that he has to, I simply want to. Sit and stare. People watch.

Like many of the people who routinely congregate at Zoo Lake Swimming Bath – the car guard in pink fake Italian T-shirt, that guy with a gammy leg, the dude on the grassy knoll who always wears a white Speedo – I don’t know the lifesaver’s name. He’s just the lifesaver, that’s all. Which is enough for me. I come here to get lost. He reminds me of Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, the lifesaver. It’s the combination of ripped body and messy tattoos.

“Are you here everyday?” I ask him.

“Everyday!” he sighs. “Well, not everyday. I do relief between here and Sydenham. Chows my petrol.”

For a moment I wonder if he thinks me noticing him like this means I’m cruising him. It’s why some people, usually larnies with Vitality points and gym memberships, avoid the pool. The only person to ever have cruised me here is the guy in the pink shirt, and he’s always pretty upfront about his intentions: a few coins for keeping an eye on my car.

“Hey! What are you doing?” shouts a schoolgirl in blue and white uniform standing near the entrance to the pool, beneath the clock that mostly never works. The question is lobbed over the head of the lifesaver, past me. I watch its ambitious arc, which like a cricket ball is aiming, reaching, hoping for the boundary. It is here that three adolescent boys stand staring at an oversize chessboard.

“They’re playing checkers,” shouts the non-combatant in the trio. A spectator to the game, he wears swimming trunks three sizes too big for him. They remind me of the school blazer my mom bought me at the start of high school, the one meant to travel the distance between 13 and 18, which it eventually did.

With a mixture of curiosity and self-conscious awareness, the schoolgirl in blue walks briskly along the edge of the pool to join the three boys at the chessboard. She arrives as a black boy, towel wrapped around his waist, picks up a white pawn and jumps a series of opposing pawns in a cunning checker move.

I imagine what it must be like being the Egyptian Goose looking down from its perch on the tall light. Boys playing chess and a guy in fins swimming lengths. Boring. Perhaps.

I lie back on my towel, stare blankly up at an ocean of lightly speckled blue. A plane drifts in from the corner of the frame, glides effortlessly across it, purposefully headed somewhere. It’s Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, just after lunchtime. I should be writing about more earnest things. Instead I’m here, at my favourite pool.

I smile.