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Smoke, Ashes, Fable

Tummelplatz Joseph Leo Koerner

Stills from More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Chances are you will arrive somewhere in the middle. You might have heard the band already from afar, and when you arrive some tuba players may be marching by. If not, you will still know that music travels and that the brass and drums are not far away. Like a real procession, this filmed and animated one—despite its size—gives only a partial view of these whirling dancers, this troupe of marchers, this enigmatic float rolling slowly past you now, left to right, in reading direction. Enthusiasts would want to catch up with the front of the parade, where, pausing, they would soon observe the strange return of the middle they left behind. Because, whether marching or watching, you remain always in the middle, as in the stream of time—although, for as long is it lasts, the parade is somewhere perpetually beginning.

“The final procession will have to be 100m long,” reports the artist William Kentridge, from the midst of work in his “large studio in town.”1 In September 2015, in a converted warehouse in downtown Johannesburg, Kentridge costumed, choreographed, directed, and filmed a team of dancers, actors, and musicians processing on a platform 18 meters long. At any given moment, an installation can show only a small portion of the filmed and edited parade, using eight 5-meter-wide floor-to-ceiling screens lined up in a row, or, if the venue demands, wrapping around three walls of a room, a gently angled sequence, with narrow gaps separating the screens, and showing projections that jump almost imperceptibly between different moments of the same part of the parade. Thus, on one screen the giant silhouette of a stainless-steel, spring-hinged poultry shears strides on its handles past a group of spinning dancers, but when it passes to the next screen, the dancers arrive while the kitchen colossus has suddenly been replaced by a roughly torn cardboard image of poultry shears, only then to reappear on the same screen as the real shears once again, though further back in the parade. “Each figure that walks across the length of the walkway,” explains Kentridge from the studio, “has to do it several times to give us the variations and alterations that would naturally occur across the long distance of the walk.”2 The gaps between projections in the art gallery derive from the logistics of the artist’s studio. But, magnified, they simulate the discontinuous experience of a parade while also gesturing towards the unrepresentable whole procession over the entire distance of its march.

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1 William Kentridge, “If We Ever Get to Heaven: Occasional notes on More Sweetly Play the Dance,” in William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance, ed. Marente Bloemheuvel and Jaap Goldemond (Amsterdam, 2015), 29.

2 Ibid.

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Some have termed More Sweetly Play the Dance immersive, yet Kentridge’s video installation does not aim to envelope you in a complete, consistent illusion, as, say, Richard Wagner tried to do with his operas.

With the orchestra and stage machinery completely concealed, seating arranged on a sloped wedge, and the art forms (music, poetry, theater, and dance) all combined, each member of the audience at Bayreuth experienced the performance uninterrupted and in solemn isolation across a “mystic gulf”3 between reality and dream. Kentridge, by contrast, thrusts you into the chaos in between: the crowded sidewalk, the bad seat on the bleachers, your late arrival to the fun. In the midst of the spectators’ space he plants four speakers fitted into exaggerated megaphones mounted on old surveyor’s tripods, and he insists the shadows of these blaring intruders fall on the spectacle, interrupting its illusion. In the animated backdrop behind the march, Kentridge leaves static marks and measurements in pencil and numerical notations in Prismacolor red, plunging you in medias res into the artist’s studio, where everything is process, like the roiling charcoal sky.

Workshop for More Sweetly Play the Dance in William Kentridge’s studio in Johannesburg, 2015

Cinema holds its audience captive, giving it time to tell stories and develop characters. In film installations, visitors come and go on their own time, some exiting before their eyes even accustom to the dark. By casting More Sweetly Play the Dance as a procession, Kentridge solves this dilemma. He meets his wandering audience halfway, grabbing their attention through itinerates like themselves.

Around the middle of the parade a hulking porter passes by. His back bent under a tremendous load, he swings himself forward on one leg and crutches. His unlikely progress links him to a group of fantastical marchers: puppets moved and shot frame by frame by a camera. Made of roughly torn paper joined with twists of wire, their league includes a legless giant on tripod legs and the aforementioned paper poultry shears. They are cousins to wonders conjured by different techniques: a skeleton, crudely sketched in ink and brush and digitally multiplied into a trio and made macabrely to dance; a striding globe with swirling, mismatched limbs and a hovering ampersand for a head. These animated elements blend into the otherwise live-action parade through props carried by the human marchers: outsize flowers, cages, telephones, Chinese characters, heroic heads, among others, all painted, Kentridge explains, “with Indian ink onto the pages of the encyclopedia.” They are then projected onto large sheets of paper, cut or torn out, and mounted onto reinforced cardboard finally to be carried aloft by marchers.4 These images of objects—silhouettes of “all the hopes, 79

3 Richard Wagner, Wagner on Music and Drama: A Compendium of Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, ed. Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn, trans.

H. Ashton Ellis (New York, 1964), 366.

4 Kentridge, “If We Ever Get to Heaven,” 30.

Joseph Leo Koerner

5 Hans-Ulrich Roller, Der Nürnberger Schembartlauf: Studien zum Fest- und Maskenwesen des spaten Mittelalters (Tübingen, 1967).

6 Kentridge, “If We Ever Get to Heaven,” 29.

7 Ibid., 35.

fears and desires”—intermingle with real objects: a cardboard megaphone joins the instruments of members of the Sebokeng-based African Immanuel Essemblies Brass Band, who traveled to Johannesburg to play music for the dance.

Such a mingling of artifacts and implements comes naturally to parades.

Since at least the pageant wagons of medieval mystery plays, festive processions have routinely included marvelous figurative contraptions: the colossal paper-pulp masks at the carnival of Viareggio, the festooned carriages of Imperial Vienna’s Blumencorso, the giant balloons of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 15th-century Nuremberg, special guilds labored to build an elaborate Shrovetide float nicknamed “the Hell.” Different every year, and described and depicted in beautiful books—called Schembartbücher—these huge wagons crawled with play-acted demons who lured bystanders into climbing aboard and drinking themselves blind.5 Even when “the Hell” was not built to look specifically infernal, its aesthetic was grotesque and its tone bawdy. Although these party floats were cheerfully subversive and dangerously fun to ride, Nuremberg’s guildsmen designed them as stern, moralizing allegories. Through images, symbols, personifications, and pantomimes they improvised some edifying concept, such as Folly, Love, Justice, Fortune, the Seven Sins, and World Upside Down. Whether the revelers were able to grasp the annual idea was less important than the allegorical mode itself, since allegory, which by definition says one thing and means another, explained the strangeness of the display.

Kentridge’s porter stands apart from the procession, being engaged in work, not play, as if he just happens to trudge along the route taken by the parade. He encourages you to construe the march not as a festive spectacle but as an arduous caravan. And there are others for whom the parade is hard labor. The trolleys bearing the tableaux have people pulling them. Straining to haul their burden forward, these belong to the backstage of the spectacle and of bourgeois life: “People seen on the streets of Johannesburg. The recycling trolley pullers, who … pull these trolleys through the traffic, up the hills from the suburbs into the center of the city where they are delivered to the recycling depot.”6 Even their costumes are realistic, “plastic against the rain, sometimes sheets of plastic the size of a tarpaulin, like a huge cloak, tied with a string around the waist.”7 Kentridge makes these out-of-frame activities main attractions of the parade.

Anonymous German, Hell Float of the the Forty-Seventh Schemberg Carnival, 1505, c. 1600

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Joseph Leo Koerner

8 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, 1964), 151–57.

The porter’s packages have labels. One reads, “a grammar of the wound.”

This seems to point not to what lies inside the transported container but to some allegory to which the porter and the boxes belong. Allegories are natural to parades because even the humblest parade includes them, and because symbolic processions, progresses, quest journeys, and the like are allegory’s quintessential form.8 The porter, the paraded portrait heads, the skeleton float, the whirling dervish who begins Kentridge’s procession: they all promise meaning. But because meanings are expected of parades, and because they are communicated by and principally for the marchers (those quasi-autonomous corporations who take part in the parade), this meaning is less our concern than theirs, those who populate the specific troupe or built the individual float. Parades exhibit a gallery of vernacular artifacts, each advertising local ingenuity and group-specific symbolism. Kentridge can thus present what looks to be not his but someone else’s ad-libbed emblems, as the illuminators of the Schembartbücher had done, recording carnivals extemporized in Nuremberg’s past. The trolley pullers belong to this strategy. They show each allegory moving on its own steam.

And yet, the procession is also patently of Kentridge’s own making.

The phrase “the grammar of the wound” belongs to his personal symbolic repertoire, having been used in at least one other work. In his 2013 flipbook film Second Hand Reading, those words flash over fleeting pages of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Preceded by the phrases “a grammar of the word” and “a grammar of the world,” they belong to an expanding collection of cryptic mottos, slogans, and puns that circulate through the artist’s work. Ordered alphabetically like the underlying dictionary, the sequence word–world–wound typifies Kentridge’s verbal wit. Based in sounds and sentences jumbled or misheard, such wordplay points obliquely to a serious thematic core, here the physical and psychic wound (Latin trauma) in words and in the world. In More Sweetly Play the Dance, the phrase fits the amputee who bears it, the hospital patients who walk behind him, and the despoiled world through which all move.

The porter’s other slogan also resonates with the setting. “A nicely built city never resists destruction” fits the ruined gallows, poles, and pylons that rise up feebly from the blighted earth, although not without dissonance. A “nicely built city” would be expected precisely to resist destruction, unless the idea is of progress or revolution, but then the imagery would be of modernization, not of ruin. “Nicely built” sounds like “clumsy,” as if translating a foreign idiom, while “never resists” suggests an undeleted vestige of alternate translations: “never destroyed” and “resists destruction.” Kentridge likes this phrase. He used it back in 1995, at the base of an eponymous print. Executed in etching, drypoint, and aquatint, this work also prefigures 82

Stills from Second Hand Reading, 2013

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the setting of More Sweetly Play the Dance, with weeds rising from the lower framing edge and detritus of human construction punctuating featureless flatlands to plot movement into depth. In this terrain of terminated paths and projects, Kentridge balances an implausible boulder, dark and pockmarked, like a gigantic meteorite. And facing this he places (or reserves, as unprinted white paper) a tabula rasa suggesting a blank sheet or screen.

The landscape setting stands for the terrain of Johannesburg, a seemingly natural landscape shaped and scarred by human endeavor, especially the exploitative, subterranean one of mining. A geography determined by an invisible geology, this nature-culture originated—by the artist’s own account—in the depths of time, when two billion years ago a huge meteor, the largest ever to hit our planet, crashed on the spot where the city now stands; its violent impact tilted a layer of the earth’s crust that contained a seam of gold, Johannesburg’s origin and curse.9 Thus the amorphous boulder might belong to an allegory about history. In an important statement made in September 1990, seven months after the government’s first moves towards democracy, the artist called South Africa’s apartheid regime “the immovable rock” that he had both to confront and to escape, hence—perhaps—the blank rectangle as cipher for what cannot be presented.10 But only “perhaps.” The enigma remains as obdurate as the boulder: “We need the terrain of the half-solved, the half-solvable riddle,” announced Kentridge to an audience of puzzle solvers at Harvard in 2012.11 In this ambiguous terrain, the saying about nicely built cities is not a solution but an extension of the riddle into words. However, the digression about the crippled porter, his cryptic labels, and their provenance did prove that you enter the parade in the midst of an oeuvre.

A Nicely Built City Never Resists Destruction, 1995

The porter marches in a procession of processions reaching backward before the start of Kentridge’s career and forward to works still in progress and yet to come. An old snapshot finds the artist in his early twenties, squatting as he draws on a white garage wall. His model is Samson, “a local meths drinker” and rumored abortionist, and the picture is a collective mural created by Kentridge and friends on Junction Avenue in the Parktown suburb of Johannesburg.12 It featured, along with Samson, six life-size human figures, and a flying dog against a green meadow and blue sky.

When they finished, the painters sat before the mural and discussed culture and politics. The gathering resembles Kentridge’s video installation under ideal conditions: a line of represented human figures sparking conversation among a facing line of friends.

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9 William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons (Cambridge, 2014), 73.

10 William Kentridge, “Dear Diary: Suburban Allegories and Other Infections,” lecture at the Decorative Arts Society, Johannesburg, September 21, 1990, excerpted in Carolyn ChristovBakargiev, William Kentridge (Brussels, 1998), 75; Rosalind Krauss, “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” October 92 (2000): 3–35.

11 Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons, 80; the published text is based on Kentridge’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard University.

12 Steven Sack, “In the Name of Art,” in Culture in Another South Africa, ed.

Willem Campschreur and Joost Divenda (London, 1989), ills. 22–24, cited and discussed in Sean O’Toole, “Confessions of an Optimist,” Goodman Gallery (November 2014).

Steven Sack, William Kentridge and Samson, 1978

Steven Sack, Junction Avenue Theater Company Discussing Participatory Mural, Parktown, 1978

13 Matthew Kentridge, The Soho Chronicles: 10 Films by William Kentridge (London, 2015), 90.

A decade later, Kentridge built his breakthrough masterpiece around a procession. Completed in 1989, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris was the first of the artist’s series of (thus far) ten animated films, titled Drawings for Projection. It sets a private entanglement of characters—a love triangle of Soho Eckstein, his wife, and the interloping dreamer Felix Teitelbaum—against a backdrop of the city that gives the film its title.

Purchased by the robber-baron capitalist Soho, the industrial waste of the Highveld around Johannesburg becomes “Eckstein Territory,” and through it marches a vast column of itinerates. This “procession of the dispossessed” (Kentridge’s term) is a tour de force of animation. Gathering at the horizon, the marchers snake forward through the ruinous landscape, animating and measuring its extent. Visually arresting, this back-to-front movement also affects the film’s plot. When the procession reaches the foreground, Kentridge has to individualize the people at the front through clothing, physiognomy, and bearing . Thus appears, in close-up view at the head of the parade, a homeless alcoholic whom the artist calls “Harry.”

Antecedent to the porter of More Sweetly Play the Dance, and included in much of the artist’s work from the period, he serves here as the face of the dispossessed.13 A sort of supplicant, he confronts the glutton Soho, who throws food at Harry, causing the procession to retreat.

In the second of his Drawings for Projection, Kentridge intensified the contrast between marching masses and close-up view. In Monument (1990), Harry, now a porter, trudges through the landscape. His burden is piled into a shipping box of “Surf” washing powder. Soho appears as a “civic benefactor,” unveiling a monument to the workers. People process into the area around the shrouded monument and merge into a crowd. Unveiled, the monument turns out to be Harry, not a statue but the living, breathing 86

Stills from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, 1989

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man, on whose weary features the camera closes in. Made in 1990, during the uncertain transition from apartheid, Monument asks about how oppression will be remembered. Kentridge shows Harry’s feet shackled to the pediment. Designed to celebrate history’s victors, public monuments commemorate the vanquished by force. However, in a conceit borrowed from Samuel Beckett’s protest play Catastrophe (which Kentridge once directed), the porter is not passive but looks defiantly back.

Parallel to this ironic monument, Kentridge also created an ironic procession. Completed in 1990, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass takes its title from a slogan coined by Emperor Haile Selassie urging Ethiopia to modernize.14 Twelve large sheets of overlapping paper— “a row of fragments,” in Kentridge’s words—form an arch 28 feet long.15 Executed in fugitive charcoal and pastel, the paper parade, rather than progressing, rises and falls like the top segment of an anticlockwise wheel of fortune. At its head, as if tumbling into the glimpse of level landscape, walks another porter, his face concealed by the jumble he bears. Next in line, under the word “develop,” a bandaged amputee hobbles through low-lying razor wire.

Behind these ancestors of More Sweetly’s porter comes a compacted miscellany—like a bas-relief—of imagery Kentridge elsewhere develops, making Arc a recap and foreshadowing of the artist’s oeuvre.

Arc’s enigmatic montage of images and texts signals allegory, and commentators have labored to discern beneath the disparities a unity of sense. Thus, the procession has been plausibly understood as a figure of transitional justice commencing in South Africa in 1990, as radical regime change contended with a now tainted past, remembering it but rewriting it in light of a different present and future.16 In the collaged, fragmented, and curved form of his procession, the artist replaces progress (the celebratory narrative of history) with a traumatically charged play of continuity and discontinuity, remembrance and forgetting. Kentridge’s own explanations are allegorical, too. His processions try to encompass “the muchness of the people of the world,” particularly as great populations move on foot, from the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa to today’s political and economic refugees: “We are still locked in the manual labor of individual bodies as a way of making the world.”17 Walking is a historical reality and an image of history. Similarly, marches make and model history. After the French Revolution, processions represented the power of people to effect regime change, as if the Bastille had been stormed in processional form.18 These parades appropriated the forms, times, and places of the despised processional culture of the Church.

Marching, the people also imitated the festive forms of the Triumph.

Stills from Monument, 1990

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14 Michael Ross, “Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice,” Narrative 20 (2012): 3–24; Leora Maltz-Leca, “Process/ Procession: William Kentridge and the Process of Change,” Art Bulletin 95 (2013): 139–65.

15 William Kentridge, in Angela Breidbach and William Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud: Conversation with Angela Breidbach (Cologne, 2006), 16.

16 Roth, “Progress.”

17 Kentridge, “If We Ever Get to Heaven,” 25.

18 Maltz-Leca, “Process/Procession,” 155.

Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, 260 x 748 cm, 1990

Joseph Leo Koerner

19 Maltz-Leca, page 163, footnote 52.

20 William Kentridge, “‘Fortuna’: Neither Programme Nor Change in the Making of Images,” in Kentridge, ed.

Christov-Bakargiev, 67.

21 Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons, 10.

These had been a preserve of the nobility, whose actions and decisions, alone, counted as historical. Revolutionary action took processional form.

In Germany, under Metternich, assemblies of more than twenty persons were forbidden, except during designated holidays. In South Africa, the protest marches in Sharpeville (1960) and Soweto (1976) sparked murderous responses by the police, followed by the imposition of martial law, the suspension of the constitution, and the banning of public gatherings.

Conversely, in 1989, when Kentridge sketched and animated the crowds in Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City, the transfer of power to F. W. de Klerk triggered huge marches in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Kentridge himself paraded in the September 15 march bearing an encaustic version of his Casspirs Full of Love, and ten days later he began work on Arc/Procession.19

Between these processions and More Sweetly Play the Dance, Kentridge made a crucial departure. This departure acquired meanings, but like most of the artist’s developments, it derived from challenges encountered during the act of making. (Concerning his animated films, Kentridge reports, “With the charcoal technique each person is rendered with a single mark on the paper. As more marks are added, so the crowd emerges. The crowds drew themselves.”)20 Commissioned to create a work for the 1999 Istanbul Biennial, the artist decided to film a shadow procession and project it deep beneath the city in the huge Yerebatan Cistern. Unlike his earlier processions, which move to the foreground from some distance and have some aim or resting place before us, this march, created by hinged shadow puppets, could move only laterally, “neither advancing nor retreating, but passing,”21 and with no representable starting point or end. The medium set limits: “You have a light source, you have an object blocking light,” yet Kentridge found virtue in this aimlessness.

Through the exigencies of making, and strengthened by its cavernous first venue, Shadow Procession brought to mind the greatest of all philosophical allegories, Plato’s cave. In the The Republic, in the voice of Socrates, Plato asks us to imagine people chained underground and forced to watch—solely and perpetually—a show made by crafted silhouettes (artworks) of real objects projected on a screen, so that this play of illusions is all they see and know about the actual world. Plato inquires: what if one of the prisoners were given to see—in sequence—the fire and the crafted silhouettes that make the shadows, then (dragged above ground) the shadows made by the sun and the real objects that cast those shades, and finally,

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Installation view of Shadow Procession, 1999

Joseph Leo Koerner

22 Ibid., 11.

23 Ibid., 9.

24 On artists’ oeuvres as “distributed objects,” see Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998), 233.

almost blindingly, the sun itself? Would that prisoner grasp the truth of the sun as compared to the third-hand illusion of the shadows, those simulacra of artifacts of things? To which Kentridge counters that such truth depends on force—the prisoner’s violent portage from darkness to light—and that human history, and glaringly colonial history, consists largely of violence done in the name of truth, progress, and enlightenment: “We have reached a point where all destinations, all lights, arouse mistrust.”22 As shadow artist, Kentridge also discovers one practical truth left out of Plato’s description: the silhouettes casting the shadows must have had bearers parading unseen. Where Plato’s consists of the images of objects, Kentridge’s Shadow Procession shows the bearers—“people on the move.”23 The porter thus returns, his allegorical burden increased by Plato’s myth. And between Shadow Procession and More Sweetly Play the Dance, he appeared in new guises, contexts, and media, adding meanings and messages to his load. In 2000, in Phenakistoscope, his form was multiplied and mechanically animated, so that it is the load that moves as if continuously handed from one bearer to the next; and in the collage series Portage, his form—again reduced to torn black paper—marches on Larousse’s Encyclopedia pages. From 2001 to 2007, that form, much magnified, was set against old maps of the world and masterfully woven into wall hangings by Stephens Tapestry Studio. In 2012, porters appear in the dramatic conclusion to Kentridge’s multimedia installation about clocks, coercion, resistance, fate, death, and black holes, titled The Refusal of Time. And in 2016, while More Sweetly Play the Dance was premiered, the giant porter-like marchers of Triumphs and Laments were created by power-washing, around their stenciled forms, the biological patina on Rome’s Tiber embankment wall—a kind of “reverse graffiti.”

More than a leitmotif, porters in processions are Kentridge’s way of representing his oeuvre as a lineage. Although made and exhibited in different places, and distributed afterwards to different museums and collections, each procession—and, by metaphorical extension, every work the artist makes—becomes one moment in a temporal series, being descended from and ancestral to all other works in the oeuvre.24

Stills from Shadow Procession, 1999

Portage (detail), 2000

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overleaf Still from The Refusal of Time, 2012

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Triumphs and Laments (detail), 2016

The porter’s progress takes time to understand. You see the crutches planted and the legs swing. You observe hesitations in the forward movement that dramatize struggle, but you will have recognized the figure as a puppet jointed at the hips and knees—the body and crutches are one piece. Knowing this you read the hesitations as imperfect movements of the puppeteer. This shift between two aspects (porter and puppet) follows from a prior recognition of the shadow as an image of anything at all. The puppet’s proximity to formlessness, and the cognitive work that seeing the porter entails, had its testing ground in Shadow Procession: “I was interested in how roughly a figure could be torn and still be understood; how crudely it could be moved and still have coherence as a moving, specific person.”25 This interest would have had practical inspiration. In making shadow plays, whether with puppets or hands, creating a focused and readable image is the first challenge. Kentridge took an important lesson from this difficulty. Recreating actual machinery of Plato’s cave, the artist contested the philosopher’s strongest claim: from shadows in themselves, and without seeing the puppets, fire, real objects, the world, and the sun, a prisoner would know nothing. “As an artist working in the field of illusion,” counters Kentridge, “I have of course a motive for trying to move the field of images, and hence illusion, up the ladder. More specifically of showing the place that illusion has, in the making of knowledge itself.”26 This “crack in Plato’s edifice” Kentridge finds in the fact, gleaned from his roughly torn puppets, that the mind is built to read images into random forms, and that seeing anything, whether shadows, images, things, or truth, is an active trial-and-error labor.

It is this unacknowledged work that will have inevitably been accomplished by the prisoners, as by all history’s subjected people, that the porter brings to light, and that he shares with the public and with the artist.

As Kentridge demonstrated in an animation for his 2008 video installation I am not me, the horse is not mine, a horse can be created simply by moving bits of torn black pieces of paper around and seeing in them a horse: “The sheet of paper comes towards us, and our own sense of the horse goes out to it. We meet the world halfway.”27 More Sweetly Play the Dance began with such a chance discovery, reached during the preliminary chaos of making.28 The installation’s two original venues—the giant wall of an old graduation tower in Bad Rothenfelde and a long, pleated gallery in the EYE Filmmuseum, in Amsterdam—caused the “idea of a procession” to “take hold.”29 But the nature and theme of the march emerged from something that happened to come the artist’s way: new computer-game equipment that his collaborator, Janus Fouché, was trying out for making simple animations. The apparatus could recognize Fouché seen in a camera and 99

25 Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons, 9.

26 Ibid., 28.

27 Ibid., 18.

28 Leaving us many such reports, revealing in films, lectures, performances, interviews, and texts precisely how his works were created, Kentridge puts the viewer in the place of the maker and shows the maker to be a viewer like us.

29 Kentridge, “If We Ever Get to Heaven,” 30.

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follow his movements with a line on a screen. Recorded, the moving line could be used to animate a drawing. “So a stick figure is made, almost a schematic skeleton.” The computer made mistakes. There was “leeway in the ligaments … and every now and then the head of the skeleton figure flies off …. The computer gives up and we have a jumble of sticks and lines and bones of the collapsed figure, until the computer gathers itself, reconstructs the figure and continues with the dance.”30 The spectacle sparks first an association—the collapsing figures of Walt Disney’s Skeleton Dance—and then an idea: the procession cast as a dance of death, with four computeranimated skeletons as the title motif.

30 Ibid., 17.

31 Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter, 2000), 233–35.

32 Ibid., 162.

33 Ibid., 38–45; I am grateful to Harmon Siegel for alerting me to this example.

34 Christiaan Huygens, Correspondence (The Hague, 1888), 1: 16–17; Mannoni, 39.

Skeletons frolic through the prehistory of cinema. A half-century before Disney, a British physician and microscopist demonstrated a new device at London’s temple of projection, the Royal Polytechnic Institution. Marketed as Beale’s Choreutoscope, this ratcheted contraption caused six skeletons to flash by so that they appeared as one moving figure.31 The phantasmagorias that thrilled audiences in the 1790s featured ghosts and skeletons rushing towards and receding from the audience, and fans urged the art’s master, Étienne-Gaspard Robert, alias Robertson, to adapt Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death for the screen.32 This had already been done. In 1659, Christiaan Huygens sketched ten skeletons “for representation by means of convex glasses in a lantern.”33 Huygens’s magic lantern projected light through images painted on moving slides. It would have had a fixed slide showing a skeleton without a skull and right arm, and a rotating slide with the skull and arm, so that when operated the figure would seem to juggle its head. That cinema begins with the animated corpse fits its achievement: endowing the dead image with life.

Huygens wrote major works on optics, clocks, and probability, and through his telescopic studies he discovered the rings of Saturn. The magic lantern was for mere entertainment, and—out of embarrassment—he refused to send one to his father (a notable poet), who wanted to show it off at court. But Huygens was obsessed with death dances. He had one painted on the inside of his garden wall in black and white: “Large as life, they are the figures of Holbein’s Totentanz which, having been as small as a finger, I have enlarged to the height just mentioned.”34 Huygens also took the skeletons for his magic lantern from the German master. Though tiny, Holbein’s woodcuts—created around 1526 and published in 1538—animate the corpse wondrously. Death dances around his victims with an explosive vitality unprecedented in the art of the period.

Stills from I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008

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Beale’s Choreutoscope, c. 1890

35 Gert Kaiser, Der tanzende Tod (Frankfurt, 1983), 54–58.

36 Léon de Laborde, Les ducs de Bourgogne. Études sur les lettres, les arts et l’industrie pendent le XVe siècle, et plus particulièrement dans les Pays-Bas et le duché de Bourgogne, Part 2 (Paris, 1849), 1: 394; cited in Wilhelm Seelmann, “Die Totentänze des Mittelalters,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung 17 (1891), 15.

37 Kaiser, Der tanzende Tod, 79.

38 Jean Wirth, La jeune fille et la mort.

Recherches sur les thèmes macabres dans l’art germanique de la Renaissance (Geneva, 1979).

Because what the dead do with the living is to dance, historians speculated that, before it was an image or a poem, the Totentanz was a live performance.35 Only one record survives of such an actual dance, however.

It occurred in medieval Bruges, now the uncanny venue for Kentridge’s dance. Back then, Bruges was Europe’s richest city. Nerve center of the Burgundian empire and a hub of global trade, it supported the greatest artists of the day. Here Jan van Eyck and his successors, including Petrus Christus and Hans Memling, revolutionized the craft of painting.

Account books of Duke Philip the Good record a 1449 payment to a painter (Nicaise de Cambray) to stage a “certain play, history, morality of the Danse Macabre.”36 “Play” means it was a live production, with players on a stage with a painted backdrop. “History” indicates the performance had a plot and dialogue. And “morality” signals the play conveyed an edifying message, such as: “Repent, for death is upon you!” However, as in the earlier painted death dances in the Holy Innocents’ Cemetery in Paris (1424) and in Lübeck (1463)—both prompted by outbreaks of the Black Death—the message was ambiguous. Such tableaux preached confession and penance, but through the pleasure and eroticism of the dance, they whispered, “seize the day.” Most of the painted death dances appeared in graveyards. The German word Friedhof means a walled or fenced-off space (Einfriedung) often associated with rights of asylum. At once safe and unrestricted, cemeteries sometimes functioned as playgrounds where amorous encounters and dancing took place.37 Some historians have traced the death dance to a popular belief that souls having suffered violent death rested unquiet in their graves, and that on certain nights they could be seen dancing in the churchyard.38 102

Christiaan Huygens, Skeletons for Animated Magic Lantern Slide, 1659

Hans Holbein, The Expulsion, 1526

Hans Holbein, The Doctor, 1526

Hans Holbein, The Plowman, 1526

Hans Holbein, The Last Judgment, 1526

Joseph Leo Koerner

39 La Danse Macabre (Paris, 1485), see Kaiser, Der tanzende Tod, 79; Sophie Oosterwijk, “Of Corpses, Constable and Kings: The Danse Macabre in Late Medieval and Renaissance Culture,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 157 (2013), 77.

40 Kaiser, Der tanzende Tod, 294.

In Paris, Lübeck, and elsewhere, living individuals ordered by social rank, each paired with the corpse they would become, formed a long painted frieze around the walls of the churchyard or chapel. A continuous landscape backdrop, with features from the local topography, intensified the worldliness of the display. Death strikes the individual in the lonely midst of everyday life, disconnected from the vertical of transcendence.

Like Kentridge’s procession, these painted friezes were multimedia affairs.

They included rhymed verses representing Death’s dialogues with his victims as well as an edifying sermon (sometimes inscribed on a preacher’s pulpit). This moralizing clashes with the music and dance. We cannot hear their sounds, but the instruments are loud ones typical of rustic revels, or—more precisely—of charivari, those dissonant serenades that mocked wrongdoings like drunkenness, adultery, wife-beating, and the equal coupling of old and young.

The dance that Death forces on the living is indecorous as well. In their dialogues with Death, persons of rank complain more about the vulgar movements their bodies must perform than about the end that is upon them. “I never learned to dance such a wild dance to savage music,” complains the King in a woodcut Danse Macabre from 1485.39 Nobles learned to dance elegantly to measured sounds, not like peasants, with their flailing arms and stomping feet. “I lived in honor and majesty,” laments the Bishop in a Totentanz of 1465. “Now the uncreated drag me to death like a trained ape.”40 Like death, the dance is socially leveling, making the genre popular with the rising bourgeoisie, who relished the demise of their noble overlords. But the dance came easy only to the peasant, for whom death brings respite from toil. In Holbein, Death drives the plowman’s horses furiously on to a sunset of blissful rest.

Holbein’s woodcut is a showpiece of motion. With its accelerated tempo and grotesque encounters, the Totentanz brought to art’s history a new aesthetic. A modern master of the grotesque and comical, Kentridge discovered that skeletons are easy both to animate and contort, since their sticklike limbs and decaying forms conceal errors in depiction. Paradoxically, the most alive images of late medieval art, cadavers, also injected radical ugliness into art. Dreams of pictorial coherence evaporate when flesh falls randomly from the bone. Socially leveling because indecorous, death dances play havoc with the artist, too. Though they seek a place in history, artists know the connection between their illusory productions and death.

In one Swiss example, the painter-poet Niklaus Manuel Deutsch portrayed himself at the end of the dance, with a corpse grabbing the artist’s steadying mahlstick as he paints a group of Jews and Turks.

Attributed to Bernt Notke, Dance of Death, 1480

Albrecht Kauw after Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, Self-Portrait and Death with Turks and Jews, 1649, original 1516-19

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Joseph Leo Koerner

Behind the porter, a row of hospital patients with rolling IV poles shuffles by. The poles look real, but the gravity drips are cutouts of ink sketches.

These dangle alongside items from Kentridge’s repertoire of exemplary things: a globe, telephone, megaphone, among others. The sick have a topical resonance. When the artist made the procession, Ebola raged in West Africa. With a fatality rate above 70 percent, it was a modern equivalent of the bubonic plague that, between 1348 and 1350, killed every third European, motivating the Totentanz and fostering a persecuting society in search of scapegoats. Kentridge’s ailing marchers also belong to a hospital imagery that runs through his oeuvre, sometimes referencing contemporary issues—the hospice scenes in Tide Table (2003) allude to the expanding AIDS epidemic—but also linked to Kentridge’s core theme: history as trauma.

The wounds this artist pursues seem of a psychic kind: violence inflicted originally, perhaps, on the body but retained in the soul. History of the Main Complaint (1996) finds Soho Eckstein lying comatose on a bed, with doctors probing his body with CAT scans and intrusive stethoscopes.

Instead of tumors, they discover objects, principally outdated office equipment, which place the robber-baron capitalist at his seat of power: the desk.

As the instruments probe deeper, these objects give way to memories as if unfolding through the windshield of a car, with Soho at the wheel, his eyes reflected in the rearview mirror. While he follows the road, Soho chances to glimpse brief scenes of violence: a man kicked to death, another hacked with axes and hoes. Crosses in red chalk indicate the wounds—rare bits of color in the black charcoal drawing animation. They suggest forensic marks that might enter anonymous violence into the archive, there to be forgotten but observed by Soho; the injuries leave a wound—not just psychic but physical—on his skeleton.

Kentridge attests to an autobiographical aspect to this imagery: as a child he witnessed, from the backseat of a car, down a side street, a man kicked in the gutter. The car drove on, and the child tried to forget, but once observed the image did not and would not go away. Historical trauma might be hidden, and its representations—through the stethoscope, CAT scan, MRI, and car window—put it at a distance, but the wounds persist as if written in the flesh. A passionate consumer of paper, Kentridge was struck by a shipbuilder’s testimony. In forests in Germany where war once raged, trees became unsuited for timber because saws and machinery would encounter “shrapnel in the wood.” The phrase became a motto of the artist. Trauma is neither conscious nor unconscious. It lurks in the hidden 108

Still from Tide Table, 2003

The Book in the Tree (Suikerbos), 2013

order of things, always dangerously ready to return—words and the world obeying a grammar of the wound. The “history of the main complaint” reaches back through Soho and the catastrophes of colonialism to the primordial violence that humans inflict on each other. It is in our bones, as it were, hence the unquiet skeletons that lead the dance.

Stills from History of the Main Complaint, 1996

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41 Commissie van Openbare Onderstand, Sint-Janshospitaal Brugge, 1188/1976, 2 vols. (Bruges, 1976).

42 Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-laMorte, trans. Mike Mitchell (Sawtry, 2005), 33.

In Bruges, Kentridge’s death dance will march through the upper story of an ancient hospital complex. Founded in the 11th century, the SintJanshospitaal was one of Europe’s first major refuges for the sick, needy, and itinerate.41 During Bruges’s heyday in the 1400s, it received full monastic status. Run jointly by the city and Burgundian overlords, it boasted fabulous works of art. Memling painted several of his masterpieces for the altars in its chapel. After Charles the Bold’s death and defeat, at Nancy in 1477, when the Burgundian Netherlands was plunged into chaos, the hospital became a haven for displaced persons, including (according to legend) Memling. The painter’s retables served to assure the afflicted of the Church’s treasury of grace and, through scenes of the judgment, to warn them of their end. More important, however, paintings formed a mere backdrop to the hospital’s main spectacle: the sick, who constituted a tableau vivant of death. Here dying was a public event, with priests officiating at specially outfitted deathbeds, and all eyes—God’s and the Devil’s included—fixed on the expiring souls, observing whether they died a good death.

Along with printed death dances, the illustrated manuals on the “art” of dying were the bestsellers of the period, with about a hundred editions, including an influential block-book version published in the Netherlands.

The “sick man’s salve” (as one such English manual was titled) was more spiritual than medicinal, although the body did remember—as it does in Kentridge. Its afflictions reflected a history of sins that reach through the sufferer, whose maladies derive from vice, back through the corrupt human lineage to Adam and Eve. In the hospital in Bruges, and more spectacularly in the Antonine hospital in Isenheim, where Grünewald’s great altarpiece originally stood, the art of painting also displayed Christ’s gruesome wounds, which were corporeal atonement for this sad history.

Sint-Janshospitaal now serves as an art museum exhibiting works from Bruges’s artistic flowering. It is a remarkable time capsule within a city where history seems to stand still. After 1477, Bruges’s fortunes declined precipitously. The city’s leaders opposed Habsburg power and were slaughtered. Meanwhile, the irreversible silting of the Zwin inlet eliminated the city’s waterway to the sea. Global trade quickly shifted to Antwerp. Ironically, it was the celebration of a dying city that brought Bruges back to life, now as a jewel of the Flemish past. In Bruges-la-Morte, Georges Rodenbach portrayed a city “entombed in its stone quais, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them.”42 Published in 1892, the novel made Bruges a tourist destination and reignited interest in early Netherlandish art. Rodenbach built his book on an uncanny correspondence between a mind and a place. The hero, 112

Hans Memling, Triptych of Death, Vanity and Salvation, c. 1485

Jan Beerblock, Interior of Sint-Janshospitaal, c. 1778

Joseph Leo Koerner

Sint-Janshospitaal, from Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, 1892

43 Ibid., 27.

44 Ibid., 21.

45 The original images are republished in Georges Rodenbach, Das tote Brügge.

Mit allen Fotografien der Erstausgabe, trans. Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski (Berlin, 2016).

46 “History merges into the setting,” according to Walter Benjamin, paradigmatically in the Baroque Trauerspiel; see Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London, 1985), 92, 173.

47 Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons, 83.

Hugues, lives paralyzed by the melancholy that befell him on the death of his young wife. Isolated in the vast chambers of his home, but wandering Bruges obsessively at twilight, he clings to his beloved’s memory, turning her rooms into a shrine, with her “complete head of hair” preserved like a relic in a crystal box.43 A city “in its death throws,” Bruges not only reflects the hero’s melancholy but actively shapes it, inducing pathological thoughts and murderous actions. Rodenbach wanted this influence to extend to his readers. They should “experience for themselves the shadow cast over the text by the tall towers.”44 To this end, he illustrated the novel with thirty-five half-tone reproductions of original photographs, a first in literature.45 Culled from Parisian image banks, and functioning like visual relics, these ghostly black-and-white images are more than mere illustrations. History merges into the setting.

This merging happens, dramatically, in Kentridge as well.46 Consider the other primal scene in his psychic formation: as a boy of six, he entered his father’s study and discovers a box, like a chocolate box. Lifting the lid, he found instead of sweets a sheaf of black-and-white photographs. “A man lies face downward, a dot and a dark stain in the center of his checkered jacket. The next photograph: the man rolled over. An incomprehensible confusion of shirt, jacket, viscera; the whole chest disintegrated by the exit 114

Master E.S., Ars Moriendi, c. 1460

Joseph Leo Koerner

48 Ibid., 84.

49 On the concept of natural history, see Beatrice Hannsen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley, 1998), 13–23, 49–65.

50 Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons, 79.

51 William Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris, Accounts and Drawings from the Underground: East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, 1906 (Calcutta, 2015).

52 “… läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde / er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz;” “stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf,” “spielt süßer den Tod.”

wound of the bullet.”47 These were Ian Berry’s photos of the Sharpeville Massacre, and William’s father, Sir Sydney Kentridge, possessed them because, as South Africa’s most distinguished lawyer, he represented the families of the murdered protestors, and because the photographs showed the victims had been shot fleeing from the police.

The six-year-old closed the box, put it back on the shelf, and placed a book on top to conceal what he had done. “It is more than ‘this should not happen.’ This should not be seen. He should not have seen it.”48 The image is fugitive but indelible, like the charcoal marks of Kentridge’s animated films: no matter how hard he tries, they cannot be completely erased. In Felix in Exile (1994), Kentridge draws a body disappearing into the veld. It appears first drawn in charcoal, then gets concealed under gathering sheets of paper, then is outlined forensically in red, finally to disappear— almost but not quite—into the ground. Absorbed into the setting, human history thus becomes natural history.49 Conversely, nature becomes unnatural: the corpse subtly determines the very shape of the terrain, prompting the question of whether all landscapes are overgrown ruins.

Whether organic or aesthetic, the whole is always riven. The tree, that symbol of symbols in which a manifold is wondrously unified into a single living thing, becomes in Kentridge split by terminal hurt and terminal longing. In this nature-culture, “events must be excavated, sought after in traces, in half-hidden clues.”50 In More Sweetly Play the Dance, the procession marches through that same sedimented valley of death, with its ruined pylons, teetering gallows, and morphing slag heaps of the mining industry, while the dirty charcoal sky restlessly repeats its movement in a film loop. In the years leading up to the film installation, Kentridge made a series of drawings in charcoal, ink, and forensic crimson on old handwritten mining ledgers. They reveal a trauma deposited both in a landscape setting and in the pictorial ground, i.e., in the mine ledgers themselves as repositories of South Africa’s history of oppression.51 A palpable joy in their making fills these sheets, as Kentridge plays with the mysterious force of drawing, and as viewers we discover splendors in the veld and cunning in the medium. Art struggles for beauty even as it derives a terrible energy from an underlying violence.

The procession’s title engages with this contradiction, echoing lines from the poem “Todesfuge” by Paul Celan: “He has them [‘his Jews’] dig a grave in the earth / he commands us to play for the dance,” “dig deeper with the spades you and you play more for the dance,” and “more sweetly play death.”52 In his Studio Notes, Kentridge recorded as a possible title a more obvious citation: “Paul Celan ‘Death is a master from Germany’”, and the work’s eventual title condenses several lines of the poem, so that the 116

Still from Felix in Exile, 1994

Tummelplatz

Water Tower February 1906, 2011

word “sweetly” modifies “dance” rather than “death,” but the irony—that death dances to a lullaby—is there in the poem. Celan places the commands in the mouth of an SS Kommandant, who forces Jews to play music as they dig their own graves. He is the “master from Germany,” and so too is Death, from its incarnation in old German Totentänze, through Schubert and Wagner, to Mahler’s prophetic Kindertotenlieder. The German provenance of the death dance, a deforming aesthetic, and (perhaps) the infamous “Black Wall” at Auschwitz, where prisoners were shot, might have passed through Kentridge’s mind when he contemplated the procession’s projection on an ominous wall in the German town of Bad Rothenfelde. And as Margaret Koerner notes in her essay in this volume, the film’s smeared sky corresponds to what may be Celan’s most devastating image, where rising in smoke from the incinerator the countless anonymous dead “have a grave in the sky.”53 The impulse to contend with “Todesfuge” runs deep, since the poem touches on what, for Kentridge, is art’s central dilemma. Already in 1986, in the last days of apartheid rule in South Africa, Kentridge wrote that “after Auschwitz there is, alas, poetry.”54 The sentence refers to Theodor Adorno’s statement: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”55 Recently, Kentridge reflected on his personal understanding of this dictum: “For me it suggests our inability to hold on to a historical hurt as we should. To actually make sense of history we should be paralyzed but the fact that we aren’t shows us the gap in our receptivity or what we can hang on to, and that loss of memory then serves, itself, as a kind of response to Adorno.”56 Written in 1944–45, “Todesfuge” became the strongest answer to Adorno (the philosopher admitted this), as it evidences poetry not only after but also about Auschwitz. This achievement rests, among other things, on a radical movement Celan makes away from an aesthetic of the beautiful.

Beauty has become an atrocity, the domain of the “master from Germany,” who commits mass murder and loves music, wonders at the heavens, and writes poetry to his golden-haired Margarete. In Celan’s image of a grave in the air, and in the final line—“your ashen hair Sulamith”—poetry testifies by deforming poetry.

The crude cutout portraits in Kentridge’s procession derive from history.

Some refer to heroic heads paraded during China’s Cultural Revolution.

Others reach back to Europe’s violent past: Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake for believing in the plurality of worlds; Cicero, murdered for his defense of the Roman Republic. Kentridge likens these figures to the saints processed in religious festivals, but he calls them, along with the other 119

53 See Margaret Koerner, p. 36 above.

54 William Kentridge, “Art in a State of Grace, Art in a State of Hope, Art in a State of Siege,” in Carolyn ChristovBakargiev, William Kentridge, exh. cat.

(Brussels, 1998), 56.

55 Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, ed.

Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, 1967), 34.

56 “William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland in Conversation with Tamar Garb,” in William Kentridge / Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letter and Lines, ed.

Tamar Tarb (Edinburgh, 2016), 129.

57 Kentridge, “If We Ever Get to Heaven,” 30.

Joseph Leo Koerner

58 Joseph Alchermes, “Spolia in Roman Cities of the Late Empire: Legislative Rationales and Architectural Reuse,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994): 167–78.

59 Dale Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolf (Oxford, 2008), 233–52; Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, 2007), 143–47.

60 Tertullian, Apologeticus 33; also Jerome, Epistulae 39, 2, 8; on the veracity of Tertullian’s account, see Beard, Roman Triumph, 85–92.

61 Beard, Roman Triumph, 43–46.

62 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1996).

symbolic baggage on parade, “spoils.”57 The word comes from the Latin spolium, meaning the hide or fleece stripped from an animal. Already in the ancient world, the plural spolia entered the semantic field of war, denoting arms stripped from the enemy and, more generally, anything acquired by violence.58 To be spolia, however, the booty had to announce its capture.

Thus, statues stripped from a defeated city and brought home with the conqueror would be paraded along with captured weapons and enslaved people, the latter enacting, on horse-drawn floats, tableaux vivants depicting their defeat.59 These displays set the shine of victory off against the inevitable shadow of lament. Roman triumphs announced their own impermanence. The early Christian militant Tertullian reports that, in the victory chariot, the wreath of glory was held above the victor’s head by a slave who whispered constantly, “Look behind you, you are an ordinary man!”60 Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments includes the most evocative depiction of spoils to have survived since antiquity: the booty stripped by Emperor Titus from the Temple of Jerusalem. The menorah, the table of shewbread, and the trumpets of Rosh Hashanah had been paraded through Rome, and their display was then carved in stone on the Arch of Titus.61 In Kentridge, this scene joins a gallery of images from Roman history to the present.

Made by erasing the sedimented grime around them, these silhouettes will disappear within a lifetime into the newly accumulating dirt, a natural history that ingeniously performs the work’s allegory of transience. But the image of the temple’s captured cult objects is indelible, especially for the Jews, whose 2,000-year diaspora began here.

The movement of Kentridge’s ancestors to Lithuania and then, through Britain, to South Africa belongs to this history. The “wandering Jew” is a trope not only of ambivalent host peoples, who claim to be rooted by comparison. It appears in Scripture in the stories of Egyptian and Babylonian captivity. Exile is the event that matters most in Jewish history and that Jews are commanded collectively to remember. This distinguishes them from other historical peoples such as the Romans, with their written and pictorial records of past happenings great and small. Though embedded in history through their covenant with God, and required to keep the Sabbath and to remember (zakhor), the Jewish people practiced a highly selective memory, retaining certain triumphs and laments and forgetting the rest—an approach to history challenged by the Holocaust.62 In the paraded Temple spolia, Kentridge makes an image taken from history into an image of history. No longer an ordered sequence of great events, history consists of memory fragments selectively and traumatically retained.

The Dance of Death resembles a history and a triumph. Holbein’s woodcut series encompasses the whole of sweep time, from Eve and Adam to 120

Spoils from the Temple of Jerusalem, 2014

Joseph Leo Koerner

Alfred Rethel, Der Tod als Reiter (Horseman Death), 1849

63 Peter Paret, Art History as History: Episodes in the Culture and Politics of Nineteenth-Century German (Princeton, 1988), 104–30.

Judgment Day, and ancient Rome saw triumphs of death, as well as funerary and posthumous triumphs. But death dances also mock triumphs and histories, since they bring everything back to the anonymity of the corpse.

“Where is it now?” asks an adage dear to Kentridge, answering: “Smoke, ashes, fable. Or perhaps it is no longer even a fable.”

Historical amnesia is the subject of the most famous post-Renaissance death dance. Alfred Rethel made his woodcut series Auch ein Todtentanz (“Another Dance of Death,” or “This, Too, Is a Dance of Death”) in 1849, after military forces under princely command had crushed the “springtime of the people,” which had erupted in March 1848.63 An ambivalent reactionary, Rethel mocked the claim that ordinary persons could make history and bring about a new German nation unified under a constitution. Revolution, this death dance announced, brought nothing but anarchy and destruction, and its leader was secretly Death. In one of the work’s many ironies, Rethel (a history painter by trade) communicated this verdict in the form of a woodcut series. Understood by the 19th century as a popular art, one distinctive to old German culture in the age of Albrecht Dürer and Martin Luther, the woodcut would seem the perfect vehicle to celebrate actively history shaped from below. By printing his Totentanz in woodcuts rather than lithographs, Rethel turned back the clock from the emergent mass media of his age to the vanishing folk art of the past. But Rethel does this in order also to restore this medium’s sturdy folk wisdom that history is vanity and folly, and better left to others to make.

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Kentridge could have titled his procession Yet Another Dance of Death, since it marches in a long parade of ironic revivals reaching back to Holbein, for whom the subject was already passé. Repetition is inherent in the genre, as the same corpse, or different corpses that being fleshless look the same, dances a similar jig with each individuated member of the multitude. This recursive quality is what makes Kentridge’s death dance so effective as a repeating loop. Through its repetition, Death brings its message home: everyone dies and so will you. And although each individual has his or her end, the procession itself has no goal and makes no progress. Though commissioned to be a histoire, the Bruges death dance of 1449 would have warned about the futility of history.

“There is both an image of history and a history of the image, which cannot be separated from it.”64 The Drawings for Projection support this belief. Originally intended as a tool for the artist to preserve earlier stages of a drawing that get lost in the making, the activity of filming the artistic process mark by mark became, almost by chance, a form of storytelling.

Every finished drawing has a backstory, not only about the work’s development on the page but also involving the historical and personal impulses that steered the artist’s hand. In some of his drawings, Dürer seems to be making history, and he knows it, prominently signing and dating his sketches. Kentridge found a way to capture and extend drawing’s rich storyline, indeed to transform the process itself into vivid fables about love, yearning, politics, nature, childhood, family, and so on. Felix, Soho, and Mrs. Eckstein are characters in an epic fable about making art. And even before they receive, through film, this narrative embellishment, Kentridge’s drawings, the ones with which he starts, or towards which drawing first takes him, come with histories already attached. Whether derived from photographs, prints, or paintings, Kentridge’s imagery is saturated with the history of art. Mantegna, Hobbema, Watteau, Goya, Friedrich, Manet, Malevich, Tatlin, Beckmann, Brassaï, and others mingle with popular and mass images, and that mingling is made in the image of the historical avant-garde, especially Dadaist collage. Kentridge projects this “history of the image” into a specific “image of history,” that of spoils on parade.

The word spolia entered the art-historical vocabulary during the Renaissance, when devotees of the classical past recognized bits of ancient statuary crudely embedded in later buildings and monuments. Italian antiquaries recognized in the Arch of Constantine (dedicated in 315 C.E.) a pastiche of sculptural fragments from two hundred years earlier.

These they called spoglie to announce the violence of their appropriation: the Renaissance wanted antiquity whole and pure. In the last century, historians discerned a method to Christian appropriations of the pagan 123

64 William Kentridge, “A Dream of Love Reciprocated: History and the Image” (lecture, Humboldt University, Berlin); “’Leib’ um Liebe’: Geschichte aus den Bildern von Schuberts Winterreise,” trans. Klaus R. Scherpe in Europa in anderen Kulturen: Mosse-Lectures an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, ed.

Klaus R. Scherpe and Elisabeth Wagner (Berlin, 2015), 117; English original cited in Andrew Solomon, “William in Exile: Thoughts on Failed Utopias,” in William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera, ed. Karen Marta (Beijing and London, 2015), 64.

Joseph Leo Koerner

Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, 1515

65 Kinney, “Concept of Spolia,” 143.

66 Salvator Settis, “Continuità, distanza, conoscenza. Tre usi dell’antico,” in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, ed.

Salvator Settis (Turin, 1986), 399–410.

art, for example, how antique gemstones set in saints’ reliquaries signaled heathen conversion to Christ. Spolia lost its negative connotations, denoting “any artifact incorporated into a setting contextually or chronologically different from that of its creation.”65 No longer an aberration, spolia became a model for the history of art.

The past survives in fragments, and while the whole can never be restored, these ruins force later eras to complete them by exegesis and conjecture.66 More constantly than any renaissance, the fragment keeps the past alive.

In Kentridge, the history of art reveals itself as spolia both in the sense, powerful in post-colonial South Africa, of cultures despoiling a land and its peoples, and in the sense that past art, in his work, is chronologically jumbled and contextually displaced. The rhinoceros that challenges the artist’s depictive skill and wanders surreally through the artist’s oeuvre stands for the pillage of Africa and for the image itself as spolium—Kentridge taking from Dürer, Dürer taking from some source image unmentioned by his print, that source taking the likeness of the captured beast, who perished in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy. An image of the strangeness of imagery, the beast shows how the past cannot simply be remembered or repeated but needs to be worked through.

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Still from Mine, 1991

67 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Standard Edition of the Complete Pyschological Works, trans.

James Strachey (London, 1950), 12: 147–56.

68 Daniel Lagache, “Le travail du deuil,” Revue française de psychanalyse 10 (1938): 695.

69 Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” Standard Edition of the Complete Pyschological Works, trans. James Strachey (London, 1953–73), 14: 237–58.

Joseph Leo Koerner

Tummelplatz

Sigmund Freud brooded about how, after the death of a loved one, a mourner needs time to overcome the loss. On the surface, this interval makes sense: time heals. However, the dead don’t return, and coming to terms with their decease could in theory occur immediately, or never.

Ordinarily, the lapse of time is understood to be a gradual and automatic decrease in suffering, as one observes in the somatic process of healing.

Instead, Freud contended that mourning is an arduous internal psychic activity, which he termed Trauerarbeit.67 The bereaved person’s lack of interest in the world evidences this “work of mourning,” for it monopolizes all thoughts and actions as each memory and experience must be brought to mind and brought to rest. The process of “killing death” can take pathological forms as mourning is a socially acceptable psychopathology.68 In Bruges-la-Morte, the hero remains so bound to his dead wife that he identifies himself with her, killing himself off through her, while the marooned city, with its stagnant, mirroring canals, becomes the entrapping reflection of his loss.

Melancholy begins when the work of mourning fails or is misdirected.

There is nothing more central to Freud’s understanding of the psyche, and nothing more elusive, than this process he terms work. Dreams illuminate it, because a special form of work—the Traumarbeit—makes dreams in our sleep, our mind creating every night amazing filmic shows.

Psychoanalysis puts the patient to work, sometimes interminably. In the essay “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” Freud reports that his patients (who “suffered from reminiscences”) could be made to remember the trauma of the past, but this did not affect the illness.69 The analyst therefore had to recognize that analysis was mostly the patient’s work. This work takes the form of what Freud calls the transference: the processes by which unconscious wishes are actualized in the managed space of the analytic situation.

Freud’s consulting room in Berggasse 19 was the model for such a space. Not a clinical examination room, this dreamily exotic interior served as the arena for “working through.” Freud ends his essay before explaining wherein such work consists, except that the patient needs to adhere strictly to the fundamental rules of psychoanalysis: to say what one thinks and feels, selecting and omitting nothing even when what comes to mind seems uninteresting, irrelevant, stupid, or unpleasant to relate. Through free association and the transference the illness is not cured but repeated and recreated as “a real lived experience” and, over time, put to rest. Analysis,

in Freud’s words, is a Tummelplatz in which the compulsion to repeat the past has “almost total freedom.”70 There the patient can say things that might otherwise be unspeakable due to real and internal constraints. There he or she can create an “artificial illness,” an “intermediate realm between sickness and healthy life by means of which the transition from one to the other is accomplished.”

Usually translated as “playground,” Tummelplatz is wilder than that. It is a space for child’s play but also for exercising horses, for war games, and for military drills. From the verb tummeln (“to tumble”), it implies violent, dizzying, and uncontrolled movements, performed while intoxicated or in a stupor. In the padded, carpeted, artifact-lined interior of his consulting room in Vienna, Freud imagined something similar to what Kentridge, with reference to the studio adjacent to his home in the Houghton district of Johannesburg, termed “a safe space for stupidity.”

Kentridge is a prodigiously productive maker. Not only does he produce an astonishing stream of works in different media for dizzyingly diverse contexts and occasions: drawings, prints, artists’ books, collages, flip-books, tapestry designs, optical machines, mechanical theaters, films, animations, bronzes, public sculptures, stage designs, multimedia installations, puppet shows, theatrical performances, lectures, operas, and half-Kilometer silhouettes. In the scenography of the studio which he simulates in his exhibitions and performances, in the evident made-ness of his artifacts themselves, and in the work-in-progress look of even his most meticulously finished masterpieces, he announces that all of these are but byproducts of the unfathomable activity of work itself. It thus comes naturally that the dance more sweetly played should be laborious, the whirling dervish and porter being two sides of an activity that is both playful and painful. When Kentridge appears in his own work, he does so as a character at play (dancing, walking backward, tumbling about) or at work (filming himself in the act of making, or in the midst of walking, which is how he makes his films, pacing back and forth between the drawing and the camera). Tellingly, the artist sometimes sits inactive in the studio, not because the work is done but because the compulsion to work also paralyzes.

“A room full of failures,” the “bad idea,” the “less good idea”: these are the origin of work. They obey Freud’s fundamental rule, for what is that free associative process by which his drawings are made, and their making filmed, but a version of work as working through. Dispense with Freud, and an analogous model, centuries older and more fitting for Kentridge, equally applies. According to medieval medical lore, the opposite of healthy

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70 Ibid., 154.

Tummelplatz

Still from Drawing Lesson no. 17 (a Lesson in Lethargy), 2009

Drawings for Workshop Receipts, 2012

labor is sloth, acedia. The most lethal of vices and the only unpardonable one, sloth is cousin to sorrow, loathing of life, and melancholy. In Dürer’s famous engraving, the personification of melancholy strikes the pose of acedia. But sloth also has a positive value, since in certain types of people— artists supremely—it turns into its hyperactivity: that is, the “affliction of the heart that seeks always that for which it is ardently thirsty, and, as long as it is deprived of it, anxiously follows it and goes after it with howls and laments.”71 Melancholy genius vacillates between restless lethargy and uncompleted work. It suffers a “saving sorry” (tristitia salutifera).

And so do lovers, for falling in love unhinges, and melancholics fall easily in love.72 In the 2013 triptych flip-book film’s title No It Is, Kentridge’s animated full-length self-portrait stands or mills about, as if idly, only suddenly to begin to tumble wildly, his spinning body morphing into the objects he draws. In the midst of these solitary alternatives, nude women appear along with the artist’s muse, the dancer Dada Masilo. In More Sweetly Play the Dance, Dada appears at the end of the procession as this force of Eros, Death’s maiden. “Sleep sweetly in my arms,” sings the corpse in Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen.

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71 John Climacus’s Scala Paradisi, 7, 1, cited in Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis, 1993), 7.

72 Agamben, Stanzas, 17.

Stills from Anatomy of Melancholy, 2012

Drawing for Workshop Receipts, 2012

Tummelplatz

You have arrived at the end. Dada with a shovel performs her version of a Johannesburg spade dance. She is also the gravedigger for the Totentanz and perhaps one of those who, in “Todesfuge”, shovel a grave in the clouds.

Then, having passed on, Dada appears again, this time laboriously pulled on a trolley and dancing en pointe. Brandishing a Chinese carbine, she wears the garb and mimics the dance gestures of the model operas commissioned by Madame Mao during the Cultural Revolution. She twirls the rifle around like a baton, but for an instant aims its muzzle at the audience, those “intellectuals” whom the Red Guard targeted with their revolutionary wrath. Dada, Kentridge’s muse appears now as Death, bringing up the rear of the parade.

But already the beginning is upon you, the one that, chances are, you missed, and it looks instead to be the end. A whirling dervish dressed in yellow spins counterclockwise and right to left, back from where the procession proceeds. Modeled on the circular dances of certain African churches, which put the dancer in a stupor, or “tummel (originally ‘intoxication or ‘frenzy’)”, the dervish’s backward motion makes him seem like a confused member of the parade running back past the beginning to somewhere in the middle, because after him, moving in the proper left-to-right direction, comes the leader of the parade. Dressed festively in tails, he tears pages from a book and throws them behind him as he walks. Are these the leaves of Homer’s simile: “Like leaves are the generations of men, as one grows another dies?”73 Are they the unbound pages Kentridge prefers to draws on? Undoing the closure of the dictionary, the encyclopedia, indeed the world itself “bound,” as Dante writes, “by love into a single volume,”74 these leaves are reordered and overwritten to form new trees, albeit broken and allegorical ones. Are these sheets more practically the pages of the dance’s playbook, which will have already been tossed to the wind in the name of sacred stupidity before the tumbling gets underway? Perhaps they are what I might write about the dance, all these pages written as if to you and disappearing at the end as at the beginning: “My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me. Lff!”75

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514

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73 Homer, Iliad 6. 146-50.

74 Dante, Paradiso 33. 86.

75 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York, 1959), 628.

Géographie des Hébreux ou tableau de la dispersion des enfants de Noé (Children of Noah), 2001–05

Norwege, Swede et Danemark (Porter with Chairs), 2004–05

Afrique, 2001

Espagne Ancienne (Porter with Dividers), 2001–05

Asie Mineure (Tree Man), 2001–03

Germanie et des pays adjacents du sud et de l’est (Pylon Lady), 2001–06

Russie d’Europe (Man with Bed on Back), 2007

Egypte (Egypt), 2002–06