The Troubles of the Neck
ROSALIND E. KRAUSS In 2016, the creative director of New York’s Park Avenue Armory, Pierre Audi, ushered William Kentridge into the Armory’s 3,000-foot-long Drill Hall to propose a new project. Kentridge, fresh from Triumphs and Laments, his 2016 shadow procession along 550 meters of the banks of the Tiber River, must have had three lemons cross his face. A vertical spine down the length of the Drill Hall would create a vast panorama, the backdrop for his choreographic and orchestral portrayal of the massive conscription of Africans into the colonial armies fighting in World War I—a panorama necessarily enacted in Boer English, German, French, Italian, and Swahili—to be known as The Head & the Load. How to create the chaotic scene of an army at war? Kentridge formulates two ways: the mechanization of the human body into surging weapons and the layering of figures into the density of troops. Corporal mechanization is achieved by live, whirling bodies bent into the openings of metallic protrusions, like the conic speakers of gramophone players. Such mechanization has long been a trope within modern art. We only have to think of Picabia’s mechanomorphs: Stieglitz as a camera; Haviland as a desk lamp; and the little American Girl as a spark plug. Around the time of Guernica, Picasso turned to the metal readymade to industrialize his constructed bodies with colanders, automobiles, gas masks, and bicycle seats for heads. The use of mechanical heads for the dancing legs and torsos of the opera’s introductory figures transforms them into the muzzles and handles of weapons. Layering then coagulates the bodies into the surge of troop movement. The whirling bodies are soon seen against the projection of videos onto the spinelike, panoramic backdrop, each body set within turning disks: phonograph records or revolving spools of movie cameras. (As with other of his operas, such as the Met’s production of The Nose, Kentridge handles the scenic décor through projected videos, some focusing details, others fanning over the thousands of feet of panorama—some of it blank; some of it graphic.) Fanning into a continuous line, the bodies become the forward march of troops rotating into broad swathes of projected, black line—arrows conducting the parade’s march. Behind the line spatters emerge: the explosive interruptions along their advance. Fire soon consumes the whole backdrop, scattering the field into a dust of fragments: the disintegration of the ether into the crumble of eraOCTOBER 167, Winter 2019, pp. 171–175. © 2019 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
William Kentridge. Drawing for a panorama screen for The Head & the Load. 2018.
Kentridge. Drawing for a panorama screen for The Head & the Load (detail). 2018.
The Troubles of the Neck
175
sure marks and the shattering into crystals of photographic emulsion. Kentridge is driven again and again to “figure-forth” his own medium, which is the progressive drawing and erasure of the animated body and the consideration of the filmic medium, often composed as a succession of frames. Act I of The Head and the Load is a compilation of such self-reference. But enough of pedantic narrative—feeble in the face of this operatic urgency! The opera layers sound as well as form; the South African composer Philip Miller scores the static of gunfire, the wail of woodwinds, and the plaint and lament of African folk song into pointillist surges of melody that rattle the space of the panorama into breathless melodic eruption. Choral interludes punctuate the score as a quintet emotively renders “God Save the King”—the blades of a film spool fanning across the projection of the head, among others, of Martin Luther King. Soldiers need boots. They need names. They need graves. The Africans impressed into the labor of transporting weapons and matériel across a continent had none. Marching pairs of boots become the rattling grid of a projection of mechanamorphic torsos. The wrenching panorama of destruction and pain ends with the exquisite arias of Meyerbeer’s opera l’Africaine sung under projected drawings of native African birds. Under this dirge pass the missing graves: names, causes of death, and places of burial. Anonymity cancelled at last.
Kentridge. The Head & the Load. 2018.