William Kentridge’s Metonymic Line: The Art of Transformation (2012)* Stephen Clingman
At this point, in his mid-fifties, William Kentridge as artist, as person, takes on the appearance of a fully global phenomenon. Feted at galleries and museums worldwide, the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, he is regarded as something of an artistic polymath through his work in multiple forms. At various stages in his career, and sometimes simultaneously, he has worked in etching, drypoint, charcoal drawing, sculpture, tapestry, film, theatre (including life-sized puppet theatre) and opera direction. Frequently these forms will be overlaid one upon another, as in his stagings of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Shostakovich’s The Nose, which feature both his drawings and his animated projections as intrinsic elements of the production. Just one emblem of his achievement is that in March 2010, Kentridge was the subject of a one-man retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York featuring, among other things, his animated “drawings for projection,” while across town The Nose was being staged under his direction at the Metropolitan Opera. All this comes from an artist who, in terms of his sense of belonging or domicile, has never left South Africa, yet whose work melds geographies, visual and technical histories, and domains of allusion constellated through various layers of artistic and political space and time, all the while being suffused with its own unmistakeable atmospherics.
*
Note: this essay was originally written as an extended version of a conference presentation.
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Even in such a brief outline, certain motifs are announced which are worth sounding out further. For one, there is that sense of constellation and melding, whether by way of geography, history, or artistic form and allusion. Here Johannesburg and New York are conjoined as spaces and topoi of performance, as are (in the production of The Nose) Gogol’s Russia and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The place of artistic performance—on paper, on stage—is in this respect profoundly connective, neither simply here nor there, or in any number of separate heres or theres, but rather in their space of intersection, superimposition, combination. This is a sense of location which is by no means simply “displaced” or abstractly “universal” but is instead constituted out of its overlays and associations: its “routes” rather than “roots,” to adapt James Clifford’s terms.1 This might allow us to think of a model of the artwork as “transnational” in its specific connective and transitive senses rather than vacantly “global,” so that elements of the South African ethos are linked with the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, so that references to George Grosz’s Germany and Hogarth’s London are linked in other of Kentridge’s works with the street realities of Johannesburg. If there are legitimate questions in the global setting as to how certain artists are “selected” for prominence, Kentridge’s practice provides its own challenges as well as delights, provocations to the optical (read cultural, read historical, read artistic) landscape of recognition rather than simple confirmations. Perhaps the truly astonishing aspect of Kentridge’s practice is how his migrant inclinations in space, time, or reference are linked with his penchant for migration in medium and form. I have mentioned some of these: etching, drawing, film, theatre,
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opera, and so on. One way to understand this is indeed through the concept of the polymath, the artist as virtuoso, and in Kentridge’s case there would be justification for doing so. However, beyond that—and perhaps underlying it—I would like to explore his orientation as a profoundly connective mode of being an artist. It is not simply that he operates in different media. Rather, in Kentridge’s work, etching is at some level connected with drawing, drawing with film, film with theatre, theatre with opera—a metonymic chain in its own right. Even any one form—opera, for example—in Kentridge’s hands takes on more than the usual kinds of artistic constellation, so that theatre is connected with drawing, music with projection, mime with both the drawn and acted dynamics of performance. What I am gesturing towards is a profound link between the macro and the micro in Kentridge’s work. At the macro-level, it follows routes and transitions, shifts and transformations, dialogues and constellations as an intrinsic part of its exploration. Yet it is this same pattern that we can find at the heart of each element of Kentridge’s artistic expression—in its micro-textures as well. It is the sources, methods, and implications of such a modus operandi—metamorphic, combinatory, and transitive—that I would like to explore as a way of understanding why Kentridge’s work is so compelling. It may be that the micro produces the macro as its outcome and logical extension.
Disturbing the Real Any fuller understanding of Kentridge’s art would have to return to his beginnings as an artist in the 1970s and 1980s, a period that we can now see as the last phase of
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apartheid in South Africa, though it did not seem that way at the time. This was the era of the Soweto Revolt, of the United Democratic Front, of union movements and strikes, of banning, extended detention without trial, torture and brutal repression, ghostly third forces, political funerals, the toyi-toyi, “necklacing,” and successive states of emergency.2 It was also an era in which, for those opposed to apartheid, there were various calls for art to be a weapon of the struggle: this was the time of the Cultural Desk in Johannesburg, of the Amsterdam conference on Culture in Another South Africa.3 Making one’s way as an artist in these circumstances was by no means a simple matter. There was an intense, moralised sense under conditions of relentless urgency that art should provide a focused form of resistance: singular meanings to oppose apartheid’s singular form of oppression. Yet in various respects the response was more varied as writers and artists across the board found ways of disturbing the South African “real.” In a time of what Nadine Gordimer, following Gramsci, called the “interregnum,” both she (in July’s People) and J. M. Coetzee (in Waiting for the Barbarians) explored inchoate presentiments of an unforeseeable future from within the limits of the present.4 Njabulo Ndebele called for fiction that would resist the “representation of spectacle” in fashioning its own nuanced and dialectical forms of politics against the negations of apartheid.5 Writers from Mongane Wally Serote to Breyten Breytenbach to Ivan Vladislavić fused, in different ratios, the real with the hallucinatory, dreamlike, or surreal, as did the work—at once beguiling and ominous—of an artist such as Norman Catherine.6 The pages of the mass culture magazine, Staffrider (where Kentridge’s work on occasion appeared), registered
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the multiplicitous intensities of the moment in disparate voices and perspectives. Theatre, undergoing a highly energized revival, showed that political resistance—often its focus—could take on many forms. In productions ranging from Workshop ’71’s Survival, to Maishe Maponya’s Hungry Earth, to the early and later productions of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, music, mime, dance and dialogue (sometimes dialogue with the audience in directly challenging ways) cohabited in performance onstage.7 Here Brechtian modes fused with Grotowski’s theatre of the poor, disturbing not only the surface of the South African “real” but also the realism of conventional theatre forms. The ethos of South Africa in this period, where hidden or unbidden dimensions threatened to overflow the everyday at any moment, has never left Kentridge’s work. He was, to make a point to which I will return, deeply immersed in the alternative theatre of the era, in the Junction Avenue Theatre Company. And, like others in this time, he was trying to fashion his own path amidst challenges that were at once political and aesthetic. In various ways it is a practice of disrupting the surfaces and lines of the real, and then reconstructing them in other forms, that most deeply engages his art. Paradoxically, given his capacity for spectacular virtuosity, it is never simply “spectacle” that Kentridge indulges in. Where there is much discussion on the aetiologies and range of reference of his work, these, it seems to me, are good starting points from which to understand some of its intrinsic gestures and significance. As a way of beginning to explore such concerns, I want to focus here on what I will term the “grammar” of Kentridge’s work. By “grammar” I mean the inner forms and
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dynamics of his art, some of the essentials of how it is put together, and therefore how we might account for some of its extraordinary power in an attentive and possibly new way. To focus on his work through this lens is in my view by no means either to ignore the aesthetics or to suppress the political. It is to see the politics in the art, the art in the politics, transforming not only our sense of aesthetic possibility but our very definitions of the political through the specific contributions of the artist. But where the question of significance is usually understood as one of meaning, my aim here is to shift the discussion in another direction. In my view the key question in relation to Kentridge’s work is not “What does it mean?” but “What does it do?”. It is out of a sense of that “doing” that we might arrive at deeper and refashioned sense of its “meaning.” One important byproduct of this exploration will be to see an intrinsic link between the grammar of Kentridge’s practice and the migratory and constellated forms through and into which it has developed—the inner and outer, the “micro” and “macro” of his work. Primarily, I will approach these questions through Kentridge’s Stereoscope, one of his films for projection, made in 1998-99, itself a period of transition between the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. In this essay, the transitive boundary is the characteristic space I would like, in the spirit of Kentridge’s work, to dwell on—or in.
Stereoscope There is something anomalous in giving a verbal description of an animated film, and I recommend readers who haven’t yet viewed it to do so, as the only way in which it can be appreciated. Nonetheless, here are some of the things that take place in Stereoscope.
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I shall try to capture not only what happens, but aspects of the method whereby it unfolds (the film is eight minutes and twenty-two seconds in length). We begin with still images: a telephone exchange from an earlier era, a tram stop from the 1930s, a telegraph pole. Only a bird, flying, intimates movement. Telephone, tram, telegraph—these are lines of connection, transit, communication. A cat appears, always the connector, always in motion, the very nature of its fur suggesting textured rather than hard boundaries. Its tail traces out the title, Stereoscope, suggesting doubled vision, vision through doubleness. Then more movement begins: at the telephone exchange the pace begins to pick up, lines of communication begin to move, literalised in blue lines that will become the very thread of the film, moving insistently across the screen. We see Soho Eckstein, one of Kentridge’s two archetypal male figures in his films, the tycoon in pin-striped suit, surrounded by exchange, constituted by it, numbers that shift on the page around him. The blue line threads into apartment blocks, telephones start to ring, the cat emerges in blue, the blue line is the line that connects, divides, doubles; its reach is subterranean as well as above ground. We now have a split screen, mirroring left-right, but not precisely, not exactly, they are connected through asymmetry. Dials and needles on instruments morph into blotters on a desk and then electrical charts, blue lines on black. And a doubled Bakelite telephone.8 Then we have two typewriters, and two Sohos, across the line of the two frames in the picture. The two Sohos are asymmetrical, one turning right and, after a delay, the other turning left. Papers float from one half of the picture to the other. Soho and his wife are divided by a blue line cutting through the picture diagonally. There is a tape recorder, lines of
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magnetic tape on two turning reels. The line becomes water, there is a tram travelling away from us. Voices from the outside become a crowd. Soho listens at the thick blue wall, a line of division. Soho, in the left panel, bowed in acknowledgement, is divided in two by the still moving blue line, he is severed. Outside, the blue line connects scenes of political violence, police action, a dead body. Soldiers shoot, Soho has head in hands, the telegraph lines are blue. A man is shot, pistol to the head. Guns are firing. A cannonball is on a fuse, lit. Rioters throw objects at the tram. The cannonball explodes the office building, and the tram stop. Soho is surrounded by proliferating blue lines, streaking around him. The cat curls into a cannonball, ticking while Soho sits, and, after a delay, in cartoon fashion, explodes. The telegraph and telephone lines withdraw, ebbing downward in blue. The word “give” becomes “forgive,” twice, then three, then four, then, as the cat in blue walks by, five times. Soho is immeasurably sad. Blue water flows from his jacket pocket, adjacent to his heart, as if his soul is overflowing. The room fills with blue water, Soho’s head is bowed, the film fades to black. The music of the film, remarkable throughout, ends on a melancholic note, violin playing a single, troubling high line to the piano’s spare and quite beautiful elegy. As a way of approaching the grammar of Stereoscope, we can see from this account that, as J. M. Coetzee puts it, “metamorphosis one of the key techniques of Kentridge’s animation.”9 Objects turn into other objects, and even—though this is a subtler but important point—the same subject (e.g., Soho) will turn into a different kind of subject. It is worth looking at the question of technique more closely, however, because it begins to get to the heart of what Kentridge’s films do, and therefore what
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they might come to mean. Kentridge has described quite clearly his process of what he terms “stone-age filmmaking.” He starts with a sheet of paper on a wall, and a camera half-way across the room. He will begin a drawing, shoot a frame or two with the camera, return to the paper, alter the drawing, then shoot again, and so on.10 This, in other words, is a form of stop-animation drawing and filming. To say only this, however, is to miss something essential, because the key aspect of the method is both the erasure and alteration of lines, so that the drawing itself transforms in the process. Outlines become blurred, everything enters into phases of alteration. As Kentridge remarks, “I started filming drawings as a way of recording their history… A film of the drawing holds each moment… Filming enables me to follow this process of vision and revision as it happens.”11 Drawing and filming, then, are dialectically related for Kentridge: the film as a record of the drawing, the drawing as the inner dynamic of the film. In this regard, there is for Kentridge no steady opposition between the drawing as somehow “still” and the film as always “in movement.” Rather, as we can see, the film itself is composed out of “stills,” while animation is included in the very essence of the drawings, even before they are photographed. So, as Kentridge observes, he has always “drawn into drawings,” working on them, rephrasing, adding and subtracting. Often he will put his drawings into constellation with other forms of expression—for instance, in drawing on encyclopaedia pages from previous eras, so that image and text, one time and another interrelate in dialogic form, aesthetically suggestive rather than thematically precise. There is no still point of representation or perspective in such stagings; whether in its dynamics on the
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page or reaching across figural space and time, he is quite clear that his drawings are never immobile. As he puts it, “I see drawings as inherently animated.”12 One of the crucial aspects in this is erasure, a component equal to the lines of the drawing as the very mark of the trace. As Kentridge recalls, when he began drawing, he tried very hard to make perfect erasures, the kind whose capacity to make things invisible would be invisible. Later he realised that the traces left on the paper by erasure “were integral to the drawing’s meaning.”13 Erasure, as Kentridge remarks, “makes palpable the activity of the work. It gives you a sense of the process both of making and thinking, which is not linear but a series of advances and reversals and lateral moves. Erasure begs the question of what used to be there… I am always trying to think of new ways of erasing.”14 Erasure and visibility therefore merge into one another, an ontology of continual transformation that, among other things, can evoke ghosting, the uncanny, the revelatory or the repressed—a point to which I will return. Such a method also means that time is built into the process of the drawing, not only as a record of its morphologies but as a foundational experiential medium. Sometimes, in the dialectic between drawing and film, this means that the film will come into being at the expense of the drawing, where for instance, buildings collapse and the drawings as a result are wholly destroyed, or (as in Stereoscope) where cannonballs explode and all that is left is their aftermath.15 Line and erasure are then intrinsically connected in Kentridge’s work, each the implicit double and invocation of the other. Intriguingly, morphology is built into the artistic medium itself, Kentridge’s use of charcoal in his drawings. Charcoal is a “residue” in its very nature, a substance that has
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undergone metamorphosis and carries that prior history in its markings. As Susan Stewart suggests, in South Africa it also bears a direct relationship to an industrial and township landscape of charcoal fires and soot16; a landscape that is often the subject of Kentridge’s work, so that the medium is drawn from the ethos it depicts. Beyond that, however, there is something in charcoal which makes it attractive to Kentridge in his large-scale drawings which come, as he observes, from the shoulder rather than the fine-tuning of the hands. As he puts it, he is drawn to charcoal “because of the indeterminacy of the point.”17 Though the statement is primarily technical, it is impossible not to see it as also epistemelogical, so that the “point” of a charcoal drawing has no clearcut lines. And indeed, Kentridge has associated drawing with forms of thinking which are, almost literally, drawn out: “Drawing for me is about fluidity… [It is] a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought… the uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning.”18 As he suggests, “[M]y work is about a process of drawing that tries to find a way through the space between what we know and what we see.”19 Drawing, then, in medium, method, epistemology, is about a process in time, a route rather than a destination, an interaction between artist and paper in which metamorphosis, search, and unfolding is not only in the very nature of the method but is in some way the ground of its subject matter. As far as this concerns Kentridge’s drawings for projection, it extends to another key dimension, and that is the nature of the story. As Kentridge has emphasized, the narratives of his films have nothing to do with “scripting” in any usual sense:
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The films of Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum were all made with the principle of NO SCRIPT, NO STORYBOARD. The making of each film was the discovery of what each film was. A first image, phrase, or idea would justify itself in the unfolding of images, phrases, and ideas spawned by the work as it progressed. The imperfect erasures of the successive stages of each drawing become a record of the progress of an idea and a record of the passage of time. The smudges of erasure thicken time in the film, but they also serve as a record of the days and months spent making the film—a record of thinking in slow motion.20 Given such an account, we might describe the process this way. The lines of the drawing suggest other lines as well as erasures which add as much as subtract. The unfolding drawings become the unfolding films, and everything to do with the animation comes from the drawing, including the plot. The lines of the drawing, in other words, become the outlines of the story, with its positive and negative spaces, its marks and erasures, eliciting the narrative at every step of the way. Such a process cannot do without an “author,” and yet the author is not the authority in any classic sense. Rather, drawing, erasing, filming is a process which elicits the narrative through a concentrated form of artistic attention and search. Drawing becomes the form that mediates between the undiscovered and the uncovered, the subconscious and the recognized. It lies on the boundary between hidden and revealed, here and there, self and world, through the event it becomes in the making. How significant then that Kentridge calls works such as Stereoscope “films for projection” rather than anything else. For projection is also a method that unfolds in
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time. It uses light and dark, a kind of ghosting and presence, in which the marks of the drawing become the absence of light on the screen, while the absence of a mark in the charcoal is pure light in the projection, a kind of technical chiasmus. Such a discovery has underlain some of Kentridge’s subsequent work, for instance the reversed light and dark techniques of The Magic Flute, where unfolding white lines against a black background present a luminous underpinning to an opera concerned with dualities of light and dark, enlightenment and secrecy.21 As always in Kentridge’s work, method produces new forms of exploration, forms which grow out of their own elaboration, the intrinsic dynamics of an unfolding grammar.
Grammar, Navigation, Procession What kind of grammar is this, that should underlie and produce such developments? Here we can get closer to some key distinctions. Most obviously, this is not simply a grammar of component elements, the equivalent of the “school” grammar of nouns, verbs, and adjectives in speech or writing.22 Rather, if there is a significant grammar here, it must be akin to Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar in which, through an intrinsic capacity for combination in human expression, an infinite number of meanings can arise through a finite number of component parts.23 It is this capacity that underlies our common capacities to generate speech in general, or, in Kentridge’s practice, his art. Probably, the theory requires some inflection: Kentridge’s aim is not infinite meanings (but then, most actual speech does not involve infinity either); rather his work is structured through its own tonal colourations and atmospherics, its characteristic
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subject matters, as we see in Stereoscope. But it is as if, in Kentridge’s art, he has zeroed in on the principle of generation itself. Altering lines and erasures produce altering images; altering images elicit an unfolding story. The line itself, in its positive and negative aspects (mark, erasure) has a tremendous capacity to produce an unfolding artistic journey in time. It is easy to mistake the nature and implications of such a grammar. Susan Stewart talks of “metaphorical associations” in Kentridge’s work as a coffee press becomes a mineshaft, or a landscape becomes a blanket for Soho Eckstein.24 Conversely, discussing History of the Main Complaint (1996) (another of Kentridge’s drawings for projection), J. M. Coetzee observes that “[i]n the space of the screen, created by Eisensteinian montage, windscreen and eye and monitor become metonymically the same.”25 Each of these formulations, however, misses some of the resonances of Kentridge’s method. In Roman Jakobson’s model of language, in any given sentence metaphor works through substitution along a vertical axis of selection. But Kentridge’s art is not about substitution; nor does it concern “sameness” or identity in Coetzee’s version. Rather, as Jakobson indicates, metonymy is the principle of association, and it works not through substitution but contiguity.26 Indeed, metonymy underlies syntax; it is what allows us to put the sentence together horizontally in sequence. It is through such principles of contiguity—space, gap, connection—that transitions of the sentence occur as one word leads to another. Rather than the simultaneities of substitution, the intrinsic modality of the metonymic in this sense is that of time as much as space, the unfolding nature of generative thought.
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It is this kind of grammar that I believe underlies Kentridge’s method and some of the extraordinary effect of his work. It is the contiguity of one thing to another that his projections show in their extraordinary transformations. Here the line is contiguous to another version of itself, through erasure and alteration. The altering lines create images that are contiguous with one another. And contiguous images create sequences and principles of connection: the way Soho in Stereoscope is connected with marching workers, the way the story unfolds. To be clear: these are not images of causation or equivalence. Nor are the connections hard and fast. Rather, this is morphology that works through the trace, the record, the afterimage. What occurs does so not only in the lines but in the space between the lines, in their residues and continuous extensions—an aspect that may help explain Kentridge’s observation regarding “the space between what we see and what we know.” If Kentridge’s films explore anything it is at base “the nature of the boundary” in the alterations and unfolding morphologies of the line.27 The very mark that we might suppose constitutes the boundary in the first place—the line—becomes in Kentridge’s work the site of investigation and a kind of generative proposition. The implications, technical and philosophical, reach further. As we have seen, Kentridge has linked his his form of artistic search and expression to a “drawn-out” process of thought (“Drawing … [is] … a slow-motion version of thought.”) Ever selfaware, and going to the heart of a grammatical link which is more than simply one of analogy, he has also connected it with the nature of speech—but speech of a particular kind. In his model, this is less like making a speech, where everything is prepared, and
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more like ordinary conversation, which is a process of interaction and uncovering: Only occasionally do we test out a sentence in our heads before speaking. Generally, and here the process [of drawing] I have described and the nature of speech get closer, there is an impulse and a knowledge of the general direction we want to go in. But then there is a reliance on habit, experience, and unconscious parts of the brain for a sentence to emerge…28 This is a process we might, quite precisely, call navigational, a finding-the-way, part of the intrinsic nature of Kentridge’s method. Instead of a ready-made knowledge of expression and destination—what there is to be said or drawn—rather there is a more inchoate sense of direction, a melding of conscious and unconscious dimensions in discovering what it is one wants (or is able) to say, in some dialectic between the medium (words, lines, images) and the self that puts them into combination, erasure, revision. The sentence (or drawing) is like a journey: one doesn’t know at the start precisely where one will end up, but navigational capacities unfold once the process is launched. This is what Vaclav Havel, in another context, called “the inner logic of the step.”29 And how fitting it is that Chomsky (collaborating with Marc Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch) has contemplated the possibility that language, at some primary biophysical level, may be connected with a cross-species capacity for navigation.30 It appears to be one of the intrinsic discoveries, even premises of Kentridge’s artistic method. Other artists, as well as writers, may well understand, and even describe, navigation as a reality of their creative experience. Yet through his method of the
16
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unfolding and altering line, Kentridge has, with an almost uncanny precision, gone to the heart of its possibilities as a form and subject of artistic generation. Indeed, one of his more recent films invokes the linkages and principles directly. Its title makes the proposition outright: Taking a Line for a Walk (2007). Here the navigational and compositional are intrinsically linked, and as if to make the point, in the film we see Kentridge walking around his studio. He draws imaginary traces on the wall, making sweeping gestures with arm and hand; he throws an imaginary object up in the air, then scuttles across to catch it deftly behind his back as it falls. Later in the film, these are the precise trajectories of a line which has now become a drawing, with Kentridge throwing and catching it on the same “walk.” The film is playful, witty, magical—an aspect of much of Kentridge’s work. But we should not mistake its rather profound philosophical suggestion: drawing the line is a kind of walking, it is a kind of thinking, it is a kind of speech, navigation engendered in the unfolding discoveries of the line, all part of, and product of, its grammar. And it is notable how much walking is part of Kentridge’s studio and artistic practice. There is another linkage to make here, and we can do so by approaching it indirectly through theatre. Theatre is implicit in much of what has been said so far. It is there in the overt drama of a film such as Stereoscope with its characters and interactions, its shifting and developing scenes. It is also there in the microtextual, but no less significant, drama of the unfolding line and its transformations. A work such as Taking a Line for a Walk invokes Kentridge’s own involvement in theatre directly, not least the fact that he studied mime at the school of Jacques Lecoq. Frequently in
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Kentridge’s more recent work he will be directly involved in a theatrical way—walking around his studio, mixing movement and drawing, or performing I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine (2008), which draws on a Stalinist theatre of (in)justice.31 Most obviously theatre is there too in his opera stagings, where the full storehouse of combinations is unpacked, involving music, theatre, drawing, projection, even—one might add—the sheer mathematics and physics of it all to make these remarkable productions work. Ari Sitas, who was involved with Kentridge, Malcolm Purkey and others in the Junction Avenue Theatre Company early on, prompts some thought on this from an intruiging direction. (Junction Avenue: can there be a better emblem for the metonymic impulse?) As Sitas suggests, what is usually ignored in the commentary on Kentridge is “the theatricality of his imagery.”32 From early on his career this has been evident, as in some of his early monoprints which show solitary figures in a theatrical (and also celllike) space surrounded by figures peering down as a kind of implicit and silent audience.33 The theatrical link also prompts one to understand the insistent visibility of Kentridge’s altering lines—their erasure, traces, revision—in a different light. Both Brecht and Grotowski would approve the idea of having the scaffolding of a performance revealed onstage, of a narrative interleaved by the methods of its unfolding, of drawing an audience into the story in a fairly primal yet simultaneously aware and self-aware way. It is a different aspect of Sitas’s remarks, however, that I would like to focus on, for, starting with the idea of theatricality, he comes to think of Kentridge’s processions,
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which he began to develop in his imagery in the late 1980s, as marking an important phase in his work. We see those processions in Stereoscope—marchers coming towards or away. We see it in an early film such as Johannesburg, Second Greatest City After Paris (1989). But primarily we see it in Shadow Procession (1999), which uses cutout forms rather than drawings for its figurations. As Sitas suggests, the film shows people on the march: not “the people,” or a political movement, but just people, ordinary people, who in all their stages of hardship and daily experience will continue to move towards a destination that may never arrive. Sitas comments evocatively on who they are: the mineworkers with head torches, the baby with a hyena strapped to its back, figures with umbrellas, the ecstatic man, the legless person on crutches. They are not simply “triumphant,” yet they are always in movement. As Sitas remarks, “History as a grand narrative has disappeared: the procession itself is the animator.”34 Not all of Kentridge’s work appears to carry this weight. But it does seem emblematic of what I have been suggesting, that at a certain point in his development, process would lead, almost as if destined, to procession. Process/procession: method becomes subject, the subject is its method, and this form of practice as a whole seems to generate new forms of elaboration and expression in Kentridge’s work. This too then is part of its generative grammar, linking the micro and the macro. We can think of the processions of Kentridge’s art, an element as well as outcome of its metonymic and navigational inclinations as it finds new subjects and forms emerging from others. This capacity is built into the inner language of Kentridge’s philosophy of the line, providing some explanation not only for how prolific he is in any one form but also in the sheer
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number of forms he has come to explore as one medium (drawing, theatre, projection, opera) generates and proceeds to the next. This language is like the DNA of his work, a continuing process of transition, transformation, re-creation.
Story, Authority, Audience There is a tremendous faith in the nature and possibilities of the line in such a practice— the idea that it will elaborate its own unfoldings, extensions, topics, stories. In this connection Kentridge has spoken of a principle he terms “Fortuna”—a mix of conscious and unconscious direction-finding in any given work that is less than a full program or plan but also more than purely random.35 For Kentridge, his process is also connected with a form of ethics, but of a particular kind, refusing ethical authority: I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing, the contingent way that images arrive in the work, 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… If there were to be a very clear ethical or moral summing up in my work it would have a false authority.36 Note here certain principles consistent with Kentridge’s artistic practice: ethics consists in the erasure of authoritative ethics, the mark of the ethical line is ghosted in its absence, perhaps suggested in its extensions and connections. This is a surer way to find out—in Zakes Mda’s phrase—“how to live” then any clear or purely intentional method might be.37 At times in Kentridge’s work, the expression of this is quite serious “play”— creative, irreverent, adventurous in the way that children’s play can be, and it surely frees the artist in giving form to his inspiration. But it also reminds us that play is one
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way of countering the clear and imposing lines of authority. The reverse of this proposition is that play can be a serious matter, for audiences as much as artist.38 What are the effects of such a practice on an audience? We can approach the question by returning to the notion of story in Kentridge’s films. When he remarks that in his films there is “NO SCRIPT, NO STORYBOARD,” there is a foundational commitment to the idea of the story proceeding from the intrinsic dynamic of its materials rather than the other way round. Storytelling is its own process of discovery and revelation rather than any kind of predetermined (and fully understood) package to be delivered. If this model matches up to anything, it is to Walter Benjamin’s account of storytelling. In Benjamin’s classic formulation, storytelling is intrinsically opposed to what he calls “information,” which always comes “shot through with explanation.”39 Information in that regard is product; its destination—its message—is clear, and it conceals the process whereby it was fashioned. Information covers its tracks, pretending it arrived by some parthonogenetic miracle; here is no sense of navigation, no sense of space or experience of time in the evolution or construction of the message. Information, moreover, seals out the recipient or viewer in terms of any active co-construction of meaning, simply because it is already a “product” to be “consumed” (in the weird language of our own time). Storytelling, however, invites the reader, listener or viewer in—into the spaces and gaps of its construction. It even—and I believe this is Kentridge’s point—invites the creator of the story in, leading him or her on because of its navigational nature. In this aspect, every story is an unfolding event because of its dialogic relationship with an audience—even when that audience is an audience of
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one—its maker, working out just where, in his or her hands, the story is able and even willing to go. There is also an important sense in which the story does not have a hard-edged sense of boundary, either in relation to its audience, or, equally significantly, where it might end. For Benjamin, this was because what the story in its archetypal form offered was “counsel,” and, as he put it, “counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning a story which is just unfolding.”40 That is not exactly Kentridge’s model: though he draws on premodern traditions (almost literally in his idea of “stone-age filmmaking”), there is enough of the modernist and postmodern in his work to make counsel not an obvious aim or possibility. But what does carry over from Benjamin, even implicitly, is the idea of a story “just unfolding”—that the story exists, as it were, in its unfolding-ness, as a record and activity of process rather than something achieved and completed. This was the notion of process that Njabulo Ndebele fixed on in arguing against a literature of spectacle in South Africa in the 1980s. At stake in such a literature was an “aesthetics of recognition”—a realm of predetermined meanings involving surface symbols of good and evil. But spectacle, precisely because it freezes its subject matter and turns its audience into spectators, militates against the change it ostensibly promotes. As Ndebele put it, “Recognition does not necessarily lead to transformation: it simply confirms.”41 We might say: process in Benjamin’s or Kentridge’s model provides a different kind of counsel—a kind in which responsibility for the effects of a story is extended to an audience as an offer that—if the art engages them—they would not dream of refusing.
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Perhaps this is part of the meaning of a characteristic experience in which, as viewer or audience of a work of art, one feels it has been a “transforming” experience, even if there is no clear sense of what has been transformed or how. Audience has become part of the story, one aspect of the generosity—and challenge—of the process. In this regard again, Kentridge’s insistence on the visibility of his lines as they transform becomes relevant. The insistent materialism of such a method is self-evident. But also, the visibility of the line in its erasures, alterations and elaborations demarcates process rather than product. In these ways there is mystery and magic and awareness, as a quite spectacular form refuses and undercuts the logic of mere spectacle. An audience is drawn into the process of the image and its lines of development, conscious of what it is watching even as it watches, absorbed in the inner movement of an artistic process not less but more compelling for having been revealed. The technique becomes part of the experience, and the process has been entered into by viewers who are now implicated in its meanings. The grammar of Kentridge’s work generates the unfolding grammar of its audience.
Double Vision We can find metonymies at every level in Kentridge’s work. They are evident, for instance, in the puns and verbal morphologies that change “give” into “forgive” in Stereoscope; Kentridge also notes how he played with the words “Felix,” “exile” and “elixir” in his film Felix in Exile (1994)—not quite anagrams, not quite programs, yet suggestive nonetheless.42 We can see metonymies in the way that (as critics and
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Kentridge himself have noted) his characters Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum come to resemble one another, and indeed how they resemble Kentridge’s own family and Kentridge himself.43 Here is an almost literal version of what Wittgenstein called “family resemblances” as a spectrum of meanings built, from the perspective I have been proposing here, out of their associative metonymies.44 We can, at some level, see metonymy in the way that, in Felix in Exile (1994), the body will meld into the landscape, a South African landscape that, as Kentridge has suggested, hides its history.45 Metonymy here is not only a model of memory but also recovers or makes visible what the repressive line of official memory suffocates. It embeds the principle of the uncanny—that which was once known, or is now half-known, especially, as Freud suggests, in the place of the home, in its intersections of erasure, ghosting, return and trace.46 These are some of the many uses and operations of metamorphosis, and there are lineages in such a method. One thinks naturally, as Susan Stewart points out, of Ovid and his endless transformations—what Italo Calvino called a vision of “universal contiguity.”47 Yet, inviting as the Ovidian parallels may be in Kentridge’s work, it is also important to see the differences. For what Kentridge offers is not “universal contiguity,” in which anything may change into anything else, but a contiguity structured by particular resonances and echoes, a particular logic of navigation. As he suggests in his concept of “Fortuna,” these processes are not programmed, but still they follow certain patterns.48 What some of their implications might be for a film such as Stereoscope, I think we
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can now see—the doing that becomes a kind of meaning. Right at the heart of it is the blue line of connection, exchange and division, always in movement, always in extension—the archetypal metonymic line, the very line of significance. What does connection across the space of the boundary suggest in such a world? It suggests, among other things, complicity in the form Mark Sanders has outlined it in the South African setting.49 It suggests, among other things, melancholy—the melancholy of complicity. It suggests, among other things, a kind of haunting, a kind of uncanny, that will appear in ghostly form with suitably suggested and erased outlines. It suggests transformation, both in reality and the way we come to see it. It suggests a particular kind of accountability—Soho’s numbers turned into a different kind of accounting, both for the character and the film. This is why Soho’s pocket overflows with water at the end of Stereoscope: these are the waters of his connection, the spaces of his melancholy, his complicity, his haunting, linking inside and outside. Meaning, in this sense, occurs in the space of the boundary. It is the boundary that implies the unfolding logic of contiguity, where one meaning can transform into another not through substitution but through connection. And these connections follow a particular kind of morphology and linkage. It extends to us as viewers a form of vision now doubled— enraptured, captured, haunted, ghosted, compelled—much as Soho is in the film. South Africa has been a place of separation, of hard lines and buried secrets. In Kentridge’s work, however, the hard lines dissolve, reconfigure, and the buried comes to be visible. In this regard, Stereoscope—“seeing double”—made in 1998-99, in the era of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, is an emblematic piece. And
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the emblem right at its heart is the lengthening and ultimately overflowing blue line, always extending its reach and significance. It is the metonymic line of exchange, communication, and the inarguable complicities of connection. In a method conceived and developed under apartheid—a world of “separate development”—Kentridge’s work shows fusion and transformation, a metonymy of perpetual linkage where mood and fact flow into one another. And just as the resonance of his work echoed in the South African ethos, so too in a wider world of suppression and the uncanny his forms may illuminate the nature of our boundaries today. What Kentridge’s films mean is what they do, and what they do is both tantalising and inescapable. Not only their subject matter but their audience is in every sense “drawn.”
Notes 1
James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 96-112. 2 The toyi-toyi was a form of choreographed martial jog; necklacing, the practice of putting a tire around a suspected collaborator’s neck and setting it on fire; there were successive States of Emergency in July 1985 and June 1986. 3 Willem Campschreur and Joost Divendal, eds., Culture in Another South Africa (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1989). 4 Nadine Gordimer, “Living in the Interregnum,” in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (New York; London: Knopf; Cape, 1988), 261-84; Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981); J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980). 5 Njabulo Ndebele, “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa,” in South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and St Martin’s, 1994), 41, 49-50; and the other essays in this volume. 6 Mongane Serote, To Every Birth its Blood (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1981); Breyten Breytenbach, Mouroir: Mirrornotes of a Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984); Ivan Vladislavić, Missing Persons (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989); for Norman Catherine’s work: http://www.normancatherine.co.za/, accessed January 22, 2012. 7 For the impact of Survival, see Loren Kruger, The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants and
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Publics since 1910 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 164-5. For its effect on the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, see Malcolm Purkey, “Introduction,” in Junction Avenue Theatre Company, Sophiatown (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1986), ix. 8 William Kentridge has commented on his use of forms such as the Bakelite telephone in “Some Thoughts on Obsolescence,” October 100, no. Spring (2002): 16-18. 9 J. M. Coetzee, “History of the Main Complaint,” in William Kentridge, et al., William Kentridge (London: Phaidon, 1999), 91. 10 William Kentridge, “Fortuna: Neither Programme Nor Chance in the Making of Images (extract),” in Kentridge, et al., William Kentridge (1999), 114-19. 11 Kentridge, “Fortuna,” 114. 12 Michael Auping, “Double Lines: A ‘Stereo’ Interview about Drawing with William Kentridge,” in William Kentridge, William Kentridge: Five Themes, ed. Mark Rosenthal (San Francisco; [West Palm Beach]; New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Norton Museum of Art, in Association with Yale University Press, 2009), 240. 13 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “Interview: In Conversation with William Kentridge,” in Kentridge, et al., William Kentridge (1999), 17. 14 Auping, “Double Lines,” 239. 15 Neal David Benezra points this out in relation to the film “Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old”: “William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection,” in William Kentridge, et al., William Kentridge (Chicago; New York: Museum of Contemporary Art; New Museum of Contemporary Art, in association with H.N. Abrams, 2001), 20. 16 Susan Stewart, “Resistance and Ground: The Prints of William Kentridge,” in William Kentridge, William Kentridge Prints (Johannesburg and New York: David Krut Publishing, 2006), 17. 17 Auping, “Double Lines,” 235. 18 Christov-Bakargiev, “In Conversation,” 8. 19 Christov-Bakargiev, “In Conversation,” 33. 20 William Kentridge, “Soho and Felix,” in Kentridge: Five Themes, 67. 21 Kentridge comments on Learning the Flute, which inititated the Flute project: “The form, the blackboard, was the given; the photographic positive and negative of black drawing on white paper, reversed to produce white chalk drawings on the blackboard, was the discovery”: “The Magic Flute,” in Kentridge: Five Themes, 171. In the same volume, see also the comments on reversed inking by Cornelia H. Butler, Judith B. Hecker, and Klaus Biesenbach, “Walking the Line: Drawing, Printmaking, and Performance in the Art of William Kentridge,” 198-9. Also, Claudine Ise, “Shadow and Reason in William Kentridge’s ‘The Magic Flute,’” http://www.art21.org/anythingispossible/resources/essays/shadow-and-reason-in-williamkentridge’s-the-magic-flute/, accessed February 9, 2012. 22 Although such a grammar may be possible if formulated in the right way: see Butler, Hecker, and Biesenbach, “Walking the Line,” who characterize Kentridge’s drawing in his films as follows: “It is both subject and verb, performance and performed” (194). Their account of what they term Kentridge’s “performative line” (195), and the overall link they make between drawing and performance serves as useful counterpart to my discussion here. 23 Noam Chomsky, “Linguistics and Adjacent Fields: A Personal View,” in The Chomskyan Turn, ed. Asa Kasher (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 3-25. 24 Stewart, “Resistance and Ground,” 15. 25 Coetzee, “History,” 92. 26 Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in
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Selected Writings, vol. 2 (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), 239-59. 27 Stephen Clingman, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 28 Kentridge, “Fortuna,” 119. 29 Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvíždala, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 77. 30 Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?,” Science 298 (2002): 1571. 31 See Butler, Hecker, and Biesenbach, “Walking the Line,” 200, for an account of the aesthetic dimensions of this performance. 32 Ari Sitas, “Processions and Public Rituals,” in Kentridge, et al., William Kentridge (2001), 59. 33 William Kentridge, “Pit Monoprints,” in Kentridge, William Kentridge Prints, 24-5: “The simple three walls of a theatrical space became the given format for all the images, with minor variations of the viewers looking over the top.” Also, “Staffrider Gallery: William Kentridge,” Staffrider, February 1980, 24. On the relation between Kentridge’s early theatre work and his art, see Sitas, “Processions,” 60. 34 Sitas, “Processions,” 65. 35 Kentridge, “Fortuna,” 118. 36 Christov-Bakargiev, “In Conversation,” 35. 37 Zakes Mda, Ways of Dying (New York: Picador, 1995). 38 Ivan Vladislavić, a writer who shares some congruence with Kentridge, quotes Donald Barthelme on the idea that the absence of play in a work of art “is the result of a lack of seriousness”: “Gross,” in The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2011), 33. 39 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (Glasgow: Fontana, 1973), 89. 40 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 86. 41 Ndebele, “Turkish Tales and Some Thoughts on South African Fiction,” in South African Literature and Culture, 32. 42 Kentridge, “Felix in Exile: Geography,” 122. 43 Benezra, “William Kentridge: Drawings,” 26; Staci Boris, “The Process of Change,” in Kentridge, et al., William Kentridge (2001), 33. 44 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Third ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 32e, §67. 45 Kentridge, “Felix in Exile: Geography,” 126; Boris, “Process,” 31. 46 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 217-56. 47 Stewart, “Resistance and Ground,” 15 (Stewart also sees Virgilian themes of exile and migration in Kentridge); and Italo Calvino, “Ovid and Universal Contiguity,” in The Literature Machine (London: Secker and Warburg, 1987), 147. 48 Sitas, “Processions,” 63, comments on Kentridge’s combination of invention and discipline. 49 Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2002).