As a student at Wits in the seventies, I chanced upon a guided tour led by a young social historian called Tim Couzens. There was nothing formal about it. A few of us just piled into a kombi and drove around Joburg while Tim told stories–about the Doornfontein yards, Vrededorp, Langlaagte, the American Board Mission School, the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, Hindu temples, mine compounds, lunatic asylums, and other remarkable things he would later put into The New African. It was a revelation. In a single afternoon, a Johannesburg concealed within the place familiar to me came to the surface, like one of Calvino’s invisible cities, which are magical because they are real–Olinda, always renewing itself, or Raissa, the unhappy city ignorant of the happy city at its heart, or Berenice, the unjust and the just city, wrapped in one another like onion skins.
Some twenty years later, Graeme Friedman and Roy Blumenthal invited me to contribute to a collection celebrating the 70th birthday of Lionel Abrahams (published as A Writer in Stone). Soon enough, I was caught up in rereading the poems, essays and polemics of Abrahams, another teacher who had become my friend. One of the things that struck me was how intensely his work grappled with what it means to be a citizen of Johannesburg, and inspired by his example I made the first notes towards a book on the city. His poem ‘The Fall of van Eck House’ was a touchstone. I am sorry Lionel did not live to see my book published.
The writing really began in 1998, when I co-edited blank_Architecture, apartheid and after with Hilton Judin. Having to produce my own contribution for the book felt like a burden at the time, but I am glad now that Hilton would not take no for an answer. The sequence of short texts called ‘Street addresses, Johannesburg’ formed the basis for everything else.
The next year I took up a fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. ‘Street addresses’ had uncovered themes worth exploring and the fellowship allowed me to do so. A large part of this book was drafted there. I am grateful to the institution, its director Jean-Baptiste Joly and its literary juror J.M. Coetzee for giving me the opportunity.
Many of the texts have been published as cycles in other contexts. I would not have dealt with the material this way had various writers and artists not asked me to contribute to projects of their own. Such commissions not only shaped the concerns of the book but gave me the means to go on with it in a suitably roundabout way.
Corinne Diserens set the pattern by inviting me to write for the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition of David Goldblatt’s photographs, which she was curating with Okwui Enwezor. David kindly gave me access to his archives while I was writing ‘An accidental island’. Mela Dávila at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA) coordinated the publication of fifty-one years: David Goldblatt.
The circular structure of ‘An accidental island’ owes something to the work of the Austrian architect Klaus Metzler, whom I got to know in Germany. Klaus was undertaking a walking tour around the peripheries of Stuttgart, following the old and now largely forgotten city borderline and documenting the route in words and photographs. His project has subsequently been published as Blinde Grenzen: ein architektonisches Grenzprojekt links um Stuttgart (Edition Solitude, Stuttgart, 2000).
‘Portrait with keys’, the third cycle and the one that eventually lent its title to the book, was prepared for Radhika Subramaniam and Rosalind C. Morris at Connect and published in 2002. Extracts also appeared in Spanish and Portuguese in publications linked to the São Paulo Biennale, and for this I must thank Jean-Charles Massera, along with Jean-Luc Moulène and Anri Sala.
Roger Palmer commissioned ‘City centre’ for his book of photographs Overseas, which accompanied a retrospective exhibition of his work at Salzburg’s Galerie Fotohof in 2004. I am grateful to Roger for making me part of his book, and to Rainer Iglar and Michael Mauracher at Edition Fotohof for publishing it.
In 1999, I contributed an essay on the steering lock to Helfershelfer by Jörg Adam, Dominik Harborth and Andrea Vilter. This German publication accompanied a design exhibition devoted to ‘symbiotic gadgets’, secondary inventions that depend for their use on other objects (the analogy with my own method is clear enough). The English translation, Second Aid, appeared at the end of 2003. It was only then that I fully appreciated the affinity between ‘The habits of the Gorilla’ and Portrait with Keys, and decided to incorporate the essay into the book.
The various cycles were finally interleaved to create a single sequence. The paths of the original cycles and some other patterns are traced in the Itineraries. My model for this thematic index is in Humphrey Jennings’s great compendium of readings, Pandemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. Apart from a few updates in the notes, my texts have not been revised to reflect changes that may have happened since they were drafted.
Many editors have helped me to refine the work. In addition to those mentioned above, I thank Matt Weiland for his astute editing of extracts for Granta, which gave me pointers for improving the whole book. My agent Isobel Dixon read various versions of the manuscript and gave me good advice about it. I am also indebted to Tony Morphet and William Dicey for their very helpful comments.
The ‘Visitors’ book’ (as it would have been indexed in the Itineraries) was my scheme to invite some of the people mentioned in this book into its pages as a sympathetic or argumentative chorus. I am grateful to my friends for arriving with so much enthusiasm and departing with such good grace. My intention was to make the book theirs, which of course it still is. They are Alan Schlesinger, Chas Unwin, Dave Edwards, Glynis O’Hara, Lesley Lawson, Mark Gevisser, Mike Kirkwood and Sean Fourie.
And then there is Minky, always at the heart of my book and the life going on around it.
Ivan Vladislavic
February 2006