[N.B All images reproduced in this section are copyright and courtesy The Estate of Ken Kiff and Hales London and New York. ©The Estate of Ken Kiff. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. No image should be reproduced in any form without the permission of the Estate of Ken Kiff Ltd].
The Sequence, images for Folk Tales of the British Isles, and others reconsidered.
Ken Kiff Cottage in a field (Sequence 106)
The Sequence, begun in 1971 and still incomplete at Kiff’s death in 2001, consists of almost two hundred loosely cross-related images. A highly unusual body of work for which there are no close parallels, it sits right at the heart of his achievement as an artist. It has been written about in some detail by Norbert Lynton, Martha Kapos, Ken Kiff and myself in Ken Kiff’s Sequence, published in 1999, and subsequently by various other writers (largely in passing) but also, more recently, in considerable detail by Emma Hall. Because of the volume of images it contains, along with the scope of its subject-matter, The Sequence is not an easy work to discuss. Kiff himself spoke of it primarily in musical terms. I sense, however, that there was a certain defensiveness in this choice, perhaps a consequence of the unusual nature of its underlying topics and the largely uncomprehending or dismissive critical reception of his work when The Sequence was begun. With hindsight, and in addition to the important musical aspect of the work, I would now suggest that Kiff may also have had in mind a number of possible visual models. Given his interests, these might well have included early Sienese predella panels, Galway Kinnell’s 1968 translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s long poem Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, and examples of the tradition in the Indian subcontinent of artists making series of musically-themed miniatures known as Ragamala paintings. It’s important to note however that Kiff himself, when speaking with the artist Wynn Jones, referred to The Sequence as his attempting to produce a form of painterly thinking not previously undertaken before.
In the wider cultural context, Kiff is perhaps best understood as a visual thinker whose trajectory, while quite distinct in its form, converges with that of a number of other thinkers. With the work of the poets already mentioned, with Gaston Bachelard, with Paul Ricoeur’s thinking regarding the multiplicities of meaning in metaphor and image, and with the post-Jungian thinker James Hillman, who writes of the soul that it is ‘ceaselessly talking about itself, in ever-recurrent motifs in ever-new variations, like music’. (Re-visioning Psychology New York, Harper Collins 1977, p. xvi.) Hillman is here acknowledging the “polytheistic” or “animistic” consciousness located in multiple figures and persona, rather than in terms of the privileged relationship to the individual ego that characterises the “Expressionist” understanding of art and, indeed, helps underwrite the culture of possessive individualism. The visual thinking set out in The Sequence also parallels Hillman’s understanding that authenticity requires ‘the perpetual dismemberment of being and not-being a self’; the acknowledgement of a mode of being that ‘is always in many parts, like a dream with a full cast’. (Healing Fiction Woodstock, Spring Publications Inc. 1983, p. 39).
Ken Kiff Love and shadow (Sequence 30)
I suggest that this parallel offers perhaps the best way to approach, for example, the status of male figures resembling Kiff himself who appear in many of The Sequence’s images as this figure may relate to the persona of the artist. As a “dreamer” in the sense set out earlier Kiff is, at the very least, both himself-as-the-artist-making-the-work and his ‘double’, one among the many disparate beings that populate The Sequence. Yves Bonnefoy asks, in an essay of the greatest importance to Kiff, who it is that we struggle against in creative work if not our own double? Is it not against the other in us who would have us feel that the world has no meaning, that creative work is irrelevant? Ní Dhomhnaill’s view of the connection between her personal life and what comes down to her ‘through the language and through folklore’ may be also be helpful here. In acknowledging a reciprocity in which the development of the tradition through its personalisation by an individual, and the enrichment of an individual through engaging with the tradition, the maker is distanced from any exclusive focus on the “heroic” ego of possessive individualism and remains, instead, within the living flow of an ever-changing cultural tradition. For Kiff, “tradition” is nothing less than the entire imagery of a Western culture still haunted by the myths of Classicism and Christianity. An imagery in need of being simultaneously extended and re-visioned, in no small part through the artist’s referencing of parallels and possibilities latent in quite other cultures, so as to help free us into a new polysémie better attuned to a more inclusive understanding of a shared world.
Ken Kiff Typing in the garden (Sequence 93)
In this context it is worth identifying something of the range of cultural material referenced in The Sequence. (For reasons of space, I will not touch on Kiff’s use of a wide range of “formal” themes, for example the red/green polarity associated with the late medieval and Renaissance art of northern Europe, which he employs in thevarious portraits in which it is included). The Sequence references Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland, Classical and Biblical imagery, the works of Poussin, Goya, and De Chirico, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu, the poets Rilke, Yeats, and Mayakovsky, the actor W.C. Fields, Greek popular folk puppets, and variations on his own images made to accompany the stories in Folktales of the British Isles. All of which references are woven into evocations of a variety of everyday events such as leaving home, eating, sexual activity, walking in the street, excreting, taking pleasure in the experience of people, animals and objects, the acts of writing and drawing, receiving help or healing, spitting, traveling, reading, aging, being ill and communing with the dead.
I believe that the images Kiff made for Michael Foss’ Folk Tales of the British Isles (1977) are best seen as translations; as invitations to discover the rich, complex and nuanced world inhabited by those in the past whose worldviews differed from our own. If we look at three of these folktale images – No one dared go near the hill, It was surely some man that was in that dog, a soul in trouble and He went through the wood on an old lame white horse (see the three images below) – and compare these to, say, Arthur Rackham’s fairy tale illustrations, we at once see a fundamental difference of approach. While Rackham employs a generic style that, at the level of “language”, homogenises the distinct tones and feelings of different stories, Kiff focuses on “translating” the qualities of each tale as he experiences it by seeking out an appropriate visual equivalent. The artist and writer John Berger’s discussion of ‘true translation’ is useful here.
Berger points out that translation is not a two-way transaction between two languages but is in fact a triangular act, its third point being the experience that animated the text to be translated prior to it being written. Translation, then, is predicated on an empathy that seeks to return to our pre-verbal experience through a study of the original work; one that reaches through to, touches, whatever vision or experience originally prompted that work. That sensing of another’s pre-verbal experience must then be used to ground choices about the language into which the original is to be translated. In this way the translator can persuade that second language to absorb and welcome what is to be articulated. Berger continues, in terms that can be applied directly to Kiff’s images for Folk Tales: that non-verbal languages of signs, behavior and spatial accommodation are related to ‘(rhymes with?)’ ‘a mother tongue’. (See John Berger The Guardian Review, Saturday 13th December, 2014, p. 17).
To approach Kiff’s Folk Tales images as translations is consistent with his sensing of reality as experienced by an ensembled self, one aware of multiplicity at every level, rather than a reality reduced to fixed concepts or represented through a single, signature style. The Sequence has, perhaps rightly, overshadowed the sixty plus paintings and drawings that Kiff made for Folk Tales (not all of which appeared in the final publication). However, I suggest that making visual “translations” of those tales reinforced Kiff’s ability to transgress modernity’s insistence on an absolute distinction between humans and animals, the living and the dead, between body, psyche and spirit, and so on. In doing so, it facilitated his ability to evoke interactions between “the other world” and the everyday, reinforcing the fluid sense of reality that makes The Sequence a multi-layered collective psychodrama continuously being remade and renewed. (In this respect it might be related to the novels of Madeline Miller, with their remaking of the Homeric world so as to reconfigure its values in ways that can now speak directly to our own most urgent need for deep adaptation). Nor did Kiff’s interest in translating folk topics end with the commission for Folk Tales, as a large later charcoal drawing like The road past the goblin’s house (1991) below demonstrates.
Ken Kiff The road past the goblin’s house (Photo by Angelo Plantamura)
Seen in the way I am suggesting, The Sequence and Folk Tales appear as the two aspects of a single project; with the first relating more to the development of a tradition through its personalisation, and the second to an enrichment of the individual through emersion in manifestations of the cultural psyche evoked by folk material. Taken together, they illuminate a new (or possibly very old) way of exploring the fluid, shifting nature of human identity and the elusive, mercurial, echoing reminders that flow from “the other world”, so as to enlarge and extend our multiple selves in relation to a shared polyverse.
Ken Kiff Orange sky (Sequence 187)
India and The Goddess paintings
In the summer of 1981, Ken Kiff travelled with his family to the Artist’s Camp established by Vivan Sundaram in Kasauli in northern India. A trip that, while not particularly productive for Kiff in terms of actual work made, nevertheless gained him friends among contemporary Indian artists and considerably extended his knowledge of both contemporary and traditional art in the Indian sub-continent. In September of the following year an exhibition of forty-four Indian artists, including the work of six who Kiff had met in India the previous year, took place at the Royal Academy of Arts. That exhibition strengthened Kiff’s contact with contemporary Indian art since, of those exhibiting, he had already engaged with Arpita Singh, Jagdish Swaminathan, Krishen Khanna, Manu Parekh and Vivan Sundaram at Kasauli.
Goddess-red-green
Commentators have frequently assumed, somewhat to Kiff’s irritation, that his Goddess paintings were the outcome of his Indian trip. This group of paintings and drawings – Goddess in the Street (1982-3), The Feminine as Generous, Frightening and Serene (1982-3), Woman Affecting the Everyday (1983) – certainly have parallels with Goddess images common within Hindu culture. They should be seen, rather, in the context of Kiff’s concern with such numinous female figures since the early 1970s, for example Goddess, attendant and cloak (S. 59), Yellow Woman in Street (c. 1975) and Goddess in Street (Narrow Version) (c. 1980). While Kiff’s red and green goddess painting may very well reference images of Kali or Chinnamasta, it also echoes long-standing concerns in Kiff’s work and, furthermore, was actually painted before he knew he was going to India. (It is possibly influenced by memories of an image in one of W.G. Archer’s many books on Indian art).
Ken Kiff Woman Affecting the Everyday
We should also keep in mind that, within the Western tradition, certain Christian saints have iconographic attributes that may ultimately be traced back to tales of both nurturing and destroying Goddesses that are part of a very old and common root in Indo-European folk culture. For example, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill refers in an essay to St. Catherine, from whose decapitated head milk flowed instead of blood, and to the fact that any number of Irish folktale motifs relate back to a primitive Indo-European unity. The writer on art Andrew Lambert has emphatically refuted the notion that Kiff opportunistically appropriating the imagery of a culture other than his own. I would add to his argument by suggesting that Kiff’s concerns in these paintings flow, like those of Gulammohammed Sheikh in his Kaavad: Travelling Shrine, from a quite proper desire to articulate a meaningful transcultural imaginative synthesis, one able to speak to fundamental shared concerns in our time. While the issue of appropriate is a complex and often thorny one, it is important to recognise that such acts have usually been part of a two-way traffic and have a very long history indeed. For example, the sculpture produced in India by the Gandhara school between the first and sixth century CE happily married Buddhist subjects and Indian iconography with stylistic influences derived from Greek and Roman works.
The initial reception of Kiff’s Goddess works was decidedly mixed. Nicola Jacobs, with whose gallery he exhibited at the time, could not bring herself to like them. Indeed, they have sometimes been read as misogynistic or anti-feminist, a view Kiff emphatically rejected. He wrote to me that:
‘The “goddess” paintings I did: I heard a couple of girls in the gallery in which one was showing say, ‘He must hate women’. It’s the kind of thing which is very distressing. But I’d already asked my wife and daughter, and a number of women, including writers, at least one of them Indian, about these paintings of mine, and every one had said the paintings are pro-feminine’. (Letter to the author, 10th June, 1998).
While this clearly shows both Kiff’s sensitivities and a degree of empathy and support for these works from women viewers, for many viewers they none-the-less remain demanding images.
Perhaps the most “difficult” of this group of images in this respect is Woman Affecting the Everyday (1983), in which the figure is clear menstruating. The background to this image, as the artist’s daughter Anna Kiff has pointed out to me, is Kiff’s knowledge of the Mother Goddess Kamakhya, the ‘Bleeding Goddess’ as a significant focus in Tantric worship, whose temple in Assam is a famous pilgrimage site. In that context menstruation is revered as the ability of a woman to conceive and so as a celebration of this shakti within every woman. A reverence reinforced by the fact that, each June, the nearby Brahmaputra river turns red, which is taken to be an externalisation of the Goddess’ menstruation.
Perhaps understandably enough, Andrew Lambert avoids engaging with the psychosocial resonances of such images, focusing instead on what he sees as Kiff’s concern with the feminine within himself as an artist and on the Goddess as signifying the eruption into the everyday of the unknown’. Martha Kapos, by contrast, confronts their difficulty head-on in a catalogue essay for Kiff’s 1986 Arts Council travelling exhibition. In a detailed analysis of The Feminine as generous, frightening and serene, she acknowledges the relationship with images of the goddess Kali, but focuses on a hard-won melding – of the Indian image’s condensed and paradoxical nature with Kiff’s handling and colour – to articulate extremes of feeling. Through a detailed analysis of that articulation, she argues that the works loosen conventional forms by cutting through the apparent polarities enacted by bringing together senses of extreme vitality on one hand and extreme destructiveness on the other. She goes on to describe how the material aspect of the painting activates an awareness of new possible relationships of meaning that can provide an enhanced sense of reality, a new psychological truth that goes beyond the solely aesthetic in a way she compares to falling in love. Seen this way, this work and its companion pieces may stand as perhaps the most extreme examples of Kiff’s concern to articulate his sense of the Feminine in relation to that of wholeness in the sense of full psychic inclusivity.