Process/Procession: William Kentridge and the Process of Change Leora Maltz-Leca Limping, twirling, tumbling forward, the motley characters of William Kentridge’s first major drawing of a procession, Arc/ Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass (1990), skid into the future of the new South Africa (Fig. 1). This monumental drawing initiates Kentridge’s use of the ancient format of the procession as an image of history: a hiccuping narrative of discontinuities and fissures, periodically punctuated by revolutionary breaks. The first of numerous processions that the artist would draw, sculpt, animate, etch, and project over the next two decades, Arc/Procession depicts a troupe of characters shuffling across a twenty-four-foot-long semicircular arc cobbled together from overlapping sheets of paper (Fig. 2). A burlesque riposte to celebratory nationalisms—and the triumphal processions often used to visually inscribe such narratives—Arc/Procession portrays history in general, and regime change in particular, as a veritable stumble into the future. Conceived by the artist as a cinematic “row of fragments,” Kentridge’s procession is rooted in a crisis of sequencing historical time—a crisis that is brought on by South Africa’s regime change from apartheid to democracy.1 Kentridge began drawing Arc/Procession in 1989, a pivotal year in which he both developed his innovative process of drawn animation and premiered this laborious technique in his first film, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (Fig. 3). The genesis of Kentridge’s animation process in 1989, alongside the simultaneous emergence of his processional imagery that same year in Arc/Procession and Johannesburg (which likewise featured a procession, Fig. 4), bring us to an understanding of how the formal operations of Kentridge’s drawing process and the politically charged subject matter of the procession work together to gesture toward South Africa’s larger histories of change. In this way, Kentridge’s theatrics of process and his repeated processions emerge as not only extraordinarily timely—a chronic affinity striking in an artist whose work is often considered untimely or anachronistic— but also as stubbornly imbricated in the specificities of place. Kentridge’s process and his processions are therefore rooted in both a country on the cusp and a city on the edge— or what the artist calls that “rather desperate provincial city of Johannesburg.”2 While Kentridge’s practice is embedded in local histories, the artist’s physical operations in the studio become metaphorically embodied through his drawn, filmic, and sculpted processions: the ambulatory rituals of Kentridge’s own peripatetic studio process are implicated in his ubiquitous processional imagery. And so it is appropriate to begin with his unusual practice, grounded in walking, or “stalking,” the drawing. The Process: Walking/Stalking Let me stress here that it is in the process of working that my mind gets into gear— by which I mean the rather dumb physical
activity of stalking the drawing, or walking backwards and forwards between the camera and the drawing: raising, shifting, adapting the image.—William Kentridge, “Felix in Exile,” 19943 And so the film evolves as this ongoing walk between the paper and the camera, in the hope that somewhere in the middle of that walk, some idea will emerge to suggest what the next drawing or sequence should be.—Kentridge, “Drawings for Projection,” 20044
William Kentridge’s process of animated drawing is bipedal and peripatetic, its rhythms defined as much by the tread of pacing footsteps as by the scratching of the drawing hand. His idiosyncratic practice comprises a cadence of shuffles and shifts, a perpetual stalking back and forth across the studio as he circulates between the charcoal drawing pinned to the wall and his camera stationed several paces away. It is Kentridge’s method of photographing the slow progress of his drawing frame by frame—recording its restless process of change, as it were—that demands these endless perambulations. For each tiny addition or deletion precipitates a lap across the studio from the drawing board to the mounted camera (Fig. 5). The alteration is photographed, and Kentridge walks back to the drawing to add or erase a couple of marks. And then he returns to the camera. These circuits continue on and on for several months until the photographic record of the drawing is filmed in sequence to produce an animation five to ten minutes in length—a film that is a paean to the liquidity of change. When Kentridge calls his activity of prowling around the studio “stalking the drawing,” he employs the language of trekking and hunting, as if shadowing elusive quarry.5 In this sense, he transforms the studio into a shadow theater of sorts, a black box where fugitive ideas flit about, are seized on, rolled back and forth. The artist himself has poetically described his work space in such cerebral terms, comparing it to “an enlarged head; the pacing in the studio is the equivalent of ideas spinning in one’s head, as if the brain is a muscle and can be exercised into fitness, into clarity.”6 Scattered with the artist’s footsteps, the studio floor is thus fashioned into a cognitive expanse where laps of thought are spun into images. As the moving muscles of the leg and the firing neurons of the brain stretch and crank in unison, Kentridge’s plodding method of animation physically articulates what JeanLuc Nancy calls “the step of thought.”7 Like Nancy’s physicalized epistemology, Kentridge’s embodied thinking disputes the Cartesian division between mind and body that artificially splits thought and action into two substantively unlike terms. And just as Kentridge has suggested that his own thinking invariably has to emerge and be materialized through the body and its concrete activities of walking and drawing, so, too, for Nancy, it is the physical body that thinks, not an immaterial cerebral mass. Rejecting