Process/Procession: William Kentridge and the Process of Change

Transcription

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
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ART BULLETIN MARCH 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 1
1 William Kentridge, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, 1990, charcoal on paper, 8 ft. 101⁄4 in. ⫻ 24 ft. 61⁄2 in. (2.7 ⫻
7.48 m). Tate Collection, London (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph © Tate, London 2012)
2 Kentridge, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass,
detail. Tate Collection, London (artwork © William Kentridge;
photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)
thought’s traditional idealism, Nancy argues that thought
possesses weight and movement: that it is lodged in the mass
and motion of the thinking body. At the same time, his
notion of the “weight at the heart of thought” places pressure
on the lightness of the step, evoking a gravitas felt not only in
the drags on Kentridge’s drawing hand, the ponderous silences that fill the Drawings for Projection films, or the
lugubrious slump of Soho Eckstein’s shoulders but also in the
lumbering heft of his protagonists’ steps as they plod through
landscapes weighted with the pull of the past.8
The concept of drawing as a “slow-motion version of
thought” is a foundational metaphor for Kentridge, who has
frequently related his own contingent methods of arriving at
an image not merely to knowledge and its failures but also to
“some kind of model of how we live our lives.”9 The “slow” in
“slow-motion” is paramount, for it conveys how Kentridge’s
pacing also paces—that is, metronomically calibrates— his
drawing hand to its own unhurried clip: decelerating it,
temporally dragging out the drawing process. Through these
mandated delays, walking opens up a psychological terrain—
prodding, if not impelling, thinking. Yet the notion of thinking proposed here is hardly a seamless one. Kentridge’s
process is one of stops and starts: the artist’s constant walking
interrupts the flow of drawing, impeding facility and foiling
the circuits between hand and brain to mediate any semblance of gesturalism imputed to the finished drawings. As
Kentridge crisscrosses his work space, his recursive rhythm of
pacing and pausing mimics the flows and blockages of
thought itself, tracing its uneven spurts. Kentridge’s step is
thus perhaps less a stride into mastery than a knowing advance into ignorance; his pacing to and fro, he has insisted, is
not so much a mode of conscious thinking as a meditative
space clearing of not thinking, “a space of not knowing.”10
The step forward is a touchstone idea for Kentridge, doubling as both a mechanics of production and a metaphor for
the embodied nature of thought. Picture another image: a
walking figure, caught midstride, nose in an open book, who
slips between abstract witness to the ceaseless march of time
and intimate self-portrait of the artist at work (Fig. 6).11 A
repeated member of Kentridge’s processions, this walker
forms part of the larger work Portage (Fig. 7), showing a
stream of silhouetted figures who amble across eighteen
pages of Larousse’s Encyclopedia, trampling on telling definitions such as “Jamb” or, in this instance, Marche/Marchepied.
Visual cues dovetail here with lexical ones to underscore
Kentridge’s play with the poetics of leaden legs and pattering
feet: for with this silhouetted figure, Kentridge proffers a
graphic example of his own aesthetics of the peripatetic. His
hips, shoulders, and head angled ahead, this figure looks
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE AND THE PROCESS OF CHANGE
141
3 Kentridge, stills from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, opening sequence showing the incremental stages of Kentridge’s
additive drawn animation process, 1989, 16mm animated film, transferred to video and DVD, 8 minutes, 2 seconds (artwork ©
William Kentridge; photographs provided by William Kentridge studio)
4 Kentridge, Untitled, 1989, drawing
from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City
after Paris, charcoal on paper, 41 ⫻
597⁄8 in. (104 ⫻ 152 cm). Private
collection (artwork © William
Kentridge; photograph provided by
William Kentridge studio)
forward but harks back to the long philosophical tradition of
walking and thinking from which the word peripatetic derives, evoking those inveterate pacers along the ancient
Greek colonnades.12 One chunky block of a foot drawn behind, the other pressing forward onto a spongy arch, Kentridge’s marcher—who appears in three iterations in Portage—
conveys both animation’s arrest of the body in motion and
the pacing that lies at the heart of the artist’s own practice.
It is Kentridge who tells us that this book-wielding walker
figures as a portrait of his own studio process; it is he who not
only inhabits the shoes of his walker but also borrows his
text—so distinctively splayed open at the spine—reading it as
he strolls about (Figs. 9, 11). For while Kentridge’s pacing is
a private, meditative ritual, its performative aspect is betrayed
by the artist’s public reprisals of his prowling figure. The
longest such ode is Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003,
Figs. 8, 9), a filmic departure from the Drawings for Projection series that paused to ponder the artist’s now-celebrated
animation process and its studio treks. Bracketing his staccato
antics of homage to the French cine-magician with endless
circuits of performative pacings, Seven Fragments for Georges
Méliès is a medley of stalking, sauntering, and moseying.
“Sometimes I walk round and round at a fast pace for a long
time before I start work and the films are records of that
route,” Kentridge explained. “The Méliès films are specifically about that walk.”13 In a scene in one of these films,
Journey to the Moon (2003), the camera pans in on the artist’s
feet as, step by step, they sketch out theatrical “footfalls”:
here, Kentridge explores the pressures and liberties of producing art by nodding (slowly) to Samuel Beckett, a selfidentified beacon for the artist whose theatrics of pacing and
snail’s velocity have inspired the unhurried pace of the
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6 Kentridge, Marche/Marchepied, page from Portage,
Mpumalanga, S.A.: Artists’ Press, 2000, collage of torn black
paper on encyclopedia pages, Leporello (accordion-folded)
book, 107⁄8 ⫻ 91⁄4 in. (27.5 ⫻ 23.5 cm), edition of 33 (artwork
© William Kentridge; photograph provided by William
Kentridge studio)
5 Kentridge, page from Receiver, New York: Dieu Donné Press,
with Galamander Press, 2006, photogravure, 14 ⫻ 111⁄4 in.
(35.5 ⫻ 28.5 cm), edition of 50 (artwork © William Kentridge;
films.14 Imaging himself working/walking as he does in
Méliès, Kentridge valorizes the centrality of his studio perambulations; like Bruce Nauman in his own Beckett Walk, the
work becomes the walk, or what Kentridge describes as “a
one-person procession.”15
Kentridge doubles himself in the Méliès films, diffusing into
clones that intimate the psychic splits that rend his projections and that enable him to interact—and eventually to
argue—with his increasingly obstreperous self-portrait doubles. Melting into the body of his drawn character (Fig. 8), it
is as if the artist is rehearsing the porousness between the
performance and its trace, or between his own body and its
representation (Fig. 10). Whether mirroring his reflection as
he poses with charcoal and chamois (Fig. 10) or holding the
charged icon of the open book, which he contemplates with
similar absorption, as he catches a pile of flying texts (Figs. 9,
11), Kentridge’s poses, replete with the silhouette-like shadows of his Portage series, self-consciously recall the engrossed
reader of Marchepied (Fig. 6). So the image Marchepied appears to abstractly represent Kentridge’s studio wanderings,
and at the same time, the artist himself ritualistically reenacts
the personae of his ambulatory readers years after their production.
But why might Kentridge fancifully model himself on this
stooped bibliophile? An intellectual? A person of the book? A
wandering Jew? As quixotic as such notions might seem, this
distinctive image of the reading walker is in fact based on a
memory of the artist’s grandfather standing in synagogue,
holding an open prayer book and swaying rhythmically in
prayer (a repetitive movement that must have gradually
morphed into a step). “When else do you hold a book open
in two hands like that. . . . ?” Kentridge asked me rhetorically,
as if prayer were the primary context intimated by these
rituals of walking.16
When else indeed? Perhaps in a lecture-performance at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, in March 2010 (Fig. 11).
On this occasion, another public presentation of the artist’s
working process—this time an absurdist rendition of his ostensibly chaotic modus operandi of designing and directing
Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera The Nose—Kentridge again
paced about onstage with an open notebook, reading aloud
play dialogue and trial transcripts from his ubiquitous volume
(his only onstage prop save a scaffold and a glass of water).17
143
7 Kentridge, Portage, 2000, collage
of torn black paper on encyclopedia
pages, 107⁄8 ⫻ 1661⁄2 in. (27.5 ⫻
423 cm) (artwork © William
8 Kentridge, stills from Feats of
Prestidigitation, 5 minutes, 10 seconds,
from Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès,
2003, 16mm and 35mm films with
live action and animated drawing,
transferred to video and DVD (artwork
© William Kentridge; photographs
provided by William Kentridge studio)
9 Kentridge, stills from Auto-Didact,
1 minute, 50 seconds, from Seven
Fragments for Georges Méliès (artwork
© William Kentridge; photographs
Silhouetted against the stage wall, his head inclined toward
the open book in his hands, Kentridge seamlessly slipped into
the visual guise of his iconic bibliophilic marcher. This string
of formal repetitions and exchanges—ricocheting between
film and drawing, between live performance of artistic process and torn paper silhouette—proposes Marchepied as a
virtual likeness of the artist walking/working, insinuating
Kentridge’s ambulating male reader as an embodiment of his
own peripatetic studio operations.
Kentridge’s deployment of walking at the Museum of Modern Art lecture on his process also recovered one of the
artist’s first public renditions of his working methods from
nearly twenty years earlier. In this unusual instance in 1991,
Kentridge was an artist-in-residence in Cape Town’s South
African National Gallery, where he was expected to work in
the public galleries. All too aware that “Making a drawing is
not a very exciting spectator sport,”18 Kentridge began to
overtly stage the presentation of his drawing process for the
watching public by reprising, and overtly theatricalizing, the
filmic drawing that he had recently begun to experiment
with. Through a circuit of performative strolls to and fro,
interspersed with exaggerated plays of fiddling with the technicalities of his camera, he visually enlivened— or, we could
say, animated— his studio activities for the crowd.19 From very
early on, therefore, Kentridge has engaged walking as a
means to publicly convey the intimate, almost solipsistic act of
sketching: performatively drawing in space by using his body
as if it were a walking brush.
Mildly irked by the requirement to work in the galleries,
Kentridge referred to the confined work space in Cape Town
around which he trotted daily alternately as a “goldfish bowl”
and a “foxhole.”20 A decade later, the fox and its hole (or a
close feline cousin) would resurface in a striking filmic sequence that once more tethers the artist’s own animalian
“stalking” of his drawing to the image of a pacing beast. This
10 Kentridge, still from Invisible Mending, 1 minute, 30
seconds, 16mm film with live action and animated drawing,
transferred to video and DVD, from Seven Fragments for Georges
Méliès (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by
time it is a panther, restlessly circling its cramped quarters in
Zeno Writing (2002, Fig. 12). Operating both at the register of
narrative and as a self-conscious tribute to the artist’s ambulatory process, the charcoal drawing used to create this sequence remains veined with red numerical notations (Fig.
13). Two horizontal rows of ascending numbers crisscross the
paper, ciphers of Kentridge’s every lap across the studio,
which indicate how he has charted each of the panther’s
steps in order to graphically drag him across the page, and
back again. These digits, used by the artist to count out
“step-by-step” frames (and, significantly, retained for us to
see), enumerate the panther’s progressive strides. Yet
144
11 Kentridge, I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, lecture/
performance on the making of The Nose, Museum of Modern
Art, New York, March 2010 (artwork © William Kentridge;
through these numerical residues the artist also underscores
how each incremental shift of the panther’s limbs is commensurate with one of his own, how every movement of
the animal’s position mandates that he, too, trot back to the
camera. These somatic slippages point once more to the
cultivated porousness between Kentridge’s walking body and
those of his pacing characters, evoking a performative collapse of padding feet that echoes through the artist’s recurrent imagery of walking animals—and walking figures, too.
Kentridge’s partnered strides with his panther indicate not
merely how walking structures his animation process, it also
illuminates how the artist frequently inhabits the skin of his
drawn characters—whether as Ubu Roi, Soho Eckstein, Felix
Teitelbaum, or in one of his many self-portraits—in ways that
suggest fluid boundaries between his body and theirs. As in
the Cape Town galleries in 1991, the Méliès films a decade
later, and his 2010 performance of The Nose in New York,
where Kentridge again employed walking to play the role of
an artist at work, publicly staging the intricacies of his solitary
art-making practice, he continues to assume the parts of his
drawn characters in the studio by acting out poses and gestures. His 1997 suite of Ubu Tells the Truth prints are based, for
instance, on photographs of the artist dancing before a mirror and cycling around the studio (Fig. 14). In such moments, Kentridge slips among the traditional theatrical notion of playing a part; the performative self-fashioning of
playing with identities; and the ludic antics of the madcap
and ludicrous that pepper the Méliès films. On another occasion, reading aloud from Samuel Beckett’s 1963 script for
Play, Kentridge himself parsed these collapsible boundaries
via Beckett’s deft intertwining of the theatrical and ludic.21
Word plays—not unlike Beckett’s double entendres—are
no less central to Kentridge’s working methods than corporeal play. Kentridge frequently engages language to generate
ideas, displaying his trust in what he terms the “fortuna” of
the unconscious and free association, as he toys with rhymes,
palindromes, and words with onetime shared roots that have
strayed apart.22 To this end, he has inscribed prints with such
unlikely textual pairings as “amnesty/amnesia,” “history/hysteria,” and “panic/picnic.” This playful impulse, which lies at
the heart of Kentridge’s process, manifests itself partly in
Kentridge’s willingness to pursue what Jacques Derrida has
called the “friendship” between words.23 Interviewing with
the art historian Angela Breidbach while he sketched diagrams of his working processes, Kentridge wrote down and
highlighted the word “play” to explain how the film Felix in
Exile emerged from such a series of word-game wanderings
(from felix . . . to exile . . . to elixir . . .), sparked by the near
palindrome of Felix and exile. “The question was how could I
do a film that is about a word game, about words?”24
My own juxtaposition of the words “process” and “procession” salutes Kentridge’s modus operandi of generating
meaning through play, as I follow him in trusting in the
cryptic logic of the word, presuming that language possesses
its own intuitive logic, and that its subterranean connections,
metaphoric leaps, and “friendships” can illuminate that
which escapes more rationalist inquiries. To this end, Kentridge observes:
On the one hand I am wary of the particularly AngloSaxon tendency to rely on puns and alliteration as a
substitute for ideas. On the other hand, we have to trust in
things that at the time seem whimsical, incidental, inauthentic. This is not to say that the starting point will
transform itself from something ephemeral to something
solid, but rather, that it gives an entry point and that
through the process of working that ensues, connections,
inventions, images are generated that can both rescue the
origin and find a heart of the material that might otherwise not have been evident.25
Rescuing Origins: The Processions of 1989
“Rescuing the origin” of Kentridge’s animation process involves returning it to the Johannesburg of 1989, thereby
reframing the artist’s frequently dislocated practice against
the political geographies of his time and place. Increasingly,
Kentridge’s work has come to be subsumed into exclusively
Euro-American art historical trajectories, where local meanings and political specificities tend to be deemphasized. In
Rosalind Krauss’s authoritative genealogy, for example, she
145
12 Kentridge, stills from Zeno Writing,
2002, 35mm animated film with
pastel and charcoal drawing and
documentary footage, 12 minutes
(artwork © William Kentridge;
photograph provided by William
Kentridge studio)
from Zeno Writing, detail showing red
annotation and registration marks
calibrating each frame of the
animation process, charcoal on paper,
311⁄2 ⫻ 475⁄8 in. (79 ⫻ 120 cm).
Private collection (artwork © William
situates Kentridge’s process against Sergei Eisenstein’s writings and Stanley Cavell’s nonnormative definitions of medium to argue that with his innovative process, Kentridge
“invents” a medium.26 Krauss’s reading is groundbreaking,
casting the artist as the paradigm of her “postmedium” condition; yet other kinds of relationships, such as that between
the postmedium and the postapartheid— between Kentridge’s unusual animation practice and South Africa’s political change—fall beyond the sphere of her interests. And
these are crucial questions. For Kentridge’s art in general,
and his process in particular, are deeply embedded in the
shifting histories of South Africa, rendering extraordinarily
timely the work of an artist whose anachronistic imagery and
hand-wrought methods are usually understood as untimely in
one way or another. Jogged out of time and out of place by
numerous critics, Kentridge has often had to reiterate, “In
the end all the work I do is about Johannesburg,” the city he
swears is “impossible to escape.”27 Like his protagonist Felix
Teitelbaum, Kentridge remains a willing “Captive of the
City,” the man-made, crime-ridden garden of Johannesburg
where he and two generations of Kentridges before him have
lived and worked.28
Restoring Kentridge’s novel working methods to their origin in Johannesburg during the last months of apartheid
also recovers the simultaneous emergence of Kentridge’s
animation process with his processional imagery. To reiterate
a key point: 1989 saw Kentridge both officially launch his new
process of drawn animation and initiate the stream of processions that began with Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after
Paris, the film built around the artist’s “procession of the
dispossessed” (Fig. 15).29 And processions have been plodding through Kentridge’s work ever since. Here I probe the
logic of this temporal conjunction: for it is hardly coincidental that just as Kentridge was developing his own ambulatory
process, he started to portray en masse walking bodies and
processions. At this foundational moment, we find him externalizing the kinetics of his own practice, that is to say,
transmuting— or projecting— his own striding body into images of striding bodies. This form of self-projection was at
least one of the resonances intimated by the series’ witty title:
Drawings for Projection.
14 Kentridge, Ubu Tells the Truth, Scene 7, 1997, hard-ground,
soft-ground, aquatint, drypoint, and engraving, 103⁄8 ⫻ 117⁄8 in.
(26.3 ⫻ 30 cm) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph
Within weeks of the procession’s debut in Johannesburg,
Kentridge had reprised an unruly version of it in a pair of
monumental charcoal drawings: Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch
Up, Even Surpass (Fig. 1), along with a pendant arc drawing,
Arc/Procession: Smoke, Ashes, Fable (1990), which hangs in the
stairwell of the artist’s Johannesburg home (Fig. 16). From
this point on, processions paraded through Kentridge’s work,
marching through the animated films Sobriety, Obesity and
Growing Old (1991), Felix in Exile (1994), and Stereoscope
(1998 –99, Fig. 17). Moving crowds made appearances in
Monument (1990), Mine (1991), and Ubu Tells the Truth
(1997), morphing into an unusually aggressive mob in the
artist’s most recent film, Other Faces (2011). Processions also
took form in a variety of other media: not only drawings,
prints, and illustrated books (as in Procession on Anatomy of
Vertebrates, 2000) but also projected shadows, video (Shadow
146
15 Kentridge, Untitled, 1989, drawing from Johannesburg, 2nd
Greatest City after Paris, charcoal on paper, 41 ⫻ 597⁄8 in.
(104 ⫻ 152 cm). Private collection, Johannesburg (artwork
Kentridge studio)
Procession, 2000, and Zeno at 4AM, 2001), and torn paper
silhouettes (Portage, 2000, and Stair Procession, 2000, Fig. 18).
Kentridge shifted to the medium of bronze for his tabletop
Bridge Procession (2001) and for the twenty-six sculptures that
comprise Procession (2000) monumental renditions of which
grace Johannesburg’s Nedcorp building. For his Porter series
(2006), the artist collaborated with Stevens Tapestry Studio,
Johannesburg, to have his “porters” walk through—and, in a
nod to his medium, to walk imaginatively on— handwoven
tapestries.
By 2003, Kentridge had explicitly tied together the walking
central to his process and imagery of walking figures and
processions, as he paced around his studio for most of an
hour in Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès (Figs. 8 –10). His
films Day for Night and Journey to the Moon (2003) feature
repeated close-ups of Kentridge’s wife Anne striding forth,
while processions of moving ants flowing together form the
silhouette of a walking figure (Fig. 19). And another shadow
procession, this time performing a South African rendition of
a Russian folk dance, along with archival film clips of crowds
pouring down St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect in the 1920s,
graced Kentridge’s recent opera The Nose (2010), suggesting
that Kentridge’s unbroken stream of processionists shows no
sign of abating.
At a technical level, Kentridge recognized very quickly that
drawing a crowd was optimally suited to his newly developed
process of animation, for each person is rendered with a
single mark: “As more marks are added, so the crowd
emerges. The crowds draw themselves,” he commented in
1994.30 A procession, of course, is simply a crowd on the
move. Since processions can be incrementally augmented—
and therefore easily adjusted to make a line of people appear
to move forward or back—they ideally conform to the limitations, while maximizing the possibilities, of Kentridge’s
particular mode of animation. This concordance between
subject matter and technique produces an affinity that the
artist knowingly exploits, no doubt partially accounting for
his frequent animated processions. However, the matter
surely does not end there, with the pragmatics of convenience, if only because Kentridge’s numerous processions in
the wide range of other media detailed above troubles an
explanation of mere formal ease. Moreover, the persistence
of these images over a period of two decades points to deeper
alliances than the technical suitability that the artist himself
initially imputed to his processional imagery.
The multimedia spate of processions that emerged in 1989
alongside Kentridge’s recently invented animation process
clearly signals an unprecedented type of imagery in the artist’s oeuvre. Leafing through piles of his drawings made
before this landmark year, one finds a notable dearth of
crowds, processions, or even walking figures. Indeed, the
drawings and prints spanning the late 1970s through the late
1980s are wholly devoid of the thematics of the human body
in motion that has come to distinguish Kentridge’s work.
While animated movement remains largely incipient before 1989, confined to the register of graphic handling and
terse composition, there is a single drawing in which a walking figure appears: a 1987 charcoal after Antoine Watteau’s
Embarkation for Cythera (1719), similarly titled Embarkation.
Here, Kentridge retained Watteau’s subject of a departure
(or arrival), along with his iconography of a meandering line
of people walking as a means to portray it, although he
simplified the original picturesque groupings into a profile
view of four men descending onto a platform. Clonelike
projections of the same character, three of the men have
their noses buried in a book, and the fourth stares down at
the spotted hyena leading them (Fig. 20).31 “So the walking
figure begins with Embarkation?” I confirmed. “Yes,” Kentridge responded, “but he only really gets going with the
animation.”32
The engrossed figure of Embarkation, whom Kentridge
identifies by his distinctive “two-handed holding of a book,”33
returns us to the walking reader of Marche/Marchepied, for he
is the prototype for the recurring bibliophile of Vertical Time,
Stair Procession (Fig. 21) and numerous other parades. This
reader would in fact come to signal an embarkation of another sort for the artist—a venture into the poetics of walking. In this way, the walking reader stands as an originary
figure on more than one count: as the foundational processionist of the artist’s motley crew of wanderers and as a
personal memory of his own familial and religious origins
(being based on the artist’s grandfather, prayer book open in
his hands). By the time of the Stair Procession version, the
pensive bibliophile has assumed a candid likeness of the
artist—slightly paunchy and with a “Johannesburg Jewish
nose”34—rising from his humble origin in Embarkation to
become the vehicle by which Kentridge surreptitiously inserts
himself among his endless processionists.
The second and, perhaps, most salient source of Kentridge’s later processions is to be found not in the charcoal
drawings that dominated his practice of the 1980s but in a
series of largely sidelined early experiments with animation.
It was in this format that the artist had been exploring the
potentialities of pure motion since adolescence. Kentridge’s
short, unscreened 1979 film of a flip book (Untitled) stands as
one of the earliest of these examples, revealing an interest in
147
16 Kentridge, Arc/Procession: Smoke,
Ashes, Fable, 1990, charcoal and
colored pencil on paper, 70 ⫻ 1511⁄4
in. (177.8 ⫻ 384.5 cm). Collection of
the artist, Houghton, Johannesburg
(artwork © William Kentridge;
photograph by the author)
17 Kentridge, Untitled, 1998 –99,
drawing from the animated film
Stereoscope, charcoal and colored
chalk on paper, 311⁄2 ⫻ 471⁄4 in. (80 ⫻
120 cm). Private collection (artwork
© William Kentridge; photograph
investigating movement through space alongside change
through time. Repeated with slight modifications on successive pages of a notepad, the flip book’s images, stacked in a
pile, appear to move when one thumbs through it; hence, the
term Daumenkino (thumb cinema) is given to this rudimentary precinematic cognate of animation.35 Kentridge’s film in
turn revisited an earlier little flip book that he had made as
an adolescent in the late 1960s, a simple paper pad of consecutive drawings in which the ghost of one image chased the
next from page to page.
Kentridge’s 1979 combination of film with the drawn flip
book served as an important technical precedent to the
drawn and filmed animation process he would come to develop a full decade later. However, it was a second experiment with animation in the early 1980s that directly prefigured his subsequent processional imagery. In this instance,
he drew directly on a long, thin strip of film with an architect’s drafting pen, repeating a “tiny stick figure . . . a thousand times, each image on a successive frame of film” (Fig.
22).36 Unlike the flip pad, which after an excited flurry settles
down with only its top image visible, this animation, titled A
Lecture on a Chair, assumed the visual format of a minuscule
procession: an elongated rectangular strip containing tiny
boxes housing a figure in each.37
148
18 Kentridge, Vertical Time/Stair
Procession, 2000, site-specific
installation of black paper collage.
PS1, New York (artwork © William
19 Kentridge, still from Day for Night, 2003, 35mm film with
drawing and photography, transferred to video and DVD,
7 minutes (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph
In formal terms, this last attenuated, paradelike animation
portends the artist’s first major drawing of a procession,
Arc/Procession (Fig. 2) from 1990, in key ways. It, too, images
the movements of a standing figure, each rendition of which
is sequestered in a separate frame, with every rectangle of the
film strip composing a segment of a larger horizontal whole
rather than a finite piece in itself. In these early experiments,
the drawn image is already neither static nor immutable, but
rather embedded in a larger process as one moment in a
series of potentially constantly changing images. Kentridge
explains this elastic, radically unstable view of form:
I think it makes it easier to draw a table if you understand
that table as an intermediary stage between the tree, the
factory, its moment in the room in front of you and its
future, as it were. . . . Particularly in animation, I’m ready
for the removal of the table, for that transformation, from
that moment in which it’s there but understanding that in
the next moment, it will be different or gone.38
This transformative notion of form would come to famously characterize the liquid aesthetics of Kentridge’s films,
wherein objects fluidly metamorphose from cats into gas
masks, from smoke rings to typewriters.39 But more than that,
the gradual alterations of form seen in the pilot animations
indicate how Kentridge’s attraction to the medium has always
been rooted in animation’s capacity to communicate
change—what Steven Henry Madoff poetically calls “the ruthlessness. . . . or the wolf of change.”40 These early experiments in which forms morph from one into another—as if
metaphorically enacting their pasts and their futures, as Kentridge puts it— hint at a larger epistemology of flux and
becoming: a world that is always jittery with movement. The
observation often made about Kentridge’s work that everything seems to move, so that even solid bronze sculptures
appear caught in flight, reveals more than mere formal preferences. It reflects a deep-seated desire to portray a world in
continuous fluid motion.
Animation’s ability to articulate formal change allows it to
describe such a dynamic epistemology of perpetual transformation, to gesture to a world peopled less by fixed objects
than by forms that may appear stable but that trail with them
constant potentialities for transformation through time: “an
understanding of the world as . . . having a logic inside of
which unfolds through time,” as Kentridge puts it. In philosophical terms, one might say that events or actions constitute
reality, rather than objects or our apprehension of them (as
in the Kantian schema), and that the world is therefore best
understood in terms of change rather than stable essences—
or, in Kentridge’s words, “a sense of the world unfolding
rather than being a fixed fact.”41 If Kentridge’s investment in
animation hinges on its ability to evoke these underlying
processes of change, his views stem not only from long-held,
abstract beliefs about the flux of reality but also from more
focused, Marxist templates of history as a sequence of rolling
changes. Revealing his debt to a Marxist-Hegelian schema,
Kentridge has attributed his dynamic view of the world to his
1970s Witwatersrand University education in politics and his-
20 Kentridge, left panel of Embarkation, 1987, charcoal and
pastel on paper, 491⁄4 ⫻ 321⁄4 in. (125 ⫻ 82 cm). Standard
Bank Collection, Johannesburg (artwork © William Kentridge;
tory: “What history taught me was to understand the world as
a process that continues to change with time through movements. Everything moves as the world keeps on moving. From
this perspective, animation becomes a good metaphor for
history.”42 With this last phrase, Kentridge links formal
change in general—and his own process of drawn animation
in particular—with the issue of historical change. The governing principle of his unique animation process is to create
a visual medium that articulates alterations through time: it is
a process of change. Kentridge’s abiding interest in the procession is similarly bound up with its potential to formally communicate transformation—it is an image of change. It is due to
the capabilities of both of these elements to chart transformation that Kentridge’s process is so caught up in images of
processions.
Yet why the pressure to visually communicate change on
multiple fronts in 1989 at the levels of technique and subject?
The procession, we will come to find, entered Kentridge’s
work specifically as an image of regime change. For 1989, the
year in which Kentridge initiated both his innovative process
of animation and his novel imagery of processions, was the
watershed year of South African history, when the seemingly
intractable behemoth of apartheid finally began to crumble.
At some level, Kentridge’s turn to animation during these
149
21 Kentridge, “Walking Reader,” from Vertical Time/Stair
Procession. PS1, New York (artwork © William Kentridge;
22 Kentridge, Untitled, 2006, ink and pencil on paper showing
Kentridge’s second animation, A Lecture on a Chair (1979).
Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph
provided by Angela Breidbach)
tumultuous months formed part of a much larger arc of
change engulfing the country. As one local woman summed
it up at the time, “For most of our lives time stood still. I
mean, for twenty-five years nothing changed, and now suddenly everything is changing.”43
1989 and the Politics of Change
In this way, the “origin” of Kentridge’s unusual animation
process was inextricably linked to the radical political transformation that began that historic year of 1989, the turning
point in South African history, when after four decades of
150
More salient to an art historical analysis, however, was that
the political and visual form in which this transitional moment was publicly expressed, and further challenged, was the
mass procession. Between late 1989 and early 1990, South
Africa took to the streets, with people marching through the
country by the hundreds of thousands to celebrate the transformed political climate and to mobilize on foot to end
apartheid completely.48 The same trio of local historians
writing in 1990 could already declare:
Nowhere has the changing mood been more clearly demonstrated than in the streets of the cities and towns. A
countrywide spate of protest marches has occurred since
the historic first government-approved peaceful anti-apartheid march in Cape Town on 13 September 1989, and
these have become the most visible symptom of the advance to the so-called “new” South Africa.49
23 UDF poster designed at a workshop at Crown Mines,
Johannesburg, 1983 (photograph provided by the South
African History Archive, Johannesburg, South Africa)
National Party rule, the structures of apartheid unexpectedly—and rapidly— began to collapse. Finally, Nelson Mandela
could assert, “Undoubtedly a change has taken place in
South Africa.”44
Throughout the course of 1989, President P. W. Botha
began to transfer political power to F. W. de Klerk through a
series of groundbreaking legislative measures. These events
commenced with Botha’s resignation as leader of the National Party in February 1989 and his dissolution of Parliament in May, continued with his announcement of an unscheduled general election and his meeting with Mandela in
July 1989, and extended to his August resignation and de
Klerk’s installation as interim leader. This rapid-fire series of
political changes culminated in the September 1989 elections
and de Klerk’s installation as president. By the year’s end, de
Klerk had released key political prisoners and made a public
commitment to ending forty-one years of apartheid.45 The
historic series of events was immediately recognized in the
country.46 As early as 1990, a trio of South African historians
could sum up a year of local newspaper editorials with the
confident assertion, “The year 1989 will in future generations
be known as the annus mirabilis . . . within the context of
South African politics.”47
After decades in which all public gatherings had been
banned under threat of arrest and imprisonment, such that a
politically engaged Johannesburger like Kentridge would remember the 1976 demonstrations as the last in living memory, 1989 witnessed the emergence of the protest procession
as the manifest sign of the impending regime change. But the
speed with which the procession could so quickly come to
function thus was partly the result of its longtime use by
student and trade union organizations during apartheid.
Throughout the 1980s, the procession circulated as the
symbol of democratic change in the rich visual culture of
posters and trade union materials. When the United Democratic Front (UDF), a network of grassroots community organizations loosely aligned with the African National Congress (ANC), was established in 1983, for example, its hastily
printed posters immediately, and repeatedly, featured a procession shown frontally with an imposing UDF banner cresting back into the crowd (Fig. 23).50 However, particularly
after the 1985 imposition of the state of emergency, such
representations were largely aspirational, drawing formally
on Cuban and Russian revolutionary poster prototypes and
yoking the image of the procession to liberties that at the
time could only be imagined; they nonetheless primed the
procession to operate after 1989 as a locally readable icon of
democratic change. One poster of the Congress of South
African Trade Unions (COSATU) from 1988, an elongated,
profile view of dark, marching silhouettes, particularly resonates with Kentridge’s shadow processions of more than a
decade later (Fig. 24), gesturing to how the artist’s immersion in the Johannesburg underworld of graphic arts and
stealth posters informed his subsequent vocabulary of images.
By 1989, hopes had materialized into realities, and during
this intense period of political transition, historic processions
and radical democratic change seemed virtually enmeshed.
For example: the first legal, hugely publicized, and enormously symbolic march in decades took place in Cape Town
on Wednesday, September 13, 1989. Led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 35,000 South Africans marched through downtown; the following day, de Klerk was elected president. And
the very next morning, one of de Klerk’s first acts of state was
to grant last-minute permission for what would be the first
151
24 Congress of South African Trade
Unions (COSATU) poster, 1988, 83⁄4
⫻ 24 in. (artwork reproduced by
permission of COSATU; photograph
provided by the Museum of Modern
Art, New York)
legal procession in decades to be held in the city of Johannesburg, Kentridge’s hometown.
On Friday, September 15, 1989, “about 20,000 protestors,
most of them black, but some white, walked and danced
through the streets of downtown Johannesburg,” wrote one
foreign journalist.51 Proceeding from St. Mary’s Anglican
Church on Eloff Street to the infamous central police station
on John Vorster Square, the protesters presented a petition
to end police repression. William Kentridge was walking in
that throng, wielding a canvas banner of his drawing Casspirs
Full of Love above his head.52 “It was astonishing,” he recounted to me, “what we’d been waiting for all these years.”53
A mere ten days later, back in the studio, he was at work on
studies for a new drawing: Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up,
Even Surpass, sketching figures who stumble and dance into
the new democracy (Fig. 33).54
In addition to ubiquitous photographs of processions that
filled the newly liberalized South African press, Kentridge’s
physical involvement in the historic September procession
endows his images of processions that soon followed with the
lived memory of his own processing body, thereby entangling
his performative syntax of walking in a personal poetics of
protest. It was in this milieu that the animation process
Kentridge had been experimenting with since the mid-1980s
assumed timely and unprecedented resonances: just as the
procession proposed itself as the defining image of change,
so, too, Kentridge’s stop-motion animation process proffered
itself as the exemplary medium with which to chart the
country’s ongoing metamorphosis. It was in Kentridge’s first
Drawings for Projection film, Johannesburg, that these two
elements came together for the first time.
The Temporality of Change: Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City
after Paris
One of Kentridge’s earliest drawings of a procession, Smoke,
Ashes, Fable (1990, Fig. 16), was titled after a line from Herodotus that speaks to the inevitable passage of time and dissolution of form.55 This mournful temporality particularly infuses Kentridge’s Zeno Writing (2001), where a slowly burning
cigarette spirals smoky entrails delicately through the air. As
the camera lingers on the twisting fumes, filmic time protracts to a meditative crawl; the smoke here becomes an
explicit metaphor for the languid passing of time. This scene
graphically thematizes the temporal dynamics that Kentridge
had been working to foreground from the onset of the
Drawings for Projection series. Indeed, Johannesburg features
an inventory of such temporal markers: curls of ascending
smoke, streams of flowing traffic, and swells of roiling water.
For Kentridge, his animation has always been “about time.”56
Movement, action delimited by time, is used in this initial
film to visually track its passing, with the principal moving
flow— or visual rendering of the advance of time— being the
film’s several processions. Snaking its way through the East
Rand landscape to address the gluttonous Soho, the procession of Johannesburg billows gradually forward, rippling charcoal lines across a milky white field before departing into the
horizon at the film’s end (Fig. 15). The ticking of time is
equally emphasized aurally, through such conceits as the
crescendoing rumble of an approaching train and radiating
lines of sound impelling outward.
Johannesburg thematizes temporality from another angle,
too: via the clanging keys of a typewriter that belches letters
across a page in fitful spasms. Spotlighted here is a sequential
readerly vision, coaxing the eye to scan an image like a text,
so that one’s gaze sweeps directionally through space and
incrementally through time. The temporality prompted by a
viewing practice of this sort reflects the artist’s ideal that
“arriving at the image is a process, not a frozen instant.”57
Such a gradual mode of “reading” a picture from left to right
is, of course, akin to the drawn-out viewing process demanded by the simplest processional friezes dating back to
antiquity. Typically framed in an elongated horizontal format
that accentuates the image’s directional mandate, this is the
attenuation of form that Kentridge’s earliest drawn animation on a filmstrip quoted, for the temporality encoded in the
ancient processional frieze has long been understood as an
archaic precursor to the temporality of film.
Like Johannesburg, the versions of Arc/Procession on which
Kentridge was concurrently working in late 1989 conjoin
imagery of moving figures with a temporalized mode of viewing. (Kentridge has explained that he used the format of an
arch for the drawings and rendered them large so as to
prevent their being apprehended in a single glance.) Given
the artist’s attention to the procession’s potential as a model
of temporal viewing, it is clear that from the inception of the
Drawings for Projection series, Kentridge was summoning the
most ancient and outmoded of visual grammars to inscribe
his processions as a kind of primordial cinema— one not
dissimilar to the primitive flip book. In this sense, the processions operate in much the same way as the artist’s technically rudimentary, notoriously outmoded, seemingly anach-
152
from the opening sequence of the
animated film Monument, charcoal on
paper (artwork © William Kentridge;
photograph provided by William
Kentridge studio)
ronistic process, which he charmingly refers to as “stone-age
animation.”
Such a retrieval of the procession from the ancient language of Classical form would become explicit by 2001, when
Kentridge rooted his film Shadow Procession in the Platonic
allegory’s stream of shadow figures.58 Thus extending the
idea of the walking figure from a metaphor for his own
animation process to proposing the larger medium of film as
rooted in a processional logic, Shadow Procession highlights
the origins of film as a moving “procession” of images.59
Dialoguing with Plato’s parable of precinematic viewing, with
its seated audience transfixed by the play of light and shadow
in the darkened space of the cave, Kentridge re-created his
own parade of shadow figures, who, as in Plato’s original,
proceed from left to right, carrying an assortment of objects.
In this way, Kentridge anchors his distinctive animation process in the foundational procession of Western epistemology,
one whose figures have functioned for millennia as an iconic
metaphor for the processional character of thought—what
William James famously called the “stream of consciousness”—as well as for the processional structure of narrative.60
“What there is of a narrative,” Kentridge states of Johannesburg, “was evolved backwards and forwards from the first key
images—the procession through the wasteland, the fish in
the hand.”61 Structurally, this backward and forward trot of
the film’s narrative mimics both Kentridge’s studio pacings—
his “stalking the drawing, or walking backwards and forwards. . . .”62—and the pattern of advance and retreat of the
foundational procession of Johannesburg, which streams forward through the barren landscape to confront the whitebibbed and lip-smacking Soho Eckstein before turning and
disappearing into the horizon. Exceeding a logic of narrative
continuity, Johannesburg stands as a processional stream of
poetic sequences that remain disjunctive and unresolved.
What narrative there is can therefore be best described as a
procession of disparate images, so that, in effect, the processional form itself becomes a substitute for, or usurpation of,
narrative structure.
Monument and the Step Forward
In Kentridge’s second film of the Drawings for Projection
series, Monument (1990), he not merely focuses on the walking body as it proceeds across the filmic screen but homes in
on a protracted performance of a pair of feet wearily advancing (Fig. 25). The film opens with Harry, the central protag-
onist of this and other films, shuffling slowly across a barren
landscape, doubled over beneath an enormous burden. For
long drawn-out seconds, Harry’s bare feet fill the entire
screen; painstakingly they step ahead, trawling palimpsestic
charcoal lines in their wake.
An adaptation of Beckett’s Catastrophe, Monument reprises
Pygmalion thematics of stillness and animation that provide
an apt template for Kentridge’s explorations of the play
between static and animated drawing. In the final scene, a
vast crowd throngs forward to surround the cloaked monument. As the statue is revealed to be the walking man, Harry,
still bent double beneath the massive burden on his back,
Kentridge lingers on an image of Harry’s feet, now shackled,
before slowly panning up to his face. In this film Kentridge
employs two other media—sculpture and theater—to think
through his new animation process, using images of feet
walking or manacled to play with contrasts of movement and
stasis, the mobile and statuesque, animation and freezing.
Far more drawn out than the temporality of Johannesburg,
the tortoiselike pace of Monument invokes not only the narrative template of Catastrophe but also Beckett’s sluggish theatrical time.63 Harry’s lead-footed walk calibrates the temporality of this animated sequence. Time is not so much marked
here as slowed, or “thickened,” as Mikhail Bakhtin would say,
and as Kentridge himself would come to characterize his own
slow process.64 Harry’s belabored movement, along with the
time-consuming shadowy trails of drawing he drags behind
him, summon the time- and labor-intensive quality of Kentridge’s drawing process: Harry’s feet and Kentridge’s hands
perform a step-by-step demonstration of drawing as dragging.
The film’s spun-out temporality, epitomized in the protracted progress of Harry’s walk, pulls the normally speedy
medium of animation into a gray area between drawing and
animation—as if to pose the question: When does animation
become so slow it reverts back to drawing?
Once more, Kentridge’s meditations on the temporality
and pace of his new process are enacted through the locus of
the human body in motion, as the artist implies another
series of metaphoric conjunctions between his own working/
walking body and that of Harry’s. Krauss highlights the structural similarity between Kentridge’s studio pacings and the
back and forth foot traffic that Beckett play’s thematizes.65
Particularly because Kentridge himself performed Beckett’s
role of the peripatetic director in a 1984 production of
Catastrophe, the mobile transitions possible between the the-
26 Photograph from the back cover of Nelson Mandela, Long
Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, New York:
Little, Brown, 1994
matics of content and the performance of process are once
more suggested.
Harry’s walking scene in Monument is politically timely, too:
his slow, encumbered trudge forward stages an image of
history as a grueling trajectory that is exemplified in the title
of Mandela’s famous autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.
The book’s back cover, depicting a photograph of a minuscule Mandela advancing down a long dusty path on the
Robben Island prison where he spent so many decades, visually underscores this conceit of history as an arduous journey
(Fig. 26).66 While characterizations of personal and national
history as a road are a staple of Western literature, the literary
and visual tropes of the “step forward,” the “long walk,” and
the “march to freedom” as images of change were particularly
potent in South Africa in 1989 and early 1990, when Kentridge drew Monument. Mandela’s famous walk to freedom, a
highly orchestrated international media event, was figured in
text and image, in newspapers and on television, as the
foundational journey of the new democracy: his first steps to
freedom became the nation’s first steps; his walk became the
visual icon of the regime change.
Within South Africa, Mandela’s exit from Victor Verster
Prison on February 11, 1990, seemed to arrest time, as the
entire country paused and crowded around television
screens, waiting through hours and hours of delays to view
the momentous physical and metaphoric crossing of a threshold—a symbolic junction between past and future that would
be obsessively replayed by the media in the following months
and years (Fig. 27).67 In Long Walk to Freedom, over the course
of several pages, Mandela describes his performative journey
toward liberty, which was scripted by the ANC and the government-run media for maximum symbolic impact:68
A well-known SABC presenter . . . requested that I get out
of the car a few hundred feet before the [prison] gate so
that they could film me walking toward freedom. . . .
About a quarter of a mile in front of the gate, the car
slowed to a stop and Winnie and I got out and began to
walk toward the prison gate . . . I raised my right fist and
there was a roar . . . as I finally walked through those
gates. . . .69
153
27 Alexander Joe, press photograph of Nelson Mandela on
the day of his release from prison, February 11, 1990
(photograph by Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images)
Mandela’s car was surrounded by thousands of people as it
crawled through the crush of crowds into Cape Town. Tens
of thousands more were gathered at City Hall in a mass public
display that would have been banned six months prior: “a
boundless sea of people cheering, holding flags and banners,
clapping and laughing,” Mandela remembers.70 This throng
of citizens is the same public of the “new” South Africa that
fills Kentridge’s films of the early 1990s. The central role
accorded them in both Mandela’s description and Kentridge’s films of the period speaks to the historical specificity
of the South African situation as one of the few instances in
recent history where decades of grassroots action, carried out
by a popular democratic movement of enormous mass and
power, succeeded in bringing down an oppressive government and implementing regime change. These are the people whom Mandela addressed as collaborators in a shared
journey toward freedom that first night of his release, telling
the crowds, “The sight of freedom looming on the horizon
should encourage us to redouble our efforts . . . to return to
the barricades, to intensify the struggle, and we would walk
the last mile together.”71 This ongoing walk, an acting out on
foot of the political process—as much communal pilgrimage
from bondage as a performance of civil liberties— became
concretized from metaphor to lived reality in the mass processions of 1989. In the ensuing months, in hundreds of local
marches, Mandela’s own “last mile” walk to freedom was
reenacted time and again in the rumble of pounding feet and
the deafening roars of “Amandla! Awethu!” (Power! To the
People!).
“Walking the last mile together” was a turn of phrase
Mandela frequently employed in interviews of the early
1990s. For example, in a 1992 documentary made for South
African cable television, he affirmed, “We are traveling the
last mile, and there may be difficulties, there may be crises, but
the writing is definitely on the wall, and the days of this
government are numbered.”72 Concluding the half-hour documentary, this forceful quote marries Mandela’s hallmark
persona as aging prophet of the people trudging through the
desert of apartheid with the biblical prediction of Babylonian
154
28 Still from The Last Mile: Mandela, Africa and Democracy,
written and directed by Tom Carver, M-Net, 1992 (photograph © M-Net, provided by Bob Link, Advanced Video Data
Service, Fairfield, Ohio)
doom. Moreover, Mandela’s statement is editorially stitched
between footage of street processions and singer Youssou
n’Dour’s assessment of postcolonial African democracy as
powered by the mass action of citizens demonstrating in the
streets. N’Dour calls this a “system of refusal” and rightly
identifies it with Mandela’s political legacy of street processions.73 Then, on the heels of Mandela’s statement, a telling
series of images flash in quick succession: a motorcade
streams down a busy concourse; crowds stamp out the toyitoyi dance of revolution in a broad thoroughfare; rowdy
processions throng urban streets; and Mandela walks sedately
out into the crowd. Then the credits roll.
Given the resonance of the stride forward in Mandela’s
public image, it is unsurprising that the producers selected
this iconic imagery as their summary snapshots of the period
or that they chose to title the documentary The Last Mile:
Mandela, Africa and Democracy. But more than simply speaking
to the widespread association of Mandela as a savior on foot,
this particular rhetorical conjunction leads straight back to
the centrality of images of walking for Kentridge in the early
1990s, for it was he who served as assistant producer of this
film.74 Kentridge was among those who so clearly understood
the visual impact and timely political resonance of the metaphoric string: the step, the walk, the last mile.
The video footage preceding Mandela’s concluding
quote—a feisty procession that streams through city streets,
wedged between two large buildings and wielding enormous
banners (Fig. 28)—must have infiltrated Kentridge’s mental
archive as well. For this signal image stands as uncanny
double to the artist’s drawn rendition of the procession in
Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991, Fig. 29) and other
films. In this way, the processions advancing through Kentridge’s early Drawings for Projection films function as snapshots of current history or allegorical representations of the
tides of political change then engulfing the country. Kentridge noted that “these images of crowds emerged in my work
in 1989, the year of the start of the political thaw in South
Africa when, for the first time in my memory, huge political
29 Kentridge, Untitled, 1991, drawing from the animated film
Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old, charcoal on paper, 271⁄2 ⫻
393⁄8 in. (70 ⫻ 100 cm). Private collection (artwork © William
Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)
processions surged through the streets.”75 Historical data on
the resurgence of processions at this time corroborates the
artist’s memory, as well as his association of processions with
political freedom.
In a country where gatherings of more than eleven people
at a time had been illegal since the 1960s, the spectacle of the
sudden emergence of the public procession cannot be sufficiently underscored. Public processions and the political resistance they have long expressed were, moreover, indelibly
tied to some of apartheid’s most violent episodes.76 Time and
again, peaceful processions initiated as part of the ANC’s
early program of passive resistance had turned into scenes of
mass murder—most tragically during the 1960 Sharpeville
massacre; then again in 1976, when police opened fire on
black children walking through the streets of Soweto. Kentridge quotes both these tragic carnages in his film Ubu Tells
the Truth, juxtaposing archival photographs of the historic
Johannesburg demonstrations with bleeding corpses and another kind of march: a row of military boots pounding the
pavement.77 The Soweto incident, in particular, which had
been organized by the South African Students’ Movement
(SASM), provoked outrage among liberal white South Africans, and the day after the police killings, on June 17, 1976,
Kentridge was one of the leaders of a student march staged in
protest of the massacre, which was chased by police and
eventually dispersed.78
In the wake of the international outcry incited by Sharpeville and Soweto, the South African government effectively
banned all public gatherings and processions through a series of progressively authoritarian legislative measures.79
These laws, as well as the ANC’s realization by the early 1960s
that in the face of government brutality its passive-resistance
marches needed to shift to more muscular measures, ensured
that processions, political or otherwise, were outlawed in the
country for nearly three decades.
The absolute prohibition on processions during apartheid
was deeply symbolic of the apartheid regime’s inability to
tolerate the political dissent that defines a democracy. For
this reason, de Klerk’s granting of permission for the September 1989 Cape Town march to proceed was recognized as
an enormously meaningful symbol of a promised regime
change that had heretofore been largely rhetorical.80 Mandela, watching events from prison, and himself only six
months from release, noted that the Cape Town march indicated that “A new and different hand was on the tiller.”81
Indeed, insofar as freedom of assembly is recognized as a
fundamental human right, the government’s unbanning of
processions at the pivotal juncture of late 1989 was widely
understood as the sign of the shifting political climate. With
much fanfare, the “right of assembly and procession” would
eventually be written into the new South African constitution,
as it has been in several other recent postcolonial constitutions, making the procession richly symbolic of South Africa’s
transition to democracy.82
Revolution and Procession
The association of the procession with political change, and
with the fervor of the revolutionary process itself, dates back
to the French Revolution, when the religious processional of
the Catholic Church was transformed into a secular civic
ritual that flourished in the post-Revolutionary period.83 Historians agree that since 1789, processions “have been intimately connected with the revolutionary process.”84 The 1989
bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution—precisely at the time of South Africa’s own political transition—
made the Gallic context particularly proximate: journalists
drew comparisons between France and South Africa, spoke of
“storming the Bastille,”85 or complained that the “Bastille was
not stormed.”86 Mandela, as noted, advocated a “return to
the barricades,”87 while at least one major government commission, Reshada Crouse’s monumental mural for Johannesburg’s Nelson Mandela Theatre, recast Eugène Delacroix’s
Liberty on the Barricades with a South African “Liberty” marching at the head of a procession of freedom fighters.
Kentridge, too, planned a work based on the figure of
Liberty: Liberty Eckstein was to be the major character of his
film Mine (1991). Ultimately, however, Liberty was jettisoned;
Kentridge’s inability to incorporate her likely indicated his
reluctance to embrace a symbol so celebratory of revolution.88 In any event, by then Kentridge had already signaled
the French Revolution as a primary context for his work of
the period, having titled his first film, produced in the bicentennial year of 1989, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after
Paris.89 Here, the qualification of Kentridge’s hometown as
being “after Paris” emphasizes not merely temporal and aesthetic distance from the original modernist avant-gardes but
also a profound political distance from the original revolution in whose shadow all others fall. Paris and its ur-context of
revolutionary change thus looms uneasily at the origin of
Kentridge’s Drawings for Projections series, tying together
Johannesburg’s processions with their revolutionary Parisian
precursors.
Kentridge’s procession in Johannesburg calls up later contexts of regime change, too, quoting the opening scene of
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento, where socialists throng the
streets in a victorious postwar procession.90 The red socialist
banners Bertolucci’s processionists wave and the songs of
155
unity they sing all find their echo in the South African protest
marches of the early 1990s. But if the masses’ revelling procession through the streets has well-established associations
with political revolution, it has equally deep significance as a
marker of freedom, specifically from slavery and racial prejudice, as evidenced by emancipation parades throughout the
Americas that in turn reach back to African rituals of masked
processions.91
In South Africa itself, such connections were firmly in
place, with the local abolition of slavery in 1834 long celebrated with a famous emancipation procession known as
Tweede Nuwe Jaar (Second New Year), performed annually
on January 2. Even as this symbolic date records historical
emancipation, it underscores how processions frequently
mark a temporal cleavage between legal states or political
regimes: between slavery and freedom, or between apartheid
and democracy. In this way, the advance of the procession
signals, paradoxically, a moment of temporal arrest or stoppage—a revolutionary break in time not unlike the moment
of Mandela’s release, or the recurring images of frozen clocks
in Kentridge’s work of this transitional period.92 Like the
resetting of the French Revolutionary calendar, the Second
New Year procession stages a ritual of change, encoding a
distinct and symbolic temporality that speaks to the transgressive potential of the procession.93
While Kentridge’s crowds denote regime change, enabling
him to portray the emergent public of postapartheid South
Africa, he refers to them as a “procession of the dispossessed,”
thereby alluding to the historical dispossessions of South
Africa’s indigenous inhabitants. In a country with centuries of
bitter territorial struggles, the filmic procession’s progressive
advance over the South African landscape performs a symbolic repossession of space, employing the walking body to
performatively reclaim terrain violently seized by British,
Dutch, and Afrikaans settlers. Such a use of the walking body
to patrol the land and rehearse contested land claims has
long precedents: throughout the twentieth century, Afrikaners too engaged imagery of people and vehicles processing
over the country to reinscribe their title to the land. Periodically, actual processions of dozens of wagons would traverse
the country, retracing the foundational migration of the
Great Trek, as on its centennial in 1938, for example, and
again in 1988. In a 1988 photograph, for example, David
Goldblatt recorded how on this latter occasion concrete was
poured in the path of the processional wagons to make
permanent their otherwise ephemeral tracks through the
landscape. Claiming the land by obsessively marking it, and
by mounting real and symbolic processions over it, thus has a
long history in South Africa, as the emergence of Kentridge’s
processions on the eve of the political transition confirms.
In Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991), the “procession
of the dispossessed” again plays a major role, this time as an
urban procession surging through a Johannesburg rendered
as a midcentury metropolis, in an almost utopian moment
before the onset of apartheid (Fig. 29).94 Carrying large
banners and waving flags, the enormous crowd of Sobriety
reclaims the city built on black labor, marching through the
streets from which black South Africans were physically dispossessed by apartheid zoning laws. This time, the procession
seems to lay claim to what David Harvey calls “the right to the
156
30 Kentridge, Untitled, 1991, drawing from Sobriety, Obesity
and Growing Old, charcoal on paper, 471⁄4 ⫻ 59 in. (120 ⫻
150 cm). Collection of the artist (artwork © William
city,” a revolutionary impulse he traces from the Paris Commune to the Occupy movements. Predicated on a seizing of
urban space from the hands of capital, the crowd demands
city and citizenship, and the right to shape both in the vision
of the “new” South Africa.95
But if Kentridge’s processions enact a symbolic repossession, it is far from celebratory, for the land, like the people,
bears the scars of apartheid. Littered with the detritus of
abandoned gold-mining operations and heavy industry, the
procession in Johannesburg moves through the profoundly
dystopic landscape east of the city: “mine dumps and slime
dams; pylons and power cables; roads and tracks that lead
from nowhere to nowhere,” in J. M. Coetzee’s description.96
In Sobriety, moreover, Felix and Mrs. Eckstein occupy a pictorial space unrelated to the far-off procession (Fig. 30); later in
the film, Soho contemplates the moving crowd through his
office window, similarly distanced physically and emotionally.
When the procession reaches Soho’s headquarters, confronting him searchingly, his building becomes flooded, bloated,
bursting with water until it crumbles from within: a resonant
metaphor for both the collapse of the apartheid edifice and
the role of the mass democratic movement in toppling it. So
even as Kentridge’s crowds salute this history, his work also
evinces the existing failures of communication between the
emergent, largely black, voting public of the new regime and
the insular world of affluent white South Africans, to whom
such a public often remains faceless. Despite the inclusive
discourse of the “rainbow nation” at this time of national
reconfiguration, the film suggests that the country remained—and arguably still remains—irrevocably divided.97
The communicative gulf separating the procession from
the principal white protagonists, the scarred landscape of the
East Rand, and the backward-looking 1950s cityscape all complicate any implication of the procession as a forward march
of history in any Hegelian sense. While Kentridge therefore
adopts the rhetorical device of a step or a walk forward as a
marker of political change—a semiritual transition between
two worlds—it is neither as an index of progress nor as a path
toward revelation or telos. Lest we imagine he is indicating a
progression from darkness to light—as the transition from
the colonial to the postcolonial is often figured98—Kentridge
31 Kentridge, study for Arc/Procession I, detail showing Harry
impaled, 1990, charcoal and pastel on paper, 413⁄8 ⫻ 1181⁄8 in.
(105 ⫻ 300 cm). Private collection (artwork © William
firmly establishes his processions as deeply ambiguous journeys, shot through with numerous obstacles and multiple
reversals.
Arc/Procession: “Walking to Utopia or Perdition. Or Both”
When Kentridge began work on the monumental Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass in late 1989 (Fig. 1), his
landmark drawing confirmed the procession as antiteleology.99 Once more harnessing the procession as the visual
portent of the impending regime change, Kentridge portrayed current history as a disorderly stampede into the future. Riffing parodically on myths of progress, miners and
revelers stagger along with apartheid’s victims, the crippled,
the homeless, and the displaced. Megaphones (an apartheidera symbol of labor 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. At the
drawing’s center, hands raised and arms outstretched in crucifix form, is Harry, the man who leads the procession in
Johannesburg. He appears here as martyred for Marxist utopianism—a point made unequivocally in a preparatory drawing, where Harry is literally impaled on a model of Vladimir
Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (Fig. 31).
That Arc/Procession is an extraordinarily timely image,
rooted in the local politics of transition, is confirmed by
Kentridge’s 1991 reprisal of this same procession under the
title Procession of the Delegates (Fig. 32), where the processionists are identified as political emissaries ambling along to one
of the numerous parliamentary negotiations that followed
Mandela’s release. Though Kentridge contracts the processional form to engage the problematic of historical change in
all his works of the period, in Arc/Procession he registers
greater ambivalence toward the oncoming transition than is
evident in the processions of Johannesburg.100 Impugning the
idea of advance as necessarily entailing progress, Arc/Procession bears shadowy trails of the failed utopias of Communist
regime changes and is studded with ironic ladders leading
nowhere. To this end, another drawing of the period features
a large ladder that spells out bluntly: “this is not a step.”
Meanwhile, the hyena, an African animal deeply associated
with ambiguity and corruption, presides over the scene.101
Arc/Procession captures the energy and theatricality that
often characterized 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 galvanized the crowd and publicized political
messages in the only “revolution fought in four-part harmony.”102 Ari Sitas, one of Kentridge’s colleagues from his
agitprop theater years, grounds Arc/Procession in precisely
these hybrid political-theatrical experiences, describing a
chaotic mass rally the two attended in 1985, with thousands of
black union workers parading around and around Durban’s
Greyville stadium, all the while singing, dancing, making
speeches, reciting poetry, trailing banners.103 For Sitas, “these
experiences . . . provided a symbolic language” evident in
Kentridge’s “clear political economy of exaggerated gesture.”
While the oval track of Durban’s stadium would be formally
reprised in Kentridge’s subsequent circular processions, the
overt theatricality of Arc/Procession is accentuated in an early
study portraying the artist looking up at his work with an
exaggerated viewing device, as if beholding the procession as
a performative allegory of history (Fig. 33).
The procession has long been used as a visual metaphor for
the tumult of regime change. 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. . . .”104 For Benjamin, the procession is synonymous with military victory and narratives of
progress. He invokes the procession as an image of history, a
resonant visual metaphor that he uses to call up and then
dispute a view of history as a narrative of continuity, increasing perfectability, and economic efficiency. Kentridge similarly employs the procession as an image of history, yet one
that he casts as a foil to triumphant nationalisms and the
colonialism they fostered. For the victory procession is historically a colonial spectacle; the format dates back to Roman
times, epitomized by Rome’s Arch of Titus frieze depicting
soldiers marching home with booty from the conquered
temple in Jerusalem.
The colonial procession finds its unruly double in the
frequently bombastic parades of the postcolony, hypertrophied displays of excess often aimed at showcasing parity with
Western powers.105 The esoteric title of this drawing—Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass—which Kentridge mined from a
biography of the former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie,
hints at such dynamics, while extending Kentridge’s historicist critique to include Marxist and celebratory postcolonial
nationalisms. The cryptic phrase derives from one of Selassie’s 1960s speeches, when the onetime reformist was already
in his third decade of despotic power.106 In this light, his
stated desire for Ethiopia “to develop, catch up, even surpass”
Western nations assumes a sycophantic stance of emulation,
which is rendered even more hollow by Selassie’s epic failures
of leadership. But these words also ring with the distant echo
of the postcolonial optimism that swept the continent in the
wake of liberation movements of the 1960s. Now they read as
a quaint artifact of the time when such rhetoric, and the
157
32 Kentridge, Procession of the Delegates, from the series Little
Morals, Kwazulu-Natal, S.A.: Caversham Press, 1991, etching
with sugar lift, 93⁄8 ⫻ 121⁄2 in. (23.7 ⫻ 31.8 cm) (artwork
Kentridge studio)
utopianism it galvanized, could still inspire. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, which lingers in the early study
Arc/Procession I, serves as a similar beacon of failed hopes. It
registers as the dated utopianism of the modernist avantgardes and, more specifically, as the local failures of Communism, which as late as the 1980s remained the dominant
political ideology of the ANC and other liberation parties in
South Africa.107
Even as Kentridge indicts the utopian teleologies underpinning Selassie’s statement, questions the value of so-called
Western development, and rejects the possibilities of a linear
progress from the “darkness” of apartheid to the “light” of
democracy, he refuses to overlook Africa’s histories of dictatorship and rampant corruption. Moreover, Ethiopia’s
bloody histories since Selassie came to power impugn the very
narratives of progress that Selassie and others had routinely
served up.108 History, in this view, comes to resemble Benjamin’s famous description of progress as demolition site: a pile
of “wreckage upon wreckage. . . . This storm is what we call
progress.”109
Suspicious of the myths of progress, Kentridge’s Arc/Procession looks both to Benjamin and to Theodor Adorno, whose
work on the Enlightenment equally renders history as antiteleological and radically fractured. The series of etchings Kentridge made the following year titled Little Morals (1991), an
English translation of Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1953), reflects Adorno’s views. As in Arc/Procession, these prints reveal
Kentridge digesting the current process of negotiations under way between the government and delegates of the recently unbanned political parties over a transfer of power.
Just as the titles of these prints—Procession of the Delegates (Fig.
32), Negotiations Begin (Fig. 34), and Practical Considerations
(Fig. 35)— ground them in the moment of South Africa’s
political transition, so do Kentridge’s comments on this as “a
period of extreme intensity; enormous possibilities seemed to
be opening up, whilst there was also a real threat that the
process towards democracy might be derailed by vio-
158
33 Kentridge, study for Arc/Procession
I, 1989, charcoal on paper, 221⁄2 ⫻
301⁄4 in. (57 ⫻ 77 cm). Private
collection (artwork © William
34 Kentridge, Negotiations Begin, from Little Morals, etching
with sugar lift, 93⁄8 ⫻ 121⁄2 in. (23.7 ⫻ 31.8 cm) (artwork
Kentridge studio)
35 Kentridge, Practical Considerations, from Little Morals,
etching with sugar lift, 93⁄8 ⫻ 121⁄2 in. (23.7 ⫻ 31.8 cm)
(artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by
lence . . . also a sense that . . . for many others circumstances
would be as hard as ever.”110
This tussle between enormous optimism for “the South
African miracle” that had overturned apartheid with negotiation rather than violent revolution and pessimism that little
would change for the country’s poorest is reflected in these
bifurcated images. In typical apartheid fashion—and as in the
communicative disjunct between the procession and the viewing protagonists, or Soho in his feeding frenzy in Johannesburg—individuals are encapsulated in disjunctive realities,
enveloped in a state of self-absorption. In Negotiations Begin,
three figures dance around in Dionysian abandon, oblivious
to a figure tied to a post who is dead or dying, while in
Practical Considerations a couple twirls blithely alongside an
“Atlas” figure bent double beneath a burden. Kentridge’s
resistance to the logic of “and/or” in favor of the complexity
of “both/and” is revealed in his ambivalent embrace of oppositional, or dualist, realities. As he explains, “It’s not that
one’s an optimist or a pessimist. One lives with both. One is
a committed optimist and a firm pessimist. Both of those
futures are unspooling at the same time.”111
Tying this model of parallel potentialities to the ambiguous
telos of his Arc/Procession processionists, Kentridge continues,
“It’s as if they’re stumbling into the future but not knowing
what is coming: salvation or damnation, who knows what. You
don’t know if they were walking to utopia or perdition. Or
both.”112 Kentridge’s ambivalence between his desire to reclaim a measure of utopianism for the success of this transitional period and his more deep-seated suspicion of the
possibility for profound change rives these images formally
and thematically. Accordingly, he looks to Adorno, with his
resistance to the possibility of fundamental and permanent
moral and political change, to temper the potency of the
metamorphosis implicated by the processional format.113
Adorno’s Minima Moralia is both structurally fragmented (a
series of aphoristic reflections on the Socratic ideal of the
“good life,” that is, the ethical life) and steeped in doubt
(Adorno finds little place for the Socratic ideal and limited
possibilities for ethical behavior in the postwar world). The
question of individual moral responsibility is inseparable
from the specific cultural nexus in which one is enmeshed,
Adorno argues, so that, as one critic puts it, “in a wrong
society the good cannot be done, cannot be known, and
independent of its realization does not exist.”114 The pathological, divisive relationships that Kentridge images—the repeated cocooning of individuals and their incapacity to notice or respond to the plight of others—resonate with
Adorno’s outlook. Arc/Procession also reveals a local undercurrent of pragmatism that sought to moderate the rhetoric of
the “miraculous transition” rehearsed throughout these
heady years, a view that stressed that change would be long,
slow, and difficult—that it would be an incremental process of
change. Indeed, the word “process” was so often applied to
South Africa after 1989 that it become synonymous with that
period: people spoke of the “negotiation process,” “the peace
process,” and the “process of transition”—all processes that
would in turn lead to other processes by the mid-1990s,
such as “the process of democracy” and, finally, the judicial
processes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC).115
This gradual, processual notion of historical change similarly informs Kentridge’s treatment of the politics of this
time, shaping his own process of conveying change within a
drawing. The artist explains how, while rejecting Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s historicism, his own understanding of
historical process remains indebted to Hegelian models of
history.116 In theater school, as Kentridge became immersed
in parallel epistemologies of theatrical process and corporeal
gesture, he came to understand how the larger dynamic of
process could be used to undercut the rigid, teleological
aspects of the Hegelian system that he had studied at university:
Actually, then [at theater school] I understood the stuff I
was doing in university with politics, where there was a lot
of emphasis on the most simplified forms of Hegelian
logic, of understanding deeply the way in which contradiction is embodied in how we move through the world
and how process rather than fact is fundamental to the
understanding. These gave a bedrock of material to work
with, which I don’t think has changed.117
Adorno’s disjunctive, fragmented vision of history underpins Arc/Procession formally as well as thematically. The drawing is unusually constructed, cobbled together from overlapping sheets of rectangular paper, which are visibly sutured
159
36 Kentridge, Untitled, 2006, ink and pencil on paper, showing
(below) how Arc/Procession was conceived as part of a larger
circular procession and (above) Bernardo Bertolucci’s head-on
portrayal of a procession versus Francisco de Goya’s diagonal
rendering. Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge)
together with pieces of masking tape (Fig. 2).118 The piece
fans across the wall in a huge arc, with each sheet of paper
roughly encapsulating a figure. While the exposed seams
between each page atomize the composition into discrete
slices, the text flowing in the opposite direction to the figures
and the abrupt shifts in color between pages further interrupt
the possibility of narrative continuity. Even though the linking of individual pages together summons a cinematic mode
of sequencing, the flimsiness of the whole unit implies the
potential reversibility or resequencing of this proposed narrative chain.119 When Kentridge describes this work as “a row
of fragments,” he again reprises a Benjaminian grammar, one
that conceives history as a series of units to be shuffled or
resequenced, as in the potentially interchangeable “volutes”
that compose Benjamin’s Arcades Project.120
For Benjamin and Adorno, as for Kentridge, such an exploded view of history is rooted in a crisis of sequencing
historical time—a crisis provoked by revolution, war, and the
radical breaks with history that are similarly expressed by the
resetting of the French Revolutionary calendar or the Second
New Year Cape Town procession. Under such pressures,
narrative shatters, too. The medium of film, which can be
physically cut into pieces and then spliced back together, so
that narrative time becomes malleable and endlessly rearrangable, like volutes, accords with such a Benjaminian view
of history. As he indicated in a sketch, Kentridge conceived of
Arc/Procession as visualizing such a history of slivers and slices
and as a mere section of a larger cyclical panorama in which
there is no conceivable beginning or end, only an endless
cycle around and around (Fig. 36). Eventually, all Kentridge’s processions would stretch into this cyclical form, spinning on their axes as characters process around and around
160
38 Kentridge, still from Overvloed, 1999, animated film with
paper cutout silhouettes, video footage, charcoal and pastel
animated drawing, shadows, water, and text projected onto the
ceiling, 6 minutes. Civic Hall, Amsterdam (artwork © William
37 Kentridge, Atlas Procession, Kwazulu-Natal, S.A.: Caversham
Press, 2000, first of a set of 3 etchings on a map spread from
Stieler’s Hand-Atlas, Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1906, 171⁄8 ⫻ 14 in.
(43.6 ⫻ 35.5 cm) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph
a large central circle, as in his Atlas Processions and the artist’s
numerous circular processions of the past decade (Fig. 37).
Revolving, Revolt, Revolution
Finally, we see the revolutionary thematics of the procession
shift from a poetics of content to one of form, as Kentridge’s
processionists physically start revolving around a circular core
in an endless cycle. And although regime change and political revolution often signal breaks in history, the word “revolution” has etymological origins as a continuous cyclical
narrative, an endless repetition of history that is a “revolving”
as well as a revolt.121 Kentridge’s processions, we come to
find, are based on this conception of dynamic temporal
change, a notion that comes to the fore in the full circular
revolutions of Atlas Procession.122
Kentridge’s visual model for Arc/Procession, with its figures
arranged around a central, circular axis, was a Renaissance
tondo drawing he saw in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of
Art in 1986. The other templates for rendering processions
that he had considered (and sketched out for Breidbach, Fig.
36)—Bertolucci’s straight-on view of the procession in Novecento and Francisco de Goya’s Black paintings depicting approaching crowds from an oblique angle—were both “extremely static,” he felt.123 Searching for a more dynamic
rendering of the procession, the artist came up with the idea
of a long, thin drawing that would physically force a temporal
reading; curving the ribbon of paper into an arc, along with
monumentalizing it, would render it impossible to apprehend the work in a single instantaneous glance. He noted, “If
one actually curves the horizon line, so that in each section of
the curve people are standing upright on the ground, the
viewer can’t look at it all in one. You see it as a row of
fragments.”124
What is most elemental to Kentridge’s process of drawn
animation is the way that it spins drawing into a thread of
time. “I remember thinking that I could put people around
that circle and I would have a form that could be used to
show a lot of people moving and that would encapsulate
time,” he recalled.125 Kentridge’s desire for his processional
imagery to express or “encapsulate time” in the same way as
his filmic animation reveals underlying alliances between his
images of processions and his animation process. The artist
has self-consciously infused both with the dynamic of temporal change—which in turn enables their evocation of political
change.
In order to further “encapsulate time,” Kentridge also
borrowed the traditional formal means of visualizing time as
a circle. More than reels of film or their looping replay
format, Kentridge’s revolving processions call up another
kind of “stone-age” instrument: the sundial, or the circular
calendars and celestial charts of the Renaissance to which the
word “revolution” was first applied. Kentridge’s circling processionists thus creep around the face of a clock, their steps
aligning with spatial coordinates on the arc of time, so that
each processionist’s step becomes a temporal marker dashing
around a clock face—a step in and through time.
The Atlas Processions are closely related to Kentridge’s 1999
projection Overvloed of the previous year, a six-minute animated film commissioned for the dome of Amsterdam’s Civic
Hall (Fig. 38). For this installation, Kentridge projected shadowy figures made of cut-paper silhouettes onto the domed
ceiling, layering his aerial walkers with projections of video
footage, charcoal-and-pastel animated drawing, shadows, and
water. Weaving through these visual elements were streams of
text, aphoristic fragments of Dutch and African proverbs that
recalled Nietzschean aphorisms, or Benjamin’s and Adorno’s
splintered fragments of thought. These shattered trails of
cross-cultural communication—“Getting thin is not dying,”
“A nicely built city never resists destruction”— circle around
each other, suggesting that the histories of the Netherlands
and South Africa are historically bound, yet discursively disconnected.126 As in the film Johannesburg, the watery flows are
echoed in the constant temporal surge of the procession and
the tension of advancing time it underscores. Here, however,
flooding bears with it threatening local meanings, verging as
it does on a national psychosis for the Dutch.127
Discussing his process of making these foreshortened figures in the studio, with the hope that they would project onto
the domed ceiling as planned, Kentridge noted that “they
worked, walked, very beautifully,” his word choice evincing a
telling correspondence between his process (“working”) and
the procession (“walking”) that again briefly illuminates the
subterranean connections between the artist’s process and
his processions.128 This verbal slippage also points to Kentridge’s concern with prodding the viewer into an active engagement with his work, so that a participatory aesthetics of
somatic engagement vies with the ocular draw of the image.
As early as Arc/Procession, Kentridge had sought to emphasize
a temporal and physicalized reading of the work by arching its
horizon, thereby mandating that viewers physically move at least
their heads, if not their whole bodies, to accommodate the
drawing’s fan-shaped, twenty-four-foot span. Likewise, Stair Procession winds three flights up the stairwell of New York’s PS1,
requiring the viewer to walk up to look at the work, thereby
reenacting the climbing bodies of Kentridge’s processionists.
This fluid interchange between the movements of Kentridge’s
processionists and those of his viewers in turn refers back to the
installation of Smoke, Ashes, Fable in the central stairwell of
Kentridge’s home, in a site that demands he view this touchstone procession every day from the bobbing perspective of
his own body as he ascends and descends his stairs.
Overvloed further developed this reciprocation between the
depicted movement of the procession through space and the
physical ambulation required by the viewer to apprehend it.
For as the Overvloed procession revolved around the dome in
its site-specific installation, the artist imagined viewers walking around the space beneath and gazing up into the moving
ceiling as one does in a Renaissance church. Alternatively,
viewers could peer down into the tiny mirror given each of
the four hundred guests, which reversed the mirrored text on
the ceiling to make it legible, functioning like a personalized
mobile screen. “The project became about ways of looking
either down into what was almost a little prayer book, the
mirror, or looking up into the ceiling, into heaven,” Kentridge explained.129 Here, the artist cycles us back to an earlier
prayer book—the one his grandfather once held—and which
the iconic marcher of Marchepied has been clutching throughout. Walking and reading, circling forward, yet always retracing the same horizon of memory, Kentridge’s figures revolve
around Overvloed waving the flags and wielding the banners of
his other revolutionary marchers.
The prayer book/screens of Overvloed also gave rise to the
birth of the viewer as the walking reader, for it set free the
audience to roam the space of Amsterdam’s Civic Hall, heads
bowed in contemplation like the iconic reader, holding their
devotional mirrors/prayer books, just as he does. “With the
mirror, you simply swivel your body and you swivel the whole
image,” Kentridge explained.130 In this way, the movement of
the viewer’s body came to dictate the reading of the procession, definitively tying together in swirls of motion the walk-
161
39 Kentridge, still from What Will Come (Has Already Come),
2006, anamorphic film projected onto a circular horizontal
screen and reflected back, anamorphically adjusted, in a
vertical metal cylinder, 8 minutes, 40 seconds (artwork
Kentridge studio)
ing, shadowy figures circling above and the bowed heads of
the pacing viewers below.
Kentridge clearly conceived the revolving procession of
Overvloed as a cross-cultural journey of sorts, a maritime excursion from one continent to another that is emphasized by
his trotting figures’ circular trajectory around what becomes
a virtual globe. When the artist speaks of Overvloed in terms of
“what it means to go round a cupola, as if you are going
round the world,”131 he invokes an image of the world as a
circular track around which figures process, returning us to
ancient astrological and calendrical images of temporal
change.132 However, the artist would not push this notion
into full visibility until a subsequent film, What Will Come (Has
Already Come) from 2006, an 8-minute 40-second anamorphic
film projected onto a circular horizontal screen and reflected
back in a vertical metal cylinder. Its title alluding to the
spiraling repetitions of history, the film is dominated by
images of flight as a bird, a fly, a biplane, and other aerial
objects circle and soar around the screen along with another
of Kentridge’s processions.
At one juncture, a globe with crutchlike legs appears,
hopping and skipping around the circular disk (Fig. 39).
Losing its legs, the anthropomorphized globe takes flight and
begins revolving around the screen, now explicitly conflating
the passage of time and the turning of the earth with the idea
of traveling through space (Fig. 40). And finally the walking
man starts to fly! Sheer revolving animated movement has
replaced the once literalized plodding of earthbound figures.
Now everything races and revolves around the cylindrical
core in a dematerialized procession of spinning filmic images.
The rapidly mutating forms streaking past at breakneck speed
and constantly disappearing from view demand that the viewer
pursue the flying objects and racing figures, forcing her to circle
around the screen with them.133 And as the viewer walks around
and around the screen, chasing the spinning images, she becomes the walking, peering figure, performatively reenacting
both the striding bodies of the processional figures and the
ambulations of the artist’s own process.
162
ing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning.
What ends in clarity does not begin that way.”
10. Kentridge, quoted in Rosenthal, William Kentridge, 67.
11. Despite the rough-hewn quality of this collage, Kentridge clearly demarcates the book as open, twisting the natural angle of the spine
exaggeratedly clockwise in order to do so.
12. For an excellent history of walking that discusses the legendary pacings of the peripatetic philosophers and the long philosophical tradition of walking and thinking that follows, see Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2001).
13. Kentridge, interview with the author, Boston, March 18, 2009.
14. In this context, Kentridge’s walking becomes a metaphor for journeying, so that the physicality of the step suggests not thought but flights
of imaginative travel (to the moon and beyond).
40 Kentridge, still from What Will Come (Has Already Come)
(artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by
Leora Maltz-Leca is assistant professor of contemporary art at the
Rhode Island School of Design. A 2011 recipient of a Warhol
Foundation Arts Writer’s Grant and a 2012 Getty postdoctoral
fellow, she is currently completing a book on William Kentridge titled
“Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises” [History of Art
and Visual Culture, Rhode Island School of Design, 2 College Street,
Providence, R.I. 02903, [email protected]].
Notes
I am extremely grateful to William Kentridge for his graciousness and generosity, and to his superb studio staff: Natalie Dembo, Linda Liebowitz, and,
most of all, Anne McIlleron, who has been helpful in too many ways to
enumerate. I am indebted to Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Suzanne Blier for their
long-standing support of my work. I also want to thank Carrie Lambert-Beatty,
Angela Breidbach, Ruth Simbao, Gemma Rodrigues, Steven Nelson, Joni
Brenner, Liza Essers, Ara Merjian, Judy Hecker, Martha Kennedy, and of
course, Benedict Leca; Karen Lang and The Art Bulletin’s readers and editors
for their insightful comments; the Getty Research Institute, the Swann Foundation for Animation, and the Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s Program; and
finally, audiences at the Library of Congress, the Getty Research Institute, and
the Rhode Island School of Design, where I delivered versions of this essay as
a talk.
1. William Kentridge, quoted in Angela Breidbach and William Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud: Conversations with Angela
Breidbach (Cologne: Walther König, 2006), 16.
2. William Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement,” in Art from South Africa (London: Museum of Modern Art; Oxford: Thames and Hudson, 1990),
52. On other occasions, Kentridge has spoken of the city’s sense of
peripheralism, especially during the isolated years of late apartheid.
See Kentridge, “Zeno at 4 am—Director’s Note” (October 2001), in
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge (Milan: Skira/Castello di
Rivoli, 2003), 173.
3. William Kentridge, “Felix in Exile: Geography of Memory” (lecture,
Northwestern University, November 1994), in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge (Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des
Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1998), 93.
4. William Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement for ‘9 Drawings for Projection,’ ” exh. cat., Spier Amphitheatre, Stellenbosch, S.A., Old Fort at
Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, and other venues, March 2004, n.p.
5. Kentridge, “Felix in Exile,” 7.
6. Kentridge, quoted in Mark Rosenthal, ed., William Kentridge: Five
Themes (San Francisco: SFMOMA, 2009), 13.
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Suspended Step,” in The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 11.
8. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Weight of a Thought,” in The Gravity of
Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanity, 1997), 81.
9. Kentridge, interview by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “William Kentridge,” in PressPlay: Contemporary Artists in Conversation (New York:
Phaidon, 2005), 408: “So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion
version of thought. . . . The uncertain and imprecise way of construct-
15. Samuel Beckett often leans over Kentridge’s drawing hand; “footfalls”
is Beckett’s term from his eponymous play about pacing. In his most
recent project, an artist’s book called Everyone Their Own Projector, Kentridge returns to his routes around the studio in a double-page spread
he titles Parcours l’Atelier, which, as he describes, “is a route of a walk
around the studio: the bed for sleeping, defensive sleeping in the
chair, a glimpse of the idea disappearing. . . . It’s a fictional making
up of a series of different routes, as if I had a marker on me checking
my steps.” Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009. Kentridge also chose
“Parcours l’Atelier” as one of the five central themes of his work for
his recent retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
16. The artist commented, “I wasn’t thinking of shul, but I’m sure that’s
what the image is of: he kind of looks like my grandfather davening
in shul. A man in that position with a book. . . . Because otherwise
you don’t read when you’re standing. . . . The two-handed holding of
a book is an important way of walking.” Kentridge interview, March
18, 2009. The triplicate rendering of this figure in Embarkation (Fig.
20) further suggests an arc of movement.
17. Titled I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, this lecture-performance saw
Kentridge splitting into a veritable stack of Russian dolls as the live
Kentridge interacted with screened film footage of multiple projected
versions of himself. Commissioned by Kentridge’s longtime curatorial
collaborator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, it was performed in Sydney
in 2008, again in New York in November 2009, as part of RoseLee
Goldberg’s Performa, in March 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, and finally in Johannesburg in June 2010.
18. William Kentridge, “William Kentridge: Artist in Residence,” Friends of
the South African National Gallery Newsletter 33 (December 1991): 4.
19. As Kentridge noted after the residency (ibid.): “The actual physical
activity (what observers would see) is at best dull. But when brought
to consciousness, (as performing the drawing would make it) it is
clearly ridiculous. I foresaw that if I simply went on with my drawings
as my project at the gallery, I would end up acting out the making of
a drawing and what people would see would not be me drawing, but
me acting out some stereotypical idea of how it should look for a
drawing to be done.”
20. At the time, Kentridge was understandably disenchanted with the requirement of working publicly: “I think it unrealistic to expect strong
work to be made by anyone in those conditions,” he wrote (ibid.).
Nonetheless, this enforced interference in his working routine served
to effectively foreground his new process “as a better performance art
than simply drawing,” as he himself concluded after the residency.
21. At Kentridge’s DIA Art Foundation (New York) lecture on the work
of Bruce Nauman, he simultaneously showed film footage of Jackson
Pollock painting and Nauman performing, while reading aloud Beckett’s Play. Kentridge’s invocation of the Irish playwright’s cryptically
titled Play suggests his own interest in juggling the ludic and the theatrical.
22. By “fortuna,” Kentridge refers to the combination of chance, event,
and planning that collide to produce a drawing, defining it as “the
general term I use for this range of agencies, something other than
cold, statistical chance, and something too, outside the range of rational control.” William Kentridge, “Fortuna: Neither Program nor
Chance in the Making of Images,” Cycnos 11, no. 1 (1994): 165.
23. Much of Jacques Derrida’s writerly process revolves around exploring
such “friendships,” that is, forging lateral connections among words
or concepts of shared etymologies. See Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press,
2005), 142. In this context, Derrida is referring to the proximity between the words penser (thinking) and peser (weighing). Kentridge,
likewise, often starts with word plays and lexical juxtapositions based
on etymological connections or homological resonances. The word
pair “thinking/weighing,” in fact, subtends his film Weighing . . . and
Wanting; for more on this, see Leora Maltz-Leca, “Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises” (forthcoming), chap. 4.
24. Kentridge, in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking
Aloud, 66. See ibid., 67, for the artist’s sketch of his thinking process
regarding Felix in Exile.
26. Rosalind Krauss, “ ‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” October, no. 92 (2000): 8.
27. Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement,” 52.
28. A signal drawing from the film Johannesburg shows a naked Felix Teitelbaum staring out at a tangle of urban highways, the scene dominated by an enormous billboard bearing the slogan “Captive of the
City.”
29. Kentridge, quoted in Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, 1998, 42.
30. Kentridge, “Fortuna,” 165.
31. In 1987, Antoine Watteau’s painting was likely more interesting to
Kentridge for its famed theatricality and its representation of the period’s stereotypical decadence than for its semiprocessional imagery.
For Kentridge, the pre-Revolutionary fantasy world of Watteau’s fête
galante, much like the touted hedonism of Max Beckmann’s pre–
World War II Berlin, served as an analogue of decadent white South
Africa in the 1980s. Kentridge also endows Watteau’s ambling subjects
with local meanings, figuring their absorption as symptomatic of
apartheid’s radical social fragmentation and their blindness as both a
product of apartheid’s degenerate society and a feature necessary for
survival within it.
163
president of South Africa and de Klerk was installed as interim president.
In the September 6 election, despite fears of a right-wing Afrikaner victory, the National Party won by an overwhelming majority, and de Klerk
assumed office on September 20. Before the end of that year, seven senior ANC delegates were released from prison (October 15, 1989) followed by another five antiapartheid leaders a month later (November
16), enormous rallies were held in celebration, and on December 13, de
Klerk and Mandela held talks.
46. Numerous historians view 1989 as a pivotal year. See H. Marais, Limits
to Change: South Africa; The Political Economy of Transition (Cape Town:
University of Cape Town Press, 2001); or Michael Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in
Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Beyond the borders of South Africa, and in the wake of the Berlin
Wall, 1989 has been seen as an epic year that inaugurated a series of
democratizations throughout the African continent—so much so that
it is claimed to have initiated “a second independence” for the continent. See Richard Joseph, “Democratization in Africa after 1989:
Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives,” Comparative Politics 29, no.
3 (1997): 363– 82.
47. J. A. du Pisani, M. Broodryk, and P. W. Coetzer, “Protest Marches in
South Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 28, no. 4 (1990): 573.
48. For example, on the single day of October 14, 1989, one could find
approximately 150,000 people participating in seventeen different
marches countrywide; cited in ibid.
32. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009.
49. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
50. For a comprehensive compendium of South African posters of the
1980s, see Judy Seidman, Red on Black: The Story of the South African
Poster Movement (Johannesburg: STE/South African History Archive,
2007).
34. Kentridge’s description of his own nose, which he used as the template for the drawings of The Nose.
35. The flip book, a kind of precinema also called cinéma de poche, dates
to the 1860s. At its zenith, in the 1870s and 1880s, it expressed the
contemporary fascination with the study of motion, often using the
images of Eadweard Muybridge’s zoogyroscopes and Étienne-Jules
Marey’s chronophotography as source material.
36. Kentridge, quoted in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge
Thinking Aloud, 35.
37. According to the artist (interview, March 18, 2009), this hand-drawn,
1:50⬙ animation, Lecture on a Chair, which dates to the early 1980s, is
about “a person talking about a chair, and he talks and talks and
talks, and the weight of his words eventually collapses the chair. And
the chair gets up from under the words and kicks the man out. And
he stays there by itself.”
38. Kentridge, quoted in Robert Enright and William Kentridge,
“Achievements of Indecision: The Art of William Kentridge,” BorderCrossings, February 2002, 55.
39. The early flip books presage this kind of transmutation, as do later
iterations like the 2004 Cyclopedia of Drawing, a homage to ÉtienneJules Marey’s early images of birds in flight, in which a figure slowly
transforms into a bird, flapping its wings within the cage of the page,
before settling into a corner, human once more. Marey, Physiologie du
mouvement: Le vol des oiseaux (Paris: G. Masson, 1890).
40. Steven Henry Madoff, “William Kentridge: San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art,” Artforum, October 2009: 228.
42. William Kentridge, “Black Box-Interview,” Afritopic, 2005, www.afritopic
.com. Kentridge received his bachelor’s degree in African history and
politics.
43. A remark of Jean Miller, a white pensioner to researcher Helena
Broadbridge, “Negotiating Post-Apartheid Boundaries and Identities:
An Anthropological Study of the Creation of a Cape Town Suburb”
(PhD diss., University of Stellenbosch, 2001), 81.
44. Nelson Mandela, interview by Tom Carver, The Last Mile: Africa, Mandela and Democracy, M-Net (a South African cable TV station), 1992.
45. This series of transformations was sparked by President P. W. Botha’s
stroke in February 1989, after which he was encouraged to resign as
leader of the National Party (NP). His appointment of the moderate
education minister F. W. de Klerk as party head in February 1989 offered little evidence for the reforms that would ensue. But once in
power, de Klerk immediately announced the need for political
change: the ongoing political violence that had incited the government to institute a state of emergency four years earlier had only
worsened, destroying the last vestiges of civil liberties with it, while the
economy, seriously damaged by international sanctions, had suffered
massive currency devaluation. Under increasing pressure from his own
party, Botha dissolved Parliament in May 1989, announced an upcoming
general election (whites only), and agreed to an official meeting with
banned African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela. A
month after this historic meeting, on August 15, 1989, Botha resigned as
51. Christopher Wren, “20,000 Apartheid Foes Allowed to March through
Johannesburg,” New York Times, September 16, 1989.
52. Kentridge’s huge banner was seen by others: Shaun de Waal, chief
film critic at Johannesburg’s Mail and Guardian “remembers taking
part in the first fully legal protest march through central Johannesburg in 1989, and seeing in the distance, bobbing above the heads of
the crowd, a big poster depicting boxed heads and the mysterious
legend, ‘Casspirs full of love.’ It turned out to be borne by Kentridge.” Shaun de Waal, “Art of Reversals,” Mail and Guardian Friday
(Johannesburg), March 10 –16, 2006. This banner was probably the
same one that had been made for Kentridge’s exhibition earlier that
year at London’s Victoria Miro gallery.
54. Study for Arc/Procession I, 1989 (Fig. 33), is clearly dated in the topright corner: “Sept. 25, 1989.”
55. The full quote from the Greek historian, which Kentridge also employed
at the conclusion of his 2001 film Zeno Writing, is “Smoke, Ashes, Fable / Where are they all now? / Perhaps they are no longer fable.”
Aloud, 37.
57. Kentridge, interview by Christov-Bakargiev, “William Kentridge,” 408,
414.
58. Along with the film’s visual invocation of the Platonic shadow procession, Kentridge in his lectures and writings on this film has explicated
this relation to the Platonic allegory.
59. In a famous 1970 essay, Jean-Louis Baudry used the Platonic allegory
as a template for cinematic experience. Baudry, “The Apparatus:
Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the
Cinema,” trans. Jean Andrews and Bernard Augst, Camera Obscura 1,
no. 11 (1976): 104 –26. Others have noted the similarities between
shadow puppets and cinema, too: Francis MacDonald Cornford, for
example, in his notes to The Republic, explains, “A modern Plato
would compare his Cave to an underground cinema.” Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1945), 228 n.
60. William James rejected metaphors such as “chain” or “train” as being
too disjunctive or “jointed,” choosing instead natural processes as a
model for a consciousness that “flows.” James, The Principles of Psychology, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 233.
61. Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement” for 9 Drawings for Projection.
63. Beckett’s response to the persecution of Vaclav Havel, Catastrophe employs the conceit of a director issuing instructions to an assistant who
trots back and forth making onstage adjustments to a human “monument.”
64. “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators
164
are fused into one carefully thought out, concrete whole. Time, as it
were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible. . . .” Mikhail
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Carl Emerson and
Michael Holquist, ed. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981), 84. In Kentridge’s retrospective curated by Mark Rosenthal,
the artist chose the phrase “Thick Time” for his Drawings for Projection series, one of the five themes of his works.
65. Krauss, “ ‘The Rock,’ ” 5.
66. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson
Mandela (New York: Little, Brown, 1994).
67. For the generation born after the 1960s in particular, this signal event
was further dramatized by what would be their first sighting of the
banned face of the antiapartheid leader, who during his imprisonment for twenty-seven years had become unrecognizable to the majority of his followers.
68. Mandela was originally supposed to be flown to Johannesburg, which
had been his home prior to his imprisonment, but he wished to be
released in Cape Town and to physically walk through the prison
gates—although he suggestively displaces this as a production of the
SABC (the government-run South African Broadcast Company).
Under President Botha, the march would have been banned, marchers would have defied that ban, and violence would have resulted.
The new president lived up to his promise to ease restrictions on political gatherings and permitted the march to take place.”
82. Pisani et al., “Protest Marches,” 574, 575.
83. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). For Ozouf, these
thousands of processions and festivals were a form of transgressive
release (following Sigmund Freud), “a people’s idealized expression
of itself” (after Emile Durkheim), and a reenactment of a foundational historical moment.
84. Jonathan Sperber, “Festivals of National Unity in the German Revolution of 1848 –1849,” Past and Present 136 (1992): 116.
85. New York Times journalist Joseph Lelyveld, in relating the story of
Philip Kgosana, whose 1960 freedom march helped to precipitate an
earlier state of emergency, called this a time when “the Bastille might
have been stormed in South Africa and wasn’t”; quoted in Anthony
Sampson, “In Apartheid’s Grip,” New York Times, October 13, 1985.
69. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 490 –91.
86. Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele, musing on the strangely uncathartic nature of the South African regime change. Ndebele, Rediscovery of the
Ordinary (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994), 9.
70. Ibid., 493.
87. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 494.
71. Ibid., 494, my emphasis.
88. But after two weeks of “looking into space and brooding . . . [I] conceded: I would allow myself to start with Soho, the war-horse from the other
films. He would make a short entrance before his daughter Liberty Eckstein took over. In the end, she did not get a look in.” Kentridge, “Fortuna,” 164. Krauss (“ ‘The Rock,’ ” 14) argues that the jettisoning of Liberty Eckstein indicates Kentridge’s indebtedness to the traditions of
animation, with their limited, serial characters. Nonetheless, the artist
included a new character, Thandi, in his next film, Felix in Exile.
72. Mandela’s spoken words in The Last Mile (my emphasis) must have firmly
lodged themselves in some corner of Kentridge’s mind, for the latter
part of Mandela’s phrase— his invocation of Belshazzar’s dream—reemerged years later as marginalia in Kentridge’s sketchpad, a kernel that
would blossom into his 1996 film Weighing . . . and Wanting.
73. N’Dour is interviewed partly because the documentary covers Mandela’s 1992 trip to Senegal, where the singer was commissioned to write
and perform a song for Mandela. N’Dour states: “There were many
dictators who ruled by force. There are millions of us. We can demonstrate in the streets. Thousands have died, but we will get what we
want. Mandela encouraged this system of refusal.” The Last Mile at 24
minutes, 32 seconds. My translation from the French.
74. This half-hour documentary, written and directed by Tom Carver,
with Kentridge as associate producer, detailed Mandela’s 1993 visits to
Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.
75. Kentridge, “Fortuna,” 165.
76. In 1990, processions continued to be a fraught proposition, often
threatening to spiral into the horrific violence engulfing the country
during this transitional period, which claimed thousands of lives.
77. Organized by the Pan African Congress (PAC) as a peaceful demonstration of 5,000 to 7,000 people, the official death toll at Sharpeville
was 69 people killed, including 8 women and 10 children, and 180
people injured, including 31 women and 19 children. At Soweto in
1976, official police reports stated the death toll at 23 and the injured
at 1,000, most of whom were children. But these figures are notoriously fabricated; Reuters estimated the Soweto dead at between 500
and 700.
78. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009. Archival photographs at the
Hector Pietersen Museum in Soweto—the museum named for the
thirteen-year-old boy who was one of the first children shot on June
16 —record Kentridge and his wife Anne marching through Johannesburg on the following day, June 17, 1976.
79. The legislative machinery for banning public marches began with
amendments to the Suppression of Communism Act of 1954 and the
Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956, which prohibited public gatherings if
they threatened to endanger public peace or cause racial hostility. In
1961 and 1962 (after Sharpeville), these laws were made more restrictive, and by 1973 the Gatherings and Demonstrations Act stated that
gatherings of more than eleven people had to be held on private
premises and all open-air gatherings near the Houses of Parliament
or near courts were prohibited. After the 1976 Soweto riots, temporary laws (repeatedly extended throughout the late 1970s and 1980s)
banned all outdoor gatherings, with the exception of sporting and
religious events. Violators, especially those from the political opposition, could be arrested and imprisoned without trial. See Pisani et al.,
“Protest Marches,” 581, for this history.
80. Through this risky, but ultimately successful gambit, de Klerk also
won overnight international approval. The United States, for example, responded promptly to the Cape Town march and all it represented by lifting its economic sanctions against South Africa.
81. Mandela (Long Walk, 480 – 81) noted, “In his inaugural address, Mr de
Klerk said his government was committed to peace. . . . But his commitment to a new order was demonstrated only after his inauguration
when a march was planned in Cape Town to protest police brutality.
It was to be led by Archbishop Tutu and the Reverend Allan Boesak.
89. In a sense, Kentridge’s work had long been made “after Paris,” with
drawings such as Embarkation (after Watteau, 1987), Swinging Lady (after Honoré Fragonard, 1986), and Boating Party (after Auguste
Renoir, 1985), all nodding toward Paris and its artists as the ur-location of European modernity.
91. Hollis Urban Liverpool, “Origins of Rituals and Customs in the Trinidad
Carnival: African or European?” Drama Review 42, no. 3 (1988): 24 –37.
Liverpool traces the origins of Caribbean carnival traditions such as Trinidad’s specifically back to Yoruba masking processions, claiming African
rather than European origins for such processions and citing scholars
with broader claims: that medieval European carnival traditions themselves can be traced back to ancient Egyptian processionals.
92. Kentridge employed an image of a clock with no hands in Faustus in
Africa, and he further developed this theme in History of the Main Complaint. For more on these temporal arrests, see Jessica Dubow and
Ruth Rosengarten’s excellent essay “History as the Main Complaint:
William Kentridge and the Making of Post-Apartheid South Africa,”
Art History 27, no. 4 (September 2004): 671–90.
93. Theorists from Mikhail Bakhtin to Joseph Roach have long stressed
the boundary-defying, revolutionary potential of processions. Michael
Holquist states, “Bakhtin’s carnival is revolution itself.” Holquist, prologue to Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), xvii. See also Joseph
Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
94. At this time, Johannesburg housed the law offices of the young Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, and a newly regrouped ANC fought
apartheid through the channels of law and organized dozens of historic marches through the city streets.
95. In his recent study of the modern city as a site of revolutionary politics, class, and ecological struggles, David Harvey writes that “the right
to the city has to be construed not as a right to that which already
exists, but as a right to rebuild and re-create the city as a socialist
body politic in a completely different image.” Harvey, Rebel Cities: From
the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 138.
96. J. M. Coetzee, “History of the Main Complaint,” in William Kentridge,
by Neal Benezra, Dan Cameron et al. (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art
New York, 2001), 84. Emily Apter, like others, sees a connection between this damaged landscape and the injured body/body politic, tying these violations of human rights and ecology together as constituent elements of a sophisticated “aesthetics of critical habitat that must
be framed by the politics of anti-globalization.” Apter, “The Aesthetics
of Critical Habitat,” October, no. 99 (2002): 21– 44.
97. This was Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s phrase, which was widely adopted by politicians and press alike as a way to characterize the socalled new South Africa.
98. See Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term
‘Post-Colonialism,’ ” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 84 –98.
99. The quotation above comes from the Kentridge interview, March 18,
2009.
100. However, the rubbery aesthetics of reversibility that govern Kentridge’s animations imply that this early filmic procession’s step forward can just as easily become a step back; indeed, in Johannesburg,
the procession’s advance quickly becomes a retreat, countering any
insinuation of triumphalism.
101. Aristotle and many after him have commented on the hyena’s association with ambivalence and ambiguity, which traces back to perceptions about its sexual ambivalence, resulting from the species’ lack of
phenotypic differentiation (the female has an enlarged clitoris that
looks like a penis). See Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “Sarah and the
Hyena: Laughter, Menstruation, and the Genesis of a Double Entendre,” History of Religions 36, no. 1 (1996): 13– 41.
102. Music and dance, especially the famous toyi-toyi, were central to apartheid-era resistance. “Almost every phase of our struggle had its own
song,” declared a musician in Amandla, a recent documentary about
the only “revolution fought in four-part harmony.” Lee Hirsch, Amandla: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, Sherry Simpson Dean and Lee
Hirsch, producers, 2003. The distinctive toyi-toyi dance performed at
political rallies is reenacted by the animated cat in Kentridge’s Shadow
Procession; many of Kentridge’s scores use local music and powerful
group vocals associated with apartheid-era resistance.
103. Ari Sitas, “Processions and Public Rituals,” in Benezra, Cameron et al.,
William Kentridge, 59 – 65.
104. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256.
105. 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 Mbembe, “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity,” in On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001).
106. Kentridge, quoting Haile Selassie, quoted in Benezra, in Benezra,
Cameron et al., William Kentridge, 19, based on a conversation with the
artist, who located the source of the quote in Polish journalist Ryszard
Kapuscinski’s The Emperor (New York: Vintage International, 1989).
Kapuscinski’s book is in turn an elaborate allegory for the story of the
downfall of the Polish Communist leader Edward Gierek.
107. Marxism was central to the ANC’s political and economic model from
the 1950s until the late 1980s. The ANC maintained close contacts with
South Africa’s Communist Party and with Moscow, where many ANC
leaders were educated. South Africa’s strategic location and its production of uranium made it a key arena in which Cold War politics were
played out— hence, the CIA’s surveillance of ANC activity. It was, in fact,
the CIA, working closely with the South African government, that was
responsible for Mandela’s final capture in 1963. In this sense, the collapse of Communism in 1989 was not unrelated to events in South Africa: a key stumbling block had always been white fear of a black leadership nationalizing businesses. The failure of Communism in the late
1980s neutralized these fears, allowing for a changed political climate in
which the release of Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC and Communist Party could proceed. Kentridge refers to this moment in Johannesburg when Soho, a caricature of Capitalism, tosses a miniature Bolshevik
hammer and sickle out of his office.
108. In Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen’s famous analysis,
genocidal famines such as the Bengal famine of 1943 were avoidable:
they stand as the sign of government failure (Sen, Poverty and Famines:
An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1981). One of the reasons for Selassie’s overthrow was his supposed lack of knowledge of the massive famine that was decimating
large sections of Ethiopia and that was finally brought to his attention
by the United Nations. Indeed, his “blindness” to the famine illustrates Sen’s empirical study concluding that famines do not occur in
democracies. In this light, famine becomes fatefully symptomatic of
the failure of government.
109. Benjamin, “Theses on Philosophy of History,” 258 –59.
110. Kentridge, quoted in Kay Wilson, William Kentridge Prints (New York:
David Krut, 2006), 42.
165
114. Rahel Jaeggi, “ ‘No Individual Can Resist’: Minima Moralia’s Critique
of Forms of Life,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical &
Democratic Theory 12, no. 1 (March 2005): 69.
115. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up in 1994
to address apartheid crimes, headed by Archbishop Tutu. The TRC
did not prosecute apartheid criminals but instead exacted their testimony with the promise of amnesty, and it awarded limited financial
damages to some victims.
116. Kentridge’s views on the philosophy of history are eclectic. He takes
up Hegel’s ideas selectively—accepting, for example, his notions
about historical process but rejecting their teleological implications—
but even these Hegelian strands may appear at odds with the artist’s
interest in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s revisions of Hegelian philosophies of history. Kentridge is, of course, uninterested in adopting
wholesale any philosophical system, but rather seizes on particular
ideas from a range of thinkers. In any event, his embrace of contradiction and inconsistency liberates him from traditional philosophical
demands for a systematic or even consistent approach.
117. Kentridge, quoted in Enright and Kentridge, “Achievements of Indecision,” 35, my emphasis.
118. Of the two versions of Arc/Procession, Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass is
the larger drawing, measuring 8 ft. 101⁄4 in. by 24 ft. 61⁄2 in. (2.7 by
7.48 m), consisting of eleven sheets, while Smoke, Ashes, Fable consists
of only three or four, measuring 5 ft. 101⁄8 in. by 12 ft. 75⁄8 in. (1.78 by
3.85 m). The individual sheets of Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up were
originally held together with masking tape (Fig. 2); however, when
the drawing was sold to and installed at the Tate, the tape was replaced with clear pushpins.
119. While sequence is the organizational structure that usually underpins
coherent narrative, Kentridge uses the term to describe changes to a
single drawing that forms a single filmic fragment: “it’s very easy to
start a sequence without knowing necessarily how it links together and
how it will end,” he states. Key for him is that such sequences are not
preplanned; moreover, they often do not connect together in any developmental fashion in the final film. See William Kentridge, “An Interest in the Making of Things: An Interview with William Kentridge”
(1992), in Theater and Change in South Africa, ed. Geoffrey Davis and
Anne Fuchs (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996), 143.
Aloud, 16.
121. Both revolve and revolt derive from the Latin revolvere, meaning to turn
or roll back.
122. Kentridge’s Phenakistoscope (2000) in particular revisits Muybridge’s
zoopraxiscope and other early viewing apparatuses: it shows a series of
walking figures arrayed around a gramophone disk, which the viewer
can move with a handle. The “figures should appear to stay in place,
only passing their burdens from one to another.” Kentridge, in Wilson, William Kentridge Prints, 89.
Aloud, 16.
124. Ibid.
125. Ibid., 17.
126. The Amsterdam Civic Hall was built in 1648 —four years before the
Dutch arrival in South Africa—at the zenith of the Dutch golden age
of mercantile colonialism. As such, the paintings of the original ceiling fresco, with their scenes of mercantile expansion, navigation, and
exploration, formed the ground, as a palimpsest, beneath Kentridge’s
projections. The West African proverb “One should not be too hopeful of a ship sailing from Europe” alludes directly to this Dutch maritime history and, in particular, to its colonial vessels.
127. The title Overvloed, with its connotations of abundance and excess,
also invokes the thematics of excess, gluttony, and decadence—and
the loss and exploitation they inflict—that have characterized Kentridge’s treatments of colonialism since the mid-1980s.
Aloud, 16.
129. Ibid., 20.
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid., 19.
112. Ibid.
132. Angela Breidbach notes this connection in Breidbach and Kentridge,
William Kentridge Thinking Aloud.
113. This is an argument that Theodor Adorno spells out in the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, rather than Minima Moralia; nonetheless, it is a conclusion
that may be drawn from a broad knowledge of his work. Max Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New
York: Continuum, 1982); and Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a
Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978).
133. The processional imagery alludes to the exodus of the Ethiopian Jews
to Israel after the famine of 1984. Earlier images, such as the gasmasked figures and Italian phrases like “L’Inesorabile Avanzata” (The
Inexorable Advance) speak to the colonial occupation of Ethiopia between the world wars.

Process/Procession: William Kentridge and the Process of Change

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