Footnotes to History: On Processions, Development and the State

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Shadow Procession, 1999 Film stills

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Footnotes to History: On Processions, Development and the State Leora Maltz-Leca This is an essay on footnotes, footsteps and ‘foot power’.1 It explores history told from below: from the bottom of the page, from the lowest extremities of the body, and from the tip of Africa. The procession is a key protagonist in this story, for it is, after all, a mass performance of moving feet, flying dust and disappearing footsteps. These notes, written thirty years after William Kentridge’s earliest drawings of a procession (see p. 125), ponder why the procession became, and has remained, such a touchstone for the South African artist.

Modernism as Development From the outset, Kentridge’s first major procession, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass (1990; see pp. 40–41), took aim at the spurious ideal of development, especially as it unfolded in the African postcolonies, which are littered with the debris of failed ‘improvement’ projects, many with roots in colonial-era schemes for progress. Nearly three decades later, Triumphs and Laments (2016), a sandblasted frieze along the banks of Rome’s Tiber River, narrated histories of devastation and loss alongside familiar tales of glory and power, affirming how Kentridge continues to reinvent ways for the procession to unwind triumphalist accounts of the past. The fact that Kentridge’s critique of certain strains of official history and teleologies of progress was formed in the last decades of apartheid South Africa seems to root his processions in the time and place of their emergence: Johannesburg, 1989. Can we read Kentridge’s processions not only as markers of global mobilities but also as born from, and in dialogue with, local debates around resistance, cultural difference, and the shape and form of state power in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa?

1

William Kentridge, in ‘Frieze London Special: In Conversation with William Kentridge’, Lux Magazine, 2018, https://www.luxmag.com/frieze-london-william-kentridge/.

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And if so, how does the visual language of the procession signal challenges to the state and development projects of a particularly postcolonial, African kind?

Today, amidst massive and ongoing refugee crises, Kentridge’s processions, in which figures balance and drag a variety of sundry objects, appear as commentaries on displacement. The artist acknowledges and embraces these readings, and given that many would attribute the current refugee emergency – from the caravans fleeing violence in El Salvador to Syrian victims of military aggression – to violence sown during colonialism, and to Euro-American imperial interference in local governments thereafter, such themes are consistent with Kentridge’s commitment to excavating the after-effects of colonialism. We might hold on to such understandings while layering them with a consideration of the procession as both more specific and more abstract.

To this end, I propose that Kentridge’s mobilisation of walking figures into processions on the cusp of South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1989 visualised the long-awaited regime change.

Moreover, the artist’s invention of his novel form of drawn animation – which he premiered in Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989; see p. 50) – went hand in hand with his turn to the procession. The procession became this film’s signal image of transition, just as his drawn animation became its exemplary medium of change.2 Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris’s ‘procession of the dispossessed’ imaged new forms of social mobility that were unheard of during apartheid, even as they sometimes critiqued the pace of the transition and its mythologies: whether the amnesiac ‘tabula rasa’ of the new state, the relentless optimism of the ‘rainbow nation’, or the insistent teleology of advance.3 As the regime change receded into history, Kentridge’s later processions transformed into more abstract and allegorical signs of mobility. They nonetheless remain imprinted with the resistance to the state that defined South Africa’s apartheid-era anti-state

processions, just as they retain their loyalty to their original subject as a ‘procession of the dispossessed’, whether economic or political dispossession, or actual statelessness.

In this sense, though the condition of mass exile is as ‘stoneage’ as Kentridge claims his process of animation to be, and though the scale of the current refugee crisis may be singularly contemporary, I want to situate Kentridge’s processions in the hour between forever and now: in the modern, the period between 1860 and 1960 when colonial modernism produced the visual regimes of modernity, the economic systems of industrial capital, as well as the key political instrument of modernity: the nation state.4 And I want to understand Kentridge’s processions as part of a larger argument with the authoritarian underside of EuroAmerican high modernism, especially as it played out in southern Africa. As Zygmunt Bauman has argued that the Holocaust is modern because it is ‘a by-product of the modern drive to a fully designed, fully controlled world’, in which the ‘modern phenomena of racist theory’ was enabled by ‘modern means of implementation … modern bureaucracy’,5 so too James C. Scott and others view the massive social engineering project of apartheid as a textbook example of a ‘high-modernist utopianism of the right’.6 Here I follow Scott in viewing continuities between high modernism as an aesthetic position and as an instrument of the state, both of which, he argues, are defined by the very development projects and paradigms of progress that Kentridge’s processions have long refused. In Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, he tracks the poor record and human cost of top-down, grand utopian projects, from Soviet forced collectivisation in the late 1920s to state villagisation in Kenya in the 1970s and Ethiopia in the 1980s.7 Scott argues, moreover, that the challenges that mobile people pose to the nation state are a particularly modern 4

2

For a detailed discussion of this, see Leora Maltz-Leca, ‘Process/Procession: William Kentridge and the Process

Making of Images’, Cycnos 11, no. 1 (1994), p. 163.

5

of Change’, Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (2013), pp. 139–65.

3

See Kentridge, quoted in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, Brussels 1998, p. 42.

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William Kentridge, ‘Fortuna: Neither Program nor Chance in the Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge, MA and Oxford 1989; repr. 2013, p. 26.

6

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven 1998, p. 89.

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phenomenon: moving people ‘have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project – perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded.’8 Kentridge’s streams of figures, who carry the world on their shoulders, speak not only of individuals displaced, but also, viewed en masse, challenge the very project of the modern nation state, with its regulatory borders, its classifications of subjects and its prescriptive sedentariness. Indeed, throughout postcolonial Africa, large-scale development projects such as villagisation aimed to foil the age-old, necessary and productive mobility of their populace – as did apartheid. Ultimately, I root Kentridge’s long-time enchantment with the procession in the way it functions as a moving sign of resistance, a multitude of itchy feet that will not be synchronised to the march of the state and its institutions: its official languages, its top-down policies, its development schemes, its standardised measures, and its demand for a visible, countable, taxable, conscriptable, stationary populace. And if the state (and its revolutionaries) propound development as a focused narrative of advance – a directed mobility – Kentridge harnesses the procession to contract that very sign of mobility but detours its teleological thrust into an acephalous, uncontrollable wave of motion that ripples up from the ground. In a procession, the subject takes form in public space, fleshing out abstractions of the citizenry with the particularity of a face. And the slippery body asserts itself as a moving target, as a liquid measure of history – which might be narrated not through time passed but through distance walked: through the human measure of feet, or what Kentridge calls ‘foot-power’.

7

Scott explores statist interventions and taxonomic systems like the creation of surnames, or standardised measures that enabled accurate tracking and taxation of a population, as well as partnerships with artists or designers, such as Brasília, that

William Kentridge, Video stills from a film fragment made for The Refusal of Time, 2012

What Is a March?

Kentridge has often approached lofty abstractions such as time or space by filtering them through the quirks of the physical body.

For decades, he has paced the hours it takes to animate a drawing by pacing up and down his Johannesburg workspace, at first ‘stalking the drawing’ by walking back and forth between the camera and the drawing; later, circling the studio more aimlessly: walking, thinking, scattering footsteps across the floor as he presses time through the length of a gait.9 The Refusal of Time (2012) extended the rhythms of the beating heart and the blinking eye into a formal complaint against the disciplinary, multistate project of standardised time – and the colonial regimes of labour that subtended it. And recently, Kentridge approached the trauma of the First World War again through the measure of the body: the head and its load.

extended the projections of individual architects into massive systems. Many of these projects were thwarted by those very

8

9

William Kentridge, ‘Felix in Exile: Geography of Memory’,

people whose needs and use patterns had been mispredicted

lecture delivered at Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern

or disturbed.

University, Evanston, Illinois, September 24, 1994, reprinted in

Scott 1998 (see note 6), p. 1.

Christov-Bakargiev 1998 (see note 3), p. 93.

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The Head & the Load (2018; see pp. 162–173) invites us to consider history from the ground up, from the viewpoint of those who carried its burdens, bent double beneath their weight, or caught within the throng of pressing bodies as their feet dragged across Africa. The ninety-minute multimedia production featuring several dozen actors, dancers, singers and musicians remembers the nearly two million Africans who served in the First World War, and commemorates the death of a million or more, many of whom fell as porters, carrying food, supplies and weapons for the French, German and British armies.10 ‘The graves that were not ours… The graves that were not even graves,’ the narrator exclaims, decrying the large-scale failure to bury, or tally, the African dead who succumbed to cholera, malaria and sheer exhaustion. ‘We have played our part with gallantry while honour has gone to others,’ he continues. Hence: ‘The medals that were not ours’, and, too, ‘The poem that was not ours’. This last line, which appears in a preparatory drawing for the production (see pp. 170–171), prompts the title for this exhibition, marking a continuity between the erasure of the Africans who died in the Europeans’ war and the more recent forgetting of Africa in times of genocide, disease and conflict.

The Head & the Load culminated decades of processions with a performance defined by an inventory of walking: from the ordered advance of troops to the exhausted shuffle of the dying soldier; from the dancer’s leap to the porter’s trudge. But as a tale of life in the colonial army, where the body is subject to the most extreme forms of regimentation by the state, it highlights the conforming of a step (see p. 118). ‘What is a march?’ we are asked rhetorically. ‘It is accentuated walking. Double time. A marching step is thirty inches. Yet each person’s leg is a different length, so the gait of each must conform to that measurement.’ Throughout the performance, the robotic movement of the men – faces glazed, 10

The Head & the Load, 2018 Detail from the performance at Park Avenue Armory, New York

The production was co-commissioned by 14–18 NOW: WW1 Centenary Commissions, Park Avenue Armory, Ruhrtriennale and MASS MoCA with additional support from Holland Festival.

It premiered in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London in summer 2018, and in New York’s Park Avenue Armory in December 2018.

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bodies stiff, spirit drained – contrasts with the free, expressive gestures of the dancers so that, like the dream of controlling global time in The Refusal of Time, the standardised step cues us to larger histories of control in which the African body (along with African languages, religions and cultures) was forcefully moulded to European norms. Hence, soon after the description of ordered walking comes the direct demand by the European states for the bodies themselves: ‘from Nyasaland, 255,000 carriers; from Uganda 100,000 carriers; from Congo 200,000’. ‘You have taken all I have, now you take my son,’ cries a man with a megaphone. Soon the procession unrolls across the stage, and one man runs back, as if trying to counter its advance. But the march is inexorable, unstoppable, endless. It just swells and grows bigger.

The war unfolds in stories of walking and carrying, heaving and dragging. We hear the tale of the disassembly and transport of a boat halfway up Africa, from Cape Town to Lake Tanganyika (see p. 145). When the train tracks end and the oxen die of tsetse fly disease, the pieces of the vessel are loaded on to the backs of African porters, attesting to the resilience of the human body that survives where machine and beast fail. The question ‘What Is a march?’ returns in the singular: although the order of the official system, the co-ordinated marching of the neatly uniformed battalion has long broken down, the individual persists.

The Barbarism of Other People’s Poems From the haunting rhythms of the Guinean kora player N’Faly Kouyaté to the frenetic stomping and penny-whistle flute dances of the Witwatersrand mines, The Head & the Load rallies a panAfrican chorus of thinkers and dancers to showcase the multitude of African music and languages. We hear archival sources, such as John Chilembwe’s 1914 letter to the Nyasaland Times, the terse wisdom of Sol Plaatje, and Frantz Fanon translated into siSwati. Juxtaposed against these reasoned, eloquent pleas for selfdetermination, the ‘civilised’ European commanders, held aloft and carried in litters, emit animalian howls and blood-curdling shrieks. Their language reverts to the nonsensical stutter of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate (1932); their ‘rationalism’ disintegrates into the rat-ta-tat-tat of machine guns. From their watchtowers far

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above, they look down on the foot soldiers, demanding their backs scratched, their shoes polished, their breakfast served.

The result is not simply a contrast between the specific textures of lived experience and the abstractions of war, or a visualisation of the hierarchies of power, but, at times, it is absolute cacophony. When African war chants meet European waltzes, there are moments of great lyricism. Yet the collage of overlapping sound, image and movement often veers into excess: a riot of bodies swinging, music belting, drums rolling, animation flashing, words unrolling, lights blinking, sirens sounding, feet marching. Though some would condemn Kentridge for embracing ‘spectacle’, and others reject the confusion it generates as unpleasant, our own bewilderment and incomprehension is entirely the point.11 For this deluge of sensory stimulation and its resultant confusion is surely meant to alert us to the deeper sense in which the artist conceives of A Poem That Is Not Our Own: in terms of ‘a phrase which refers to the unreachable otherness of texts, images and objects which are foreign to us, and in The Head & the Load, the incomprehension between Africa and Europe.’12 The visual and sonic anarchy of The Head & the Load attest to the inaccessibility of individual people, languages and cultures, and the limits of the rationalist desire to make sense of the other – especially for those with poor listening skills. What Kentridge cites as ‘Europe not understanding Africa, not hearing Africa’, resounds in the signal image of the production: a man wearing enormous oversized sonic devices designed to detect aircraft before the invention of radar (see p. 121). In this way, the performance and the touchstone drawing, Untitled (The Pool Ahead Is Not To Be Trusted) (2018; see pp. 170–171), inscribed with the words ‘The 11

See Justin Davidson, ‘Opera Review: The Unseen Great War, in William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load ’, New York Magazine, 7 December 2018, https://www.vulture.com/2018/12/unseenww-i-in-william-kentridges-the-head-and-the-load.html. Spectacle is usually disdained by critics, sullied by Guy Debord’s critique (Society of the Spectacle). Kentridge’s engagement with spectacle refuses that well-worn association.

12

Studio William Kentridge, via email conversation with the assistant curator of the present exhibition, 21 February 2019.

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poem that was not ours’, alludes to the limitations of our own perspective and the unfeasibility and presumptuousness of inhabiting others.13 Indeed, the misunderstandings and projections that thwart cross-cultural interactions circle us back to Kentridge’s critique of developmental agendas, affirming the dubiousness of any effort to impose one’s schemes, culture or even poems on another. And answering to the breathless claims made for global contemporary culture, the artist comments that ‘even in the 21st century human foot-power remains the primary means of locomotion… . And we are still locked in the manual labour of individual bodies as a way of making the world.’14 Kentridge’s insistence on giving form to the walkers of our time draws out the unequal distribution of resources that defines globalism, a narrative of progress and efficiency that, like other revolutions before it, rarely delivers much to the dispossessed.

The drawing Untitled (The Pool Ahead Is Not To Be Trusted) materialises the performance’s unruly chorus of voices through snippets of text that create a multivocal refrain of interjections and sighs. There are messages of warning: ‘The Pool Ahead Is Not To Be Trusted’; indictments of European greed: ‘They Have Milked Our Goats Dry’; and a short history of foreign relations: ‘Deputation’, ‘Forced Labour’ and ‘Massacres’. The scene of A Poem That Is Not Our Own, with its central tuft of marshy grass circled by the red oval lens of the viewfinder, remembers a similar drawing from the artist’s Colonial Landscapes series (1995–96) and bears too the crimson measurements and numeric notations that Kentridge, in that instance, called ‘footnotes on the landscape … beacons against forgetting’, and which he cited as born of the theodolite, an instrument used to survey and measure land.15 The 1990s drawings reframe the surveyor’s view, usually from atop a hill, by 13

Other Faces meditated on a related premise, but in a more personal context, departing from Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the ‘face of the other’ to explore the difficulty of knowing another.

14

‘William Kentridge’s Grand Video Procession at the Ongoing

Reeds from Colonial Landscapes, 1995–96

lowering the horizon line and shifting the placement of the viewer to immerse them within the landscape, rather than up above it.

Given that the measuring of the colonial terrain was often a prelude to claiming ownership of it – seizing ‘a land that is not our own’ – the surveying gaze stands in for a stance of mastery, just as the crimson amendments, by showing a strategically erased record of intervention, surveying and extraction, illuminate a history denied by static picturesque colonial landscapes. The lines of measurement and angles of gradient reiterate too the systematising marks of empire scratching the African landscape, a mapping that, like the standardisation of time, forms part of the enormously ambitious ‘world projects’ of the late nineteenth century that cultural scientist and media historian Markus Krajewski has chronicled.16 Yet grand projects founder on small things. What Kentridge calls the ‘advanced arithmetic’ of the European in Africa is revealed in projected images of ledger books, with lists detailing the ‘108 Coloured Handkerchiefs’, ‘111 Song Books’, and ‘17 Cricket Bats’ sent to the African troops (see p. 117). However wellintentioned, these are useless, idiotic gifts. All the more so when

Kochi-Muziris Biennale’, Blouin Artinfo, 16 January 2019, https://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/3489923/ 15

16

Markus Krajewski, World Projects: Global Information Before World

william-kentridges-grand-video-procession-at-the-ongoing.

War I, trans. Charles Marcrum II (Minneapolis: University of

Kentridge 1994 (see note 9), p. 97.

Minnesota Press, 2014).

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the troops lacked boots. ‘We had no boots,’ one performer states, as films of barefoot troops are projected behind him. ‘We had no boots,’ another echoes. ‘Where are boots?’ another finally roars.

These inappropriate inventories of goods attest to a profound miscalculation of other people’s needs and desires, alluding to the pitfalls of presuming to know what’s best for others, and the devastation that this imperiousness has caused in Africa.

Porters, 2006

Porters and Portage: The Poetics of Leaden Legs and Pattering Feet Kentridge has long drawn, projected and sculpted porters. Sometimes they are Atlas figures, doubled beneath the world heaved on their shoulders; at other times they form marching processions, as they do in The Head & the Load, carrying doves of peace and portraits of the missing. Their relentless walk suggests history as a procession – a narrative chain, a parade of images. Yet it is the inevitability and triumphalism of the march that we are prompted to unwind, to unspin, to scatter. In The Head & the Load, this call to fragmentation took the form of animations of bits of paper fluttering down the stage set, fashioning an image of history as a roughly torn collage. But fragmentation and disjunction have been built into the processions since the beginning: Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass (see pp. 40–41) was drawn atop multiple overlapping sheets of paper, roughly taped together into a twenty-four-foot-long semicircular arc. Hung high on a wall, viewers approach it from below, as Kentridge models in another prep drawing (see p. 125). This idea culminated in Overvloed (1999), a procession for the ceiling of Amsterdam’s town hall, in which viewers on the ground gazed up at the procession circling up high, ‘looking up into the ceiling, into heaven’.17 This worm’s-eye viewing of the procession nudges viewers into roaming walkers, performing the very promenades they are beholding, and it inscribes an enthusiasm for the bottom reaches of the world, and the productivity of the view from below, that has often defined Kentridge’s processions.

At other times, the porters themselves have declared their affinity for the floor, as they did in Porters (2006), a series of handwoven tapestries where silhouetted figures traipse across colonial-era maps.18 When hung as a group on the wall (as they were in Philadelphia in 2007), the ‘porters’ walk through the verticalised carpets, yet the logic that defined their making was one of the floor, replete with memories of nomads and cultures of the tent. ‘I like the fact that a tapestry is like a frozen projection, a portable mural that you can roll up and carry to your next palace,’ Kentridge commented, tying the images of travelling porters to the most mobile of media, carpets.19 In turn, these porters reprise the leporello book Portage (2000; see p. 152), where silhouetted figures dance, carry litters and balance burdens on their head as they amble across eighteen pages of the Larousse encyclopaedia, trampling on definitions for words such as ‘Jamb’ or ‘Marche/ Marchepied’.

18

The artist collaborated with Stephens Tapestry Studio in

19

Kentridge, in William Kentridge: Anything is Possible, documentary

Johannesburg to produce the tapestries.

17

Kentridge, in Angela Breidbach and William Kentridge, William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud; Conversations with Angela Breidbach,

film, 2010, Art 21, dir. Susan Sollins and Charles Atlas.

Cologne 2006, p. 16.

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Single pages from Portage, 2000

Let’s pause on one figure from Portage: a self-portrait of the artist reading and walking, his nose in a book (perhaps a nod to the work’s textual ground). This artist-marcher appears in two other iterations in Portage, linking the porters, and their processions, with the pacing that lies at the heart of the artist’s practice.

Because Kentridge’s method of animated drawing demands that he circulate between the charcoal drawing pinned to the wall and his camera stationed several paces away, so as to photograph the slow progress of his drawing frame by frame, his process is defined as much by the tread of pacing footsteps as by the scratching of the drawing hand. Since the early 1990s, when Kentridge was called upon to discuss his unusual ‘stone-age animation’ process, he has emphasised how central the walk is to his studio practice. As he puts it: ‘Let me stress here that it is in the process of working that my mind gets into gear – by which I mean the rather dumb physical activity of stalking the drawing, or walking backwards and forwards between the camera and the drawing: raising, shifting, adapting the image.’20 Walking soon migrated from a private studio ritual to a public persona that Kentridge slips into when he lectures, or performs 20 Kentridge 1994 (see note 9), p. 93.

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Photograph showing William Kentridge leading a student procession through Johannesburg, 17 June 1976 (William Kentridge is towards the left-hand side of the image wearing a white shirt)

his process. Take his 2010 lecture-performance I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where he engaged walking to stage the intricacies of his solitary art-making practice: to publicly play the role of an artist at work, with a book, splayed open at the spine, his sole accessory while he paced back and forth across the stage (see p. 127). Through these ambulatory self-portraits, Kentridge inserts himself among his processants, as if making common cause with them. This identification is not completely fanciful; indeed the self-portrait is both a public projection and a personal remembrance of his own walking body, since Kentridge participated in and led processions in 1976, and again in 1989, crucial times in South African history. At these moments, when the artist exits the studio and enters the crowd, walking pivots from private to public, from solitary roam to group march.

Archival photographs at the Hector Pieterson Museum in Johannesburg show Kentridge and his wife, Anne, leading one of the last large-scale public processions in apartheid South Africa, on 17 June 1976. The student march was organised by the South African Students’ Movement to protest the massacre at Soweto the day before, when police opened fire on black children walking through the streets. As early as 1976, gatherings of more than

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eleven people had been deemed illegal; but after Soweto, and the outrage it incited, processions were completely banned through a series of progressively authoritarian legislative measures, such that Kentridge would later speak of that day in 1976 as the last large-scale procession he remembered – until the collapse of apartheid.21 Processions, banned and repressed from the public sphere, grew into a powerful underground symbol of resistance, an image of hope, and the marker of a democratic dispensation that could only be dreamed of in the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa. Often, as in the COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) poster (p. 129), the aspirational image of democracy took the shape of a procession, celebrating freedom of movement as a basic human liberty denied under apartheid in South Africa.

Shadow Procession, Plato and the Violence of Redemption Portage and the later processions emerged out of the experimental film Shadow Procession (1999; see pp. 108–109), personages pieced together from torn and tacked black paper cut-outs. While spectral forms flicker in the background, the porters lug, tote and carry objects across the screen from left to right, so that we ‘read’ the flow of figures like a story, or watch them like thoughts drifting through our mind’s eye. Kentridge cemented the film’s association with the flow of thinking when he grounded Shadow Procession in Plato’s famous allegory of the forms in The Republic, the founding narrative of Western epistemology.

The Platonic parade of shadow-puppet silhouettes projected on a wall before the chained audience of an underground cave is also the earliest description of cinema. For Plato, the illusory shadows epitomised art as false imitation against the truth of essence, as well as the ignorance and doubt of the underworld, 21

Kentridge screened archival footage of the 1976 police carnage at Soweto and the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in his film Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), juxtaposing photographs and video from the historic Johannesburg demonstrations with bleeding corpses and military

and those who inhabit it. Certainty and knowledge belong to the sunlit realm above. Kentridge’s 2002 lecture ‘In Praise of Shadows’ proposed a reverse procession back down to the cave, shunning light and rationalism to recuperate the denigrated shadow as valuable precisely for its doubt. Interpreting Plato’s idealised passage from ignorance to knowledge, and captivity to freedom, as the cornerstone of colonialism’s myths of redemption and enlightenment, the artist argued that an excess of light produces blindness, not insight; oppression rather than salvation.

What shadows offer is to ‘alert us to the limitations of knowledge’, Kentridge proposed, wresting from the parable the open question of the degradation of darkness and its insistent Western association with the bottom, and with ignorance.22 Kentridge’s call to doubt manifests less as a literal aesthetics of hesitation than as an epistemic claim: a refusal of the certainty of high modernism, and a theoretical demand for flexibility and changeability rooted in his larger commitment to a world in flux.

‘All calls to certainty, whether of political jingoism or of objective knowledge, have an authoritarian origin relying on blindness and coercion – which are fundamentally inimical to what it is to be alive in the world with one’s eyes open,’ he suggests, tying his valorising of doubt to a larger critique of Enlightenment rationalism and its claims for universal knowledge.23 Kentridge highlighted the authoritarian dimension of the narrative, evident in Plato’s insistence that the prisoners be dragged upwards, even though, as the Greek philosopher cautioned, they likely would resist redemption. For the artist, Plato’s conviction that darkness was a state of poverty to be ameliorated only by forced elevation to the surface marked an attenuation of imagination that is continuous with the colonial and neocolonial projects that ‘light’ (Western forms of education, medicine and religion) must be brought to those who often don’t want or need it. In this way, Shadow Procession confronted head-on the paternalistic ideals and coercive practice of 22 William Kentridge, ‘In Praise of Shadows’, lecture, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1 November 2002.

23 Ibid.

boots pounding the pavement.

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projects of ‘improvement’ even – and often most acutely – when they fly under the banner of kindly intentions.24 If Shadow Procession refuses the high idealism of Plato for the low materialism of the cave, it is also to recuperate forms of indigenous, oral and hands-on knowledge deprecated by certain strains of modernism. That the view from the bottom is also how the world looks, or feels, from the southernmost tip of Africa, is not coincidental, for the Mercator projection, like other European constructions of race or culture, rests on the same presumptive hierarchies. Kentridge embraces his worm’s-eye view of the world from the tip of Africa, extrapolating it out across his work as a framing consciousness, a perspective reiterated formally and metaphorically, as he draws untold richness from the plurality of southern African cultures. Throughout he champions material and embodied thinking over abstract positions, the specificity of the local over universalised assertions, and these principles – more ethical than formal – define his practice such that, in a sense, all the porters that have flowed out of Kentridge’s studio since Shadow Procession remember the cave. All the processants ask us to consider what we might ‘learn from shadows’, from the South, from the realms below: whether the unconscious, the repressed or that excess which escapes the neat bounds of rational thinking.

Arc/Procession: Development and Utopianism, or ‘This is not a step’ Kentridge’s use of the procession to critique violent narratives of advancement is already evident in Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, which he began to sketch in 1989, on the cusp of 24 This is not to suggest that the artist, or indeed Scott, are

the regime change from apartheid to democracy. The drawing is a sardonic riposte to celebratory nationalisms and the triumphal processions used to visually inscribe them. It captures the energy and theatricality that often characterised political gatherings in apartheid-era South Africa: the stamping sounds of the militant toyi-toyi dance and the powerful group vocals of resistance-era music, forces that galvanised the crowd and publicised political messages. But its burlesque aspect exceeds the theatricality of resistance-era politics to become an explicit parody of development. Miners and revellers stagger along with the crippled, the homeless and the displaced. Megaphones (used in labour strikes and trade union disputes), spurting showerheads, security fences, rolls of barbed wire, a can of flame retardant and the ladder of the ‘Fearless Security’ company weave their way among the walking figures. As this troupe of characters shuffle, limp and twirl across a monumental semicircular arc, Kentridge portrays South Africa’s political transition as a disorderly stumble into the future.

Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass is an extraordinarily timely image, rooted in the local politics of transition and the press responses to it.25 Amidst the media encomiums to the triumph of freedom, and the ‘South African miracle’, Kentridge queries the blinding faith in progress. Though this rhetoric has echoed through numerous postcolonial transitions across Africa, the new dispensations are often revealed to be alarmingly similar to what came before, the toxic legacy of colonialism having reproduced itself, hydra-like, in new shapes and forms, such that, as Kentridge articulated in the case of South Africa, ‘for many … circumstances would be as hard as ever’.26 Impugning the idea of advance as teleology, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass is studded with ladders leading nowhere. Another contemporaneous drawing features a ladder that spells out

proposing an anarchist rejection of the state or the withdrawal of aid or social services. Rather, Kentridge’s processions critique the

25 A 1991 reprisal of this same procession is titled Procession of the

force and certainty with which some development projects have

Delegates, identifying the processants as local participants in one

sometimes been imposed on people. The amount and scale of

of the numerous parliamentary negotiations that followed Nelson

these disasters in Africa may animate Kentridge’s critique, but it

Mandela’s release from prison.

would be absurd to understand that as a blanket indictment of all humanitarian efforts or developmental agendas.

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26 Kentridge, quoted in Kay Wilson, William Kentridge Prints, Johannesburg et al. 2006, p. 42.

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bluntly: ‘This is not a step.’ Meanwhile, the hyena, an African animal deeply associated with ambiguity and corruption, presides over several studies as well as the final rendition of the work.

If Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass registered ambivalence toward the oncoming transition, such concerns have been borne out by South Africa’s persistent income disparities, infrastructural challenges and political corruption. In subsequent studies, Kentridge would reprise Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia to articulate further reservations about the possibility of profound, overnight change. Here he also pauses to consider the troubled legacy of communism in South Africa, which as late as the 1980s remained the dominant political ideology of the ANC and other liberation parties in South Africa. Harry, the man who leads the ‘procession of the dispossessed’ in Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, stands at the drawing’s centre, hands raised and arms outstretched in crucifix form, as if martyred for Marxist utopianism; in a preparatory drawing Harry is physically impaled on a model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20).

The procession has long been used as a visual metaphor for the celebratory narratives of state history and colonial conquest.

As Walter Benjamin observed: ‘Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures’.27 The victory procession dates back to Roman times, epitomised by the frieze carved on the Arch of Titus, which depicts soldiers marching home with booty from the conquered temple in Jerusalem. In Triumphs and Laments, nearly twenty-five years later, Kentridge returned to the notion of multiple futures unrolling at the same time, supplementing imperial histories of triumph with their dialectical twin, a history of genocide and laments.

The colonial procession finds its unruly double in the frequently bombastic parades of the postcolony, displays of excess

often aimed at showcasing parity with Western powers that Achille Mbembe has called ‘the aesthetics of superfluity’.28 The esoteric subtitle of the drawing Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, which the artist mined from a biography of the former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, derives from one of Selassie’s 1960s speeches, when the one-time reformist was already in his third decade of despotic power. In this light, his stated desire for Ethiopia ‘to develop, catch up, even surpass’ Western nations assumes a sycophantic stance of emulation, rendered hollow by Selassie’s epic failures of leadership, and the famines of the early 1970s, of which he claimed ignorance. Even as Kentridge questions the value of so-called Western development, and rejects the image of progress from the ‘darkness’ of apartheid to the ‘light’ of democracy, he refuses to overlook Africa’s legacies of dictatorship and corruption, or utopian projects and development schemes that have sailed under the banner of Marxist egalitarianism and postcolonial humanitarianism.

From this perspective, history begins to resemble Benjamin’s famous description of the angel of history, who, turning his back on the future, perceives history as a catastrophic event: a pile of ‘wreckage upon wreckage…. This storm is what we call progress.’29 Kentridge’s processions, in one way or another, reject highmodernist ideals of progress, and the late- or postcolonial development projects they fuelled. It’s a scepticism grounded in the impossibility, and potential danger, of predicting the needs of other people – especially across cultures. Far from an abstract political position, the artist’s view appears to have been formed in, and by, the late-apartheid context, in which the official mandate for ‘cultural workers’ from the ANC high command was to make art that overtly opposed apartheid, and revealed the violence of the state regime. As Kentridge and others of his generation 28 For a pan-African discussion of the aesthetics of nationalist parades and their role in negotiating dictatorial displays of power and the ambiguous sycophancies they enable, see Achille

27

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,

Mbembe, ‘The Aesthetics of Vulgarity’, trans. Janet Roitman and

in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn,

Murray Last, in On the Postcolony, Berkeley 2001, pp. 102–41.

ed. Hannah Arendt, New York 1968, p. 256.

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29 Benjamin 1968 (see note 27), pp. 258–59.

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struggled with the difficulty of representing oppression – specifically the oppression of others from which they, as white artists, were largely exempt – he early on came to understand that it was not only undesirable and perhaps unethical but also impossible to represent other people or their complex experiences. And so Kentridge declined this mandate, because as he put it, remembering this time, ‘I couldn’t begin to know what other people were thinking.’30 Kentridge’s position, as an artist, obviously stands in marked contrast to the exigencies faced by state, NGO or humanitarian organisations: to be sure, any policy instrument must abstract, must indulge in large-scale predictions of need, and to an extent must repress the challenges of cross-cultural misunderstandings. However, it is also the case that the arrogance, certainty and violence with which some development projects have unfolded in the African postcolonies defines a high-modernist mindset so imperious, and so damaging, that it demands critique, especially because artists and designers are deeply implicated in what Scott calls ‘authoritarian high modernism’. For Scott, this entails ‘an aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society’ using ‘the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state … for achieving these designs’ in the face of a ‘prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.’31 In the case of South Africa, apartheid itself was such a ‘design’ project. In a parallel way, in the realm of art and design, especially in the postcolonial context, ‘authoritarian high modernism’ rooted in constructions of lone (male) genius can authorise a hegemonic vision for an artwork, a building or an entire city plan to be imposed on others, whether through subtle invitations to selfedification, appeals to technological ‘advance’ or coercive agendas of self-improvement. The epigrammatic title of A Poem That Is Not Our Own calls us to consider legacies of cross-cultural interaction – which are largely histories of trauma and appropriation – from the viewpoint of southern Africa. It queries the claims to ownership –

whether of culture, land or resources – that the procession of the dispossessed has long marched against. And it asks us to reconsider the ingrained hierarchies of high and low, North and South, what Zbigniew Herbert calls ‘the elevation of the victor and the throwing of the defeated into the dust.’32 The procession stirs up the dust. It rises in a cloud, as the crowd marches on.

30 Kentridge, quoted in Tamar Garb et al., William Kentridge, Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letters and Lines, London 2017, 31

32 Zbigniew Herbert, The King of the Ants: Mythological Essays,

p. 120.

trans. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter, Hopewell, NJ

Scott 1998 (see note 6), pp. 89, 90.

1999, p. 55.

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