Process/Procession: William Kentridge and the Process of ...

Process/Procession: William Kentridge and the Process
of Change

Leora Maltz-Leca

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

140 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

1 William Kentridge, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, 1990, charcoal on paper, 8 ft. 101⁄4 in. ϫ 24 ft. 61⁄2 in. (2.7 ϫ
7.48 m). Tate Collection, London (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph © Tate, London 2012)

2 Kentridge, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, frequently related his own contingent methods of arriving at
detail. Tate Collection, London (artwork © William Kentridge; an image not merely to knowledge and its failures but also to
photograph provided by William Kentridge studio) “some kind of model of how we live our lives.”9 The “slow” in
“slow-motion” is paramount, for it conveys how Kentridge’s
thought’s traditional idealism, Nancy argues that thought pacing also paces—that is, metronomically calibrates— his
possesses weight and movement: that it is lodged in the mass drawing hand to its own unhurried clip: decelerating it,
and motion of the thinking body. At the same time, his temporally dragging out the drawing process. Through these
notion of the “weight at the heart of thought” places pressure mandated delays, walking opens up a psychological terrain—
on the lightness of the step, evoking a gravitas felt not only in prodding, if not impelling, thinking. Yet the notion of think-
the drags on Kentridge’s drawing hand, the ponderous si- ing proposed here is hardly a seamless one. Kentridge’s
lences that fill the Drawings for Projection films, or the process is one of stops and starts: the artist’s constant walking
lugubrious slump of Soho Eckstein’s shoulders but also in the interrupts the flow of drawing, impeding facility and foiling
lumbering heft of his protagonists’ steps as they plod through the circuits between hand and brain to mediate any sem-
landscapes weighted with the pull of the past.8 blance of gesturalism imputed to the finished drawings. As
Kentridge crisscrosses his work space, his recursive rhythm of
The concept of drawing as a “slow-motion version of pacing and pausing mimics the flows and blockages of
thought” is a foundational metaphor for Kentridge, who has thought itself, tracing its uneven spurts. Kentridge’s step is
thus perhaps less a stride into mastery than a knowing ad-
vance 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, dou-
bling 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 defini-
tions 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

141W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E

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 ϫ
597⁄8 in. (104 ϫ 152 cm). Private
collection (artwork © William
Kentridge; photograph provided by
William Kentridge studio)

forward but harks back to the long philosophical tradition of Figs. 8, 9), a filmic departure from the Drawings for Projec-
walking and thinking from which the word peripatetic de- tion series that paused to ponder the artist’s now-celebrated
rives, evoking those inveterate pacers along the ancient animation process and its studio treks. Bracketing his staccato
Greek colonnades.12 One chunky block of a foot drawn be- antics of homage to the French cine-magician with endless
hind, the other pressing forward onto a spongy arch, Kent- circuits of performative pacings, Seven Fragments for Georges
ridge’s marcher—who appears in three iterations in Portage— M´eli`es is a medley of stalking, sauntering, and moseying.
conveys both animation’s arrest of the body in motion and “Sometimes I walk round and round at a fast pace for a long
the pacing that lies at the heart of the artist’s own practice. time before I start work and the films are records of that
route,” Kentridge explained. “The Me´lie`s films are specifi-
It is Kentridge who tells us that this book-wielding walker cally about that walk.”13 In a scene in one of these films,
figures as a portrait of his own studio process; it is he who not Journey to the Moon (2003), the camera pans in on the artist’s
only inhabits the shoes of his walker but also borrows his feet as, step by step, they sketch out theatrical “footfalls”:
text—so distinctively splayed open at the spine—reading it as here, Kentridge explores the pressures and liberties of pro-
he strolls about (Figs. 9, 11). For while Kentridge’s pacing is ducing art by nodding (slowly) to Samuel Beckett, a self-
a private, meditative ritual, its performative aspect is betrayed identified beacon for the artist whose theatrics of pacing and
by the artist’s public reprisals of his prowling figure. The snail’s velocity have inspired the unhurried pace of the
longest such ode is Seven Fragments for Georges M´eli`es (2003,

142 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

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 ϫ 91⁄4 in. (27.5 ϫ 23.5 cm), edition of 33 (artwork
© William Kentridge; photograph provided by William
Kentridge studio)

5 Kentridge, page from Receiver, New York: Dieu Donne´ Press, reader of Marchepied (Fig. 6). So the image Marchepied ap-
with Galamander Press, 2006, photogravure, 14 ϫ 111⁄4 in. pears to abstractly represent Kentridge’s studio wanderings,
(35.5 ϫ 28.5 cm), edition of 50 (artwork © William Kentridge; and at the same time, the artist himself ritualistically reenacts
photograph provided by William Kentridge studio) the personae of his ambulatory readers years after their pro-
duction.
films.14 Imaging himself working/walking as he does in
M´eli`es, Kentridge valorizes the centrality of his studio peram- But why might Kentridge fancifully model himself on this
bulations; like Bruce Nauman in his own Beckett Walk, the stooped bibliophile? An intellectual? A person of the book? A
work becomes the walk, or what Kentridge describes as “a wandering Jew? As quixotic as such notions might seem, this
one-person procession.”15 distinctive image of the reading walker is in fact based on a
memory of the artist’s grandfather standing in synagogue,
Kentridge doubles himself in the M´eli`es films, diffusing into holding an open prayer book and swaying rhythmically in
clones that intimate the psychic splits that rend his projec- prayer (a repetitive movement that must have gradually
tions and that enable him to interact—and eventually to morphed into a step). “When else do you hold a book open
argue—with his increasingly obstreperous self-portrait dou- in two hands like that. . . . ?” Kentridge asked me rhetorically,
bles. Melting into the body of his drawn character (Fig. 8), it as if prayer were the primary context intimated by these
is as if the artist is rehearsing the porousness between the rituals of walking.16
performance and its trace, or between his own body and its
representation (Fig. 10). Whether mirroring his reflection as When else indeed? Perhaps in a lecture-performance at the
he poses with charcoal and chamois (Fig. 10) or holding the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in March 2010 (Fig. 11).
charged icon of the open book, which he contemplates with On this occasion, another public presentation of the artist’s
similar absorption, as he catches a pile of flying texts (Figs. 9, working process—this time an absurdist rendition of his os-
11), Kentridge’s poses, replete with the silhouette-like shad- tensibly chaotic modus operandi of designing and directing
ows of his Portage series, self-consciously recall the engrossed 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

143W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E

7 Kentridge, Portage, 2000, collage
of torn black paper on encyclopedia
pages, 107⁄8 ϫ 1661⁄2 in. (27.5 ϫ
423 cm) (artwork © William
Kentridge; photograph provided by
William Kentridge studio)

8 Kentridge, stills from Feats of
Prestidigitation, 5 minutes, 10 seconds,
from Seven Fragments for Georges M´eli`es,
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 M´eli`es (artwork
© William Kentridge; photographs
provided by William Kentridge studio)

Silhouetted against the stage wall, his head inclined toward 10 Kentridge, still from Invisible Mending, 1 minute, 30
the open book in his hands, Kentridge seamlessly slipped into seconds, 16mm film with live action and animated drawing,
the visual guise of his iconic bibliophilic marcher. This string transferred to video and DVD, from Seven Fragments for Georges
of formal repetitions and exchanges—ricocheting between M´eli`es (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by
film and drawing, between live performance of artistic pro- William Kentridge studio)
cess and torn paper silhouette—proposes Marchepied as a
virtual likeness of the artist walking/working, insinuating time it is a panther, restlessly circling its cramped quarters in
Kentridge’s ambulating male reader as an embodiment of his Zeno Writing (2002, Fig. 12). Operating both at the register of
own peripatetic studio operations. narrative and as a self-conscious tribute to the artist’s ambu-
latory process, the charcoal drawing used to create this se-
Kentridge’s deployment of walking at the Museum of Mod- quence remains veined with red numerical notations (Fig.
ern Art lecture on his process also recovered one of the 13). Two horizontal rows of ascending numbers crisscross the
artist’s first public renditions of his working methods from paper, ciphers of Kentridge’s every lap across the studio,
nearly twenty years earlier. In this unusual instance in 1991, which indicate how he has charted each of the panther’s
Kentridge was an artist-in-residence in Cape Town’s South steps in order to graphically drag him across the page, and
African National Gallery, where he was expected to work in back again. These digits, used by the artist to count out
the public galleries. All too aware that “Making a drawing is “step-by-step” frames (and, significantly, retained for us to
not a very exciting spectator sport,”18 Kentridge began to see), enumerate the panther’s progressive strides. Yet
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 tech-
nicalities 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 se-
quence that once more tethers the artist’s own animalian
“stalking” of his drawing to the image of a pacing beast. This

144 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

11 Kentridge, I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, lecture/ drawn characters in the studio by acting out poses and ges-
performance on the making of The Nose, Museum of Modern tures. His 1997 suite of Ubu Tells the Truth prints are based, for
Art, New York, March 2010 (artwork © William Kentridge; instance, on photographs of the artist dancing before a mir-
photograph provided by William Kentridge studio) ror and cycling around the studio (Fig. 14). In such mo-
ments, Kentridge slips among the traditional theatrical no-
through these numerical residues the artist also underscores tion of playing a part; the performative self-fashioning of
how each incremental shift of the panther’s limbs is com- playing with identities; and the ludic antics of the madcap
mensurate with one of his own, how every movement of and ludicrous that pepper the M´eli`es films. On another occa-
the animal’s position mandates that he, too, trot back to the sion, reading aloud from Samuel Beckett’s 1963 script for
camera. These somatic slippages point once more to the Play, Kentridge himself parsed these collapsible boundaries
cultivated porousness between Kentridge’s walking body and via Beckett’s deft intertwining of the theatrical and ludic.21
those of his pacing characters, evoking a performative col-
lapse of padding feet that echoes through the artist’s recur- Word plays—not unlike Beckett’s double entendres—are
rent imagery of walking animals—and walking figures, too. no less central to Kentridge’s working methods than corpo-
real play. Kentridge frequently engages language to generate
Kentridge’s partnered strides with his panther indicate not ideas, displaying his trust in what he terms the “fortuna” of
merely how walking structures his animation process, it also the unconscious and free association, as he toys with rhymes,
illuminates how the artist frequently inhabits the skin of his palindromes, and words with onetime shared roots that have
drawn characters—whether as Ubu Roi, Soho Eckstein, Felix strayed apart.22 To this end, he has inscribed prints with such
Teitelbaum, or in one of his many self-portraits—in ways that unlikely textual pairings as “amnesty/amnesia,” “history/hys-
suggest fluid boundaries between his body and theirs. As in teria,” and “panic/picnic.” This playful impulse, which lies at
the Cape Town galleries in 1991, the M´eli`es films a decade the heart of Kentridge’s process, manifests itself partly in
later, and his 2010 performance of The Nose in New York, Kentridge’s willingness to pursue what Jacques Derrida has
where Kentridge again employed walking to play the role of called the “friendship” between words.23 Interviewing with
an artist at work, publicly staging the intricacies of his solitary the art historian Angela Breidbach while he sketched dia-
art-making practice, he continues to assume the parts of his grams 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 “proces-
sion” 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, Kent-
ridge observes:

On the one hand I am wary of the particularly Anglo-
Saxon 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, inau-
thentic. 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 other-
wise not have been evident.25

Rescuing Origins: The Processions of 1989
“Rescuing the origin” of Kentridge’s animation process in-
volves 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 mean-
ings and political specificities tend to be deemphasized. In
Rosalind Krauss’s authoritative genealogy, for example, she

145W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E

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)

13 Kentridge, Untitled, 2001, drawing
from Zeno Writing, detail showing red
annotation and registration marks
calibrating each frame of the
animation process, charcoal on paper,
311⁄2 ϫ 475⁄8 in. (79 ϫ 120 cm).
Private collection (artwork © William
Kentridge; photograph provided by
William Kentridge studio)

situates Kentridge’s process against Sergei Eisenstein’s writ- 14 Kentridge, Ubu Tells the Truth, Scene 7, 1997, hard-ground,
ings and Stanley Cavell’s nonnormative definitions of me- soft-ground, aquatint, drypoint, and engraving, 103⁄8 ϫ 117⁄8 in.
dium to argue that with his innovative process, Kentridge (26.3 ϫ 30 cm) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph
“invents” a medium.26 Krauss’s reading is groundbreaking, provided by William Kentridge studio)
casting the artist as the paradigm of her “postmedium” con-
dition; yet other kinds of relationships, such as that between Within weeks of the procession’s debut in Johannesburg,
the postmedium and the postapartheid— between Kent- Kentridge had reprised an unruly version of it in a pair of
ridge’s unusual animation practice and South Africa’s polit- monumental charcoal drawings: Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch
ical change—fall beyond the sphere of her interests. And Up, Even Surpass (Fig. 1), along with a pendant arc drawing,
these are crucial questions. For Kentridge’s art in general, Arc/Procession: Smoke, Ashes, Fable (1990), which hangs in the
and his process in particular, are deeply embedded in the stairwell of the artist’s Johannesburg home (Fig. 16). From
shifting histories of South Africa, rendering extraordinarily this point on, processions paraded through Kentridge’s work,
timely the work of an artist whose anachronistic imagery and marching through the animated films Sobriety, Obesity and
hand-wrought methods are usually understood as untimely in Growing Old (1991), Felix in Exile (1994), and Stereoscope
one way or another. Jogged out of time and out of place by (1998 –99, Fig. 17). Moving crowds made appearances in
numerous critics, Kentridge has often had to reiterate, “In Monument (1990), Mine (1991), and Ubu Tells the Truth
the end all the work I do is about Johannesburg,” the city he (1997), morphing into an unusually aggressive mob in the
swears is “impossible to escape.”27 Like his protagonist Felix artist’s most recent film, Other Faces (2011). Processions also
Teitelbaum, Kentridge remains a willing “Captive of the took form in a variety of other media: not only drawings,
City,” the man-made, crime-ridden garden of Johannesburg prints, and illustrated books (as in Procession on Anatomy of
where he and two generations of Kentridges before him have Vertebrates, 2000) but also projected shadows, video (Shadow
lived and worked.28

Restoring Kentridge’s novel working methods to their or-
igin 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 pro-
cessions 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 plod-
ding through Kentridge’s work ever since. Here I probe the
logic of this temporal conjunction: for it is hardly coinciden-
tal 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 ex-
ternalizing the kinetics of his own practice, that is to say,
transmuting— or projecting— his own striding body into im-
ages of striding bodies. This form of self-projection was at
least one of the resonances intimated by the series’ witty title:
Drawings for Projection.

146 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

15 Kentridge, Untitled, 1989, drawing from Johannesburg, 2nd artist knowingly exploits, no doubt partially accounting for
Greatest City after Paris, charcoal on paper, 41 ϫ 597⁄8 in. his frequent animated processions. However, the matter
(104 ϫ 152 cm). Private collection, Johannesburg (artwork surely does not end there, with the pragmatics of conve-
© William Kentridge; photograph provided by William nience, if only because Kentridge’s numerous processions in
Kentridge studio) the wide range of other media detailed above troubles an
explanation of mere formal ease. Moreover, the persistence
Procession, 2000, and Zeno at 4AM, 2001), and torn paper of these images over a period of two decades points to deeper
silhouettes (Portage, 2000, and Stair Procession, 2000, Fig. 18). alliances than the technical suitability that the artist himself
Kentridge shifted to the medium of bronze for his tabletop initially imputed to his processional imagery.
Bridge Procession (2001) and for the twenty-six sculptures that
comprise Procession (2000) monumental renditions of which The multimedia spate of processions that emerged in 1989
grace Johannesburg’s Nedcorp building. For his Porter series alongside Kentridge’s recently invented animation process
(2006), the artist collaborated with Stevens Tapestry Studio, clearly signals an unprecedented type of imagery in the art-
Johannesburg, to have his “porters” walk through—and, in a ist’s oeuvre. Leafing through piles of his drawings made
nod to his medium, to walk imaginatively on— handwoven before this landmark year, one finds a notable dearth of
tapestries. crowds, processions, or even walking figures. Indeed, the
drawings and prints spanning the late 1970s through the late
By 2003, Kentridge had explicitly tied together the walking 1980s are wholly devoid of the thematics of the human body
central to his process and imagery of walking figures and in motion that has come to distinguish Kentridge’s work.
processions, as he paced around his studio for most of an
hour in Seven Fragments for Georges M´eli`es (Figs. 8 –10). His While animated movement remains largely incipient be-
films Day for Night and Journey to the Moon (2003) feature fore 1989, confined to the register of graphic handling and
repeated close-ups of Kentridge’s wife Anne striding forth, terse composition, there is a single drawing in which a walk-
while processions of moving ants flowing together form the ing figure appears: a 1987 charcoal after Antoine Watteau’s
silhouette of a walking figure (Fig. 19). And another shadow Embarkation for Cythera (1719), similarly titled Embarkation.
procession, this time performing a South African rendition of Here, Kentridge retained Watteau’s subject of a departure
a Russian folk dance, along with archival film clips of crowds (or arrival), along with his iconography of a meandering line
pouring down St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect in the 1920s, of people walking as a means to portray it, although he
graced Kentridge’s recent opera The Nose (2010), suggesting simplified the original picturesque groupings into a profile
that Kentridge’s unbroken stream of processionists shows no view of four men descending onto a platform. Clonelike
sign of abating. projections of the same character, three of the men have
their noses buried in a book, and the fourth stares down at
At a technical level, Kentridge recognized very quickly that the spotted hyena leading them (Fig. 20).31 “So the walking
drawing a crowd was optimally suited to his newly developed figure begins with Embarkation?” I confirmed. “Yes,” Kent-
process of animation, for each person is rendered with a ridge responded, “but he only really gets going with the
single mark: “As more marks are added, so the crowd animation.”32
emerges. The crowds draw themselves,” he commented in
1994.30 A procession, of course, is simply a crowd on the The engrossed figure of Embarkation, whom Kentridge
move. Since processions can be incrementally augmented— identifies by his distinctive “two-handed holding of a book,”33
and therefore easily adjusted to make a line of people appear returns us to the walking reader of Marche/Marchepied, for he
to move forward or back—they ideally conform to the limi- is the prototype for the recurring bibliophile of Vertical Time,
tations, while maximizing the possibilities, of Kentridge’s Stair Procession (Fig. 21) and numerous other parades. This
particular mode of animation. This concordance between reader would in fact come to signal an embarkation of an-
subject matter and technique produces an affinity that the other sort for the artist—a venture into the poetics of walk-
ing. In this way, the walking reader stands as an originary
figure on more than one count: as the foundational proces-
sionist 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 Kent-
ridge’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

147W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E

16 Kentridge, Arc/Procession: Smoke,
Ashes, Fable, 1990, charcoal and
colored pencil on paper, 70 ϫ 1511⁄4
in. (177.8 ϫ 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 ϫ 471⁄4 in. (80 ϫ
120 cm). Private collection (artwork
© William Kentridge; photograph
provided by William Kentridge studio)

investigating movement through space alongside change drawn and filmed animation process he would come to de-
through time. Repeated with slight modifications on succes- velop a full decade later. However, it was a second experi-
sive pages of a notepad, the flip book’s images, stacked in a ment with animation in the early 1980s that directly prefig-
pile, appear to move when one thumbs through it; hence, the ured his subsequent processional imagery. In this instance,
term Daumenkino (thumb cinema) is given to this rudimen- he drew directly on a long, thin strip of film with an archi-
tary precinematic cognate of animation.35 Kentridge’s film in tect’s drafting pen, repeating a “tiny stick figure . . . a thou-
turn revisited an earlier little flip book that he had made as sand times, each image on a successive frame of film” (Fig.
an adolescent in the late 1960s, a simple paper pad of con- 22).36 Unlike the flip pad, which after an excited flurry settles
secutive drawings in which the ghost of one image chased the down with only its top image visible, this animation, titled A
next from page to page. Lecture on a Chair, assumed the visual format of a minuscule
procession: an elongated rectangular strip containing tiny
Kentridge’s 1979 combination of film with the drawn flip boxes housing a figure in each.37
book served as an important technical precedent to the

148 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

18 Kentridge, Vertical Time/Stair
Procession, 2000, site-specific
installation of black paper collage.
PS1, New York (artwork © William
Kentridge; photograph provided by
William Kentridge studio)

19 Kentridge, still from Day for Night, 2003, 35mm film with This transformative notion of form would come to fa-
drawing and photography, transferred to video and DVD, mously characterize the liquid aesthetics of Kentridge’s films,
7 minutes (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph wherein objects fluidly metamorphose from cats into gas
provided by William Kentridge studio) masks, from smoke rings to typewriters.39 But more than that,
the gradual alterations of form seen in the pilot animations
In formal terms, this last attenuated, paradelike animation indicate how Kentridge’s attraction to the medium has always
portends the artist’s first major drawing of a procession, been rooted in animation’s capacity to communicate
Arc/Procession (Fig. 2) from 1990, in key ways. It, too, images change—what Steven Henry Madoff poetically calls “the ruth-
the movements of a standing figure, each rendition of which lessness. . . . or the wolf of change.”40 These early experi-
is sequestered in a separate frame, with every rectangle of the ments in which forms morph from one into another—as if
film strip composing a segment of a larger horizontal whole metaphorically enacting their pasts and their futures, as Kent-
rather than a finite piece in itself. In these early experiments, ridge puts it— hint at a larger epistemology of flux and
the drawn image is already neither static nor immutable, but becoming: a world that is always jittery with movement. The
rather embedded in a larger process as one moment in a observation often made about Kentridge’s work that every-
series of potentially constantly changing images. Kentridge thing seems to move, so that even solid bronze sculptures
explains this elastic, radically unstable view of form: appear caught in flight, reveals more than mere formal pref-
erences. It reflects a deep-seated desire to portray a world in
I think it makes it easier to draw a table if you understand continuous fluid motion.
that table as an intermediary stage between the tree, the
factory, its moment in the room in front of you and its Animation’s ability to articulate formal change allows it to
future, as it were. . . . Particularly in animation, I’m ready describe such a dynamic epistemology of perpetual transfor-
for the removal of the table, for that transformation, from mation, to gesture to a world peopled less by fixed objects
that moment in which it’s there but understanding that in than by forms that may appear stable but that trail with them
the next moment, it will be different or gone.38 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 philo-
sophical 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-

149W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E

20 Kentridge, left panel of Embarkation, 1987, charcoal and 21 Kentridge, “Walking Reader,” from Vertical Time/Stair
pastel on paper, 491⁄4 ϫ 321⁄4 in. (125 ϫ 82 cm). Standard Procession. PS1, New York (artwork © William Kentridge;
Bank Collection, Johannesburg (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)
photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)
22 Kentridge, Untitled, 2006, ink and pencil on paper showing
tory: “What history taught me was to understand the world as Kentridge’s second animation, A Lecture on a Chair (1979).
a process that continues to change with time through move- Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph
ments. Everything moves as the world keeps on moving. From provided by Angela Breidbach)
this perspective, animation becomes a good metaphor for
history.”42 With this last phrase, Kentridge links formal tumultuous months formed part of a much larger arc of
change in general—and his own process of drawn animation change engulfing the country. As one local woman summed
in particular—with the issue of historical change. The gov- it up at the time, “For most of our lives time stood still. I
erning principle of his unique animation process is to create mean, for twenty-five years nothing changed, and now sud-
a visual medium that articulates alterations through time: it is denly everything is changing.”43
a process of change. Kentridge’s abiding interest in the proces-
sion is similarly bound up with its potential to formally com- 1989 and the Politics of Change
municate transformation—it is an image of change. It is due to In this way, the “origin” of Kentridge’s unusual animation
the capabilities of both of these elements to chart transfor- process was inextricably linked to the radical political trans-
mation that Kentridge’s process is so caught up in images of formation that began that historic year of 1989, the turning
processions. point in South African history, when after four decades of

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

150 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

More salient to an art historical analysis, however, was that
the political and visual form in which this transitional mo-
ment 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 trans-
formed 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 dem-
onstrated 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-apart-
heid march in Cape Town on 13 September 1989, and
these have become the most visible symptom of the ad-
vance to the so-called “new” South Africa.49

23 UDF poster designed at a workshop at Crown Mines, After decades in which all public gatherings had been
Johannesburg, 1983 (photograph provided by the South banned under threat of arrest and imprisonment, such that a
African History Archive, Johannesburg, South Africa) politically engaged Johannesburger like Kentridge would re-
member the 1976 demonstrations as the last in living mem-
National Party rule, the structures of apartheid unexpected- ory, 1989 witnessed the emergence of the protest procession
ly—and rapidly— began to collapse. Finally, Nelson Mandela as the manifest sign of the impending regime change. But the
could assert, “Undoubtedly a change has taken place in speed with which the procession could so quickly come to
South Africa.”44 function thus was partly the result of its longtime use by
student and trade union organizations during apartheid.
Throughout the course of 1989, President P. W. Botha
began to transfer political power to F. W. de Klerk through a Throughout the 1980s, the procession circulated as the
series of groundbreaking legislative measures. These events symbol of democratic change in the rich visual culture of
commenced with Botha’s resignation as leader of the Na- posters and trade union materials. When the United Demo-
tional Party in February 1989 and his dissolution of Parlia- cratic Front (UDF), a network of grassroots community or-
ment in May, continued with his announcement of an un- ganizations loosely aligned with the African National Con-
scheduled general election and his meeting with Mandela in gress (ANC), was established in 1983, for example, its hastily
July 1989, and extended to his August resignation and de printed posters immediately, and repeatedly, featured a pro-
Klerk’s installation as interim leader. This rapid-fire series of cession shown frontally with an imposing UDF banner crest-
political changes culminated in the September 1989 elections ing back into the crowd (Fig. 23).50 However, particularly
and de Klerk’s installation as president. By the year’s end, de after the 1985 imposition of the state of emergency, such
Klerk had released key political prisoners and made a public representations were largely aspirational, drawing formally
commitment to ending forty-one years of apartheid.45 The on Cuban and Russian revolutionary poster prototypes and
historic series of events was immediately recognized in the yoking the image of the procession to liberties that at the
country.46 As early as 1990, a trio of South African historians time could only be imagined; they nonetheless primed the
could sum up a year of local newspaper editorials with the procession to operate after 1989 as a locally readable icon of
confident assertion, “The year 1989 will in future generations democratic change. One poster of the Congress of South
be known as the annus mirabilis . . . within the context of African Trade Unions (COSATU) from 1988, an elongated,
South African politics.”47 profile view of dark, marching silhouettes, particularly reso-
nates with Kentridge’s shadow processions of more than a
decade later (Fig. 24), gesturing to how the artist’s immer-
sion 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 enor-
mously symbolic march in decades took place in Cape Town
on Wednesday, September 13, 1989. Led by Archbishop Des-
mond Tutu, 35,000 South Africans marched through down-
town; 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

151W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E

24 Congress of South African Trade
Unions (COSATU) poster, 1988, 83⁄4
ϫ 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 Johan- an inventory of such temporal markers: curls of ascending
nesburg, Kentridge’s hometown. smoke, streams of flowing traffic, and swells of roiling water.
For Kentridge, his animation has always been “about time.”56
On Friday, September 15, 1989, “about 20,000 protestors, Movement, action delimited by time, is used in this initial
most of them black, but some white, walked and danced film to visually track its passing, with the principal moving
through the streets of downtown Johannesburg,” wrote one flow— or visual rendering of the advance of time— being the
foreign journalist.51 Proceeding from St. Mary’s Anglican film’s several processions. Snaking its way through the East
Church on Eloff Street to the infamous central police station Rand landscape to address the gluttonous Soho, the proces-
on John Vorster Square, the protesters presented a petition sion of Johannesburg billows gradually forward, rippling char-
to end police repression. William Kentridge was walking in coal lines across a milky white field before departing into the
that throng, wielding a canvas banner of his drawing Casspirs horizon at the film’s end (Fig. 15). The ticking of time is
Full of Love above his head.52 “It was astonishing,” he re- equally emphasized aurally, through such conceits as the
counted to me, “what we’d been waiting for all these years.”53 crescendoing rumble of an approaching train and radiating
A mere ten days later, back in the studio, he was at work on lines of sound impelling outward.
studies for a new drawing: Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up,
Even Surpass, sketching figures who stumble and dance into Johannesburg thematizes temporality from another angle,
the new democracy (Fig. 33).54 too: via the clanging keys of a typewriter that belches letters
across a page in fitful spasms. Spotlighted here is a sequential
In addition to ubiquitous photographs of processions that readerly vision, coaxing the eye to scan an image like a text,
filled the newly liberalized South African press, Kentridge’s so that one’s gaze sweeps directionally through space and
physical involvement in the historic September procession incrementally through time. The temporality prompted by a
endows his images of processions that soon followed with the viewing practice of this sort reflects the artist’s ideal that
lived memory of his own processing body, thereby entangling “arriving at the image is a process, not a frozen instant.”57
his performative syntax of walking in a personal poetics of Such a gradual mode of “reading” a picture from left to right
protest. It was in this milieu that the animation process is, of course, akin to the drawn-out viewing process de-
Kentridge had been experimenting with since the mid-1980s manded by the simplest processional friezes dating back to
assumed timely and unprecedented resonances: just as the antiquity. Typically framed in an elongated horizontal format
procession proposed itself as the defining image of change, that accentuates the image’s directional mandate, this is the
so, too, Kentridge’s stop-motion animation process proffered attenuation of form that Kentridge’s earliest drawn anima-
itself as the exemplary medium with which to chart the tion on a filmstrip quoted, for the temporality encoded in the
country’s ongoing metamorphosis. It was in Kentridge’s first ancient processional frieze has long been understood as an
Drawings for Projection film, Johannesburg, that these two archaic precursor to the temporality of film.
elements came together for the first time.
Like Johannesburg, the versions of Arc/Procession on which
The Temporality of Change: Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City Kentridge was concurrently working in late 1989 conjoin
after Paris imagery of moving figures with a temporalized mode of view-
One of Kentridge’s earliest drawings of a procession, Smoke, ing. (Kentridge has explained that he used the format of an
Ashes, Fable (1990, Fig. 16), was titled after a line from Hero- arch for the drawings and rendered them large so as to
dotus that speaks to the inevitable passage of time and disso- prevent their being apprehended in a single glance.) Given
lution of form.55 This mournful temporality particularly in- the artist’s attention to the procession’s potential as a model
fuses Kentridge’s Zeno Writing (2001), where a slowly burning of temporal viewing, it is clear that from the inception of the
cigarette spirals smoky entrails delicately through the air. As Drawings for Projection series, Kentridge was summoning the
the camera lingers on the twisting fumes, filmic time pro- most ancient and outmoded of visual grammars to inscribe
tracts to a meditative crawl; the smoke here becomes an his processions as a kind of primordial cinema— one not
explicit metaphor for the languid passing of time. This scene dissimilar to the primitive flip book. In this sense, the pro-
graphically thematizes the temporal dynamics that Kentridge cessions operate in much the same way as the artist’s techni-
had been working to foreground from the onset of the cally rudimentary, notoriously outmoded, seemingly anach-
Drawings for Projection series. Indeed, Johannesburg features

152 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

25 Kentridge, Untitled, 1990, drawing
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 onist of this and other films, shuffling slowly across a barren
animation.” landscape, doubled over beneath an enormous burden. For
long drawn-out seconds, Harry’s bare feet fill the entire
Such a retrieval of the procession from the ancient lan- screen; painstakingly they step ahead, trawling palimpsestic
guage of Classical form would become explicit by 2001, when charcoal lines in their wake.
Kentridge rooted his film Shadow Procession in the Platonic
allegory’s stream of shadow figures.58 Thus extending the An adaptation of Beckett’s Catastrophe, Monument reprises
idea of the walking figure from a metaphor for his own Pygmalion thematics of stillness and animation that provide
animation process to proposing the larger medium of film as an apt template for Kentridge’s explorations of the play
rooted in a processional logic, Shadow Procession highlights between static and animated drawing. In the final scene, a
the origins of film as a moving “procession” of images.59 vast crowd throngs forward to surround the cloaked monu-
Dialoguing with Plato’s parable of precinematic viewing, with ment. As the statue is revealed to be the walking man, Harry,
its seated audience transfixed by the play of light and shadow still bent double beneath the massive burden on his back,
in the darkened space of the cave, Kentridge re-created his Kentridge lingers on an image of Harry’s feet, now shackled,
own parade of shadow figures, who, as in Plato’s original, before slowly panning up to his face. In this film Kentridge
proceed from left to right, carrying an assortment of objects. employs two other media—sculpture and theater—to think
In this way, Kentridge anchors his distinctive animation pro- through his new animation process, using images of feet
cess in the foundational procession of Western epistemology, walking or manacled to play with contrasts of movement and
one whose figures have functioned for millennia as an iconic stasis, the mobile and statuesque, animation and freezing.
metaphor for the processional character of thought—what
William James famously called the “stream of conscious- Far more drawn out than the temporality of Johannesburg,
ness”—as well as for the processional structure of narrative.60 the tortoiselike pace of Monument invokes not only the nar-
rative template of Catastrophe but also Beckett’s sluggish the-
“What there is of a narrative,” Kentridge states of Johannes- atrical time.63 Harry’s lead-footed walk calibrates the tempo-
burg, “was evolved backwards and forwards from the first key rality of this animated sequence. Time is not so much marked
images—the procession through the wasteland, the fish in here as slowed, or “thickened,” as Mikhail Bakhtin would say,
the hand.”61 Structurally, this backward and forward trot of and as Kentridge himself would come to characterize his own
the film’s narrative mimics both Kentridge’s studio pacings— slow process.64 Harry’s belabored movement, along with the
his “stalking the drawing, or walking backwards and for- time-consuming shadowy trails of drawing he drags behind
wards. . . .”62—and the pattern of advance and retreat of the him, summon the time- and labor-intensive quality of Kent-
foundational procession of Johannesburg, which streams for- ridge’s drawing process: Harry’s feet and Kentridge’s hands
ward through the barren landscape to confront the white- perform a step-by-step demonstration of drawing as dragging.
bibbed and lip-smacking Soho Eckstein before turning and The film’s spun-out temporality, epitomized in the pro-
disappearing into the horizon. Exceeding a logic of narrative tracted progress of Harry’s walk, pulls the normally speedy
continuity, Johannesburg stands as a processional stream of medium of animation into a gray area between drawing and
poetic sequences that remain disjunctive and unresolved. animation—as if to pose the question: When does animation
What narrative there is can therefore be best described as a become so slow it reverts back to drawing?
procession of disparate images, so that, in effect, the proces-
sional form itself becomes a substitute for, or usurpation of, Once more, Kentridge’s meditations on the temporality
narrative structure. and pace of his new process are enacted through the locus of
the human body in motion, as the artist implies another
Monument and the Step Forward series of metaphoric conjunctions between his own working/
In Kentridge’s second film of the Drawings for Projection walking body and that of Harry’s. Krauss highlights the struc-
series, Monument (1990), he not merely focuses on the walk- tural similarity between Kentridge’s studio pacings and the
ing body as it proceeds across the filmic screen but homes in back and forth foot traffic that Beckett play’s thematizes.65
on a protracted performance of a pair of feet wearily advanc- Particularly because Kentridge himself performed Beckett’s
ing (Fig. 25). The film opens with Harry, the central protag- role of the peripatetic director in a 1984 production of
Catastrophe, the mobile transitions possible between the the-

153W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E

26 Photograph from the back cover of Nelson Mandela, Long 27 Alexander Joe, press photograph of Nelson Mandela on
Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, New York: the day of his release from prison, February 11, 1990
Little, Brown, 1994 (photograph by Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images)

matics of content and the performance of process are once Mandela’s car was surrounded by thousands of people as it
more suggested. crawled through the crush of crowds into Cape Town. Tens
of thousands more were gathered at City Hall in a mass public
Harry’s walking scene in Monument is politically timely, too: display that would have been banned six months prior: “a
his slow, encumbered trudge forward stages an image of boundless sea of people cheering, holding flags and banners,
history as a grueling trajectory that is exemplified in the title clapping and laughing,” Mandela remembers.70 This throng
of Mandela’s famous autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. of citizens is the same public of the “new” South Africa that
The book’s back cover, depicting a photograph of a minus- fills Kentridge’s films of the early 1990s. The central role
cule Mandela advancing down a long dusty path on the accorded them in both Mandela’s description and Kent-
Robben Island prison where he spent so many decades, visu- ridge’s films of the period speaks to the historical specificity
ally underscores this conceit of history as an arduous journey of the South African situation as one of the few instances in
(Fig. 26).66 While characterizations of personal and national recent history where decades of grassroots action, carried out
history as a road are a staple of Western literature, the literary by a popular democratic movement of enormous mass and
and visual tropes of the “step forward,” the “long walk,” and power, succeeded in bringing down an oppressive govern-
the “march to freedom” as images of change were particularly ment and implementing regime change. These are the peo-
potent in South Africa in 1989 and early 1990, when Kent- ple whom Mandela addressed as collaborators in a shared
ridge drew Monument. Mandela’s famous walk to freedom, a journey toward freedom that first night of his release, telling
highly orchestrated international media event, was figured in the crowds, “The sight of freedom looming on the horizon
text and image, in newspapers and on television, as the should encourage us to redouble our efforts . . . to return to
foundational journey of the new democracy: his first steps to the barricades, to intensify the struggle, and we would walk
freedom became the nation’s first steps; his walk became the the last mile together.”71 This ongoing walk, an acting out on
visual icon of the regime change. foot of the political process—as much communal pilgrimage
from bondage as a performance of civil liberties— became
Within South Africa, Mandela’s exit from Victor Verster concretized from metaphor to lived reality in the mass pro-
Prison on February 11, 1990, seemed to arrest time, as the cessions of 1989. In the ensuing months, in hundreds of local
entire country paused and crowded around television marches, Mandela’s own “last mile” walk to freedom was
screens, waiting through hours and hours of delays to view reenacted time and again in the rumble of pounding feet and
the momentous physical and metaphoric crossing of a thresh- the deafening roars of “Amandla! Awethu!” (Power! To the
old—a symbolic junction between past and future that would People!).
be obsessively replayed by the media in the following months
and years (Fig. 27).67 In Long Walk to Freedom, over the course “Walking the last mile together” was a turn of phrase
of several pages, Mandela describes his performative journey Mandela frequently employed in interviews of the early
toward liberty, which was scripted by the ANC and the gov- 1990s. For example, in a 1992 documentary made for South
ernment-run media for maximum symbolic impact:68 African cable television, he affirmed, “We are traveling the
last mile, and there may be difficulties, there may be crises, but
A well-known SABC presenter . . . requested that I get out the writing is definitely on the wall, and the days of this
of the car a few hundred feet before the [prison] gate so government are numbered.”72 Concluding the half-hour doc-
that they could film me walking toward freedom. . . . umentary, this forceful quote marries Mandela’s hallmark
About a quarter of a mile in front of the gate, the car persona as aging prophet of the people trudging through the
slowed to a stop and Winnie and I got out and began to desert of apartheid with the biblical prediction of Babylonian
walk toward the prison gate . . . I raised my right fist and
there was a roar . . . as I finally walked through those
gates. . . .69

154 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

28 Still from The Last Mile: Mandela, Africa and Democracy, 29 Kentridge, Untitled, 1991, drawing from the animated film
written and directed by Tom Carver, M-Net, 1992 (photo- Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old, charcoal on paper, 271⁄2 ϫ
graph © M-Net, provided by Bob Link, Advanced Video Data 393⁄8 in. (70 ϫ 100 cm). Private collection (artwork © William
Service, Fairfield, Ohio)
Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

doom. Moreover, Mandela’s statement is editorially stitched processions surged through the streets.”75 Historical data on
between footage of street processions and singer Youssou the resurgence of processions at this time corroborates the
n’Dour’s assessment of postcolonial African democracy as artist’s memory, as well as his association of processions with
powered by the mass action of citizens demonstrating in the political freedom.
streets. N’Dour calls this a “system of refusal” and rightly
identifies it with Mandela’s political legacy of street proces- In a country where gatherings of more than eleven people
sions.73 Then, on the heels of Mandela’s statement, a telling at a time had been illegal since the 1960s, the spectacle of the
series of images flash in quick succession: a motorcade sudden emergence of the public procession cannot be suffi-
streams down a busy concourse; crowds stamp out the toyi- ciently underscored. Public processions and the political re-
toyi dance of revolution in a broad thoroughfare; rowdy sistance they have long expressed were, moreover, indelibly
processions throng urban streets; and Mandela walks sedately tied to some of apartheid’s most violent episodes.76 Time and
out into the crowd. Then the credits roll. again, peaceful processions initiated as part of the ANC’s
early program of passive resistance had turned into scenes of
Given the resonance of the stride forward in Mandela’s mass murder—most tragically during the 1960 Sharpeville
public image, it is unsurprising that the producers selected massacre; then again in 1976, when police opened fire on
this iconic imagery as their summary snapshots of the period black children walking through the streets of Soweto. Kent-
or that they chose to title the documentary The Last Mile: ridge quotes both these tragic carnages in his film Ubu Tells
Mandela, Africa and Democracy. But more than simply speaking the Truth, juxtaposing archival photographs of the historic
to the widespread association of Mandela as a savior on foot, Johannesburg demonstrations with bleeding corpses and an-
this particular rhetorical conjunction leads straight back to other kind of march: a row of military boots pounding the
the centrality of images of walking for Kentridge in the early pavement.77 The Soweto incident, in particular, which had
1990s, for it was he who served as assistant producer of this been organized by the South African Students’ Movement
film.74 Kentridge was among those who so clearly understood (SASM), provoked outrage among liberal white South Afri-
the visual impact and timely political resonance of the met- cans, and the day after the police killings, on June 17, 1976,
aphoric string: the step, the walk, the last mile. Kentridge was one of the leaders of a student march staged in
protest of the massacre, which was chased by police and
The video footage preceding Mandela’s concluding eventually dispersed.78
quote—a feisty procession that streams through city streets,
wedged between two large buildings and wielding enormous In the wake of the international outcry incited by Sharpe-
banners (Fig. 28)—must have infiltrated Kentridge’s mental ville and Soweto, the South African government effectively
archive as well. For this signal image stands as uncanny banned all public gatherings and processions through a se-
double to the artist’s drawn rendition of the procession in ries of progressively authoritarian legislative measures.79
Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991, Fig. 29) and other These laws, as well as the ANC’s realization by the early 1960s
films. In this way, the processions advancing through Kent- that in the face of government brutality its passive-resistance
ridge’s early Drawings for Projection films function as snap- marches needed to shift to more muscular measures, ensured
shots of current history or allegorical representations of the that processions, political or otherwise, were outlawed in the
tides of political change then engulfing the country. Kent- country for nearly three decades.
ridge noted that “these images of crowds emerged in my work
in 1989, the year of the start of the political thaw in South The absolute prohibition on processions during apartheid
Africa when, for the first time in my memory, huge political was deeply symbolic of the apartheid regime’s inability to

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tolerate the political dissent that defines a democracy. For unity they sing all find their echo in the South African protest
this reason, de Klerk’s granting of permission for the Sep- marches of the early 1990s. But if the masses’ revelling pro-
tember 1989 Cape Town march to proceed was recognized as cession through the streets has well-established associations
an enormously meaningful symbol of a promised regime with political revolution, it has equally deep significance as a
change that had heretofore been largely rhetorical.80 Man- marker of freedom, specifically from slavery and racial prej-
dela, watching events from prison, and himself only six udice, as evidenced by emancipation parades throughout the
months from release, noted that the Cape Town march indi- Americas that in turn reach back to African rituals of masked
cated that “A new and different hand was on the tiller.”81 processions.91
Indeed, insofar as freedom of assembly is recognized as a
fundamental human right, the government’s unbanning of In South Africa itself, such connections were firmly in
processions at the pivotal juncture of late 1989 was widely place, with the local abolition of slavery in 1834 long cele-
understood as the sign of the shifting political climate. With brated with a famous emancipation procession known as
much fanfare, the “right of assembly and procession” would Tweede Nuwe Jaar (Second New Year), performed annually
eventually be written into the new South African constitution, on January 2. Even as this symbolic date records historical
as it has been in several other recent postcolonial constitu- emancipation, it underscores how processions frequently
tions, making the procession richly symbolic of South Africa’s mark a temporal cleavage between legal states or political
transition to democracy.82 regimes: between slavery and freedom, or between apartheid
and democracy. In this way, the advance of the procession
Revolution and Procession signals, paradoxically, a moment of temporal arrest or stop-
The association of the procession with political change, and page—a revolutionary break in time not unlike the moment
with the fervor of the revolutionary process itself, dates back of Mandela’s release, or the recurring images of frozen clocks
to the French Revolution, when the religious processional of in Kentridge’s work of this transitional period.92 Like the
the Catholic Church was transformed into a secular civic resetting of the French Revolutionary calendar, the Second
ritual that flourished in the post-Revolutionary period.83 His- New Year procession stages a ritual of change, encoding a
torians agree that since 1789, processions “have been inti- distinct and symbolic temporality that speaks to the transgres-
mately connected with the revolutionary process.”84 The 1989 sive potential of the procession.93
bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution—pre-
cisely at the time of South Africa’s own political transition— While Kentridge’s crowds denote regime change, enabling
made the Gallic context particularly proximate: journalists him to portray the emergent public of postapartheid South
drew comparisons between France and South Africa, spoke of Africa, he refers to them as a “procession of the dispossessed,”
“storming the Bastille,”85 or complained that the “Bastille was thereby alluding to the historical dispossessions of South
not stormed.”86 Mandela, as noted, advocated a “return to Africa’s indigenous inhabitants. In a country with centuries of
the barricades,”87 while at least one major government com- bitter territorial struggles, the filmic procession’s progressive
mission, Reshada Crouse’s monumental mural for Johannes- advance over the South African landscape performs a sym-
burg’s Nelson Mandela Theatre, recast Euge`ne Delacroix’s bolic repossession of space, employing the walking body to
Liberty on the Barricades with a South African “Liberty” march- performatively reclaim terrain violently seized by British,
ing at the head of a procession of freedom fighters. Dutch, and Afrikaans settlers. Such a use of the walking body
to patrol the land and rehearse contested land claims has
Kentridge, too, planned a work based on the figure of long precedents: throughout the twentieth century, Afrikan-
Liberty: Liberty Eckstein was to be the major character of his ers too engaged imagery of people and vehicles processing
film Mine (1991). Ultimately, however, Liberty was jettisoned; over the country to reinscribe their title to the land. Period-
Kentridge’s inability to incorporate her likely indicated his ically, actual processions of dozens of wagons would traverse
reluctance to embrace a symbol so celebratory of revolu- the country, retracing the foundational migration of the
tion.88 In any event, by then Kentridge had already signaled Great Trek, as on its centennial in 1938, for example, and
the French Revolution as a primary context for his work of again in 1988. In a 1988 photograph, for example, David
the period, having titled his first film, produced in the bicen- Goldblatt recorded how on this latter occasion concrete was
tennial year of 1989, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after poured in the path of the processional wagons to make
Paris.89 Here, the qualification of Kentridge’s hometown as permanent their otherwise ephemeral tracks through the
being “after Paris” emphasizes not merely temporal and aes- landscape. Claiming the land by obsessively marking it, and
thetic distance from the original modernist avant-gardes but by mounting real and symbolic processions over it, thus has a
also a profound political distance from the original revolu- long history in South Africa, as the emergence of Kentridge’s
tion in whose shadow all others fall. Paris and its ur-context of processions on the eve of the political transition confirms.
revolutionary change thus looms uneasily at the origin of
Kentridge’s Drawings for Projections series, tying together In Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991), the “procession
Johannesburg’s processions with their revolutionary Parisian of the dispossessed” again plays a major role, this time as an
precursors. urban procession surging through a Johannesburg rendered
as a midcentury metropolis, in an almost utopian moment
Kentridge’s procession in Johannesburg calls up later con- before the onset of apartheid (Fig. 29).94 Carrying large
texts of regime change, too, quoting the opening scene of banners and waving flags, the enormous crowd of Sobriety
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento, where socialists throng the reclaims the city built on black labor, marching through the
streets in a victorious postwar procession.90 The red socialist streets from which black South Africans were physically dis-
banners Bertolucci’s processionists wave and the songs of possessed by apartheid zoning laws. This time, the procession
seems to lay claim to what David Harvey calls “the right to the

156 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

30 Kentridge, Untitled, 1991, drawing from Sobriety, Obesity 31 Kentridge, study for Arc/Procession I, detail showing Harry
and Growing Old, charcoal on paper, 471⁄4 ϫ 59 in. (120 ϫ impaled, 1990, charcoal and pastel on paper, 413⁄8 ϫ 1181⁄8 in.
150 cm). Collection of the artist (artwork © William (105 ϫ 300 cm). Private collection (artwork © William
Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)
Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

city,” a revolutionary impulse he traces from the Paris Com- firmly establishes his processions as deeply ambiguous jour-
mune to the Occupy movements. Predicated on a seizing of neys, shot through with numerous obstacles and multiple
urban space from the hands of capital, the crowd demands reversals.
city and citizenship, and the right to shape both in the vision
of the “new” South Africa.95 Arc/Procession: “Walking to Utopia or Perdition. Or Both”
When Kentridge began work on the monumental Arc/Proces-
But if Kentridge’s processions enact a symbolic reposses- sion: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass in late 1989 (Fig. 1), his
sion, it is far from celebratory, for the land, like the people, landmark drawing confirmed the procession as antiteleol-
bears the scars of apartheid. Littered with the detritus of ogy.99 Once more harnessing the procession as the visual
abandoned gold-mining operations and heavy industry, the portent of the impending regime change, Kentridge por-
procession in Johannesburg moves through the profoundly trayed current history as a disorderly stampede into the fu-
dystopic landscape east of the city: “mine dumps and slime ture. Riffing parodically on myths of progress, miners and
dams; pylons and power cables; roads and tracks that lead revelers stagger along with apartheid’s victims, the crippled,
from nowhere to nowhere,” in J. M. Coetzee’s description.96 the homeless, and the displaced. Megaphones (an apartheid-
In Sobriety, moreover, Felix and Mrs. Eckstein occupy a picto- era symbol of labor strikes and trade union disputes), spurt-
rial space unrelated to the far-off procession (Fig. 30); later in ing showerheads, security fences, rolls of barbed wire, a can
the film, Soho contemplates the moving crowd through his of flame retardant, and the ladder of the “Fearless Security”
office window, similarly distanced physically and emotionally. company weave their way among the walking figures. At the
When the procession reaches Soho’s headquarters, confront- drawing’s center, hands raised and arms outstretched in cru-
ing him searchingly, his building becomes flooded, bloated, cifix form, is Harry, the man who leads the procession in
bursting with water until it crumbles from within: a resonant Johannesburg. He appears here as martyred for Marxist uto-
metaphor for both the collapse of the apartheid edifice and pianism—a point made unequivocally in a preparatory draw-
the role of the mass democratic movement in toppling it. So ing, where Harry is literally impaled on a model of Vladimir
even as Kentridge’s crowds salute this history, his work also Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (Fig. 31).
evinces the existing failures of communication between the
emergent, largely black, voting public of the new regime and That Arc/Procession is an extraordinarily timely image,
the insular world of affluent white South Africans, to whom rooted in the local politics of transition, is confirmed by
such a public often remains faceless. Despite the inclusive Kentridge’s 1991 reprisal of this same procession under the
discourse of the “rainbow nation” at this time of national title Procession of the Delegates (Fig. 32), where the procession-
reconfiguration, the film suggests that the country re- ists are identified as political emissaries ambling along to one
mained—and arguably still remains—irrevocably divided.97 of the numerous parliamentary negotiations that followed
Mandela’s release. Though Kentridge contracts the proces-
The communicative gulf separating the procession from sional form to engage the problematic of historical change in
the principal white protagonists, the scarred landscape of the all his works of the period, in Arc/Procession he registers
East Rand, and the backward-looking 1950s cityscape all com- greater ambivalence toward the oncoming transition than is
plicate any implication of the procession as a forward march evident in the processions of Johannesburg.100 Impugning the
of history in any Hegelian sense. While Kentridge therefore idea of advance as necessarily entailing progress, Arc/Proces-
adopts the rhetorical device of a step or a walk forward as a sion bears shadowy trails of the failed utopias of Communist
marker of political change—a semiritual transition between regime changes and is studded with ironic ladders leading
two worlds—it is neither as an index of progress nor as a path nowhere. To this end, another drawing of the period features
toward revelation or telos. Lest we imagine he is indicating a a large ladder that spells out bluntly: “this is not a step.”
progression from darkness to light—as the transition from
the colonial to the postcolonial is often figured98—Kentridge

157W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E

Meanwhile, the hyena, an African animal deeply associated 32 Kentridge, Procession of the Delegates, from the series Little
with ambiguity and corruption, presides over the scene.101 Morals, Kwazulu-Natal, S.A.: Caversham Press, 1991, etching
with sugar lift, 93⁄8 ϫ 121⁄2 in. (23.7 ϫ 31.8 cm) (artwork
Arc/Procession captures the energy and theatricality that © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William
often characterized political gatherings in apartheid-era Kentridge studio)
South Africa: the stamping sounds of the militant toyi-toyi
dance and the powerful group vocals of resistance-era music, utopianism it galvanized, could still inspire. Tatlin’s Monu-
forces that galvanized the crowd and publicized political ment to the Third International, which lingers in the early study
messages in the only “revolution fought in four-part har- Arc/Procession I, serves as a similar beacon of failed hopes. It
mony.”102 Ari Sitas, one of Kentridge’s colleagues from his registers as the dated utopianism of the modernist avant-
agitprop theater years, grounds Arc/Procession in precisely gardes and, more specifically, as the local failures of Commu-
these hybrid political-theatrical experiences, describing a nism, which as late as the 1980s remained the dominant
chaotic mass rally the two attended in 1985, with thousands of political ideology of the ANC and other liberation parties in
black union workers parading around and around Durban’s South Africa.107
Greyville stadium, all the while singing, dancing, making
speeches, reciting poetry, trailing banners.103 For Sitas, “these Even as Kentridge indicts the utopian teleologies under-
experiences . . . provided a symbolic language” evident in pinning Selassie’s statement, questions the value of so-called
Kentridge’s “clear political economy of exaggerated gesture.” Western development, and rejects the possibilities of a linear
While the oval track of Durban’s stadium would be formally progress from the “darkness” of apartheid to the “light” of
reprised in Kentridge’s subsequent circular processions, the democracy, he refuses to overlook Africa’s histories of dicta-
overt theatricality of Arc/Procession is accentuated in an early torship and rampant corruption. Moreover, Ethiopia’s
study portraying the artist looking up at his work with an bloody histories since Selassie came to power impugn the very
exaggerated viewing device, as if beholding the procession as narratives of progress that Selassie and others had routinely
a performative allegory of history (Fig. 33). served up.108 History, in this view, comes to resemble Benja-
min’s famous description of progress as demolition site: a pile
The procession has long been used as a visual metaphor for of “wreckage upon wreckage. . . . This storm is what we call
the tumult of regime change. As Walter Benjamin observed, progress.”109
“Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in
the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step Suspicious of the myths of progress, Kentridge’s Arc/Proces-
over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional sion looks both to Benjamin and to Theodor Adorno, whose
practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They work on the Enlightenment equally renders history as antite-
are called cultural treasures. . . .”104 For Benjamin, the pro- leological and radically fractured. The series of etchings Kent-
cession is synonymous with military victory and narratives of ridge made the following year titled Little Morals (1991), an
progress. He invokes the procession as an image of history, a English translation of Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1953), re-
resonant visual metaphor that he uses to call up and then flects Adorno’s views. As in Arc/Procession, these prints reveal
dispute a view of history as a narrative of continuity, increas- Kentridge digesting the current process of negotiations un-
ing perfectability, and economic efficiency. Kentridge simi- der way between the government and delegates of the re-
larly employs the procession as an image of history, yet one cently unbanned political parties over a transfer of power.
that he casts as a foil to triumphant nationalisms and the Just as the titles of these prints—Procession of the Delegates (Fig.
colonialism they fostered. For the victory procession is histor- 32), Negotiations Begin (Fig. 34), and Practical Considerations
ically a colonial spectacle; the format dates back to Roman (Fig. 35)— ground them in the moment of South Africa’s
times, epitomized by Rome’s Arch of Titus frieze depicting political transition, so do Kentridge’s comments on this as “a
soldiers marching home with booty from the conquered period of extreme intensity; enormous possibilities seemed to
temple in Jerusalem. be opening up, whilst there was also a real threat that the
process towards democracy might be derailed by vio-
The colonial procession finds its unruly double in the
frequently bombastic parades of the postcolony, hypertro-
phied displays of excess often aimed at showcasing parity with
Western powers.105 The esoteric title of this drawing—De-
velop, 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 histori-
cist critique to include Marxist and celebratory postcolonial
nationalisms. The cryptic phrase derives from one of Selas-
sie’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

158 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

33 Kentridge, study for Arc/Procession
I, 1989, charcoal on paper, 221⁄2 ϫ
301⁄4 in. (57 ϫ 77 cm). Private

collection (artwork © William

Kentridge; photograph provided by

William Kentridge studio)

34 Kentridge, Negotiations Begin, from Little Morals, etching 35 Kentridge, Practical Considerations, from Little Morals,
with sugar lift, 93⁄8 ϫ 121⁄2 in. (23.7 ϫ 31.8 cm) (artwork etching with sugar lift, 93⁄8 ϫ 121⁄2 in. (23.7 ϫ 31.8 cm)
© William Kentridge; photograph provided by William (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by
Kentridge studio) William Kentridge studio)

lence . . . also a sense that . . . for many others circumstances Practical Considerations a couple twirls blithely alongside an
would be as hard as ever.”110 “Atlas” figure bent double beneath a burden. Kentridge’s
resistance to the logic of “and/or” in favor of the complexity
This tussle between enormous optimism for “the South of “both/and” is revealed in his ambivalent embrace of op-
African miracle” that had overturned apartheid with negoti- positional, or dualist, realities. As he explains, “It’s not that
ation rather than violent revolution and pessimism that little one’s an optimist or a pessimist. One lives with both. One is
would change for the country’s poorest is reflected in these a committed optimist and a firm pessimist. Both of those
bifurcated images. In typical apartheid fashion—and as in the futures are unspooling at the same time.”111
communicative disjunct between the procession and the view-
ing protagonists, or Soho in his feeding frenzy in Johannes- Tying this model of parallel potentialities to the ambiguous
burg—individuals are encapsulated in disjunctive realities, telos of his Arc/Procession processionists, Kentridge continues,
enveloped in a state of self-absorption. In Negotiations Begin, “It’s as if they’re stumbling into the future but not knowing
three figures dance around in Dionysian abandon, oblivious what is coming: salvation or damnation, who knows what. You
to a figure tied to a post who is dead or dying, while in don’t know if they were walking to utopia or perdition. Or

both.”112 Kentridge’s ambivalence between his desire to re- 159W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E
claim a measure of utopianism for the success of this transi-
tional period and his more deep-seated suspicion of the 36 Kentridge, Untitled, 2006, ink and pencil on paper, showing
possibility for profound change rives these images formally (below) how Arc/Procession was conceived as part of a larger
and thematically. Accordingly, he looks to Adorno, with his circular procession and (above) Bernardo Bertolucci’s head-on
resistance to the possibility of fundamental and permanent portrayal of a procession versus Francisco de Goya’s diagonal
moral and political change, to temper the potency of the rendering. Private collection (artwork © William Kentridge)
metamorphosis implicated by the processional format.113
together with pieces of masking tape (Fig. 2).118 The piece
Adorno’s Minima Moralia is both structurally fragmented (a fans across the wall in a huge arc, with each sheet of paper
series of aphoristic reflections on the Socratic ideal of the roughly encapsulating a figure. While the exposed seams
“good life,” that is, the ethical life) and steeped in doubt between each page atomize the composition into discrete
(Adorno finds little place for the Socratic ideal and limited slices, the text flowing in the opposite direction to the figures
possibilities for ethical behavior in the postwar world). The and the abrupt shifts in color between pages further interrupt
question of individual moral responsibility is inseparable the possibility of narrative continuity. Even though the link-
from the specific cultural nexus in which one is enmeshed, ing of individual pages together summons a cinematic mode
Adorno argues, so that, as one critic puts it, “in a wrong of sequencing, the flimsiness of the whole unit implies the
society the good cannot be done, cannot be known, and potential reversibility or resequencing of this proposed nar-
independent of its realization does not exist.”114 The patho- rative chain.119 When Kentridge describes this work as “a row
logical, divisive relationships that Kentridge images—the re- of fragments,” he again reprises a Benjaminian grammar, one
peated cocooning of individuals and their incapacity to no- that conceives history as a series of units to be shuffled or
tice or respond to the plight of others—resonate with resequenced, as in the potentially interchangeable “volutes”
Adorno’s outlook. Arc/Procession also reveals a local undercur- that compose Benjamin’s Arcades Project.120
rent of pragmatism that sought to moderate the rhetoric of
the “miraculous transition” rehearsed throughout these For Benjamin and Adorno, as for Kentridge, such an ex-
heady years, a view that stressed that change would be long, ploded view of history is rooted in a crisis of sequencing
slow, and difficult—that it would be an incremental process of historical time—a crisis provoked by revolution, war, and the
change. Indeed, the word “process” was so often applied to radical breaks with history that are similarly expressed by the
South Africa after 1989 that it become synonymous with that resetting of the French Revolutionary calendar or the Second
period: people spoke of the “negotiation process,” “the peace New Year Cape Town procession. Under such pressures,
process,” and the “process of transition”—all processes that narrative shatters, too. The medium of film, which can be
would in turn lead to other processes by the mid-1990s, physically cut into pieces and then spliced back together, so
such as “the process of democracy” and, finally, the judicial that narrative time becomes malleable and endlessly rear-
processes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission rangable, like volutes, accords with such a Benjaminian view
(TRC).115 of history. As he indicated in a sketch, Kentridge conceived of
Arc/Procession as visualizing such a history of slivers and slices
This gradual, processual notion of historical change simi- and as a mere section of a larger cyclical panorama in which
larly informs Kentridge’s treatment of the politics of this there is no conceivable beginning or end, only an endless
time, shaping his own process of conveying change within a cycle around and around (Fig. 36). Eventually, all Kent-
drawing. The artist explains how, while rejecting Georg Wil- ridge’s processions would stretch into this cyclical form, spin-
helm Friedrich Hegel’s historicism, his own understanding of ning on their axes as characters process around and around
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 univer-
sity:

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 contra-
diction 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 under-
pins Arc/Procession formally as well as thematically. The draw-
ing is unusually constructed, cobbled together from overlap-
ping sheets of rectangular paper, which are visibly sutured

160 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1

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
Kentridge; photograph provided by William Kentridge studio)

37 Kentridge, Atlas Procession, Kwazulu-Natal, S.A.: Caversham viewer can’t look at it all in one. You see it as a row of
Press, 2000, first of a set of 3 etchings on a map spread from fragments.”124
Stieler’s Hand-Atlas, Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1906, 171⁄8 ϫ 14 in.
(43.6 ϫ 35.5 cm) (artwork © William Kentridge; photograph What is most elemental to Kentridge’s process of drawn
provided by William Kentridge studio) animation is the way that it spins drawing into a thread of
time. “I remember thinking that I could put people around
a large central circle, as in his Atlas Processions and the artist’s that circle and I would have a form that could be used to
numerous circular processions of the past decade (Fig. 37). show a lot of people moving and that would encapsulate
time,” he recalled.125 Kentridge’s desire for his processional
Revolving, Revolt, Revolution imagery to express or “encapsulate time” in the same way as
Finally, we see the revolutionary thematics of the procession his filmic animation reveals underlying alliances between his
shift from a poetics of content to one of form, as Kentridge’s images of processions and his animation process. The artist
processionists physically start revolving around a circular core has self-consciously infused both with the dynamic of tempo-
in an endless cycle. And although regime change and polit- ral change—which in turn enables their evocation of political
ical revolution often signal breaks in history, the word “rev- change.
olution” has etymological origins as a continuous cyclical
narrative, an endless repetition of history that is a “revolving” In order to further “encapsulate time,” Kentridge also
as well as a revolt.121 Kentridge’s processions, we come to borrowed the traditional formal means of visualizing time as
find, are based on this conception of dynamic temporal a circle. More than reels of film or their looping replay
change, a notion that comes to the fore in the full circular format, Kentridge’s revolving processions call up another
revolutions of Atlas Procession.122 kind of “stone-age” instrument: the sundial, or the circular
calendars and celestial charts of the Renaissance to which the
Kentridge’s visual model for Arc/Procession, with its figures word “revolution” was first applied. Kentridge’s circling pro-
arranged around a central, circular axis, was a Renaissance cessionists thus creep around the face of a clock, their steps
tondo drawing he saw in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of aligning with spatial coordinates on the arc of time, so that
Art in 1986. The other templates for rendering processions each processionist’s step becomes a temporal marker dashing
that he had considered (and sketched out for Breidbach, Fig. around a clock face—a step in and through time.
36)—Bertolucci’s straight-on view of the procession in Nove-
cento and Francisco de Goya’s Black paintings depicting ap- The Atlas Processions are closely related to Kentridge’s 1999
proaching crowds from an oblique angle—were both “ex- projection Overvloed of the previous year, a six-minute ani-
tremely static,” he felt.123 Searching for a more dynamic mated film commissioned for the dome of Amsterdam’s Civic
rendering of the procession, the artist came up with the idea Hall (Fig. 38). For this installation, Kentridge projected shad-
of a long, thin drawing that would physically force a temporal owy figures made of cut-paper silhouettes onto the domed
reading; curving the ribbon of paper into an arc, along with ceiling, layering his aerial walkers with projections of video
monumentalizing it, would render it impossible to appre- footage, charcoal-and-pastel animated drawing, shadows, and
hend the work in a single instantaneous glance. He noted, “If water. Weaving through these visual elements were streams of
one actually curves the horizon line, so that in each section of text, aphoristic fragments of Dutch and African proverbs that
the curve people are standing upright on the ground, the 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

161W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E

and South Africa are historically bound, yet discursively dis- 39 Kentridge, still from What Will Come (Has Already Come),
connected.126 As in the film Johannesburg, the watery flows are 2006, anamorphic film projected onto a circular horizontal
echoed in the constant temporal surge of the procession and screen and reflected back, anamorphically adjusted, in a
the tension of advancing time it underscores. Here, however, vertical metal cylinder, 8 minutes, 40 seconds (artwork
flooding bears with it threatening local meanings, verging as © William Kentridge; photograph provided by William
it does on a national psychosis for the Dutch.127 Kentridge studio)

Discussing his process of making these foreshortened fig- ing, shadowy figures circling above and the bowed heads of
ures in the studio, with the hope that they would project onto the pacing viewers below.
the domed ceiling as planned, Kentridge noted that “they
worked, walked, very beautifully,” his word choice evincing a Kentridge clearly conceived the revolving procession of
telling correspondence between his process (“working”) and Overvloed as a cross-cultural journey of sorts, a maritime ex-
the procession (“walking”) that again briefly illuminates the cursion from one continent to another that is emphasized by
subterranean connections between the artist’s process and his trotting figures’ circular trajectory around what becomes
his processions.128 This verbal slippage also points to Kent- a virtual globe. When the artist speaks of Overvloed in terms of
ridge’s concern with prodding the viewer into an active en- “what it means to go round a cupola, as if you are going
gagement with his work, so that a participatory aesthetics of round the world,”131 he invokes an image of the world as a
somatic engagement vies with the ocular draw of the image. circular track around which figures process, returning us to
ancient astrological and calendrical images of temporal
As early as Arc/Procession, Kentridge had sought to emphasize change.132 However, the artist would not push this notion
a temporal and physicalized reading of the work by arching its into full visibility until a subsequent film, What Will Come (Has
horizon, thereby mandating that viewers physically move at least Already Come) from 2006, an 8-minute 40-second anamorphic
their heads, if not their whole bodies, to accommodate the film projected onto a circular horizontal screen and reflected
drawing’s fan-shaped, twenty-four-foot span. Likewise, Stair Pro- back in a vertical metal cylinder. Its title alluding to the
cession winds three flights up the stairwell of New York’s PS1, spiraling repetitions of history, the film is dominated by
requiring the viewer to walk up to look at the work, thereby images of flight as a bird, a fly, a biplane, and other aerial
reenacting the climbing bodies of Kentridge’s processionists. objects circle and soar around the screen along with another
This fluid interchange between the movements of Kentridge’s of Kentridge’s processions.
processionists and those of his viewers in turn refers back to the
installation of Smoke, Ashes, Fable in the central stairwell of At one juncture, a globe with crutchlike legs appears,
Kentridge’s home, in a site that demands he view this touch- hopping and skipping around the circular disk (Fig. 39).
stone procession every day from the bobbing perspective of Losing its legs, the anthropomorphized globe takes flight and
his own body as he ascends and descends his stairs. begins revolving around the screen, now explicitly conflating
the passage of time and the turning of the earth with the idea
Overvloed further developed this reciprocation between the of traveling through space (Fig. 40). And finally the walking
depicted movement of the procession through space and the man starts to fly! Sheer revolving animated movement has
physical ambulation required by the viewer to apprehend it. replaced the once literalized plodding of earthbound figures.
For as the Overvloed procession revolved around the dome in Now everything races and revolves around the cylindrical
its site-specific installation, the artist imagined viewers walk- core in a dematerialized procession of spinning filmic im-
ing around the space beneath and gazing up into the moving ages.
ceiling as one does in a Renaissance church. Alternatively,
viewers could peer down into the tiny mirror given each of The rapidly mutating forms streaking past at breakneck speed
the four hundred guests, which reversed the mirrored text on and constantly disappearing from view demand that the viewer
the ceiling to make it legible, functioning like a personalized pursue the flying objects and racing figures, forcing her to circle
mobile screen. “The project became about ways of looking around the screen with them.133 And as the viewer walks around
either down into what was almost a little prayer book, the and around the screen, chasing the spinning images, she be-
mirror, or looking up into the ceiling, into heaven,” Kent- comes the walking, peering figure, performatively reenacting
ridge explained.129 Here, the artist cycles us back to an earlier both the striding bodies of the processional figures and the
prayer book—the one his grandfather once held—and which ambulations of the artist’s own process.
the iconic marcher of Marchepied has been clutching through-
out. Walking and reading, circling forward, yet always retrac-
ing 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 proces-
sion, definitively tying together in swirls of motion the walk-

162 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 3 V O L U M E X C V N U M B E R 1 ing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning.
What ends in clarity does not begin that way.”
40 Kentridge, still from What Will Come (Has Already Come)
(artwork © William Kentridge; photograph provided by 10. Kentridge, quoted in Rosenthal, William Kentridge, 67.
William Kentridge studio)
11. Despite the rough-hewn quality of this collage, Kentridge clearly de-
Leora Maltz-Leca is assistant professor of contemporary art at the marcates the book as open, twisting the natural angle of the spine
Rhode Island School of Design. A 2011 recipient of a Warhol exaggeratedly clockwise in order to do so.
Foundation Arts Writer’s Grant and a 2012 Getty postdoctoral
fellow, she is currently completing a book on William Kentridge titled 12. For an excellent history of walking that discusses the legendary pac-
“Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises” [History of Art ings of the peripatetic philosophers and the long philosophical tradi-
and Visual Culture, Rhode Island School of Design, 2 College Street, tion of walking and thinking that follows, see Rebecca Solnit, Wander-
Providence, R.I. 02903, [email protected]]. lust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2001).

Notes 13. Kentridge, interview with the author, Boston, March 18, 2009.

I am extremely grateful to William Kentridge for his graciousness and gen- 14. In this context, Kentridge’s walking becomes a metaphor for journey-
erosity, and to his superb studio staff: Natalie Dembo, Linda Liebowitz, and, ing, so that the physicality of the step suggests not thought but flights
most of all, Anne McIlleron, who has been helpful in too many ways to of imaginative travel (to the moon and beyond).
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, 15. Samuel Beckett often leans over Kentridge’s drawing hand; “footfalls”
Angela Breidbach, Ruth Simbao, Gemma Rodrigues, Steven Nelson, Joni is Beckett’s term from his eponymous play about pacing. In his most
Brenner, Liza Essers, Ara Merjian, Judy Hecker, Martha Kennedy, and of recent project, an artist’s book called Everyone Their Own Projector, Kent-
course, Benedict Leca; Karen Lang and The Art Bulletin’s readers and editors ridge returns to his routes around the studio in a double-page spread
for their insightful comments; the Getty Research Institute, the Swann Foun- he titles Parcours l’Atelier, which, as he describes, “is a route of a walk
dation for Animation, and the Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s Program; and around the studio: the bed for sleeping, defensive sleeping in the
finally, audiences at the Library of Congress, the Getty Research Institute, and chair, a glimpse of the idea disappearing. . . . It’s a fictional making
the Rhode Island School of Design, where I delivered versions of this essay as up of a series of different routes, as if I had a marker on me checking
a talk. my steps.” Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009. Kentridge also chose
“Parcours l’Atelier” as one of the five central themes of his work for
1. William Kentridge, quoted in Angela Breidbach and William Ken- his recent retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
tridge, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud: Conversations with Angela
Breidbach (Cologne: Walther Ko¨nig, 2006), 16. 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
2. William Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement,” in Art from South Africa (Lon- in shul. A man in that position with a book. . . . Because otherwise
don: Museum of Modern Art; Oxford: Thames and Hudson, 1990), you don’t read when you’re standing. . . . The two-handed holding of
52. On other occasions, Kentridge has spoken of the city’s sense of a book is an important way of walking.” Kentridge interview, March
peripheralism, especially during the isolated years of late apartheid. 18, 2009. The triplicate rendering of this figure in Embarkation (Fig.
See Kentridge, “Zeno at 4 am—Director’s Note” (October 2001), in 20) further suggests an arc of movement.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge (Milan: Skira/Castello di
Rivoli, 2003), 173. 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
3. William Kentridge, “Felix in Exile: Geography of Memory” (lecture, Kentridge interacted with screened film footage of multiple projected
Northwestern University, November 1994), in Carolyn Christov-Bakar- versions of himself. Commissioned by Kentridge’s longtime curatorial
giev, William Kentridge (Brussels: Socie´te´ des Expositions du Palais des collaborator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, it was performed in Sydney
Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1998), 93. 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,
4. William Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement for ‘9 Drawings for Projec- New York, and finally in Johannesburg in June 2010.
tion,’ ” exh. cat., Spier Amphitheatre, Stellenbosch, S.A., Old Fort at
Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, and other venues, March 2004, n.p. 18. William Kentridge, “William Kentridge: Artist in Residence,” Friends of
the South African National Gallery Newsletter 33 (December 1991): 4.
5. Kentridge, “Felix in Exile,” 7.
6. Kentridge, quoted in Mark Rosenthal, ed., William Kentridge: Five 19. As Kentridge noted after the residency (ibid.): “The actual physical
activity (what observers would see) is at best dull. But when brought
Themes (San Francisco: SFMOMA, 2009), 13. to consciousness, (as performing the drawing would make it) it is
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Suspended Step,” in The Sense of the World, trans. Jef- 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
frey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 11. a drawing and what people would see would not be me drawing, but
8. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Weight of a Thought,” in The Gravity of me acting out some stereotypical idea of how it should look for a
drawing to be done.”
Thought, trans. Franc¸ois Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Atlantic High-
lands, N.J.: Humanity, 1997), 81. 20. At the time, Kentridge was understandably disenchanted with the re-
9. Kentridge, interview by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “William Kent- quirement of working publicly: “I think it unrealistic to expect strong
ridge,” in PressPlay: Contemporary Artists in Conversation (New York: work to be made by anyone in those conditions,” he wrote (ibid.).
Phaidon, 2005), 408: “So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion Nonetheless, this enforced interference in his working routine served
version of thought. . . . The uncertain and imprecise way of construct- 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 Beck-
ett’s Play. Kentridge’s invocation of the Irish playwright’s cryptically
titled Play suggests his own interest in juggling the ludic and the the-
atrical.

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 ratio-
nal 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 Ques-
tion: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press,
2005), 142. In this context, Derrida is referring to the proximity be-
tween 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 Meta-
phor & Other Doubtful Enterprises” (forthcoming), chap. 4.

24. Kentridge, in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking 163W I L L I A M K E N T R I D G E A N D T H E P R O C E S S O F C H A N G E
Aloud, 66. See ibid., 67, for the artist’s sketch of his thinking process
regarding Felix in Exile. president of South Africa and de Klerk was installed as interim president.
In the September 6 election, despite fears of a right-wing Afrikaner vic-
25. Kentridge, “Felix in Exile,” 7. tory, the National Party won by an overwhelming majority, and de Klerk
assumed office on September 20. Before the end of that year, seven se-
26. Rosalind Krauss, “ ‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Pro- nior ANC delegates were released from prison (October 15, 1989) fol-
jection,” October, no. 92 (2000): 8. lowed by another five antiapartheid leaders a month later (November
16), enormous rallies were held in celebration, and on December 13, de
27. Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement,” 52. Klerk and Mandela held talks.

28. A signal drawing from the film Johannesburg shows a naked Felix Tei- 46. Numerous historians view 1989 as a pivotal year. See H. Marais, Limits
telbaum staring out at a tangle of urban highways, the scene domi- to Change: South Africa; The Political Economy of Transition (Cape Town:
nated by an enormous billboard bearing the slogan “Captive of the University of Cape Town Press, 2001); or Michael Bratton and Nicho-
City.” las van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in
Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
29. Kentridge, quoted in Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, 1998, 42. 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
30. Kentridge, “Fortuna,” 165. democratizations throughout the African continent—so much so that
it is claimed to have initiated “a second independence” for the conti-
31. In 1987, Antoine Watteau’s painting was likely more interesting to nent. See Richard Joseph, “Democratization in Africa after 1989:
Kentridge for its famed theatricality and its representation of the peri- Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives,” Comparative Politics 29, no.
od’s stereotypical decadence than for its semiprocessional imagery. 3 (1997): 363– 82.
For Kentridge, the pre-Revolutionary fantasy world of Watteau’s fˆete
galante, much like the touted hedonism of Max Beckmann’s pre– 47. J. A. du Pisani, M. Broodryk, and P. W. Coetzer, “Protest Marches in
World War II Berlin, served as an analogue of decadent white South South Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 28, no. 4 (1990): 573.
Africa in the 1980s. Kentridge also endows Watteau’s ambling subjects
with local meanings, figuring their absorption as symptomatic of 48. For example, on the single day of October 14, 1989, one could find
apartheid’s radical social fragmentation and their blindness as both a approximately 150,000 people participating in seventeen different
product of apartheid’s degenerate society and a feature necessary for marches countrywide; cited in ibid.
survival within it.
49. Ibid.
32. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009.
50. For a comprehensive compendium of South African posters of the
33. Ibid. 1980s, see Judy Seidman, Red on Black: The Story of the South African
Poster Movement (Johannesburg: STE/South African History Archive,
34. Kentridge’s description of his own nose, which he used as the tem- 2007).
plate for the drawings of The Nose.
51. Christopher Wren, “20,000 Apartheid Foes Allowed to March through
35. The flip book, a kind of precinema also called cin´ema de poche, dates Johannesburg,” New York Times, September 16, 1989.
to the 1860s. At its zenith, in the 1870s and 1880s, it expressed the
contemporary fascination with the study of motion, often using the 52. Kentridge’s huge banner was seen by others: Shaun de Waal, chief
images of Eadweard Muybridge’s zoogyroscopes and E´ tienne-Jules film critic at Johannesburg’s Mail and Guardian “remembers taking
Marey’s chronophotography as source material. part in the first fully legal protest march through central Johannes-
burg in 1989, and seeing in the distance, bobbing above the heads of
36. Kentridge, quoted in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge the crowd, a big poster depicting boxed heads and the mysterious
Thinking Aloud, 35. legend, ‘Casspirs full of love.’ It turned out to be borne by Kent-
ridge.” Shaun de Waal, “Art of Reversals,” Mail and Guardian Friday
37. According to the artist (interview, March 18, 2009), this hand-drawn, (Johannesburg), March 10 –16, 2006. This banner was probably the
1:50Љ animation, Lecture on a Chair, which dates to the early 1980s, is same one that had been made for Kentridge’s exhibition earlier that
about “a person talking about a chair, and he talks and talks and year at London’s Victoria Miro gallery.
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 53. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009.
he stays there by itself.”
54. Study for Arc/Procession I, 1989 (Fig. 33), is clearly dated in the top-
38. Kentridge, quoted in Robert Enright and William Kentridge, right corner: “Sept. 25, 1989.”
“Achievements of Indecision: The Art of William Kentridge,” Border-
Crossings, February 2002, 55. 55. The full quote from the Greek historian, which Kentridge also employed
at the conclusion of his 2001 film Zeno Writing, is “Smoke, Ashes, Fa-
39. The early flip books presage this kind of transmutation, as do later ble / Where are they all now? / Perhaps they are no longer fable.”
iterations like the 2004 Cyclopedia of Drawing, a homage to E´ tienne-
Jules Marey’s early images of birds in flight, in which a figure slowly 56. Kentridge, in Breidbach and Kentridge, William Kentridge Thinking
transforms into a bird, flapping its wings within the cage of the page, Aloud, 37.
before settling into a corner, human once more. Marey, Physiologie du
mouvement: Le vol des oiseaux (Paris: G. Masson, 1890). 57. Kentridge, interview by Christov-Bakargiev, “William Kentridge,” 408,
414.
40. Steven Henry Madoff, “William Kentridge: San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art,” Artforum, October 2009: 228. 58. Along with the film’s visual invocation of the Platonic shadow proces-
sion, Kentridge in his lectures and writings on this film has explicated
41. Kentridge interview, March 18, 2009. this relation to the Platonic allegory.

42. William Kentridge, “Black Box-Interview,” Afritopic, 2005, www.afritopic 59. In a famous 1970 essay, Jean-Louis Baudry used the Platonic allegory
.com. Kentridge received his bachelor’s degree in African history and as a template for cinematic experience. Baudry, “The Apparatus:
politics. Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the
Cinema,” trans. Jean Andrews and Bernard Augst, Camera Obscura 1,
43. A remark of Jean Miller, a white pensioner to researcher Helena no. 11 (1976): 104 –26. Others have noted the similarities between
Broadbridge, “Negotiating Post-Apartheid Boundaries and Identities: shadow puppets and cinema, too: Francis MacDonald Cornford, for
An Anthropological Study of the Creation of a Cape Town Suburb” example, in his notes to The Republic, explains, “A modern Plato
(PhD diss., University of Stellenbosch, 2001), 81. would compare his Cave to an underground cinema.” Plato, The Re-
public of Plato, trans. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
44. Nelson Mandela, interview by Tom Carver, The Last Mile: Africa, Man- 1945), 228 n.
dela and Democracy, M-Net (a South African cable TV station), 1992.
60. William James rejected metaphors such as “chain” or “train” as being
45. This series of transformations was sparked by President P. W. Botha’s too disjunctive or “jointed,” choosing instead natural processes as a
stroke in February 1989, after which he was encouraged to resign as model for a consciousness that “flows.” James, The Principles of Psychol-
leader of the National Party (NP). His appointment of the moderate ogy, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
education minister F. W. de Klerk as party head in February 1989 of- sity Press, 1981), 233.
fered little evidence for the reforms that would ensue. But once in
power, de Klerk immediately announced the need for political 61. Kentridge, “Artist’s Statement” for 9 Drawings for Projection.
change: the ongoing political violence that had incited the govern-
ment to institute a state of emergency four years earlier had only 62. Kentridge, “Felix in Exile,” 93.
worsened, destroying the last vestiges of civil liberties with it, while the
economy, seriously damaged by international sanctions, had suffered 63. Beckett’s response to the persecution of Vaclav Havel, Catastrophe em-
massive currency devaluation. Under increasing pressure from his own ploys the conceit of a director issuing instructions to an assistant who
party, Botha dissolved Parliament in May 1989, announced an upcoming trots back and forth making onstage adjustments to a human “monu-
general election (whites only), and agreed to an official meeting with ment.”
banned African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela. A
month after this historic meeting, on August 15, 1989, Botha resigned as 64. “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators