A Paradoxical Monumentality

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a paradoxical monumentality

by Gabriele Guercio

Triumphs and Laments is a work of paradoxical monumentality. The paradox lies first and foremost in the fact that although William Kentridge’s project in Rome employs a public space and has clearly commemorative implications—as do so many ancient and modern monuments—the artist seems uninterested in making something that will last forever. He is not driven by the classic aspiration of “monumental” undertakings. Instead, the method used to create Triumphs and Laments already contains the seed of its own dissolution.

The Fluidity of the Work

plate / tav. 37 — Deportees / deportati (no. / nr. 33)

Based on a series of drawings that the artist made from 2013 to 2016, a variety of figures and scenes have been depicted on the walls along the banks of the Tiber River, running about 550 meters between the Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini. The themes of Triumphs and Laments vary, but as a whole are related to Rome’s millennia of history. They range from the legendary fratricide of Remus at the hands of Romulus (no. 22), to the tragic, mysterious death of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975 (no. 25); from the pope’s temporary exile to Avignon (no. 18), from 1309 to 1377, to Benito Mussolini’s solemn equestrian parades (no. 23); and from the ecstasy of Saint Teresa (no. 21), sculpted by Bernini, to the famous scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita where Anita Ekberg splashes in the Trevi Fountain (no. 49). Kentridge’s long procession of characters was created without applying pigments or any other material, but instead by eliminating, removing, what was already on the wall. Certain portions of the dirty, smog-eaten travertine were meticulously cleaned so that white lines emerged, setting off or rendering visible the black silhouettes that Kentridge had initially drawn on paper.

It is also worth noting, however, that Triumphs and Laments is a work doomed to disappear over time. No instructions have been given for preserving the images, nor has the artist prescribed any method of preventing them from inevitably vanishing. The gradual buildup of continued smog will eventually

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re-blacken the empty spaces that now mark the clear, visible outlines of each figure, making them less and less recognizable until they implode into darkness. The same grime that has been used as a medium, giving a positive semblance of form to the silhouettes along the Tiber embankments, is also what will gradually erase them, with the accumulation of additional soot.

And this is not merely an implicit demonstration of how we are polluting planet Earth; Triumphs and Laments is also particularly effective at prompting us to reflect on the dimension of time. Due to its fluid nature, the project Kentridge has conceived for Rome manifests and implements the dynamics of both its creation and its own destruction. As a whole, it obeys a highly performative impulse. And what is more, it is a work that to some degree emulates the Tiber itself: just as the river seems to flow without pause, the figures on the wall are not meant to remain there unaltered, but rather to change and “flow” over the course of their own temporal duration. Their fate is entrusted to time—to the instability and unpredictability that characterize both historical and natural events.

But how should one interpret the fluidity that leads to the eventual dissolution of the work? Does it reflect an urge for self-destruction? The twentieth century did indeed give rise to the phenomenon of “auto-destructive” art.

Prominent figures such as Gustav Metzger—who coined the term—and Jean Tinguely come to mind. Metzger, the author of a series of manifestos published beginning in 1959, in which auto-destruction is seen as a way to break the capitalist cycle of production and consumption, made works such as nylon sheets that he painted with hydrochloric acid; the act of painting triggered the work’s rapid dissolution.1 Tinguely, on the other hand, primarily worked in sculpture. One of his best-known pieces, Homage to New York, consisted of a machine programmed to self-destruct within the space of thirty minutes, on March 17, 1960, in the garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.2

However different, the work of both these artists tends to put destruction and creation on the same plane. This is not true of Kentridge’s work.

The pivotal aspect of Triumphs and Laments does not seem to be the active destruction of the images, but rather the acceptance of an ungovernable process of decay that will take place over an incalculable span of time. Another conceivable comparison is with Adrián Villar Rojas’ practice, so attuned to the theme of entropy and to the idea of an ending that is simultaneously a new beginning or rebirth.3 Kentridge, however, is clearly focused on history. It is through this historical dimension that Triumphs and Laments envisions the possibility of a becoming that prevails over being, and over any production of meanings, images, or figures meant to hold true forever. It is as if space opened up to time, and to the chaos of the metamorphic processes that shape both nature and human affairs.

Indeed, the yearning for evolution is what drives Kentridge’s oeuvre.4 To this end, he relies on drawing along with a varied range of expressive media, including video, theater, performance, and sculpture. The themes he

addresses, moreover, reflect an enduring predilection for ethical and political questions: from apartheid to colonialism, and from totalitarianism to the quandaries of modernity and the fate of migrants, sometimes pictured in his work as a procession of shadows (fig. 1).5 The content is nevertheless inextricably bound to the process through which the artist imagines and presents forms. And in Rome, this process takes on a truly unique nuance. Before I explain what constitutes this “Roman” quality, however, it may be useful to remember other recurring aspects of the artist’s practice, which also show up in Triumphs and Laments.

Roads Made by Walking In Kentridge’s oeuvre, not only are forms subject to ongoing mutation, but there seems to be an attempt to embody changes of state, and capture what lies and/or emerges in the unfolding from before to after. Given these priorities, the point from which the images themselves originate is obscured or ignored. The artist often works from found material. In the case of Triumphs and Laments the effigies on the wall sprang into being, as is often the case in his work, from drawings made on ledger books, full of numbers and calculations (plates 1-37).6 They then took shape on the embankments of the Tiber through the manipulation of preexisting dirt which was not invented or introduced by the artist, but already accumulated on the travertine. The impression that Kentridge’s work is a palimpsest, its origin ineffable, is confirmed by his film Journey to the Moon (2003), whose title evokes a film by the pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès.7 Kentridge films himself in his Johannesburg studio as he walks around and makes drawings, sketching in, transforming, or erasing a multitude of figures; uses a coffee cup as a monocle, and then a telescope, to glimpse infinitesimal molecular structures or animated compositions of stars; grabs floating pieces of paper, examines them, then throws them back into the air; lifts up a chair, letting it rise to flout the laws of gravity; and is followed around by a woman whose body is invisible to him, but whose features have appeared before, popping out of, or drawn over, the pages of a book (fig. 2).

From the private recesses of Kentridge’s studio to the public space of the Tiber embankments, there does not seem to be a privileged or canonical starting point for his work, let alone a primordial void or pristine font of creativity. The lack of a known foundation is more of a resource than an impediment—an absence that in itself takes on a meaningful function. The artist’s task is to prepare himself to expect the unexpected: to become aware of the flux of perceptual, emotional, and mental states he experiences when immersed in his work. As Kentridge explained in the lectures series he gave at Harvard University in 2012, part of his studio day is spent alternating or combining observation, bodily movement, and cerebral activity, to loosen the

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hold of reason and open the door to creative moments in which an image or an idea can manifest itself beyond all the technical, manual, or intellectual mediation nevertheless demanded by the practice.8

It is through drawing, whether using lines or words,9 that Kentridge tries to depict the roiling flow of thoughts and images. Drawing is what underpins much of his oeuvre. One of the most obvious hallmarks of his animated films— such as Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989, fig. 3), Mine (1991, fig.

4), and Felix in Exile (1994, fig. 5)—is that they are each constructed by taking a series of charcoal and pastel drawings and repeatedly modifying each one by erasing it, redrawing it, and photographing its metamorphoses. Unlike animations that employ thousands of drawings, Kentridge’s films—which, not coincidentally, he explicitly calls “Drawings for Projection”—blend together stages in a limited number of drawings made to visually render a scene or sequence. Each film documents the flow of drawing itself: an outpouring and fading of visions, lines, figures, and narrative threads.

The artist’s faith in the multidimensional properties of drawing can also be sensed in his statements: “Drawing for me is about fluidity. What I am interested in is a sort of multilayered highway of consciousness . . . my work is about a process of drawing that tries to find a way through the space between what we know and what we see.” 10 Sidestepping both realism and abstraction, drawing can make the extrasensory actions of the mind and of the imagination perceptible to the senses. It is a practice for which the spectrum of application is so broad and ineffable that it creates an overlap between forms of art and forms of life. “I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing,” Kentridge says, “lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are or how we operate in the world.” 11

Co-opting the dynamics of life and presenting itself as a potential model for existing in the world, drawing intensifies one’s awareness of the visual, emotional, cognitive, and existential components of artistic practice. As we can see from Journey to the Moon, the artist trains his body and mind in the studio, whether by walking around randomly or making drawings.

Kentridge’s walking and drawing are the two key actions. They make him a party to evolving forms that he can thus observe, capture, and release again. Moreover, these two actions help disclose passages from, and to, unknown dimensions. They mark moments of rupture, mediation, and contact between states in constant metamorphosis, which could not have been predicted before the shifts themselves. Echoing the poem by Antonio Machado, which warns a traveler not to imagine that roads are already there, drawing paves the way to the singularity of a road that does not yet exist, but is made by walking.12

The sense of movement with no preconditions, which can generate the lines of a path as easily as it can erase them, turns up again in Triumphs and Laments. The creation of a work on and about the river is in keeping with

the vision of this artist, who gives the figures and situations he draws— inspired by Roman history—the quality of fluvial or cinematic traces; the same process, spanning art and nature, causes them to both appear, then eventually implode and vanish.

Culture or Barbarism?

What is the Roman significance of this practice aimed at making roads by walking? To answer that, we must first look at the title of Kentridge’s work: Triumphs and Laments. It alerts us that the work is an interweaving of glory and disaster, presumably moving from the assumption that success for one person may entail disaster for someone else. One is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s phrase from his seventh thesis on the philosophy of history: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” 13 Through the cognizance of this contradiction, Benjamin can say that the task of the historical materialist is to “to brush history against the grain.” 14

In his own way, Kentridge also perceives the shifting boundary between culture and barbarism. Recalling the preliminary stages of Triumphs and Laments, he admits that it was shocking to realize how “the glories of the Renaissance and the ignominy of the Roman ghetto were not only projects of the same era, but intricately intertwined.”15 The pope who commissioned the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica and the rooms by Raphael, at the same time actively promoted the persecution of the Jews. Triumphs and Laments is not blind or naive about these brutalities of the past; rather, it tries to brush history against the grain. This is achieved in a particularly significant way at the thematic level: among the various images of splendor and aberration, there is one, that didn’t finally make its way into the frieze, that references the grotesque custom, popular in the fifteenth century at Carnival, of rolling an elderly Jew down Monte Testaccio in a spike-lined barrel (fig. 6). Other levels, though—perhaps less tangible but more global and incisive—can be seen when the system of religious and cultural beliefs that underlies the most entrenched images of Rome’s magnificence is called into question. Indeed, alongside the subjects it depicts, Triumphs and Laments takes a stand on the injustices and asymmetries of Roman history, precisely through the paradoxical monumentality that characterizes the entire project.

We have already made a few observations about this unique quality of the work. But we ought to probe the paradox by examining, for instance, the spectral or ghostly appearance of the pictures along the Tiber. There is little or nothing stable or secure about these images. In some sense, Triumphs and Laments restates arguments the artist has presented before, in discussing the allegory of the cave from the seventh book of Plato’s Republic. Kentridge questions the Platonic doctrine according to which light and good can be

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clearly separated from darkness. A return to the cave might instead be auspicious: it could help us appreciate the power of shadows to generate awareness. Because seeing “is always a mediation between this image and other knowledge,” the shadows “make the mediation conscious.” When hands dexterously mimic the shadow of something against an illuminated wall, we understand that the result is both the shadow of two hands with crossed fingers and the shadow of an imaginary bird or rabbit. We hover between the realms of optics and physics, and the realms opened up by paying conscious attention to the event. Platonism contends that the truth lies in the crossed fingers, but Kentridge’s rebuttal is that the fluctuation between conflicting realms conjured up by a shadow can be just as illuminating.

It hones the sense of mediation which is conducive to art itself—which makes us “conscious of the precept ‘always be mediating.’” Kentridge is explicit about the ethical relevance of his discourse: “all calls to certainty, whether of political jingoism or of objective knowledge, have an authoritarian origin based on blindness or coercion.” 16 One must lay aside all partisanship. From shadows, one learns how we create both illusion and meaning. It’s not a question of clinging to an idea or its alternative, but of acknowledging the circle that enfolds truth and falsehood. If shadows operate in a way that is analogous to art, it is because they open up paths to experiencing our own construction of experience.

With the pictures along the Tiber, as well, seeing and knowing cease to be separate activities. We feel moved to survey them, blending vision and memory. The ghostly look of the images; the way they are shadowed on the travertine; the grime that composes them, to which more grime will presumably be added—all help to underscore the anti-Platonic message of the work.

It is as if the figures and scenes imagined by Kentridge stand there to say that Rome is not a symbol of archetypal, changeless, perfect ideas. The good and the bad that alternate throughout its history demonstrate this, and they should be treated as neither relative nor absolute if we are to free them from any arrogant, partial grasp. This may be the only way for the question “culture or barbarism?” to not only be confronted, but remain an open question from and within history, awaiting new answers that could inspire new thoughts, as well as new interweavings and mediations between past and present.

It was also particularly popular with travelers in the modern era. Goethe, for instance, called Rome the center of Weltgeschichte, or world history; Stendhal associated eternity with Christianity, and praised Saint Peter’s as what he felt was the most beautiful church of the world’s most beautiful religion; and Nathaniel Hawthorne extolled it as “the city of all time, and of all the world.” 18 In the Western imagination, Rome plays the role of a place where time can stand still. Archaeological ruins and traces of art history are there to corroborate this, feeding into the notion of an indestructible entity: not just a treasure trove of innumerable artistic and cultural monuments, but a monument in itself. Rome thus comes to embody, and instill in those who visit or reside in it, the sense of an absolute permanence.

Such views begin to crumble, however, as soon as one looks at Triumphs and Laments. The work does not echo this aspiration to permanence. According to its creator, “it is important that the project be ephemeral in the long run: it is, he says, no Moses that will remain for centuries and centuries.” 19 Any predilection for space and the sense of immobility associated with it gives way to an acknowledgment of duration and movement. The fact that Triumphs and Laments changes, is blurred and tarnished day by day, makes time an active component of the work; it allows itself to be experienced and shared, but never possessed the way one can possess things in space.

With Kentridge, the memory or monumentum no longer alludes to the presence of a majestic, indelible identity, with the superlative capacity to endure now and forever. His aim is instead to capture the transient: to bear witness to what is altered and dissolved over time, inherently frustrating both the attempt to freeze a moment outside of time, and the omnipotent urge to classify and memorize every component of the whole. Rather than aspiring to stably occupy space, Kentridge’s Roman project expresses and fosters a desire to experience both the unfolding of time, and time itself as an unfolding. Its monumentality has to do with the interplay of composition and dissolution, visibility and invisibility, light and shadow, matter and antimatter. Looking at these effigies on the walls, the spell of “timelessness” is broken: we are invited to reflect on the inescapably transitory nature of both these images and our own lives.

There is another aspect that gives Kentridge’s working method a new significance in the Roman context. Along the Tiber, his practice not only proves to be an evocative expression of a Jewish conception of time, but it employs this conception as a tool of resistance, a useful counterweight for achieving a new equilibrium. As we know, the biblical notion of time is linear and directional, and does not contemplate cyclical returns, interruptions, or fixities outside of time: rather, it fosters the development of historical awareness. Judaism is inextricably bound to this awareness.20 By orienting his work within time, Kentridge makes it not a commentary on the past so much as an invitation to immerse oneself in the present—discovering history in order to feel like an active, responsible part of it. This is in keeping

The Value of Impermanence Fluid and protean, Kentridge’s modus operandi takes on surprising connotations when applied to Rome and juxtaposed with the city’s history.

The impermanence that characterizes the paradoxical monumentality of Triumphs and Laments profoundly undermines the topos of the “eternal city.”

Introduced by the Roman poet Albius Tibullus circa 19 BCE and bolstered by Ovid and Virgil, this phrase is one of the longest-lived concepts in history.17

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with the uniquely Jewish quality found in the experience of historical time, conceived of as a one-way street, without regressions or reversibility, and lived out in a precarious state, caught between hope and desperation. At the level of form, Triumphs and Laments incorporates and develops similar views and puts them into the setting of immortal Rome—the emblem of Christianity and of the temporal power of the Catholic church.

Indeed, Kentridge’s modus operandi challenges not only the Rome of the popes, but also the earlier pagan and Greek city that would later be absorbed

by Christianity, and the arena of confrontation is offered by differing visions of time. In ancient Greek and, later, Christian thought, that which is eternal is given pride of place, while movement and evolution often constitute lower levels of existence. With its ephemeral composition, Triumphs and Laments reminds us instead that Judaism lacks the idea of eternity: the Hebrew word olam, often translated into the Greek aion (atemporal eternity), actually means only a very distant time.21 What matters is the total sphere of reality.22 And what is more, Triumphs and Laments suggests that we should be concerned not with objects in space, which are static even within time, but rather the events that take place within the constant innovation and unpredictability of time, which do not remain fixed in the spatial dimension.

Triumphs and Laments confirms the keen insights of Bruno Zevi, according to whom art that is Jewish or inspired by Judaism cannot be reduced to a spatial conception, and therefore stands in opposition to the aprioristic order that characterizes classicism, the absolutist visions of the Enlightenment, and the abstraction pursued by analytical cubism. According to Zevi, Judaism in art aims for “anticlassicism, the expressionist deconstruction of forms; it rejects the ideological fetishes of the golden ratio, and celebrates relativity; it refutes the authoritarian rules of beauty and opts for the unruliness and ungovernability of what is true.” 23 In keeping with these aspirations, Triumphs and Laments is antistatic: it does not swap time for space, but rather temporalizes space, suggesting that spatial things—the figures and events depicted on the travertine—will constantly fade away.

Given the kind of observations the work elicits when compared to what Rome represents in the history of civilization and religion, should we conclude that Triumphs and Laments reflects a mood of rancor about past injustices? 24 It wouldn’t seem so. Kentridge’s previously cited precept of “always mediating,” given concrete form in art, suggests a hopeful outlook: a belief that it is always possible to achieve new negotiations and arbitrations. Rather than an attack on the Christian and Greek culture of Rome, the artist’s project conveys a message of openness and freedom. It sets up a dialectic between the progressive Jewish time, which moves from before to after, and the immobile time more commonly celebrated in the GrecoChristian tradition. The deterioration of Kentridge’s work along the Tiber is a specific declaration of the fact that existence—and therefore also art, as an activity that is part and parcel of human life—cannot be explained on its

own, but only through time. It is an appeal to do away with all inhibitions about the impermanent nature of living.

The experience of impermanence is valuable for its capacity to show that what does not end is time, the ultimate reality that transcends every determination of place. By manifesting pure evolution—that which is constantly on the cusp of becoming something else—Triumphs and Laments refutes any facile contrast between being and becoming. By making the past present and bringing it back into the flow of time’s unfolding, the work supports the view of Vladimir Jankélévitch, according to whom evolution is merely “being’s ungraspable manner of being,” to the point that one ought to say that “time is the intention of being.” The philosopher continues: Considered concretely . . . being is reduced here to the doubtful and equivocal I-know-not-what, the hybrid of being and nonbeing, the almost-nothing, in short, that is fugitive becoming. Since it is the realm in which the object incessantly comes undone, is formed, deformed, reformed, and transformed, this becoming counters the rounding off of the object; the change that becoming brings about is not a molding, but a constant modification.25

Jankélévitch’s argument is well-suited to describing both the visual and mental impact of Triumphs and Laments, which indeed knows neither interruption nor conclusion, and reveals itself to be even more polychronic than polysemic.

Why Give Up on Eternity?

The fact that Triumphs and Laments is a work that refuses to let itself be fenced into a system means that it represents a situation of unpredictability and discontinuity. Moreover, by taking temporality into account without rendering it absolute, Kentridge’s project gives historical expression to the past without claiming it can necessarily be known as it truly was. Attention is focused on a succession of eras and people—from imperial Rome to the Rome of Fellini, from Giordano Bruno to Giorgiana Masi—that come back to life in the figures along the Tiber, precisely insofar as they intersect with questions of the present and with the artist’s personal viewpoint. Historical memory is thus brought back into the present and to the specific features of the time we live in. The temptation to break out of the categories of past, present, and future fades away. The thought of eternity shows itself to be steeped in a deleterious Platonism. It alleges the presence, no less, of a dimension that stands beyond differences and otherness, and it tries to sidestep matter and promulgate the idea of a time without evolution—a time we may imagine in our minds, without being able to know exactly what it is outside of our own cogitations.

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But there is still another reason why, especially nowadays, the eternal could be anathema: it can be used to legitimize assertions of identity. In other words, the thought of the eternal is easily co-opted by sweeping ideologies that, heedless of all ethics and logic, reject otherness and difference. The ignominy of Auschwitz is proof of the pernicious implications of the principle of identity. It is no coincidence that in addition to upholding the myth of racial purity, the Third Reich envisioned an art of eternity, whose solemn monumentality would not only mirror the perfect understanding between the people and the führer-artist, but would continue to seem so, even when only ruins remained.26

There can be little question that one of the thinkers who most incisively and insightfully countered the barbarism of Nazi thought was Theodor W. Adorno. His philosophical and aesthetic positions tried to weed out the very roots of the aberrant mentality that made Auschwitz possible.27 In regard to art, the need to eliminate the deadly effects of that identitarian stance led Adorno to theorize an artistic practice built around nonidentity, open to the proliferation of difference and receptive to the special condition of otherness represented by the suffering of victims. His posthumously published book Aesthetic Theory enunciates an understanding of form that cannot and should not be something everlasting, concluded, universal, and unitary, and hence always the same.28 The demand emerges for a fragmentary, heterogeneous, and nomadic practice which obeys the imperative to break with every canonical distinction between art and nonart. Deliberately ephemeral, the works that seem to be called for after Auschwitz not only turn a critical eye on the world, but are made up of forms and figures accepted only because they are subject to evolution and constant change.

And yet, if there are many good reasons to put an end to the idea of eternity, there are perhaps just as many valid ones for wondering whether its eradication might be too hasty, possibly leading to further damage and other impasses. In recent decades, Adorno’s theories have enjoyed considerable consensus, to the degree that they now underpin prevailing viewpoints and the conformity they engender. While, on the ethical front, playing the role of victim is almost an obligatory prerogative if one is to claim a public voice and subjectivity,29 on the artistic front, most of the established phenomena seen in the so-called “art world” take the guise of works left intentionally incomplete, precarious, fragile, and often without inner cohesion, and which interact with an outside context. The spread of an aesthetic based on fragmentation and dispersion goes hand in hand with the entrenchment of the conviction that anything at all is possible in the artistic sphere. In both cases, the supposed objective is to liberate art from bonds or norms that are seen as coercive. The new mainstream wisdom preaches that there are no predefined forms or languages, and that potentially, anyone is capable of making something artistic or creative. By embracing this trend, though, do we not end up fueling a frenzied laissez-faire that diminishes the reality

of artworks and opens the way to the intervention of extraneous forces and desires? Are we not tolerating the danger of “becoming a tool of the ruling classes,” as Benjamin suggested? 30

The rejection of eternity is ambiguous. It is not simply wedded to the repudiation of a kind of art suspected of megalomania, prone to support a “totalitarian” impulse as it tries to express everlasting ideals of life for our species. This rejection also comes at a time when the commodification of artistic phenomena has reached its height.31 The two phenomena are not necessarily connected. And yet, it is worth noting that the global elites do not seem particularly interested in the notion of the monument, as an extraordinary creation of universal scope. Assuming they aspire at all to dictate the artistic agenda, it actually looks more as if the ambition of the ruling classes is to celebrate, and celebrate themselves, through the splendors of an art based on difference and dissemination, and whose products seem easily enjoyed, are blissfully unconcerned with immortal questions, and mirror the tastes and habits of a secular existence, grounded in the laws of profit and the drive to consume.

Where does Triumphs and Laments stand with respect to all this? Does it follow the trail of post-Adorno aesthetics, or venture onto other paths? Is it accommodating, or does it distance itself from the spread of art that has fewer and fewer qualms about being “commercial?” Isn’t it true that however ephemeral the work in Rome may be, it’s accompanied by quite a few drawings that will nevertheless end up on the market?

In one sense, Kentridge’s project is openly aimed at fragmentation and dissolution. It is also clear that the artist is working within the global system of contemporary art, where money has played a tyrannical role for some time now. However, there are other specific implications in Triumphs and Laments to consider. One cannot deny that, although destined to vanish, the pictures along the Tiber will exist for an unknown length of time; one might speak of them as one speaks of a human’s existence, the duration of which is an unknown variable. And so, over the lifetime of Triumphs and Laments, as in the span of a person’s life, the work could generate a range of stories, impressions, feelings, and thoughts (of which this essay and book are already one example) that go beyond its physical and perceptible tangibility as a procession of figures marching along the river. One is prompted to acknowledge that, contrary to what is often assumed in the field of art history, artworks need not necessarily be the only primary documents we study; what the work does, or leads people to do, outside of itself is equally significant. Triumphs and Laments fosters this realization. Rather than relying exclusively on its prodigious form, Kentridge’s project seems to trust in the prodigious power of memory and word of mouth, which may help construct a legacy of the work to be preserved and passed on from generation to generation.

One therefore gets the sense that Triumphs and Laments is guided by an aspiration not unlike that of other monuments, be they in Rome or

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elsewhere: in other words, Kentridge is also challenging and defying time.

The fact that his work has evolution at its core, and makes impermanence a virtue, does not rule out the possibility that certain feelings and thoughts never experienced before Triumphs and Laments have now come into the world, and will remain here—historicized, relived, and brought back into the present, albeit through innumerable metamorphoses. A tangled web of connected and superimposed metaphysical elements grows out of the fact that an artist has attempted to depict the glories and infamies of Rome, without trying to compete with the explorations of the absolute generally associated with the art-historical heritage of the eternal city.

And so, one can finally envision a kind of grandeur that is no longer the fruit of mere ostentation, and no longer in thrall to a tyrannical affirmation of identity, let alone the tastes and interests of a few governing elites.

Kentridge’s project in Rome hints at the possibilities of a new greatness in art that reflects and inspires reflection on the abiding themes of humanity, on history, and on the fate of the species and of planet Earth, yet resists the urge to try to encompass everything. It neither spreads out, losing sight of its boundaries, nor fixes itself in a thing or object, but rather separates and removes itself from and within the whole. Triumphs and Laments invites us to think about how and why an artwork that subtracts itself from the world—ultimately vanishing or dying, imploding into the dirt from which it arose—can nonetheless remain present in time, in ways that can for now be only partially predicted or known.

To envision this significant yet intangible presence, we must venture three connected hypotheses. First, one must accept the idea that the identity of an artwork, like that of a person or a people, may not necessarily be tied to the cessation of conflict or elimination of otherness; it might even be created and manifested by lacerations, absences, and disjunctions. Second, one must imagine that “greatness” could even imply something small, the solemnity of which is harder to see or grasp using the yardstick and criteria of intelligibility that prevail in a given era or circumstance. And, last, that “eternal” could mean something unknown, yet essential for thought: the maximum point of tension between states of fact and ideals extraneous to fact, lucidity and dreams, anguish and hope, the harmony of the cosmos and the complex disunity of the world.

The paradoxical monumentality of Triumphs and Laments is therefore inextricable from its ability to preserve something great and undying that is consumed without becoming consumable; that passes from person to person without allowing itself to be transformed into anything else; that can be spent, but cannot be bought with any coin. Kentridge’s “monument” trusts, and invites us to trust, not in its durability as a physical object or its desirability as a commodity, but in the qualities of the event that the work could come to represent by disseminating new values—so that the situation of anyone who encounters it or comes into its orbit will be forever changed.

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notes 1.

Metzger’s artistic practice cannot be separated from his work as a political activist, particularly his criticism of nuclear weapons, pollution, and the capitalist system. His autodestructive art, often publicized through lectures and performances, is marked by a clearly collective approach, the polemical content of which is meant to stimulate audience reflection. By depriving his practice of any material outcome, the artist wanted to prevent its commercialization. See Andrew Wilson, “Gustav Metzger’s Auto-Destructive/Auto-Creative Art: An Art of Manifesto, 1959–1969,” Third Text 22, no. 2, March 2008, pp. 177–194.

2.

See press release from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Friday, March 18, 1960, https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/ pdfs/docs/press_archives/2634/releases/ MOMA_1960_0033_27.pdf?2010. Among the many publications on the artist, a prime reference is still Tinguely, the catalog from the exhibition curated by Karl Gunnar Pontus Hulten (Centre Georges Pompidou—Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, December 8, 1988–March 27, 1989), Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1988.

3.

The idea of the end as a new beginning was particularly evident in Rinascimento, the Adrián Villar Rojas exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, November 4, 2015–February 28, 2016. See http://www.fsrr.org/ mostre/rinascimento.

4.

On Kentridge, see William Kentridge, catalog from the exhibition curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Société des Expositions des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, May 15–August 23, 1998), Brussels: Société des Expositions des Beaux-Arts, 1998; Dan Cameron, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and J. M. Coetzee, William Kentridge, London: Phaidon, 1999; Rosalind Krauss, “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” October 92, Spring 2000, pp.

3–35; William Kentridge, catalog from the exhibition curated by Neal Benezra, Staci Boris, and Dan Cameron (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, October 20, 2001–January 20, 2002), Chicago and New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2001; William Kentridge, catalog from the exhibition curated by Carolyn ChristovBakargiev (Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, January 10–February 29, 2004), Milan: Skira, 2004; William Kentridge: Tapestries, catalog from the exhibition curated by

Carlos Basualdo (Philadelphia Museum of Art, December 12, 2007–April 6, 2008), Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2007; William Kentridge: Five Themes, catalog from the exhibition curated by Mark Rosenthal (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, March 14–May 31, 2009), San Francisco, West Palm Beach, Florida, and New Haven, Connecticut: San Francisco Museum of Art and Norton Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2009; William Kentridge, The Refusal of Time, Paris: Éditions Xavier Barral, 2012; and William Kentridge: Fortuna, catalog from the exhibition curated by Lilian Tone (Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro, October 24, 2012–February 17, 2013), London: Thames & Hudson, 2013.

5.

Regarding these processions of migrants, see especially Gabriele Guercio, “Becoming Aware in a World of People on the Move,” William Kentridge: Tapestries, pp. 43–63.

6.

Regarding this habit of using ledger paper, Kentridge comments: “It is a mixture of the particular quality of the paper and how it holds charcoal and the fact of (not) starting with a blank sheet. The ledger pagers have a history already there on the page. There is something about the quality of the ledger pages which is different from a handmade paper or other art papers and is very good to draw on.” E-mail to the author, February 6, 2016.

7.

In 2003, Kentridge made another video inspired by the French filmmaker: 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès.

8.

William Kentridge, “Six Drawing Lessons,” Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2012. Published in Six Drawing Lessons, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 99–128.

9.

As the artist explains, “I think of myself as an artist making drawings even when the charcoal is replaced by an ink word. Being led by a line, in this case a line of ink or a pen. A kind of lapidary thinking or drawing, an embroidery of thought to bring us to some new sentence or image (and then take this back).” Six Drawing Lessons, pp. 175–176.

10.

See “Interview: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in Conversation with William Kentridge,” Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev, and Coetzee, William Kentridge, especially pp. 8, 30, and 33.

The primacy of drawing in Kentridge’s practice can be seen in his writing and his discussions of theory; see especially William Kentridge and Angela Breidbach, William Kentridge: Thinking

142

a paradoxical monumentality

Aloud, Conversations with Angela Breidbach, Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, 2006. On the concept of drawing in Kentridge’s work, see also Six Drawing Lessons.

11.

“Interview: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in Conversation with William Kentridge,” Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev, and Coetzee, William Kentridge, p. 35.

12.

“Caminante, son tus huellas el camino y nada más; caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar.” (“Walker, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; walker, there is no road, the road is made by walking. Walking you make a road, and turning to look behind, you see the path you never again will step upon.

Walker, there is no road, only foam trails in the sea.”) Antonio Machado, “Caminante no hay camino,” Border of a Dream: Selected Poems, trans. Willis Barnstone, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2003, p. 281.

13.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed.

Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1968, p. 256.

14.

Ibid.

15.

Statement by the artist in a document circulated during the preparatory stage of the project.

16.

All quotes are from the 2001 lecture “In Praise of Shadows,” transcribed in William Kentridge, catalog from the exhibition curated

by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, 2004, pp.

151–161. Linking cinema to the myth of Plato’s cave, Kentridge emphasizes a point often made in film theory. See, for instance, Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema” (1975), Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 299–318.

17.

See especially Kenneth J. Pratt, “Rome as Eternal,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 1, January–March 1965, pp. 25–44.

18.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italienische Reise (1816), Eng. trans. W. H. Auden and E. Mayer, Italian Journey: 1786–1788, London: Penguin, 1970, p. 220; Stendhal, Promenades dans Rome (1873), Eng. trans. Haakon Chevalier, A Roman Journal, London: Orion Press, 1959, p. 23; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 87.

19.

Statement made by the artist in interview with Kristin Jones, Giulia Zappa, “William Kentridge a Roma: L’intervista,” Artribune, June 30, 2014, http://www.artribune.com/2014/06/ william-kentridge-a-roma-lintervista-2.

20.

In the ninth of his ninety-five theses on Judaism and Zionism (1918), Gershom Scholem wrote that Judaism was founded with the discovery of history. The Jewish conception of time has inspired a vast literature. Key texts include: Wheeler Robinson, Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament, Oxford: Clarendon, 1946; Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951; Gerhard von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 2 vols., Munich: Kaiser, 1957–1960; Ernst Jenni, “Time,” The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible: An Illustrated Encyclopedia Identifying and Explaining All Proper Names and Significant Terms and Subjects in the Holy Scriptures, Including the Apocrypha, with Attention to Archaeological Discoveries and Researches into the Life and Faith of Ancient Times, 5 vols., ed. G. A. Buttrick, T. S. Kepler, J. Knox, S. Terrien, E. S. Bucke, and H. G. May, New York and Nashville: Abingdon, 1962, vol. IV, pp. 642–649; André Neher, L’essence du prophétisme, Paris: Calmann–Lévy, 1972; Neher, Clefs pour le judaïsme, Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1977; Mauro Perani, “La concezione ebraica del tempo: appunti per una storia del problema,” Rivista biblica 4, no. 26, October–December 1978, pp. 401–421; Vladimir Jankélévitch, Ressembler, dissembler (la conscience juiveé), Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984; Sergio Quinzio, La croce e il nulla, Milan: Adelphi, 1984; Quinzio, “Figure del tempo nella Bibbia,” ed. Giovanni Ferretti, Temporalità ed escatologia, Turin: Marietti, 1986; and Quinzio, Radici ebraiche del moderno, Milan: Adelphi, 1990.

21.

See Ernst Jenni, “Das Wort 'ōlām im Alten Testament,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 64, no. 1, January 1952, pp. 197–248; and 65, no. 1, January 1953, pp.

1–35.

22.

Quinzio, Radici ebraiche del moderno, p.

20. See also Thorleif Boman, Das hebräische Denken im Vergleich mit dem Griechischen, Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1952. On the rift between the Greek and Jewish worlds, see also Neher, L’essence du prophétisme, who explains the contrast by pointing out that “Greek time, as a metaphysical dimension, cannot give birth to anything, it can only be reflected in perfectly identical pictures, engenders nothing; it is the source of no progress, it

gabriele guercio

can only be reflected in similar images, whereas Hebrew time renews itself in childbirth in unforeseeable futures . . . Hebrew time does not start over again like Greek time; it engenders.”

Quoted in Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud, trans. Llewellyn Brown, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 169.

23.

Bruno Zevi, Ebraismo e architettura, Florence: La Giuntina, 1993, p. 13.

24.

Grievances toward the eternal city are part of a long history of conflict and incomprehension; in the modern era they have been noted

by Moses Hess in Rom und Jerusalem (1862), who observes that “papal Rome symbolizes to the Jews an inexhaustible well of poison.” Hess, The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question, trans. Meyer Waxman, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p. 35.

25.

Vladimir Jankélévitch, Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980, p. 30.

26.

Eric Michaud, Un art de l’éternité: L’image et le temps du national-socialisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1996.

27.

This draws on Alain Badiou’s arguments regarding the philosophical and aesthetic position of Adorno, especially in reference to music

143

and Wagner, developed in Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, London and New York: Verso, 2010.

28.

Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970.

29.

See the evocative ideas of Daniele Giglioli (Critica della vittima, Rome: Nottetempo, 2014), according to whom the victim mentality has become the paradigm through which contemporary ideology conceives of history and human nature itself. No longer a source of scandal and conflict, the status of victim is gratifying, builds self-esteem, and claims attention and recognition from others.

30.

Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 255.

31.

This phenomenon has been noted even by the art-world media. See, among others, Achille Bonito Oliva, “Il mercato come opera d’arte,” Op. Cit. 56, May 1983, pp. 5–12; Lilly Wei, “Making Art, Making Money,” Art in America 78, no.

7, July 1990, pp. 132–141; Raymond Moulin, Le marché de l’art: Mondialisation et nouvelles technologies, Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2003; Olav Velthuis, “Accounting for Taste,” Artforum 46, no.

8, April 2008, pp. 305–309; François Bourgineau, Art et Argent: Les liaisons dangereuses, Paris: Hugo & Cie, 2009; and Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009.

1

FIGS. 1-6 >

( FIG. 1 )

( FIG. 2 )

[ ENGLISH here ]

( FIG. 1 ) Porter Series: Egypte, 2006, tapestry weave with embrodery. Warp: polyester. Weft and embroidery: mohair, acrylic, an polyester, 252.7 ≤ 340.4 cm ( FIG. 2 ) Fotogrammi da Journey to the moon, 2003, film 16 mm e 35 mm trasferiti su video e DVD ( FIG. 3 ) Drawing for Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (Soho with hands behind head smoking) / Disegno per Johannesburg, la seconda più grande città dopo Parigi (Soho con le mani dietro la testa mentre fuma), 1989, carboncino su carta, 100 ≤ 130 cm ( FIG. 4 ) Drawing for Mine (Drill)/ Disegno per Miniera (martello pneumatico), 1991, carboncino su carta, 59.5 ≤ 75 cm

( FIG. 3 )

( FIG. 5 ) Drawing from Felix in Exile (Head) / Disegno da Felix in esilio (testa), 1994 – 2001, carboncino e pastello su carta, 50 ≤ 64 cm ( FIG. 5 )

( FIG. 6 ) Disegno per Triumphs & Laments (#7), 2014, carboncino su fogli contabili, 63 ≤ 83 ≤ 4 cm

( FIG. 4 )

( FIG. 6 )