[N.B All images reproduced in this section are copyright and courtesy of 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].

Acceptance: greeting the animal

‘Why do they come to us, the animals? What do they want, inhabiting our dreams’?

James Hillman (in James Hillman & Margot McLean Dream Animals San Francisco, Chronical Books 1997, p. 13).

Ken Kiff Acceptance

Gerhard Richter has claimed that nature is always against us, knows no meaning, pity, or sympathy, because it is absolutely mindless so the antithesis of the human. That Richter’s claim that nature is “mindlessness” now appears somewhat over-simplistic, as the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn has amply demonstrated, is ultimately secondary here. I reference it because it duplicates the mindset of the Western status quo as predicated on assumptions that the Enlightenment inherited from Christianity. These assumptions include the presupposition that nature is lower than and opposed to, human culture; something to transcend, conquer, tame, or exploite. As already indicated, a significant aspect of Kiff’s work lies in his rejection of such assumptions in favour of an inclusive sense of inter related wholeness.

Kiff much admired Sienese painting so will have known Sassetta’s Wolf of Gubbio in the National Gallery in London, an image in which St. Francis takes the wolf’s paw so as to ratify an agreement negotiated on behalf of the townspeople of Gubbio. This visual evocation of a contractual parity between a human and animal is, to my knowledge, unique in Western iconography. As such, it points directly to the quiet, but profoundly radical, nature of Kiff’s painting Acceptance and the images related to it. However, while the topic of The Wolf of Gubbio is significant here, the strict division between urban and natural space in Sassetta’s painting is the antithesis of the unified space in Acceptance. Given his interest in Indian art, it is possible that Kiff also recalled any number of ragamala paintings, many of which depict empathetic face-to-face meetings between a single person and one or more animals – deer, birds, a snake, a bull, etc. If so, these may have influenced his development, over a decade, of the cluster of paintings evoking such meetings that includes Acceptance, given that they show striking similarities of format, simplification, colour and imaginative tenor. (I have in mind works like the Basohli ragamala painting Pancham Raga, c. 1690-1695, reproduced in W.G. Archer’s Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills 1973, 28, no. 14 (ii). Archer had been Keeper of the Indian Section, Victoria and Albert Museum, London and this work was formally in his private collection).   

Ken Kiff Elements with salamander (Sequence 43)

Acceptance, begun in 1967 and extensively reworked between 1975-8, occupies a pivotal place in Kiff’s work, not least because of its emphatic title. (Kiff’s normal practice was simply to name the entities that form a work’s topic). Acceptance is one of six works begun in 1965 on square boards primed with heavy gesso. In two others, a naked man also communes with a non-human being (a salamander and a fish respectively). Acceptance reworks and simplifies the topic of the earlier Elements with Salamander (S. 43), probably begun in 1972, with its salamander’s inter-elemental associations (they are traditionally associated with fire), and its emergence from water onto land and into air. Kiff also further develops the dominant yellow of the earlier work into an all-embracing, glowing yellow field, which is only qualified in the tree and the small area where the blue of the pool moves through a transitional green that runs through the head and shoulders of the emergent lizard.

Ken Kiff Man and salamander

To understand what is implied by the title Acceptance, we must reference Kiff’s other works that evoke meetings between humans and animals. These include Pink Man and Green Lizard, 1966-70, and Man and Fish, 1968-70 in the same group, together with numerous significant Sequence images. Ubu, Salamander and symbol (S. 134), probably started around the same time as Acceptance was reworked, reconfigures the meeting in the earlier Elements with Salamander (S. 43), where the relationship between the figures is more tentative. The pensive figure in the earlier work is replacing by Alfred Jarry’s anti-hero Ubu, dressed as a portly English gentleman who tentatively reaches out towards a salamander that looks back at him as it walks away on its hind legs. The predominately yellow palette of the earlier work is now restricted to the hill behind Ubu, emphasising the contrast between the figure and the salamander. The inclusion of Ubu – a figure known for his infantile engagement with the world – has today taken on an additional resonance. We might remember, for example, that the UK establishment spends many billions of pounds a year subsidising a fossil fuel industry directly linked both to human deaths from air pollution and to conflict and ecocide across the globe.     

Ken Kiff Ubu, Salamander and symbol (Sequence 134)

The salamander or lizard that reoccurs in many of Kiff’s works from this period also plays an important role in Bonnefoy’s series of poems Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, suggesting possible ways of reading its recurrence in Kiff’s work. John Naughton draws particular attention to Lieu de la salamandre in his exploration of Bonnefoy’s concern with ‘incarnation’, the state of being he links to moments of: ‘epiphany and oneness’ when we may become conscious of an intuition of the co-existence of the eternal and the here-and-now. This may be as close as we can get to describing the overall mood of Acceptance and related paintings.

Man in desert (Sequence 119)

This does not, of course, limit the many different resonances that attach to the loose cluster of paintings that includes Acceptance. Man in desert (S. 119), begun the same year Kiff resumed work on Acceptance, is a powerful articulation of his view of human/animal relationships. The painting freely reworks the traditional Christian iconography of St Jerome with a lion in the desert, and is indicative of Kiff’s radical unsettling and reconfiguration of traditional presuppositions. Man in desert  reverses the traditional Christian presuppositions of the Great Chain of Being, the hierarchy descending down from God, through the angels, to man, down through woman, to the natural world, concepts that would inform Western culture’s belief in its own exceptionalism, in the superiority of humans over animals, and in various gender differences. The iconography of Kiff’s image directly questions the hierarchical distinction between human saint and lion. Here the lion is powerfully self-composed while the saint, who has acquired the head of a donkey, appears ill at ease as he lifts his eyes from his book, perhaps to contemplate the Miro-like twined signs that float above. Saint and lion are linked by a sweep of blue (a river or stream?) which, in its colour, echoes the crescent form in the abstract configuration above (the “elements” named in Sequence 43).

In conversation Kiff referred to this Miro-like configuration as “the parallelogram and spike”. Although I pressed him on a number of occasions about its specific significance, his response was always ambivalent. He seems to have had two distinct lines of thoughts regarding this configuration. One related to earth, air, fire and water. The other to the material, the elements, from which a painting is made; literally the flat rectangle support, but also brushstrokes, colour, intervals between forms and their echoes, each of the basic aspects of what a painting does. These, then, along with what these evoke in the world. He added that he thought of these elements as a chemist or physicist might, and sometimes thought of them as ‘molecules’. While I understand the reasons for Kiff’s ambivalence, I also think it’s possible to suggest more about the function of the parallelogram and spike in his images, together with its relevance to the cluster of works in which it appears, many of them related to Acceptance.  

Ken Kiff Sun-moon and flower (watercolour)

Elements with Salamander (Sequence no. 43) marks the first appearance of the parallelogram and spike and, unusually, names it as “elements”. The configuration subsequently appears with some variations throughout Kiff’s work, in each case relating to the image as a whole in ways analogous to the placing of figures of Saints or the Virgin in the vernacular art of Catholic retablos. As such, it evokes a sense of another, nameless but perhaps numinous, dimension to the image – one that is, however, without a prior, given, meaning but perhaps analogous to the pairing of yin and yang, the opposing yet complementary forces of Daoism. Any such identification must, however, remain provisional since, in the watercolour Sun-Moon and flower (1997), the title identifies the parallelogram and spike with the sun and moon. I would argue however that the Daoist analogy is not incompatible with Kiff’s inflection of his ‘elements’ as ‘molecules’. The writer Jeremy Lent supports this when he reminds us that Song dynasty Chinese thinkers rejected all notions of transcendent meaning in favour of seeing it as intrinsic to the world all about them. He also notes that their philosophy both remains relevant today and that it shows a remarkable correspondence with findings in contemporary systems and complexity science. There is insufficient space here to pursue the parallels between this claim and the concerns Kiff shares with Bonnefoy. However, I hope their potential is sufficiently clear to encourage any interested reader to explore them further if they so wish.  

In this and the previous section I have touched on synergies between Kiff’s work and Bonnefoy’s concern with the world in its concrete appearing. For Bonnefoy language breaks up the evidence of the world by extracting it from the place of its being, arguing that when we stop reading any text, we of necessity ‘become painters’ because, in the moment we raise our eyes from the text to see the world in its concrete visibility. (A movement that might also be linked back to discussion of Kiff’s images’ in relation to dinnsheanchas). A world of hope and despair, life and death, love and loneliness, because the true painter accepts the world as it is, greets it, opens her or his painting to light and colour, to all the phenomena of the real, which then enter the painting from the world beyond the painting, and in the process make visible how they have entred so that work and world coexist in a constant dialogue and exchange.

It is here that, perhaps, we approach a fuller sense of what works like Acceptance evoke. That Kiff regarded this act – of raising of our eyes from the page (whether written or drawn on) so as to see the world in its concrete visibility – as vitally important is, I think, implicit not only in Man in desert (S. 119), but in images such as Energies (S. 46), Unlikely Angel (S. 67), Typing in the garden (S. 93), Writing (S. 97) and, perhaps most explicitly, in the large pastel Tree with black trunk and person reading (1990). While Bonnefoy identifies this “seeing the world in its concrete visibility” with the work of the painter, I suggest that in terms of a current reading of Kiff’s work, we need to take this thought a little further.

Ken Kiff Tree with black trunk and person reading (pastel)

Another Modernity?

In this essay  I have tried to show how Ken Kiff departed from the mentality underpinning the post-1955 orthodoxies of Modernist visual culture by creating an expanded realism that evokes the process of rediscovering, reclaiming, and bringing into being a new wholeness, one inclusive of both the life inside and outside a self grounded in relationality. I have also indicated how this relates to his sense of the Feminine and, drawing on Martha Kapos, to love. Arguably, then, his work belongs to quite another sense of modernity; one that might in part be identified with the Nobel-winning poet Octavio Paz’s notion of a place where all time, whether past or future, real or imaginary, becomes pure presence and who, in his linking of the present to presence, exactly echoes Yves Bonnefoy’s understanding of incarnation. But only if, along with the poets John Burnside and Randall Jarrell, that sense of presence is seen as inseparable from ‘the dailiness of life’.

If Kiff is to be considered some kind of visionary, this is surely the nature of his vision. Norbert Lynton, Kiff’s long-time critical supporter and friend, observed that: ‘He knew a lot and knew more profoundly than most, for the simple reason that he cared immeasurably. This dual activity, caring through his work and caring through attention, was central to him’. (Thinking about Ken’ in Andrew Lambirth Ken Kiff London, Thames and Hudson 2001, p.8).

This suggests that, for Kiff, making art was never simply a professional activity, but part of a larger caring in which aesthetic concerns were a means, not an end. A way of understanding his relationship to the world at large that is comparable, in a strictly this-worldly, incarnate sense, to that of a traditional icon painter. If that is the case, Lynton’s reference to Kiff’s immeasurable care, which we might also call love understood as agape, begs the question: care or love for, and attention to, who or what? A question that extends the one implicit in Jeremy Deller’s claim that all good artists are socially engaged.

Kiff’s images articulate a concern for the innumerable internal conflicted, and shifting desires, ideals and interests of  human beings in all their complexity; for qualities that, if properly understood and respected, wholly undermine the stereotypical binary of “Us” and “Them” fundamental to current exploitation, inequality and injustice globally. Through making such images, Kiff engaged with processes that permeate all areas of human life in a variety of forms and shapes that cannot be conceptually delimited. They can be visualised, however, as a net of connected relations spreading in all directions without any set trajectory. This echoes those human processes that change as we come use, interpret, reuse and understand them, the processes I suggest The Sequence was intended to evoke. Far from simply painting his own idiosyncratic nightmares, as John Hoyland claimed he did, Kiff was in fact contesting the presuppositions that, as we are now coming to understand, link the climate crisis to a crisis of culture, and finally of imagination; the same understanding that underwrites Amitav Ghosh’s analysis of the roots of the Great Derangement, the consequences of which derangement we are now increasingly suffering.

Kiff’s art evokes what is overlooked or repressed by those with most to gain from maintaining a politics and economics underpinned by possessive individualism, while obscuring their own complicity in that Great Derangement. Their continuation of a modernity that repurposed, rather than broke with, previously religiously sanctioned exceptionalism and hierarchy. The deeply embedded hierarchies of value and entitlement encoded in, and so ultimately reinforced by, much of the West’s visual art. A visual tradition that Kiff, in the spirit of early modern painting, worked to refigure and revalue through a radical visual polysémie that was also open to the cultural values that underwrite the visual traditions of the Indian sub-continent and China. In doing so, he perhaps anticipated Bruno Latour’s insistence that what really counts today, when we must face the possibility of the collapse of our psychic, social and natural ecologies, is to understanding whether we can ‘managing to register, to maintain, to cherish a maximum number of alternative ways of belonging to the world’. (Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Cambridge, Polity Press 2018, 93-95 & 16.

This is, surely, as good a way as any to understand the immeasurable sense of care that animates Kiff’s work? 

Ken Kiff Green hill

Coda

I started writing the original essay from which this version is derived in less troubled times. Revisiting it now, during deepening social unease shading into fear and worsening environmental decline, has at times led me to doubt the value of doing this. Against that background I have to set Ken Kiff’s dedication, not only to his own work but to a belief in the value and benefit of the free exercise of an attentive and inclusive imagination as a fundamental human necessity. There is also my sense that life, and perhaps the human world itself, would be impossibly diminished without the many and various arts that help us attend to, value, and so learn to genuinely care for, the world. That remind us that there are values iother than those of the economic bottom line, naked self-interest, lust for power over others, and so on.

Sitting quietly with the reproduction of Ken Kiff‘s Green hill, with its tiny figure going down into a darkness that is also a route to what nourishes the natural world, and with the memory of the vastness of the hill above, is somehow a confirmation that, however difficult the times, it is possible to find a sense of necessary continuity, of the need for care for those who will, hopefully, come after us.