William Kentridge: Ghosts and Erasures - animated films

Since 1989, Johannesburg native William Kentridge has been making short, animated films from charcoal drawings that he alters and erases in the course of filming. Like dense, insistent poems, the films move through time on the momentum of associations, loves, fears and memories exhumed both willfully and reflexively. Like Kentridge's animation process itself--born of the desire to keep alive the transient, evolutionary stages of his drawings--the unscripted narratives of the films reckon with the tenuous nature of memory, both personal and historical. How much are we to hold onto the past as a way of navigating the future, and how much to let it go or suppress it as an impediment to progress?

Kentridge (b. 1955) developed the rich technique used in the "drawings for projection" over the course of apartheid's collapse and the establishment of a democratic South Africa--a period, ongoing still, of flux and revelation. The state-sanctioned violence of the 1980s, the so-called decade of emergencies, has been quelled, but the resulting dead have not stayed buried, nor the buried dead. Dozens of apartheid victims were exhumed this year and last, so their wounds could serve as testimony in the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a tribunal set up, like Kentridge's camera, to position the brutalities of the past in the present and future.

"The disaster always takes place after having taken place."[1] What Maurice Blanchot has written in reference to the Holocaust pertains as well to more recent human-generated cataclysms in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Bosnia, South Africa. Closure is unthinkable after such societal trauma, and Kentridge's work, startling yet suffused with familiar gestures and everyday rhythms, reflects this lack of fixity. With its transmutations and erasures--a cat metamorphoses into a telephone, cigar smoke materializes as a typewriter clicking out messages--Kentridge's work epitomizes the provisionality of being, how becoming necessitates both doing and undoing.

Kentridge's drawings for projection chronicle, on a visceral level, his country's transitions. After decades under a cruelly rigid template, South Africa is now drawing itself, drafting, erasing and reformulating its structures of power, its social relations, its systems of rights, benefits and protections. "South Africanness now," as the expatriate poet Breyten Breytenbach puts it, "is an itinerary (and a topography) of becoming in the making."[2]

References to particular social and political circumstances abound in Kentridge's films, as well as in his prints, drawings and theater productions. His art is permeated with the texture of resistance, yet it remains open-ended and thus is antithetical to propaganda. While it does share with classic agitprop art an immediacy, emotional urgency and accessibility, it targets no particular person, class or regime as much as the broader, erosive power of forgetting, the phenomenon of "disremembering."

The moral dimensions of memory, the discontinuities it provokes, the burden of its light (or shadow) are all present in Kentridge's deeply affecting films. Their continual erasures, yielding ghosts, traces, stains, evoke both memory's natural stoppage and a more calculated form of amnesia. Subject matter and Kentridge's own personal references root the work in Johannesburg, but its broad appeal testifies to how closely aligned the personal and the universal can be on the continuum of human experience. In the last few years, Kentridge has been welcomed enthusiastically into an international art community as receptive to issues of memory as the literary world is awash in memoir. He represented South Africa at the 1993 Venice Biennale and at Documenta X last year. His work was seen at biennials in Istanbul, Havana, Sydney and Johannesburg in the past few years, and in shows at Houston's FotoFest, SITE Santa Fe and the Drawing Center in New York. Early this year, director Hugh Davies of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, curated Kentridge's first one-person museum show; around the same time, he was named a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum's second Hugo Boss Prize.

The fluidity and contingency of drawing lie at the heart of all of Kentridge's art of the past 20 years, not just his work on paper. In the films, however, an unusual, reciprocal dynamic comes into play between the drawings that comprise the visual fabric of the films and the films themselves. Unlike conventional cel animation, which fuses thousands of drawings into a slick, seamlessly continuous whole, Kentridge's process is overtly raw and hand-wrought. For each film (all are under 10 minutes) Kentridge makes about 20 drawings, which undergo continual addition, permutation and erasure, the traces of which are plainly visible, yielding an impression of time and space as viscous, invariably altered by every arrival and departure. "You could look at the drawings as indicative of the process and the route to making the film," he says. You can also see the finished film as the complicated way of arriving at that particular suite of drawings."[3]