Shaun de Waal tries to get the elusive Aryan Kaganof to explain what his multifarious works add up to
it’s the coldest night of the Johannesburg winter and Aryan Kaganof is hanging naked, upside down, from the ceiling. This is a multimedia/performance piece called The Shooting Gallery, about how the media exploits people’s suffering (I think). It’s striking enough in its own right, but it’s only one of the plethora of works of different kinds produced by Kaganof.
There are the many films (about 80, including features, documentaries and shorts), some made when he was still Ian Kerkhof and living in Holland to avoid the apartheid army. Newer movies under the name Kaganof include SMS Sugar Man, due out next year — the first feature film to be shot entirely on cellphones. There are the performance pieces, the gallery-based artworks, the digital-media works, the net poems. Get on his mailing list and he’ll bombard you with news of his latest cultural productions.
There is the stream of books (poems, stories, novels, musings) that have appeared in the past few years, under names including Abraxas, “the prophet of nothing”, a sort of Aleister Crowley manqué, and Acéphale, the notional group-author of an almost late-19th century decadent text called The Corpse-Grinders of Berlin. Books bearing Kaganof’s own name include Hectic!, Stones Again, Jou Ma se Poems, Drive-Thru Funeral and Sugar Man and Other Bitter Stories. There’s even something called Laduma by AK Thembeka, who may or may not be Kaganof. (Ask him and he’ll say: “Thembeka wrote it.”)
Kaganof is a maverick, a law unto himself, even an “outsider artist”. Perhaps the only comparable figure in South African literary (or artistic) culture is Zebulon Dread. It all seems obsessive, excessive. Kaganof throws off these works in a punk spirit, with a do-it-yourself ethic; they often seem slapdash, less concerned with their own production values than some overall conceptual game about authorship and oeuvre. He excoriates contemporary media culture, yet yearns for widespread acclaim and financial success. That’s if what he writes about himself in some of these works is anything to go by; it may be a complex joke about artistic status and commercial success. Who knows?
buy uselessly now (in south africa) (in united kingdom)
It’s hard to come to terms with such a slew of works. He talks of digital culture, and implies that linearity is past its sell-by date and each artefact is an entry point into a network that has no centre and an indeterminate periphery. His latest book, Uselessly, is published by Jacana (instead of his own Pine Slopes), and it echoes elements of Hectic! while recycling or remixing a poem in Jou Ma se Poems, with phrases from elsewhere in his writings popping up like samples. His works seem to bleed into one another, but a coherent whole remains elusive.
Uselessly is narrated by JJ Uselessly — the author is the title. It is, in part, the story of his reconnecting with his father, who abandoned his mother soon after she became pregnant. After years of exile in Holland, JJ Uselessly returns to South Africa to be reunited with his father, who has cancer. This basic narrative frames a host of memories and meditations — the similarities between the feckless Uselessly and his father, JJ’s hatred of his mother, or just the enigma of existence.
The book describes itself as “a very funny book about me, my dad, the Devil and God” — dad, in fact, being “the Devil” (occasionally a “Nazi”), and God being the addressee of the letters from JJ that form the book. It is indeed funny, off-the-wall, often beautifully done, as in the hospital scenes or a restaurant scene in which fragmented overheard comments feed into JJ’s scattered consciousness. It’s sometimes even rather touching.
That’s as far as Uselessly goes. It’s hard, though, to extract self-reflective commentary from Kaganof himself. Either I’m an insufficiently coercive interviewer or he’s very adept at evasion, in turning the question on the questioner — or moving the conversation elsewhere. If characters such as Red Kowalski in Hectic! or JJ in Uselessly are alter egos, they are there to generate slippage between the author and his creations. Aryan Kaganof may have changed his name to take his lost-and-found father’s name, but Kaganof is also as much a fiction as Red or JJ.
And he’s dead. The biographical (and critical) notes in some of his works are obviously part of the fiction itself, and Kaganof is frequently declared dead. Perhaps this is a way of doing what one author advised, which was that writers should write as though they were already dead, as though all their work were to be published posthumously. (And much of his work is resolutely shocking, uncensored.) If, for Kaganof, the author is already dead, culture is too: “There’s a kind of drive to produce. Adorno describes it as the twitchings of a dead culture, and these twitchings get more and more ecstatic, and faster, as the culture moves towards its end.”
It’s liberating to be dead, he says. This may be a way of escaping some of the constraints of authorship and authority, even selfhood. One gallery work of his was called The Staging of the Artist as the Work Itself; for another show he got six other artists to make work and claimed it as his own: “It was the most personal art I had ever done,” he says. But, also, he asks: “Whenever you get something from an artist, what are you getting? The artist or the work?”
When I ask Kaganof about his writing, he gives me instead a copy of Stones Again — all the answers are in there, he says. Or are they? One’s not sure how to take utterances such as this: “I don’t know what I’m doing when I write, nor do I have destination. I merely join the dots between the dust of scattered inspirations.” Maybe I’m being too rationalist, too Enlightenment. He says in Stones Again that “the problem is the quest for meaning. This generates a parasitical language of alibis. Finding words to replace the absent reasons that were never there in the first place.”
He also writes: “I lack the necessary imagination for invented writing. I can only write what I know; what I have experienced.” This experience seems to include his fantasies — surely a kind of “imagination”? When I ask him about Uselessly as a text that sits on the limits of fiction, this is what emerges: “That’s the kind of question only you could answer, as a literary critic. I as a mere novelist can’t answer that question.”
I say: “But the fact that you are now answering me ‘as a novelist’ answers the question.”
“That’s in quotation marks, of course.”
“But you’re telling me it’s fiction.”
“I always say, when people ask me this question: everything I write is fiction, except for the stuff I make up myself.”
I put it to him that, regardless of the play of multiple personae, the narrative fragments to which he repeatedly returns can be read in terms of an individual’s psychology or history. “Does that make sense to you?” I ask.
“Yes it does. It makes sense to me that you’re interested in that.”
“But it’s not about me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. It’s all about you. And I think that’s the point of me, that I’m all about you.”
He talks about Michael Moorcock, the author of many, many sword-and-sorcery novels, all of which are part of a larger “Multiverse”. Is that a search for an ultimate coherence, or an acceptance of incoherence?
“What totally changed my life about Moorcock,” he says, “was the notion that all those books, 70, 80, 100 books, are merely episodes, devices, interlocking elements … he was a digital author in the 1970s already. That’s how the digital world works — everything is an episode.”
They may be episodes, but of what? Are they parts of a whole that doesn’t exist?
“There are definitely loads of hooks in the book,” he says of Uselessly, “leading out into other work — works of fiction, but also documentary works — but I do believe the work has its own internal containment.”
Perhaps it does. If Uselessly is the most conventionally satisfying of his written works, then one’s conventional response is wanting to know more about the father and less about the son. Is there any point in trying to trace the links between Red, JJ and Kaganof?
“What I think is very important is the notion of masks. I’ve got a poem for Nietzsche which says:
Most of my poetry
Is a mask
I hide behind
The rest is a mask
I hide
In front
There is a very conscious choice of masking in all the work.”
In terms of his multifarious work as a whole, he goes further: “The whole idea of joining all these dots, the whole idea that the universe, the meta-politics of all the work, [is that it] might be connected — I say ‘might be’ because it’s not finished yet, and one doesn’t want to be paranoid by assuming it’s all connected, or paranoid by assuming it’s not connected. Hopefully that’s also the narrative drive, to get the next instalment. I’ve always described it as a sculpture in time. All of it is a time sculpture, and this is one element in the total grid.
“The performance work is the most important, because what’s beautiful about it is that generally it’s not recorded, so at the end of the day the only person who’ll make sense of Kaganof’s work is me.”
this interview first appeared in the mail and guardian on 8 september 2006
Uselessly / Aryan Kaganof. – Johannesburg : Jacana Media, 2006. – 192 p. – ISBN 978-1-77009-100-9 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now 
buy uselessly now