William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

PROCESS AS METAPHOR AND OTHER DOUBTFUL ENTERPRISES

LEORA MALTZ-LECA

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING - IN - PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Maltz-Leca, Leora, author.

Title: William Kentridge : process as metaphor and other doubtful enterprises / Leora Maltz-Leca.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017033918 | ISBN 9780520290556 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Kentridge, William, 1955—Criticism and interpretation.

Classification: LCC N7396.K45 M325 2017 | DDC 700.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033918

Printed in China 26+25+24+23+22+21+20+19+18+17 10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1

In memory of my beloved father, Harold Paul Maltz, 1932–2011.

With endless love and gratitude.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments On the Southern Tip of Africa

ix

1

1

The Politics of Metaphor Erasing

29

2

History as Process, or Chasing Hegel out of Africa Animating

85

3

Process/Procession Processing Regime Change

131

4

Thinking/Doubting/Doubling Drawing (Up)

195

5

The Most Promiscuous of Metaphors Projecting

259

Being Contemporary Up South World Time and Other Doubtful Enterprises

323

Notes

339

List of Illustrations

381

Index

393

ON THE SOUTHERN TIP OF AFRICA Isn’t metaphor the natural condition of making art?

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, interview, Johannesburg 20111

I’m interested in the places where we meet the world, membranes where what is us meets what is not us. The possibility of actively constructing our world as we go through it, with drawing as a kind of metaphor for that. If I had to name grand, large-scale interests, it would be them.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, in Kenneth Baker,

“Simple Images, Potent Impact,” 2006&2

Summoning studio visits and the pungent whiff of turpentine, artistic process usually presents itself as the most material—and most apolitical—of concepts. William Kentridge explodes both notions. Dematerializing charcoal dust into the cerebral ether of metaphor, he compares drawing to “a slow-motion version of thought,” describes shadow puppetry as “an emblematic way of thinking about vision,” and connects the formal apparatus of projection with the projective processes of the mind.3 The South African artist has likened printmaking to a logical syllogism (see fig. 1.6). He has suggested parallels between animation and history. And he has analogized his process of erasure to both the local landscape’s “hiding” of its traumatic histories and the amnesiac windshield wipes of human memory (see fig. 1.26). This book explores the meanings of Kentridge’s studio practices, especially his “stone-age” process of drawn animation.4 Focusing on the ten films of the Drawings for Projection series (1989–2011), I propose

1

that Kentridge renders such pedestrian activities as cutting and pasting, drawing, walking, and projecting light as metaphors for how we think and how we live.

By investing his studio practice—or what he pointedly calls his “process”—with a gamut of metaphoric meanings, Kentridge both defies the proscription on metaphor that has dominated contemporary art, and demands that we amplify the dominant understanding of studio process as purely the physical means by which a work of art is made. For whether grounded in the tangibility of the object or, after the 1950s, in the corporeality of the artist’s body and the performative activities of its production, artistic process has usually been tethered to a literalism exemplified in Richard Serra’s famous Verb List (1967–68): “to roll, to crease, to fold. . . .” Kentridge seizes instead on the metaphorical possibilities of such workaday procedures, positing correspondences, citing analogies, and drawing parallels between the processes of making art and those of the world beyond, thereby reiterating his assumption of metaphor as fundamental to, if not “the natural condition of,” making art.

As Kentridge ranges fluidly across media, he conjures new metaphorical possibilities. “Think of the black ink as blood and the brush mark as dagger stroke,” he exhorted the cast of Lulu in 2015.5 A decade earlier, as director of Mozart’s Magic Flute for Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, he shaped the production around what he dubbed the “chemical and metaphoric process” of photography, fashioning the transition from negative film to positive print as the “ur-metaphor” of the 2005 opera (fig. 0.1).6 Thus engaging the formal grammar of projected light and its obverse, projected shadow, as visual signs trailing long histories behind them, Magic Flute recast Plato’s “central metaphor of moving from darkness to light or from ignorance toward knowledge and justice” as a reverse journey—a willful return to the cave, and with it, a flouting of Mozart’s Enlightenment ideal of the value of pure luminosity, or what Jacques Derrida calls the “the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as metaphysics.”7 Here Kentridge plumbs not only the metaphorics of his material support (light and shadow in this case), but also the ideological stakes that subtend them. His work asks how it is possible to think the poetics of dark and light apart from histories of race and colonialism. From the viewpoint of the southern studio, such separations seem untenable. Hence the artist repeatedly deploys metaphor to link the physical processes of the studio—making and unmaking—with both the psychological processes of the self, and the historical processes of the world at large.8 As this book examines the artist’s varied metaphorical lexicon, it probes the curious logic of metaphorizing: of analogizing drawing to thought; of comparing animation to history. Perhaps more than a study of Kentridge’s visual production, it is an attempt to decipher the logic that underpins his potent interpretations of it, a towering pile of words that rests, in my view, on the artist’s investment in metaphor, specifically in his framing of studio processes as metaphoric acts that parallel the processes of the world

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0.1

William Kentridge, The Queen of the Night (Ana Camelia Stefanescu), the Three Ladies (Isabelle Everarts de Velp, Angélique Noldus, Salomé Haller), and Monostatos (Jeffrey Thompson), The Magic Flute, La Monnaie, Brussels, 2005. Note how the opera stage itself becomes like the inside of a folding bellows camera.

outside. When Kentridge affirms that “in the indeterminacy of drawing . . . lies some kind of model of how we live our lives” and that “the activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are or how we operate in the world,” he extends the metaphorical possibilities of process beyond an epistemology (drawing is like thinking) to an ontology (drawing is like being).9 It is, as he put it in the second epigraph to this chapter, “a kind of metaphor” for “the possibility of actively constructing our world as we go through it.”10 This philosophical bent is important, for even as Kentridge devises a range of mediumspecific analogies for activities such as drawing and erasing, the larger concept of

ON THE SOUTHERN TIP OF AFRICA

3

“process” has developed into a core metaphor in his ontology of the studio. He marshals the expansive term in (at least) two registers: to describe his material operations of art making—the “very stupid, dumb and practical process” of drawing—and to characterize an abstract philosophical concept embedded in an ontology of flux and becoming: “a sense of the world as process, as unfolding rather than being a fixed fact.”11 By portraying his animated films, then, as being “about process and transformation, not fact,”12 he points to the metaphor of process as a shorthand for the world’s condition of perpetual, ceaseless change, just as walking—in his signal image of the world walking (fig. 0.2)— gestures to the notion of a universe in constant flux.

The artist speaks of life itself “as a process,” of our “processes of rationality,” and our “processes of forgetting,” dilating the word further to encompass biological and psychological processes. These invocations also suggest a modulation from a noun (a process) to a verb (to process). Kentridge’s cardinal metaphor of drawing-as-thinking turns on precisely this conception of his practice as an open-ended form of mental processing, a cognitive chewing or ponderous recalibration adumbrated in the artist’s hope that the films “can somehow lumberingly draw agency into existence.”13 Likewise, Kentridge’s discussions of processing memories, his coining of the term reprocessing to portray his relationship to the bruised landscape of his native terrain, and a drawn figure bearing the sign Trauerarbeit—Freud’s term for the work of mourning (see fig. 4.40)—all further the impression of his studio process as a processing, or “working through” of the trauma that is South African history.

The notion of processing also sets us in motion, launching us to the heart of the artist’s “mechanical kinetic.”14 At a formal level, it is not difficult to appreciate Kentridge’s jittery objects and liquid animations as describing a world in process, their motion recursively driven by and striving toward incremental, perpetual change. Steven Henry Madoff has eloquently identified “a single essence that inhabits his every theme and leap from medium to medium . . . and that is the ruthlessness, or should I say the wolf, of change.”15 This kinetic energy reaches, moreover, far beneath the level of form to articulate a dynamic epistemology that aligns the artist’s views with key tenets of process philosophy and its metaphysics of perpetual change. By this rubric, identified with the work of Alfred Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Henri Bergson, and others, reality is understood as constituted less by objects or our apprehension of them, as in the Kantian schema, than by events and processes. Drawing on ideas that date back to Heraclitus, the process philosopher Nicholas Rescher defines process as “a categorical concept—one that provides a thought instrument for organizing our knowledge of the world.”16 Kentridge, I argue, employs process as just such a structuring logic, a fundamental metaphor that underpins his view of “seeing the world not as static, but in motion.”17 If indeed “animation is a good metaphor for history,” it is because the medium’s rolling changes gesture to the ceaseless flow of time and metamorphoses of objects,

4

ON THE SOUTHERN TIP OF AFRICA

0.2

Kentridge, World Walking, 2007, drawing for Il Sole 24 Ore, charcoal, gouache, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, 213 Ă— 150 cm.

rendering it a visual analogue of the world in motion “at the rate of twenty-five frames a second.”18 Kentridge’s metaphorics of process is thus rooted in his contrivance of an unusual method of animation that is—and was devised to be—a paean to the restlessness of change. His insistence on characterizing his studio operations as processes intimate these connections to movement, for the etymology of the word can be traced to the Latin procedere, meaning “to proceed,” or “advance.” Indeed, the procession—a mass advance—became a signal image for the artist, both because it embodied the potentialities inherent in his new animation process and because it united medium with content, the formal with the political, allowing a studio process to gesture beyond itself to the dramatic changes occurring in South Africa’s political sphere circa 1989.

THREE PICTURES OF PROCESS That Kentridge’s animations read as essays on inconstancy is partly due to the smudges of charcoal and billows of erasure that attest to the numerous adjustments needed to nudge his forms across the page (see fig. 1.24). The artist’s shrewd retooling of traditional animation hinged on his impulse to preserve this record of change and ultimately to make it central to the film’s meaning. Drawing and erasing on a single sheet of paper, rather than on many (as in traditional cel animation), he tracks the slow progress of his charcoal forms by photographing their every alteration and then filming the entire train of images in sequence (fig. 0.3). In turn, this chronicle of the drawing’s volatile histories is facilitated by—and thematically linked to—the physical movement Kentridge has built into his animation process: in the sequence of photographs reproduced here the artist performs this pacing to and fro, between the drawing tacked to the studio wall and the shutter release cable of the mounted prefocused camera. Although the artist originally grounded these ambulations in the exigencies of photographing the drawing as it changed, he soon expressed them metaphorically, as a “stalking of the drawing.”19 Kentridge’s body attenuates into sprays of dotted lines in a 2007 map of his process, Parcours d’Atelier (fig. 0.4), where he homes in on his snail’s trails of pacing footsteps.

They spiral out from the camera (the crimson heart of the image), and advance toward the pinned-up drawing on the studio wall (the vertical red rectangle at right). Then they

»0.3

6

Photographs showing Kentridge’s process of drawing, erasure, and filmic capture, with drawings from Other Faces hanging in the studio. In the first image the artist is photographing the drawing; in the second he has walked to the wall to erase part of the drawing; finally he returns to the camera again. Note that the artist staged these photographs to elucidate his working operations photographically in a lecture he gave in 2010, on the occasion of being awarded the Kyoto Prize.

ON THE SOUTHERN TIP OF AFRICA

ON THE SOUTHERN TIP OF AFRICA

0.4

Kentridge, Parcours d’Atelier, 2007, drawing from the artist’s book Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008. Collage, pen, ink, and pencil on paper, 24.6 × 39.3 cm (Valence, France: Editions Captures, 2008). The rectangular red camera is at the center, and the drawing is pinned to the studio wall on the right. Downstairs in this studio, a double-story split-level building designed by Briget Grosskopff, in an open space with a high ceiling, Kentridge draws and photographs his work.

cross the page and swarm into the thicket of arabesques on the left. “It’s as if,” the artist tells me (analogizing again), “someone has attached a marker to my shoes checking my steps.”20 Granted an ostensible glimpse into his process of producing—in this case, the 2010 opera The Nose—the viewer is summoned to roam with Kentridge in his insomniac peregrinations around his workspace. On a path that reinscribes the foundational association between drawing and thinking, we follow him through his echo chamber of decamping ideas: from the “emptiness” near the center to the “echo of emptiness”

8

ON THE SOUTHERN TIP OF AFRICA

below; from the “insupportable weight of eyelids” toward the lower right through a scant “6½ minutes sleep” in the corner beneath. Chronicling his studio work as cycles of relentless tedium punctuated by forays toward the couch for “defensive sleeping” and vanishing glimpses of the day’s half-formed idea, this catalogue of inactivity and lethargy asserts the artist’s distance from Serra’s triumphalist exhortations to action. It evinces too Kentridge’s gentle deflating of his vaunted process which, over the past two decades, has shifted from a peculiarly quaint, notoriously slow, and fairly inefficient mode of making a film to being fêted internationally precisely for the awkwardness and amateurish quality that the films have quietly sloughed off over time.

Kentridge’s parodic rendition of his process as one of inertia and sloth takes its place in a long lineage of shifting portrayals of his studio dramas. Another summary image of studio process (fig. 0.5), this one produced in 2004 for a screening of the Drawings for Projection cycle (1989–present) that is the focus of this book, also addressed the relationship between drawing and photography. Here, the principal props of the artist’s theatrical operation—menacing Bolex camera and propped-up drawing—take center stage, now confronting each other across the compressed space of a landscape squeezed into a portrait format. Effacing his own position as “mediator” between these rival media, this portrait of process defines Kentridge’s signature operation as one of countermanding terms of gestural touch and rote opticality—the drawing hand and the clicking camera shutter—thereby restaging the productive friction embodied in the figures of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. Just as Pollock’s corporeal mark making and theatricalization of the studio serve as reference points for the South African artist, so too Kentridge’s use of the mechanized camera to defuse the impugned expressivity of gestural drawing marks the Warholian legacy he has built in to the heart of his practice. Yet even as the artist summons these postwar artists—and the American histories they stand in for—he ultimately dislodges them in favor of the Soviet traditions that assumed greater resonance on the tip of Africa (fig. 0.6). Here, Kentridge affirms Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera as the touchstone of the Drawings for Projection series, inscribing his own filmic efforts under the aegis of the Russian director’s remarkable film.

We find the artist still pondering his distinctive tempo of drawing and photography, flow and arrest in Other Faces (2011), the tenth of the Drawings for Projection films.

Chewing on the implications of his process, churning content from form, Other Faces opened with an exterior shot of the artist’s studio in Houghton, Johannesburg, where we glimpse him pacing inside. Segueing to another studio in the city’s downtown, we find a photographer snapping portraits, each burst of his handheld flash dramatically enfolding his sitter—and the filmic screen—in a blinding aureole of electric light that violently arrests the flow of the drawn film (fig. 0.7). A strained pause follows before the frozen, flattened portrait appears, creating a filmic tempo of lively movement punctuated by the deathly stillness of the camera’s flash (fig. 0.8). This rhythm of flow and arrest

ON THE SOUTHERN TIP OF AFRICA

9

0.5

Kentridge, drawing for the screening of Drawings for Projection, in New York’s Central Park Band Shell, 2004, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 230 × 165 cm.

0.6

Dziga Vertov, still from Man with a Movie Camera, 1929. The film’s eponymous cameraman towers over the crowds gathered below him in post-Revolutionary Russia.

0.7

Kentridge, drawing from Other Faces, 2011, charcoal and colored pencil on paper, 57.5 × 79.5 cm. The studio photographer holds up a flash as he shoots one of his portrait subjects in a downtown Johannesburg studio.

0.8

Kentridge, drawing from Other Faces, 2011, charcoal and colored pencil on paper, 57.5 × 79.5 cm. The studio photographer takes the portrait of a woman. The red viewfinder markings, reminiscent of the automated face-tracking function on digital cameras, call up colonial ethnographic practices of measurement and calibration, racist pseudo-sciences in which the history of photography in Africa is embedded.

11

allegorizes, among other things, Kentridge’s own fitful process of stops and starts, in which the act of drawing is perpetually interrupted by the click of the studio camera.

Here photography’s artificial, even violent, petrifications spotlight the “static image” as what the artist has called a “frozen fact,” underscoring the “process and transformation” implicit in the moving image, the dynamism that enables it to parallel the flux of the world.21

THE PLACE OF FORMALISM, OR “THE WINDOW,” FROM UP SOUTH These three pictures of process build on a myriad of ways the artist has drawn attention to the mechanics of his working methods, whether in his analytical lectures and writings on the subject (I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine; see fig. 3.8); his numerous project-based books visually detailing its minutiae (Everyone Their Own Projector, from which Parcours is drawn); or his early stress on his films as aimed less at producing an animation than at recording “the process of a drawing coming into being.”22 To this end, most of his drawings index their storied methods of production in one way or another, with streaks of erasure stretching into performative spumes, while ruled lines, scribbled marginalia, and rows of ascending numbers bear witness to counted frames and countless walks across the studio (see fig. 3.12, panther and detail).

Responding to these cues, critics have certainly noted Kentridge’s foregrounding of his working methods, although only Rosalind Krauss has broached the difficult question of why he does so. Analyzing the artist’s process in the traditions of film and animation, historicizing it against Sergei Eisenstein’s writings and Stanley Cavell’s non-normative definitions of medium, Krauss argued in a landmark 2000 article that Kentridge “invents” a medium.23 In Under Blue Cup (2011), she again credits the artist with resuscitating the fatigued concept, inducting him into her select cavalry of the “knights of medium.” Kentridge’s work is thus skillfully, seamlessly assimilated into the larger narratives of Euro-American art history, cast as a strategic gambit in a battle to retain the slipping memory of an avant-garde for whom medium underpinned the very possibilities of making art.

When Kentridge’s practice emerged in 1980s Johannesburg, a version of the Greenbergian formalism Krauss is indebted to did in fact dominate South African visual culture, exerting “a pressure during my art school training,” he recounts.24 Along with the increasingly hidebound conventions of South African resistance art, homegrown versions of formalist painting did provide an important template against which the artist came to define his own practice. Eschewing the formalist fantasy that one could—or would wish to—close the studio door on the world outside, Kentridge mobilized his art

12

ON THE SOUTHERN TIP OF AFRICA

practice precisely as a means to process contemporary history, establishing formal gestures as a means rather than an end. As early as 1981, Kentridge is on record politely lambasting local adherents of Greenbergian formalism for turning away from the challenge of the (white) self and its compromised place in South African society. Their formalist introversion mirrored the larger self-absorption of whites under apartheid—what the artist began to call around this time “the disease of urbanity”—and exposed the limits of transplanting Euro-American formal traditions to the context of apartheid. Escapism, Kentridge ventured time and again, did not make for strong art.25 Ironically, the aging Clement Greenberg apparently agreed, confiding in the twenty-year-old artist (over dinner at Kentridge’s parents’ house during the critic’s 1975 African sojourn) that a political situation such as South Africa’s demanded political art.26 This could hardly have strengthened the case for the doctrinal formalisms that dominated the Johannesburg art world. Ultimately, by turning to the very figuration he understood this tradition to deem “regressive, essentially sentimental,” Kentridge refused long ago the notion “that only that which is formally innovative is of value.”27 In a conversation with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 1998, Kentridge again weighed in on the legacy of formalism in his practice: “I think the glass itself is interesting,” he agreed, before adding: “but only for a few minutes. What is seen through the window is interesting for much longer. You can’t have a fin-de-siècle introversion, closing out the world in the hope that what’s outside the window will go away.”28 Moreover, as if clarifying how a work’s playful references to its processes of production serve neither as evidence that he is “intent on the representation, or the figuring-forth, of the medium” nor as justification of his supposed disregard of content, he clarifies further: “A knowledge of the ‘glass’ . . . doesn’t negate what is represented, nor that representation is possible.”29 If Krauss’s reading of Kentridge’s work, though dazzling in its rhetorical impact, seems forced at times, it is owing to her lack of interest in the generative context of the artist’s location, culture, and the seismic political changes that he both worked toward and, once they began, worked over. These factors, and the artist’s processing of them in his art of the period, are essential to understanding Kentridge’s metaphorics of the local. Moreover, if Kentridge did indeed “invent” a medium, as Krauss has brilliantly discerned, the question remains: Why then? Why there? Plumbing the artist’s timely imagery of processions, I propose (in Chapter 3) not only that Kentridge’s ambulatory process emerged in and through this content, but also that his animated “process of change” is imbricated in the country’s larger political processes of transition. (Please note: the book’s chapters are outlined in full near the end of this introduction.)

Just as “the political process is one element of the films,” by Kentridge’s own account, so too are other local nuances of meaning that inflect the practice of an artist who stresses that “in the end all the work I do is about Johannesburg.”30 Like his character Felix Teitelbaum, Kentridge remains a willing “Captive of the City,” the man-made,

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0.9

Kentridge, drawing from the animated film Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, 1989, charcoal on paper, 96 × 150 cm. Felix Teitelbaum, dreamer extraordinaire, and one of the artist’s acknowledged alter egos, stares at the thronging highways of the “captivating” city of Johannesburg, or Egoli, city of gold.

crime-ridden garden of Johannesburg where he was born and bred (fig. 0.9). “The context is important to me,” Kentridge reiterated in 2010, discussing the transformative processes of local history. “Some people flourish much better when they are far away from home, in a completely other place from where they grew up. I am still intrigued by the processes and changes that happen in Johannesburg specifically and in South Africa in general.”31 Time and again Kentridge has grounded his work in the South African metropolis Achille Mbembe calls “the classic location . . . of African modernity,” where he and three generations before him have lived and worked.32 In his poster for the

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Drawings for Projection (fig. 0.5) series, the artist therefore drags his film camera, paper, and bulky equipment out of the studio and into the open veld to anchor his process visually in the “second greatest city in the world”; to root it materially in the abandoned mines and calcined grass of Johannesburg’s Highveld. For if the low hills that span the drawing’s horizon—the slag heaps of low-grade ore that rise and fall with the price of gold—strike the artist as formal analogues of his own process of erasure, so too the burnt bristles of the winter veld in the poster’s foreground—what he calls “charcoal on the hoof”—completes Kentridge’s poetic intimation of the landscape itself as a kind of drawing. Or at the very least, of his process of charcoal and erasure as somehow contiguous with, or an extension of, the paper-flat carbonic landscape of his natal terrain.33 Despite these moorings to Johannesburg and its politics, Kentridge is a philosopher at heart, and his macrocosmic “understanding of the world as something in process rather than a series of facts,” or his abstract comments on “how we look at the world, of the drawing [as] . . . a membrane between you and the world,” can give leave to occlude the specificities of his work and of his world at the tip of Africa.34 Yet, by virtue of my own histories in South Africa (where I grew up)—and thanks to my own clouded lens— this book is grounded in the microcosm of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.

It is shaped by the partial views of the universe one gets from the bottom of the African continent; and it contends that the inconsistencies of that perspective color standard accounts of Euro-American late modernism. “Much of what was contemporary in Europe and America during the 1960s and 1970s seemed distant and incomprehensible to me,” Kentridge has explained. “Images became familiar from exhibitions and publications but the impulses behind the work did not make the transcontinental jump to South Africa.”35 Process as Metaphor stresses the art-historical, cultural, and political gaps between New York and Johannesburg, elaborating the artist’s emergence from an idiosyncratic local modernism, where an odd and abbreviated version of twentiethcentury art history molded his art in distinct ways. Indeed the distance and incomprehensibility of Euro-American contemporaneity, along with the pathologies of South African history, go some way toward illuminating why the twin concepts of process and metaphor came to assume the centrality they did in Kentridge’s work. Together, they enabled him to describe both the particular tremors of the South African social and political landscape, as well as the wobbliness of the world in general.

If I maintain that Kentridge’s southern perspective defines his view of the North and its histories, it is precisely because the boreal regions have always thrown a long shadow over the artist’s work. And while I may demur at the particular lineage Krauss establishes for Kentridge, both as it rewinds backward through the twentieth century and as it rolls him forward into the twenty-first, there is no question that the artist dialogues constantly with the Euro-American canon. Employing the lens of process to track Kentridge’s ambivalent relationship to certain beacons of mainstream modernism, I assess

ON THE SOUTHERN TIP OF AFRICA

15

the geographically transplanted, intentionally delayed, willfully misunderstood, ironic tenor of his cross-cultural operations. For over the years Kentridge has initiated dozens of dialogues: with filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov and Georges Méliès, the playwrights Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht, authors and composers ranging from Johann Goethe to Wolfgang Mozart, and numerous philosophers, writers, and artists. Yet even as the work of these Europeans acquired an unexpected afterlife in South Africa, so too it often changed in its journey across the Atlantic, assuming distorted refractions or gaining immoderate weight. Kentridge’s dispersed dialogues therefore prompt a larger question: how to account for a practice so steeped in Euro-American modernism—albeit a particular, southern-inflected version—yet equally defined by the histories of racism and colonialism, and the ongoing economic and social injustices of the South African postcolony?36 If Kentridge’s position, squeezed between a rock and a hard place, between Scylla and Charybdis, as he put it, conveys his equivocal relationship to the Euro-American tradition, it is equally his deep investment in the specific social and political matrix of the postcolony—of which the South African postcolony is but one configuration of a larger continental condition—that defines him as a contemporary African artist.37 To the extent, then, that it may be useful to apprehend Kentridge in this way, such a designation is less one of a spurious continental identity than a nod to the defining role of context, and a valorization of the utility of distance and difference in sharpening understandings of a globalized art world discourse that often skates on surfaces of superficial affinity. Indeed, the physical ease of flying south can blind us to the chasms—economic, political, medical, cultural—between the United States and South Africa. From this vantage, Kentridge’s very embrace of metaphor separates him from most of his Euro-American peers, aligning him instead with a generation of artists, many of them from the postcolonies, who refuse the notion that the pigments, materials, and media of art can be shorn of their social meanings and political entanglements. For an artist deeply invested in peeling away the histories of media and materials to examine their political alliances, such formalist purities constitute a curious distortion of vision. Thus Kentridge’s work, pressing beyond current materialist and mediacentric conceptions of artistic practice, implies that process must be understood, in its structure and function, as metaphor.

THE PLACE OF METAPHOR This book is less an exploration of the textures, smells, and caprices of materials and making than a pondering of their philosophical dimensions. It is concerned less with Kentridge’s formal maneuvers per se than with the rhetorical gambits he posits in their wake. And it pauses at the fact that time and again these post-production exegeses hinge

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on metaphor. For metaphor remains a most unfashionable concept in contemporary art, jettisoned several decades ago from its discourses (though certainly not from its practices) as bound excessively to the literary, to narrative, and to retrograde types of symbolism. For this reason, metaphor stages the rarest of appearances in writing about contemporary, or even modern, art.38 And when it does appear, it is usually in discussions of how depicted images function as visual metaphors. My concerns differ significantly.

Rather than a metaphorics of content, they involve a metaphorics of process, or how Kentridge formally and discursively situates his various studio methods as analogues of operations in the world beyond.39 To be sure, these formulations of studio processes as metaphors are part of a much larger metaphorical impulse in Kentridge’s work. Metaphors, similes, comparisons, parallels, and correspondences pepper his interviews, lectures, and conversation. In fact he has cited conversation itself as a metaphor for drawing—a “thinking aloud”—and his Johannesburg Biography lecture is structured entirely on a series of extended correspondences between himself, his practice, and the city.40 On this occasion we are told how the agitation beneath the Vaal landscape “became a metaphor for the political churning in the country in the 1960s and ’70s,” and how instead of “a metaphor for understanding eternity,” the region’s fickle mountains of gold dust, which rose and fell with the price of the metal, came to signal the process of erasure of a city in flux, and by extension, the capriciousness of the world itself.41 Kentridge has also drawn on the elucidative power of analogy to connect how we see with how we live, relating an “openness” to seeing images in clouds to a larger “openness” to the world. And when comparing media, he likewise resorts to analogy: the piecing together of collage, he proposes, “is analogous [to] but not completely the same as the way in which the structure of the film starts to come together: from pieces.”42 The content of Kentridge’s drawings and films can likewise be read metaphorically, in both its imagery and its larger thematics. The artist’s notes to The Refusal of Time reveal him jotting down ideas in the form of parallels like “turning page/turning time,” the concrete visual image of the former roped to the abstract notion of the latter.43 These associations and endless others are rooted in the logic of metaphor. Likewise, Kentridge explains how the mutinous cutlery in Woyzeck on the Highveld, an animation in which the place settings on a table become increasingly out of control, functions as “a metaphor for Woyzeck’s inability to cope with the world.”44 Or we read that “World War One is a metaphor for the war inside” Zeno (the lead character in the film Zeno Writing).45 Although this metaphorics of content is not my primary interest, it seeps into Kentridge’s metaphorics of process, with meaning often emerging from the tissue between metaphors of form and content.

Given that metaphor has been routed from the landscape of contemporary art, this book asks, ultimately, what the appeal of metaphor is for Kentridge. Just as Chapter 1

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considers how the artist dispatches metaphor to unravel closed or rigid rationalist logic, Chapter 6, on the metaphorics of projection, spirals back to locate the lure of metaphor in the interpretive openness it affords, or the space for projection it generates, which answers Kentridge’s striving for an art as ambiguous and uncertain as the world itself. This call to project—to associate, to imagine, to displace—is the principal invitation of the Drawings for Projection series, as its title and its myriad images of blank screens emphasize (fig. 0.10; see also fig. 0.5). If the cycle’s larger use of metaphor to unfix meaning underscores Kentridge’s aversion to certainty in all its guises, so too do his open-ended narratives and his efforts to encourage viewers to augment them by producing their own interpretations, or becoming “their own projector.” This provocation, the title of a 2008 artist’s book (see fig. 5.24), spills down the volume’s cover like the magnifying cone of a projector, spotlighting how projection’s amplifying charge parallels that of metaphor.46

0.10

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Kentridge, drawing from Felix in Exile, 1994, charcoal on paper, 45 × 54 cm. One of the artist’s ubiquitous blank screens faces the mute Highveld, the paper-flat landscape around it framed by the circular viewfinder of a theodolite or telescope and scarred by calibrations that draw attention to the terrain’s violent colonial and apartheid histories.

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Other Faces (2011) turns on this proximity too, as both projection and metaphor rise to unprecedented visibility. In fact, in this meditation on studio process—and for the first time in Kentridge’s oeuvre—the word metaphor announces itself, scrawled on a preparatory drawing, provocatively hidden under the claw of a hadeda bird (fig. 0.11).

The scribbled letters seem to acknowledge the centrality of metaphor to Kentridge’s process—long assumed but never foregrounded. But (I wondered, as I stood in Marian Goodman Gallery in 2011), what on earth was the word metaphor doing inscribed on a bank ledger bearing the name Leviticus, below columns of accounting records, under the foot of a perpetually laughing bird? Here was a classic Kentridgean invitation to project: to decipher the riddle of this seemingly incongruous juxtaposition. Two laps around the gallery yielded an associational logic of sorts, as I remembered that the hadeda, the raucous landmark of the Johannesburg suburban garden, is associated with the Egyptian ibis, a revered and ancient bird.47 I thought that the cue to Egypt must have something to do with the Near East and Leviticus, the Old Testament book named for the Jewish priestly class. But a series of unhelpful Google searches informed me that I was wrong. Unlike Exodus, Leviticus is mostly a technical tract detailing ritual offerings and appears to have no relationship at all to Egypt.

Finally, I began to connect the dots, or to decipher the mental accounting pictured in the ledger: Other Faces is a film about strangers and hospitality, and Leviticus is famous for its directive “To treat the stranger as a local. To love the foreigner as oneself, for you were strangers in Egypt.”48 This line, taking us back to ancient Egypt by way of a caution to remember history, holds particular poignance for South African Jews who, as Kentridge has noted, celebrated their own liberation from slavery at Passover every year, even as they prospered off the carnivorous system of apartheid.49 In this drawing, the word metaphor therefore not only signals Kentridge’s associative method of intuitive conceptual leaps (which he invites viewers to double), but also enjoins them to think metaphorically, that is, to imagine themselves in the shoes of another. To project.

The biblical appeal to hospitality grounds its command in a shared history that pivots on the vagaries of fortune: Now he is a slave, but the slave could just as easily be you. In fact, it was you. Make the metaphorical leap.

A second drawing from Other Faces (fig. 0.12) provides a further instance of how associative conjunctions—or provocative disjunctions of meaning—shape the artist’s process, often by propelling the film’s narrative from one word or image to another. In this case, the spark plug at the center, whose name intimates a potential “sparking” of violence, seems to connect with the handgun at right, another potential “trigger.” Or the threat could be misread, and the spark plug could pivot left instead, toward an empty hand held out in an appeal for money, or even offered in peace. Like a roll of the dice, this drawing pictures chance—its underside, its terrors—laying out (per the artist) the possibilities of how a Johannesburg carjacking might unfold: one might merely have a

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0.11

Kentridge, drawing from Other Faces, 2011, charcoal and colored pencil on ledger paper, 43.18 Ă— 55.25 cm. The word Metaphor appears beneath the foot of the hadeda bird and word Leviticus at upper left.

0.12

Kentridge, drawing from the animated film Other Faces, 2011, charcoal and colored pencil on paper, 37.5 × 120.5 cm. The camera pans the sequence of three small drawings—an outstretched hand, a spark plug, and a hand holding a gun—tacked onto a larger piece of paper.

spark plug smashing a window, or one might find a handgun in one’s face. If these heartstopping quirks of fortune suggest the horrific obverse of “fortuna” when it exits the Johannesburg studio—“fortuna” being Kentridge’s principle of production, “between pure chance and planning,” which he holds responsible for steering much of his work—Other Faces’s central image of the car crash further narrativizes how the “accidents” of studio process infiltrate filmic content.50 In a detail of imaginative geography, the car crash occurs on the amusingly named Error Street, reiterating this typically Kentridgean pun on the blunders of the studio while rooting the artist’s process in local cartographies (fig. 0.13). Like Jeppe and Pritchard Streets, Error Street is an actual downtown Johannesburg thoroughfare, rerouted on Kentridge’s fanciful map of the studio some two city blocks from its actual site. But it is also the road the artist travels down on many a day in the studio, especially because here it is made to intersect with Eckstein Street, in reality, also, about three miles away.51 The car accident, or mishap of “fortuna,” occurs at the whimsical convergence of Error and Eckstein Streets, a symbolic chiasma on an otherwise faithful city road map, indicating how Kentridge’s flights of metaphor are anchored in, and arguably enabled by, a fierce local naturalism. This naturalism, evident especially in this film’s numerous on-site drawings, verges on literalism. But far from being incompatible with Kentridge’s metaphorics, I would stress that the artist’s commitment to detailing the

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0.13

Kentridge, drawing from the animated film Other Faces, 2011, charcoal and colored pencil on paper, dimensions unknown. This metaphoric map of the artist’s studio process includes an avenue of error, accidents of fortuna, and a street named Eckstein.

material and political specificities of the local is precisely what forms the structuring condition of his metaphoric abstractions. One needs actual ground from which to leap.

METAPHORIC PLAYS From avenues for error to flirtations with the goddess Fortuna, wordplay—and the metaphoric leaps it depends on—has long been central to Kentridge’s practice. Derrida, whose writerly process famously plumbed such alliances too, once described the relationship between penser and peser (thinking and/as weighing) as a “friendship” between words, though one that does not necessarily reside in shared etymologies.52 Rather, seemingly false friends like homologies and proximities can point equally toward forgotten semantic camaraderie.53 Fortuitously, the connection between thinking and weighing also underpins Kentridge’s Weighing . . . and Wanting, joining the artist’s store of wordplay: the near palindrome “Felix” and “exile” launched the eponymous film, and anagrams such as “breathe” and “berate,” or words with shared roots like “inspire” and “expire” are both noted in a sketchbook for The Refusal of Time.54 Such games, which reveal the artist’s determination to treat words less as taut definitions than as provocations to pry open meaning, owe much to Bruce Nauman’s palindromes (such as his neon War/Raw or Eat/Death signs). While Kentridge often bounces around semantic associations in the preliminary stages of a project to generate ideas—“exit/exist” and “historical/hysterical” are two such transitions he cites—frequently these metaphorical pairings maintain their place in the final artwork.55 Such is the case with another Derridean coupling “give/forgive,” which flashes several times at the end of Stereoscope (see fig.

1.34). The list of these word pairings is as manifold as their importance, with a coupling such as “amnesty” and “amnesia” providing a pressure toward the making of both Weighing . . . and Wanting and History of the Main Complaint.

Lexical shufflings are among the many ludic enterprises that define Kentridge’s metaphoric process, which has long obfuscated the boundaries between modes of play: the traditional theatrical notion of playing a part; the performative self-fashioning of playing with identities; and the ludic antics of the madcap and the ludicrous, the slapstick and the absurd.56 When Kentridge acts out poses and gestures, performs onstage, and assumes the roles of his drawn characters, his performative plays take on a metaphorical relationship with the self (or selves). For just as Kentridge’s wordplay reveals the unstable, shifting notion of language expressed in Wittgenstein’s famous dictum that words are defined by their use rather than by their dictionary meaning—so that they are always in flux, always stretching around new significations—so too the artist’s physical play and gambols with his doubles describe an easily unsettled and elastic self. These wobbly words and wobbly personas join Kentridge’s larger cohort of unstable forms:

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especially the liquid aesthetics of his playful, restless animations in which cats spring into gas masks and coffee plungers nosedive into mine shafts.

A RECITATION OF THE DOUBTFUL ENTERPRISES THAT FOLLOW Gas masks and mine shafts return us to apartheid era South Africa, where Kentridge’s process of animation and his investment in metaphor were forged in tandem. The first two chapters of this book excavate this history: one is structured on the parallels between erasure and forgetting (Chapter 1), and the other on those between animation and history (Chapter 2). Situating Kentridge’s practice in the politically fraught and adversarial visual culture of apartheid South Africa, the first chapter, “The Politics of Metaphor: Erasing,” comes to grips with the slippery trope of metaphor and how it acted on this confined discursive space. Rejecting reigning perceptions that the horrors of apartheid defied “reduction” to metaphor, as Njabulo Ndebele and others saw it, Kentridge joined J.2M. Coetzee in embracing metaphor at the height of apartheid to treat these very pathologies. For example, he first employed the formal process of erasure in the months following the new 1985 press restrictions specifically to signal censors’ “erasures” of text from the newspapers. From the outset, the artist’s metaphorics responded to—and bristled at—the literalist demands of resistance culture that art serve as “a weapon in the struggle.” Rejecting such instrumentalism by supplanting literalism with the leaps of metaphor, Kentridge forged an art that is as political as it is metaphorical. At the same time, he pitted metaphor against the linear reasoning of the law, mobilizing it in favor of the cryptic grammar of the aphorism and the fluid logic of the unconscious as part of a larger rejection of Analytic rationalism. Erasure, although initially grounded in the politics of hiding and amnesia, ultimately comes to signal a potential reversibility of action, and with it an unraveling of time and historical process.

My second chapter, “History as Process, or Chasing Hegel out of Africa: Animating,” likewise proposes that Kentridge’s recruitment of animation as a metaphor for history is indebted to the apartheid context, in this instance to the tradition of history as a dynamic series of processes, which assumed an unusual prominence in the South African art world to become a mantra of 1970s Johannesburg resistance culture. Here I root Kentridge’s ideas on process in dynamic Hegelian and Marxist philosophies of historical process that, among other things, gainsaid the petrified tradition of South African landscape painting as much as the fixities of Platonic essences. While the Brechtian theater company of which Kentridge was a founding member, Junction Avenue, homed in time and again on history as a process potentially open to change, Brecht’s larger commitment to method equally shaped the company’s, and later the artist’s, attention to what he would come to call his “process.”

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A connective third chapter, “Process/Procession: Processing Regime Change,” presses on this dynamic of change, exploring how the rhythmic footfalls of Kentridge’s peripatetic process find their metaphorical echo in the repetitive thump of his processant’s footsteps, linking the artist’s animated “process of change,” developed in 1989 with the transition from apartheid to democracy that began that same year. Centered on the image of the procession, the chapter charts a geography of origins that embeds the artist’s ambulatory and sequentialized process in his drawn and filmic processions, and in timely media imagery that deployed the visual syntax of striding figures to conceptualize regime change.

The second half of this book considers Kentridge’s post-apartheid work where, almost two decades after the demise of the Nationalist regime, his engagement with metaphor has only intensified. Offering a fine-grained analysis of Stereoscope (1999), Zeno Writing (2002), and Other Faces (2011), Chapters 4 and 5 respectively treat the dual terms of the Drawings for Projection series: drawing and projection. Kentridge’s cardinal metaphor of drawing as thinking suggests a path between extraction and blockage, inscribing knowledge and our processes of seeking it as among the most doubtful of enterprises. Chapter 4, “Thinking/Doubting/Doubling: Drawing (Up),” explores the artist’s epistemology of doubt, probing the relationship between doubt and doubling—especially as manifested in the vacillating forms of the shadow—and examining how the repressions and splits of the apartheid regime play out upon the body of the amnesiac and divided post-apartheid subject. Charting Kentridge’s numerous visual analogues of consciousness, it focuses on the internalized fractures of Stereoscope, chasing after the film’s electric blue line as it fissures drawings in half and sparks explosions to sketch a model of consciousness as embedded in shock: electric, somatic, nervous. This picture of physical and psychological trauma returns us to the early Freudianism of Zeno Writing, which centers on the therapeutic dialogues of Zeno, another divided, doubtful subject scribbling his thoughts on the far-flung edge of empire.

As drawing reverts to its semantic origins as a “drawing up” and a “drawing out,” Kentridge highlights the structural affinities between his own processes of retrieval, mark making, and projection and those of psychoanalysis.

Chapter 5, “The Most Promiscuous of Metaphors: Projecting,” departs from the writing on the wall that fills Stereoscope and Zeno Writing—admonitions and musings, portents and projections of all kinds—which hint at the knowing way in which the artist harnesses his physical apparatus of projection to serve a range of metaphoric transfers and displacements. From the shifting of guilt from people to objects to the psychic transfers of his “displaced self-portraits”; from Richard Wollheim’s projective impulse of “seeing-in” to Emmanuel Levinas’s transcendent ethics of empathetic identification, Kentridge has explored the gamut of projection’s meanings. Highly attuned too to the rich metaphorics of casting light, or “bringing things to light” as Freud would have it,

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the artist has not only called on “everyone” to be “their own projector,” their own source of illumination, but has also compared his working quarters to “an enlarged head,” “a space for . . . internal projections.”57 The work floor scattered with pacing footsteps is thus fashioned into a psychic expanse where laps of thought are spun into images, implicating the studio as a “projection room”—a chamber of circling ideas and leaping thoughts—as well as a site for making. This chapter focuses largely on Kentridge’s 2011 film Other Faces, where projection is mobilized to support a post-apartheid ethics of identification, all the more urgent amid violent post-apartheid paroxysms of xenophobia in South Africa that culminated in May 2008 with hundreds of injured and fifty-six people dead.

TIME IN THE POSTCOLONY Kentridge has long claimed that his process is “all about time.”58 His repetitive pacing up and down the projective swath of his workspace is therefore pivotal for the way it temporally measures—or paces—the “thick time” of the studio, calibrating his working routines to a brisk metronomic clip.59 Swaying back and forth in The Refusal of Time (2012; see fig. 6.3), a troupe of monstrous metronomes gesture both to this ambulatory pacing and to the viscous southern temporality that calls out for—yet obdurately refuses—such an ordering. Kentridge’s temporal process, I conclude, is therefore both a symptom of, and an antidote to, the chronic resistance that forms part of the larger temporal disturbance Achille Mbembe has ascribed to the postcolony, its “discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another: an entanglement.”60 “Being Contemporary Up South: World Time and Other Doubtful Enterprises” closes the book to the hiccupping lurches of the rabble of metronomes in The Refusal of Time, as it considers how southern temporalities pace the artist’s process. In fact, for decades Kentridge’s work has been rife with temporal tics: handless clocks crop up in Faustus in Africa! (fig. 0.14), and Stereoscope opens with the hands of another timepiece racing dementedly around in circles. History of the Main Complaint is interrupted by piercing alarms, with Soho gaining consciousness to the image of a smashed watch (fig. 0.15), while the Méliès films inventory several kinds of temporal rewindings and reversals. Kentridge’s other chronic issues—namely, the untimely, obsolescent, or even

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»0.14

Kentridge, drawing for Faustus in Africa! 1995, charcoal on paper, 52 × 63 cm. The clock has no hands because, pace Hegel, history and “historical movement”—the tick of the clock—long ago left Africa. To rail against such stupidities, Kentridge animates Africa and African history in countless ways—and ultimately makes animation a metaphor for historical process.

»0.15

Kentridge, stills from History of the Main Complaint, 1996, 35 mm animated film, transferred to video, 5:50 minutes. In the film Soho Eckstein’s watch explodes to the sound of bells and alarms just as he awakens from his coma, wide-eyed with alarm.

sentimental qualities so often attributed to his work—are also symptomatic of the anomalies of southern time. These temporal quirks, rather than index anachronism, ultimately emphasize Kentridge’s southernness, his imbrication in the time and place of the South African postcolony. Just as portraying the artist’s work as out of time forms part of a larger critical tendency to nudge it out of place, so too easing his work back into its milieu reveals it as an extraordinarily timely set of responses to the visual and political culture around him. By refusing the authority of Greenwich, the artist’s willful timepieces bespeak a time defiantly out of joint with other, so-called mainstream chronologies. And in spurning the totalizing logic subtending centralized, axial time, categorical imperatives and the certainty of universals are once more made to yield to the particularities of the local.

So this, finally, is another reason why process matters for Kentridge: because its innate temporality enables him to calibrate the singularities of local time, and to ponder the unstable, delayed, and prophetic temporalities of cross-cultural exchange that make possible his engagements with international modernisms. With his metaphoric process, Kentridge carves out a narrow corridor in which to tread—to pace himself, to test himself—lodged between “the weight of Europe leaning on the tip of Africa” and the fraught histories of the South African postcolony.61 This book joins Kentridge in that attenuated space of southern time.

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