William Kentridge: 9 Drawings for Projection
24 September
The screening at the Durban Art Gallery’s quarterly Redeye Art event, of William Kentridge’s 9 Drawings for Projection, felt in some ways like a cultural mission from a second-string colonial power. Established as a trading post for an exploratory market in ivory in the early 1800s, and later a sugar port, the city of Durban has for the most part enjoyed leisurely growth into the modest commercial hub it is today. By contrast Johannesburg, now an African juggernaut with double the population and rising, was founded on a single cataclysmic event – the discovery of gold – barely a century ago, and Durban is largely dependent on it for its commercial wellbeing.
Johannesburg is at the heart of Kentridge’s films – as a canvas for the epic interior struggles of their protagonists, Soho Eckstein, the man of commerce and Felix Teitelbaum, the man of soul – and as a protagonist itself, that is repeatedly demolished and reinvented in any number of nightmarish ways. And, of course, as a home for the artist. In the cool and slightly damp atmosphere of a subtropical spring night, in the faded Edwardian splendour of the auditorium of the Durban City Hall, Kentridge’s bleak and threatening Johannesburg dreamscapes feel even more alien.
And yet also entirely appropriate. The slightly florid auditorium, with its vast organ pipes and dusty velvet drapes, the clattering of the film projector, the shuffling of feet on scuffed floorboards and the muted movements of chairs, all enhanced rather than detracted from the screening. And while his more intimate themes are timeless, Kentridge’s drawing style is evocative of an earlier era – of a boyhood in the 1950s and ’60s spent looking at illustrated books from the ’40s as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has suggested in the 1998 catalogue for Kentridge’s show at the Societe des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. The screening became an installation responding to a space which, according to executive producer Ross Douglas, was not entirely unintentional: ‘We try to find spaces that collaborate with the work. Much of Kentridge’s work is themed around the crumbling of empire, or an empire changing in Africa. And this was a fantastic Edwardian venue in a great new African city.’ Interestingly Red Eye Art, of which the screening formed the centrepiece, was conceived as an attempt by the Durban Art Gallery (situated in the same building as the auditorium) to transcend its colonial roots and find new audiences in a democratic South Africa.
During a typical Redeye evening, the colonial spaces of the gallery – even the artworks of the existing collections themselves – are appropriated and subverted by a range of performance or installation art, and art makes forays into the streets outside. The evening’s other performances, for example, included photographic installations, a new work by the cross-cultural Siwela Sonke dance company, some darkly political gospel from the Burlesque Supergroup and a visitation of gaudy fibreglass bovines from the Cow Parade. As with Kentridge’s work, there were layers of resonance in this event.
Kentridge, who comes from a family of barristers and has remarked that he finds public speaking easier and more natural than the creation of art, was an urbane and thoroughly obliging presence throughout the evening, talking briefly before the screening about some of his practical techniques. To achieve movement from frame to frame, he draws primarily in charcoal, though also in pastel, on large sheets of paper on his studio wall, films a frame then erases his drawing and draws the new frame – each drawing occupying 1/25th of a second. ‘The film is constructed somewhere on this walk between the camera and the sheet of paper. The hope is that somewhere on this walk, the ideas will come.’
Kentridge’s work is a palimpsest in the truest sense of the word. In many instances, the recent history of each image remains visible – titles haunt the main action long after the opening sequence has rolled, the passage of a sheet of paper across the sky forms a beautiful, ghostly arc of geometric planes. And throughout the work there is a sense of the origins and the outcomes of things, revealed in layers. Soho Eckstein’s telephone in Mine (1991) becomes the mineshaft driven into the earth, while the levels full of miners become something familiar: the deck layout of a slave ship, with its rows of prostrate slaves. In a cruder form, the analogy between ship and mine might have been rejected; the coherence of Kentridge’s argument, his showing of the workings, renders it coldly undeniable.
This is the first time the works have all been seen together, and the programme is somewhat demanding. The work is conceptually and symbolically rich, not to mention visually exciting and technically accomplished, and sitting through all eight, plus the ‘bonus track’ of Kentridge’s live-action/animation tribute to Journey to the Moon (2003), is invigorating but overwhelming. Watching even one of the shorter films (although none exceeds eight minutes), there is a sense of things half-glimpsed, and of things one doesn’t want to miss. Phillip Miller’s score, ranging from jaunty to haunting via cacophonic, was played live at this screening and elsewhere by the Sontonga quartet, and is entirely integral to the performance. According to Douglas, who conceived of this project, the idea is not for the audience to engage too deeply with the work, at least not in this format: ‘In a way, our intention was to make the event less intimidating for people, and to allow them to enjoy the spectacle, the music and the space.’ To date, almost 8000 people have seen the films, in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban – a substantial number for South Africa.
Performance aside, the project began primarily as an exercise in preservation. No finished master copies of the eight original films, which were made between 1991 and 2003, existed in any format other than relatively unstable analogue video. At a substantial cost, the original 16mm film was scanned frame by frame onto computer, digitally cleaned up, then remastered by laser onto 35mm, allowing audiences to enjoy the clarity and scale of the work in this format for the first time.
Christov-Bakargiev recommends Kentridge as a ‘point of entry’ into a more nuanced understanding of South Africa and the complexities of interiority it spawns. It has even been suggested that his work proposes a valid means by which white South Africans may address their complicity in Apartheid. These are weighty and indeed worthy undertakings, whether intended by the artist or not. This new treatment shows his ability to please a crowd as well.
Nicholas Paul