Some surprising strings attached to Handspring’s puppeteering story

With the exception of War Horse, which I was lucky enough to watch twice, I have had to admire the work of Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones from afar.

From Ubu and the Truth Commission to Woyzeck on the Highveld and Life & Times of Michael K, I have been limited to photographs and recordings of the remarkable creations produced by Jones and Kohler’s Handspring Puppet Company.

Images and videos convey something of their haunting quality but are no substitute for proximity to the personanimal-objects themselves, especially as they come alive in the theatre.

Tracking Handspring’s Little Amal, a 3.5m puppet of a young refugee, as she walked about 8,000km from the Turkey/ Syria border to the UK in recent months, heightened this sense of displacement — of separation in space and time. But I guess that’s our default mode nowadays: watching things happen elsewhere, overhearing conversations in distant rooms. Life playing out on a screen.

The digital world does have its perks, however, and this week I had the opportunity to join Kohler and Jones in a Zoom webinar hosted by Aspire Art

Auctions. For me, listening to eloquent artists discussing their craft is second only to actually seeing them exercise that craft.

Add to that the richness of two generous-spirited artists reflecting on the work of other artists and, despite the inevitable hitches that come with a virtual platform, there were the makings of a rich conversation.

The occasion that spurred this event is the sale of 15 lots from Jones and Kohler’s collection in Aspire’s upcoming auction of modern and contemporary art.

Over four decades, the pair have acquired sculptures, paintings, prints and photographs that represent a range of artistic styles and traditions. It was fascinating to learn how these works have intersected with (and, in a number of cases, informed) the Handspring story.

Key figures include William Kentridge, with whom Kohler and Jones have frequently collaborated — no surprises there. But I was intrigued to learn about their connection to Simon Stone, whose S.N.C.P. (Spontaneous, Non-Conceptual Painting) is one of the lots on auction: it turns out that Stone, along with another seminal SA painter in Marlene Dumas, was at Michaelis School of Fine Art with them in the 1970s.

After Jones and Kohler wryly observed that Stone’s renowned taciturnity when it comes to talking about his own paintings has its equivalent in Little Amal’s silence, they emphasised how this reluctance or inability to speak — whether on the part of the artist or the subject — places the interpretive burden on the viewer. “Look, look, look, look, look, look and look” was their advice for inexperienced collectors; but this is also good advice for anyone engaging with any work of art, for it insists that insights are yielded by long, loving attention.

Indeed, Jones and Kohler gave something of a minimasterclass in how to “look” at an artwork. Black-and-white photographs by Zanele Muholi, Billy Monk and Bonile Bam were subjected to keen analysis in terms of composition, depth of field, texture of surfaces, background and the details that signal complexities in the “mood” of an image: poignance and humour, sincerity and playfulness.

Those attending the webinar were informed how Dumile Feni’s pen and ink drawings

Two Bulls and Head of a Man, produced 20 years apart, inspired the three-dimensional vision of Handspring’s puppetry. And an assessment of two paintings from Clive van den Berg’s Frontier Erotics series (Lone Figure with Veil and Two Figures) gave Kohler and Jones the chance to discuss their contrasting experiences of being young gay men trying to escape military service.

A number of the items on auction speak to the pair’s subsequent queer activism.

Other lots from Kohler and Jones’s collection have an ambiguous place in SA art history. Samuel Daniell’s early 19th century colour aquatints But they, too, have had are associated with the gaze of significant parts to play in the colonial anthropology, as are Handspring story — you’ll have Francois Le Vaillant’s etchings to read the auction catalogue to produced in the 1790s. find out how. ● Aspire’s auction of Modern and Contemporary Art starts on November 30. Visit .aspireart.net/upcomingauctions/) for more information.