Point of View: William Kentridge

Malformed human figures tread stiffly across the video projection from left to right. Dark silhouettes torn from paper seem to move relentlessly towards an unknown destination. The movement of the shadow procession is accompanied by powerful music: the energetic singing of a South African street musician makes the clumsy shadows human, almost overwhelmingly real. Suddenly, the viewer realises that he himself is being watched, too, as a giant eye stares at him from William Kentridge’s video installation, Shadow Procession.

In his life, the South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955) has learned to see things in a different way. He was born in Johannesburg and raised in a politically aware, actively anti-apartheid white Jewish family. Kentridge’s parents came from immigrant families from Lithuania and Russia. In the society that believed in white supremacy, Kentridge was, automatically, one of the privileged but also one of the ’others’. ”In South Africa, which has always been defined by its rulers as a very Christian country, to be Jewish was to be other”, Kentridge says.

Kentridge sees his situation as controversial: ”But a central irony exists for South African Jews. Our Passover ceremony every year commemorates the Jews as slaves in Egypt. And there was always an understanding that here we are in South Africa talking about having been slaves in Egypt, yet in the present we are certainly not slaves. This contradiction does not change the fact that Jews had a historical context to understand the desire to be free of fetters.”

Drawings bear witness

Unlike most of his peers, upper middle class white men, Kentridge chose a role of witness by refusing to close his eyes to the tragedies surrounding him. Art is his channel. Kentridge uses a wide range of media for his artistic expression, even though he sees himself mainly as a draughtsman. His scale ranges from film, video, animation, television, theatre (both as a director and actor), opera and sculpture to various multidisciplinary experiments.
Drawing is essential in Kentridge’s films, too. His dark-toned animated films, that have won him international acclaim in recent years, are based on his drawings. The lively strokes of charcoal, the process of drawing, can be clearly seen.

The procession of shadows

Kentridge’s works bristle with allusions to the traumatic times when the government made segregation legal. Shadow Procession, too, comprises references to oppression, high-handedness of the rulers and human suffering.

The video installation Shadow Procession in the Kiasma collection is made in a seemingly ’primitive’ technique. The black-and-white work seems unfinished, but deliberately so. The rough narration captures the viewers’ attention by shattering the customary smoothness of the flow of expression. Here, too, the work process is visible in the final artwork. The shadow figures moving jerkily in the film are constructed from black paper, and even the paper fasteners used for joining the limbs can be seen in the picture.

The video comprises three parts that follow one another without explanation and obvious links to each other. The silhouettes of the first part stem from Kentridge’s experiments in shadow theatre, and it differs from his other films where he animates a drawn line. Here Kentridge makes a seemingly endless stream of shadows march before us: outcasts, cripples, blind and lame. Humans, animals and the indeterminate figures in between carry their burdens, sacks, bundles and houses. Some lead others by the hand, some carry gallows and bodies. Some drag entire neighbourhoods on their backs. The procession is accompanied by Alfred Makgalemele, a street singer from Johannesburg, whose singing is expressive and full of different emotions.

The second part introduces a three-dimensional actor, the Ubu character often repeated in Kentridge’s works. The grotesque character filling the whole picture space does his horrible wobbly dance waving his huge arms to shouted army commands and sounds of shooting. The Ubu character familiar from Kentridge’s series of etchings Ubu Tells the Truth refers to the work of the Truth Commission that also dealt with apartheid issues publicly on TV. Absurd additions to the whole in part three are a graphic cat that staggers along in time with the music, and an enormous eye that rolls from one side to another and baffles the viewer for a moment.

The importance of remembering

Kentridge is worried that in places in South Africa people are collectively forgetting what happened in the immediate past. ”For example, in the area where I used to live there was a whites-only swimming pool. The laws changed. It became a mixed swimming pool, and within about a month, it wasn’t that everybody forgot the fact that it used to be segregated but that it was hard to actually remember what our experience was like when it was a whites-only pool.” Kentridge wants to remember and remind. His personal experience of the tragedy of the South-African apartheid as both a witness and a participant is powerfully present in his works, and in the Shadow Procession probing various dimensions in ARS 01 as well.

Kentridge is especially interested in what happens when people forget their traumas so easily. ”All my works are part of the same project, I don’t see a great difference between them.”

It is hard to tell if Kentridge is referring to a specific historical event in Shadow Procession, even though the work is clearly set in the ’past’. In this context, however, recognising the events is not even important. Rather, this video installation epitomises the grim memory of all those who were oppressed and left their home country. Kentridge says he often refers to certain local events that are clearly recognisable in his own country, but he also stresses the universality of human tragedies and believes they can be understood without the local references. The most important thing is to remember.

From obscurity to world fame

Five years ago, William Kentridge and his works were fairly unknown outside South Africa. Reasons for his international obscurity may be various: the almost world-wide cultural boycott of South Africa in the last years of apartheid, the artist’s interdisciplinary way of working on different projects, and the tendency in the art world to focus on Europe and North America probably contributed to Kentridge’s invisibility. In recent years, he has won much acclaim in international circles. He has won several important art awards and acknowledgements, and his multi-layered works have been on show in various big art exhibitions. All this tells about the recent interest in what used to be marginal art.

Minna Raitmaa

Quotes from bell hooks’ interview with William Kentridge, Breaking down the wall (1998) and from Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev, Coetzee: William Kentridge, Phaidon Press Limited, 1999.