WILLIAM KENTRIDGE LIBERATING VISION
STEPHEN CLINGMAN
‘What happens at the edges?’
William Kentridge, ‘Peripheral Vision’1
1 IMAGES
Here are some images drawn from William Kentridge’s films and other works over the years.
A typewriter turns into a tree. Leaves of paper lift in the breeze, just as the leaves of a tree would.
In a triumphant scene from a colonial film, a rhinoceros is shot by hunters; later the rhinoceros, turned gymnast, somersaults over a humanoid construction with megaphone head bearing the sign Trauerarbeit
A cat curls itself into a cartoon bomb with its fuse lit; the seconds tick away and it explodes (fig. 5).
A procession marches across the landscape, growing larger as it comes nearer.
A man in a suit on a beach skims a stone over the waves. An African ballerina en pointe flutters like a swan in Swan Lake, brandishing a carbine and waving the red flag of the Chinese revolution. Around, in front and behind her flash pastiches of revolutionary slogans. A notebook with its pages also fluttering is populated with Chinese calligraphy and sparrows flying desperately, hectically as the leaves turn.
A bird in a picture leaves a charcoal trail on the paper and its flight continues across the wall on which the paper is pinned. The trail is the track of time and space.
A large-scale sculpture is comprised of random shapes, splintered in various directions. As you move around it they resolve into the perfect giant image of the world on its hind legs (figs 2, 3).
A coffee-plunger goes down through the earth into the depths of a gold mine beneath Johannesburg.
Blue water flows from the breast pocket of a man with bowed head in a striped suit, a pool rising around him in what seems to be his melancholy and grief.
A procession goes by in an angled arc without beginning or end. A human procession with twirling ritual celebrants, it proceeds also by way of objects: banners and cut-out heads, megaphones, crutches, dancing skeletons, burdens and loads, typist and typewriter, shower and bathtub, walking secateurs, hospital drips. Charcoal drawing, animation, projection, silhouettes and shadows work through a flickering onscreen landscape. The movement is suffering, ecstatic, libidinal, skeletal, spiritual; it is mythic, incantatory, the dance of death, the dance of life (fig. 4).
The Johannesburg Art Gallery crumbles away in time. Through all these images, other dimensions. Music is there: Mozart, Hindemith and African church brass bands, ‘The Internationale’ behind the ballerina, Franco and L’OK Jazz playing ‘Likambo Ya Ngana’ as the tide ebbs and flows on the beach, compositions by Philip
Miller as two processions approach one another on the bank of the Tiber, silhouettes and images on the wall behind them, astonishing vocal arrangements by Nhlanhla Mahlangu set to the filmed drawing of a South African woman, a diviner, dancing through the pages of a notebook, performing the role of the Sibyl of Cumae in a new impassioned guise.
All is done with exquisite touch and skill, something epic about it even in the smallest details. In the films a few seconds will take many hours to create, and it all exists in many modalities of being.
How to put it together? What does it mean at any given moment in Kentridge’s work, and collectively in time? These are questions to absorb us, but that can only be addressed indirectly. We have to walk around them.
2 THE EXHIBITION
An exhibition is a place for walking through, for contemplation, for reverie, for exhilaration, for stillness. It is a place for circumambulation – the pictures and installations around you as you walk, your routes around the pictures as you contemplate them. Time is slowed, space becomes different; in conversation with the work the mind enters into places of its own and a different experience of time. Time inside the space of art is different from time outside. If art is inspired by the muses, one might say that viewing art is a time and space for musing, for its own kind of music.
This essay will take on a form inspired by that idea. Written as a series of enquiries, each will be a kind of walking around William Kentridge’s art and his practices of making art. Just as Kentridge’s work proceeds by layers and linkages, crossings and connections, it will take up themes, explore them, proceed by association to others. There will be overlaps, thought-collages, allusions and assemblages, a kind of connective and dimensional thinking inspired by Kentridge’s habits of creation.
Whether you are fortunate enough to see (or have seen) the exhibition, or are simply viewing the images in this book, feel free to enter into conversation with what you read here, to find your own way. For that too is the idea of the exhibition, and of Kentridge’s work.
3 DRAWING
A prevailing theme in all Kentridge commentary is the way his art takes on multiple forms. Over the years, he has worked in etching, drypoint, theatre, puppetry, opera, film, dance, sculpture, tapestry. Collage is a standard method, music flows through it all. Moreover, these modalities don’t operate in sequence but very often in combination, simultaneously. At the core of it, though, may be drawing, in both narrow and wide senses. There is drawing in Kentridge’s favoured charcoal, a medium of erasure, transition, alteration. And there is drawing in a larger sense, in which all these forms are drawn into and through one another. We have image upon image as a form of multi-dimensionality, multi-modality.
What kind of art is it? For Kentridge, drawing is a kind of thinking, thinking a kind of drawing: ‘drawing is a testing of ideas, a slow-motion version of thought…
The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning.’2 But if we wish to settle on a meaning in any of his works, we are unlikely to be able to do so, something that may be generally true of any complex art. Gerhard Richter remarks, ‘Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures.’3 Certainly, in Kentridge’s work there are moments of sudden perception, of deep feeling or insight for the viewer, but they are not likely to be easily summarised or expressed. One leaves the work in a different state, a sensation of vision, of something shattered or seen at the periphery,
or apprehended almost as a whole condition of being. So that may be the meaning: that state of sudden disruption and introduction to a different sense of vision: the event of art.
In other words, the meaning may not be a ‘thing’ but a process, in various guises. It is the process in and behind the typical Kentridge work, a process which he often makes half-glimpsed, part of its intrinsic magnetism and mystery. There is also the process into which the viewer enters, moved by the work’s echoes and allures until some new place of vision occurs. Engaging with the work, you become part of the drawing, the work comes off the wall to engage you in your relation to it.
The key question about Kentridge’s art then is not what does it mean but what does it do The ‘doing’ is a question of technique and process which becomes nothing less than the totality of the work itself, a totality which will generally exceed its apprehension. For the artist it is a matter of vision which both engenders and grows out of that process. And because of this, for the viewer it is also a matter of its effects in the moment of engagement and after, whether those effects are conceptual, intuitive or emotional. It is out of these many dimensions of ‘doing’ that we might arrive at a deeper and refashioned sense of meaning in Kentridge’s work. Its meaning is what it does.
Inspiration, from spirare: to breathe, draw in breath. Or: to draw; in breath; in movement. This is where it begins.
4 BEGINNINGS
William Kentridge had his own beginnings in South Africa, and lives there to this day. He came from a very specific world. His paternal great-grandfather, Woolf Kantrovich, emigrated from Lithuania via England to South Africa. As his name suggests, he was a synagogue cantor, and subsequently a rabbi. By 1912, the family had changed the name to Kentridge to suit its anglicised surroundings. William Kentridge’s grandfather, Morris Kentridge, took to politics and was briefly jailed for his prominent role in supporting the white miners in the Rand Rebellion of 1922; in 1924 he was elected a Labour Member of Parliament, combining both his socialist and Zionist commitments with a preference for protecting the privileges of the country’s white workers.4 Kentridge’s maternal grandmother, Irene Geffen (née Newmark), was the first female advocate in South Africa (and the first woman to obtain a driving licence). His mother, Felicia Kentridge, was also a lawyer and a co-founder of the Legal Resources Centre, which did indispensable work in opposing apartheid legislation. His father, Sydney (later Sir Sydney) Kentridge, was one of South Africa’s most famed anti-apartheid lawyers, appearing for the defence in the epic Treason Trial (1956–61), in which all 156 accused were acquitted, and in the inquest into the death in detention of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, where he represented the Biko family. In 1955, when William Kentridge was born, his lineage had emerged generationally from a relatively sequestered history into one that was prominent and revered,
identifiably part of a Johannesburg professional elite, if not aristocracy. In the not-too-distant past was a world of marginalisation and migration; in the present there were confidence and solidity.
Metamorphosis was therefore part of his story, and yet there were also constants in the life of his family. One would have been a sense of cultural affiliation to the long legacies of Europe, even if distantly in Africa. Another would have been the commitment of both his parents to issues of morality and justice, and to the rationalities of the law as a lens for seeing (and improving) the world. Paradoxes and contradictions abounded. On the one hand, his father defended South Africans of various races committed to the overthrow of apartheid. On the other, William went to a school set in the colonial mould, segregated twice over by race and gender, and coloured by the pervasive habits of superiority. Kentridge’s family was anti-apartheid to its bones; yet, living in a home in one of the most select Johannesburg suburbs, it also occupied a position of privilege based on the system it opposed. This would have been a matter of daily acknowledgement. Yet it is this very same world, now both transformed and untransformed in the aftermath of apartheid, that has always been William Kentridge’s home, and the energy source for much of his work. It is a place that in a fractured and fragmented form joins the here with the there, the self with the other, the now with the then, and where the future is an open question, a place without a clear boundary or horizon. Again, this is not a bad way to think of his art.
5 BOUNDARIES
Without a clear boundary or horizon: what are the implications of this idea? We should think through context and form to the inner grammar of Kentridge’s work. Here is one essential aspect of the apartheid world in which Kentridge grew up: it was governed by the logic of the hard boundary. Most directly, this was the boundary between black and white, the two realms which at all costs had to be separated. It was a boundary which operated in all kinds of ways: in the economy; in labour laws; in geography; in cultural and religious institutions; in education and schooling; in hospitals; in buses and taxis; on beaches. The hard boundary was also a mental feature. This was not only a matter of psychology – the very sense of oneself, what tone of voice one used, the habits of mastery and deference – but it concerned the nature of a whole mental system which the hard boundary both constructed and was constructed by. In some respects it had all the attributes of a rigorous rationality: identity depended on alterity and difference. You knew what things were by where they were and vice versa, and usually they were on opposite sides of a clear dividing line. That is to say, they existed this way in the ideal, absurdly schematic world of apartheid. Think then of the characteristic habits of Kentridge’s art, its difference within a hard philosophy of difference. Nothing is more revealing in this regard than the way he uses charcoal, his chosen material for drawing. Charcoal does not make
clear lines, sharp points of differentiation; as Kentridge says, he is drawn to charcoal ‘because of the indeterminacy of the point’ – a statement we can take as not only methodological but also epistemological.5 Not only that, but in using charcoal, Kentridge will characteristically blur what outlines he has. If apartheid divided black from white, Kentridge’s charcoal by its material nature edges black into white, white into black. Where apartheid put up walls and fences, Kentridge will erase outlines, leaving their traces to ghost the presence they once had. If for apartheid the future was a perfected version of the present, then Kentridge turns time into morphology, a space of undecidability, opening and question. In Kentridge’s world there is no such thing as a line that divides, only a line that transforms into something else. In this if in nothing else – and there is much, much else besides – Kentridge’s work is anti-apartheid in its very form. He has no problem with objects as such, indeed he is drawn to their intrinsic capacities for suggestion, but he does have a problem with the idea of essences as clear, transtemporal and indivisible. What is essential for Kentridge is the object’s transformation in time and space, this strange mystery of the world around us brought to the fore and to life in his work. As for absurdity, the logical illogicality of the world, his idea is if anything to heighten it, a process that rearranges all boundaries.
6 TRANSFORMATION: THE FORMATION OF FORMS
Walter Benjamin wrote that ‘all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one’.6 Benjamin was commenting on Proust, whereas Kentridge is a visual artist, yet the formulation applies. It is not only that a kind of dissolution is at the heart of his method, but that one of his remarkable contributions in artistic terms is to dissolve genre itself. Rather than dissolving a single genre to establish it in a new form, Kentridge dissolves multiple genres into and through one another. And therefore, coming out of it, we have completely new composite forms.
Think of it this way. I have already mentioned the multiple modes in which Kentridge works: drawing, animation, puppetry, opera, dance, tapestry, sculpture, collage. We could consider these as separate media, but because they are often combined in any given instance of Kentridge’s work, it may make sense to view them as different phases or aspects of one another –modulations of genre or kind within the work. As true as this is in combination, it is equally true in any particular guise one may expect to be singular. Take drawing once again, the central operation in much of Kentridge’s work. In any given drawing, Kentridge will erase or blur the outlines, or draw over them with other lines, whether in charcoal or coloured pencil. A seemingly scattershot drawing, brushed with charcoal dust and massaged between two pages of a ledger book, resolves when
the pages are opened into a sphinx (fig. 6). What do these changes introduce? Apart from the subject matter or figuration, one thing it introduces is time the time of the process still registered there as an alteration. Irrespective of whether the drawing will become an image in one of Kentridge’s animated films, it already introduces animation of one image transforming into another. Inside the drawing there is already a sense of drama as the unfolding elements become spatialised and ‘speak to’ one another as if in a dialogue of some kind, a performance on the stage of the paper.7 The paper, too, is part of the dialogue. Kentridge will often make his drawings on ledger books, or dictionary pages, or encyclopaedias from other eras, whether in English or other languages. The relation between the work and the surface on which it appears is thus also ‘drawn out’ in time and space, the complex inheritance of the past an element of the dialogue. The ledger book has its own resonance: how will we render our ‘accounts’, our beliefs and complicities? The dictionary: how do we define our world? The encyclopaedia: what is the legacy of our knowledge? Art, with its own forms of knowing, in a doubled sense ‘draws’ on that background and is set against it. And it leaves space for the viewer to enter in: the space between the boundaries of all these forms and transformations.
Multiply that out. Etching involves time in the chemical transformation of the material it works on.
In Kentridge’s films – say his drawings for projection – the film comprises multiple ‘still’ drawings photographed in minute phase after phase of change, while the drawings – as we have just seen – are already intrinsically animated. Add music: is the form of the film then not also an opera? Or when Kentridge directs an opera, consider the drawings and projections that constitute the stage (figs 7, 8). But more than that, consider his actors as ‘drawings’ in transformation through the time of the performance. Kentridge’s small sculptures – his ‘glyphs’, as he calls them, the coffee pot, the ampersand, the camera, the world on its hind legs – become characters, the dramatis personae of an extended play in his work. They are even in dialogue with themselves, for the small glyphs become monumental sculptures: what is the relation between small and big, how do those
characters speak to one another and shift? The glyphs will be arranged in lines that look like a paragraph, or will be titled ‘Lexicon’: the very building blocks of language (fig. 9). Kentridge’s motion sculptures – those strange pieces with a seeming life of their own – become a kind of choreographic drama, which we watch, fascinated. Even when the shattered sculpture does not move, it transforms as if in a kind of film as we move around it, until it becomes the character it has been concealing, the giant world on its hind legs. On stage, Kentridge’s actors will sometimes become live sculptures facing the audience but not one another, the whole machine of the performance in motion as the drama progresses. So, where Benjamin talks of genre dissolving or being established in a new form, what we are really talking about in Kentridge is the formation of forms as an animating principle of his work. One modality transforms into and is transformed by another in a continuing progression of generation and regeneration.
In this sense the dissolution is not complete: the multiple modes retain some independence even as they speak to and through one another and become something new in the process.
Genre, re-genre, regenerate: surely this is part of what seems the endless energy of Kentridge’s work, its continual rebirth, its self-renewing capacity to delight, awe and surprise. His art seems to be something that has discovered the secret of perpetual motion. If one asks, why did he not just stick to drawing, or to etching or drypoint, the answer is that all these other forms were already there in principle, ready to be generated and elaborated outwards as he discovered them. But of course it took the artist to make that discovery, willing both to follow and explore in giving implicit principles an actual new physical form. Here again the meaning was the doing.
7 THE LINE
It is easy to put this elaborative capacity under the heading of metaphor. Commentary on Kentridge will often operate that way, speaking of metaphor as built into his process, of drawing as a metaphor for everything he does.8 Metaphor is intriguing in that respect. At base, metaphor is generated by different essences vibrating through one another; it crosses the distance between meanings, creating something relational and unforeseen between them. That is why we like metaphor: it is a way of discovering the new through the play of difference, opposition and unexpected analogy.
There is no doubt this has relevance for Kentridge’s work: how many oscillations and vibrations we see in it, how much play, delight and wit, how much by way of conjuring and conjecture. At the same time, we can explore this further. Here, if we are considering the inner ‘grammar’ of Kentridge’s work, I would like to invoke a different figure of speech, the idea of metonymy. Metaphor and metonymy are usually thought of as both partnered and opposed to one another. Where metaphor operates through difference and comparison, metonymy operates through contiguity, adjacency or association, where one thing connects with another. In speech it underlies the principles of syntax – how words next to one another in a sentence invite ever-new possibilities of expression and meaning in combination.9 It is in this regard that Kentridge’s work builds on metonymy, say where one form edges into or generates another, becoming a new kind of syntax – what Denis Hirson calls ‘a syntax of constant possibility’.10 It underlies the notion of transformation in time, so central to Kentridge’s work. It involves his lines too, and what could be more fundamental for the artist than the line? We see it in Kentridge’s drawings, where an object will become another iteration of itself or something quite different as lines are blurred, erased and reconstituted. The cat will become a bomb. The coffee-plunger will go through the earth. Blue lines will connect the telephone exchange with the procession in the streets, with Soho Eckstein’s breast pocket overflowing with water. The sangoma connects with the Sibyl, the African ballerina with China,
Trotsky with the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (fig. 10). Paul Klee famously spoke of ‘taking a line for a walk’: Kentridge remarks that it is not about taking the line for a walk, but (following Henri Michaux’s reformulation) hoping that the line will take you for a walk, ‘the dog that is pulling you on the leash’.11 He has also spoken, with reference to his own work, of ‘being led by a line’.12 That line is the metonymic line, joining one thing with another, one condition of being with another, one version or modality of itself with another, one place with another, one moment with another, whether long past or – perhaps – to come. In this regard, if drawing is the key metaphor for Kentridge’s work, it is so because underlying it is a practice and even philosophy of metonymy: extending the line, following it to see what it will become, what its transformations might be. If there is metaphor, it proceeds out of a metonymy of linkage. What about that connection between drawing and walking? That too may be central. Kentridge often comments how his work in the studio is preceded and accompanied by walking as the work generates in his mind and is then very quickly unleashed on the paper.13 One of his key creative images is that of Rilke’s panther circling its cage, pacing around an absent centre where ‘a mighty will was put to sleep’.14 For Kentridge the cage is the creative space of the studio where energy builds towards outward manifestation. Walking/drawing: both are forms of navigation, finding a way from here to there, from potential to actual, which always suggests potential again. Walking is itself a form of metonymy, finding renewed possibility, changing horizons, new ways of conceiving the work.
8 THE LESS GOOD DOCTOR
‘Play’ is somehow key to all of this, and not only in the sense of drama or performance, but also in the idea of playing, whether with images, ideas, or materials, that sense of adventure. There is something of the child in such possibilities, and indeed, Kentridge’s sculptures have often been inspired by a practice he followed with his children, constructing things out of everyday objects from the kitchen or the house. His sculptures – made from various found objects, whether typewriters or sewing machines, compasses or corkscrews – still work that way.
Play means mixing things that perhaps should not be mixed; it comes from the play of the imagination, mixing the observance of rules with breaking them, or offering new formulations. In downtown Johannesburg – itself a place of constant transformation in the post-apartheid world – Kentridge has established the Centre for the Less Good Idea. The concept came from Kentridge’s own practice: it would have been a good idea just to stick to one form in his work and master it, whether drawing or painting or sculpture.15 But the less good idea is where things happen – the unexpected and the vivid. If ‘play’ is key to this, it is perhaps no coincidence that the Centre for the Less Good Idea is often the arena for developing plays and other kinds of inventive performance.16
But play can also be serious, and Kentridge drew the name of his centre from the great South African writer, Sol. T. Plaatje, who among his many other activities (novelist, diarist, documentarist, political leader) translated Shakespeare into Setswana, and Setswana proverbs into English – translation itself a version of transformation. One of those proverbs was, ‘If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.’17
In some way, then, the ‘less good idea’ is connected with an expansion of possibility at the edges of the customary, and also with the notion of ‘cure’. What might the less good idea be a cure for? How does it work?
It may have something to do with the way we approach the world, a cure for our everyday vision, even if Kentridge himself would probably disown the idea of anything as certain or exact as that. That is part of the point, the indeterminate, charcoal-like point. It may be a different way of knowing.
9 LIBERATING VISION
How is this so? Let us see it again through a particular lens, the lens of biography. The exploration comes in two parts. The first part is relatively straightforward and returns to the world of apartheid. Along with being a political enactment of the hard boundary, apartheid was also formulated as a hermetically sealed system. For those inside its conception, it reconciled all differences and explained everything. For those who were its objects, it controlled everything. Or at least it attempted to:
nothing is ever that controlled, there is always leakage, overflow, resistance, opposition. But the key here is that along with being a political regime, apartheid was also a regime of seeing, a way of seeing the world in which everything was governed by its supposed logics and rationalities, its moralities, divisions, structures, mentalities, its boundaries. Part of opposing apartheid was breaking out of this regime, finding ways to imagine alternatives and draw on alternative traditions, histories and possibilities, to see the world in a different way. But how to do this, especially for the artist? When Kentridge was coming to a fuller sense of both political and artistic consciousness, he was a student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, in that time and place a ferment of discussion and action. Kentridge majored in Political Science and African Studies, and would have been schooled in everything from the traditions of high political theory (Hegel, Marx, the Frankfurt School of Adorno and others) to the intensities of African political history. Though the university was almost entirely white, it had a strong tradition of opposition to apartheid; student leaders were regularly imprisoned, and while demonstrations were highly restricted, they nonetheless took place. The campus was also infiltrated by the Security Police; at one point, a startling percentage of the Students’ Representative Council consisted of police spies. One political activist, Carlos Cardoso, would be on his
soapbox at the slightest opportunity, announcing how everything on earth was political, even being in one’s mother’s womb.18 (Cardoso was later assassinated in Mozambique, investigating financial corruption in the same FRELIMO movement he supported.19) Kentridge was on campus on 16 June 1976, when the Soweto Uprising began and students marched through the centre of the city. The demonstration was viciously broken up by right-wing members of the Railway Police; there is a photograph showing Kentridge and his future wife Anne Stanwix among those at the head of the march (fig. 11).20 As always, the white students would have recognised that what they faced did not compare to what black schoolchildren in the townships were confronting: the live ammunition of the police. This ferment occurred in the cultural sphere as well. Together with Malcolm Purkey and others, Kentridge formed the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, which devised and performed a succession of plays: The Fantastical History of a Useless Man (an allusion to the figure of the proverbial ‘useless man’ in pre-revolutionary Russia; see fig. 35); Randlords and Rotgut (based on Charles van Onselen’s history of turn-of-the-century Johannesburg); and Will of a Rebel (exploring the life of the Afrikaans writer and political prisoner, Breyten Breytenbach) (see fig. 36).21 Radical theatre theory and practice were in the air. Junction Avenue drew its inspirations from Bertolt Brecht (Entfremdung – the
‘alienation effect’) and Jerzy Grotowski (‘poor theatre’) in developing a drama of engagement and provocation. They were not alone in this: South African theatre at the time was in a highly experimental mode, from the workshop plays of Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, to the work of Maishe Maponya, or Workshop 71’s performance, Survival. Plays used mime, song, dance, multiple languages; they were exercises in formal collage, the net effect of which was both to exhilarate and challenge audiences. After Workshop 71 came to an end, some of its members joined Junction Avenue, and there the collaborative workshop method continued in what was now a multi-racial group.22 Beyond this realm there were other spheres of cultural activity: the tradeunion plays of the period, and trade-union poetry.
This then was the air that Kentridge was breathing. In an era that Nadine Gordimer, following Antonio Gramsci, called ‘the interregnum’ – when ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’23 – the conditions of South Africa seemed by their very nature to involve a surplus of the ‘real’. By the same token it was the surface of the real that South African writers, among others, were setting out to disturb.24 Both of these factors may have had long-term implications for Kentridge’s art in its own relation to the real, its own rampant surplus and excess. The future may have been the destination, but how was one to get there? How was the artist to respond in the present?
Implicit in this was the question of accountability – how to make work responsive to the needs of the time. It felt like a massive imperative, an exponential increase in the feelings Kentridge would have absorbed growing up. And yet, along with the sense of exhilaration and purpose in this new creative world, there were contradictory ripples. Kentridge has spoken openly of how, in the Junction Avenue workshop environment, issues were often decided by those with the loudest voices working according to their own certainties. Kentridge would give way, only to regret that he had not followed his own lights.25 The cultural boycott against the apartheid state was in place, and artists were expected to abide by it. In later years an organ known as the Cultural Desk, allied with the African National Congress, imposed a kind of revolutionary conformity
whereby art was expected to follow the needs of political struggle. For a while Kentridge was a member of an artists’ collective meant to advise the Cultural Desk. He has called it a ‘terrible committee’, where everything he argued for was lost – often because he could not bear going to the ‘one more meeting’ that was always required.26 Though his sympathies were with the ANC, he never joined it, nor any other political party.27 The tension then between joining a movement of prescribed orientations, and lighting out with one’s own vision. Could art be revolutionary without conforming to the prescriptions of a political formula? Was there something in its creative energies which might be radical in a different form? On the one hand there was the sense of political need; on the other the kind of art to which Kentridge was intrinsically drawn. Could it be that he was leaving one regime of seeing only to enter another? Was the fundamental truth about regimes that they are closed rather than open systems? And if so, what to do about it? Was it possible to find a way of liberating vision itself – a form in which the radicalness of art could be its own liberation? If one had to avoid tackling head on what Kentridge called ‘the immoveable rock’ of apartheid dominating the conceptual landscape, was it true that in fact one had to avoid two rocks: like the errant but also purposeful Odysseus, the Scylla and Charybdis of opposing regimes of thought?28
Political prescription produced the prescribed – the thing written before it is written, drawn before it is drawn. Why would an artist want to do that? As a result of what he has called a schizophrenic reality, Kentridge stopped making drawings between 1981 and 1984.29 But then he opened up again, affiliated not to system but rather to the intrinsic and proliferating logic of the image – a logic which creates its own vistas, its own narratives and horizons. Repression is always here, revolutions come and go, but this is the revolution inside the revolution, art that prompts us always to see things in a different way. The idea is to dislodge us from what purports to be the ‘real’ in the everyday world of our existence, to open up the surfaces of our lives. We are introduced to an unsettling way of seeing that also expands the horizons of possibility. This was the destination if not the destiny. Liberate the image, and you just might liberate vision.
10 COUNSEL
In this light, Kentridge drew inspiration from various directions. There were alternative ways of being political that had to do not with closed but with open systems –or indeed, a way of opening systems. In the Theatre of the Absurd, Neue Sachlichkeit, German Expressionism, or the example of Mayakovsky and others in the Soviet Union before Stalin’s repression stifled everything, there seemed to be other models. As if by a geographical tangent, Kentridge was drawn to the experimental modes of continental Europe rather than the rationalrealist legacies of imperial Britain. This also meant that he was drawn to a philosophy of doubt. Partly it had to do, paradoxically, with trust. As he put it, ‘Give the image the benefit of the doubt, give the whim the benefit of the doubt.’30 In this view, doubt is not the opposite of trust but its precondition, and there is something promising in its dual nature. As Salman Rushdie has suggested, doubt modulates between belief and disbelief –perhaps the very condition of art itself.31 Between the real and imagined, art is the possible given embodied form. In this way, the work of the work of art is to be unpredictable, to say what has never been said, or what couldn’t be said any other way, which in a way cannot be ‘real’.
Art then is not only the result of process, but it induces process in the viewer – the process of absorbing, responding, making sense, or simply entering into a domain of contemplation, reverie and question. If it contains knowledge, counsel or wisdom, it is not something simply conveyed, sealed and complete –not a product, but this process. As Walter Benjamin (to turn to him again) put it in his essay ‘The Storyteller’, ‘After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is in the process of unfolding.’32 If wisdom exists, it is inseparable from its nature as an invitation to continuing contemplation.
The viewer stands before the work and is – to use a demotic but apt term – blown away like the Sibyl’s leaves dispersed and then reassembled by the wind. We move on with a strange sense of renewal, of a world seen afresh, both recognisable and different. It has a new valence, a different kind of weight; we see with a
sense of dis/orientation.33 This is revolution as the world revolves, seeming to be in the same place but in reality never there again. If the work of art does not provide new forms of knowledge, it suggests that new forms are possible. Art speaks its own language, and what it offers is a practice of freeing us from the world to which we are accustomed, suggesting there are other dimensions of seeing, other modalities of knowledge, other ways of confronting our being which are both startling and humanising. This is one of the profound inspirations of Kentridge’s work.
11 SIGNATURE
If art speaks its own language, in some ways Kentridge’s work conforms to a central insight regarding language. That is, out of a finite series of linguistic elements (sounds, syllables, words), we can construct an infinite series of combinations.34 This is a proposition that might be extended to any form of human expression, whether music (note, duration, rhythm) or art (shape, colour, texture). Kentridge’s work, however, does not approach the infinite, and not only because of the hubris such an attempt would imply. Rather, it has something to do with the nature of his work itself, and perhaps that of any artist: whether deliberately or inevitably, it is limited in intriguing ways. So Kentridge has his repertoires – the kinds of images and motifs we find in his productions, the regular cast of characters that appear and reappear like the figures of the commedia dell’arte. We have the rhinoceros and coffee pot (fig. 12), the telephone and the megaphone, but not the hippopotamus or the viola.35 Or, as we have seen, the same forms get reworked, whether film or opera, or both in relation to one another. In this sense the drama of Kentridge’s ‘play’ is subject to constraint; but constraint can also liberate, precisely because it gives shape and focus to energy. It may be from those combined forces that Kentridge is so endlessly productive.
There is another aspect to this. Language may be infinite, but it is still governed by underlying rules. So too in Kentridge’s work, even though part of his contribution is to reformulate the rules he has inherited. Liberation, in this sense, is far from the absence of
structure. Like the jazz musician, one has to know the rules in order to improvise. Moreover, part of the project for the truly creative artist is discovering the inner rules that govern what any specific work seems to demand – and then giving them form and substance in action. This is true even if one of Kentridge’s most sacred rules is allowing space for the unknown and the uncertain – the thing that is discovered only in the making.
Rule and the unruly, repertoire and recombination result in the energised reformulations of his work. In this way, we can see Kentridge’s hand, both literally and figuratively, in everything he does. This is how an artist who reconstitutes multiple genres can become sui generis – of his own type, one of a kind. This is the Kentridge signature, the stamp of his work beyond any name we might see inscribed on the paper, and when we see it we recognise it.
12 THE LAW AND THE GIFT
Rules and their reinvention: there may be other routes to understanding this prompt in Kentridge’s work that are both conceptual and biographical.
If art provides its own form of knowledge, its own way of seeing, for Kentridge the foil in this regard is Plato. In Plato’s allegory of the cave the ‘viewers’ of the scene are prisoners with heads bolted forwards, bound to watch shadows on the wall in front of them, cast by the movement of figures behind. This is the world of illusion which the viewers mistake for the real. It is the job of the philosopher to turn their heads around, by force if necessary, to lead them towards the light and the truth. In Kentridge’s reversed allegory of this allegory, it is instead the shadows on the wall that contain their own reality, while the philosopher’s actions foretell the future of a violent and coercive history on the part of those who claim to know the truth. Prophesied in Plato is the history of European colonialism professing to lead the ignorant masses of India or Africa to the light. Here too is the dark underside of the Enlightenment, whose very name concealed the scandal of slavery, or even regarded it as a non-contradiction. Light was not the cure for what Joseph Conrad called the heart of darkness; rather the heart of darkness was itself a version of this light,
a paradox Kentridge explored in his production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (figs 13, 14). More wisdom perhaps in Sophocles or Aeschylus, who better understood the consequences of arrogance and the precariousness of existence than Plato (who was, we should remember, suspicious of poets). By contrast, it was the textured version of reality that the world of shadows – flickering, combining light and dark – could reveal.
Kentridge discussed Plato’s allegory in his 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University, a series entitled ‘Six Drawing Lessons’. They were lectures which, in their own bravura performance, were a refutation of Plato not only in content but in form. Here, in yet a further elaboration of genre, Kentridge took the academic lecture and turned it into one of his characteristic works, combining drawing, projection, drama, music, film and collage. In projection and in person there were two Kentridges across time and space: one who wrote the lectures in the studio and provided the notebooks that the other performed on stage across time through debate, dialogue, comedy, critique and difference. Kentridge the artist confronted Kentridge the viewer; four Kentridges recited in syncopated mayhem (fig. 15). Was this theatre, opera, live drawing or sculpture? After this, no future academic lecture had any justification for ever being simply itself.
One figure Kentridge turned to in the lectures was his father. Indeed, the first lecture opened with him, and what Kentridge clarified was why he had not followed his father into law. At school Kentridge was an adept debater, often the sign of someone who will make a good lawyer. But soon – at some ‘meta’ level of debate, so to speak – he realised that he could use the same habits and systems of reason to argue any particular case with equal facility. Given the task, the debater could argue both for and against the proposition that ‘This House Abhors the Dissolution of the British Empire’.36 It was this that made Kentridge wonder whether systems of logic were any more grounded in their ultimate self-justification than other ways of understanding the world. When Kentridge was first invited to present the Norton Lectures, his father had asked him, ‘Well, do you have anything to say?’37 The question may have been amusing, but the lectures were themselves an attempt
to answer that question, not so much in its own terms but by disempowering the assumptions behind it. Part of Kentridge’s evolution as an artist meant that it became ‘imperative to make something, a self, impervious to cross-examination’.38 The artist did have something to say, but as an artist, not as a lawyer.
In this light, it is intriguing that a number of Kentridge’s films in the ‘Drawing Lessons’ series show two versions of himself: one the creative artist, often shambling, disorganised, incapable of self-justification, and the other a critical counterpart, leaning over the artist’s shoulder and doubting his every move. Kentridge told me he thinks of this counter-voice as the internalised voice of his father.39 One should not overdo the point: there is much affection between Kentridge and his father; and yet there is this difference. Quite possibly there is a Freudian dimension: the struggle of the son against the father for his own form of recognition takes the shape of a struggle for a different form of cognition It involves a resistance to sealed systems of logic. As Kentridge has pointed out, he is interested in theorems, but not as proof: ‘There are things we can learn at the side from them.’40 So, Plato and the father turn out to be a formidable combination, and hence perhaps the eagerness of the son’s resistance. We might see here not only the law of the father but what Jacques Lacan referred to as the Law of the Father: the system based on a paternal law that encloses and traps us all, which pre-sets the symbolic system of our being. Lacan also referred to it as the Name of the Father, le Nom du Père, where in French the word nom will sound like non: the No of the Father, that which you cannot do.41 Sydney Kentridge had a name recognised the world over; the son had to make his own.
But there is another side to this. In the Norton Lectures, Kentridge also referred to his mother. She too was a highly successful lawyer, but his habit of making art for her had a different incentive: ‘I wanted to make my mother happy.’42 Elsewhere Kentridge has remarked, ‘For her, what I did was a gift; not to prove who I was, but for her pleasure in receiving.’43 This is perhaps, on a very private level, where Kentridge’s art is situated, between the law (or Law) of the father and the gift of the mother. He has his own rationality, and he is an extraordinarily
articulate exponent of his own practice. He would have made not only a fine debater but a lawyer par excellence But between these two polarities – the law of reason, the gesture of the gift – comes his own gift. Reason is matched with play, and play is essential to creation; but it is also play followed through with great attention to its own system, discipline and rigour. Between the law and the gift, the father and the mother, the male and the female, lies the work of the artist, a gift of play, shadow and creation that follows its own laws.
13 INVITATION
There is an invitation in Kentridge’s work, and this is true in multiple senses. The archetypal locus of creation for him is the studio, and he continually returns to it as both an actual and a conceptual site. Kentridge’s studio is in fact a remarkable space, large and capacious, set in the garden of his home in Houghton, Johannesburg. This is where his team assembles daily, this is where new works are planned, enacted and often performed, all the way from solo works of drawing to filming, to editing, to music. It is a space hospitable to that team, as Kentridge himself is to all his artistic collaborators, as well as to the steady stream of visitors who arrive from around the world. It is a home of a kind. It is hospitable in other respects as well, intrinsic to the making of art. The studio, Kentridge always remarks, is where the world comes in. This is where it is absorbed, reflected on, projected and transformed into the work that the artist does. And it is from the studio that the work is sent out again into the world, to invite viewers into its environs, and therefore indirectly back into the studio. What happens in this space is complex: once the work is in progress the walls narrow in the intensity of creation; in that sense they are, as Kentridge remarks, like the bars of the cage which confine the panther’s pacing.44 But if there are bars, then they are bars through which one is enabled to see What Kentridge says of the paper he works on is true of the studio too: it is a kind of membrane between the artist and the world (fig. 16). If, as he also remarks, the studio is an external form of the artist’s brain, then somehow we enter into that space through the work that is produced there.45
Regarding hospitality, the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas put it this way: ‘The possibility for the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows.’46 Notable here is not the opposition but the duality of closure and openness, something we might apply to the creative process. In a non-paradoxical form, both appear to be required: the pressure-cooker of the studio closes in precisely so that the doors and windows can open. The artwork is an inviting host, ready to speak its meanings, but hostage until the viewer releases it from silence. The guest is host, the host is guest, even in the work of someone who might be called a master.47
14 SUBJECTS
There are multiple subjects in Kentridge’s work, and not only because it covers multiple topics, but also because of the subject at the heart of it, William Kentridge himself. His films will often feature two or more Kentridges, offset from one another, disputing, contemplating, speechifying. William Kentridge walks through the pages of his own notebooks. Two of ‘him’ engage in debate about art or memory. Three of them begin a recitation of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, but soon work at cross-purposes in a mutual kind of interference. What is this about? Certainly it is about the vagaries of art, the entrapment of the artist inside his work, the oscillations of perspective, memory and truth as much as of selfhood in the work.
If this involves the subject as essentially dispersed or fragmented, in other respects Kentridge’s work moves from the dispersed towards the collective. Nowhere is this more so than in his processions, which he has figured and refigured over the years. A procession marches across the landscape or through Johannesburg in demonstration or resistance. In live performance two processions approach one another on the banks of the Tiber, embodying the ‘triumphs and laments’ of Roman imperial history (fig. 19). A procession of African porters files towards the First World War in the opera The Head & the Load (fig. 20). A haunting aquatint shows figures in the midst of their journey by boat: Refugees (You Will Find No Other Seas) (fig. 21). Kentridge’s iconic
More Sweetly Play the Dance combines the medieval danse macabre with a countervailing human spirit and endurance as an unending arc of silhouetted figures proceeds through their encumbered world. Here are suffering, survival, the lost and haunting memories of history.
Where does this topic come from? There is the possibility that technically Kentridge’s focus on process in his work elaborates into procession in his topography, that the latter grows organically out of the former.48 But more fundamentally, there can be no doubt that for Kentridge the origin lies in the experience of black South Africans under oppression, marching to work, towards freedom, or simply in endurance, then generalised to other settings. This is the populace, individualised and en masse the unspoken and unnamed moving across the landscape of space and time. ‘A great storyteller will always be rooted in the people’: this again is Walter Benjamin.49 It is too much to ask Kentridge to be similarly rooted; coming out of apartheid and in some respects still living in it, that is an impossibility. But this is perhaps as close as the white artist can come, in the kind of acknowledgement Kentridge provides, the search in
which he engages. It is not a mark of appropriation; the artist recognises difference and distance even in the gesture. But Kentridge is willing to enter that territory, to deal with its complex fractures and demands, and to recognise a strength that does not come from his own world. There is a collective subject here, so difficult to render in traditional narrative that always favours the individual, but brought to life in a barely suppressed emotional tribute to the unending human journey, borne more heavily by some than by others.
15 MAKING
The word poiesis in the Greek classical tradition combined the ideas of ‘making’ and ‘creation’, and it is where our word ‘poetics’ comes from.50 It is clear there is a poetics in Kentridge’s work in the way we now understand it: the repertoires, figurations, styles, structures and techniques we see in abundance. At the same time, we should recover that underlying sense of ‘making’, for Kentridge is at heart and in practice a maker, someone who proceeds as much from material to vision as the other way round. This is something on which
he himself is quite clear: ‘The idea is produced by the material.’ 51 Charcoal will invite a certain kind of drawing or composition. The typewriter will suggest in its shapes and shadows a tree (fig. 22). The pair of compasses will become the hind legs of the world. The sousaphone and the chair will intimate a waltz in the era of Covid (fig. 24). Coffee pots and cameras, strange machinery, all of this is involved in Kentridge’s making, his alternative to the regimes of seeing we inhabit.
At some level it is important that many of these materials are everyday objects, the kinds of things that surround us all the time, here in another guise entirely, both recognisable and new. We discover a tribute to the ordinary and the magic we can create from it in things discarded and superannuated, fallen into desuetude, otherwise unnoticed. At the same time, these insistent presences in Kentridge’s work become mythic, larger than themselves. The megaphone is ubiquitous, enigmatic, sometimes a head, sometimes a voice. The ampersand is the very image of connection.52 The coffee pot and movie camera are enlarged and become monumental. In that shift the coffee pot becomes almost irresistibly female: it could be the Venus of Willendorf, or an ancient Cycladic incarnation (fig. 23). By contrast, the movie camera becomes male: channel of vision, surveillance, assertion. Together in a room, the two sculptures work polarities of interaction, projections from the unconscious, not exactly threatening, partly comic, yet full of time and mystery. There is a direct progression from glyph to myth and back again: from Kentridge’s drawings and marks on paper,
to the small sculptures he fashions from them, to the looming presences that preside.
As the archetypal environment for it all, nothing is more mythic than Kentridge’s Johannesburg landscapes, in the broadest sense the ‘home’ of all his work. These are ordinary, fallen Johannesburg settings, sites blasted with waste and decay, bare and barren, peopled with mine-dumps and electricity pylons, abandoned drivein screens, with African miners chipping away at the surface of the earth or plunging underground, of bodies covered with newspaper, of the burials and memorials of time (fig. 25). They are landscapes conceived in charcoal, a universe of black, grey and white, with theodolitic markings of blue or pink, a history of measurement and subjection. Kentridge does for Johannesburg what Faulkner did for Mississippi, or Joyce for Dublin. Seeing the images, we are in Kentridge’s world, a place at once real, surreal and mythological, where the ghosts of the past and present are shadowed and etched.
work. The drawing exists between the outline and the erasure, between the markings of past and present. Kentridge’s creativity comes from the space between the law and the gift. His music comes from Mozart and Hindemith as well as the African church brass band: a different music happens between them. The studio exists between the world and the work of art it produces. The panther paces around the still and absent centre – a perpetual and magnetic space. Kentridge draws inspiration from the Russian Revolution, from Gogol, from African porters in the First World War. He melds geographies, visual and technical histories, domains of allusion and layers of artistic and political reference. His navigational axis runs between Europe, Africa and China, between past and present and the future unfolding from that history. In all this, the work of art opens a space always unfolding, always resonating, between the artist and the viewer. Here the unforetold may come into being, the space of profusion, exploration and invitation.
‘[M]y work is about a process of drawing that tries to find a way through the space between what we know and what we see.’ 53 It is characteristic of Kentridge’s approach that the process he describes involves both polarities. The space of crossing between knowing and seeing is nothing less than the drawing.
I want to move towards a conclusion by thinking of that space as the essential environment of Kentridge’s
What happens there gestures beyond the edges of the art that constitutes it. Kentridge has spoken of how the African church band brings waves of deep emotion to him.54 Soho Eckstein, with his breast pocket overflowing, is caught in a moment of overwhelming feeling. In a later incarnation that same Soho contemplates a Zama Zama miner chipping away at the surface of the earth in what looks very much like a grave,55 while the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the site of Kentridge’s early visual education, crumbles. In this
place of cathexis and crossing, the minework, the grave, is both outside and inside the art gallery; it may be the excavation of art itself. In recent years Kentridge has taken to contemplating fate, mortality and memory, and the mythic figure of the Sibyl of Cumae. The Sibyl would write the fate of human beings on oak leaves, but the wind would blow and tumble them around; the prophecy was accurate, but to whom did it belong? There is no final inscription, no final legibility, no secure memory. In Waiting for the Sibyl, the image is that of Michelangelo’s iconic rendition, reproduced in exquisite form; but more importantly it is an African woman, a seer, a diviner, dancing through the pages of a notebook. In that conjunction of Europe and Africa, of different forms of art and vision, there is deep engagement, deep recognition. Kentridge’s recent work is populated with apothegms of enigma and suggestion. The tree is a tree that grows in his garden, but it is also the tree of mortality growing inside us. How can you escape your fate? ‘You will not see that city.’ ‘You will find no other seas.’ It is a mystery written inside us, until we too fall like that tree, blow away like those leaves.
We live our lives in that space, a space Kentridge’s art helps us to contemplate both within and at the edges of our being. That he does so with a continuing sense of wonder is part of the liberating vision, a vision that leaves us elated and renewed, challenged as well as deepened. If the meaning of Kentridge’s art is what it does, what it does is tantalising, captivating and moving. Drawn by his drawings, we enter the space of encounter.
