cdk-mk-2009-1-haoxing

For about a year I have been drawing landscapes. They started off as incidental details in other drawings. A window behind a couple dancing, an open space behind a portrait. Gradually the landscape took over and flooded the interiors. Few of the people in the pictures managed to retain their place in them. The drawings are in charcoal on a rough paper so images which seem solid and dark can be removed with a swipe of a cloth. Traces are left. Even after scrubbing the paper there is evidence of some disturbance. But this is easily overgrown and incorporated into the drawing. A few of the drawings are of specific places but most are constructed from elements of the countryside around Johannesburg [... ]

Dear diary

Tuesday and Thursday afternoons at King Edward VII Preparatory School. Watching endless ethnographic films of mealies being stamped and herdboys bring the cattle back to the mud huts while a marimba sounded scratchily from the speaker at the back of the school hall. Even at five or six this vision of Africa seemed a complete fiction, far less convincing than the Tarzan films we were allowed to see at the end of the term. The Africans I knew and met did not live in mud huts guarding cattle, playing drums; they took buses, wore smart hats, lived in small rooms at the back of large houses, listened to the wireless.

Alexis Preller out on parole

[... ] I have always envied people working in France at the turn of the twentieth century in their ability to appropriate African iconography, the masks and sculptures, into the formal language of their work without having to deal with the loaded questions which follow.

Tribal Africa always has a reactionary smack to it - particularly in the hands of people who have tamed it militarily - only to celebrate its totems as decoration. But even freed from these immediate associations, the idea of an innocent classless Africa is highly problematic. There is a nostalgia within it, whether in a painting by Preller or its invoca- tion by Black Consciousness groups, a reference to a state of grace which is pure, and ignorant of the constraints and processes of Africa in its dominated state. This idea of a pre-European Africa of innocence is firstly false and more importantly it obscures the strange contradictory relationship between Western conquest and the tribalism that still endures.

This Utopian Africa of mysticism, spiritual healing, untamed nature, is not unlike the Africa as Eden in the paintings of the famous South African landscape artists.

The Volschenks and Pierneefs are empty of tribal images but are not unrelated. The landscape is arranged into a vision of pure nature, majestic primal forces of rock and sky. A kloof and escarpment, a tree is celebrated. A particular fact is isolated and ait idea of process or history is abandoned. These paintings, of landscape in a state of grace, are documents of disremembering.

This is not an instantaneous process. The early South African landscape paintings were scientific, cartographical studies. Or directly historical. A number of the early colonial paintings showed scenes of conquest, battles fought within the landscape. Puffs of gunsmoke and falling Xhosa can be catalogued by the hundred. Later there is a change; the guns are directed more towards other fauna, herds of elephant charging lions. And only at the end of a long process which corresponds to the completion of the domination of Africa does the pure landscape emerge.

A journey into Africa

For a white suburban house the journey through Africa began across the yard in the servants room. I remember trips to the market in Mbabane with mixed smells of over- ripe fruit and fresh basketwork; only later I became aware of the sculpture made in Venda and understood that in Africa some people live in mud huts and herd cattle, though not in the way shown in school films. But then in the heart, in the centre of Africa in the Houghton house, was Michelangelo's Last Judgement and Hobbema's Avenue, the latter on the cover of The Great Landscape Paintings of the World, a book my grandfather gave me.

London is a suburb of Johannesburg

Private maps of familiar places do not correspond to any geographer's projection. Pretoria has always been alien, the foreign place to which my father set off for years of my childhood. The place was associated with frustration and anger. It has not become more familiar. And of course, with a South African passport, all the lend to the north is a huge void, something to be taken on trust from pictures in National Geographic tee is Eastern Europe and most of Asia). Parts of London or New York are more familiar - extensions of Johannesburg; certainly closer than Cape Town.

Hobbema's avenue of trees was a staging post. Halfway between the way nature was meant to be ordered - the spreading oaks and lush greens of colonial children's books - and the non-existent landscape I knew around Johannesburg. At least in this strange painting there was not much to see. a few trees, a road, a ditch a hedge

Not the purple-headed mountain and river running by of the Volschenks and De Jonghs and Pierneefs which in their own way were as alien as those ethnographic films. (I have since been told by people who have spent time on farms or in the country that there are places that look like these paintings, but by now the damage is done.)

Of course it was also easy to love the Hobbema. It is of a foreign country painted hundreds of years ago, there is nothing to test it against, no context that throws the work into question. But the Volschenks flew in the face of my experience. I had not seen a picture which corresponds to what the South African landscape feels like. I suppose my understanding of the countryside is an essentially urban one. It has to do with visions from the roadside, with landscape that is articulated or given a meaning by incidents across it, pieces of civil engineering, the lines of pipes, culverts, fences. This is essentially a naturalistic approach to drawing the landscape. One of the ways I work is to drive predetermined but random distances, say 6.3 or 19.8 km, and at that point work with what presents itself. This is largely to get away from the plague of the picturesque (though this is almost impossible). Usually I end up with a catalogue of civil engineering details. It has become clear that the variety of the ephemera of human intervention on the landscape is far greater than anything the land itself has to offer. The varieties of high mast lighting, crash barriers, culverts, the transitions from cutting, to fence, to road, to verge, to fields are as great as any geological shifts (particularly on the highveld -the beauties of the Cape are different, to be enjoyed but certainly they don't make me reach for my sketchbook).

There are other traces there too. A never-ending chronicle of disasters or almost disasters in the sets of skid marks that punctuate the road. (Even in the flat straight sections of the Nl through the Karroo the number of such traces seldom falls below five or six per kilometre.) And a sense of a space which has been acted upon, which is not as simple or as bathed in grace as one would wish.

Magoeba's Kloof and the 1913 Land Act

Of course, even with random stops at the roadside, remarkably beautiful vistas do present themselves. To be blind to that beauty is crass but to swallowed up by it seems equally foolish. I do not think there can be any simple response to a place whose appearance is so different from its history. In a documentary on television there was a shot of forests somewhere in Poland. Deep grey-green pine trees and rolling hills in the

All fact is an abstraction of something that is inherently moving and changing. There is a sense in which animation deeply connects to my sense of the world as provisional. Whatever is there is liable to change. Certainties can disappear. Emotions felt so unbelievably strongly don't necessarily endure: they shift and change. — WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, 2008

Drawing, like painting, is today discussed in terms of its rise and fall, its ebbs and flows, the eccentricities of its reception and market. Those of us who nurture its history and discourse speak with reverence about the intimate world we access through the attenuated vision and slowed attention it demands. The recent return of drawing to the forefront of contemporary art practice began in the early 1990s, when the appeal of its immediacy, its undervalued status, and its poten­tial to communicate meaning and subjectivities in a newly globalized world were widely recognized as emblematic of startling innovation in an expanded field.William Kentridge's films—drawings that unfold over time and through prolonged engagement- are emblematic of a moment when our visual world expanded through the representation of the narra­tives of geopolitics.

If drawing is associated with a kind of authenticity and an almost kinesthetic channeling of an artist's consciousness, Kentridge's process represents a hybrid methodology that is a sign of its time both in its effu­sive expression of drawing as process and its proposal of a performative, politicized subject for drawing.² His work is structured around narrative and yet func­tions formally as a visual record of the activity of drawing. It is both subject and verb, performance and performed. The peculiar and unforgettable encounter with the artist's films resonates because of this dual­ity and because of the way in which the films record the history of line as it moves across the page. The medium of drawing can be said to have its own tension and interior logic, its modern history characterized by the pendular shift between form and image, the line becoming abstracted and independent of representa­tion. The animated conflation of the two is at the core of Kentridge's production; it is what gives his project of film, drawing, performance, and stage design its power and uniqueness.

Kentridge's films and drawings came to Western audiences at a moment when South Africa's terrible racial history was hurtling toward apartheid's dramatic dissolution. The artist's choice to remain in his homeland coincided with a nascent discus­sion in the arts concerning the local versus the global and the relative merits of subject matter and forms that could be understood as indigenous or vernac­ular. What was remarkable about encountering the artist's work in the 1 990s was the way in which the screen of the film seemed to map a space of embodied consciousness—the drawings and story unfolding through the process of their own making. The viewer, sensing so me thing familiar, intimate, and even roman­tic in the character of the artist, is simultaneously disturbed by a deeply unsettling pattern of violence and suffering invented and perpetuated by one's fellow human beings. This rupture of consciousness and perturbation of conscience are at the heart of what Kentridge communicates in his work, the provisional world he describes and captures through the performative line or the exteriorization of emotions and human subjects through the act and accretion of drawing.

The hand of the artist is animated by the line that creates form through a process of revision. The additive process of drawing is turned on its head and what we see is a kind of accumulation in reverse. The drawings on which the films are based are literally erased and reworked between frames; the protag­onists are embodied through erasure and negation. As a representation of the process of making, of the consciousness of making, Kentridge's line enacts both the historical rupture and revision that the artist and his country have undergone over time. In Felix in Exile (1994; pis. 77-81), the character of Felix Teitlebaum wanders through what seems to be the wasteland of a landscape scarred by death, violence, and sorrow. It is a touching, fragile narrative of the daily life of the everyman.

PERFORMANCE INTO/OUT OF PRINTMAKING

Performance and printmaking have steadily — and sometimes radically — commingled in Kentridge's work, from his early student days to his most recent operatic productions. In the 1970s, as a founding member of the politically engaged Junction Avenue Theatre Company in Johannesburg, Kentridgewas the troupe's principal poster designer; he also designed sets and ultimately both acted in and directed plays. The posters he created in the small print workshop attached to the theater reveal an artist experimenting with motifs from plays and his own developing style, using the straightforward, bold designs that are an outgrowth of silkscreen printing (see fig. 36). This early engagement with theater not only provided a formative opportunity for hands-on activity with printmaking; the theater itself provided fodder for Kentridge's musings on the subjects of perfor­mance, space, and audience in other work produced during the period.

Kentridge's first one-person exhibition in 1979 comprised a series of thirty monotypes, enti­tled Pit, that evoke the dark, dramatic space of the theater through their exaggerated verticalitv, heavy inking, and cropped staging (see pi. I). In these prints, the performers or models enact simple activities,sometimes disengaged from one another (sipping tea, sunning, swimming) and at other times interacting (modeling for an artist). Several scenes are dreamlike: a woman looking at art while holding a man on a leash, a woman holding a gun while a man reads a book. The audience is sometimes absent, but is often present as a voyeuristic yet faceless array of people overlooking an open-air balcony or gazing through overhead windows. The pitlike atmosphere of the stage derives from the steep walls and the pervasive darkness, which results from the monotype technique itself. Kentridge created these prints by covering a Plexiglas plate entirely in black ink, and then making fine marks by removing areas of ink with his finger­tips, tissue paper, cotton balls, and matchsticks3; these i marks show as light areas when printed on paper. The results are sinister and otherworldly.

Whereas the monotypes established Kentridge's interest in envisioning, in two dimensions, the space of the theater and the interaction of performer and audience, a 1996 portfolio of etchings on the subject of Ubu represents an unusual moment when the artist's prints themselves generated a full-scale theatrical production. Kentridge's earliest involvement with the subject of Ubu was as an actor in the Junction Avenue company's 1975 staging of Ubu Rex, an adaptation of the French dramatist Alfred Jarry's 1 896 Ubu Roi. Years later, on the centenary of Jarry's production, Kentridge revisited the subject through the format of the print portfolio. Jarry's play, a satirical expression of the life of a brutal despot, became a potent metaphor for the barbaric system of apartheid in South Africa.

The set of eight etchings, titled Ubu Tells the Truth (pis. 112-19), is among Kentridge's most technically rich and thematically potent print projects. The prints co,prise layered impression of two different plates that combine to produce the illusion of two realities. The cartoonlike white chalkboard line of Ubu's world derives from an engraved plate; this image is printed over a more textured human counterpart created using etching (including fingerprints), aquatint, and drypoint. As the human figure showers, draws, sleeps, scratches, dances, and bicycles, the rotund Ubu mimics these actions in his own exaggerated, grotesque way. It is relevant to note that Kentridge based the human figure in these etchings on photographs he took of himself performing against a black backdrop in the studio (see figs. 37-38): "I decided I might as well enact those poses myself. I placed the camera, with a self-timer, on one side of the studio, and I performed Ubu in front of the blackboard." The use of performance in the process of making the prints underscores the merging of media so characteristic of Kentridge's work; it also elucidates his apt choice of the print portfolio, with its traditionally serial format, as the medium for conveying this action-baserd, marrative subject.

In the footsteps of his C/bu etchings, Kentridge produced the play Ubu and t/ie Truth Commission (1996), a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company and the writer Jane Taylor. He also created the animated film Ubu Tells the Truth (1997; figs. 10-11,21, pis. 120-29) and a series of related drawings (1997-98; pis. 130-34). Kentridge's most direct statement on the atrocities of apartheid, the Ubu and the Truth Commission play explores personal stories of apartheid- era violence and victimization made public during Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Visual motifs from the prints and their themes of interroga­tion, flagellation, shame, and guilt became the jumping-off points for the play. Kentridge notes that the idea of combining an actor onstage with a schematic white-line projection on a screen behind the actor stemmed directly from the overlapping figures in the Ubu prints.⁶ Significantly, although discussions of a theatrical performance were not initiated until after the etchings were completed, the artist inscribed each print with fictitious act and scene numbers, seen in the corners or at the edges of each composition.

A more recent instance of prints and performance mutually informing and inspiring one another came as Kentridge developed his 2005 production of Mozarfs opera The Magic Flute. During this time he created a large body of preparatory work that included an outpouring of prints along with drawings, films, and a miniature theater (see pis. 149-62). In these projects Kentridge explored the opera's themes of lightness and darkness, as embodied by the Queen of the Night (associated with obscurity and the moon) and her antagonist Sarastro (associated with insight and the sun). As he began to experiment with the opposition of black-and-white imagery in his work, Kentridge seized upon printmaking's inherent qualities of reversal and variation to create a massive multipart edition entitled Learning the Flute (2004; figs. 39-40). For the project Kentridge made a nine-foot black ink drawing on clear acetate and then worked with a master printer to produce two prints that mirror each other in compo- sition and coloration. Both prints were executed with black ink, but in the second one not only is the image mirrored, the inking is also reversed: areas of white, uninked paper in the first print become areas of black ink, while the black areas in the first print become white paper.

 Making matters more multifaceted, Kentridge chose to print half of the prints on unbound pages from a 1950 edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia and half on plain white sheets of paper cut to the size of the unbound encyclopedia pages. A complex and laborious technical feat of printmaking, the project is also thematically intricate. Images of pyramids, temples, falcons, and the like—motifs from Kentridge's The Magic Flute and from encyclopedias- underscore the sense of history bound to the opera. Kentridge's exploitation of positive and negative imagery and coloration, meanwhile, speaks directly to the themes of light and darkness at the opera's philosophical core.

From his earliest projects, Kentridge has consis­tently inserted his likeness into his work—his body as an actual model for work or his life as an indi­rect point of reference. Considering that he began his career in part as a stage actor, it is logical to think that he would, at some later point, reassert himself onstage. In his background projection for the opera The Magic Flute, we see the artist's moving silhouette—just a step removed from live perfor­mance itself (see fig. 41). It is fitting that Kentridge turned to printmaking to continue investigating this coupling of performance and creation. In 2006 he created a portfolio of ten prints entitled Bird Catching and based on The Magic Flute opera. Here we see Kentridge standing onstage, drawing, interacting with birds, and morphing into a torn paper collage. This merging of Kentridge's roles as artist, performer, and subject remains at the forefront of his practice, revealing the artist as actor coming full circle.

THE PERFORMING/ MOVING IMAGE

In the spring of 2008 Kentridge was busy rehears­ing a performance that would debut at the Biennale of Sydney a few months later. The artist had filmed himself drawing on the main wall of his workspace, then projected this video onto the very same wall. During the rehearsal he walked across his studio and stood in front of the wall, beside the projected image of himself—the artist himself interacting with the filmic self represented by the moving image. The end product of superimposed, multiplied images was meant to be realized in front of a live audience.

During the actual performance in Sydney, titled I am not me, the horse is not mine (figs. 13,17,42), viewers could see up to four different Kentridges—three prere­corded projections and one live — gesturing, acting, and lecturing. As Kentridge intends to perform this piece regularly in the future, it will become a sort of portrait of Dorian Gray — Kentridge, the aging live actor, appearing alongside his projected younger self. The body of the performer of course casts a shadow over the projected image, a phenomenon that had already occurred when Kentridge acted for the camera to create the first layers of the portraits. According to the artist:

A shadow is superficially like a silhouette, a dark two-dimensional trace of a being, its movements directly connected to the movements of the dancer. But there is a big shift. A shadow is a sil­houette with attitude. As the light source is moved in relation to the subject, the shadow changes. It is still of course directly connected to its source, but elongations and compressions occur.

The shadow assumes a life of its own by taking on properties independent of the performer. In the film Shadow Procession (1999; pis. 135-43), the silhouettes of torn paper forms march toward an unknown desti­nation. When the work is presented, the viewer's own physical presence casts a shadow onto the projected image, instantly becoming a moving, active part of the parade. The layers Kentridge describe—"a dance, a shadow of a dance...a shadow of the shadow of the dance"⁸—are conflated.

A much younger Kentridge appears in his first stop-motion animation, Vetkoek/Fete Galante (1985), in which he follows a blank surface through the process of his self-proclaimed "poor-man's animation," using charcoal drawings, collages, and live actors.⁹ The white background undergoes many changes, drawings, tears, and layerings as the setting for "The Battle of Yes and No" — a parable in which the two become one. Drawing for stop-motion animation is always an intense process, but the performative act of turning the page (or, to be more precise, changing the page — erasing and adding to the image that will be photographed) is normally left out. Instead of exclud­ing from the viewer's gaze the act of manipulating the image, Kentridge reveals the before and after of the shot, showing himself and his fellow actors working on the moving image. In another early film, Exhibition (1987), the phrase "opening the exhibition" precedes a series of drawings presented in a slide-show format. Kentridge performs the role of the artist in a scene captioned "the artist explains his work" (later we discover that "his explanation was not accepted"). In a telling interval the phrase "this too will pass" is written and then erased a moment later.

In 2003 Kentridge depicted himself in a suite of seven short films entitled 7 Fragments for Georges Meltes (2003; figs. 44-46,53-55, pis. 8-27). The French filmmaker Melies pioneered the use of effects such as stop-motion and time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color to transform reality via film. Rather than recording the "real," he constructed back­drops in his studio and staged the acting in front of them. In his homage to M61ies, Kentridge uses draw­ing, sculpture, animation, and film to portray himself as the main protagonist in a series of studies of life in the studio. In one fragment the artist emerges from a charcoal drawing; the film is reversed, creating the illusion that he is repairing a torn self-portrait. Once the drawing has been put back together, he exits the studio before emerging from the drawn image again. In the context of contemporary art, the motif of the artist in the atelier calls to mind the early videos and films of Bruce Nauman, whose musings and repetitive exercises in the studio have become seminal images of performative experimentation. Kentridge refer­enced Nauman directly in a 2005 interview: "There's one narrative film that's a version of [Melies's] famous journey to the moon. It comes out of the lecture I did at Dia on Bruce Nauman, out of looking at Nauman's early films where he is walking round and round his studio…There's obviously a similarity to Melies in his studio as seen against his painted backdrops."¹⁰ Whereas Nauman stomps about the studio as though waiting for an idea to come to him, making the creative process the subject of the work, Kentridge shows himself drawing, acting, and moving, portraying the act of art making as a performative process that both passes and visualizes time.

Kentridge studied mime and acting at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris in the early 1 980s; his acting credits include a variety of productions at theaters in Johannesburg. He has said that he knew right away that he did not have the skills to make it as an actor: "I knew very early on I would never be a performer."¹¹ But he has also conceded to learning much more about what it is to make a work of art from his time study­ing the theater than from any of his fine arts training. It is significant that the recurring characters of Felix, the romantic, contemplative artist and existentialist, and Soho, the rapacious businessman, can be read as surrogates for Kentridge himself; they resemble him physically and allegorically live out aspects of his bio­graphy, enacting or reperforming events from his own lifetime, memories, and dreams. In a sense, Kentridge is performing through these ambiguously constructed avatars; he uses his self-portrait over and over again. Other protagonists bear striking similarities to individuals that are close to him in real life.

In the space between writing, drawing, and daily experience are the puppets that Kentridge has repeatedly made use of in his artistic practice. He elaborates, "I've learned a huge amount from theatre. I came to the puppets with a lot of that thinking/'¹² The puppets, created by a company with which Kentridge has often collaborated, operate in a space between live performance and an imagined sequence of drawing. A puppet is one step removed from an actor — a three-dimensional drawing set in motion. In the work that is developing out of his staging of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera The Nose, scheduled to premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in 2010, the character of the Nose is repre­sented as a puppet and with a mask, functioning both as subject and prop.

Kentridge has pointed out that opera has a unique capacity to slow time; a performer might hold a single note or sing about one instant for many minutes.'³ Presented in a conventionally theatrical environ­ment, many of his recent endeavors have adapted the operatic form — consider, for instance, his interpreta­tion of Claudio Monteverdi's opera II ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1998; fig. 43) and Zeno at 4 A.M. (2001), productions that combine actors, musicians, puppets, and projections of moving images (a kind of theater within a theater). Most recently, in 2005, he took on a large-scale production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. Kentridge has managed to transfer the slowness and duration of these epic productions to works intended for the gallery environment, where a shorter attention span is generally demanded of the viewer. His multi- layered animations, as time-based narratives and as products of a laborious production process, expand a moment in time before it is essentially over.

For Jacques Derrida, "The act of writing ...is precisely the production of traces.*¹⁴ Even as we write, we erase. Applying the same idea to performance, the farther along we are in the act, the closer we are to the end. There is an intrinsic (sad. ironic) mortality in performance — as it grows and swells it moves closer and closer to extinction. Kentridge conveys the passage of time in many of his animations through the technique of erasure. He draws a key frame, erases certain areas, and redraws them to create the next frame, thereby signaling the impression of movement. He leaves visible the traces or shadows of what has been erased—physical remnants of past actions and vestiges of his process. As Kentridge points out, "The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are or how we operate in the world....[It] is a slow motion version of thought."¹⁵

A successful performance is often described as timeless. Kentridge's directorial ability to suggest vastness in a finite moment similarly liberates his films, theatrical productions, and kinetic sculptural works from the constraints of time. Even an illusory construc­tion such as What Will Come (has already come) (2007; fig. 18, pis. 170-72), in which a mirrored cylinder at the center of projected anamorphic images deciphers and completes the distorted visual information, is cyclical and seemingly endless. Each time a rotation is made the content changes, but the beginning and end are conflated, making the work essentially timeless.

In his performance I am not me, the horse is not mine, Kentridge simultaneously functions as the author and as a performer interpreting the instruc­tions of the other Kentridge (the director). These are precisely the kind of complexly layered roles that are interwoven in the artist's operas and other theatrical productions. In The Magic Flute the musical instru­ment is a magical tool, the means through which art can make an impact on the world. Kentridge's own tools, whether charcoal, pastel, or pencil, are just as magical, creating and leaving traces that stay alive long after the performance has ended. As in Melies's Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1 902\ Kentridge's world is a collage of painted and drawn backgrounds, of models and puppets, but he himself is ultimately the most real player in it.

Kentridge's Lithuanian and German-Jewish origins had always meant that he nav­igated an awkward position in South Africa:

"In South Africa, which has always been defined by its rulers as a very Christian country, to be Jewish is to be other. There were always Jewish people prominent in the anti-Apartheid movement, in the Communist 派对, the ANC, or the liberal 派对. (There were of course many who took part in these activities and profited from their circumstances as did all white South Africans.) But there is a palpable irony for South African Jews. Our Passover ceremony every year remembers the Jews as slaves in Egypt. And in the ceremony it is spoken about as if we our­selves had been slaves, while in fact we were the opposite. This contradiction did not change the fact that Jews had a historical context for understanding the desire to be free of fetters. But in the present, toe are absolutely not part of those most oppressed. That remains an uncomfortable irony to live with."⁶

Kentridge's dilemma from the outset was that he did not want to pursue the fiction of 制作 South Africa look like a "white" Arcadia, in the manner of the colonial painters of South Africa such as Jacobus Pierneef - yet he could not easily speak for the "black" either, nor provide a platform or voice for the "other." He could only explore a zone of uncertainty and shifting meanings through the portrayal of a "double-bind" where guilt and expiation express the condition of the privileged.

The denunciatory works belonging to this "revolutionary" period in South African history include the short animated films Kentridge called "drawings for projection," begun in 1989, and for which he has become most known: 约翰内斯堡, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), Monument (1990), Mine (1991), Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (1991) and Felix in Exile (1994)7 These films present the evils of avidity and power, and the struggle for emancipation against the background of pain and suffering experi­enced by exploited miners in a ravaged landscape. They employ stock characters and the miraculous transformations typical of cartoons, thus communicating on various levels and avoiding the heroics of "high art." The films chronicle the rise and fall of a white 约翰内斯堡 magnate, Soho Eckstein. Always seen wearing a pin-striped suit, Soho buys land, builds mines and develops his "empire," which finally crumbles. He is counterpoised with Kentridge's alter ego, the naked, sensual artist, lover and dream­er Felix Teitlebaum.

A similar negation of the relationship between being able and willing allows Kentridge himself to produce art without being prescriptive, to be original without being innovative, to be expressive without being expressionistic. One could say that he

celebrates the erasure of his own drawing, and makes it a public and poetic act of defec­tion, just as in more recent years he has celebrated not objects but their shadows, side­stepping the dilemma between making and not making.

"It is a barbaric act to think of writing a work of poetry after Auschwitz," E un alto di barbaric pensare di scri- vere un'opera di poesia dopo Auschwitz, T.W. Adorno, Critica delta cultura e societa, 1949, in Prismen. Kulturpolitik und Gesellschaft, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1955.

²  "The idea of animation as continuously falling short I like a lot - like the description of walking as falling and stopping yourself from falling" (W. Kentridge, unpublished quote, 2003).

³  "Obsolescence operates on various levels in his work. Kentridge draws upon a European legacy of oppo­sitional art from Goya to Hogarth to Beckmann, and his work is oddly out of synch with current trends. Though he uses the prevailing technology of video projection the drawings that form the basis of his ani­mated films retain an old-fashioned appearance, as opposed to a documentary-conceptual one. A sense of belonging to a cultural 'periphery' of Europe, and therefore of geographic distance from a 'center/ is trans­lated into the visual imagery of objects that represent a historical distance from today's accoutrements. The clothes, telephones, typewriters and other items in his animated drawings recall an early twentieth-century colonial world as perceived by a child in the 1950s and 60s looking at illustrated books from the 1940s. The simultaneous presence in the work of CAT scan machines and other examples of modern equipment, how­ever, indicates the way in which experience is layered: the computer exists side-by-side with the old-fash- ioned telephone. Similarly, Kentridge's portrayal of anti-Apartheid demonstrations in the 1980s and early 1990s recalls photographs showing crowds of striking miners in Johannesburg in the previous part of the century, such as the famous strike of March 1922 (C. Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, William Kentridge, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles, p. 11).

| "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form," Kunsthalle, Bern, 1969.

⁵  Afrikaners were Dutch, German and French colonials who settled in South Africa in the 1600s. Until 1759, before British sovereignty, the territory of the Cape had been governed by the Dutch East India Company of Holland, on whose initiative the first European settlers had landed. When British rule began, the Afrikaners moved into the interior of the country, where various Boer republics were established. Afrikaner nationalism grew during the 19th century and was further heightened as a consequence of the Anglo-Boer War (1899- 1902). The National Party of Afrikaners came to power with the 1948 elections. Although segregation of black and colored Africans had already existed for decades, segregation was accelerated, codified by law and enforced during Apartheid. Townships and separate education programs were offidally set up to encourage a multinational state in which different ethnic groups could maintain their own culture autonomously. Sexual relations between radal groups were banned and whites developed a form of paternalistic racism, which was proposed as positive. Laws were passed to classify the population into white, colored and indige­nous.

⁶  "Breaking Down the Wall," William Kentrigde interviewed by Bell Hooks, Interview, New York, September 1998, p. 182 [quote revised by William Kentridge in 2003 for this essay].

⁷  Animated drawings are also used as backdrops in the theater productions that Kentridge has made in col­laboration with the Handspring Puppet Company since 1992.

⁸  Hooks, op. cit., p. 167.

⁹  Kentridge had already experimented in this vein with his early Memo, 1993.

¹⁰  January 10 - July 27,2002, Dia: Chelsea, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2002.

¹¹  Unpublished quote, 2003.

¹²  Le locataire diabolique, 1909.

¹³  In Monument Soho presents himself to a crowd as a civic benefactor, giving a public address followed by the unveiling of a monument - the sculpture of a laborer carrying a heavy load. As in Samuel Beckett's play Catastrophe (1982) which inspired Kentridge, in the last moments of Monument, one sees that the figure with the load is actually alive. He becomes the image of a defiant reality unwilling to become subjugated to Soho's control.

¹⁴  "These two elements - pure history and the moral imperative arising from that - are the factors for mak­ing that personal beacon rise into the immovable rock of Apartheid. To escape this rock is the job of the artist. These two constitute the tyranny of our history. And escape is necessary, for as I stated the rock is possessive and inimical to good work. I am not saying that Apartheid, or indeed, redemption are not worthy of repre­sentation, description or exploration, I am saying that the scale and weight with which this rock presents itself is inimical to that task," W. Kentridge, "Dear Diary: Suburban Allegories and Other Infections," 1990, published in C. Christov-Bakargiev, op. cit., pp. 74-77.

¹⁵  R. Krauss, '"The Rock': William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection," October, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, Spring 2000, p. 10.

¹⁶  Ibid., pp. 19-20.

¹⁷  See Animations, the catalogue of an exhibition focusing on this issue, held at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center/ a MoMA Affiliate, in Fall 2000 and touring to Kunstwerke, Berlin in 2002.

¹⁸  G. Agamben, Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999, pp. 254- 255 [1st edition 1993, G. Deleuze, G. Agamben, Bartleby. La formula della creazione, Edizioni Quod Libet, Macerata, 1993, pp. 61-62].

In 1998, just four years after the African National Congress (ANC) was elected into power in South Africa, and Nelson Mandela became the first President of a post- Apartheid nation, Kentridge stated: "There is a sort of wilful amnesia, a refusal to accept accountability, that comes from the naturalization of outrageous systems in the world. But I'm more interested in the question of historical memory - of what happens when people forget so quickly."⁸ In more recent years, Kentridge's art has focused on the attempt, both on the level of form and content, to reach through this form of post- revolutionary "dullness" towards some "core" experience. In the late 1990s, when Felix and Soho fuse into two sides of the same persona, Kentridge's characters and suggest­ed narratives take on a more introspective gaze. In this post-revolutionary period things seem to take place primarily in the brain of his characters, as the artist begins to analyze the dulling of memory, guilt and how we negotiate with our past. History of the Main Complaint (1996), WEIGHING ...and WANTING (1998) and Stereoscope (1999) por­tray intimate, psychological and personal scenarios about consciousness and how to deal with memory and guilt in a post-Apartheid era. Images of medical pathology recur in the works, functioning as metaphors for the diseased body politic.

Early in 1999, Kentridge also began to create a new series of works that combined projected images with three-dimensional objects. While his character Soho was retreat­ing into his inner universe of remembering and forgetting, Kentridge himself was grappling with how to give more substance to the immaterial world of what goes on in the mind. For an exhibition on the theme of memory in Rome in 1999, he created the animated film Sleeping on Glass, which was transferred to video and rear-projected onto the mirror of an old wooden chest of drawers. This new interest in shadows and pro­jections onto objects was followed by other works such as Medicine Chest (2000), screened on the mirror of a cabinet, and Learning the Flute (2003), projected onto a black­board. The universe of shadows, shadow puppetry and shadow projections began to capture his interests, both in theater and in his art projects. Shadows imply an indirect gaze and suggest that it is better, at times, to look aslant, and to remain off center. Kentridge has cast shadows of objects in animations such as Shadow Procession (1999), in the small bronze sculptures Procession (2000), and in his torn black paper Stair Procession (2000 - see Jane Taylor's essay in this catalogue, pp. 41-57).

Kentridge's exploration of different forms of non-linear techniques and processes has included an investigation into the effects of reversal. In Day for Night (2003), for example, he used the negative film as opposed to the positive, while in his Video- reversal drawings (2002) he projected recordings backwards rather than forwards. In his new live action film and video experiments titled Fragments for Georges Melies (2003), he performed actions backwards and then reversed the direction of the pro­jected film so that apparently normal actions appear oddly out of synch. Other recent series of works like Projection for Drawing. Studio Portrait No.l (2003) and Projection for Drawing. Large Bird (2003), which he significantly calls "projections for drawings," see Kentridge reversing his habitual technique of making sketches for projections in order to create large drawings that stem from projections of mundane objects onto paper pinned on his studio wall.

In his newest work Tide Table (2003), Kentridge has returned to his portrayal of Soho, as he did in Stereoscope (1999). This animated film again pulls his audience through the veil of dullness, which now becomes one of its explicit themes. At the sea­side, Soho muses from the balcony of his hotel, or sits alone on a deck chair at the beach, reading the tide tables in a newspaper. Around him certain events take place: a group of people perform a baptism, accompanied by a choir; cows waste away and die; a child plays with stones in the shallow water; a man holds a sick body that is literally washed away, leaving only stones; some beach huts become a hospital ward filled with patients; the skull of an animal and an old wheelbarrow are washed up on shore. Water is no longer the passionate blue of Felix's world, but the colorless agent of erasure.

On one level, this new film portrays Soho's attempt at getting out of introspection, and to move into the world again. On another level, however, Soho is detached from all that surrounds him; no one notices him, and he dozes through most of these events. He is in a public space, with a community of people nearby, but he might as well be in his enclosed office or in his home - no sense of collective endeavor emerges. He is not as productive as he was in his office in the earlier films, nor even as connected with the outside world as he was when he lay terminally ill in a hospital ward in History of the Main Complaint. He is a guest at a hotel, an outsider, a temporary resident.

From the hotel balcony three generals (who resemble Soho) watch the landscape below through binoculars. They patrol the scene with their surveillance apparatus, yet there are no demonstrators below, no terrorists, no enemy or armies for them to com­bat. There is only the daily drama of illness, starvation and dying. We think of the hor­ror of Aids claiming millions of lives in Africa, yet marginalized by the Western media. Tide Table suggests a sense of solitude even in the public sphere, of not knowing what to do, of an enforced holiday. Retrospection and memory are ineffective; they bring only alienation even from one's own past. Soho is unable to recognize his own child­hood self, portrayed in the film as a boy skipping stones. In a moment of brief respite from solitude, a woman in a headscarf, portrayed from behind, holds his hand for a moment while he sleeps.

It is interesting to note that this melancholy film was made in the fall of 2003, after a period of intense and energetic experimentation with various techniques of draw­ing and recording that coincided with a residency at Columbia University in New York in 2001-2002. These experiments in the mechanics of making art and construct­ing vision resulted in displaced Anamorphic drawings, which can be experienced only by looking in a mirror cylinder at their center; in optical devices with drawings such as his Phenakistoscope; and in a return of interest in live-action filming, combined with drawing.⁹

These recent playful and dramatic works express a dynamic expansion of filming and editing techniques that move the art forward experimentally, yet with no notion of linear progression. The result is the evocation of the implausible and mad, reminiscent of, yet distinct from, the work of Western artists of the 1970s such as Bruce Nauman, who were exhibiting at the time in New York.¹⁰ Kentridge understood the radical impulses behind Nauman's video and body-performance works, yet did not share the existentialist impulse towards phenomenological reduction. "It did not seem enough," Kentridge has commented, "for the body to be the gesture; the activity itself was not enough to justify the artist's incessant 'look at me, look at me'... So when I look at Bruce Nauman's works, part of my astonishment is at his audacity to do so little and claim it is enough. A wonder and jealousy at his confidence in his place in the world, a kind of certainty that feels impossible to me."¹¹

This "madness" is achieved, even within the universe of live action film, by return­ing to some of the earliest techniques of cinema in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as the extravaganzas of Georges Melies, who made a film, for example, where an entire apartment is pulled out of a suitcase.¹² However, in a highly illuminating analy­sis focusing on Kentridge's short film Monument, in October magazine of Fall 2000, Rosalind Krauss has suggested that Kentridge deliberately pulls the work backwards to a pre-filmic moment.¹³ She comments on how, when talking or writing about his art, Kentridge avoids directly addressing outrage over Apartheid (the "rock" as Kentridge described it in an essay of 1990),¹⁴ shifting our attention away from content towards a discussion of his drawing and creative process. He never denounces injustices head- on, as if suspicious of the ways in which historical memory is transformed into specta­cle. He expands the field of improvisation by moving back and forth from the paper to the camera as he records the evolving drawing one frame at a time. During the time and space of this "dance," free associations occur - neither chance operations nor con­trolled actions - which ultimately determine the open narrative and the meaning of the artwork. His work emerges not out of a wish to achieve motion, to "animate," com­ments Krauss, but rather through the impulse to interrupt the flow of film, to reach back from filmic animation to a form of palimpsest, "dragging against the flow of film."¹⁵ Thus he evolves a new medium of automatism where the foregrounding of procedure induces meaning. The deliberate jerkiness resists cinematic illusion, and, adds Krauss, "Kentridge's technical alternative... sets his... 'drawings for projection' at an angle to animation, one that seems below it, which is to say even less technolog­ically invested than the flicker book."¹⁶

The technological universe has by now so infected our bodily and graphic experi­ences, our subjectivity, that Kentridge's recourse to the palimpsest - even though the palimpsest has itself been infected by the technological - becomes a way of avoiding the spectacularization of memory. His work focuses among other things on the recrudescence of the hand-drawn in an age when popular culture is profoundly engaged with the digital. It is a form of "poor" animation, like Arte Povera's slowing down and reduction of experience in the 1960s, which emerged in antithesis to the speed and mediatization of culture in the post-war period.¹⁷

However, in Kentridge's most recent art, the hand-drawn itself becomes ambivalent. In his works up to Stereoscope (1999), which ends with alternating graphic images of the words "GIVE" and "FORGIVE," text was usually present only as block-letter intertitles that recalled early silent movies. In recent years, however, the distinction between draw­ing and writing has blurred in the artist's works through the growing presence of sinu-

ous handwriting. Writing by hand is an intimate activity, and emerges in an area of the mind and body that is neither fully rational nor fully unintentional - it rarely occurs in the computer and digital age, and is an almost obsolete bodily activity, where the brain moves with the arm and hand almost like an automaton. It is not usually valued as a form of draughtsmanship, belonging more to a universe of regressive doodling. Again, Kentridge defects from the grand drawings that are expected of him.

In parallel fashion, machines and mechanical devices are no longer depicted as inherently violent in Kentridge's work. In early films such as Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, Soho's business concerns were represented through calculators, type­writers and papers filled with calculations and minute notations. Cameras on tripods became machine guns that could only be deflected from their aggressive nature through art (Monteverdi madrigals, rather than orders and speeches, broadcast from public-address speakers, for example). Now Kentridge has embarked on a journey to disenfranchise mechanics, no longer presenting them as dehumanizing instruments of control but rather as challenging devices to expand vision and open up complex visu­al thoughts through playful experimentation.

At about this time, Kentridge also began a series of drawings and prints on the pages of disembowelled books, physically overlaying the two universes of drawing and text. By the time he began to create the body of works inspired by Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno (1923), in 2001, drawing and writing had merged fully in many images, and their connection continues to be foregrounded in even more recent works such as Automatic Writing (2003) and Day for Night (2003).

Svevo's original novel is introduced by a framing device according to which the entire story of Zeno is a diary that the character has written on the suggestion of his psychoanalyst. Aware of his own weaknesses yet unable to influence in any way the course of his own life, let alone take responsibility for his actions, the inept, guilt-rid­den Zeno believes that life is a manifestation of illness, with its better and worse moments. He is weak willed, continuously resolving and failing to give up smoking, a trivial aim against the background of external events and the incipient First World War.

Kentridge's avoidance of intentionality also recalls Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener (1853). Bartleby is an office clerk who prefers not to participate in the pro­ductive endeavors of the burgeoning 19th-century modern world. He simply refuses to work in his office, yet he does not leave it, maintaining himself in what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has recently termed a state of "absolute potentiality," adopting the term from Medieval theologians. Agamben comments:

Bartleby calls into question precisely this supremacy of the will over potentiality. If God (at least the potentia ordinata) is truly capable only of what he wants, Bartleby is capable only without wanting; he is capable only de potentia absoluta. But his potentiality is not, therefore, unrealized; it does not remain unactualized on account of a lack of will. On the contrary, it exceeds will (his own and that of others) at every point Inverting Karl Valentin's witticism "I wanted to want it, but I didn't feel able to want it," one could say of Bartleby that he succeeds in being able (and not being able) absolutely without wanting it. Hence the irreducibility of his "I would prefer not to." It is not that he does not want to copy or that he does not ivant to leave the office; he simply would prefer not to. The formula that he so obstinately repeats destroys all possibilities of constructing a relation between being able and willing, between potentia abso­luta and potentia ordinata. It is the formula of potentiality.⁸

The technique used for what the artist has called the "stone-age filmmaking" in these works, is based on creating a series of drawings in charcoal and pastel on paper; each is successively altered through erasure and re-drawing, and photographed at the many stages of its evolution. Thus, rather than being constructed from thousands of drawings, as in traditional Cel animation, Kentridge's films are made up of hundreds of moments in an ongoing process across a small number of drawings. These range from about twenty for shorter films to roughly sixty for longer ones, each correspond­ing with the final stage of a scene in the film. The narrative emerges through a sequence of broadly related scenes and recurring "personae" reflecting different perspectives on the world and various aspects of the artist's own self.

Numerous essays on Kentridge's work, as well as his own lectures and interviews, have over the years pointed out how his technique of erasure engenders a time-based, open form of "process" drawing, which can never be definitive. This openness to change, and "un-finiteness" of language, is an aesthetic position that is based on a polit­ical perspective - a refusal of all authoritarian and authoritative forms of communica­tion embedded in most usages, from advertising to politics. The process of fracture remains visible, establishing a jerky effect (tempered by the film's musical soundtrack) that causes the viewer to perceive the spatial and temporal disjunctures of the draw­ing, rather than creating an illusion of fluid movement. And, because erasure is neces­sarily imperfect, traces of the preceding stages of each drawing can still be seen. These smudges and shadows reflect the way in which events are layered in life, how the past lingers in the mind and affects the present through memory.

The technique of filming consecutive moments of erasure and drawing was not a novelty in the field of animation, and had been variously used in the age of early film and the history of animation. But the way in which Kentridge uses it as a metaphor for a new, flexible model of parallel thinking, a paradigm of radical thought made up of indirect gazes, shadows, and of continuously "falling short," is grounded in a basic dual­ity and ambivalence that is particularly topical today. "Erasure" in his art is used as a metaphor for the loss of historical memory - the amnesia to which injustice, racism and brutality are subjected in society. (Often Kentridge depicts scenes of bodies lying on the ground, becoming erased and "absorbed" into the landscape through transformation into mere rocks or bumps in a barren environment punctuated by the detritus of civil engineering.)

Yet "erasure" - as opposed to pristine, exact line drawing - is also a metaphor for the healthy questioning of the certainties and preconceptions lying behind human rela­tions in what might only appear to be an increasingly interactive and democratic world of the digital age. It questions the notion that any definitive statement is ever possible; it denies the value of complete or binary theories of politics and social relations (or of any finished artwork, for that matter). Kentridge's device of erasure allows the emer­gence of a palimpsest - a synchronic image that contains its own diachronic denial through a layering of traces of earlier drawings that have been erased.

This ambivalence, joined with an astounding draughtsmanship, is what brought Kentridge to the fore as one of today's most significant artists. His work is uniquely personal and yet also expresses the field of contradictions in today's culture, at a deli­cate moment in which modernity, the West and post-colonial realities must evolve dynamically in order to prevent globalization from becoming a degenerative moment in world history.

Kentridge's choice of figuration as an avant-garde and radical practice ties into his acknowledgement of cultural amnesia. Rather than representation - which actually distances the viewer from experience by focusing on content and information, as it had done in pre-modernist practice and in much conservative art of the 20th century - fig­uration and narrative became a way of relating the inner landscape (personal memo­ry) with the outer landscape of social and political events at large. Even when politi­cally radical, as in much neo-conceptual work of today, documentary footage allows for a detached gaze (the viewer identifying with and protected by the camera's eye as in news broadcasts). However, Kentridge's hand-drawn scenes of individuals carrying out mundane daily activities - petting a cat, sitting at a desk, walking along a path and picking up a stone, having coffee, shaving in front of a mirror - portrayed against a background of extreme and outrageous events - a dog's head with earphones explod­ing into bits, bodies being beaten and shot, terminal illness in a hospital ward, cows starving and dying along the beach - connect the specificity of daily life (with which every viewer can identify) to the broader moral and ethical issues of active citizenship. This device recalls the way in which James Joyce managed to ground his writing so specifically in Dublin that it paradoxically became universal. It is the local nature of much of what Kentridge draws that allows the work to engage so intimately with viewers everywhere. It is the specifics of pain and the minutiae of the intimate lives depicted against the backdrop of events in South Africa that transform them into scenes that could be happening almost anywhere. We recognize our own weaknesses, our dreams, desires and fears.

In many ways, Kentridge's themes recall the preoccupations of Holocaust sur­vivors, just as his drawings sometimes echo those of labor camp prisoners. The hard physical toil and the notorious "boxes" - bunk-beds stacked one above the other - depicted in one of his earliest animated films, Mine (1991), which follows a day in the life of the mines, recall drawings made by prisoners in labor camps. Further associa­tions arise through the imagery of gassing or burning: the crematorium chimney, smoke, the sombre, charcoal atmosphere. And his procession of the dispossessed sug­gests not individuals, but the de-humanised masses incarcerated in the camps. Yet the Holocaust - and Apartheid - transcend their original meaning and become a symbol of the tragedy of modernity as a whole.

As a consequence, guilt, complicity and indirect responsibility are key themes in

Kentridge's art. In connection with this he also portrays the intolerable position of being a survivor and a witness. In Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (1991), Felix is a wit­ness of protest marches; in Felix in Exile (1994), he watches abuses and the shooting of the female character Nandi from his hotel room. And in History of the Main Complaint (1996) Soho observes violent brutality through the windshield of his car. In Stereoscope (1999), he is overwhelmed by the echoes of troubles going on outside his enclosed space to the point where his "self" splits into two separate but adjacent rooms, repre­senting the collapse of stereoscopic vision, and therefore of consciousness. In a series of unique prints made on book pages titled Sleeping on Glass (1999), Kentridge developed this theme using drawings of trees with splitting trunks, accompanied by phrases such as, "This is how the bow breaks" and "Terminal hurt/terminal longing."

The 1994 elections in South Africa brought an end to Apartheid and introduced a period of inquiry and national retribution represented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In this process, amnesty was given by the new government for crimes committed for the sake of the Apartheid government in return for full disclosure of those crimes by their perpetrators. Not by chance, in the years following Apartheid, Kentridge's drawings and films began to express the weight of having been one of the privileged few, exploring the notion and implications of indirect responsibility. During the period of the Commission, when horrendous atrocities were recounted and legally forgiven, Kentridge made Ubu Tells the Truth (1996). This film, and the related theater production, depart from the Soho films, marking the height of Kentridge's explicit engagement in South African affairs. It does this through the use of documentary footage that alternates with rough chalk drawings in a work of intense human outcry. A series of large self-portrait drawings (including for instance a work called The Flagellant), inspired by Alfred Jarry's tyrant Ubu roi (1888), expressed this acute self-criticism.

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Born in Johannesburg in 1955, at an early age Kentridge became aware of the bru­tality of South African society. His maternal great-grandfather emigrated to South Africa just before the Boer war in the late 1800s, driven out of Eastern Europe by the Pogroms. He grew up in a liberal South African household. His parents were both lawyers and worked with anti-Apartheid activists and groups.⁵ Kentridge took part early on in drama workshops and art classes, which he had begun as a teenager at the Johannesburg Art Foundation. Established in 1972, during Apartheid, the JAF was founded on non-racial principles, offering art training and opportunities to different groups, with bursary funding for students unable to support their studies. For several years Kentridge taught etching there, and although he made a number of early paint­ings, it was on the "poorer" medium of drawing and printmaking that he soon focused his attention. His first exhibition in 1979 included a number of monoprints and some drawings. These dark gray, claustrophobic works show figures in pits being watched from above by faceless individuals, a vision of people living in a closed society from which there is no escape. They prefigure later images of enclosure, such as the curtains around the hospital bed in History of the Main Complaint (1996), Felix's hotel room in Felix in Exile (1994), or Soho's double and enclosed space in Stereoscope (1999).

Experiencing feelings of inadequacy, however, Kentridge stopped making visual art for some years, pursuing film and theater instead - with which he had already been actively involved since the mid-1970s as a member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, Johannesburg. In 1981-82, he went to Paris with his wife Anne Stanwix, an Australian doctor, where he studied mime and theater. He is still deeply involved in the­ater, having created numerous performances with the Handspring Puppet Company.

It was not until 1984 that Kentridge returned to drawing, engaging in a series of large works on paper, sometimes narratively grouped in triptychs, like Dreams of Europe (1984-85). These sketchy drawings present charged, haunted settings. Multi-layered and dynamic, they combine deep, abysmal spaces with compressed perspectives. From these drawings of the 1980s to his animated films of the 1990s, Kentridge's works were marked by the urgency of taking part in truly momentous historical events I the civil rights movement in South Africa. He was trying to make sense of the violence that characterized the last period of Apartheid in his country.