As the Crow Flies

AS THE C ROW F LI E S

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE AND THE SPACE OF JOHANNESBURG

ROSALIND C. MORRIS

As the Crow Flies There is a saying, in English, that equates the briefest and most direct route between places with the flight of a bird. A black bird. Often, when one speaks of such straight, avian flight, it is for the purposes of negative comparison. For, if the bird flies undeterred by the undulations of the landscape beneath its wings, it is as a contrasting figure for the human beings below who must obey the contours of the natural world and who are always being waylaid by history.

The placement of a black bird at the entrance to the William Kentridge exhibition titled Thick Time redeems its function as omen and anticipates its recurrence in several works in the show—such as Second-hand Reading (2013) and the anamorphic drawing in What will Come (has already come), 2007. If it flies directly, however, Kentridge’s bird also acts like a shadow or a photographic negative. It throws into relief a significant theme in his œuvre: the movement of people in time, across space, and in pursuit of destinations that are obstructed or inaccessible, or that, upon being reached, turn out to be different from what was anticipated. Such material and psychic migrations are frequently given form in Kentridge’s work in “processions” of figures that traverse the landscape. These figures are often themselves shadows: shadows of shadows, like the idols in Plato’s cave.

They appear from nowhere and mass on the horizons of his landscapes—sometimes in the guise of laborers, sometimes as machinic creatures, and sometimes as revolutionary vanguards. They were already apparent in the earliest animated drawing, Johannesburg, Second Greatest City After Paris (1989) and became central in Shadow Procession (1999), an 8-channel projection rooted in the Medieval tradition of ‘danse’ macabre.’ The latter features cut-out figures who walk, burdened by their possessions, or who limp and drag their heavy bodies with the aid of crutches across the landscape, impassive but steadfast in a forward motion that nonetheless loops and thus returns them to their points of origin to start, Sisyphus-like, all over again. Since then, the migratory processions have recurred in the more abstract, ludic forms of Kentridge’s ‘shadow oratorio,’ Zeno at 4am. and in the ironic, multi-screened works such as More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), and Notes Towards a Model Opera (2015).

As a pair, the bird and the procession emblematize two modes of journeying, the one mythic and the other historical, which comprise two orienting antinomies of Kentridge’s œuvre. Between them (beneath their wings, one might say) there is utopian aspiration and apartheid limitation, revolutionary hope and post-revolutionary melancholy.

The inked bird that appears at the entrance of the Louisiana exhibition,

or that hovers in flight thanks to the magic of the flip-book, recalls other coal-black birds, fluttering over land and page, drawn and erased and drawn again.

These latter, repeatedly drawn birds are not merely figures, however; they are

2

As the

also the residue of a relationship between the place in which Kentridge makes his home and the nature of his artistic process. As he often says, he began with charcoal, and only afterward, moved into animation. Charcoal’s provisionality, its susceptibility to erasure, and the possibility for building by erasing, made it an ideal medium for animation even as it permitted him to transform animation itself: from a magical and irresponsible medium of absolute freedom in which violence and death have no consequences, into one in which every change is registered. The paper’s memory of the charcoal line, in the form of its trace, has allowed Kentridge to produce an ethical animation, one in which the past is always present, haunting the future and calling for accountability. Those same qualities can be discerned in the history and form of Johannesburg, South Africa, where Kentridge lives and maintains two studios. The city is similarly marked by geological and violent political upheavals, the scars and traces of which remain despite the enormous transformations of the past two decades. And the artist has made much of the uncanny resonances between his aesthetic process and the historical milieu in which it is undertaken.

Created at the site where gold was discovered in the late nineteenth century, Johannesburg’s contours are shaped by the mountains of earth excavated in the pursuit of precious metal. The country is home to 50% of the world’s gold reserves, but the metal is deeply buried. Its extraction has entailed massive industrial efforts, including shafts that descend several kilometers into the earth. Millions of tons of rock have been removed and piled upon the surface of the earth to create flat, trapezoidal hills that mimic the natural koppies (hills or small mountains) of the meteor-pocked Highveld, but in a more severely geometricalized form.

The fact that the city is itself the product of an inversion—of making the underground visible as a kind of ‘second nature’—has as its brutally ironic counterpart the fact that the nation was also erected upon an historic eviction of the peoples who had previously resided there. This history was referenced in Johannesburg, Second Greatest City after Paris, which introduced the characters, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum, alter egos who jointly personify the historical force that has commanded Johannesburg since its inception, namely mining capital and its beneficiaries. In the opening sequence of the film, Soho Eckstein appears in a pin-striped suit, and the landscape that he surveys quite literally (he is a landscape developer) is inscribed into a ledger where he calculates his profits, indifferent to the relentless tide of workers who appear as if in a dream, first as charcoal marks and then as an accumulating set of recognizable figures: the migrant laborers whose forced movements would underwrite the country’s and the city’s wealth.

Kentridge sometimes refers to the fact that, for white people, the experience of living in Johannesburg during the apartheid years (1948-1994) was one

C R O W F L I E S

3

in which black residents were supposed to be invisible. Invisible does not mean absent, however. Rather, the apartheid state, like the Dutch and English colonial regimes and Boer republics that preceded it, reduced black residents to merely bodily status—as the bearers of labor. What was invisible, because denied, was their personhood, their status as subjects. Invisible, that is, to and for white people.

This seemingly improbable but brutal accomplishment, which amounts

to the virtual banishment of a nation’s majority population, had its material counterparts. It was commenced even before the formal establishment of apartheid in 1948, through legislation that regulated who could buy land from whom (via the Native Land Act of 1913, for example, which confined the black residents of the nation to a mere 10% of the country’s land). Beginning in 1950, the Group Areas Acts further designated the spaces in which people could reside on the basis of their racial ascription. Under the terms of these laws, and indeed long before, any movement by people of color was highly regulated and subject to pass laws.

Moreover, their surveillance depended on elaborate systems of identification that were implemented by state authorities without respect for the ways in which individuals understood their own identities. On grounds of a spurious morality that made ‘purity’ the alibi for ‘separation’ (apartheid means separateness), families were often torn asunder and ejected from their natal spaces. In the process, they were also deported from a future of their own making. When Kentridge avows the virtues of ambiguity and bastardy, it is partly as a repudiation of the apartheid legacy, which fantasized a world in which racial segregation was the principle of rule, and where purity was the goal.

While apartheid legislation led to violent displacements (and brave resis-

tance), the mining industry depended on the regular influx of hundreds of thousands of male workers from the countryside and neighboring states to Johannesburg and its satellite mining towns. Female workers were summoned along parallel tracks into the suburbs where they were employed as domestic servants. Much remains the same.

Johannesburg, today, is a sprawling metropolis of variegated textures

and ethnically diverse communities. It is an expanding and contracting formation that lies upon a ground of unceasing transformation. A city of appearances and disappearances, of arrivals and departures. And it remains a destination for migrants. But these migrants are no longer limited to those whose movements were once compelled by the mining companies. Just as waves of European Jews sought freedom from oppression and found new livelihoods in South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Kentridge is himself heir to that history), today’s migrants include millions seeking employment and opportunity, in mines and elsewhere, and millions more who are simply trying to

4

As the

escape from destitution, political oppression and agrarian collapse in neighboring states. Coming from throughout Africa, they have created a labyrinth of enclaves where one can hear a multitude of languages other than South Africa’s 11 official tongues.

Sometimes, as in Other Faces (2011), this very multilingualism and the self-imposed Euro-(mono)-lingualism of the English-speaking white minority (the Afrikaans-speaking minority is typically at least bilingual) becomes the medium of conflict. Other Faces is an animated drawing in which the transformations of Johannesburg in the post-apartheid era are intercut with scenes from Kentridge’s childhood, on one hand, and his mother’s’ old age on the other. These are supplemented by a dream sequence in which the artist, now almost indistinguishable from Felix Teitelbaum, bears the enigmatic figure of the sphynx in his own arms: the question confronting Oedipus is now transformed into the abyssal enigma posed by the mother’s death. Erupting into that fragile space are scenes of mutual incomprehension from daily life in the city, as when a traffic accident leads a black and a white man to face off against each other. Kentridge depicts such agons as a process in which speech becomes thing-like: a congelation of rage that erupts from the mouths of characters who do not speak so much as spit language at each other. But he does not confine this violent gesture to inter-racial miscommunication. It also occurs in the intimate relations between lovers when these devolve into two solitudes, mirroring the alienations that characterize a racialized social field. There is no radical separation between the social context and the secret, interior lives of the individuals who are born into it.

Kentridge’s parents, both lawyers, opposed the apartheid regime and its inequalities in the medium that the South African state used to camouflage its injustice, namely the law and its language. He insists that his choice of theatrical and then visual and multimedia arts was partly a turning away from the language of disputation—with its rhetorical sophistry and its false certitudes. Instead of verbal combat, he made visual ambiguity the weapon with which to expose the apartheid unconscious. To do so, he tapped into its dreams and its nightmares.

There is thus an oneiric dimension to Kentridge’s work, which is constantly using and reusing images, tropes, and narrative sequences that come from elsewhere: the detritus of everyday life and the residue of traumatic events.

In complex ways, his art uses the techniques of what Freud described as the dreamwork, including the processes of condensation and displacement, and the transformation of words into images. One sees this in the fantastical metamorphoses of coffee plungers into drill bits (as in Mine, 1991) or sextants into human beings (as in Shadow Procession), cats into coffee pots, and coffee pots into space ships (as in Journey to the Moon, 2003). It can also be discerned in the recent

C R O W F L I E S

5

drawings of trees that are assembled from fragments of writing on large surfaces made of multiple book pages—such as accompany his animated drawing for Schubert’s Winterreise (2014). Similar assemblages of ‘found’ words and poetic phrases recur in Kentridge’s large-scale drawings related to the process of “speaking bitterness” in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Such fragments are often comprised of individual words torn from books, magazines and other print forms—a technique that Kentridge took over from early modernist collage. At other times, as in Felix in Exile (1994), Kentridge shows us the very process by which the printed page lifts off from the scene of its inscription, to float across and enter the landscape. Pages fly out of typewriters and newspapers blow across the landscape, photographs rise to adorn walls. As this happens, we come to understand something of the history in which words and measurements become law, acquire the status of things, and weigh upon the lived world.

In many drawings, the fragments of speech are drawn reproductions of the textual scraps that actually cover the modern city’s convoluted passageways. In this sense, there is a nearly photographic quality to Kentridge’s work, one that he himself accords an indexical value. In his case, it is not the photochemically marked surface but his own eye that bears witness to the truth of his observations. But anyone driving in Johannesburg’s inner city today will find herself in a space made of such verbal fragments as fill his work: advertisements posted on street signs (for everything from diamonds to magical cures for HIV/AIDS and sexual impotence, the termination of pregnancy and help with school exams), billboards championing the contributions of mineworkers or the prestige value of whiskey, newspaper headlines full of violence, and snippets of speech overheard on the radio and broadcast media. It is significant that, in the artworks, these fragments are not merely words but often form what we call ‘figures of speech.’

For, the figural remains important—as a concept and as an aesthetic principle—in Kentridge’s work, and distinguishes his art from much of the modernist tradition oriented by abstraction. One might say that it is the ground of his ethical relation to Johannesburg and the history of South Africa.

Now, the images that appear in dreams are not codes but symptoms, the trace of a contradiction between what is desired and what is demanded by the social law. It is this contradiction that forces words into images. And it is this contradiction that makes of such images a kind of border-crossing. Kentridge’s animated drawings also stage such border crossings, in individual metamorphoses and in the theme of migration, a theme that returns as regularly as the flocks of birds that nest in the verdant spring canopy of Johannesburg’s wealthier neighborhoods. But what is transcended and perhaps repressed in these magical

6

As the

transfigurations is also made explicit in the processional works, namely: the fact of discontinuity, of difference, of boundaries and limit points. This too is a feature of Johannesburg.

As Kentridge often says, Johannesburg is a divided city. Its leafy suburbs

of fenced but spacious houses abut neighborhoods dense with apartment blocks.

Its inner cities are teeming with people who live pressed against each other beneath the dizzying height of the Ponte Tower in Berea, a kind of vertical slum near the once-fashionable neighborhood called Hillbrow. Townships and informal settlements crust the perimeter of the city, and in these areas, electricity and water are almost as valuable as gold. South Africa has one of the highest rates of inequality in the world, and this fact materializes itself on the horizontal plane.

Transecting this horizon is a vast network of highways, which branch into winding avenues, overlaying the ghostly grid of claims that once divided the land into the property of competing prospectors. Along these arteries, there is a constant flow of traffic: luxurious cars pass and are passed by minivans, many battered and carrying the workers who continue to live in the shadow of wealth. A journey across Johannesburg is, in fact, a movement across spaces that touch each other without being related as part of the same social fabric. It is therefore less a matter of moving through a single world than of leaping from point to point. But unlike the crow’s flight, these fragmentary itineraries are relentlessly diverted and interrupted. At times, the dotted lines that appear in the skies of Kentridge’s operas seem to echo their broken trajectories, inscribing there the human counterpart to the mythic directness of winged flight.

So, too, the bird’s eye and the eye of God for which it substitutes (thematized in the projections for Kentridge’s rendition of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, 2005) have their opposite in the cinematic screen, for which the car window provides its quotidian proxy. Like the surface of the Top Star Drive-In (movie theater), which landmark features so centrally in Kentridge’s films, but especially Other Faces, these little screens reveal the projections of apartheid history. They permit us to look back on the apartheid era as a dream of the future whose grotesqueries have become more and more visible in its passing, but whose traces cannot be entirely eliminated. Kentridge is always playing with the technologies of vision; his œuvre abounds with anamorphic drawings and cinematic reversals, stereoscopes and other forms of double-vision. The figures in his works—from Nandi in Felix in Exile to the generals of Tide Table (2003), and the unseen subject of The Black Box (2005)—are often using visual prostheses, such as telescopes, binoculars, sextants and monocles. But a special place must be accorded to the rear-view mirror, which is invariably associated in Kentridge’s works with an introspective and retrospective glance, and with the melancholic portrayal of the mining-made

C R O W F L I E S

7

landscape as a scene of death, violence, and loss. And the loss of loss.

The loss of loss refers to the ephemerality of the processions, as well as those scenes in which a corpse is initially marked out—with stakes or outlines that suggest crime-scene demarcations—and then vanished. The erasures of the charcoal redouble the deaths and then the forgetting of these deaths: corpses are enveloped in newspaper, transformed into mounds of earth and then made to disappear, like dust in a Highveld wind. The melancholy that is often orchestrated by the musical score in the Felix and Soho animated drawings, has its visual aid in the rear-view mirror, which only permits the capitalist to see, too late, what has already occurred, and indeed what he himself made happen. And then only fleetingly.

Amid such loss, and the grief that accompanies it, the impulse to memorialization and even monumentalization is powerful. Many monuments were erected during the apartheid era, but there are no monuments to apartheid per se. There are, however, monuments to the memory of apartheid, and to the task of learning from its mistakes, its violences, its exclusions and terrorisms. These include the Apartheid Museum near Soweto; the museums of Constitution Hill, which include former prisons and the court where opponents of apartheid were once condemned to death; Robben Island, where political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, were incarcerated; and District Six, a community in Cape Town destroyed under the terms of the Group Areas Act. There are others, and there will be still more.

By contrast, Kentridge’s animated drawings are anti-monuments. They share neither the heroic nationalism of the apartheid era nor the nostalgia for righteous struggle of the post-apartheid period. In them, history’s atrocities are exposed. And most South Africans seeing his work can identify the particular events to which they refer (such as the murder of an apartheid activist, whose body is hurled from the police station at John Vorster Square, or the aftermath of a strike at Marikana). But recollection itself is in question in these works. One sees this in a work like Other Faces, where the landscape’s revision and the dissipation of memory in old age are explored as rhymed processes.

Contemporary South Africans and residents of South Africa are constantly confronted by the residues of history, which continue to haunt and shape the landscape. The dreamed-of flight into a just and less unequal future has proven to be indirect at best. As the country’s residents struggle to avoid the pitfalls of post-revolutionary vengeance, Kentridge has increasingly turned his attention to other histories of failed revolution for lessons. In his recent operatic works, and in the projects that emerged simultaneously with them, such as Shostakovichs’s The Nose (2010), and Alban Berg’s Lulu (2015), but also I am Not Me, the

8

As the

Horse is Not Mine (2008), and the more existentially philosophical Refusal of Time (2012), Kentridge has explored the relationship as well as the dissonance between the aesthetic inventions and the ideological closures that informed revolutionary projects in Europe, from the Weimar Republic to Russia. More recently, that exploration has led him to think and work with the legacies of the Cultural Revolution in China, as in Notes Towards a Model Opera (2015). The latter is a 3-channel video work, with dance and choreography by Dada Masilo and music by Philip Miller, based on the forms of didactic ballet that were generated during China’s tumultuous experiment with both State-authorized anti-statism and coerced cultural transformation.

In these different but related works, Kentridge engages the anticipatory forgetting that is performed by censorship and by the kind of speech that one finds in slogans, manifestos, and the theatrical trials of dissidents: the speech of the rulers when it takes the form of advertising. Such censorship introduces a scission in thought, cuts it off from itself. While some historians have taken it upon themselves to restore the lost narratives of the archive, Kentridge has made it his task to plumb a deeper shadow archive, one about which certainty remains impossible. He uses the principles of montage but instead of generating an analytic image that would give us a form of judgment, he gives us time-images in which we can see the movements of effacement, erasure, and over-writing.

Such over-writing has its own avian totem in Kentridge’s work. This is the hadeda bird. The hadeda is an iconic creature in Johannesburg, and it is known equally for its bitter cry and its strangely elongated beak and awkward flight. The hadeda is a kind of ibis—the bird that functions as familiar to Theuth, the god of memory and the inventor of writing. In a famous passage in Plato’s Phaedrus, the king Thamus argues with Theuth and claims that writing is an elixir of forgetting rather than memory. The more that we externalize experience in writing, argues Thamus, the less is it inscribed in our innermost consciousness. Kentridge has often invoked Plato’s Republic and the parable of the cave, and has implied a resemblance between the world that mining made and the shadow world of an idealist philosophy. The double-play between the birds of carrion and culture (crow and hadeda) supplements the opposition between a fantasy of perfect flight and the historical reality of a bedraggled procession. And beneath it all are the layers and layers— of gold mining and mass migration, of apartheid and liberation, of destruction and construction, drawing and erasure, of discontinuities and connections—that make up the space of Johannesburg and William Kentridge’s art. Such, at least, would be the beginning of an overview. As the crow flies.

C R O W F L I E S

9

This article was first published in Danish as ' Som kragen flyver: William Kentridge og Johannesburgs Landskab' to accompany the exhibition entitled Thick Time at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Denmark in 2017.

Modest revisions have been made in the English version.

10

As the