Process/Procession: William Kentrdige and the Process of Change

Process/Procession: William Kentridge and the Process of Change Leora Maltz-Leca Limping, twirling, tumbling forward, the motley characters of William Kentridge’s first major drawing of a procession, Arc/ Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass (1990), skid into the future of the new South Africa (Fig. 1). This monumental drawing initiates Kentridge’s use of the ancient format of the procession as an image of history: a hiccuping narrative of discontinuities and fissures, periodically punctuated by revolutionary breaks. The first of numerous processions that the artist would draw, sculpt, animate, etch, and project over the next two decades, Arc/Procession depicts a troupe of characters shuffling across a twenty-four-foot-long semicircular arc cobbled together from overlapping sheets of paper (Fig. 2). A burlesque riposte to celebratory nationalisms—and the triumphal processions often used to visually inscribe such narratives—Arc/Procession portrays history in general, and regime change in particular, as a veritable stumble into the future.

Conceived by the artist as a cinematic “row of fragments,” Kentridge’s procession is rooted in a crisis of sequencing historical time—a crisis that is brought on by South Africa’s regime change from apartheid to democracy.1 Kentridge began drawing Arc/Procession in 1989, a pivotal year in which he both developed his innovative process of drawn animation and premiered this laborious technique in his first film, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (Fig. 3).

The genesis of Kentridge’s animation process in 1989, alongside the simultaneous emergence of his processional imagery that same year in Arc/Procession and Johannesburg (which likewise featured a procession, Fig. 4), bring us to an understanding of how the formal operations of Kentridge’s drawing process and the politically charged subject matter of the procession work together to gesture toward South Africa’s larger histories of change. In this way, Kentridge’s theatrics of process and his repeated processions emerge as not only extraordinarily timely—a chronic affinity striking in an artist whose work is often considered untimely or anachronistic— but also as stubbornly imbricated in the specificities of place.

Kentridge’s process and his processions are therefore rooted in both a country on the cusp and a city on the edge— or what the artist calls that “rather desperate provincial city of Johannesburg.”2 While Kentridge’s practice is embedded in local histories, the artist’s physical operations in the studio become metaphorically embodied through his drawn, filmic, and sculpted processions: the ambulatory rituals of Kentridge’s own peripatetic studio process are implicated in his ubiquitous processional imagery. And so it is appropriate to begin with his unusual practice, grounded in walking, or “stalking,” the drawing.

The Process: Walking/Stalking Let me stress here that it is in the process of working that my mind gets into gear— by which I mean the rather dumb physical

activity of stalking the drawing, or walking backwards and forwards between the camera and the drawing: raising, shifting, adapting the image.—William Kentridge, “Felix in Exile,” 19943 And so the film evolves as this ongoing walk between the paper and the camera, in the hope that somewhere in the middle of that walk, some idea will emerge to suggest what the next drawing or sequence should be.—Kentridge, “Drawings for Projection,” 20044

William Kentridge’s process of animated drawing is bipedal and peripatetic, its rhythms defined as much by the tread of pacing footsteps as by the scratching of the drawing hand. His idiosyncratic practice comprises a cadence of shuffles and shifts, a perpetual stalking back and forth across the studio as he circulates between the charcoal drawing pinned to the wall and his camera stationed several paces away. It is Kentridge’s method of photographing the slow progress of his drawing frame by frame—recording its restless process of change, as it were—that demands these endless perambulations. For each tiny addition or deletion precipitates a lap across the studio from the drawing board to the mounted camera (Fig. 5). The alteration is photographed, and Kentridge walks back to the drawing to add or erase a couple of marks. And then he returns to the camera. These circuits continue on and on for several months until the photographic record of the drawing is filmed in sequence to produce an animation five to ten minutes in length—a film that is a paean to the liquidity of change.

When Kentridge calls his activity of prowling around the studio “stalking the drawing,” he employs the language of trekking and hunting, as if shadowing elusive quarry.5 In this sense, he transforms the studio into a shadow theater of sorts, a black box where fugitive ideas flit about, are seized on, rolled back and forth. The artist himself has poetically described his work space in such cerebral terms, comparing it to “an enlarged head; the pacing in the studio is the equivalent of ideas spinning in one’s head, as if the brain is a muscle and can be exercised into fitness, into clarity.”6 Scattered with the artist’s footsteps, the studio floor is thus fashioned into a cognitive expanse where laps of thought are spun into images. As the moving muscles of the leg and the firing neurons of the brain stretch and crank in unison, Kentridge’s plodding method of animation physically articulates what JeanLuc Nancy calls “the step of thought.”7 Like Nancy’s physicalized epistemology, Kentridge’s embodied thinking disputes the Cartesian division between mind and body that artificially splits thought and action into two substantively unlike terms. And just as Kentridge has suggested that his own thinking invariably has to emerge and be materialized through the body and its concrete activities of walking and drawing, so, too, for Nancy, it is the physical body that thinks, not an immaterial cerebral mass. Rejecting

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1 William Kentridge, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, 1990, charcoal on paper, 8 ft. 101⁄4 in. ⫻ 24 ft. 61⁄2 in. (2.7 ⫻ 7.48 m). Tate Collection, London (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph © Tate, London 2012)

2 Kentridge, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, detail. Tate Collection, London (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

thought’s traditional idealism, Nancy argues that thought possesses weight and movement: that it is lodged in the mass and motion of the thinking body. At the same time, his notion of the “weight at the heart of thought” places pressure on the lightness of the step, evoking a gravitas felt not only in the drags on Kentridge’s drawing hand, the ponderous silences that fill the Drawings for Projection films, or the lugubrious slump of Soho Eckstein’s shoulders but also in the lumbering heft of his protagonists’ steps as they plod through landscapes weighted with the pull of the past.8 The concept of drawing as a “slow-motion version of thought” is a foundational metaphor for Kentridge, who has

frequently related his own contingent methods of arriving at an image not merely to knowledge and its failures but also to “some kind of model of how we live our lives.”9 The “slow” in “slow-motion” is paramount, for it conveys how Kentridge’s pacing also paces—that is, metronomically calibrates— his drawing hand to its own unhurried clip: decelerating it, temporally dragging out the drawing process. Through these mandated delays, walking opens up a psychological terrain— prodding, if not impelling, thinking. Yet the notion of thinking proposed here is hardly a seamless one. Kentridge’s process is one of stops and starts: the artist’s constant walking interrupts the flow of drawing, impeding facility and foiling the circuits between hand and brain to mediate any semblance of gesturalism imputed to the finished drawings. As Kentridge crisscrosses his work space, his recursive rhythm of pacing and pausing mimics the flows and blockages of thought itself, tracing its uneven spurts. Kentridge’s step is thus perhaps less a stride into mastery than a knowing advance into ignorance; his pacing to and fro, he has insisted, is not so much a mode of conscious thinking as a meditative space clearing of not thinking, “a space of not knowing.”10 The step forward is a touchstone idea for Kentridge, doubling as both a mechanics of production and a metaphor for the embodied nature of thought. Picture another image: a walking figure, caught midstride, nose in an open book, who slips between abstract witness to the ceaseless march of time and intimate self-portrait of the artist at work (Fig. 6).11 A repeated member of Kentridge’s processions, this walker forms part of the larger work Portage (Fig. 7), showing a stream of silhouetted figures who amble across eighteen pages of Larousse’s Encyclopedia, trampling on telling definitions such as “Jamb” or, in this instance, Marche/Marchepied.

Visual cues dovetail here with lexical ones to underscore Kentridge’s play with the poetics of leaden legs and pattering feet: for with this silhouetted figure, Kentridge proffers a graphic example of his own aesthetics of the peripatetic. His hips, shoulders, and head angled ahead, this figure looks

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3 Kentridge, stills from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, opening sequence showing the incremental stages of Kentridge’s additive drawn animation process, 1989, 16mm animated film, transferred to video and DVD, 8 minutes, 2 seconds (artwork © William Kentridge; photographs provided by William Kentridge studio)

4 Kentridge, Untitled, 1989, drawing from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, charcoal on paper, 41 ⫻ 597⁄8 in. (104 ⫻ 152 cm). Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

forward but harks back to the long philosophical tradition of walking and thinking from which the word peripatetic derives, evoking those inveterate pacers along the ancient Greek colonnades.12 One chunky block of a foot drawn behind, the other pressing forward onto a spongy arch, Kentridge’s marcher—who appears in three iterations in Portage— conveys both animation’s arrest of the body in motion and the pacing that lies at the heart of the artist’s own practice.

It is Kentridge who tells us that this book-wielding walker figures as a portrait of his own studio process; it is he who not only inhabits the shoes of his walker but also borrows his text—so distinctively splayed open at the spine—reading it as he strolls about (Figs. 9, 11). For while Kentridge’s pacing is a private, meditative ritual, its performative aspect is betrayed by the artist’s public reprisals of his prowling figure. The longest such ode is Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003,

Figs. 8, 9), a filmic departure from the Drawings for Projection series that paused to ponder the artist’s now-celebrated animation process and its studio treks. Bracketing his staccato antics of homage to the French cine-magician with endless circuits of performative pacings, Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès is a medley of stalking, sauntering, and moseying.

“Sometimes I walk round and round at a fast pace for a long time before I start work and the films are records of that route,” Kentridge explained. “The Méliès films are specifically about that walk.”13 In a scene in one of these films, Journey to the Moon (2003), the camera pans in on the artist’s feet as, step by step, they sketch out theatrical “footfalls”: here, Kentridge explores the pressures and liberties of producing art by nodding (slowly) to Samuel Beckett, a selfidentified beacon for the artist whose theatrics of pacing and snail’s velocity have inspired the unhurried pace of the

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6 Kentridge, Marche/Marchepied, page from Portage, Mpumalanga, S.A.: Artists’ Press, 2000, collage of torn black paper on encyclopedia pages, Leporello (accordion-folded) book, 107⁄8 ⫻ 91⁄4 in. (27.5 ⫻ 23.5 cm), edition of 33 (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

5 Kentridge, page from Receiver, New York: Dieu Donné Press, with Galamander Press, 2006, photogravure, 14 ⫻ 111⁄4 in.

(35.5 ⫻ 28.5 cm), edition of 50 (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

films.14 Imaging himself working/walking as he does in Méliès, Kentridge valorizes the centrality of his studio perambulations; like Bruce Nauman in his own Beckett Walk, the work becomes the walk, or what Kentridge describes as “a one-person procession.”15 Kentridge doubles himself in the Méliès films, diffusing into clones that intimate the psychic splits that rend his projections and that enable him to interact—and eventually to argue—with his increasingly obstreperous self-portrait doubles. Melting into the body of his drawn character (Fig. 8), it is as if the artist is rehearsing the porousness between the performance and its trace, or between his own body and its representation (Fig. 10). Whether mirroring his reflection as he poses with charcoal and chamois (Fig. 10) or holding the charged icon of the open book, which he contemplates with similar absorption, as he catches a pile of flying texts (Figs. 9, 11), Kentridge’s poses, replete with the silhouette-like shadows of his Portage series, self-consciously recall the engrossed

reader of Marchepied (Fig. 6). So the image Marchepied appears to abstractly represent Kentridge’s studio wanderings, and at the same time, the artist himself ritualistically reenacts the personae of his ambulatory readers years after their production.

But why might Kentridge fancifully model himself on this stooped bibliophile? An intellectual? A person of the book? A wandering Jew? As quixotic as such notions might seem, this distinctive image of the reading walker is in fact based on a memory of the artist’s grandfather standing in synagogue, holding an open prayer book and swaying rhythmically in prayer (a repetitive movement that must have gradually morphed into a step). “When else do you hold a book open in two hands like that. . . . ?” Kentridge asked me rhetorically, as if prayer were the primary context intimated by these rituals of walking.16 When else indeed? Perhaps in a lecture-performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in March 2010 (Fig. 11).

On this occasion, another public presentation of the artist’s working process—this time an absurdist rendition of his ostensibly chaotic modus operandi of designing and directing Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera The Nose—Kentridge again paced about onstage with an open notebook, reading aloud play dialogue and trial transcripts from his ubiquitous volume (his only onstage prop save a scaffold and a glass of water).17

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7 Kentridge, Portage, 2000, collage of torn black paper on encyclopedia pages, 107⁄8 ⫻ 1661⁄2 in. (27.5 ⫻ 423 cm) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio) 8 Kentridge, stills from Feats of Prestidigitation, 5 minutes, 10 seconds, from Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès, 2003, 16mm and 35mm films with live action and animated drawing, transferred to video and DVD (artwork © William Kentridge; photographs provided by William Kentridge studio)

9 Kentridge, stills from Auto-Didact, 1 minute, 50 seconds, from Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès (artwork © William Kentridge; photographs provided by William Kentridge studio)

Silhouetted against the stage wall, his head inclined toward the open book in his hands, Kentridge seamlessly slipped into the visual guise of his iconic bibliophilic marcher. This string of formal repetitions and exchanges—ricocheting between film and drawing, between live performance of artistic process and torn paper silhouette—proposes Marchepied as a virtual likeness of the artist walking/working, insinuating Kentridge’s ambulating male reader as an embodiment of his own peripatetic studio operations.

Kentridge’s deployment of walking at the Museum of Modern Art lecture on his process also recovered one of the artist’s first public renditions of his working methods from nearly twenty years earlier. In this unusual instance in 1991, Kentridge was an artist-in-residence in Cape Town’s South African National Gallery, where he was expected to work in the public galleries. All too aware that “Making a drawing is not a very exciting spectator sport,”18 Kentridge began to overtly stage the presentation of his drawing process for the watching public by reprising, and overtly theatricalizing, the filmic drawing that he had recently begun to experiment with. Through a circuit of performative strolls to and fro, interspersed with exaggerated plays of fiddling with the technicalities of his camera, he visually enlivened— or, we could say, animated— his studio activities for the crowd.19 From very early on, therefore, Kentridge has engaged walking as a means to publicly convey the intimate, almost solipsistic act of sketching: performatively drawing in space by using his body as if it were a walking brush.

Mildly irked by the requirement to work in the galleries, Kentridge referred to the confined work space in Cape Town around which he trotted daily alternately as a “goldfish bowl” and a “foxhole.”20 A decade later, the fox and its hole (or a close feline cousin) would resurface in a striking filmic sequence that once more tethers the artist’s own animalian “stalking” of his drawing to the image of a pacing beast. This

10 Kentridge, still from Invisible Mending, 1 minute, 30 seconds, 16mm film with live action and animated drawing, transferred to video and DVD, from Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

time it is a panther, restlessly circling its cramped quarters in Zeno Writing (2002, Fig. 12). Operating both at the register of narrative and as a self-conscious tribute to the artist’s ambulatory process, the charcoal drawing used to create this sequence remains veined with red numerical notations (Fig. 13). Two horizontal rows of ascending numbers crisscross the paper, ciphers of Kentridge’s every lap across the studio, which indicate how he has charted each of the panther’s steps in order to graphically drag him across the page, and back again. These digits, used by the artist to count out “step-by-step” frames (and, significantly, retained for us to see), enumerate the panther’s progressive strides. Yet

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11 Kentridge, I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, lecture/ performance on the making of The Nose, Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 2010 (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

through these numerical residues the artist also underscores how each incremental shift of the panther’s limbs is commensurate with one of his own, how every movement of the animal’s position mandates that he, too, trot back to the camera. These somatic slippages point once more to the cultivated porousness between Kentridge’s walking body and those of his pacing characters, evoking a performative collapse of padding feet that echoes through the artist’s recurrent imagery of walking animals—and walking figures, too.

Kentridge’s partnered strides with his panther indicate not merely how walking structures his animation process, it also illuminates how the artist frequently inhabits the skin of his drawn characters—whether as Ubu Roi, Soho Eckstein, Felix Teitelbaum, or in one of his many self-portraits—in ways that suggest fluid boundaries between his body and theirs. As in the Cape Town galleries in 1991, the Méliès films a decade later, and his 2010 performance of The Nose in New York, where Kentridge again employed walking to play the role of an artist at work, publicly staging the intricacies of his solitary art-making practice, he continues to assume the parts of his

drawn characters in the studio by acting out poses and gestures. His 1997 suite of Ubu Tells the Truth prints are based, for instance, on photographs of the artist dancing before a mirror and cycling around the studio (Fig. 14). In such moments, Kentridge slips among the traditional theatrical notion of playing a part; the performative self-fashioning of playing with identities; and the ludic antics of the madcap and ludicrous that pepper the Méliès films. On another occasion, reading aloud from Samuel Beckett’s 1963 script for Play, Kentridge himself parsed these collapsible boundaries via Beckett’s deft intertwining of the theatrical and ludic.21 Word plays—not unlike Beckett’s double entendres—are no less central to Kentridge’s working methods than corporeal play. Kentridge frequently engages language to generate ideas, displaying his trust in what he terms the “fortuna” of the unconscious and free association, as he toys with rhymes, palindromes, and words with onetime shared roots that have strayed apart.22 To this end, he has inscribed prints with such unlikely textual pairings as “amnesty/amnesia,” “history/hysteria,” and “panic/picnic.” This playful impulse, which lies at the heart of Kentridge’s process, manifests itself partly in Kentridge’s willingness to pursue what Jacques Derrida has called the “friendship” between words.23 Interviewing with the art historian Angela Breidbach while he sketched diagrams of his working processes, Kentridge wrote down and highlighted the word “play” to explain how the film Felix in Exile emerged from such a series of word-game wanderings (from felix . . . to exile . . . to elixir . . .), sparked by the near palindrome of Felix and exile. “The question was how could I do a film that is about a word game, about words?”24 My own juxtaposition of the words “process” and “procession” salutes Kentridge’s modus operandi of generating meaning through play, as I follow him in trusting in the cryptic logic of the word, presuming that language possesses its own intuitive logic, and that its subterranean connections, metaphoric leaps, and “friendships” can illuminate that which escapes more rationalist inquiries. To this end, Kentridge observes: On the one hand I am wary of the particularly AngloSaxon tendency to rely on puns and alliteration as a substitute for ideas. On the other hand, we have to trust in things that at the time seem whimsical, incidental, inauthentic. This is not to say that the starting point will transform itself from something ephemeral to something solid, but rather, that it gives an entry point and that through the process of working that ensues, connections, inventions, images are generated that can both rescue the origin and find a heart of the material that might otherwise not have been evident.25 Rescuing Origins: The Processions of 1989 “Rescuing the origin” of Kentridge’s animation process involves returning it to the Johannesburg of 1989, thereby reframing the artist’s frequently dislocated practice against the political geographies of his time and place. Increasingly, Kentridge’s work has come to be subsumed into exclusively Euro-American art historical trajectories, where local meanings and political specificities tend to be deemphasized. In Rosalind Krauss’s authoritative genealogy, for example, she

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12 Kentridge, stills from Zeno Writing, 2002, 35mm animated film with pastel and charcoal drawing and documentary footage, 12 minutes (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

13 Kentridge, Untitled, 2001, drawing from Zeno Writing, detail showing red annotation and registration marks calibrating each frame of the animation process, charcoal on paper, 311⁄2 ⫻ 475⁄8 in. (79 ⫻ 120 cm).

Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

situates Kentridge’s process against Sergei Eisenstein’s writings and Stanley Cavell’s nonnormative definitions of medium to argue that with his innovative process, Kentridge “invents” a medium.26 Krauss’s reading is groundbreaking, casting the artist as the paradigm of her “postmedium” condition; yet other kinds of relationships, such as that between the postmedium and the postapartheid— between Kentridge’s unusual animation practice and South Africa’s political change—fall beyond the sphere of her interests. And these are crucial questions. For Kentridge’s art in general, and his process in particular, are deeply embedded in the shifting histories of South Africa, rendering extraordinarily timely the work of an artist whose anachronistic imagery and hand-wrought methods are usually understood as untimely in one way or another. Jogged out of time and out of place by numerous critics, Kentridge has often had to reiterate, “In the end all the work I do is about Johannesburg,” the city he swears is “impossible to escape.”27 Like his protagonist Felix Teitelbaum, Kentridge remains a willing “Captive of the City,” the man-made, crime-ridden garden of Johannesburg where he and two generations of Kentridges before him have lived and worked.28 Restoring Kentridge’s novel working methods to their origin in Johannesburg during the last months of apartheid also recovers the simultaneous emergence of Kentridge’s animation process with his processional imagery. To reiterate a key point: 1989 saw Kentridge both officially launch his new process of drawn animation and initiate the stream of processions that began with Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, the film built around the artist’s “procession of the dispossessed” (Fig. 15).29 And processions have been plodding through Kentridge’s work ever since. Here I probe the logic of this temporal conjunction: for it is hardly coincidental that just as Kentridge was developing his own ambulatory process, he started to portray en masse walking bodies and processions. At this foundational moment, we find him externalizing the kinetics of his own practice, that is to say, transmuting— or projecting— his own striding body into images of striding bodies. This form of self-projection was at least one of the resonances intimated by the series’ witty title: Drawings for Projection.

14 Kentridge, Ubu Tells the Truth, Scene 7, 1997, hard-ground, soft-ground, aquatint, drypoint, and engraving, 103⁄8 ⫻ 117⁄8 in.

(26.3 ⫻ 30 cm) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

Within weeks of the procession’s debut in Johannesburg, Kentridge had reprised an unruly version of it in a pair of monumental charcoal drawings: Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass (Fig. 1), along with a pendant arc drawing, Arc/Procession: Smoke, Ashes, Fable (1990), which hangs in the stairwell of the artist’s Johannesburg home (Fig. 16). From this point on, processions paraded through Kentridge’s work, marching through the animated films Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991), Felix in Exile (1994), and Stereoscope (1998 –99, Fig. 17). Moving crowds made appearances in Monument (1990), Mine (1991), and Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), morphing into an unusually aggressive mob in the artist’s most recent film, Other Faces (2011). Processions also took form in a variety of other media: not only drawings, prints, and illustrated books (as in Procession on Anatomy of Vertebrates, 2000) but also projected shadows, video (Shadow

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15 Kentridge, Untitled, 1989, drawing from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, charcoal on paper, 41 ⫻ 597⁄8 in.

(104 ⫻ 152 cm). Private collection, Johannesburg (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

Procession, 2000, and Zeno at 4AM, 2001), and torn paper silhouettes (Portage, 2000, and Stair Procession, 2000, Fig. 18).

Kentridge shifted to the medium of bronze for his tabletop Bridge Procession (2001) and for the twenty-six sculptures that comprise Procession (2000) monumental renditions of which grace Johannesburg’s Nedcorp building. For his Porter series (2006), the artist collaborated with Stevens Tapestry Studio, Johannesburg, to have his “porters” walk through—and, in a nod to his medium, to walk imaginatively on— handwoven tapestries.

By 2003, Kentridge had explicitly tied together the walking central to his process and imagery of walking figures and processions, as he paced around his studio for most of an hour in Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès (Figs. 8 –10). His films Day for Night and Journey to the Moon (2003) feature repeated close-ups of Kentridge’s wife Anne striding forth, while processions of moving ants flowing together form the silhouette of a walking figure (Fig. 19). And another shadow procession, this time performing a South African rendition of a Russian folk dance, along with archival film clips of crowds pouring down St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect in the 1920s, graced Kentridge’s recent opera The Nose (2010), suggesting that Kentridge’s unbroken stream of processionists shows no sign of abating.

At a technical level, Kentridge recognized very quickly that drawing a crowd was optimally suited to his newly developed process of animation, for each person is rendered with a single mark: “As more marks are added, so the crowd emerges. The crowds draw themselves,” he commented in 1994.30 A procession, of course, is simply a crowd on the move. Since processions can be incrementally augmented— and therefore easily adjusted to make a line of people appear to move forward or back—they ideally conform to the limitations, while maximizing the possibilities, of Kentridge’s particular mode of animation. This concordance between subject matter and technique produces an affinity that the

artist knowingly exploits, no doubt partially accounting for his frequent animated processions. However, the matter surely does not end there, with the pragmatics of convenience, if only because Kentridge’s numerous processions in the wide range of other media detailed above troubles an explanation of mere formal ease. Moreover, the persistence of these images over a period of two decades points to deeper alliances than the technical suitability that the artist himself initially imputed to his processional imagery.

The multimedia spate of processions that emerged in 1989 alongside Kentridge’s recently invented animation process clearly signals an unprecedented type of imagery in the artist’s oeuvre. Leafing through piles of his drawings made before this landmark year, one finds a notable dearth of crowds, processions, or even walking figures. Indeed, the drawings and prints spanning the late 1970s through the late 1980s are wholly devoid of the thematics of the human body in motion that has come to distinguish Kentridge’s work.

While animated movement remains largely incipient before 1989, confined to the register of graphic handling and terse composition, there is a single drawing in which a walking figure appears: a 1987 charcoal after Antoine Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (1719), similarly titled Embarkation.

Here, Kentridge retained Watteau’s subject of a departure (or arrival), along with his iconography of a meandering line of people walking as a means to portray it, although he simplified the original picturesque groupings into a profile view of four men descending onto a platform. Clonelike projections of the same character, three of the men have their noses buried in a book, and the fourth stares down at the spotted hyena leading them (Fig. 20).31 “So the walking figure begins with Embarkation?” I confirmed. “Yes,” Kentridge responded, “but he only really gets going with the animation.”32 The engrossed figure of Embarkation, whom Kentridge identifies by his distinctive “two-handed holding of a book,”33 returns us to the walking reader of Marche/Marchepied, for he is the prototype for the recurring bibliophile of Vertical Time, Stair Procession (Fig. 21) and numerous other parades. This reader would in fact come to signal an embarkation of another sort for the artist—a venture into the poetics of walking. In this way, the walking reader stands as an originary figure on more than one count: as the foundational processionist of the artist’s motley crew of wanderers and as a personal memory of his own familial and religious origins (being based on the artist’s grandfather, prayer book open in his hands). By the time of the Stair Procession version, the pensive bibliophile has assumed a candid likeness of the artist—slightly paunchy and with a “Johannesburg Jewish nose”34—rising from his humble origin in Embarkation to become the vehicle by which Kentridge surreptitiously inserts himself among his endless processionists.

The second and, perhaps, most salient source of Kentridge’s later processions is to be found not in the charcoal drawings that dominated his practice of the 1980s but in a series of largely sidelined early experiments with animation.

It was in this format that the artist had been exploring the potentialities of pure motion since adolescence. Kentridge’s short, unscreened 1979 film of a flip book (Untitled) stands as one of the earliest of these examples, revealing an interest in

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16 Kentridge, Arc/Procession: Smoke, Ashes, Fable, 1990, charcoal and colored pencil on paper, 70 ⫻ 1511⁄4 in. (177.8 ⫻ 384.5 cm). Collection of the artist, Houghton, Johannesburg (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph by the author)

17 Kentridge, Untitled, 1998 –99, drawing from the animated film Stereoscope, charcoal and colored chalk on paper, 311⁄2 ⫻ 471⁄4 in. (80 ⫻ 120 cm). Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

investigating movement through space alongside change through time. Repeated with slight modifications on successive pages of a notepad, the flip book’s images, stacked in a pile, appear to move when one thumbs through it; hence, the term Daumenkino (thumb cinema) is given to this rudimentary precinematic cognate of animation.35 Kentridge’s film in turn revisited an earlier little flip book that he had made as an adolescent in the late 1960s, a simple paper pad of consecutive drawings in which the ghost of one image chased the next from page to page.

Kentridge’s 1979 combination of film with the drawn flip book served as an important technical precedent to the

drawn and filmed animation process he would come to develop a full decade later. However, it was a second experiment with animation in the early 1980s that directly prefigured his subsequent processional imagery. In this instance, he drew directly on a long, thin strip of film with an architect’s drafting pen, repeating a “tiny stick figure . . . a thousand times, each image on a successive frame of film” (Fig. 22).36 Unlike the flip pad, which after an excited flurry settles down with only its top image visible, this animation, titled A Lecture on a Chair, assumed the visual format of a minuscule procession: an elongated rectangular strip containing tiny boxes housing a figure in each.37

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18 Kentridge, Vertical Time/Stair Procession, 2000, site-specific installation of black paper collage.

PS1, New York (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

19 Kentridge, still from Day for Night, 2003, 35mm film with drawing and photography, transferred to video and DVD, 7 minutes (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

In formal terms, this last attenuated, paradelike animation portends the artist’s first major drawing of a procession, Arc/Procession (Fig. 2) from 1990, in key ways. It, too, images the movements of a standing figure, each rendition of which is sequestered in a separate frame, with every rectangle of the film strip composing a segment of a larger horizontal whole rather than a finite piece in itself. In these early experiments, the drawn image is already neither static nor immutable, but rather embedded in a larger process as one moment in a series of potentially constantly changing images. Kentridge explains this elastic, radically unstable view of form: I think it makes it easier to draw a table if you understand that table as an intermediary stage between the tree, the factory, its moment in the room in front of you and its future, as it were. . . . Particularly in animation, I’m ready for the removal of the table, for that transformation, from that moment in which it’s there but understanding that in the next moment, it will be different or gone.38

This transformative notion of form would come to famously characterize the liquid aesthetics of Kentridge’s films, wherein objects fluidly metamorphose from cats into gas masks, from smoke rings to typewriters.39 But more than that, the gradual alterations of form seen in the pilot animations indicate how Kentridge’s attraction to the medium has always been rooted in animation’s capacity to communicate change—what Steven Henry Madoff poetically calls “the ruthlessness. . . . or the wolf of change.”40 These early experiments in which forms morph from one into another—as if metaphorically enacting their pasts and their futures, as Kentridge puts it— hint at a larger epistemology of flux and becoming: a world that is always jittery with movement. The observation often made about Kentridge’s work that everything seems to move, so that even solid bronze sculptures appear caught in flight, reveals more than mere formal preferences. It reflects a deep-seated desire to portray a world in continuous fluid motion.

Animation’s ability to articulate formal change allows it to describe such a dynamic epistemology of perpetual transformation, to gesture to a world peopled less by fixed objects than by forms that may appear stable but that trail with them constant potentialities for transformation through time: “an understanding of the world as . . . having a logic inside of which unfolds through time,” as Kentridge puts it. In philosophical terms, one might say that events or actions constitute reality, rather than objects or our apprehension of them (as in the Kantian schema), and that the world is therefore best understood in terms of change rather than stable essences— or, in Kentridge’s words, “a sense of the world unfolding rather than being a fixed fact.”41 If Kentridge’s investment in animation hinges on its ability to evoke these underlying processes of change, his views stem not only from long-held, abstract beliefs about the flux of reality but also from more focused, Marxist templates of history as a sequence of rolling changes. Revealing his debt to a Marxist-Hegelian schema, Kentridge has attributed his dynamic view of the world to his 1970s Witwatersrand University education in politics and his-

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20 Kentridge, left panel of Embarkation, 1987, charcoal and pastel on paper, 491⁄4 ⫻ 321⁄4 in. (125 ⫻ 82 cm). Standard Bank Collection, Johannesburg (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

tory: “What history taught me was to understand the world as a process that continues to change with time through movements. Everything moves as the world keeps on moving. From this perspective, animation becomes a good metaphor for history.”42 With this last phrase, Kentridge links formal change in general—and his own process of drawn animation in particular—with the issue of historical change. The governing principle of his unique animation process is to create a visual medium that articulates alterations through time: it is a process of change. Kentridge’s abiding interest in the procession is similarly bound up with its potential to formally communicate transformation—it is an image of change. It is due to the capabilities of both of these elements to chart transformation that Kentridge’s process is so caught up in images of processions.

Yet why the pressure to visually communicate change on multiple fronts in 1989 at the levels of technique and subject?

The procession, we will come to find, entered Kentridge’s work specifically as an image of regime change. For 1989, the year in which Kentridge initiated both his innovative process of animation and his novel imagery of processions, was the watershed year of South African history, when the seemingly intractable behemoth of apartheid finally began to crumble.

At some level, Kentridge’s turn to animation during these

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21 Kentridge, “Walking Reader,” from Vertical Time/Stair Procession. PS1, New York (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

22 Kentridge, Untitled, 2006, ink and pencil on paper showing Kentridge’s second animation, A Lecture on a Chair (1979).

Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by Angela Breidbach)

tumultuous months formed part of a much larger arc of change engulfing the country. As one local woman summed it up at the time, “For most of our lives time stood still. I mean, for twenty-five years nothing changed, and now suddenly everything is changing.”43 1989 and the Politics of Change In this way, the “origin” of Kentridge’s unusual animation process was inextricably linked to the radical political transformation that began that historic year of 1989, the turning point in South African history, when after four decades of

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More salient to an art historical analysis, however, was that the political and visual form in which this transitional moment was publicly expressed, and further challenged, was the mass procession. Between late 1989 and early 1990, South Africa took to the streets, with people marching through the country by the hundreds of thousands to celebrate the transformed political climate and to mobilize on foot to end apartheid completely.48 The same trio of local historians writing in 1990 could already declare: Nowhere has the changing mood been more clearly demonstrated than in the streets of the cities and towns. A countrywide spate of protest marches has occurred since the historic first government-approved peaceful anti-apartheid march in Cape Town on 13 September 1989, and these have become the most visible symptom of the advance to the so-called “new” South Africa.49

23 UDF poster designed at a workshop at Crown Mines, Johannesburg, 1983 (photograph provided by the South African History Archive, Johannesburg, South Africa)

National Party rule, the structures of apartheid unexpectedly—and rapidly— began to collapse. Finally, Nelson Mandela could assert, “Undoubtedly a change has taken place in South Africa.”44 Throughout the course of 1989, President P. W. Botha began to transfer political power to F. W. de Klerk through a series of groundbreaking legislative measures. These events commenced with Botha’s resignation as leader of the National Party in February 1989 and his dissolution of Parliament in May, continued with his announcement of an unscheduled general election and his meeting with Mandela in July 1989, and extended to his August resignation and de Klerk’s installation as interim leader. This rapid-fire series of political changes culminated in the September 1989 elections and de Klerk’s installation as president. By the year’s end, de Klerk had released key political prisoners and made a public commitment to ending forty-one years of apartheid.45 The historic series of events was immediately recognized in the country.46 As early as 1990, a trio of South African historians could sum up a year of local newspaper editorials with the confident assertion, “The year 1989 will in future generations be known as the annus mirabilis . . . within the context of South African politics.”47

After decades in which all public gatherings had been banned under threat of arrest and imprisonment, such that a politically engaged Johannesburger like Kentridge would remember the 1976 demonstrations as the last in living memory, 1989 witnessed the emergence of the protest procession as the manifest sign of the impending regime change. But the speed with which the procession could so quickly come to function thus was partly the result of its longtime use by student and trade union organizations during apartheid.

Throughout the 1980s, the procession circulated as the symbol of democratic change in the rich visual culture of posters and trade union materials. When the United Democratic Front (UDF), a network of grassroots community organizations loosely aligned with the African National Congress (ANC), was established in 1983, for example, its hastily printed posters immediately, and repeatedly, featured a procession shown frontally with an imposing UDF banner cresting back into the crowd (Fig. 23).50 However, particularly after the 1985 imposition of the state of emergency, such representations were largely aspirational, drawing formally on Cuban and Russian revolutionary poster prototypes and yoking the image of the procession to liberties that at the time could only be imagined; they nonetheless primed the procession to operate after 1989 as a locally readable icon of democratic change. One poster of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) from 1988, an elongated, profile view of dark, marching silhouettes, particularly resonates with Kentridge’s shadow processions of more than a decade later (Fig. 24), gesturing to how the artist’s immersion in the Johannesburg underworld of graphic arts and stealth posters informed his subsequent vocabulary of images.

By 1989, hopes had materialized into realities, and during this intense period of political transition, historic processions and radical democratic change seemed virtually enmeshed.

For example: the first legal, hugely publicized, and enormously symbolic march in decades took place in Cape Town on Wednesday, September 13, 1989. Led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 35,000 South Africans marched through downtown; the following day, de Klerk was elected president. And the very next morning, one of de Klerk’s first acts of state was to grant last-minute permission for what would be the first

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24 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) poster, 1988, 83⁄4 ⫻ 24 in. (artwork reproduced by permission of COSATU; photograph provided by the Museum of Modern Art, New York)

legal procession in decades to be held in the city of Johannesburg, Kentridge’s hometown.

On Friday, September 15, 1989, “about 20,000 protestors, most of them black, but some white, walked and danced through the streets of downtown Johannesburg,” wrote one foreign journalist.51 Proceeding from St. Mary’s Anglican Church on Eloff Street to the infamous central police station on John Vorster Square, the protesters presented a petition to end police repression. William Kentridge was walking in that throng, wielding a canvas banner of his drawing Casspirs Full of Love above his head.52 “It was astonishing,” he recounted to me, “what we’d been waiting for all these years.”53 A mere ten days later, back in the studio, he was at work on studies for a new drawing: Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, sketching figures who stumble and dance into the new democracy (Fig. 33).54 In addition to ubiquitous photographs of processions that filled the newly liberalized South African press, Kentridge’s physical involvement in the historic September procession endows his images of processions that soon followed with the lived memory of his own processing body, thereby entangling his performative syntax of walking in a personal poetics of protest. It was in this milieu that the animation process Kentridge had been experimenting with since the mid-1980s assumed timely and unprecedented resonances: just as the procession proposed itself as the defining image of change, so, too, Kentridge’s stop-motion animation process proffered itself as the exemplary medium with which to chart the country’s ongoing metamorphosis. It was in Kentridge’s first Drawings for Projection film, Johannesburg, that these two elements came together for the first time.

The Temporality of Change: Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris One of Kentridge’s earliest drawings of a procession, Smoke, Ashes, Fable (1990, Fig. 16), was titled after a line from Herodotus that speaks to the inevitable passage of time and dissolution of form.55 This mournful temporality particularly infuses Kentridge’s Zeno Writing (2001), where a slowly burning cigarette spirals smoky entrails delicately through the air. As the camera lingers on the twisting fumes, filmic time protracts to a meditative crawl; the smoke here becomes an explicit metaphor for the languid passing of time. This scene graphically thematizes the temporal dynamics that Kentridge had been working to foreground from the onset of the Drawings for Projection series. Indeed, Johannesburg features

an inventory of such temporal markers: curls of ascending smoke, streams of flowing traffic, and swells of roiling water.

For Kentridge, his animation has always been “about time.”56 Movement, action delimited by time, is used in this initial film to visually track its passing, with the principal moving flow— or visual rendering of the advance of time— being the film’s several processions. Snaking its way through the East Rand landscape to address the gluttonous Soho, the procession of Johannesburg billows gradually forward, rippling charcoal lines across a milky white field before departing into the horizon at the film’s end (Fig. 15). The ticking of time is equally emphasized aurally, through such conceits as the crescendoing rumble of an approaching train and radiating lines of sound impelling outward.

Johannesburg thematizes temporality from another angle, too: via the clanging keys of a typewriter that belches letters across a page in fitful spasms. Spotlighted here is a sequential readerly vision, coaxing the eye to scan an image like a text, so that one’s gaze sweeps directionally through space and incrementally through time. The temporality prompted by a viewing practice of this sort reflects the artist’s ideal that “arriving at the image is a process, not a frozen instant.”57 Such a gradual mode of “reading” a picture from left to right is, of course, akin to the drawn-out viewing process demanded by the simplest processional friezes dating back to antiquity. Typically framed in an elongated horizontal format that accentuates the image’s directional mandate, this is the attenuation of form that Kentridge’s earliest drawn animation on a filmstrip quoted, for the temporality encoded in the ancient processional frieze has long been understood as an archaic precursor to the temporality of film.

Like Johannesburg, the versions of Arc/Procession on which Kentridge was concurrently working in late 1989 conjoin imagery of moving figures with a temporalized mode of viewing. (Kentridge has explained that he used the format of an arch for the drawings and rendered them large so as to prevent their being apprehended in a single glance.) Given the artist’s attention to the procession’s potential as a model of temporal viewing, it is clear that from the inception of the Drawings for Projection series, Kentridge was summoning the most ancient and outmoded of visual grammars to inscribe his processions as a kind of primordial cinema— one not dissimilar to the primitive flip book. In this sense, the processions operate in much the same way as the artist’s technically rudimentary, notoriously outmoded, seemingly anach-

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25 Kentridge, Untitled, 1990, drawing from the opening sequence of the animated film Monument, charcoal on paper (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

ronistic process, which he charmingly refers to as “stone-age animation.”

Such a retrieval of the procession from the ancient language of Classical form would become explicit by 2001, when Kentridge rooted his film Shadow Procession in the Platonic allegory’s stream of shadow figures.58 Thus extending the idea of the walking figure from a metaphor for his own animation process to proposing the larger medium of film as rooted in a processional logic, Shadow Procession highlights the origins of film as a moving “procession” of images.59 Dialoguing with Plato’s parable of precinematic viewing, with its seated audience transfixed by the play of light and shadow in the darkened space of the cave, Kentridge re-created his own parade of shadow figures, who, as in Plato’s original, proceed from left to right, carrying an assortment of objects.

In this way, Kentridge anchors his distinctive animation process in the foundational procession of Western epistemology, one whose figures have functioned for millennia as an iconic metaphor for the processional character of thought—what William James famously called the “stream of consciousness”—as well as for the processional structure of narrative.60 “What there is of a narrative,” Kentridge states of Johannesburg, “was evolved backwards and forwards from the first key images—the procession through the wasteland, the fish in the hand.”61 Structurally, this backward and forward trot of the film’s narrative mimics both Kentridge’s studio pacings— his “stalking the drawing, or walking backwards and forwards. . . .”62—and the pattern of advance and retreat of the foundational procession of Johannesburg, which streams forward through the barren landscape to confront the whitebibbed and lip-smacking Soho Eckstein before turning and disappearing into the horizon. Exceeding a logic of narrative continuity, Johannesburg stands as a processional stream of poetic sequences that remain disjunctive and unresolved.

What narrative there is can therefore be best described as a procession of disparate images, so that, in effect, the processional form itself becomes a substitute for, or usurpation of, narrative structure.

Monument and the Step Forward In Kentridge’s second film of the Drawings for Projection series, Monument (1990), he not merely focuses on the walking body as it proceeds across the filmic screen but homes in on a protracted performance of a pair of feet wearily advancing (Fig. 25). The film opens with Harry, the central protag-

onist of this and other films, shuffling slowly across a barren landscape, doubled over beneath an enormous burden. For long drawn-out seconds, Harry’s bare feet fill the entire screen; painstakingly they step ahead, trawling palimpsestic charcoal lines in their wake.

An adaptation of Beckett’s Catastrophe, Monument reprises Pygmalion thematics of stillness and animation that provide an apt template for Kentridge’s explorations of the play between static and animated drawing. In the final scene, a vast crowd throngs forward to surround the cloaked monument. As the statue is revealed to be the walking man, Harry, still bent double beneath the massive burden on his back, Kentridge lingers on an image of Harry’s feet, now shackled, before slowly panning up to his face. In this film Kentridge employs two other media—sculpture and theater—to think through his new animation process, using images of feet walking or manacled to play with contrasts of movement and stasis, the mobile and statuesque, animation and freezing.

Far more drawn out than the temporality of Johannesburg, the tortoiselike pace of Monument invokes not only the narrative template of Catastrophe but also Beckett’s sluggish theatrical time.63 Harry’s lead-footed walk calibrates the temporality of this animated sequence. Time is not so much marked here as slowed, or “thickened,” as Mikhail Bakhtin would say, and as Kentridge himself would come to characterize his own slow process.64 Harry’s belabored movement, along with the time-consuming shadowy trails of drawing he drags behind him, summon the time- and labor-intensive quality of Kentridge’s drawing process: Harry’s feet and Kentridge’s hands perform a step-by-step demonstration of drawing as dragging.

The film’s spun-out temporality, epitomized in the protracted progress of Harry’s walk, pulls the normally speedy medium of animation into a gray area between drawing and animation—as if to pose the question: When does animation become so slow it reverts back to drawing?

Once more, Kentridge’s meditations on the temporality and pace of his new process are enacted through the locus of the human body in motion, as the artist implies another series of metaphoric conjunctions between his own working/ walking body and that of Harry’s. Krauss highlights the structural similarity between Kentridge’s studio pacings and the back and forth foot traffic that Beckett play’s thematizes.65 Particularly because Kentridge himself performed Beckett’s role of the peripatetic director in a 1984 production of Catastrophe, the mobile transitions possible between the the-

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26 Photograph from the back cover of Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, New York: Little, Brown, 1994

matics of content and the performance of process are once more suggested.

Harry’s walking scene in Monument is politically timely, too: his slow, encumbered trudge forward stages an image of history as a grueling trajectory that is exemplified in the title of Mandela’s famous autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.

The book’s back cover, depicting a photograph of a minuscule Mandela advancing down a long dusty path on the Robben Island prison where he spent so many decades, visually underscores this conceit of history as an arduous journey (Fig. 26).66 While characterizations of personal and national history as a road are a staple of Western literature, the literary and visual tropes of the “step forward,” the “long walk,” and the “march to freedom” as images of change were particularly potent in South Africa in 1989 and early 1990, when Kentridge drew Monument. Mandela’s famous walk to freedom, a highly orchestrated international media event, was figured in text and image, in newspapers and on television, as the foundational journey of the new democracy: his first steps to freedom became the nation’s first steps; his walk became the visual icon of the regime change.

Within South Africa, Mandela’s exit from Victor Verster Prison on February 11, 1990, seemed to arrest time, as the entire country paused and crowded around television screens, waiting through hours and hours of delays to view the momentous physical and metaphoric crossing of a threshold—a symbolic junction between past and future that would be obsessively replayed by the media in the following months and years (Fig. 27).67 In Long Walk to Freedom, over the course of several pages, Mandela describes his performative journey toward liberty, which was scripted by the ANC and the government-run media for maximum symbolic impact:68 A well-known SABC presenter . . . requested that I get out of the car a few hundred feet before the [prison] gate so that they could film me walking toward freedom. . . .

About a quarter of a mile in front of the gate, the car slowed to a stop and Winnie and I got out and began to walk toward the prison gate . . . I raised my right fist and there was a roar . . . as I finally walked through those gates. . . .69

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27 Alexander Joe, press photograph of Nelson Mandela on the day of his release from prison, February 11, 1990 (photograph by Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images)

Mandela’s car was surrounded by thousands of people as it crawled through the crush of crowds into Cape Town. Tens of thousands more were gathered at City Hall in a mass public display that would have been banned six months prior: “a boundless sea of people cheering, holding flags and banners, clapping and laughing,” Mandela remembers.70 This throng of citizens is the same public of the “new” South Africa that fills Kentridge’s films of the early 1990s. The central role accorded them in both Mandela’s description and Kentridge’s films of the period speaks to the historical specificity of the South African situation as one of the few instances in recent history where decades of grassroots action, carried out by a popular democratic movement of enormous mass and power, succeeded in bringing down an oppressive government and implementing regime change. These are the people whom Mandela addressed as collaborators in a shared journey toward freedom that first night of his release, telling the crowds, “The sight of freedom looming on the horizon should encourage us to redouble our efforts . . . to return to the barricades, to intensify the struggle, and we would walk the last mile together.”71 This ongoing walk, an acting out on foot of the political process—as much communal pilgrimage from bondage as a performance of civil liberties— became concretized from metaphor to lived reality in the mass processions of 1989. In the ensuing months, in hundreds of local marches, Mandela’s own “last mile” walk to freedom was reenacted time and again in the rumble of pounding feet and the deafening roars of “Amandla! Awethu!” (Power! To the People!).

“Walking the last mile together” was a turn of phrase Mandela frequently employed in interviews of the early 1990s. For example, in a 1992 documentary made for South African cable television, he affirmed, “We are traveling the last mile, and there may be difficulties, there may be crises, but the writing is definitely on the wall, and the days of this government are numbered.”72 Concluding the half-hour documentary, this forceful quote marries Mandela’s hallmark persona as aging prophet of the people trudging through the desert of apartheid with the biblical prediction of Babylonian

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28 Still from The Last Mile: Mandela, Africa and Democracy, written and directed by Tom Carver, M-Net, 1992 (photograph © M-Net, provided by Bob Link, Advanced Video Data Service, Fairfield, Ohio)

doom. Moreover, Mandela’s statement is editorially stitched between footage of street processions and singer Youssou n’Dour’s assessment of postcolonial African democracy as powered by the mass action of citizens demonstrating in the streets. N’Dour calls this a “system of refusal” and rightly identifies it with Mandela’s political legacy of street processions.73 Then, on the heels of Mandela’s statement, a telling series of images flash in quick succession: a motorcade streams down a busy concourse; crowds stamp out the toyitoyi dance of revolution in a broad thoroughfare; rowdy processions throng urban streets; and Mandela walks sedately out into the crowd. Then the credits roll.

Given the resonance of the stride forward in Mandela’s public image, it is unsurprising that the producers selected this iconic imagery as their summary snapshots of the period or that they chose to title the documentary The Last Mile: Mandela, Africa and Democracy. But more than simply speaking to the widespread association of Mandela as a savior on foot, this particular rhetorical conjunction leads straight back to the centrality of images of walking for Kentridge in the early 1990s, for it was he who served as assistant producer of this film.74 Kentridge was among those who so clearly understood the visual impact and timely political resonance of the metaphoric string: the step, the walk, the last mile.

The video footage preceding Mandela’s concluding quote—a feisty procession that streams through city streets, wedged between two large buildings and wielding enormous banners (Fig. 28)—must have infiltrated Kentridge’s mental archive as well. For this signal image stands as uncanny double to the artist’s drawn rendition of the procession in Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991, Fig. 29) and other films. In this way, the processions advancing through Kentridge’s early Drawings for Projection films function as snapshots of current history or allegorical representations of the tides of political change then engulfing the country. Kentridge noted that “these images of crowds emerged in my work in 1989, the year of the start of the political thaw in South Africa when, for the first time in my memory, huge political

29 Kentridge, Untitled, 1991, drawing from the animated film Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old, charcoal on paper, 271⁄2 ⫻ 393⁄8 in. (70 ⫻ 100 cm). Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

processions surged through the streets.”75 Historical data on the resurgence of processions at this time corroborates the artist’s memory, as well as his association of processions with political freedom.

In a country where gatherings of more than eleven people at a time had been illegal since the 1960s, the spectacle of the sudden emergence of the public procession cannot be sufficiently underscored. Public processions and the political resistance they have long expressed were, moreover, indelibly tied to some of apartheid’s most violent episodes.76 Time and again, peaceful processions initiated as part of the ANC’s early program of passive resistance had turned into scenes of mass murder—most tragically during the 1960 Sharpeville massacre; then again in 1976, when police opened fire on black children walking through the streets of Soweto. Kentridge quotes both these tragic carnages in his film Ubu Tells the Truth, juxtaposing archival photographs of the historic Johannesburg demonstrations with bleeding corpses and another kind of march: a row of military boots pounding the pavement.77 The Soweto incident, in particular, which had been organized by the South African Students’ Movement (SASM), provoked outrage among liberal white South Africans, and the day after the police killings, on June 17, 1976, Kentridge was one of the leaders of a student march staged in protest of the massacre, which was chased by police and eventually dispersed.78 In the wake of the international outcry incited by Sharpeville and Soweto, the South African government effectively banned all public gatherings and processions through a series of progressively authoritarian legislative measures.79 These laws, as well as the ANC’s realization by the early 1960s that in the face of government brutality its passive-resistance marches needed to shift to more muscular measures, ensured that processions, political or otherwise, were outlawed in the country for nearly three decades.

The absolute prohibition on processions during apartheid was deeply symbolic of the apartheid regime’s inability to

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tolerate the political dissent that defines a democracy. For this reason, de Klerk’s granting of permission for the September 1989 Cape Town march to proceed was recognized as an enormously meaningful symbol of a promised regime change that had heretofore been largely rhetorical.80 Mandela, watching events from prison, and himself only six months from release, noted that the Cape Town march indicated that “A new and different hand was on the tiller.”81 Indeed, insofar as freedom of assembly is recognized as a fundamental human right, the government’s unbanning of processions at the pivotal juncture of late 1989 was widely understood as the sign of the shifting political climate. With much fanfare, the “right of assembly and procession” would eventually be written into the new South African constitution, as it has been in several other recent postcolonial constitutions, making the procession richly symbolic of South Africa’s transition to democracy.82 Revolution and Procession The association of the procession with political change, and with the fervor of the revolutionary process itself, dates back to the French Revolution, when the religious processional of the Catholic Church was transformed into a secular civic ritual that flourished in the post-Revolutionary period.83 Historians agree that since 1789, processions “have been intimately connected with the revolutionary process.”84 The 1989 bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution—precisely at the time of South Africa’s own political transition— made the Gallic context particularly proximate: journalists drew comparisons between France and South Africa, spoke of “storming the Bastille,”85 or complained that the “Bastille was not stormed.”86 Mandela, as noted, advocated a “return to the barricades,”87 while at least one major government commission, Reshada Crouse’s monumental mural for Johannesburg’s Nelson Mandela Theatre, recast Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty on the Barricades with a South African “Liberty” marching at the head of a procession of freedom fighters.

Kentridge, too, planned a work based on the figure of Liberty: Liberty Eckstein was to be the major character of his film Mine (1991). Ultimately, however, Liberty was jettisoned; Kentridge’s inability to incorporate her likely indicated his reluctance to embrace a symbol so celebratory of revolution.88 In any event, by then Kentridge had already signaled the French Revolution as a primary context for his work of the period, having titled his first film, produced in the bicentennial year of 1989, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris.89 Here, the qualification of Kentridge’s hometown as being “after Paris” emphasizes not merely temporal and aesthetic distance from the original modernist avant-gardes but also a profound political distance from the original revolution in whose shadow all others fall. Paris and its ur-context of revolutionary change thus looms uneasily at the origin of Kentridge’s Drawings for Projections series, tying together Johannesburg’s processions with their revolutionary Parisian precursors.

Kentridge’s procession in Johannesburg calls up later contexts of regime change, too, quoting the opening scene of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento, where socialists throng the streets in a victorious postwar procession.90 The red socialist banners Bertolucci’s processionists wave and the songs of

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unity they sing all find their echo in the South African protest marches of the early 1990s. But if the masses’ revelling procession through the streets has well-established associations with political revolution, it has equally deep significance as a marker of freedom, specifically from slavery and racial prejudice, as evidenced by emancipation parades throughout the Americas that in turn reach back to African rituals of masked processions.91 In South Africa itself, such connections were firmly in place, with the local abolition of slavery in 1834 long celebrated with a famous emancipation procession known as Tweede Nuwe Jaar (Second New Year), performed annually on January 2. Even as this symbolic date records historical emancipation, it underscores how processions frequently mark a temporal cleavage between legal states or political regimes: between slavery and freedom, or between apartheid and democracy. In this way, the advance of the procession signals, paradoxically, a moment of temporal arrest or stoppage—a revolutionary break in time not unlike the moment of Mandela’s release, or the recurring images of frozen clocks in Kentridge’s work of this transitional period.92 Like the resetting of the French Revolutionary calendar, the Second New Year procession stages a ritual of change, encoding a distinct and symbolic temporality that speaks to the transgressive potential of the procession.93 While Kentridge’s crowds denote regime change, enabling him to portray the emergent public of postapartheid South Africa, he refers to them as a “procession of the dispossessed,” thereby alluding to the historical dispossessions of South Africa’s indigenous inhabitants. In a country with centuries of bitter territorial struggles, the filmic procession’s progressive advance over the South African landscape performs a symbolic repossession of space, employing the walking body to performatively reclaim terrain violently seized by British, Dutch, and Afrikaans settlers. Such a use of the walking body to patrol the land and rehearse contested land claims has long precedents: throughout the twentieth century, Afrikaners too engaged imagery of people and vehicles processing over the country to reinscribe their title to the land. Periodically, actual processions of dozens of wagons would traverse the country, retracing the foundational migration of the Great Trek, as on its centennial in 1938, for example, and again in 1988. In a 1988 photograph, for example, David Goldblatt recorded how on this latter occasion concrete was poured in the path of the processional wagons to make permanent their otherwise ephemeral tracks through the landscape. Claiming the land by obsessively marking it, and by mounting real and symbolic processions over it, thus has a long history in South Africa, as the emergence of Kentridge’s processions on the eve of the political transition confirms.

In Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991), the “procession of the dispossessed” again plays a major role, this time as an urban procession surging through a Johannesburg rendered as a midcentury metropolis, in an almost utopian moment before the onset of apartheid (Fig. 29).94 Carrying large banners and waving flags, the enormous crowd of Sobriety reclaims the city built on black labor, marching through the streets from which black South Africans were physically dispossessed by apartheid zoning laws. This time, the procession seems to lay claim to what David Harvey calls “the right to the

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30 Kentridge, Untitled, 1991, drawing from Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old, charcoal on paper, 471⁄4 ⫻ 59 in. (120 ⫻ 150 cm). Collection of the artist (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

city,” a revolutionary impulse he traces from the Paris Commune to the Occupy movements. Predicated on a seizing of urban space from the hands of capital, the crowd demands city and citizenship, and the right to shape both in the vision of the “new” South Africa.95 But if Kentridge’s processions enact a symbolic repossession, it is far from celebratory, for the land, like the people, bears the scars of apartheid. Littered with the detritus of abandoned gold-mining operations and heavy industry, the procession in Johannesburg moves through the profoundly dystopic landscape east of the city: “mine dumps and slime dams; pylons and power cables; roads and tracks that lead from nowhere to nowhere,” in J. M. Coetzee’s description.96 In Sobriety, moreover, Felix and Mrs. Eckstein occupy a pictorial space unrelated to the far-off procession (Fig. 30); later in the film, Soho contemplates the moving crowd through his office window, similarly distanced physically and emotionally.

When the procession reaches Soho’s headquarters, confronting him searchingly, his building becomes flooded, bloated, bursting with water until it crumbles from within: a resonant metaphor for both the collapse of the apartheid edifice and the role of the mass democratic movement in toppling it. So even as Kentridge’s crowds salute this history, his work also evinces the existing failures of communication between the emergent, largely black, voting public of the new regime and the insular world of affluent white South Africans, to whom such a public often remains faceless. Despite the inclusive discourse of the “rainbow nation” at this time of national reconfiguration, the film suggests that the country remained—and arguably still remains—irrevocably divided.97 The communicative gulf separating the procession from the principal white protagonists, the scarred landscape of the East Rand, and the backward-looking 1950s cityscape all complicate any implication of the procession as a forward march of history in any Hegelian sense. While Kentridge therefore adopts the rhetorical device of a step or a walk forward as a marker of political change—a semiritual transition between two worlds—it is neither as an index of progress nor as a path toward revelation or telos. Lest we imagine he is indicating a progression from darkness to light—as the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial is often figured98—Kentridge

31 Kentridge, study for Arc/Procession I, detail showing Harry impaled, 1990, charcoal and pastel on paper, 413⁄8 ⫻ 1181⁄8 in.

(105 ⫻ 300 cm). Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

firmly establishes his processions as deeply ambiguous journeys, shot through with numerous obstacles and multiple reversals.

Arc/Procession: “Walking to Utopia or Perdition. Or Both” When Kentridge began work on the monumental Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass in late 1989 (Fig. 1), his landmark drawing confirmed the procession as antiteleology.99 Once more harnessing the procession as the visual portent of the impending regime change, Kentridge portrayed current history as a disorderly stampede into the future. Riffing parodically on myths of progress, miners and revelers stagger along with apartheid’s victims, the crippled, the homeless, and the displaced. Megaphones (an apartheidera symbol of labor strikes and trade union disputes), spurting showerheads, security fences, rolls of barbed wire, a can of flame retardant, and the ladder of the “Fearless Security” company weave their way among the walking figures. At the drawing’s center, hands raised and arms outstretched in crucifix form, is Harry, the man who leads the procession in Johannesburg. He appears here as martyred for Marxist utopianism—a point made unequivocally in a preparatory drawing, where Harry is literally impaled on a model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (Fig. 31).

That Arc/Procession is an extraordinarily timely image, rooted in the local politics of transition, is confirmed by Kentridge’s 1991 reprisal of this same procession under the title Procession of the Delegates (Fig. 32), where the processionists are identified as political emissaries ambling along to one of the numerous parliamentary negotiations that followed Mandela’s release. Though Kentridge contracts the processional form to engage the problematic of historical change in all his works of the period, in Arc/Procession he registers greater ambivalence toward the oncoming transition than is evident in the processions of Johannesburg.100 Impugning the idea of advance as necessarily entailing progress, Arc/Procession bears shadowy trails of the failed utopias of Communist regime changes and is studded with ironic ladders leading nowhere. To this end, another drawing of the period features a large ladder that spells out bluntly: “this is not a step.”

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Meanwhile, the hyena, an African animal deeply associated with ambiguity and corruption, presides over the scene.101 Arc/Procession captures the energy and theatricality that often characterized political gatherings in apartheid-era South Africa: the stamping sounds of the militant toyi-toyi dance and the powerful group vocals of resistance-era music, forces that galvanized the crowd and publicized political messages in the only “revolution fought in four-part harmony.”102 Ari Sitas, one of Kentridge’s colleagues from his agitprop theater years, grounds Arc/Procession in precisely these hybrid political-theatrical experiences, describing a chaotic mass rally the two attended in 1985, with thousands of black union workers parading around and around Durban’s Greyville stadium, all the while singing, dancing, making speeches, reciting poetry, trailing banners.103 For Sitas, “these experiences . . . provided a symbolic language” evident in Kentridge’s “clear political economy of exaggerated gesture.”

While the oval track of Durban’s stadium would be formally reprised in Kentridge’s subsequent circular processions, the overt theatricality of Arc/Procession is accentuated in an early study portraying the artist looking up at his work with an exaggerated viewing device, as if beholding the procession as a performative allegory of history (Fig. 33).

The procession has long been used as a visual metaphor for the tumult of regime change. As Walter Benjamin observed, “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures. . . .”104 For Benjamin, the procession is synonymous with military victory and narratives of progress. He invokes the procession as an image of history, a resonant visual metaphor that he uses to call up and then dispute a view of history as a narrative of continuity, increasing perfectability, and economic efficiency. Kentridge similarly employs the procession as an image of history, yet one that he casts as a foil to triumphant nationalisms and the colonialism they fostered. For the victory procession is historically a colonial spectacle; the format dates back to Roman times, epitomized by Rome’s Arch of Titus frieze depicting soldiers marching home with booty from the conquered temple in Jerusalem.

The colonial procession finds its unruly double in the frequently bombastic parades of the postcolony, hypertrophied displays of excess often aimed at showcasing parity with Western powers.105 The esoteric title of this drawing—Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass—which Kentridge mined from a biography of the former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, hints at such dynamics, while extending Kentridge’s historicist critique to include Marxist and celebratory postcolonial nationalisms. The cryptic phrase derives from one of Selassie’s 1960s speeches, when the onetime reformist was already in his third decade of despotic power.106 In this light, his stated desire for Ethiopia “to develop, catch up, even surpass” Western nations assumes a sycophantic stance of emulation, which is rendered even more hollow by Selassie’s epic failures of leadership. But these words also ring with the distant echo of the postcolonial optimism that swept the continent in the wake of liberation movements of the 1960s. Now they read as a quaint artifact of the time when such rhetoric, and the

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32 Kentridge, Procession of the Delegates, from the series Little Morals, Kwazulu-Natal, S.A.: Caversham Press, 1991, etching with sugar lift, 93⁄8 ⫻ 121⁄2 in. (23.7 ⫻ 31.8 cm) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

utopianism it galvanized, could still inspire. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, which lingers in the early study Arc/Procession I, serves as a similar beacon of failed hopes. It registers as the dated utopianism of the modernist avantgardes and, more specifically, as the local failures of Communism, which as late as the 1980s remained the dominant political ideology of the ANC and other liberation parties in South Africa.107 Even as Kentridge indicts the utopian teleologies underpinning Selassie’s statement, questions the value of so-called Western development, and rejects the possibilities of a linear progress from the “darkness” of apartheid to the “light” of democracy, he refuses to overlook Africa’s histories of dictatorship and rampant corruption. Moreover, Ethiopia’s bloody histories since Selassie came to power impugn the very narratives of progress that Selassie and others had routinely served up.108 History, in this view, comes to resemble Benjamin’s famous description of progress as demolition site: a pile of “wreckage upon wreckage. . . . This storm is what we call progress.”109 Suspicious of the myths of progress, Kentridge’s Arc/Procession looks both to Benjamin and to Theodor Adorno, whose work on the Enlightenment equally renders history as antiteleological and radically fractured. The series of etchings Kentridge made the following year titled Little Morals (1991), an English translation of Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1953), reflects Adorno’s views. As in Arc/Procession, these prints reveal Kentridge digesting the current process of negotiations under way between the government and delegates of the recently unbanned political parties over a transfer of power.

Just as the titles of these prints—Procession of the Delegates (Fig. 32), Negotiations Begin (Fig. 34), and Practical Considerations (Fig. 35)— ground them in the moment of South Africa’s political transition, so do Kentridge’s comments on this as “a period of extreme intensity; enormous possibilities seemed to be opening up, whilst there was also a real threat that the process towards democracy might be derailed by vio-

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33 Kentridge, study for Arc/Procession I, 1989, charcoal on paper, 221⁄2 ⫻ 301⁄4 in. (57 ⫻ 77 cm). Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

34 Kentridge, Negotiations Begin, from Little Morals, etching with sugar lift, 93⁄8 ⫻ 121⁄2 in. (23.7 ⫻ 31.8 cm) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

35 Kentridge, Practical Considerations, from Little Morals, etching with sugar lift, 93⁄8 ⫻ 121⁄2 in. (23.7 ⫻ 31.8 cm) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

lence . . . also a sense that . . . for many others circumstances would be as hard as ever.”110 This tussle between enormous optimism for “the South African miracle” that had overturned apartheid with negotiation rather than violent revolution and pessimism that little would change for the country’s poorest is reflected in these bifurcated images. In typical apartheid fashion—and as in the communicative disjunct between the procession and the viewing protagonists, or Soho in his feeding frenzy in Johannesburg—individuals are encapsulated in disjunctive realities, enveloped in a state of self-absorption. In Negotiations Begin, three figures dance around in Dionysian abandon, oblivious to a figure tied to a post who is dead or dying, while in

Practical Considerations a couple twirls blithely alongside an “Atlas” figure bent double beneath a burden. Kentridge’s resistance to the logic of “and/or” in favor of the complexity of “both/and” is revealed in his ambivalent embrace of oppositional, or dualist, realities. As he explains, “It’s not that one’s an optimist or a pessimist. One lives with both. One is a committed optimist and a firm pessimist. Both of those futures are unspooling at the same time.”111 Tying this model of parallel potentialities to the ambiguous telos of his Arc/Procession processionists, Kentridge continues, “It’s as if they’re stumbling into the future but not knowing what is coming: salvation or damnation, who knows what. You don’t know if they were walking to utopia or perdition. Or

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE AND THE PROCESS OF CHANGE

both.”112 Kentridge’s ambivalence between his desire to reclaim a measure of utopianism for the success of this transitional period and his more deep-seated suspicion of the possibility for profound change rives these images formally and thematically. Accordingly, he looks to Adorno, with his resistance to the possibility of fundamental and permanent moral and political change, to temper the potency of the metamorphosis implicated by the processional format.113 Adorno’s Minima Moralia is both structurally fragmented (a series of aphoristic reflections on the Socratic ideal of the “good life,” that is, the ethical life) and steeped in doubt (Adorno finds little place for the Socratic ideal and limited possibilities for ethical behavior in the postwar world). The question of individual moral responsibility is inseparable from the specific cultural nexus in which one is enmeshed, Adorno argues, so that, as one critic puts it, “in a wrong society the good cannot be done, cannot be known, and independent of its realization does not exist.”114 The pathological, divisive relationships that Kentridge images—the repeated cocooning of individuals and their incapacity to notice or respond to the plight of others—resonate with Adorno’s outlook. Arc/Procession also reveals a local undercurrent of pragmatism that sought to moderate the rhetoric of the “miraculous transition” rehearsed throughout these heady years, a view that stressed that change would be long, slow, and difficult—that it would be an incremental process of change. Indeed, the word “process” was so often applied to South Africa after 1989 that it become synonymous with that period: people spoke of the “negotiation process,” “the peace process,” and the “process of transition”—all processes that would in turn lead to other processes by the mid-1990s, such as “the process of democracy” and, finally, the judicial processes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).115 This gradual, processual notion of historical change similarly informs Kentridge’s treatment of the politics of this time, shaping his own process of conveying change within a drawing. The artist explains how, while rejecting Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s historicism, his own understanding of historical process remains indebted to Hegelian models of history.116 In theater school, as Kentridge became immersed in parallel epistemologies of theatrical process and corporeal gesture, he came to understand how the larger dynamic of process could be used to undercut the rigid, teleological aspects of the Hegelian system that he had studied at university: Actually, then [at theater school] I understood the stuff I was doing in university with politics, where there was a lot of emphasis on the most simplified forms of Hegelian logic, of understanding deeply the way in which contradiction is embodied in how we move through the world and how process rather than fact is fundamental to the understanding. These gave a bedrock of material to work with, which I don’t think has changed.117 Adorno’s disjunctive, fragmented vision of history underpins Arc/Procession formally as well as thematically. The drawing is unusually constructed, cobbled together from overlapping sheets of rectangular paper, which are visibly sutured

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36 Kentridge, Untitled, 2006, ink and pencil on paper, showing (below) how Arc/Procession was conceived as part of a larger circular procession and (above) Bernardo Bertolucci’s head-on portrayal of a procession versus Francisco de Goya’s diagonal rendering. Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge)

together with pieces of masking tape (Fig. 2).118 The piece fans across the wall in a huge arc, with each sheet of paper roughly encapsulating a figure. While the exposed seams between each page atomize the composition into discrete slices, the text flowing in the opposite direction to the figures and the abrupt shifts in color between pages further interrupt the possibility of narrative continuity. Even though the linking of individual pages together summons a cinematic mode of sequencing, the flimsiness of the whole unit implies the potential reversibility or resequencing of this proposed narrative chain.119 When Kentridge describes this work as “a row of fragments,” he again reprises a Benjaminian grammar, one that conceives history as a series of units to be shuffled or resequenced, as in the potentially interchangeable “volutes” that compose Benjamin’s Arcades Project.120 For Benjamin and Adorno, as for Kentridge, such an exploded view of history is rooted in a crisis of sequencing historical time—a crisis provoked by revolution, war, and the radical breaks with history that are similarly expressed by the resetting of the French Revolutionary calendar or the Second New Year Cape Town procession. Under such pressures, narrative shatters, too. The medium of film, which can be physically cut into pieces and then spliced back together, so that narrative time becomes malleable and endlessly rearrangable, like volutes, accords with such a Benjaminian view of history. As he indicated in a sketch, Kentridge conceived of Arc/Procession as visualizing such a history of slivers and slices and as a mere section of a larger cyclical panorama in which there is no conceivable beginning or end, only an endless cycle around and around (Fig. 36). Eventually, all Kentridge’s processions would stretch into this cyclical form, spinning on their axes as characters process around and around

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38 Kentridge, still from Overvloed, 1999, animated film with paper cutout silhouettes, video footage, charcoal and pastel animated drawing, shadows, water, and text projected onto the ceiling, 6 minutes. Civic Hall, Amsterdam (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

37 Kentridge, Atlas Procession, Kwazulu-Natal, S.A.: Caversham Press, 2000, first of a set of 3 etchings on a map spread from Stieler’s Hand-Atlas, Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1906, 171⁄8 ⫻ 14 in.

(43.6 ⫻ 35.5 cm) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

a large central circle, as in his Atlas Processions and the artist’s numerous circular processions of the past decade (Fig. 37).

Revolving, Revolt, Revolution Finally, we see the revolutionary thematics of the procession shift from a poetics of content to one of form, as Kentridge’s processionists physically start revolving around a circular core in an endless cycle. And although regime change and political revolution often signal breaks in history, the word “revolution” has etymological origins as a continuous cyclical narrative, an endless repetition of history that is a “revolving” as well as a revolt.121 Kentridge’s processions, we come to find, are based on this conception of dynamic temporal change, a notion that comes to the fore in the full circular revolutions of Atlas Procession.122 Kentridge’s visual model for Arc/Procession, with its figures arranged around a central, circular axis, was a Renaissance tondo drawing he saw in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1986. The other templates for rendering processions that he had considered (and sketched out for Breidbach, Fig. 36)—Bertolucci’s straight-on view of the procession in Novecento and Francisco de Goya’s Black paintings depicting approaching crowds from an oblique angle—were both “extremely static,” he felt.123 Searching for a more dynamic rendering of the procession, the artist came up with the idea of a long, thin drawing that would physically force a temporal reading; curving the ribbon of paper into an arc, along with monumentalizing it, would render it impossible to apprehend the work in a single instantaneous glance. He noted, “If one actually curves the horizon line, so that in each section of the curve people are standing upright on the ground, the

viewer can’t look at it all in one. You see it as a row of fragments.”124 What is most elemental to Kentridge’s process of drawn animation is the way that it spins drawing into a thread of time. “I remember thinking that I could put people around that circle and I would have a form that could be used to show a lot of people moving and that would encapsulate time,” he recalled.125 Kentridge’s desire for his processional imagery to express or “encapsulate time” in the same way as his filmic animation reveals underlying alliances between his images of processions and his animation process. The artist has self-consciously infused both with the dynamic of temporal change—which in turn enables their evocation of political change.

In order to further “encapsulate time,” Kentridge also borrowed the traditional formal means of visualizing time as a circle. More than reels of film or their looping replay format, Kentridge’s revolving processions call up another kind of “stone-age” instrument: the sundial, or the circular calendars and celestial charts of the Renaissance to which the word “revolution” was first applied. Kentridge’s circling processionists thus creep around the face of a clock, their steps aligning with spatial coordinates on the arc of time, so that each processionist’s step becomes a temporal marker dashing around a clock face—a step in and through time.

The Atlas Processions are closely related to Kentridge’s 1999 projection Overvloed of the previous year, a six-minute animated film commissioned for the dome of Amsterdam’s Civic Hall (Fig. 38). For this installation, Kentridge projected shadowy figures made of cut-paper silhouettes onto the domed ceiling, layering his aerial walkers with projections of video footage, charcoal-and-pastel animated drawing, shadows, and water. Weaving through these visual elements were streams of text, aphoristic fragments of Dutch and African proverbs that recalled Nietzschean aphorisms, or Benjamin’s and Adorno’s splintered fragments of thought. These shattered trails of cross-cultural communication—“Getting thin is not dying,” “A nicely built city never resists destruction”— circle around each other, suggesting that the histories of the Netherlands

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and South Africa are historically bound, yet discursively disconnected.126 As in the film Johannesburg, the watery flows are echoed in the constant temporal surge of the procession and the tension of advancing time it underscores. Here, however, flooding bears with it threatening local meanings, verging as it does on a national psychosis for the Dutch.127 Discussing his process of making these foreshortened figures in the studio, with the hope that they would project onto the domed ceiling as planned, Kentridge noted that “they worked, walked, very beautifully,” his word choice evincing a telling correspondence between his process (“working”) and the procession (“walking”) that again briefly illuminates the subterranean connections between the artist’s process and his processions.128 This verbal slippage also points to Kentridge’s concern with prodding the viewer into an active engagement with his work, so that a participatory aesthetics of somatic engagement vies with the ocular draw of the image.

As early as Arc/Procession, Kentridge had sought to emphasize a temporal and physicalized reading of the work by arching its horizon, thereby mandating that viewers physically move at least their heads, if not their whole bodies, to accommodate the drawing’s fan-shaped, twenty-four-foot span. Likewise, Stair Procession winds three flights up the stairwell of New York’s PS1, requiring the viewer to walk up to look at the work, thereby reenacting the climbing bodies of Kentridge’s processionists.

This fluid interchange between the movements of Kentridge’s processionists and those of his viewers in turn refers back to the installation of Smoke, Ashes, Fable in the central stairwell of Kentridge’s home, in a site that demands he view this touchstone procession every day from the bobbing perspective of his own body as he ascends and descends his stairs.

Overvloed further developed this reciprocation between the depicted movement of the procession through space and the physical ambulation required by the viewer to apprehend it.

For as the Overvloed procession revolved around the dome in its site-specific installation, the artist imagined viewers walking around the space beneath and gazing up into the moving ceiling as one does in a Renaissance church. Alternatively, viewers could peer down into the tiny mirror given each of the four hundred guests, which reversed the mirrored text on the ceiling to make it legible, functioning like a personalized mobile screen. “The project became about ways of looking either down into what was almost a little prayer book, the mirror, or looking up into the ceiling, into heaven,” Kentridge explained.129 Here, the artist cycles us back to an earlier prayer book—the one his grandfather once held—and which the iconic marcher of Marchepied has been clutching throughout. Walking and reading, circling forward, yet always retracing the same horizon of memory, Kentridge’s figures revolve around Overvloed waving the flags and wielding the banners of his other revolutionary marchers.

The prayer book/screens of Overvloed also gave rise to the birth of the viewer as the walking reader, for it set free the audience to roam the space of Amsterdam’s Civic Hall, heads bowed in contemplation like the iconic reader, holding their devotional mirrors/prayer books, just as he does. “With the mirror, you simply swivel your body and you swivel the whole image,” Kentridge explained.130 In this way, the movement of the viewer’s body came to dictate the reading of the procession, definitively tying together in swirls of motion the walk-

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39 Kentridge, still from What Will Come (Has Already Come), 2006, anamorphic film projected onto a circular horizontal screen and reflected back, anamorphically adjusted, in a vertical metal cylinder, 8 minutes, 40 seconds (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

ing, shadowy figures circling above and the bowed heads of the pacing viewers below.

Kentridge clearly conceived the revolving procession of Overvloed as a cross-cultural journey of sorts, a maritime excursion from one continent to another that is emphasized by his trotting figures’ circular trajectory around what becomes a virtual globe. When the artist speaks of Overvloed in terms of “what it means to go round a cupola, as if you are going round the world,”131 he invokes an image of the world as a circular track around which figures process, returning us to ancient astrological and calendrical images of temporal change.132 However, the artist would not push this notion into full visibility until a subsequent film, What Will Come (Has Already Come) from 2006, an 8-minute 40-second anamorphic film projected onto a circular horizontal screen and reflected back in a vertical metal cylinder. Its title alluding to the spiraling repetitions of history, the film is dominated by images of flight as a bird, a fly, a biplane, and other aerial objects circle and soar around the screen along with another of Kentridge’s processions.

At one juncture, a globe with crutchlike legs appears, hopping and skipping around the circular disk (Fig. 39).

Losing its legs, the anthropomorphized globe takes flight and begins revolving around the screen, now explicitly conflating the passage of time and the turning of the earth with the idea of traveling through space (Fig. 40). And finally the walking man starts to fly! Sheer revolving animated movement has replaced the once literalized plodding of earthbound figures.

Now everything races and revolves around the cylindrical core in a dematerialized procession of spinning filmic images.

The rapidly mutating forms streaking past at breakneck speed and constantly disappearing from view demand that the viewer pursue the flying objects and racing figures, forcing her to circle around the screen with them.133 And as the viewer walks around and around the screen, chasing the spinning images, she becomes the walking, peering figure, performatively reenacting both the striding bodies of the processional figures and the ambulations of the artist’s own process.

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ing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning.

What ends in clarity does not begin that way.”

10. Kentridge, quoted in Rosenthal, William Kentridge, 67.

11. Despite the rough-hewn quality of this collage, Kentridge clearly demarcates the book as open, twisting the natural angle of the spine exaggeratedly clockwise in order to do so.

12. For an excellent history of walking that discusses the legendary pacings of the peripatetic philosophers and the long philosophical tradition of walking and thinking that follows, see Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2001).

13. Kentridge, interview with the author, Boston, March 18, 2009.

14. In this context, Kentridge’s walking becomes a metaphor for journeying, so that the physicality of the step suggests not thought but flights of imaginative travel (to the moon and beyond).

40 Kentridge, still from What Will Come (Has Already Come) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

Leora Maltz-Leca is assistant professor of contemporary art at the Rhode Island School of Design. A 2011 recipient of a Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s Grant and a 2012 Getty postdoctoral fellow, she is currently completing a book on William Kentridge titled “Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises” [History of Art and Visual Culture, Rhode Island School of Design, 2 College Street, Providence, R.I. 02903, lmaltzle@risd.edu].

Notes I am extremely grateful to William Kentridge for his graciousness and generosity, and to his superb studio staff: Natalie Dembo, Linda Liebowitz, and, most of all, Anne McIlleron, who has been helpful in too many ways to enumerate. I am indebted to Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Suzanne Blier for their long-standing support of my work. I also want to thank Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Angela Breidbach, Ruth Simbao, Gemma Rodrigues, Steven Nelson, Joni Brenner, Liza Essers, Ara Merjian, Judy Hecker, Martha Kennedy, and of course, Benedict Leca; Karen Lang and The Art Bulletin’s readers and editors for their insightful comments; the Getty Research Institute, the Swann Foundation for Animation, and the Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s Program; and finally, audiences at the Library of Congress, the Getty Research Institute, and the Rhode Island School of Design, where I delivered versions of this essay as a talk.

1. William Kentridge, quoted in Angela Breidbach and William Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud: Conversations with Angela Breidbach (Cologne: Walther König, 2006), 16.

2. William Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement,” in Art from South Africa (London: Museum of Modern Art; Oxford: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 52. On other occasions, Kentridge has spoken of the city’s sense of peripheralism, especially during the isolated years of late apartheid.

See Kentridge, “Zeno at 4 am—Director’s Note” (October 2001), in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge (Milan: Skira/Castello di Rivoli, 2003), 173.

3. William Kentridge, “Felix in Exile: Geography of Memory” (lecture, Northwestern University, November 1994), in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge (Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1998), 93.

4. William Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement for ‘9 Drawings for Projection,’ ” exh. cat., Spier Amphitheatre, Stellenbosch, S.A., Old Fort at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, and other venues, March 2004, n.p.

5. Kentridge, “Felix in Exile,” 7.

6. Kentridge, quoted in Mark Rosenthal, ed., William Kentridge: Five Themes (San Francisco: SFMOMA, 2009), 13.

7. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Suspended Step,” in The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 11.

8. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Weight of a Thought,” in The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanity, 1997), 81.

9. Kentridge, interview by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “William Kentridge,” in PressPlay: Contemporary Artists in Conversation (New York: Phaidon, 2005), 408: “So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought. . . . The uncertain and imprecise way of construct-

15. Samuel Beckett often leans over Kentridge’s drawing hand; “footfalls” is Beckett’s term from his eponymous play about pacing. In his most recent project, an artist’s book called Everyone Their Own Projector, Kentridge returns to his routes around the studio in a double-page spread he titles Parcours l’Atelier, which, as he describes, “is a route of a walk around the studio: the bed for sleeping, defensive sleeping in the chair, a glimpse of the idea disappearing. . . . It’s a fictional making up of a series of different routes, as if I had a marker on me checking my steps.” Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009. Kentridge also chose “Parcours l’Atelier” as one of the five central themes of his work for his recent retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 16. The artist commented, “I wasn’t thinking of shul, but I’m sure that’s what the image is of: he kind of looks like my grandfather davening in shul. A man in that position with a book. . . . Because otherwise you don’t read when you’re standing. . . . The two-handed holding of a book is an important way of walking.” Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009. The triplicate rendering of this figure in Embarkation (Fig. 20) further suggests an arc of movement.

17. Titled I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, this lecture-performance saw Kentridge splitting into a veritable stack of Russian dolls as the live Kentridge interacted with screened film footage of multiple projected versions of himself. Commissioned by Kentridge’s longtime curatorial collaborator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, it was performed in Sydney in 2008, again in New York in November 2009, as part of RoseLee Goldberg’s Performa, in March 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and finally in Johannesburg in June 2010.

18. William Kentridge, “William Kentridge: Artist in Residence,” Friends of the South African National Gallery Newsletter 33 (December 1991): 4.

19. As Kentridge noted after the residency (ibid.): “The actual physical activity (what observers would see) is at best dull. But when brought to consciousness, (as performing the drawing would make it) it is clearly ridiculous. I foresaw that if I simply went on with my drawings as my project at the gallery, I would end up acting out the making of a drawing and what people would see would not be me drawing, but me acting out some stereotypical idea of how it should look for a drawing to be done.”

20. At the time, Kentridge was understandably disenchanted with the requirement of working publicly: “I think it unrealistic to expect strong work to be made by anyone in those conditions,” he wrote (ibid.).

Nonetheless, this enforced interference in his working routine served to effectively foreground his new process “as a better performance art than simply drawing,” as he himself concluded after the residency.

21. At Kentridge’s DIA Art Foundation (New York) lecture on the work of Bruce Nauman, he simultaneously showed film footage of Jackson Pollock painting and Nauman performing, while reading aloud Beckett’s Play. Kentridge’s invocation of the Irish playwright’s cryptically titled Play suggests his own interest in juggling the ludic and the theatrical.

22. By “fortuna,” Kentridge refers to the combination of chance, event, and planning that collide to produce a drawing, defining it as “the general term I use for this range of agencies, something other than cold, statistical chance, and something too, outside the range of rational control.” William Kentridge, “Fortuna: Neither Program nor Chance in the Making of Images,” Cycnos 11, no. 1 (1994): 165.

23. Much of Jacques Derrida’s writerly process revolves around exploring such “friendships,” that is, forging lateral connections among words or concepts of shared etymologies. See Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 142. In this context, Derrida is referring to the proximity between the words penser (thinking) and peser (weighing). Kentridge, likewise, often starts with word plays and lexical juxtapositions based on etymological connections or homological resonances. The word pair “thinking/weighing,” in fact, subtends his film Weighing . . . and Wanting; for more on this, see Leora Maltz-Leca, “Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises” (forthcoming), chap. 4.

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24. Kentridge, in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud, 66. See ibid., 67, for the artist’s sketch of his thinking process regarding Felix in Exile.

25. Kentridge, “Felix in Exile,” 7.

26. Rosalind Krauss, “ ‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” October, no. 92 (2000): 8.

27. Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement,” 52.

28. A signal drawing from the film Johannesburg shows a naked Felix Teitelbaum staring out at a tangle of urban highways, the scene dominated by an enormous billboard bearing the slogan “Captive of the City.”

29. Kentridge, quoted in Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, 1998, 42.

30. Kentridge, “Fortuna,” 165.

31. In 1987, Antoine Watteau’s painting was likely more interesting to Kentridge for its famed theatricality and its representation of the period’s stereotypical decadence than for its semiprocessional imagery.

For Kentridge, the pre-Revolutionary fantasy world of Watteau’s fête galante, much like the touted hedonism of Max Beckmann’s pre– World War II Berlin, served as an analogue of decadent white South Africa in the 1980s. Kentridge also endows Watteau’s ambling subjects with local meanings, figuring their absorption as symptomatic of apartheid’s radical social fragmentation and their blindness as both a product of apartheid’s degenerate society and a feature necessary for survival within it.

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president of South Africa and de Klerk was installed as interim president.

In the September 6 election, despite fears of a right-wing Afrikaner victory, the National Party won by an overwhelming majority, and de Klerk assumed office on September 20. Before the end of that year, seven senior ANC delegates were released from prison (October 15, 1989) followed by another five antiapartheid leaders a month later (November 16), enormous rallies were held in celebration, and on December 13, de Klerk and Mandela held talks.

46. Numerous historians view 1989 as a pivotal year. See H. Marais, Limits to Change: South Africa; The Political Economy of Transition (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2001); or Michael Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Beyond the borders of South Africa, and in the wake of the Berlin Wall, 1989 has been seen as an epic year that inaugurated a series of democratizations throughout the African continent—so much so that it is claimed to have initiated “a second independence” for the continent. See Richard Joseph, “Democratization in Africa after 1989: Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives,” Comparative Politics 29, no.

3 (1997): 363– 82.

47. J. A. du Pisani, M. Broodryk, and P. W. Coetzer, “Protest Marches in South Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 28, no. 4 (1990): 573.

48. For example, on the single day of October 14, 1989, one could find approximately 150,000 people participating in seventeen different marches countrywide; cited in ibid.

32. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009.

49. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

50. For a comprehensive compendium of South African posters of the 1980s, see Judy Seidman, Red on Black: The Story of the South African Poster Movement (Johannesburg: STE/South African History Archive, 2007).

34. Kentridge’s description of his own nose, which he used as the template for the drawings of The Nose.

35. The flip book, a kind of precinema also called cinéma de poche, dates to the 1860s. At its zenith, in the 1870s and 1880s, it expressed the contemporary fascination with the study of motion, often using the images of Eadweard Muybridge’s zoogyroscopes and Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography as source material.

36. Kentridge, quoted in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud, 35.

37. According to the artist (interview, March 18, 2009), this hand-drawn, 1:50⬙ animation, Lecture on a Chair, which dates to the early 1980s, is about “a person talking about a chair, and he talks and talks and talks, and the weight of his words eventually collapses the chair. And the chair gets up from under the words and kicks the man out. And he stays there by itself.”

38. Kentridge, quoted in Robert Enright and William Kentridge, “Achievements of Indecision: The Art of William Kentridge,” BorderCrossings, February 2002, 55.

39. The early flip books presage this kind of transmutation, as do later iterations like the 2004 Cyclopedia of Drawing, a homage to ÉtienneJules Marey’s early images of birds in flight, in which a figure slowly transforms into a bird, flapping its wings within the cage of the page, before settling into a corner, human once more. Marey, Physiologie du mouvement: Le vol des oiseaux (Paris: G. Masson, 1890).

40. Steven Henry Madoff, “William Kentridge: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,” Artforum, October 2009: 228.

41. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009.

42. William Kentridge, “Black Box-Interview,” Afritopic, 2005, www.afritopic .com. Kentridge received his bachelor’s degree in African history and politics.

43. A remark of Jean Miller, a white pensioner to researcher Helena Broadbridge, “Negotiating Post-Apartheid Boundaries and Identities: An Anthropological Study of the Creation of a Cape Town Suburb” (PhD diss., University of Stellenbosch, 2001), 81.

44. Nelson Mandela, interview by Tom Carver, The Last Mile: Africa, Mandela and Democracy, M-Net (a South African cable TV station), 1992.

45. This series of transformations was sparked by President P. W. Botha’s stroke in February 1989, after which he was encouraged to resign as leader of the National Party (NP). His appointment of the moderate education minister F. W. de Klerk as party head in February 1989 offered little evidence for the reforms that would ensue. But once in power, de Klerk immediately announced the need for political change: the ongoing political violence that had incited the government to institute a state of emergency four years earlier had only worsened, destroying the last vestiges of civil liberties with it, while the economy, seriously damaged by international sanctions, had suffered massive currency devaluation. Under increasing pressure from his own party, Botha dissolved Parliament in May 1989, announced an upcoming general election (whites only), and agreed to an official meeting with banned African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela. A month after this historic meeting, on August 15, 1989, Botha resigned as

51. Christopher Wren, “20,000 Apartheid Foes Allowed to March through Johannesburg,” New York Times, September 16, 1989.

52. Kentridge’s huge banner was seen by others: Shaun de Waal, chief film critic at Johannesburg’s Mail and Guardian “remembers taking part in the first fully legal protest march through central Johannesburg in 1989, and seeing in the distance, bobbing above the heads of the crowd, a big poster depicting boxed heads and the mysterious legend, ‘Casspirs full of love.’ It turned out to be borne by Kentridge.” Shaun de Waal, “Art of Reversals,” Mail and Guardian Friday (Johannesburg), March 10 –16, 2006. This banner was probably the same one that had been made for Kentridge’s exhibition earlier that year at London’s Victoria Miro gallery.

53. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009.

54. Study for Arc/Procession I, 1989 (Fig. 33), is clearly dated in the topright corner: “Sept. 25, 1989.”

55. The full quote from the Greek historian, which Kentridge also employed at the conclusion of his 2001 film Zeno Writing, is “Smoke, Ashes, Fable / Where are they all now? / Perhaps they are no longer fable.”

56. Kentridge, in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud, 37.

57. Kentridge, interview by Christov-Bakargiev, “William Kentridge,” 408, 414.

58. Along with the film’s visual invocation of the Platonic shadow procession, Kentridge in his lectures and writings on this film has explicated this relation to the Platonic allegory.

59. In a famous 1970 essay, Jean-Louis Baudry used the Platonic allegory as a template for cinematic experience. Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” trans. Jean Andrews and Bernard Augst, Camera Obscura 1, no. 11 (1976): 104 –26. Others have noted the similarities between shadow puppets and cinema, too: Francis MacDonald Cornford, for example, in his notes to The Republic, explains, “A modern Plato would compare his Cave to an underground cinema.” Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 228 n.

60. William James rejected metaphors such as “chain” or “train” as being too disjunctive or “jointed,” choosing instead natural processes as a model for a consciousness that “flows.” James, The Principles of Psychology, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 233.

61. Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement” for 9 Drawings for Projection.

62. Kentridge, “Felix in Exile,” 93.

63. Beckett’s response to the persecution of Vaclav Havel, Catastrophe employs the conceit of a director issuing instructions to an assistant who trots back and forth making onstage adjustments to a human “monument.”

64. “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators

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are fused into one carefully thought out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible. . . .” Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Carl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. In Kentridge’s retrospective curated by Mark Rosenthal, the artist chose the phrase “Thick Time” for his Drawings for Projection series, one of the five themes of his works.

65. Krauss, “ ‘The Rock,’ ” 5.

66. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (New York: Little, Brown, 1994).

67. For the generation born after the 1960s in particular, this signal event was further dramatized by what would be their first sighting of the banned face of the antiapartheid leader, who during his imprisonment for twenty-seven years had become unrecognizable to the majority of his followers.

68. Mandela was originally supposed to be flown to Johannesburg, which had been his home prior to his imprisonment, but he wished to be released in Cape Town and to physically walk through the prison gates—although he suggestively displaces this as a production of the SABC (the government-run South African Broadcast Company).

Under President Botha, the march would have been banned, marchers would have defied that ban, and violence would have resulted.

The new president lived up to his promise to ease restrictions on political gatherings and permitted the march to take place.”

82. Pisani et al., “Protest Marches,” 574, 575.

83. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). For Ozouf, these thousands of processions and festivals were a form of transgressive release (following Sigmund Freud), “a people’s idealized expression of itself” (after Emile Durkheim), and a reenactment of a foundational historical moment.

84. Jonathan Sperber, “Festivals of National Unity in the German Revolution of 1848 –1849,” Past and Present 136 (1992): 116.

85. New York Times journalist Joseph Lelyveld, in relating the story of Philip Kgosana, whose 1960 freedom march helped to precipitate an earlier state of emergency, called this a time when “the Bastille might have been stormed in South Africa and wasn’t”; quoted in Anthony Sampson, “In Apartheid’s Grip,” New York Times, October 13, 1985.

69. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 490 –91.

86. Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele, musing on the strangely uncathartic nature of the South African regime change. Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994), 9.

70. Ibid., 493.

87. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 494.

71. Ibid., 494, my emphasis.

88. But after two weeks of “looking into space and brooding . . . [I] conceded: I would allow myself to start with Soho, the war-horse from the other films. He would make a short entrance before his daughter Liberty Eckstein took over. In the end, she did not get a look in.” Kentridge, “Fortuna,” 164. Krauss (“ ‘The Rock,’ ” 14) argues that the jettisoning of Liberty Eckstein indicates Kentridge’s indebtedness to the traditions of animation, with their limited, serial characters. Nonetheless, the artist included a new character, Thandi, in his next film, Felix in Exile.

72. Mandela’s spoken words in The Last Mile (my emphasis) must have firmly lodged themselves in some corner of Kentridge’s mind, for the latter part of Mandela’s phrase— his invocation of Belshazzar’s dream—reemerged years later as marginalia in Kentridge’s sketchpad, a kernel that would blossom into his 1996 film Weighing . . . and Wanting.

73. N’Dour is interviewed partly because the documentary covers Mandela’s 1992 trip to Senegal, where the singer was commissioned to write and perform a song for Mandela. N’Dour states: “There were many dictators who ruled by force. There are millions of us. We can demonstrate in the streets. Thousands have died, but we will get what we want. Mandela encouraged this system of refusal.” The Last Mile at 24 minutes, 32 seconds. My translation from the French.

74. This half-hour documentary, written and directed by Tom Carver, with Kentridge as associate producer, detailed Mandela’s 1993 visits to Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.

75. Kentridge, “Fortuna,” 165.

76. In 1990, processions continued to be a fraught proposition, often threatening to spiral into the horrific violence engulfing the country during this transitional period, which claimed thousands of lives.

77. Organized by the Pan African Congress (PAC) as a peaceful demonstration of 5,000 to 7,000 people, the official death toll at Sharpeville was 69 people killed, including 8 women and 10 children, and 180 people injured, including 31 women and 19 children. At Soweto in 1976, official police reports stated the death toll at 23 and the injured at 1,000, most of whom were children. But these figures are notoriously fabricated; Reuters estimated the Soweto dead at between 500 and 700.

78. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009. Archival photographs at the Hector Pietersen Museum in Soweto—the museum named for the thirteen-year-old boy who was one of the first children shot on June 16 —record Kentridge and his wife Anne marching through Johannesburg on the following day, June 17, 1976.

79. The legislative machinery for banning public marches began with amendments to the Suppression of Communism Act of 1954 and the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956, which prohibited public gatherings if they threatened to endanger public peace or cause racial hostility. In 1961 and 1962 (after Sharpeville), these laws were made more restrictive, and by 1973 the Gatherings and Demonstrations Act stated that gatherings of more than eleven people had to be held on private premises and all open-air gatherings near the Houses of Parliament or near courts were prohibited. After the 1976 Soweto riots, temporary laws (repeatedly extended throughout the late 1970s and 1980s) banned all outdoor gatherings, with the exception of sporting and religious events. Violators, especially those from the political opposition, could be arrested and imprisoned without trial. See Pisani et al., “Protest Marches,” 581, for this history.

80. Through this risky, but ultimately successful gambit, de Klerk also won overnight international approval. The United States, for example, responded promptly to the Cape Town march and all it represented by lifting its economic sanctions against South Africa.

81. Mandela (Long Walk, 480 – 81) noted, “In his inaugural address, Mr de Klerk said his government was committed to peace. . . . But his commitment to a new order was demonstrated only after his inauguration when a march was planned in Cape Town to protest police brutality.

It was to be led by Archbishop Tutu and the Reverend Allan Boesak.

89. In a sense, Kentridge’s work had long been made “after Paris,” with drawings such as Embarkation (after Watteau, 1987), Swinging Lady (after Honoré Fragonard, 1986), and Boating Party (after Auguste Renoir, 1985), all nodding toward Paris and its artists as the ur-location of European modernity.

90. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009.

91. Hollis Urban Liverpool, “Origins of Rituals and Customs in the Trinidad Carnival: African or European?” Drama Review 42, no. 3 (1988): 24 –37.

Liverpool traces the origins of Caribbean carnival traditions such as Trinidad’s specifically back to Yoruba masking processions, claiming African rather than European origins for such processions and citing scholars with broader claims: that medieval European carnival traditions themselves can be traced back to ancient Egyptian processionals.

92. Kentridge employed an image of a clock with no hands in Faustus in Africa, and he further developed this theme in History of the Main Complaint. For more on these temporal arrests, see Jessica Dubow and Ruth Rosengarten’s excellent essay “History as the Main Complaint: William Kentridge and the Making of Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Art History 27, no. 4 (September 2004): 671–90.

93. Theorists from Mikhail Bakhtin to Joseph Roach have long stressed the boundary-defying, revolutionary potential of processions. Michael Holquist states, “Bakhtin’s carnival is revolution itself.” Holquist, prologue to Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), xvii. See also Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

94. At this time, Johannesburg housed the law offices of the young Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, and a newly regrouped ANC fought apartheid through the channels of law and organized dozens of historic marches through the city streets.

95. In his recent study of the modern city as a site of revolutionary politics, class, and ecological struggles, David Harvey writes that “the right to the city has to be construed not as a right to that which already exists, but as a right to rebuild and re-create the city as a socialist body politic in a completely different image.” Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 138.

96. J. M. Coetzee, “History of the Main Complaint,” in William Kentridge,

by Neal Benezra, Dan Cameron et al. (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, 2001), 84. Emily Apter, like others, sees a connection between this damaged landscape and the injured body/body politic, tying these violations of human rights and ecology together as constituent elements of a sophisticated “aesthetics of critical habitat that must be framed by the politics of anti-globalization.” Apter, “The Aesthetics of Critical Habitat,” October, no. 99 (2002): 21– 44.

97. This was Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s phrase, which was widely adopted by politicians and press alike as a way to characterize the socalled new South Africa.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE AND THE PROCESS OF CHANGE

98. See Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’ ” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 84 –98.

99. The quotation above comes from the Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009.

100. However, the rubbery aesthetics of reversibility that govern Kentridge’s animations imply that this early filmic procession’s step forward can just as easily become a step back; indeed, in Johannesburg, the procession’s advance quickly becomes a retreat, countering any insinuation of triumphalism.

101. Aristotle and many after him have commented on the hyena’s association with ambivalence and ambiguity, which traces back to perceptions about its sexual ambivalence, resulting from the species’ lack of phenotypic differentiation (the female has an enlarged clitoris that looks like a penis). See Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “Sarah and the Hyena: Laughter, Menstruation, and the Genesis of a Double Entendre,” History of Religions 36, no. 1 (1996): 13– 41.

102. Music and dance, especially the famous toyi-toyi, were central to apartheid-era resistance. “Almost every phase of our struggle had its own song,” declared a musician in Amandla, a recent documentary about the only “revolution fought in four-part harmony.” Lee Hirsch, Amandla: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, Sherry Simpson Dean and Lee Hirsch, producers, 2003. The distinctive toyi-toyi dance performed at political rallies is reenacted by the animated cat in Kentridge’s Shadow Procession; many of Kentridge’s scores use local music and powerful group vocals associated with apartheid-era resistance.

103. Ari Sitas, “Processions and Public Rituals,” in Benezra, Cameron et al., William Kentridge, 59 – 65.

104. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256.

105. For a pan-African discussion of the aesthetics of nationalist parades and their role in negotiating dictatorial displays of power and the ambiguous sycophancies they enable, see Achille Mbembe, “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity,” in On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

106. Kentridge, quoting Haile Selassie, quoted in Benezra, in Benezra, Cameron et al., William Kentridge, 19, based on a conversation with the artist, who located the source of the quote in Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Emperor (New York: Vintage International, 1989).

Kapuscinski’s book is in turn an elaborate allegory for the story of the downfall of the Polish Communist leader Edward Gierek.

107. Marxism was central to the ANC’s political and economic model from the 1950s until the late 1980s. The ANC maintained close contacts with South Africa’s Communist Party and with Moscow, where many ANC leaders were educated. South Africa’s strategic location and its production of uranium made it a key arena in which Cold War politics were played out— hence, the CIA’s surveillance of ANC activity. It was, in fact, the CIA, working closely with the South African government, that was responsible for Mandela’s final capture in 1963. In this sense, the collapse of Communism in 1989 was not unrelated to events in South Africa: a key stumbling block had always been white fear of a black leadership nationalizing businesses. The failure of Communism in the late 1980s neutralized these fears, allowing for a changed political climate in which the release of Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC and Communist Party could proceed. Kentridge refers to this moment in Johannesburg when Soho, a caricature of Capitalism, tosses a miniature Bolshevik hammer and sickle out of his office.

108. In Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen’s famous analysis, genocidal famines such as the Bengal famine of 1943 were avoidable: they stand as the sign of government failure (Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). One of the reasons for Selassie’s overthrow was his supposed lack of knowledge of the massive famine that was decimating large sections of Ethiopia and that was finally brought to his attention by the United Nations. Indeed, his “blindness” to the famine illustrates Sen’s empirical study concluding that famines do not occur in democracies. In this light, famine becomes fatefully symptomatic of the failure of government.

109. Benjamin, “Theses on Philosophy of History,” 258 –59.

110. Kentridge, quoted in Kay Wilson, William Kentridge Prints (New York: David Krut, 2006), 42.

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114. Rahel Jaeggi, “ ‘No Individual Can Resist’: Minima Moralia’s Critique of Forms of Life,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory 12, no. 1 (March 2005): 69.

115. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up in 1994 to address apartheid crimes, headed by Archbishop Tutu. The TRC did not prosecute apartheid criminals but instead exacted their testimony with the promise of amnesty, and it awarded limited financial damages to some victims.

116. Kentridge’s views on the philosophy of history are eclectic. He takes up Hegel’s ideas selectively—accepting, for example, his notions about historical process but rejecting their teleological implications— but even these Hegelian strands may appear at odds with the artist’s interest in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s revisions of Hegelian philosophies of history. Kentridge is, of course, uninterested in adopting wholesale any philosophical system, but rather seizes on particular ideas from a range of thinkers. In any event, his embrace of contradiction and inconsistency liberates him from traditional philosophical demands for a systematic or even consistent approach.

117. Kentridge, quoted in Enright and Kentridge, “Achievements of Indecision,” 35, my emphasis.

118. Of the two versions of Arc/Procession, Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass is the larger drawing, measuring 8 ft. 101⁄4 in. by 24 ft. 61⁄2 in. (2.7 by 7.48 m), consisting of eleven sheets, while Smoke, Ashes, Fable consists of only three or four, measuring 5 ft. 101⁄8 in. by 12 ft. 75⁄8 in. (1.78 by 3.85 m). The individual sheets of Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up were originally held together with masking tape (Fig. 2); however, when the drawing was sold to and installed at the Tate, the tape was replaced with clear pushpins.

119. While sequence is the organizational structure that usually underpins coherent narrative, Kentridge uses the term to describe changes to a single drawing that forms a single filmic fragment: “it’s very easy to start a sequence without knowing necessarily how it links together and how it will end,” he states. Key for him is that such sequences are not preplanned; moreover, they often do not connect together in any developmental fashion in the final film. See William Kentridge, “An Interest in the Making of Things: An Interview with William Kentridge” (1992), in Theater and Change in South Africa, ed. Geoffrey Davis and Anne Fuchs (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996), 143.

120. Kentridge, in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud, 16.

121. Both revolve and revolt derive from the Latin revolvere, meaning to turn or roll back.

122. Kentridge’s Phenakistoscope (2000) in particular revisits Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope and other early viewing apparatuses: it shows a series of walking figures arrayed around a gramophone disk, which the viewer can move with a handle. The “figures should appear to stay in place, only passing their burdens from one to another.” Kentridge, in Wilson, William Kentridge Prints, 89.

123. Kentridge, in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud, 16.

124. Ibid.

125. Ibid., 17.

126. The Amsterdam Civic Hall was built in 1648 —four years before the Dutch arrival in South Africa—at the zenith of the Dutch golden age of mercantile colonialism. As such, the paintings of the original ceiling fresco, with their scenes of mercantile expansion, navigation, and exploration, formed the ground, as a palimpsest, beneath Kentridge’s projections. The West African proverb “One should not be too hopeful of a ship sailing from Europe” alludes directly to this Dutch maritime history and, in particular, to its colonial vessels.

127. The title Overvloed, with its connotations of abundance and excess, also invokes the thematics of excess, gluttony, and decadence—and the loss and exploitation they inflict—that have characterized Kentridge’s treatments of colonialism since the mid-1980s.

128. Kentridge, in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud, 16.

129. Ibid., 20.

130. Ibid.

111. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009.

131. Ibid., 19.

112. Ibid.

132. Angela Breidbach notes this connection in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud.

113. This is an argument that Theodor Adorno spells out in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, rather than Minima Moralia; nonetheless, it is a conclusion that may be drawn from a broad knowledge of his work. Max Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1982); and Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978).

133. The processional imagery alludes to the exodus of the Ethiopian Jews to Israel after the famine of 1984. Earlier images, such as the gasmasked figures and Italian phrases like “L’Inesorabile Avanzata” (The Inexorable Advance) speak to the colonial occupation of Ethiopia between the world wars.