kagablog

nowadays almost everybody is a film maker of some sort, even the kitchen staff and people who work on trams, even in the remotest regions of the world like the kalahari desert, everybody is in some way associated with the film industry

the most common of all these film makers are of course, the documentary directors

and so, in the space of a mere twenty years, not only has all the glamour been drained from the film world, but in fact, there is something vaguely ridiculous about calling one’s self a film maker

it reminds people of the steam train, and all those high and mighty steam train executives who rapidly went out of business when electricity took over

one has to guard very carefully the truth about one’s identity these days

it makes much more sense to people if you tell them you work in extreme sports, or graffitti management, or anything with “urban” in front

these are fields where glamour sticks

actually in south africa only the arms industry still works as a chick magnet

in sweden i am not yet sure what is de rigeur

i will make it my business to find out and INFORM you

your man in malmo

ak

…innan vi smäller upp bilder från Elisabets galna födelsedagsfirande!Mannen på bilden heter Aryan Kaganof. Han är Sydafrikas kanske mest överskattade konstnär just nu. Han inte bara vände sin namnskylt upp och ner på ett barnsligt och demonstrativt sätt under seminariet vi deltog i under lördagen utan filmade även en av seminarietalarna med sin mobil under hennes 10 minuter långa tal.Mobilen var ca 10 cm från hennes ansikte ibland.Vid något tillfälle sa han något på något afrikanskt språk som en slags protest mot att det talades engelska på seminariet och det gladde mig oerhört när jag hörde ett par färgade killar bakom mig fnissande viska till varandra:”What did he just try to say?!?Hahaha…”.Vi fick även se två verk av denne man och de var ungefär lika pretentiösa som hans kamouflagefärgade mössa.
Näe.Jag gillar inte Aryan./Sofie

this article first appeared on djungeltelegrafen

i think that what every colonized mind wants more than anything else is to respectable, to be respected
(by the mythical colonial “mother”)
this keeps colonized people in a state of perpetual infancy
as so-called “white south africans” we shared this infantile mentality with the so-called blacks
without realising it of course because the so-called whites always had the so-called blacks to feel superior to
when so-called white left-wingers erase their feelings of superiority to so-called blacks
they are left with… PANIC
and they need to replace the security blanket of racial superiority with the anodyne comfort of respectability
but fundamentally they don’t get to the point of letting go of the “mother”s” approval/opprobrium
ie, they remain infantile
and hence entirely unable to deal with criticism
they become cry babies
all this happens in the shithouse of the “post-colony”
and it’s telling because isn’t it in the shithouse that the proud infant desperately seeks approval from its “mother” for the little dump it’s just deposited?

with due thanks to professor christo doherty for the providing the title of this piece

“Welcome to the Slaughterhouse” is a powerful video essay produced by Aryan Kaganof in 2007, with extracts from films and the complicity of other video makers from the African Noise Foundation. During the 41 minutes of the film, we witness violent scenes, some of them from television reports, opening with one of that year’s most shocking emblems – the image of the latest college massacre in the United States perpetrated by Cho Seung Hui. At the beginning of the film he talks to us of his motives and decision to kill his fellow students, and his secret method. The second part of the film is an ironic collage of various CNN images of the current American president expounding his plans to fight terrorism. The superimposed headings parody his discourse, mixing up his words which promise to spare us from terrorists’ blackmail.

The music by the composer Joel Assaizky, (Kaganof’s long-term collaborator and member of their group “Freedom Fighter”) aims to give unity and intimate coherence to this slightly jumbled collage. Aside from the themes of violence and war which we come back to again and again, the films’ other themes are various; in the third part of the film entitled “Baphomet danse macabre” we see extracts from the ball from “Last Year in Marienbad”, scenes with no apparent logical suite but in sonic contradiction, for in this remake of Resnais’ film, a couple are looking at each other peacefully and lovingly.

The fourth part is the most sado-masochist and is made up of images of Johan Thom’s actual performance. It is called, simply “Baphomet” and is a contemporary adaptation of “Bodybuilding”, a performance by Otto Muehl dating from 1966, where the artist firmly binds his face with bandages. Here, 41 years later, Thom attaches his face with thick, transparent thread which must surely hurt. This time, the electronic editing and stroboscopic effects transform his face into a modifiable and elastic – almost plastic – space, in emotional contradiction with the melodic and serene music by Ruth White. The representation of corporal pain is in complete accordance with the film’s other images.

The fifth part is the most abstract, and a formal variation on the preceding one. It’s called “Corticotropin” and is inspired by Kaganof’s abstract plastic creations. Kaganof the plastic artist wanted to animate them in order to emphasise the enigmatic aspect of his essay. “Panic Attack” is the title of the sixth part and is an adaptation of Rob Schroder’s film “Moral Panic”, which consists of a collage of television reports from 1963 to 2004. Principally inspired by images of war and terrorist attacks, Schroder’s film is inspired by the militant cinema of Guy Debord, in a more contemporary context.

“Mary Worshipping Baphomet” is the seventh part, containing images from one of Kaganof’s earlier films, “Two Heads Are Better Than One”. The impressively edited bicephalous monster who sings is a variation on the contemporary individual. The penultimate section is called “War Zone” and is the most violent, with real images of lynched corpses. The ninth and final section, “Floor Crossing”, again contains scenes from the classic “Dead man 2”, a film on death and resurrection through pure love.

With this film, Kaganof is above all trying to subvert television, which is not his favourite medium, in order to show us how television news and reports are used as method of widespread manipulation. The rotoreliefs in the fifth part of his film are nothing but a metonymy of the vertigo of televisual disinformation. As a whole, his film takes up the chaotic images of this disinformation, giving it perfect aesthetic and poetic coherence worthy of the pinnacle of video art. The film is dedicated to the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, the American author of “Slaughterhouse-Five”, who died in 2007.

Dionysos ANDRONIS

translated from the french by lucy lyall grant

listen to the interview on the sunday times planet podcast

http://podcasts.thetimes.co.za/2008/02/22/aryan-kaganof-talks-to-tymon-smith/”

if you bluff with conviction people will respect you no matter how wrong you are.
if you tell the truth and admit to not knowing the answer you will be the subject of contempt and ridicule, especially from those who pretend to want to hear the truth.

alex dodd about to spew chlorinated water into aryan kaganof’s right ear

it was the weirdest thing, i got invited by alex dodd to take part in a panel discussion at wits university. it was part of a conference about democracy and the media. i don’t know anything about either of those hot potatoes, but i could not say “no” to the money that was being shelled out to entice my participation. apparently the joe schmos were paying seven hundred and fifty rand to attend this conference and these must be people who are earning good bacon to afford such a price to listen to little old ladies kibbitz about democracy and the media. well anyway, to the left of me on the night of my panel discussion is the very dignified lebo mashile who steals the show by performing a poem of much magnitude and not a little length and doing so without forgetting a single word or missing her timing or any other similar misdemeanour and i can honestly report that lebo deserves all the moolah she is getting paid on this evening, whereas to the left of her rian malan does nothing other than mumble all evening and maybe that’s his schtick but it is a pretty incomprehensible schtick to me so i say come on rian give back the money: you don’t deserve to get paid to mumble all evening you deserve to get the phone number of a speech therapist and make an appointment with such therapist as of yesterday. there is also bongani madondo at the table who makes a deep impression on all of us at the panel discussion by demanding that black men stop with the raping already. there is a general gasp in the audience at bongani’s verve meanwhile
alex dodd herself is drinking out of the bonaqua bottled water bottle that is on the table in front of each of us panelists and she spews the contents of her mouthful all over and into my right ear and screams “chlorine!” and yes it is true that the plastic bottle is filled with chlorinated water. whilst all other bottled waters apparently get their supply of h20 from natural springs underground, the coca cola company who own bonaqua fill their plastic bottles up in the swimming pools of their northern suburbs shareholders. fact. meanwhile somebody in the audience mentions that joburg throbs with humanity. rian mumbles “i’m running on last night’s fuel” (i can hear that because it is a quote and he seems to mumble quotes more distinctly). all this talk about democracy and the media makes me acutely aware that outside this little haven of intellectual debate there is gridlocked traffic all the way home because none of the robots are working because there’s no electricity because dizzy mbeki fired all the white people at eskom who actually knew what they were doing. a girl in the front row not wearing any panties gradually lets her skirt slip up over her knees, i can read her lips, they are saying “let’s go back to my place and do some load shedding together”. alex says of rian, “the brilliant thing he’s done is change his mind”. how would anyone know? it’s all mumble mumble mumble from our traitor’s tongue. rian replies to this backhanded compliment, “i’m not really an intellectual i’m only here to serve truth.” the only time he is ever audible is when it’s a one-liner, he’s mastered the art of the sound byte, he could teach old dizzy mbeki a thing or two. bongani starts up with his unrelenting disavowal of punk status. he claims that boring is radical and tax payers are hip. it’s rian again, “i had 15 minutes of infamy then i sold my house”. suddenly i figure out what rian and david bullard have in common: conservative liberals are all publicity whores. alex calls me an ex-pornographer. i take umbrage to this. i’m not an ex- anything. the enemy is the ascription of identity, it’s all representational tyranny here at wits, the intellectual blackhead on top of a culture in denial.
alex barks out into the audience, “i don’t want to be told by you that i’m in denial”. well exactly, that’s the problem with so-called democracy and the media. nobody wants to hear the truth anyway, so what’s the point of it all? bongani says “i’m interested in the currency of the margins”, but who defines the margins? why let them be defined by the mainstream? actually the truth is that joburg is a money-driven slut and when the chinese come we will all speak mandarin. rian receives a letter from someone in the audience saying that no one can understand a word he’s saying. instead of articulating his words more clearly he becomes even more vague. that’s very vague believe me. sanza pancho in the audience gets up and spends about 7 minutes complaining vaguely about how vague the evening’s been. “I agree with all those in denial” and “blacks feel pity for themselves” are the two smart bits that don’t get mangled by his faux rasta drawl. then it’s lebo’s turn to summarize the evening, “whether you get described as in or out you always need courage”. a round of heartfelt applause. she’s very centred and delivers her poem from the volcanic core of her muse. “apartheid was kak but it made things easy, who’s the enemy now? this is a country that doesn’t have an emotional vocabulary.” she’s a very smart woman. a smart person even. as everybody files out of the origins centre to go snack on prawns and sushi it strikes me that the left really got left behind and the centre is you, wherever you are.

l-r: alex dodd, aryan kaganof, lebo mashile, bongani madondo and rian malan (mumbling)

by Anna Tilroe

Ian Kerkhof is no more. No one has heard anything from him since he left the Netherlands under dramatic circumstances in 1999 and headed for South Africa, the land where he was born and raised. Someone else has taken his place and has assimilated everything having anything to do with Kerkhof. That may come as a shock to those who expected so much from this talked-about filmmaker, but fortunately there’s been “no real loss. Because although Kerkhof may have disappeared as a name, there seems to be no end to his output as a creative spirit. Books, films, drawings and written work appear one after another, and these plus an endless series of pamphlets, e-mails and web publications all point to a mentality that reflects Kerkhof’s down to the most minute details. It’s just that all the work is signed nowadays by a certain Aryan Kaganof.

Does the name change really matter? Strictly speaking, no. After all, we say that a work of art is autonomous and greater than its maker. Yet in the past few centuries more and more emphasis has been placed on the name of the maker, so much so that we may well ask whether something hasn’t gone totally awry. Oddly enough, this is a question that has attracted very little discussion, even though at the deepest level it touches on the place of art in our society. Everyone can see that the signature of the artist has become a brand name that determines not only the market value of the work of art but also its significance in the scope of art history and in contemporary society. Likewise, we know that branding as an economic and artistic principle has become so prevalent in the art world that even leading exhibition organizers have become trademarks. These international curators establish name recognition by developing themes that appear to lend a certain urgency to art. It doesn’t really matter if the urgency is understood within society as a whole, or even if it corresponds with the intentions of the chosen artists. The brand name, after all, is not a dialogue but a system, as closed as fundamentalist belief.

What the exact reasons were for Kerkhof’s discarding his name like a moth-eaten suit is something we will never know. But if we properly understand what Kaganof is hinting at, name recognition and everything that goes with it today is fatal to the pursuit of art. In his eyes, an artist is not a personality who keeps giving shape to his specific identity in a way that is recognizable, but a chameleon-like personage, a transparent figure whose absence of identity enables him to be fully receptive to the form, colour, odour and sex of all that surrounds him. It might even be said that this lack of identity, according to a text that Kaganof distributed among his friends and acquaintances, is a cardinal rule for anyone who calls himself an artist, especially if he or she is driven by the ambition to create a masterpiece. Like Kaganof.

The text was written in 1936 by Gertrude Stein and was entitled What Are Master-pieces And Why There Are So Few Of Them. Identity, she wrote in her familiar unrestrained flow of words that I am paraphrasing here, has to do with what you remember about yourself. It is a form of illustrating yourself based on your memory, and although that may be good for people who want to establish a persona that they and others can recognize, it is not good for the making of a masterpiece. A masterpiece can only be created when nothing prior has been laid down and when a conscious effort has been made to relinquish every form of identity.

Kaganof advances Stein’s argument for doing away with identity just when economic globalism and mass migration have brought the idea of cultural and personal identity into sharp focus. As a white man who left South African in protest against Apartheid, he is undoubtedly well aware of this. But, as you might gather from his written work and his films, it is not the task of the artist to create or maintain any kind of identity but to see behind, beneath, beside or through the masquerades, institutions and systems that support it. Because therein lies that which people have in common, that which unites them and makes them human.

A splendid example of this is the film Nice to meet you, please don’t rape me!, made in 1994 during the first round of democratic elections held in South Africa. In this work we follow four men, three black and one white, who have found each other on the seamy side of life in South Africa and try to help each other out as best they can. None of them has an identity in the form of a legal name, a permanent place of residence, a wife, family or possessions. All we learn about them is that they are lost in a society that is marked by vengeance, moral degeneration, and spiritual and physical violation. Their mutual suspicion and aggression, often influenced by alcohol and drugs, lead to fierce outbursts of rage and violence that they are constantly struggling to keep in check with regard to each other by means of pacifying rituals. Each one perceives to a greater or lesser degree that he needs the other, not so much to survive in a desolate, bloodthirsty urban jungle, because these men don’t attach all that much to life. What connects them, rather, is a longing, the longing to preserve whatever shred of human dignity is left to them.

But what do we really mean when we talk about humanity and human dignity? What social and moral criteria do we employ? For Kaganof, there are no presuppositions for human existence. The human being, he believes, has the ability to invent himself, and that ability, that freedom, is both a privilege and a curse. That is why his characters seek the dark and the margins of life. That is why they electrify their brains with drugs and torment their bodies to the farthest limits. They celebrate their limitlessness by transgressing all the rules, even if it means physical or mental ruin, because they know, consciously or unconsciously, that hidden in the transgression lies the ecstasy, the power that lifts us above ourselves, towards the light.

Most of the characters never get that far, however. They go round and round in their limitlessness like guinea pigs in a maze. We look at them and see people for whom the transgression is an end in itself, and it doesn’t matter if they over indulge in sex and drugs in the Amsterdam party circuit (the film Wasted; Naar de klote in Dutch), or sink into the world of criminals and prostitutes in Tokyo (Shabondama Elegy), or scour the bars and drug dens of Capetown (the novel Hectic). Wherever they live, whatever they do and whatever their age, what Kaganof’s people have in common is their recognizability. We recognize them as exponents of a time without memory, without direction, without passion, without morals. Time as a vacuum: our time.

Is Kaganof a moralist? You would almost think so to look at the sharpness with which he renders the moral decay of his characters. But morality as a system of ethical principles and norms is incompatible with what for Kaganof constitutes the artistic vocation. For him, Good and Evil are concepts like Identity: they lay down in the form of rules and regulations that which is essentially fleeting and mutable and, above all, infinitely nuanced. Morality is tantamount to a denial of the depth of the human spirit, a depth that, oddly enough, is mainly perceptible in what is generally regarded as Evil. And that is the area in which Kaganof chooses to be active.

In doing so, he often assumes the position in his books of an involved observer on the one hand and one who sees himself in relative terms on the other. This results in descriptions that are as remorseless as they are humorous and that attest to a profound feeling for detail, such as this fragment from Sugarman and Other Bitter Stories that he himself published in South Africa:

“Brigitta, not yet 21, studies Drama, is distantly related to Hitler. She’s wearing black. Hair dyed purple. Swastika decals on her fingernails. Bored.
Diamond bursts in, kisses the table, kicks Brigitta. He’s wearing a great t-shirt. It says ‘Eat the homeless’. Brigitta kisses his boots and licks him. He kicks her again in her ample buttocks. Diamond smiles insanely, his speed blackened teeth threatening to spill out of his mouth any second now.”

Evil is a choice that only can be made by those who know what Good is. Evil is consciousness as well as loss of innocence and security. Those who embrace Evil are doomed to live with the realization that there is no absolute Truth and that nothing is what it seems. That is why Evil is such a perfect fit in modern life. Living with a sense of insecurity became a condition of our life when, as Hannah Arendt writes in Vita Activa, we began to realize along with Descartes that ‘the nature of Being is such that its manifestations can be nothing but delusions and the images that are derived from those manifestations nothing but hallucinations.’ Everything today is wavering now that science has once and for all shown the limits of the senses and the power of reason, and technology has eliminated the difference between reality and unreality. For this reason we see the good God today, in the words of Arendt, as a Dieu trompeur, an evil spirit who with his cunning trickery ‘has created a being and instilled in it a certain notion of what truth is, but at the same time has poisoned it with such different capacities that it will never be capable of finding one single truth or of being certain of one single thing.’

Kaganof is the son of this deceitful god. He made that choice the minute he picked up a motion picture camera and suddenly found himself able to create the world anew. He filmed not only what he saw, but also what, from the point of view of prevailing morality, should not be seen: the sinful lusts of the body. In Kyodai Makes the Big Time, made when he was still at Film Academy in Amsterdam, he convinced actor Koos Vos to masturbate for the camera – and won a Golden Calf, an important Dutch film prize.

The body has always been a central element in his work. The human being is his body. He bases his identity on it from the moment he says ‘I’, but even that makes him afraid of losing his body again, something he always sees happening with other people. That is why for Kaganof the body must endure everything it fears: torture, sexual excess, sensual chaos and even (as in the film Beyond Ultra Violence – Uneasy Listening By Merzbow) hara kiri. And always in a ritual way, because it is through ritual that the body transcends itself, particularly the frightened mouse that is hiding within it and is so tightly attached to itself.

But inherent in that transcendence is violation: a transgression of borders that is neither socially nor politically acceptable. The person who determines his own death places himself outside the rule of law. He withdraws himself from what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his book Homo Sacer, calls ‘bio-politics’: the ‘process of discipline, imposed by the political system in which the human being as a living creature becomes both the object and the subject of political power’. It is political power that determines how far a person’s freedom may extend in making decisions about his own life, whether it be a question of drug use, smoking and sex before marriage or of suicide, euthanasia and dying a hero’s death for one’s country.

In line with this came Kaganof’s Western 4.33. That film, which came out in 2002, is a documentary about a mineworkers’ village in Namibia built by German colonists between 1904 and 1907 and based on a model concentration camp that the British had designed in South Africa during the Boer War. More than sixty thousand people from the Herero tribe lost their lives there.

Kaganof filmed the abandoned camp during the winter in black and white. We see barbed wire, fences, dark barracks, a vast white landscape and a black silence. Not a living soul. Then images – in colour – of a woman mourning over a lost love with a man’s voice speaking in an African language (no subtitles, because, as Kaganof once explained during an interview, ‘The Germans never took the trouble to understand what the Herero were saying.’) Murder, loss, lack of understanding, colonialism: the words take shape in the images, forming not a story but an emotion, a scorch mark on the soul.

Kaganof is a brilliant storyteller, but his films don’t follow a story line. They follow the image. He employs that image like a tone in a musical piece, setting it in motion, driving it along, draining it of its colour, letting it flow apart or run over into other images, staccato and dazzling or slowly diminishing, vaguely trilled or clear and taut. It is the moving image at maximum intensity, and in all its movements it shows itself to be as nimble and transparent as thoughts in the brain. We look through the bodies, the birds and the landscapes and see, as in the four Suprematist Compositions, the body of a dancer like a continuously dying and reviving cellular structure, falling mountains, a dog’s carcass as a relief map of the earth and – just like that – a pair of squabbling pigeons.

Kaganof is dead, we suddenly read in white on black between two Suprematist Compositions. Kaganof, son of a god with a thousand tongues, has a great deal more to tell us.

Translation: Nancy Forest-Flier

photo by nicole rouillard, independent armchair theatre, observatory, cape town, 09/12/07

Introduction

In his poems Kaganof sings of a world he’d rather not live in, but to which, at the same time, he feels emotionally and morally connected. He imagines himself schizophrenic. But it is not his mind, but his heart that is doubtful about the now and the here. Divided into two equal moments of love and disgust. Leaving him forever now - and heartbroken. The poetry is therefore not meant as a cure - for his displacement is incurable - but serves as diagnostic solace. To reassure himself, line after line, verse after verse, that this haunted feeling is not a mad - but a sadness. In between these sad and angry lines he seems to be having - from time to time - a rocking great time. Living like a god, albeit for a drug drained second. His poetry gives him a reason to be amongst - and breathe in the same air - as his subjects. The poem and the field on which it grows - his notebook - is his mental dug-out. An excuse not to look up from the pristine white paper and face once again this grimmest of realities. And thus, although Kaganof is amidst his people - and lends their smallest talk his keenest ear - the poetry itself is his sanctuary. A garden of words. A raison de non-etre.

Dick Tuinder

portrait by guto bussab

SCENE 11 ZARATHUSTRA’S DREAM OF NIETZSCHE

Zarathustra is fast asleep in his cave. Even the eery sounds of the vultures screeching outside do not wake him. The television set is on and tuned to a collage of important media events of the twentieth century (Moral Panic by Rob Schroder). Friedrich Nietzsche steps into the cave, looks down at the sleeping form of Zarathustra, and carefully switches the television set off. Nietzsche looks down at Zarathustra with warmth and almost ironic affection.

NIETZSCHE
Sleeping is no mean art: for
its sake one must stay awake
all day.

Nietzsche nudges Zarathustra with his foot.

SCENE 12 ZARATHUSTRA AND NIETZSCHE

Zarathustra wakes up in the Groningen Museum auditorium. Nietzsche is peering intently at him, his face very close to Zarathustra’s. Nietzsche’s moustache is so large and bushy that it almost touches Zarathustra’s face. They stare at each other in silence for a few moments, then Nietzsche reaches into his waistcoat and withdraws two large Havan cigars. He profers one to Zarathustra who accepts gracefully. Nietzsche hands a cigar guillotine to Zarathustra who neatly clips off the edge of his cigar. Nietzsche then does the same. They both carefully lick the tips of their cigars, all the time watching each other. Finally Nietzsche takes out a flame thrower from his left hand jacket pocket. He lights Zarathustra’s cigar. The jet of flame is much bigger than Zarathustra (or Nietsche) had expected. One of Zarathustra’s dreadlocks is singed.

As soon as both Zarathustra and Nietzsche are puffing happily on their cigars the Museum fire alarm goes off. Four security guards bustle into the chamber and escort Zarathustra and Nietzsche to the front entrance.

Zarathustra and Nietzsche walk together slowly along the bridge away from the Groningen Museum. They are both puffing regularly on their cigars.

SCENE 13 THE BOOKSHOP

When the two cigar puffing characters reach a bookshop Nietzsche becomes animated. He pulls Zarathustra into the bookshop and walks purposefully towards the “PHILOSOPHY” section. There he proudly points to the section that includes all his collected works, and many books written about him. The camera moves across the spines of this wall of titles – the Nietzsche industry.

Zarathustra remains unimpressed. He blows his smoke into the slightly vain Nietzsche’s face.

ZARATHUSTRA
Of all that is written I
love only what a man has
written with his blood.
Write with blood, and
you will experience that
blood is spirit.

Nietzsche blushes. He appears flustered and embarrassed. He does not know how to react to Zarathustra’s cutting remark.

ZARATHUSTRA
That everyone may learn to
read, in the long run corrupts
not only writing but also thinking.

Zarathustra laughs loudly, coarsely, he grabs Nietzsche by the hand and pulls him out of the bookshop.

ZARATHUSTRA
Come, let us kill the
spirit of gravity!

Zarathustra and Nietzsche take off and fly. Amazed onlookers look up as the two rapidly become tiny specks in the sky.

I met Kaganof in 2002, when he presented a performance installation at the NSA Gallery in Durban. During this time he lived in the gallery for a period of three weeks. Locked in every night from 5pm until 7am the next morning, Kaganof spent every night inside the empty gallery space, writing with a black marker on the wall, which resulted in an endless stream of consciousness that was part poetry, part autobiography, part fiction, and often obscene.

As the exhibition continued, the writing became thick and black on the gallery walls, and every morning when I entered, was bombarded with the inside, peculiar scribblings on the wall, which circumscribed the entire ground floor of the gallery, and snaking up the staircase. Every day something new.

This graffitti was an extension of writing that Kaganof did compulsively in tiny little notebooks that he carries with him - miniature sentences that often became disjointed and disrupted, that crept and crawled over the page to form patterns and textures, essentially becoming images. When I asked Kaganof about these notebooks, and the relationship between these and his poetry he confessed that he does not use these little notebooks much anymore, that the urge and need to make sense of the world through and in between these ink blotted pages has largely subsided, to quote a Dutch phrase by Kaganof: “The writing is afgelopen” - a translation could be : “the writing ran out of steam.”

The poems contained in the anthology entitled Jou Ma Se Poems, and also in the six other collections of poems published by Kaganof, germinated from these notebooks and the word installation at the KZNSA, and is in some form or the other related, but reworked and also maybe cleaned up.

Aryan Kaganof is a multi faceted and eloquent artist who produces prolifically - internationally renowned as a film maker, writer, producer, artist, philosopher, and publisher, with an ever enlarging and rapidly increasing filmography and bibliography. An auteur extraordinaire, Kaganof mixes, regurgitates and recycles his work, as if all part of the same continuum - his work is all part of a connective process that he revisits and reworks until he has drained all possible juices from a subject - a constant interrogation of word and image.

The work contained in most of his written publications is often autobiographical. But here is evident the larger ever present work of Kaganof - Kaganof himself. a carefully considered and crafted entity. Kaganof in his official biography notates this creation as follows and I quote:

“Kaganof was born again in Randburg on 28 March 2001. He founded the Abraxas Younity Movement in Hout Bay in 1999. He is the artistic director of the African Noise Foundation, lead vocalist and lyricist of the post-dub ensemble Freedom Fighter and CEO of Die Kaksusters. Kaganof was co-founder, with Frank Scheffer, of the Sonic Arts Ensemble (Merzbow, Tomoko Mukaiyama, Philipp Virus). Their manifesto “The Digital Future Is Now” formulates a position for digital art and technohybridization movements in the new millenium. Kaganof studied at the Netherlands Film And Television Academy, majoring in screenwriting and direction. He works in many media, drives Valiant and shoots Glock.”

The personality is ever present and permeates Jou Ma Se Poems and other work - the author is a constant reference, and the act of writing itself a leitmotif. A recurring thematic string is a brooding violence, that occasionally erupts in the pages, and often with the author as aggressor. It is no more evident in Foreword” in this publication (also reproduced on the back sleeve) where these elements come to the fore,

A part of you is murdered
when you read my poems
a part of me is sacrificed
when i write them

Storm Janse Van rensburg

(all photos by guto bussab)

SCENE 8 ZARATHUSTRA AND THE CORPSE

Zarathustra hoists the corpse of the tightrope walker over his shoulder and begins his journey through the streets of urban Amsterdam. This collage of images takes in the red light district, the Plantage Buurt, the Tropen Museum, as Zarathustra walks towards Amsterdam East. He walks through the night carrying the corpse.

In the Javastraat a car filled with four Morrocan youths in hoodies stops briefly and hoots at Zarathustra. The youths mock and jeer at him.

MORROCAN YOUTH
Go away from this town,
Zarathustra, there are too
many here who hate you.

Zarathustra continues walking all through the night. He reaches an area of so-called “Nieuwbouw” at dawn. He is dwarfed by the cool hyper modern geometry of the new architecture. As the sun rises Zarathustra becomes exhausted. He lays the corpse down on the concrete sidewalk.

ZARATHUSTRA
And you, my first companion,
farewell!

Zarathustra takes off his diamond encrusted swastika chain from around his neck and places it on the forehead of the corpse.

SCENE 9 ZARATHUSTRA’S METAMORPHOSIS

Zarathustra is startled by the sharp call of a bird. He looks up and sees an eagle, soaring through the sky with, around its neck, a serpent. (This section of the film is an animation done by Micha Kleijn). The eagle swoops down toward Zarathustra who jumps on the eagle’s back and the three of them soar into the sky.

SCENE 10 CHAMBER MUSIC

In the middle of the large, main gallery space of the GRONINGEN MUSEUM, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE is singing his own composition VERWELKT accompanied on piano by Tomoko Mukaiyama and on cello by Frances Marie Uitti. A small audience is seated on three sides around the chamber group, watching the performance intently.

NIETZSCHE
Du warst ja meine einz’ge Blume,
verwelkt bist du kahl ist mein Leben.
Du warst für mich die strahlende
Sonne,
du schiedst ich bin von Nacht umgeben.

Warst meiner Seele leichteste Schwinge,
du brachst ich kann nun nimmer fliegen
Du warst die Wärme meines Blutes,
du flohst ich muß dem Frost erliegen.

Zarathustra slips into the chamber unnoticed by the crowd. He sits in the back row and listens for a short while to Nietzsche, singing. Then Zarathustra falls into a deep sleep.

SCENE 5 CENTRAAL STATION

With an enormous digital clash Zarathustra finds himself standing on the square in front of Centraal Station in Amsterdam. He is holding a wooden staff which has the Caduceus as its head. Zarathustra slowly adjusts to the extreme pace of the passers by on the square who are all rushing backwards and forwards in great haste. (a Koyaanisqatsi type sequence, with Zarathustra standing still while the crowds move en masse around him like ants – stop time exposure).

SCENE 6 THE TIGHTROPE WALKER

The moving crowd speeds up and becomes a digital whorl around Zarathustra. This morphs into the fairy-tale like imagery of super 8mm footage of tightrope walkers. (High Wire Funambulists by Catherine Henegan). The music we hear is a cello improvisation by Frances Marie Uitti. The entire improvisation is done on a single string of the cello – emulating in sound the visual tension that we see on the single “string” of the tight-rope. This sequence “steps out” of our film as it were, giving us a magical interruption.

SCENE 7 CENTRAAL STATION

We return to Zarathustra with the abrupt fall of the funambulist, who lands next to Zarathustra, his body badly maimed and disfigured, but not yet dead. The mortally wounded funambulist grabs hold of Zarathustra and wheezes.

TIGHTROPE WALKER
What are you doing here? I
have long known that the Devil
would trip me. Now he will drag
me to hell. Would you prevent him?

ZARATHUSTRA
By my honour friend, all that
of which you speak does not exist:
there is no devil and no hell.
Your soul will be dead even before
your body: fear nothing further.
TIGHTROPE WALKER (suspiciously)
If you speak the truth, I lose
nothing when I lose my life.
I am not much more than a beast
that has been taught to dance
by blows and a few meager morsels.

ZARATHUSTRA
By no means. You have made danger
your vocation; there is nothing
contemptible in that. Now you
perish of your vocation: for that
I will bury you with my own hands.

The tightrope walker smiles, his hands clutch those of Zarathustra, and then he dies, the final breath passing noisly out of his mouth.

SCENE 1 Black Screen
We hear the exquisite Piano notes of Mozart’s K475 Fantasia in C Minor being played with a poise and tension that is other worldly.

Fade in.
The camera is directly above a pair of hands playing the notes we hear. The piano is a Fazioli Grand piano. The hands are small but extremely strong and determined. They caress their way across the keys of the piano with the confidence of total mastery. There is no distance between the musical notes, the keys of the piano and the fingers - all three elements combine to produce an effect of TRINITY - total unity of body, mind and soul. It is unclear whether the hands are playing the music, or the music is playing the hands. Then a drop of blood falls onto the piano keyboard. The hands do not interrupt their labour. More droplets join the first. The fingers merely play through the blood, smudging the red liquid over the pristine black and white keys of the Fazioli grand piano. The visual effect is akin to Japanese calligraphy.

The camera now moves slowly up and away from the hands, travelling up the arms and revealing that the pianist is TOMOKO MUKAIYAMA. She is wearing a dress of sheer white muslin. There are splatters of blood besmirching the purity of the muslin dress. She is naked underneath the dress. Her nipples glowing like dark moons under the sheer fabric. When the camera reaches her face we see that both of her eyes have been plucked out. We hear the sound of a vulture screeching.

The movement of the camera continues and we become aware that the piano and the pianist are in the middle of a vast desert. A huge uninhabited space in Mexico. The vastness of this geographical auditorium at once dwarfs the piano and pianist - and yet the perfection of the music does not produce a flattening of culture by nature, but rather a marriage of culture and nature.

The camera continues to move away from the piano (helicopter) and we leave the earth altogether (digital morphing). The musical sounds that we hear are now visually accompanied by a choreography of dancing notes - the earth’s globe is merely one musical punctuation in a cosmos comprised of an infinity of notational gestures. (This animation to be done by JOOST REKVELD). The universe itself is a vast musical composition. As the K475 Fantasia in C MInor comes to an end the screen darkens and we hear the uncanny sounds of vultures screeching.

SCENE 2 THE CAVE

Fade in from black.

ZARATHUSTRA is wakened by the sounds of the vultures. He stands up, moves to the entrance of his cave, bends down to pick up a stone and flings it at the vultures who fly away. He is a tall black man with a very imposing mass of dreadlocks on top of his head that give the effect of a crown. He is wearing a sackcloth and looks very raggedy, as if he has become wild, has fused with nature. He stretches his arms wide open and looks up at the sun and addresses the heavens.

ZARATHUSTRA
Behold, this cup wants to become
empty again, and Zarathustra wants
to become man again.

SCENE 3 THE MOUNTAIN AND THE DESERT
A collage of scenes of Zarathustra walking barefoot through mountainous terrain that is desolate and harsh looking. Zarathustra looks extremely comfortable with his isolation and untroubled by the vastness that would dwarf and intimidate any normal man. Zarathustra carries a wooden staff and a leather bag and little else except for his army surplus water bottle. Around his neck are many beads and chains and icons including a glittering diamond swastika. He walks with a measured pace, neither rushing nor dawdling. He is a man in control of himself.He has mastery over his many elements. The sun beats down and he sweats. He stops for a sip of water from his water bottle. He does not drink greedily, but takes a carefully measured sip and closes the bottle. He resumes his walk. The collage of images indicates to us that he is walking a great distance. Eventually Zarathustra reaches the forest.

SCENE 4 THE FOREST
As Zarathustra walks into the forest a wizened old man
jumps down from a branch above Zarathustra. Zarathustra whirls around to face the tiny man whose dreads are grey shadows of Zarathustra’s crowning mane. The old man appears to be blind. He steps towards Zarathustra and reaches out with his hands, touching Zarathustra’s face questioningly but very gently. His fingers cover the contours of Zarathustra’s lips and eyes, it is as if he is reading braille.

OLD MAN (speaking in sranang tongo/papiemento)
No stranger to me is this
wanderer; many years ago he
passed this way. Zarathustra
he was called, but he has changed.

Zarathustra pulls away from the wizened old man but the old man does not let go of him. Instead, he pushes his fingers more violently into Zarathus-tra’s face, grabbing hold of him fiercely whilst continuing his fevered speech.

OLD MAN
Yes, I recognize Zarathustra.
His eyes are pure and around
his mouth there hides no disgust.
Does he not walk like a dancer?

The old man shoves Zarathustra away from him and Zarathustra does an elegant pirouette accompanied by a stylized and very graceful choreography of his arms (this is to be studied from the Wu Tang movement in Maya Deren’s film Meditation On Violence).

OLD MAN
Zarathustra has changed,
Zarathustra has become a child.
But Zarathustra is an awakened
one; what do you now want among
the sleepers?

Zarathustra stops his balletic war dance and faces the Old Man calmly.

ZARATHUSTRA
I love man.

OLD MAN
And I love God. Man is for me
too imperfect a thing. Love of
man would kill me.

ZARATHUSTRA
Did I speak of love? I bring men
a gift.

OLD MAN (vehemently)
Give them nothing! Rather take
part of their load and help them
to bear it. And if you want to
give them something, give no more
than alms, and let them beg for that!
ZARATHUSTRA
No. I give no alms. For that I am
not poor enough.

OLD MAN
Do not go to man! Stay in the
forest!

ZARATHUSTRA
And what is the saint doing in
the forest?

OLD MAN (sings)
I make songs
And sing them
And when I make songs
I laugh, cry and hum
Thus I praise God
With singing, crying and laughing
And humming.
I praise the God who is my God

When the Old Man finishes his song Zarathustra embraces him and walks away. The Old Man laughs heartily as he waves to Zarathustra. But Zarathustra’s mood changes once he is away from the Old Man. His face turns quizzical.

ZARATHUSTRA
Could it be possible? This old
saint in the forest has not yet
heard anything of this, that God
is dead!