A week ago, when the effects of racist riots were felt all over Britain, I had an online  conversation with Mohamud Mumin, a co-founder and artistic director at Soomaal House of Art, who is also an artist working in photography. We had been introduced virtually by an old friend of mine, Prof. Christine Baeumler at the University of Minnesota, who had suggested that Mohamud get in touch with me to talk about our shared interests in place-based initiatives and deep mapping as positive forms of place-making. Forms that have the potential to strengthen links between communities, rather than generate the kinds of division that were all over the media – here and in relation to the presidential elections in the USA.

I remember noticing a large number of Somalis when I visited Minneapolis St. Pauls some fifteen years ago, but did not know then that the city has the largest Somali diaspora population outside Africa. I learned from taking with Mohamud a little about the ways in which he and others at Soomaal House which, as an organisation, has been built up from scratch, are fostering creative expression and cultural understanding within the Minnesotan East African community. 

I find the degree to which various crude and reductive nationalisms allied to racism have been used to generate a rhetoric of hatred in across Europe, in the USA, the Middle East, India and elsewhere using lies and distortions to feed prejudice, deeply depressing. So it was very cheering to find positive common ground and shared values with Mohamud, who is dedicating his time and energy to encourage, support and educate for a broader, deeper perspective on the world, one that unites rather than divides.  

One of the things that cultural work at its best provides is ways of “translating” thoughts and feelings grounded in very different mentalities. This in turn can help us address what Paul Ricoeur calls: ‘the danger of incommunicability through … protective withdrawal’. A withdrawal that results from refusing to look beyond internalised and fixed attitudes embedded in a given mentality. Shared cultural work and enquiry can give us the ability and willingness to translate and mediate, through creative conversations, between distinct mentalities that are deeply entangled with heritages, both our own and those of others. This relates to the first of Paul Ricoeur’s three models ‘for the integration of identity and alterity’, namely ‘the model of translation’. Also to George Steiner’s observation that translation is central to both culture and consciousness. A view that leads him to argue that, without translation, ‘we would live in arrogant parishes bordered by silence’. This is one significant reason why we need to see the activities we categorise as “the arts” not as the “product” of a “culture industry”, but rather as one vital way in which we can help to cultivate what Ricoeur calls ‘a translational ethos’. An ethos that is central to any society that aspires to being a genuine democracy and one that we need to do all we can to promote.

[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.

[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 13^th 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.       

[N.B All images reproduced in this essay 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 not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the Estate of Ken Kiff Ltd].

Wholeness

Ken Kiff The Radiant Woman (Sequence 185)

Ken Kiff saw the evocation of a sense of inclusivity or wholeness as the central challenge shared by visual art, poetry, and music. Typically, he used a Shakespeare sonnet to discuss the challenge involved in relation to his own work. He notes that the Shakespearean sonnet has: ‘… a syllabic construction but on top of that he overlays rhythms caused by alliteration, and another brought about by the relative force of the words, or by abrupt stops – then he might reverse some of the stresses. Shakespeare is a master because he can hold the basic structure in his subconscious all the time yet do all these other things too’; adding that the poet needs ‘all these structural things moving along’ in his own work, but needs them simultaneously ‘all flowing into one organic thing’. (quoted in Inge ‘2019 Archive interviews with painters: Ken Kiff’). This concern with wholeness as a confluence of multiple, tensioned, yet also closely related, elements becoming ‘one organic thing’ informed his work and was informed in turn by his reading very widely and in particular, according to his daughter Anna, his reading of Chinese philosophy. A philosophy that, unlike the elevation of the spirit/intellect over the bodily that characterises cultures based in the binary religious of the West, recommends a down-to-earth holism predicated on the observation that the heart-mind is nothing without the body and the body is nothing without the heart-mind. A view that can serve here to link Kiff’s search for wholeness with his commitment to a “realism of the psyche”.

A Realism of the Psyche

‘Elusive, mercurial, the unconscious is not a place, not a state, but a dark ironic brother, an echoing sister, reminding’.

James Hillman (On Paranoia Dallas, Spring Publications Inc. 1988, p. 41).

In Flight Out Of Time the Dadaist Hugo Ball writes of the search for new forms with which to depict the actualities of inner experience necessary to social and cultural renewal. A search that, starnge as it may now seem, united groups as apparently disparate as the Dadaists and the Jungian Psychological Club. In the visual arts that search was informed a wide range of aesthetic experiments, including the Orphic Cubism of Kupka, Delauney and Chagall. A key aspect of their experimentation, all-too-often misrepresented by Modernist art historians as the early pursuit of a “pure” abstraction, was in actuality the exploration of the evocative power of colour-as-a-felt-structuring, an approach that emerged in its earliest full form in Chagall’s work during his time in Paris. In an important article from 1985, Martha Kapos uses this element of Chagall’s work to challenge the presuppositions used to validate the re-emergence of figurative painting in exhibitions like Timothy Hyman’s 1979 Narrative Painting (which includes Kiff’s work) and the Royal Academy’s 1981 New Spirit in Painting (which did not).

Ken Kiff On brown

She sees the Neo-expressionist claim to ‘individual expression’ which underwrote not only European Neo-expressionist, Transavantgarde and, in time, much “post-modern” painting, as reactionary in the sense of being predicated on the notion that artists are wholly self-contained and exceptional individuals able to express a unique self-based vision in paint. A notion that, as she points out, entirely fails to acknowledge the larger psychosocial processes that help shape both self and work. She exempts Kiff and Chia from this criticism, however, citing their engagement with Cubism’s potential to both radically reorganise pictorial structures and to liberate colour so as to enable new, more open, forms of figuring reality in all its complexity. Adopting these concerns in turn enable them to challenge the ideological formation and control of given or assumed unities and continuities within both the self and the world by both opposing and transforming conventional presuppositions about representation. This “return” to a genuinely radical re-figuring of the painted image enhanced the poetic polyvalence of painting, allowing it to access new pictorial structures and, as a result, new ways of knowing and envisaging self and world. It is this that enables Kiff not only to break with expectations regarding self and world, but also to alter, expand, and altogether transform them; to undertake, in the phrase Kapos borrows from Chagall, a new ‘realism of the psyche’.

Ken Kiff Head incorporating blue space face towards the street

Kapos’ analysis of Chagall’s use of colour is fundamental to understanding the importance of his paintings to Kiff, but I would also want to stress the relevance of Chagall’s commitment to an inclusive approach to imagery. One that relates to his desire for art as ‘an open invitation to everyman to “look in his own way, interpret what he sees, and how he sees”’. The resulting balancing act, matching Cubism’s radical restructuring of the world with a sense of a common and inclusive reality, seems to me fundamental to Kiff’s approach. One that once again might be related to Ní Dhomhnaill’s concerns as an Irish-language poet with vivifying that language in a post-colonial context.

Or, equally, to the Indian artist Arpita Singh’s shift from non-figurative painting so as to submerge herself in the forms of Bengali folk art in the late 1970s, before moving on to draw together the possibilities she discovered in both types of work. I cite such parallels so as to offer a reminder that Kiff’s psychic realism is, in no small part, an attempt to overcome the alienation produced by the supposedly heroic “progressivism” and the absolutism within Western European and American Modernity; its ultimately authoritarian/colonialist insistence on subordinating all other ways of knowing, including alternatives within its own geo-political region, in an attempt to induce them to serve the reductively monolithic conception of reality that, in turn, serves global capitalism.

Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ní Dhomhnaill identifies two interlinked forms of this alienation: a self-distancing from a shared reality and a disassociation from the daily  language of interaction in home and community. Taken together these constitute a psychic fault-line all-too-easily denied or glossed over. I believe it was precisely to address this psychic fault-line that Kiff revisited the radical possibilities of early twentieth century painting when looking for the means to reimagine everyday life; possibilities that would enable him to refigure the world in terms of understanding that life as inclusive of both “inside” and “outside” worlds, and from the viewpoint of a multiple self. In so doing he attempted another kind of thinking, one articulated through the visual polysémie necessary to any genuine realism of the psyche. His visual poetics thus enabled him to evoke objects, animals, and human beings in the context of a relational sense of “home” and “community” in ways that parallel the richness and expressive potential that Ní Dhomhnaill draws from the use of her native Irish, over against the psychically-colonising language of English, so as to write a properly contemporary Irish poetry.

Against the grain

Above: Ken Kiff The Selection Committee’s Fear of the Irrational (Sequence 140)

Below: Ken Kiff The Conversation (Sequence 139)

Within his work as a whole, only a few of Kiff’s images – for example The Selection Committee’s fear of the irrational (S. 140) and The Conversation (S. 139) reproduced above – suggest something of his response to the prevailing critical culture within the visual arts in his time. Among other things, a dominant culture contemptuous of the direct articulation of psychic realities as these relate to daily interactions in the home and the community. In turn, the dominant art world culture’s perception of Kiff is all too apparent in the two comments directed at his work discussed below.

In 1980 the art critic Stuart Morgan suggested that: ‘to walk into a room of Ken Kiff paintings is like finding a grown man in tears at a bus stop’. He goes on to claim that, in such circumstances, ‘an excess of fellow feeling, well-meant but sentimental’ follows an initial coldness and distaste that makes it ‘doubly hard to sympathise with the stranger or to truly understand his problems’. He continues: ‘spectators like being permitted to condescend to artists, and Kiff, like the man at the bus stop, gives them every opportunity. They leave in a spirit of emotional largesse, confident that they have discovered a new Chagall or an L.S. Lowry’.

However, Morgan then goes on to identify what he sees as a central problem for reviewers of Kiff’s work such as himself. In doing so, he appears to distance himself from his own, rather convoluted, initial position, perhaps suspecting these may say more about his own personality than they do about Kiff’s work. He goes on to suggest that, while reviewers will ‘concede that Kiff is no naïf’, they will still face the problem that his concerns are not those ‘of any other advanced abstractionist’, since to do otherwise would be to ‘deny the power of his imagery’. Morgan then claims that, because looking for ‘buried narrative is futile’, ‘the rightness of… these works resembles that of a nursery rhyme’. (‘Ken Kiff at Nicola Jacobs’, Artforum April 1980, p. 86).

It is hard to know from his observations whether Morgan does in fact sees Kiff as a sophisticated painter whose work is undercut by a child-like imagery or whether he views Kiff’s work as offering something more positive. After all, a good proportion of nursery rhymes began life either as more or less coded political satires or as “Mother Goose Songs” or “Old Wives’ Tales”; that is as indicative of the traditional understanding of vernacular folklore. All in all, it seems that at best Morgan’s attitude towards Kiff’s work is both itself convoluted and highly coded, suggestive of a critic more anxious to protect his own sense of sophistication than to honestly engage with work that challenges it. Although, in the last analysis the review is possibly less dismissive on a careful re-reading than might initially appear, it remains indicative of the critical reluctance to engage with Kiff on his own terms rather than those of the “advanced abstraction” dominant at the time.

Ken Kiff Dog in the street (Sequence 63)

What I suggest Morgan fails to engae with can be indicated by a brief discussion of Dog in a street (S. 63), a work easily presumed as visualising a scene from a nursery rhyme or children’s story. At first sight the image appears mundane enough – “dog discomforted by over-friendly man”. Kiff’s subtle stylistic shifts clearly question the conventional expectations about the relationship between dog and man. The three-dimensionality of the cringing figure of the large dog, emphasised by black outline drawing, contrasts with the less emphatic figure of the man who appears all of a piece with the wall behind him (and, by implication, with his surroundings more generally). The resulting sense of tension between isolation and belonging puts in question the emotional expectations conventionally attached to encounters between a large dog and a man. The painting suggests what might be called a “dog’s eye view”, one in which, faced with the man’s gesture, the dog is perhaps uncertain as to whether it is being greeted or threatened. This focus on the emotional state of uncertainty of a non-human being is, I suggest, a significant aspect of the quiet radicalism of Ken’s work, its challenge to conventional expectations. If, as an image, its’ ‘rightness … resembles that of a nursery rhyme’, then it is surely a nursery rhyme that offers a highly unusual and empathetic view of the lives of non-human beings.   

My second example is a claim by the abstract painter John Hoyland, who fully identified with the ideology of Modernist painting. Hoyland dismissed Kiff as turning his back on ‘all the understanding of what’s gone on in modern art’ and, as a result, ending up doing ‘some idiosyncratic little kind of painting’, ‘an escape’ said to result in the artist painting his own ‘nightmares’. (A rather extraordinary characterisation of Kiff’s work, given the sense of joy and wonder articulated by much of it). Hoyland’s assumptions about the “progressive” nature of modern art are part-and-parcel of High Modernity’s professionalised alienation from any connection with, or attempt to inform, common life. Perry Anderson has indicated the cause of that alienation in Modernist culture: its complicity with a market preoccupied with ‘commodities, including works of art’. For Anderson, the revolutionary possibilities that informed Cubism and Surrealism came to an end with Abstract Expressionism, after which painting in the West was increasingly driven by a commercial gallery-system that needed a regular turnover of new styles to supply a market increasingly aligned to the cultural values of ‘haute-couture’. To Hoyland, wholly identified with the Modernist belief in a “progressive” abstraction, Kiff’s work could only appear isolated and regressive. That work appears very differently, however, if we accept to see it in Kiff’s terms; namely as the articulation of an expanded, and inclusive, visual poetics concerned to maintain connections with, or attempt to inform, common life.

Ken Kiff Posting a letter

Extracts from a conversation between Marega Palser and Iain Biggs.

IB. I hadn’t realized that you’d got that connection with Clifford McLucas. That’s fascinating.

MP. I’ve said it quite a few times over the last few years when people say: ‘Oh, who are your influences’? Cliff will really be there. And it’s funny because it was for such a short amount of time in the grand scheme of things and given the amount of time I’ve worked with other people that have been really quite key in my life. But it really did something, you know, that moment in time, just a switch to where you’re thinking about the body in space.

IB. That makes absolute sense to me. I often think with things that influence us it’s not about the length of time, it’s about an intensity or relationship that’s a catalyst. What kind of response, or what kinds of conversations, did you have around the phone box once you converted it into this map, shrine, information booth, whatever you want to call it?

Viewing the Climate Lab phone box installation.

MP. Well, I just sat quite outside of it, sort of woman-ed or man-ed it you know, just to make sure that no one was going to trash it. I wanted it to be safe for the purposes of Climate Lab. With other stuff I just go: ‘OK, what happens when you put something on the street happens’. A lot of the time, it’s fine. It’s the Council you’ve got to look out for, they want to clean everything up. So I stayed very outside of it. And then sometimes people would come and sit with me. Quite a lot of them seemed very … a bit like you just had a meditation. A lot of them said they felt very calm afterwards and so it was quite a profound effect because they’re still hearing the high street because all their focus is leaning in. It was a moment just to sit and be somewhere else. And I guess what happens as well, when you’re in that zone where your breathing starts calming down, getting slower. I think that’s probably why there’s this feeling of a kind of serenity, and I think people felt very moved by it. One of the key things is the image of a foetus of a baby in that it’s very strong, everyone can relate to it, whatever they’re bringing to that image. And I guess it’s a symbol of something that’s new, a new life, it’s hopeful.

Viewer in the Climate Lab phone box installation.

Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.

It’s really a way in for people, because they can relate to it directly. And then all the other images might at first look random, but because the baby’s got images in it, and you see the whole network of the body working, and that’s a sort of animal, there’s a horse head in the heart, and the baby’s got like a frog in it. But they’re making these connections further into nature.

IB. This reminds me of when I had acupuncture. My acupuncturist had an amazing image on her wall of a body that was also a landscape with all sorts of different elements in different places, a picture map of acupuncture points. And I’ve suddenly got to a vision of the telephone box as having a similar kind of feel.

MP. Yes, very much. Because I think what I really wanted to try and convey – and it feels like it’s still a work in progress – is the idea that we’re 70% water, we have the water elements, we have minerals in us, we have so much electricity, it’s incredible, you know… So there’s all this stuff that makes you, and this isn’t even our memory and our emotional memory, or our traumas or whatever. This is the fundamental makeup of the body. But because we can’t see half of it, it’s very hard to know that it’s there. So it’s really wanting to address this connectivity, to relate these things in nature to the elements, constellations. Everything is connected, it’s out there and it’s really fascinating. I watched a little documentary about Zen Buddhism last night and it had this lovely image of a tree. And it’s not a tree, we name it a tree, but actually, for the tree to exist, it needs everything. It needs the Earth, it needs this, it needs that. So everything is in everything. If we think of our bodies we’re the same as the tree.

IB. How did the scientists in climate lab respond to this? Particularly, I guess, to the phone box?

MP. Oh, I think a lot of them were like: ‘OH’!

I was concerned that it should be playful but also empowering. It’s about taking power really and doing something, taking a step into a public space that doesn’t normally happen, going there. I remember what one of the cofounders of the Incredible Edible Network [https://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/] said about asking permission to do things, ‘Just do it. Apologize later’. And I’ve always been the same. The response to the phone box has been really, really lovely, you know – there’s a word, ‘lovely’! – but positive.

What I thought you were going to ask me was: ‘how did the scientists respond to the whole process’? And on the whole the response was really good. Sometimes resistant. You could see people thinking like: ‘Why the fuck are we doing this’? ‘What was the point’? ‘Oh, my God, no, that’s hippie-dippie shit’, you know? But then people saw where it led to and it suddenly turned into something else and transformed those feelings. I guess any feelings we have of resistance, it’s just us being scared a bit, fear. Or coming in with a preconceived idea of something. I think sometimes when you just let yourself be open something changes. A lot of the responses, as well as being about really wanting to take in the body, the somatic elements, related to when people are working, not just for themselves, but in their teaching with students as well. Which is good, I think, really good.

IB. Thanks. Is there anything you want to say that I hadn’t asked you about ?

MP.  I guess I’m just thinking of the deep mapping now. It’s a never-ending process, isn’t it? Every day just keeps throws up something different with what’s going on in the wider world. What goes on directly around us and how it’s affecting us, how it’s affecting people. I think what I really noticed doing Climate Lab is how – coming back to place and space and how that affects us – is the environments and the institutions that people are working in. How they are affected by those places and spaces because of the demands on them and the amount of stress they’re all under.

What really hit me during the first Climate Lab was all these people working in various departments of Swansea university, which is quite vast now, and most of them hadn’t met. Or if they had they didn’t know each other, they weren’t really seeing each other “in the flesh” because of how they’re working. And so their connecting felt very, very powerful. I think they felt very empowered and also, a bit: ‘So I’m not on my own with all these thoughts and feelings’. Because what arose was how many of them expressed how they weren’t able to say how they felt. The opportunities just weren’t there. So you’re working in that world, then you’re going home and you can’t talk about it in a social way because people are going: ‘oh, no, you’re not going to talk about that, are you’! So it’s the amount of emotion being held in that people are living with. I could see that. The climate issue is what it is, you know, and none of us individually can go: ‘If I do this, blah, blah ….’ But what we can do is acknowledge how we’re being affected, how we’re being affected by our immediate environment, and what can we do within that. Starting with the body and things very close up to us, because if that’s not right, there’s no way you’re going to be able to do anything else….

Because I’ve worked with some of those people before in various contexts, I was very aware of how on edge they are in all sorts of ways in relation to the institution. They have to play the institutional game. They’ve got to put in grant applications, they’ve got to write papers, and so on and so forth, and the gap between those institutional expectations and where they are in their internal world, just seems to be under enormous tension.

IB. I could tellhow importantClimate Lab was for some of the academics at Swansea I know. So, congratulations. I notice that one respondent said:

No one talks about climate or ecology crises in my department – not in work time, not at work meetings. Let alone their feelings. It’s an extraordinary taboo. I am always thinking about it, yet never feel ‘allowed’ to mention it.

MP. Well it was a shared responsibility that the whole thing came about. Me and Fern were one part, but it took a lot from other people to make it happen. Some of them are deeply sensitive and throughout the whole thing I thought back to those people. I just wanted to say: ‘Alright, you know that it’s not alright. But it’s alright as well to really acknowledge that feeling that it’s not alright. OK, now what little things can we do’?

IB. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because in a way that’s a kind of mutual mapping of the emotional situation and an acknowledging of it, and that somehow makes it possible to keep going.

MP. Yes. And the feeling of being heard. What came up a lot was people saying: ‘I feel like I’ve been heard’. I think that’s deeply emotional for people. Lots of people really cried when it came to talking and being witnessed, because I guess it was the first time. It’s a bit like keeping everything in, still keeping everything in, and then the balloon bursts. … I think that was especially interesting for me because over the last couple of years I’ve been doing work in Park Prison as well. It was very interesting to be working in a really fucking hard environment, with prisoners on the wing, when just going into the prison environment is so inhuman. It’s all just straight lines and there’s no room for ‘being heard’ at all. So to be able to start creating that within a very hard environment has been interesting, and then doing Climate Lab. I can see some similarities in environments there!

IB. Thank you very much.

M P with the Climate Lab phone box

Extracts from a conversation between Marega Palser and Iain Biggs.

Background and context

Marega Palser and I first met in 2017. We walked round her home town of Newport and talked about the possibilities that deep mapping might offer someone like herself: trained as a dancer, then at art school, and at that time working with movement, drawing and performance. (She has since also trained as a yoga teacher). We met again later during her project Framing the Transient NoW (An exercise in deep mapping), part of a residency she had in Swansea. In 2023 I found myself attending Climate Lab, an unusual collaboration between scientists, engineers and artists that began at Swansea University in 2022, via Zoom.I particularly wanted to talk to her about the way she sees the influence of deep mapping on her work with Climate Lab because her background and ways of working. Her performance work “on the street” seemed to me to place her differently in relation to deep mapping from the points of departure represented elsewhere in this section of the PLaCE International web site. 

Marega co-designed and co-hosted Climate Lab withFern Smith [https://fernsmith.uk/],  co-founder of Volcano Theatre and initiator of Emergence, a forum for dialogue and collaborative practice in support of a life-sustaining future. (For Fern’s account of Climate Lab see the Emergence web site – https://emergenceuk.blogspot.com/). Fern sees Climate Lab as ‘an experiment in the power of connection, creativity, and spontaneity’ and designed to take ‘the expert viewpoint of climate researchers out of the box of the scientific method’ by ‘creating a space for those on the front-line of climate research to connect to the emotions they have about the climate data they are collecting or working alongside’.

Climate Lab came about due to an exchange between a 12-year-old Japanese schoolboy and Professor Tavi Murray, a highly respected Glaciologist and Antarctic Researcher base at Swansea University who he interviewed as part of a school project. At the end of the interview he asked her a question that, as a professional environmental scientist working in academia, she’d never been asked before. “How does it makes you feel seeing the changes you’ve seen?” Over time she tried to answer that question and inviting other climate scientists to do the same. Climate Lab grewout of theirconcerns in relation to that emotionally difficult question. Drawing on their various skills, Marega and Fern facilitating processes that enabled Climate Lab participants to witness emotions, create art, and imagine the future.

N.B. All the images used here are copyright Marega Palser and are used with her permission.

Introduction

What follows here is edited extracts from a long, fascinating, interview-come-conversation with Marega. As her observations will make very clear, Climate Lab has lessons for us all. However, the length of our conversation, which sometimes rambled, required some editing and I have occasionally changed the order of sentences for greater clarity. I’ve also chosen sections that focus on those aspects of Climate Lab likely to be of particular interest to readers, whether institutionally employed or otherwise, concerned with the many ‘faces’ of deep mapping. I hope in doing this I’ve not lost the gist and spirit of what Marega told me.  

Iain Biggs (IB) First of all, many thanks for agreeing to talk to me. Can you start us off by telling me how you came to be involved with Climate Lab and what was your role in it? 

Marega Palser (MP) A call went out to work with scientists to do with emotions. Working with data that just doesn’t seem to be penetrating is emotionally so overwhelming for them. Fern got in touch and said, ‘look, this call-out’s happening, would you be interested in collaborating on it’? In a pilot Climate Lab they’d focused on the sea level rise and, coincidentally and at the same time, I’d seen this map of the coast of Britain with all these red areas saying ‘just go and look, this is all the land that’s going to go’. So we needed to explore how we could work through their situation in a creative way, tapping into those emotions.

We’d known each other since 1988 and every now and then we’ve done bits of work together, but never on this sort of project. Anyway, we said: ‘yes, let’s rise to the challenge’ even though it was very scary. You’re working with people that inhabit this totally different field and suddenly you’re finding reasons to justify why you’re going to use this process with scientists, coming in with a different way of working, a different language. We spent a week together throwing loads of ideas into the mix. Fern is one of the most qualified people I can think of for these kinds of workshops because she’s done lots of counselling work over the years, but we were also thinking about how to get people out of their heads and into the body to find different ways of looking at things. Fern put a proposal in and it got accepted. Oh, and part of that was to work with two other artists so there’d be an artist’s response to all the information that came up….

IB. You made two really quite distinct types of work for Climate Lab. First there is Seeing and Feeling, put together by Steve Jones and yourself and based on words and responses from the participants.Then later you made the phone box installation. Can you say a little about the thinking behind both pieces? How they were put together and why you chose to take the approaches you did?

MP. The first Climate Lab was in three parts, with the first part about doing lots of exercises and listening to the scientists. The response I made to that was a performative piece. You saw how people responded to what’s said. Then it was as if the work wanted to develop or grow into something else that can be a final piece. So I made Seeing and Feeling for the third part of that Climate Lab because it just felt like: ‘well, I can’t do a performance for it but it could be filmed’. It was very much based on performance, on a total response to everything I heard and witnessed from the first Climate Lab.

IB. Your phone box installation draws on your experience of deep mapping. What was involved in putting it together and why did you take the approach that you did?

The Climate Lab phone box installation.

MP. I’ve got to break that down a bit first. Tavi, who’d initiated the project, was bowled over by the first event and got funding to open up Climate Lab internationally. We knew that we had to do that on Zoom, so Fern and me spent lots of time working on it and rehearsing to make it even more succinct because the international event had to be in two parts because of Zoom and time zones.

I was working as a co-facilitator and as an artist, so I made two different art responses to each of those workshops. Then what I did was to take everything from the workshops into the phone box. So earlier I’d looked at shrines and what it is to make a shrine, but also at the idea of a baby and the internal network and patterns that are formed internally and in the exterior world.

Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.

Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.

As you know, I like doing stuff on the high street and I’ve done lots of what some people might call gorilla art. I don’t know what you’d call it. But I think over time, especially when lock-down happened, me and Steve just used the high street as a gallery. You know, we’d drag things around, take a vacuum cleaner for a walk and install it somewhere. I want to say ‘stupid shit’, but I think what I love about it is the conversations that arise from doing it. And during lock-down, a lot of the people were out there, living on the streets or maybe just doing their shopping in a supermarket. So there’s always this question: ‘who is your audience? Who is this for”? And I always think: ‘well, anyone that’s curious’. On the high street you will get every age, every colour, every background, every social status. It’s there for anyone who’s curious….

IB That reminds me very much of the way that you worked in Swansea on the Framing the Transient NoW project.

MP I think doing that project really taught me a lot because it was the first time I’d really worked in that way. I’d done other stuff on the streets as the Clarks, but Swansea went deeper…. Our conversations really helped me ground it in something else; not just conversations, not just about art, but looking at something wider in society. Anyway using the phone box was a way for Climate Lab to take a message out, to say: ‘look, this is what’s happening’. It takes that message out of an academic situation or as a Zoom thing and puts it very directly on the high street. So it’s broadening the underlying message without saying: ‘This is what it is’. I think people started seeing these connections for themselves.

Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.

The reason I chose the phone box is that I’d done another one. I’d had to move three times this year. So I have all this stuff, and art pictures, and postcards I’ve collected for years and years. And I thought, Oh, God, you know, part of me just wants to burn them all. And then I thought no, what can I do creatively with them. There was this meggie old phone box outside The Place in Newport, which is a community space. So I thought, right, I’m just going to start pasting all these postcards up in there. And it looked amazing. And there was another phone box the other side of it so I just covered the two of them in these images which stayed up for ages and ages. They were going to be part of an event in Newport but about two weeks before it started BT took them away!

As a result of that, I thought of using the phone box as a gallery for Climate Lab. I love the idea of a BT phone box as places where communication was key. I remember leaving home at 16 and I was in London and I’d phoned home every week on a Sunday, you know, in the phone box: ‘Can I reverse the charge”? So, coming back to Climate Lab, I thought it’s a lovely symbol, really, that it’s about communicating something going on.

IB. When you introduced the phone box installation at the two Climate Lab sessions I attended, you mentioned deep mapping as an influence on how you worked. Can you say something about that influence, because what’s always fascinated me is that you come from a place that is actually much more about the body and performance. And although performance was what deep mapping in Wales was about early on, a lot of it has moved away from that. You somehow seem to move between those two approaches.

MP. The mapping really came out through dance. I started combining my love of making art and dance, because for years I thought: ‘how can I merge these two things’? They always felt quite different. Being at art college as a mature student doing my final project just birthed this idea: ‘I’ll just manage to find a way of doing drawing, printmaking and performance’. And then out of that grew a show called Sometimes We Look, which was all about drawing and dance, responding to choreography. I’d be going through some notebooks thinking: ‘oh, there’s my stick figures of that dance, how does it go’? And then you’re trying to ape these stick figures, and then another dance comes out of it. So it’s a feedback thing and out of that questions. ‘Why do I do certain moves’? ‘What is it in my body that goes to do certain positions’? You know, they’re not taught positions, they’re just felt. So I started thinking of the body as a map where things are held, and about the story behind that mapping of the body. So it goes into a whole emotional, somatic, mapping.

Then there was the idea of how spaces affect us because I always like working with space. And it was Clifford Lucas who really introduced me to that again, back in the late 80s when he was with Brith Gof. We did a small project with them, Dance Wales and Brith Gof. And I always remember Clifford said: ‘Why does a dancer start in the middle of the stage’? You know? And so he just really flipped my head about working with space. I love architecture anyway, and places and spaces; some people might call it psychoactive space. So how does the space trigger something in the body and the body respond to a place and memory? That is really my way into deep mapping. It hasn’t just happened instantly, its grown over time. And then before doing the Swansea project I saw this term ‘deep mapping’, which is how I met you. I read your article, where you quote from Clifford.

So it’s been a long, winding, way to deep mapping and the Climate Lab. But I think what I really love about it and the Swansea project is that it’s a form of documenting something in its present moment and looking at the past and future. It felt really relevant to Climate Lab. It’s such a natural process for me to ask: ‘What is happening here, not just in this little bit, but as a whole; what is happening in this time-frame with these people’? So it was a way of collecting their responses, all this information coming in, and then going away and laying it all out. That’s where the … What’s the word? Not just curation. But finding a way of going: ‘how can I best respond to this and give it back.’

[N.B All images reproduced in this and subsequent sections are copyright and reproduced 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].

Ken Kiff The poet Mayakovsky invites the sun to tea

Questions of category

Just why Kiff’s work is hard to categorise can be illustrated by looking at Timothy Hyman’s Beyond the Formalist Canon: Visionaries, Dreamers, Outsiders, Chapter Four of his book The World Made New: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century (Thames and Hudson 2016). In it Kiff is grouped with Ensor, Kubin, Rabindranath Tagore, Jack Yeats, Henry Darger, and Jacob Lawrence. Artists Hyman sees as modern symbolists who challenge ‘exclusive orthodoxies, whether academic or formalist’. I suspect this says more about Hyman’s idiosyncratic view of twentieth century figurative painting than about Kiff’s work, given possible comparisons with the work of the American artsit Romare Bearden or the Indian artist Arpita Singh; that is to the work of practitioners of various forms of expanded and inclusive “realisms” that marry the possibilities of early modern Western painting with older cultural traditions. An approach that Kiff would summarise as a ‘flexible realism’ that interacts with ‘the life inside one and outside’, so that ‘more of reality can be rediscovered, reclaimed, brought into a new wholeness’. (A view Hyman refers to, but then simply ignores). Rather than locate Kiff’s work in relation to dialogues between the different arts and the cross-cultural concerns that run through a significant proportion of twentieth century figurative painting, Hyman choses to include Kiff in a chapter dealing with “visionaries”, “dreamers”, “symbolists”, and “outsiders”, without ever making clear to which he sees Kiff as belonging. None the less, despite this Hyman’s categories, if suitably qualified, can serve to indicate something of Kiff’s orientation and concerns.

Kiff might be called a “dreamer”, for example, in the specific sense used by the Archetypal psychologist and writer James Hillman, who notes: ‘… it is in the dream that the dreamer himself performs as one image among others and where it can legitimately be shown that the dreamer is in the image rather than the image in the dreamer’. (Archetypal Psychology Putnam, Conn., Spring Publications, Inc. 2004, p.18). Hillman’s observation would suggest we might identify Kiff as both maker of, and frequent participant in, his own images, an observation seemingly confirmed by the work itself. However, if they are a form of conscious dreaming-through-painting, they also reflect his careful attention to ‘other voices of thought’, since they become an intrapsychic conversation that includes elements from history, culture, religion and nature. Kiff is certainly no solitary fantasist.

But is he a “visionary”? Cecil Collins, perhaps the best known twentieth-century English visionary painter, aligned himself with the spiritual concerns of the poet Kathleen Raine, whose work he sometimes illustrated. Spiritual concerns that are, in my view, pretty much the antithesis of Kiff’s down-to earth psychic inclusivity. If Kiff is a visionary, then it’s of a very different kind to Collins. Following James Hillman again, we might link Kiff’s dreaming-through-painting to: ‘“soul-making”, taking the phrase from the poets William Blake and, particularly, John Keats: ‘Call the world if you please, “The vale of soul-making”. Then you will find out the use of the world’. (Ibid. p. 38). Kiff’s vision then, unlike that of Collins’, is very much this-worldly, terrestrial, grounded in an expanded sense of dailiness, of the everyday. That expanded sense is, then, the basis of his radicalism and of the alternative, “pagan”, and inclusive notion of a shared modernity championed by a poet such as John Burnside.

Is Kiff in any sense an “outsider”? As a Royal Academician, an Associate Artist at the National Gallery, and someone who showed work in major galleries internationally, this hardly seems an appropriate categorisation. However, in one particular sense it points to an aspect of Kiff’s position if we take up Lynne Cooke’s suggestion that we substitute the term “outlier” for “outsider”. This, she believes, properly acknowledges that some artists gain ‘recognition by means at variance with expected channels and protocols’. (Lynne Cooke Boundary Trouble: Navigating Margin and Mainstream in Lynne Cooke (ed.) Outliers and American Vanguard Art Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2018, p. 4.) In Cooke’s very specific sense Kiff could reasonably be seen as an “outlier”, since his work gained recognition largely despite being seen by many in the art world as at variance with the dominant late Modernist theories of painting at the time of his emergence into art world consciousness.

To sum up, Kiff could possibly be categorised as a visionary, a dreamer, and an outlier, but only along the highly specific lines indicated above. All of which discussion I see as ultimately pointing to the fact that his radicalism lies in his rejection of a Modernist culture underwritten by possessive individualism; a culture predicated on the exclusivity built into the notion of a monolithic “heroic” ego and on the Cartesian splitting off of notions of self from other, of body from mind, of the imaginal from the perceptual, of the spiritual from the material, and of the so-called “inner” from the so called “outer”. By contrast, I see Kiff as embracing a plural and relational notion of self, one that requires our awareness of multiplicity at all levels.      

Some background

Ken Kiff was born in Dagenham in 1935. His father’s death at the beginning of the war resulted in family difficulties that, along with the consequences of nocturnal nervous attacks, complicated his childhood. Despite this he did well at school, studied at Hornsey School of Art, married, raised a family and, in time, won an international reputation for his work. Sadly Kiff died in 2001, aged only sixty-five. His work was then largely ignored by the art world at large until 2018, when the major exhibition Ken Kiff, The Sequence again attracted attention to its visual complexity, its variety, richness and extended emotional reach. Subsequent smaller shows suggest a growing interest in his work.

I first wrote about Kiff’s work in 1983 and subsequently, working closely with him, organised and edited the book Ken Kiff’s Sequence, published in 1998. It was clear to me then that his images were as unusual in the orientation of the mentality behind them as they were compelling, but it has taken me a further quarter-century to fully grasp their quiet but fundamental radicalism. While neither “politically” nor “socially” engaged in the sense these terms are usually deployed, I believe Kiff’s images none-the-less speak to some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Ken Kiff’s radicalism

The artist Jeremy Deller has argued that any good artist is ‘socially engaged’, presumably on the basis that he or she cannot but be critically engaged with a shared culture. It’s in this context that we might understand the art historian and critic Norbert Lynton acknowledgement that Ken Kiff’s historical and aesthetic understanding was much subtler than his own and those who shared his professions. It was this that enabled Kiff to see that early modern painting offered a radically new form of material thinking, the implications of which Chagall had grasped before any of his contemporaries. (A thinking that would be increasingly marginalised or ignored after c.1955). Kiff in turn recognised the importance of Chagall’s balancing of an old and more or less universal language predicated on figurative imagery against the socially distancing effect of Cubism’s formal radicalism. This balancing served as the basis of his own particular form of radical social engagement An insight that allowed him to take up Chagall’s distinction between Cubism’s concern with ‘a surface covered with forms in a certain order’ and: ‘a surface covered with representations of things (objects, animals, human beings) in a certain order in which logic and illustration have no importance. The visual effect of the composition is what is paramount. (Quoted in Norbert Lynton ‘Chagall “over the Roofs of the World”’ in Susan Compton (ed). Chagall London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1985: pp. 20-21). The result is images with a plurality of connections, attachments and relationships that resonate both with our multiple senses of self, yet maintain clear connections with the mundane and every-day.

Ken Kiff Woman in sky.

Kiff rejected Modernist critics’ promotion of the idea of the separateness and exclusivity of each of the arts in their “advanced” forms in favour of an inclusive approach to the making of images. Reading Yves Bonnefoy’s poetry and art writing helped shape his work, as did his friendship with Martha Kapos – a poet, art historian and a colleague at Chelsea School of Art. I will draw on both writers here. However, I will also draw on the Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, whose work Kiff almost certainly did not known. If this requires some justification, it must be that many of the folk tales in Michael Foss’ Folk Tales of the British Isles, for which Kiff made images, are Irish, and so are part of Ní Dhomhnaill’s own heritage. My reasoning, however, is less literal. They share a poetic orientation, a shared concern with an saol eile. This becomes apparent if you view Kiff’s Woman and Sky (1999) in the light of John Montague’s translation of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem Cailleach (Hag). Doing so alerted me to the fact that, despite their very real differences, they share a broadly Jungian view of folklore and an interest in the Feminine, particularly the transformative image of the spéirbhean (literally ‘sky woman’, but more usually ‘woman of great beauty or goddess’). This figure is the topic of poems by Ní Dhomhnaill such as Primavera and of her prose essay Mis and Dubh Ruis: A Parable of Psychic Transformation. The spéirbhean is, I suggest, as good a name as any for the numinous female figure present in a great many of Kiff’s paintings, drawings and prints.

I also see “linguistic” parallels. Ní Dhomhnaill is concerned to revivify the poetic possibilities of the Irish language in the face of the ubiquity of English in post-colonial Ireland. Kiff wanted to revivify painting by returning to the radical “linguistic” possibilities inherent in early modern painting at a time when these were increasing seen as passé. The animating impulse is, for both artists, ultimately psychosocial; a desire to use the psychic resources revealed by immersion in their chosen “language” so as to help us achieve a degree of detachment from our unconscious activity and, rather than repress it, help incorporate it into our lives. In this context their attention to folklore, understood as a very old way of thinking that helps link past and present, provides the testimonial aspect necessary to any empathetic imagination. In Kiff’s work this testimonial imagination, possibly fed by Picasso’s reinterpretation of major paintings in the Western canon in his later work, enabled Kiff to refigure iconography from Western and other traditions from the viewpoint of an ensemble sense of self. A viewpoint initially animated by synergies between insights obtained during sessions with a psychoanalyst and his experience of painting and taken up in the explorations of The Sequence. A viewpoint further confirmed and deepened by his reading of, and making images to accompany, British and Irish folk tales.

An aside: heads resting sideways…

Ken Kiff Desolation (Sequence 101)

Thinking about Kiff’s paintings in the context of Ní Dhomhnaill’s work may also provide an insight into an otherwise enigmatic aspect of his imagery. When he was asked about the ‘heads resting sideways’ in many of his paintings and prints by Martha Kapos, he replied that: ‘… the “music” of the painting has kind of firmed up at that point into that particular key, or concentration of themes; that each colour, form, edge or whatever will be speaking, and at that point the speaking is coming right up into the concentrated form of a head’. A response that is explicit, but only at the level of the process of composition. It does not help the viewer who wonders how such “heads” serve as one element among others in Kiff’s figuration. Ní Dhomhnaill’s discussion of dinnsheanchas (loosely “place lore”) however, suggests another way in which we might understand the poetics of these heads without diminishing Kiff’s focus on their ‘concentration of themes’.

Dinnsheanchas, as a way of knowing, bypasses distinctions between nature and culture in order to facilitate an intimate and reciprocal relationship between place and community. Thus Ní Dhomhnaill refers to a relative who, when mentioning a local landmark, almost invariably tells her that it is the petrified body of a giant. This focusing of the qualities of place through personification parallels Kiff’s sense of the music of a painting that becomes a focused “speaking”, one that then takes the concentrated form of a head. Such a head might be said to personify dinnsheanchas; not literally in the sense of a specific body of local knowledge, but as signifying the sense of intense reciprocity between humans and the landscapes that ground them that such knowledge enacts. This same sense of focused “placed-ness” can also be linked to Bonefoy’s notion of ‘true place’ as that which appears in moments of epiphany and oneness. (See John T. Naughton The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1984, p.79).

(The references to the work of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and to Yves Bonnefoy above and throughout this essay refer to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Collected Essays Dublin, New Island, 2005 and to John T. Naughton The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Listening at the confluence

…there is “a fundamental unity to everything related to the making of images”.

                        John T. Norton quoting Yves Bonnefoy

Ken Kiff Talking with a psycho-analyst: night sky (Sequence 113)

In Kiff’s painting Talking with a psycho-analyst: night sky (S. 113), two seated figures face each other across a space where two worlds meet. On the left a daylight world cluttered with tools and a cast of strange persona; on the right a twilight world attuned to the shrouded figure of the psychoanalyst. Against the implication of the title, the analyst’s stance suggests that it is he who is speaking, while the figure on the blue chair and those around him listen. The overall suggestion is of a conversational give-and-take that might stand for the orientation of The Sequence as a whole. Kiff’s concern with a “musical thinking’ is closely related to that of Yves Bonnefoy, who quotes St. Bernard’s aphorism: ‘If you want to see, listen’. The poet and polymath Erin Kavanagh notes that: ‘The process of drawing is a close study in attention. The process of writing poetry, a close study in listening’. She adds:

‘In paying close attention, making oneself become still, there arises a connection between the artist and subject, a flow. It’s an intangible encounter that the artist then dresses with skill and humility. Such as where Shakespeare holds the essence consistently in mind, then plays with accidentals to confer meaning….This experience is commonly described most with music. That feeling where one is being played by the music and not the other way around. The foremind can separate off and, for brief bursts, observe itself locked in a dance, a copulation. The result being creation’. (Email communication with the author, 06.09.2019 in response to a request to clarify points made in the abstract for an unpublished paper ‘Spirituality and Culture: Portraits’).  

These linkages relate directly to the value Kiff placed on poetry, notably that of Rilke, Yeats, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Vladimir Mayakovsky, the last the subject of two of Kiff’s paintings. Kiff particularly valued the poets Wallace Stevens, Yves Bonnefoy and Martha Kapos, who supported his view that the work of the poet and the painter is essentially the same. I reference poets, then, to indicate significant, and often neglected, aspects of Kiff’s work.

While Kiff’s work can be seen as aligned with innovative concepts in contemporary thought, it remains important to stress its poetic qualities, its musicality and psychic openness. This, in turn, requires us to be clear about his relationship to psychoanalysis. Kiff visited psychoanalysts to discuss aspects of his work and to address his often acute anxiety. He read Marie-Louise von Franz on folk tales and Freud’s The Question of Lay Analysis. We know he was prompted to start The Sequence because of things he’d discovered to exist through psychoanalysis also surfaced in pictorial images and dynamics. None-the-less, John Elderfield’s framing of Kiff’s work as ‘the charting of an obviously modern voyage of discovery into the primal interior of the imagination’ (quoted in Andrew Lambirth Ken Kiff London, Thames & Hudson, 2001, p. 98) is potentially misleading. Kiff worked with a “language” of imagery far older and more diverse than that of modern psychology and, when discussing his work, studiously avoided any suggestion of the “heroic discovery” that underpins the colonialist history of modern cartography (‘charting’) as part of what Ursula K. Le Guin calls ‘The Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero’. His painting and print-making is related to ‘dream-work’ in Bonnefoy’s sense, where the dream is a collective event shared by a multitude of persons/persona, but where dreaming and image-making remain distinct acts. It is perhaps more helpful to understand that, through the physical act of making images in all their visual musicality, Kiff imaginatively evokes the flowing-together of everyday life and that “other life”; one that, as Ní Dhomhnaill says, even the dogs in the streets of West Kerry know exists, and where a constant moving in and out of those two worlds is understood as entirely natural. Kiff worked precisely by attending to this constant flowing together of different worlds emerging through the making of an image, often over long periods of time. (Attending to a flowing together that, we should remind ourselves, has been considered entirely normal in most cultures and at most times by those concerned to gain a deeper understanding of the world). That attention enabled the emergence of Kiff’s works to evoke, not some ego-focused process of “heroic” personal discovery, but rather as an activity closer to that of a midwife, as a process of patiently accompanying the birth of an image over time.

Ken Kiff Sun, tree and lightning (pastel)

Preface

A version of this long essay on the artist Ken Kiff was originally written for the catalogue of what was intended to be a major exhibition of his work in the RWA’s galleries in Bristol. Sadly, what would have been a very substantial exhibition of a major figure in recent British painting failed to materialise. I did not attempt to publish that essay, both because of its length and because I had hoped that, at some point, a similar exhibition opportunity to which I could hope to contribute might appear. That now seems unlikely. So, rather than leave many months of work “on file”, I have decided that I will put a version of that original essay online here in instalments. When putting the first section of this essay on line I wrote:

‘There is, of course, a major disadvantage in having to “publish” it in this way: namely that, unlike when reading a catalogue, you cannot turn to the images about which I write. Some of these can be found online, others are included in catalogues and books devoted to the artist.  I hope you will take the trouble to hunt out at least some of these’.

Subsequently, through the good offices of John Talbot who had read the first two essay sections and is in touch with the Estate of Ken Kiff Ltd., I have been given copyright permission to reproduce images of the work of Ken Kiff. I am very grateful both to John and the Estate for this, since it clearly makes an enormous difference to be able to include Kiff’s images here.     

N.B. All images reproduced in this and subsequent sections are copyright and reproduced here 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.  

Introduction.

Ken Kiff Old man being sick, comforted by a large man rising out of the ground (Sequence 27)

Ken Kiff’s small painting Old man being sick, comforted by a large man rising out of the ground (S27), dates from 1971, the year he began The Sequence, arguably his major work. The painting’s various elements – the men of the title, the large expanse of green, the woman in the purple dress, the trunk of a tree, the narrow strip of blue sky with a single grey cloud – are loosely painted but very carefully placed within the off-square support. Glimpses of white paper, along with traces of paint on the brown margin of tape that originally held the support to a board, reinforce the sense that this image evokes rather than represents. Despite the scene’s strangeness, the way the larger man cradles the older one is as matter-of-fact as the tree trunk in the middle distance. Yet the presence of the larger man rising out of the ground is ambiguous, thinly-enough painted for us to glimpse the green behind him through his head. Is this an uncanny event glimpsed in peripheral vision, a dream, or is it simply an evocation of compassion? Who’s to say, yet it has the strange and compelling matter-of-factness of a folktale or a Catholic retablo painting.

This essay sets out to explore the resonances of such images, the visual poetics that animate them, and to indicate the wider context in which I would suggest they now appear.   

Although deeply engaged in making paintings, drawings and prints, Kiff was endlessly curious about all the arts; as interested in Wallace Stevens or Mozart as Braque, Nancy Spiro or Sigmar Polke. His curiosity extended to the world at large, an important factor in a quiet radicalism entirely without the self-conscious rebelliousness that Guy Debord links to an acceptance of the status quo for the simple reason that dissatisfaction itself has become a commodity. To explore this, I will start from Garner Tullis’ notion that Kiff was a poet without a tongue, someone who by-passed Western modernity’s categorical distinctions between the different arts, between its high culture and other post-colonial, “subaltern” cultures, between consciousness and the subconscious, and between reality and imagination. A visual poet who combined a concern with the radical possibilities inherent in the “language” of early modern painting, and with “the Feminine” understood in a broadly Jungian sense (as linking the conscious and unconscious realms and so able to disrupt the deceptively tranquil surface of everyday social, familial and domestic lives). Also, perhaps most fundamentally, with the richness inherent in our proximity to what, in Irish, is termed an saol eile (“the other life”), a phrase reductively paraphrased in English as “the unconscious”. All of which led him to visualise how complex internal worlds and multi-faceted selves are manifest in the everyday world.

Kiff‘s images employ highly evocative colour to figure the mutuality of the mundane and “other” world in ways that are constantly surprising. As such, they also serve as a tacit critique of the extent to which Modernist and post-Modernist art largely fails to connect with or inform any common life. Kiff’s approach to the body is fundamental here. The poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill observes that, in the Irish language, orifices and excrements are understood without prudishness or purulence as “an nádúir”, or “nature”, a source of humour rather than of shame or embarrassment. Questioned about imagery that included such things, it became very clear that Kiff felt the same.

Ken Kiff Excrement-1 (Sequence 57)

Kiff’s work has, in my view, been under-appreciated, particularly since his death in 2001. There are a number of possible reasons for this. His work is not easy to categorise. It builds on a view of the ongoing value of the “formal” lessons for the language of painting of the early twentieth century. A view at odds with mainstream art historical notions of “progress” and perhaps closer in orientation to the work of some of Kiff’s near-contemporaries working in India, rather than to artists in the West. Furthermore, Kiff shared Gaston Bachelard’s view that  the image cannot give matter to the concept and that the concept, by giving stability to the image, would stifle its existence. A view very much at odds with the analytic and conceptual preoccupations of academic art discourse and art oriented to them.

In what follows I will begin by taking up the issue of categorisation, provide some brief biographical information, and then outline the basis of what I see as Kiff’s quiet radicalism in relation to his concern with “wholeness”. I will discuss his “psychic realism” and indicate the adverse conditions under which he managed to develop it. I will then turn to particular clusters of images: The Sequence, those made to accompany folktales, the Goddess images, and Acceptance and related works. In the final section I consider the wider context in which his work now appears.

‘Ken [Kiff] is a poet without a tongue as a true painter should always be’.

                        Garner Tullis

One – I grew up in the second half of the 20^th century, a cultural era often referred to in the visual arts as “late Modernism”, when leading art critics promoted the notion of the separateness and exclusivity of each of the arts in their “advanced” forms. I was fortunate to work with the painter Ken Kiff on a book about his Sequence and came to understand why he rejected the dominant cultural of late Modernism for in favour a more inclusive approach to making images. As perhaps implicit in Garner Tullis’ observation above, Kiff read poetry avidly – by Rilke, Yeats, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Vladimir Mayakovsky. He was particularly interested in both the poetry and art writing of Yves Bonnefoy, which  helped to shape his whole orientation as a painter. He also developed a close working friendship with the contemporary poet Martha Kapos – an art historian and a colleague teaching with Kiff at Chelsea School of Art – who would come to write perceptively about his work, particularly his use of colour.

Thinking about Ken today, it seems to me more important than ever to celebrate a highly original visual artist who related so deeply to the work of poets. 

Ken Kiff comes to mind because he was someone who was true to his own particular vision of the world and made his way without conforming to the expectations of the cultural status quo in the visual arts. His quiet defiance in this respect so unsettled John Hoyland, an abstract painter heavily identified with the ideology of late Modernist painting, that he publicly dismissed Kiff’s work out of hand, claiming that he had turned his back on ‘all the understanding of what’s gone on in modern art’. In fact nothing could have been further from the truth. Kiff simply had a much broader and deeper understanding of modern art than Hoyland; an understanding that critically engaged not simply with the various strands within early modern painting, but also with poetry and music.  Hoyland’s conformity to the the “progressive” ideology that sustained a certain view of abstract painting can be seen as part-and-parcel of late Modernism’s professionalised alienation from any connection with, or attempt to inform, our common life. Perry Anderson has indicated the cause of that alienation in Modernist culture: its complicity with a market preoccupied with ‘commodities, including works of art’. For Anderson, the revolutionary possibilities that informed the Cubism and Surrealism on which Kiff pondered long and hard – on the work of Picasso, Chagall and Miro, for example – came to an end with Abstract Expressionism, after which painting in the West was increasingly driven by a commercial gallery system that needed a ‘regular output of new styles’ to feed a market increasingly aligned to the cultural values of ‘haute-couture’. So to Hoyland, wholly identified with the late Modernist notion of “progressive” abstraction, Kiff’s richly varied forms of figurative work could only appear isolated and regressive. They appear very differently, however, if we choose to see them as an articulation of an expanded and inclusive visual poetics, one engaged with what the poet John Burnside refers to as ‘the dailiness of everyday life’.

Two – Sometimes very different moments in our experience align in unexpected ways. I have always puzzled over the literalism that insists that different types of cultural activity are understood as isolated one from another. An example would be the concern expressed by some writers over failure to differentiate between “literature” and “song-writing”; a “failure” that provoked farce reaction in some quarters when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

My puzzlement surfaced again recently when, after listening to Paul Simon’s song America, I happened to re-read Paula Meehan’s The Moon Rose Over an Open Field. Her title is, of course, the last line from the third verse of Simon’s song. I take Meehan’s poem to be both a celebration of Simon’s skill with language as a song-writer and an expression of gratitude for the positive effect the song had on her when she was a young woman. (You can find the poem on page 251 of her As If By Magic: selected poems, published by Wake Forest University Press in 2021). Having read John Burnside’s I Put a Spell on You (2014), I suspect that he too would not want to draw too firm a distinction between the two forms, although that’s not something I can be certain of.

Unlike those poets who want to insist on an absolute distinction between what a poet and a song-writer make, Paula Meehan has happily acknowledged a blurring of the lines between these two activities. She has said that she began her engagement with the power of language by listening to, and then writing song lyrics under the influence of, artists like Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny and Van Morrison. So it’s indicative that she sub-titles her poem The Ghost of My Mother Comforts Me, ‘after Van Morrison’ (you can find it on page 80 of As If By Magic). The poem contains echoes that reference the phrase ‘gardens wet with rain’ that appears in both Morrison’s Sweet Thing from his 1968 Astral Weeks and in In the Garden, a song from No Guru, No Method, No Teacher that was released in 1986. It’s this second song that, I would guess, Meehan had in mind when she acknowledged her dept to Morrison.  

All this matters to me because it seems important to acknowledge that what touches us culturally, what wakes us to being present to the complexities of our relationship to the world, comes in many forms. Forms, types or modes of articulation that, if bound up too tightly with the expectations invested in fixed categories and the hierarchies of value attached to them so as to distinguish, say, “high” from “popular” culture, can blind us to what is valuable in our own responses. This is not to suggest that some works of art are more significant within a culture than others – it’s not unreasonable to claim that the work of J S Bach is more significant than that of Chip Taylor – but I also need to remember that Taylor’s Wild Thing may have had a real significance in someone’s life, someone for whom the music of Bach is a closed book. I think it also matters because the forms of articulation we call the arts can take on new energy and meaning when they cross-pollinate or when one art form offers an artist working in another strengthens her or his desire to resist the dominant theoretical framings that inhibit what they feel they need to do creatively.

Postscript

As so often happens, no sooner had I posted this than I came across a piece of writing that I should have known about and referenced. In this case, the chapter Like a Striped Pair of Pants in John Burnside’s excellent book The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Profile Books, 2019). In it he offers a very clear and helpful discussion of the distinction between poetry and song, while at the same time addressing the various reasons why we need such a clear understanding of the real basis for that distinction, one that has nothing to do with ‘maintaining a cultural hierarchy commensurate with a class based social order’. His argument is made all the more compelling by his deep knowledge, and clear enjoyment, of the best in both categories together with his awareness of how they feed each other.

It makes no sense to try to think through the notion of deep mapping as conversation unless I’m first clear about what the word conversation refers to in this context. Perhaps the best place to start here is with a claim made by the curator Monica Szewczyk  in an article called ‘Art of Conversation, Part 1’ in e-flux journal no 3 – February 2009. There she writes: “… if, as an art, conversation is the creation of worlds, we could say that to choose to have a conversation with someone is to admit them into the field where worlds are constructed. And this ultimately runs the risk of redefining not only the ‘other’ but us as well” (italics mine). While I believe this may indeed be the case, it clearly does not refer to the type of verbal exchange referred to as “conversation” that most of us have most of the time.

Arguably the most important quality that marks out a genuine conversation has nothing to do with what it’s about, what the participants say, but is rather to do with the quality of how they listen to each other. Someone once observed that, if you listen carefully to two academics having a discussion, you’ll soon come to realise that when one is silent it’s not because he’s actually listening to what the other is saying but, instead, is mentally preparing what he’s going to say next. This is even more obvious in political exchanges and interviews on TV.

To really listen to another person requires something close to an act of unconditional care towards that person, one in which the listener tries as far as possible to let go of her or his own concerns; the desire to win an argument, to impress, to ingratiate themselves, to flatter, to demonstrate superior knowledge, wit, or “woke-ness”. In short, to set aside the assumption of exchange as something based on having an agenda, whether explicit or tacit. To attempt a genuine conversation, an exchange not already predetermined by the mental parameters within which you are willing to attend to what another person says, is indeed an art, one that requires a great deal of practice to develop. To really listen to another person requires both the willingness and the ability to set aside one’s own positions and pre-judgements. To attempt to hear what they say on their own terms and without the habitual series of reactive judgements that usually accompany my listening. All of which matters because, unless I’m willing at least to attempt this, I have no chance of touching on what my friend Siân refers to as our “core commonality”. Of course all this is an ideal, one that most of us will fail to reach, but we can remember Samuel Becket’s advice and keep making the attempt, failing again no doubt, but hopefully failing better.

It’s attempting genuine listening that opens into what Szewczyk calls conversation as an art, as the creation of worlds. It’s also this attempt that links us to what I referred to earlier as the unending conversation or exchange that grounds us through attending to the world in its fullest sense. And, because conversation is by definition a two-way process, it must ultimately involve us in attending – both in the sense of attentively listening, as when a teacher asks her class to “pay attention” to her or to each other, and in the sense of an act of caring for or attending to, an act predicated on that open listening. 

Arguably, then, it’s because people, particularly those with power and authority, refuse to attempt the art of conversation, that so much of the world’s suffering happens. It happens, in short, because they (we?) don’t want to run the risk of being in a situation that might redefine not only the responses of others but, in the process, our sense of ourself.     

At present, it might seem that the obvious examples of the lack of genuine listening and conversation relate to extreme examples, for example the wars we see reported daily in the media. But in the UK there is real everyday suffering caused by the simple refusal of those with power and authority to genuinely listen to others. To go into this in any real depth would take me a long way from my main concern here. However, I can point to an example, one that’s very much part of my own experience. It’s a situation that’s the consequence of professional people not listening, of failing to attempt to engage in genuine conversations in order to protect their sense of professional authority, something that perfectly illustrates the point I want to make. You can find this example online at a site set up by my wife called Dialogues – ME/CFS.

What has all this to do with deep mapping?

Put very simply, deep mapping can be seen as an attempt to enter into a genuine conversation, only not with another person but rather with a place. As suggested earlier, that involves a two-way process between person and place. It involves listening to, attending to, manifestations of the multiple, indeed probably endless, particular qualities of a place, seen as the taskscape over time of human and other-than-human life.  It also involves attending, not only to the multiplicities of place as they immediately appear or are currently represented, its literal presence as the sum of a plurality of relationships, but also to all those aspects of the specific place that have not been “heard”, that is to say recognised or acknowledged. And, if one really listens to a place, it will speak back to . If we attend to those aspects of a place that have been consciously or unconsciously overlooked, neglected or repressed, it repays our attention by subtly changing, reconfiguring itself. Again, all this requires practice and patience, a particular act of care.

We can begin, however, by attending to some particular aspect of a place. Attending, that is, not to the given categories that are used to define a place, but to what strikes our own curiosity in terms of how some particular aspect of it starts to solicit attention, which is how it speaks. That aspect can, in turn, offer a starting-point for sketching out the working limits of what a deep mapping might attempt.   

If, for example, I was to consider begining a deep mapping of Farlands, I might start by reflecting on the implications of a simple change of name in relation to what appears, physically, when I walk around the place. The building currently named as Broadmeadows, which lies just south of the mire that feeds into the beck that runs approximately north north east through Farlands, was previously called Bogmire. What this suggests to me is either thatthere has been an actual drying out of the area, perhaps through a process of draining, that enabled an area of bog to be transformed into meadow, or else it simply reflects a change of ownership and with it a change to a more picturesque name. A change that might also reflect a shift of attitude towards bogs as “unproductive” wetland. Either way, listening to, attending to, that change of name and its implications, is enough to begin the process of listening to the place as a whole through how it solicits my attention.    

It may be that, as an aspect of the transformation of Farlands, some form of deep mapping activity also takes place. Whether or not that happens is entirely up to Will and Charlotte but, if that is indee what happens, I hope to be part of the conversation.