William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose 9780226444048

Citation preview

William Kentridge

William Kentridge Being Led by the Nose Jane Taylor

The University of Chicago Press 

Chicago and London

Contents

List of Illustrations Prologue 1 Nasal Passages

vii 1 5

2 Nose Bleeds

59

3 A Special Theory of Relativity

77

4 Object Lessons

111

5 Collegiate Assessments

141

Acknowledgments

155

Bibliography

157

Index

161

Illustrations

Illustrations are listed by page number. All works are by William Kentridge unless otherwise noted. 2 Art in a State of Grace, 1988; Art in a State of Siege, 1988; Art in a State of Hope, 1988. Silkscreen on paper. Each 1600 × 1000 mm.

6

Kentridge cutting Eight Figures linocut in his Johannesburg studio, 2010. Photo: John Hodgkiss.

7 Three Rhinos (no. 3 in series), 2005. Etching, drypoint, colored pencil on Hahnemühle paper. 285 × 32.5 mm. Photo: John Hodgkiss. 10 Spectrophotometrie, 2010 (from Carnets d’Egypte). Charcoal on found page. 235 × 145 mm. Photo: John Hodgkiss.

15

Projection test for The Nose, Johannesburg, 2009.

18 Electrical Industries (Rodchenko). Drawing for artist’s book Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008. Photo: John Hodgkiss.

19

Ernst Iosipovitch Neizvestny, Bust of Dmitri Shostakovich, 1976. Bronze. 12 × 9 × 9 in. Edition of 5. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA. Gift of Renée and Paul Mansheim, 2012.8.1.

19 Head I (from a series of five three-­dimensional paper heads), 2007. Lithography, letterpress, scanned book pages, hand-­coloring, and chine collé. 350 × 300 × 220 mm. Photo: John Hodgkiss.

26

Kentridge working on Carnets d’Egypte in his Johannesburg studio, 2010. Photo: John Hodgkiss.



32

Drawing for Art & Australia (from a series of 23), 2008. Indian ink, watercolor, colored pencil, found book pages, collage. 250 × 235 mm.

33 Dear Friends, drawing for The Nose, 2007. Poster paint, pastel, charcoal on paper. 2100 × 1500 mm.

34

Pa Ubu and the eye, from Ubu and the Truth Commission, 1996 (restaged 2014). Photo: Luke Younge.



38

Projection test for Telegrams from the Nose, 2009.



39

Untitled drawing for Universal Archive linocuts, 2011. Indian ink on found pages. 270 × 192 mm.



39

Untitled drawing for Universal Archive linocuts, 2011. Indian ink on



39

Drawings for artist’s book Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008. Indian ink,



44

Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, 1515. Woodcut and typeprint. 212 × 300 mm.



45

Robert Hooke, “Study of a Flea,” from Micrographia. Engraving from

found pages. 270 × 192 mm. watercolor, colored pencil, found book pages, collage.

Hooke’s observations through microscopes, made by him.

45

Electron microscope image of a flea, from ASU School of Life Sciences. https://askabiologist.asu.edu?content/robert-­hooke.



46

Kentridge looking through stereoscopic device in his Johannesburg studio, 2009. Photo: Jane Taylor.



50

Model noses in Kentridge’s Johannesburg studio, 2007. Photo: Jane Taylor.



52

Still from The History of the Main Complaint, 1996. Charcoal on paper. Animated as 35 mm.

60 What lies in store (diptych). Drawings for artist’s book Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008. Indian ink, watercolor, colored pencil, found book pages, collage. Each page 260 × 195 mm. Photo John Hodgkiss. 63 Il Sole 24 Ore: Domenica (Newspaper), 2007. Charcoal and colored pencil on paper. 2320 × 1670 mm. 64 Il Sole 24 Ore: Domenica (Newspaper II), 2007. Charcoal and colored pencil on paper. 2320 × 1670 mm. 65 City of Moscow, 2009. Mohair tapestry. 4210 × 4080 mm. Woven in the Stephens Tapestry Studio, directed by Marguerite Stephens. 67 Untitled V (from series of seven horse bronzes), 2007. 380 × 330 × 240 mm.

67



68, 69

Drawing for The Nose, 2010. Watercolor and ink on paper. Costume designs for The Nose, by Greta Gorois and William Kentridge, 2009. Photocopies, cardboard, collage.



70, 71

From the series Shostakovich, 2010. Wood, wood stain, black paper, metal clamps and cold glue. 900 × 700 × 1200 mm.



72

Video stills from I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine (Country Dances II (Paper)), 2008. Installation of eight video fragments for projection. DV cam, HD video. 6 min.

73 Lobster in Aspic (diptych). Drawing for artist’s book Everyone Their Own Projector 2008. Indian ink, watercolor, colored pencil, found book pages, collage. Single page, 260 × 195 mm; spread (as shown here), 260 × 380 mm. Photo: John Hodgkiss.

82, 83

Video stills from Tide Table, 2003. Charcoal on paper. Animated as 35 mm, video, and DVD transfer.

85 Muizenberg, 1933, 1976. Linocut on paper. Image 330 × 350 mm; paper size may vary.

viii



86

Video still from Tide Table, 2003. Charcoal on paper. Animated as 35 mm,



90

Video still from Other Faces, 2011. Charcoal and colored pencil on paper.



92

video, and DVD transfer. 35 mm animated film transferred to video. 9:45 min. Drawing of two anamorphic heads from What Will Come (Has Already Come), with views in cylindrical mirror, 2007. Charcoal on paper with mirrored cylinder.

93

Image of anamorphic heads from What Will Come (Has Already Come), reflected on polished cylinder. Photo: John Hodgkiss.



94, 96

Video stills from Other Faces, 2011. Charcoal and colored pencil on paper. 35 mm animated film transferred to video. 9:45 min.



95

William Kentridge with his mother, Felicia Kentridge, ca. 1957.

97 Bankers Ledger Paper (Early State), from Carnets d’Egypte, 2010. Charcoal and colored pencil on page from ledger book. 480 × 335 mm. Photo: John Hodgkiss.

98

Dr. Peter Magubane, Nanny and Child, Johannesburg, 1956. Courtesy of the photographer.

99–­101, 103, 109  Video stills from Other Faces, 2011. Charcoal and colored pencil on paper. 35 mm animated film transferred to video. 9:45 min.

113

Video stills from Stereoscope, 1999. 35 mm animated film transferred to video (color, sound). 8:22 min.

116–17

William Kentridge with stereoscopic rhinoceros drawings for Larder, 2007. Drawings: charcoal on paper; each 2100 × 2750 mm.

118 Wittgenstein’s Rhinoceros (detail), 2007. Two-­color lithograph and collage on paper. 1600 × 1200 mm.

119

Albrecht Dürer, The Painter’s Manual. 1525.

123–26

Video stills from Stereoscope, 1999. 35 mm animated film transferred



Video still from Stereoscope (1999) and drawings for artist’s book Everyone

to video (color, sound). 8:22 min. 128

Their Own Projector, 2008. Indian ink, watercolor, colored pencil, found book pages, collage. Each page, 260 × 195 mm. Photo: John Hodgkiss. 130 Eye Test (diptych). Drawings for artist’s book Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008. Indian ink, watercolor, colored pencil, found book pages, collage. Each page, 260 × 195 mm. Photo: John Hodgkiss. 132 Etant Donnée (from Underweysung der Messung) (detail), 2007. Photogravure. 344 × 570 mm. 133 You will find no new lands (diptych). Drawings for artist’s book Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008. Indian ink, watercolor, colored pencil, found book pages, collage. Each page, 260 × 195 mm. Photo: John Hodgkiss.

ix



135

Video still from 7 Fragments for George Méliès, 2003. Animation plus footage with the artist, found objects, sound.

144 God/Rocks (diptych). Drawings for artist’s book Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008. Indian ink, watercolor, colored pencil, found book pages, collage. Each page, 260 × 195 mm. Photo: John Hodgkiss. 150–52

Production photos of The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2010.

x

Prologue

William Kentridge’s prints Art in a State of Grace, Art in a State of Siege, and Art in a State of Hope (1988) are only obliquely related to his 2010 production of Shostakovich’s The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. But consider how these silkscreens suggest the intersection of South Africa, the Soviet Union, and cultural critique. Kentridge’s aesthetic career has been defined in complex ways through an intersection of Northern and Southern revolutionary arts, and his works have wrestled both with Soviet and South African aesthetic orthodoxies. Art in a State of Grace portrays a rather grandiloquent woman. The fish atop her head casts her as an ironic figure of affectation and narcissism. She wears cat’s-­eye glasses and stares askance. The top right corner of the print carries the text “A Journey into Africa.” Along the bottom edge are the names of the three images in the series: Art in a State of Grace; Art in a State of Hope; Art in a State of Siege. Art in a State of Siege represents a pin-­striped businessman, the type of Soho Eckstein, who becomes the “public enemy” in Kentridge’s early animations. Kentridge’s self-­consciousness is invoked by the formulation “Dear Diary,” in the top left. Ideological formulae are printed across the base of the image: “Cultural Activity Is Epistemological Struggle”; “Political Activity Is Epistemological Struggle”; “London Is a Suburb of Johannesburg.” But it is the third image that makes explicit Kentridge’s long-­term engagement with Soviet aesthetics. Art in a State of Hope centers on a large featureless bust with a mechanical fan where the head should be, clearly a critique of ideological bluntness. A megaphone lies abandoned at the base of stadium stairs, suggestive of a revolutionary rally. The phrase “Tatlin in Berea” makes the link overt. Berea is a suburb of Johannesburg, and Tatlin was one of the artists whose utopian sculptural works anticipated the great exhilaration of a Soviet aesthetic revolution. Tatlin’s project for a Monument to the Third International was proposed after the Bolshevik revolution. A large model was built, but the tower was never constructed. 1

It would seem that all of these circumstances are destructive of the arts. The Vanity of Patronage; the Brutishness of Capitalism; the Idealism of Revolutionary Culture—­each, in its own way, is a threat to artful play.

2

do you ever ponder the function of the nose, beloved reader? The explanation proferred by Dr Pangloss is that noses were created to support spectacles. . . . If noses contemplated only each other, the human race would not last two centuries; indeed, it would not have survived the most primitive tribes. . . . The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two major forces in society: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium.1

1. Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 88–­89. This is one of Kentridge’s favorite novels.

1 Nasal Passages

A conversation begins in the Johannesburg studio of William Kentridge. me. What do you think of, when I say pince-­nez?1 he. My grandfather!—­my father’s father—­used to wear them! . . . And my drawing “Comrade Mauser, You Have the Floor, Sir” has a pair of free-­floating pince-­nez. Maybe Trotsky’s? That’s about it, I think. me. But they are also “Nez.” he. I hadn’t thought of that. I hadn’t thought of noses. But then, I hadn’t thought of rhinoceroses as noses. An artist has to be unreflective.

me. Even given that you work with reflections? he. Yes, even given that I work with reflections. me. Maybe this book on The Nose should be like this, a series of dialogues? he. Oh. Socratic dialogues? (Skeptical.) me. No. More like Diderot. Diderot has lovely essays written in the form of dialogues.2 he. Ah, okay. Because there is nothing as un-­Socratic as a Socratic dialogue. Everyone who tests an opinion ends up saying, “Yes, of course you are right,” to Socrates.3 me. Yes, of course you are right.4

7

1. Kentridge wears a pince-­nez perched on his nose while making art and filming, an almost unimaginable affection that seems wholly unaffected, and now surely is so, with the ease of the on/off, on/off of a second depth-­of-­field. This dapper detail is at odds with his famous disregard for his own attire. (A basic artisanal uniform is worn to the studio, to dinner, to lectures: cotton chinos and a plain cotton shirt with undervest, more or less regardless of the weather.) The cord of the pince-­nez seems here to become just another of the drawn curlicues with which the artist works.

A Jansenist, Diderot père would have affinities with Augustinian as well as Calvinist austerities and a strong conception of the place of grace in redemption. The fragment begins in a novelistic or essayistic idiom, then suddenly shifts into a re-­creation of the reported voice as if it is a dramatized first-­person. That deft trick makes it all but impossible to determine when the son is ventriloquizing his father and when the old man is speaking for himself. As a result, the son inhabits the speech act of the father, makes himself his own accuser, in a way. The accused “you” stands in for Diderot, and the “I” is a personification of the writer’s father. In several of Kentridge’s recent works, there has been a marked conflation of father-­and-­son embodiments; often marked through the artist’s identification of the protagonist/self-­portrait with the figure of Soho Eckstein (in his pin-­striped suit), who bedevils the Romantic idealist Felix Teitelbaum of the early films, a blithe youth once the avatar of Kentridge himself. Teitelbaum has not appeared in Kentridge’s films for some time, except perhaps in the most oblique way, through a large-­scale series of drawings of trees plastered over with textual captions. These are, indeed, “title trees.” 3. As Nietzsche noted, “The dialectician paralyzes the intellect of his opponent. What? Is dialectics only a form of revenge with Socrates?” (“The Problem of Socrates,” in Twilight of the Idols, trans. Thomas Common [New York: Dover, 2004], p. 11, sect. 7.)

2. Once Diderot came to mind, it seemed to me that he was a “natural” interlocutor to bring into my conversations with Kentridge. Because his use of the dialogic makes his work so open, so ambiguous as to the relations of inside and outside, Diderot confounds fixed boundaries between subject and object, shadow and figure, agent and mirror. This strikes me as sympathetic in many ways to Kentridge’s long exploration of doubles and, in particular, of fathers and sons. So, for example, at the end of his rather charming piece “Conversation of a Father with His Children,” there is a brief sketch of the end of a family occasion. The sundry visitors have been discussing various questions of value, each speaking in his or her own voice. We then get the following closing fragment, in which there is a striking slippage between direct and reported speech: My father called for his nightcap, broke up the conversation, and sent us all to bed. When it was my turn to bid him goodnight, I whispered as I kissed him: “Father, the truth is, there are no laws for the wise man”—­“Not so loud,” said my father.—­“All laws being subject to exceptions, it is for the wise man to judge when they should be obeyed and when they should be broken.” MY FATHER I should not be too sorry if there were one or two in the town like you; but I should not want to live there if they all thought like you. (Diderot, “Conversation of a Father with His Children,” in This Is Not a Story and Other Stories, trans. P. N. Furbank [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], 159)

The lawmaker and the lawbreaker are father and son in this sketch. Diderot’s father, Didier, was a cutler, although his specialization in medical and surgical instruments suggests that his skills were rather out of the ordinary.

8

There are some fundamentals worth clarifying. This is not simply a book about Kentridge’s production of The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera in 2010. Rather, it is about the “making of” the opera; and I am struck to note that my first notebook entry, from the start of the project, is dated 2007. What I will pursue in these pages is a prehistory, and an emergence, rendering visible some of the communication that happens between William Kentridge’s mind and hand as he thinks through the activity of making. During the years in which The Nose was in preproduction, Kentridge made an all but unimaginable variety of “incidental” works, each of which solved a formal problem for the forthcoming opera production (and addressed a formal question for its director), even as the new artworks impelled their own questions. Many of the artworks that arose during the three years preceding the first exuberant performance were aesthetic experiments, formal tests in which the artist was gauging scale, pace, affect. The vastness of the Met stage embraces humanity as a collective audience. Throughout the twentieth century the Metropolitan Opera participated in “inventing” an urban elite, cultivating taste and developing an appetite for design and spectacle, all the while buoying the irrational economy that, since the eighteenth century, has held opera singers as super celebrities. The voice of the opera singer traditionally is part of an auditory hallucination enmeshing singer and audience. Whoever is being addressed onstage in the sung declamation, each member of the audience has an expectation that he or she will experience the full intimacy of its affective charge and expressive nuance. The “big voice” supplements the presence of the physical performer who, even if “big,” as has often been the contentious claim, is dwarfed by the stage itself. The massive voice acts to overwhelm distance and scale, and the audience surrenders to the illusion of an aural collectivity. Sighing to a shared emotion, swooning to a single heartbeat, we as audience find ourselves drawn inside hypercharged erotic and emotional events. 9

4. While engaged in research for this study, I read the marvelous Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the USSR by John Berger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Neizvestny, a sculptor, recounts a dialogue between himself and Khrushchev. Khrushchev asks what the sculptor thought of the art produced under Stalin, and Neizvestny candidly responds that the work was “rotten.” Khrushchev’s responses are belligerent, though frank. He asks Neizevstny how he could withstand the pressure of the state for so long. This is Neizvestny’s uncompromising reply: There are certain bacteria—­very small, soft ones—­ which can live in a super-­saline solution that could dissolve the hoof of a rhinoceros. (85)

I am pleased to think of Khrushchev, Kentridge, Neizvestny, and the rhinoceros all in this unlikely conjunction of ideas, as we begin the strange rhinoplasty that is the operation on The Nose.

10

In ways, this is the auditory equivalent of the cinematic, which is characterized by close-­ups and zooms. Opera reaches its apotheosis in the moment when the visual field of the cinema overwhelms the voice, precipitating Western culture into “silent movies.”5 One might refer to the particular phenomenon of nineteenth-­century operatic form as the audiomatic6 in contrast with the cinematic, which was soon to be in the ascendant. Shostakovitch was on the cusp of this shift as a composer who would write extensively for (and be influenced by) the cinema, while retaining an engagement with operatic composition. In order to come to terms with Kentridge’s production of Shostakovich’s opera, it is useful to have an account of the Soviet cultural experiment from the early twentieth century, and the persistence of its ideological import in the complex situation of South Africa in the 1960s through to the present. This situates the historical as well as intellectual contexts of Kentridge’s engagement with Suprematism and Constructivism, the aesthetic idioms that underpin his production of The Nose. Shostakovich’s operas have at times been relegated to the status of “minor works” in relation to the symphonies, concertos, quartets, and sonatas, but such a judgment does not fully recognize their experimental vigor. There is, in Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s sensibility, an apprehension of the relation between the dramatic visual event and the sound environment. His aural aesthetic is a deeply complex combination of reverence for traditional instruments and folk music and for the global contemporary avant-­garde. Formed by his admiration for Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky, his sensibility is no doubt informed by his enormous commitment to piano playing. These elements are all integral to the compositions. Assessments of Shostakovich’s work are mixed; critics and interpreters have had difficulty coming to terms with passages in the symphonies (for example) that seem overtly to celebrate pomposity and grandiosity, militarism 11

5. Although that is a misnomer. Silent movies as a rule made use of live sound and/or sound effects. See note 42. 6. I would like for the purposes of this consideration to discount the recent turn to miked and amplified singing. In such cases the voices are manifestly not reaching us from the singer but from some disembodied space where audio speakers are positioned to relay the voice from an elsewhere. In recent decades there has been increasing reliance on the artificially amplified voice.

and clamor. However, it is also wholly credible to hear these works as deeply ironic parodies of just such monomania as characterized Stalin’s regime. Part of Shostakovich’s achievement is the precarious balancing act he engages in, providing insights into the textures and sounds of the Soviet will-­to-­power. Without this understanding of the oeuvre, it is all but impossible to apprehend what attracted Shostakovich to The Nose, a work that is an explicit satire, the story of a manifestly absurd battle for supremacy between a man and his proboscis. Shostakovich’s relationship with Stalin was persistently conflictual—­not that anyone was secure in their relation to the dictator. Though deployed as an exemplar of Soviet arts, he was always under suspicion. The biographies are filled with anecdote and evidence of how frequently the composer’s work was censured. Orlando Figes notes in The Whisperers that Stalin, with his ghastly seasonal purges, sought to “root out those who ‘make false oaths of loyalty.’”7 How, then, to demonstrate loyalty, if loyalty itself was a sign of duplicity? Surely Shostakovich’s compositional passages of militaristic pomp, structured alongside folkloric jigs and lyrical set pieces, deliberately invoke the schizophrenia of his generation, torn by the knowledge that both servility and resistance could be read as disloyalty. In his use of disparate musical idioms, he was seeking to inhabit this contradictory reality. This brought him into direct conflict with Stalin, who was overtly endeavoring to determine the direction of Soviet arts through a suppression of avant-­garde and “formalist” works, traits that frequently were attributed to Shostakovich. Also informing Shostakovich’s aural language is his extensive engagement with the great Soviet experiments in film theory, in psychology, social theory, and modernization. Here again, he is an innovator, one of the first substantial and serious composers for film. There is a marvelous syncretism in the sound world he invents. A small jig is displaced by a grand march, or a storm of strings, as if the composer were disclosing the simultaneity and complexity of the intertwined worlds of modernity, using his music much as a filmmaker might use a camera to zoom in to frame one fragment of the larger carnival macabre that is contemporary living. His early years composing extempore on a piano in front of movie audiences must surely have developed a fine double regard, as he listened to his inner voice while watching the scene unfolding on the screen above him; he would be composing (in the fullest sense) a sound texture while shifting from interpreting the mood of a disputatious couple, to capturing the grandeur of a landscape or the sudden arrival of a carriage, though these shifts must not be understood as mimetic in a limited sense. By the late1920s Soviet film directors had begun to reconsider the 12

illustrative and inevitable (inexorable) logic of film sound. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov began to resist the drift toward motivated and naturalized sound. Their “Statement on Sound” (1928) advocated a rupture between visual and aural information: “The first experiments in sound must aim at a sharp discord with the visual images.”8 What is tested between the vocal/affective delivery and audience response is, in part, a dynamic dialectic between autonomy and authority. Dziga Vertov’s “score” for The Man with a Movie Camera delivers suggestions of the most generalized sort, leaving the detail of each set piece to the musicians.9 This experiment opens onto a universe of radical experiment, evocatively suggested in Trinh T. Minh-­Ha’s Cinema Interval: If seeing and sounding isn’t saying, it’s likely because words work best in relationships when they are taken to the very threshold of language—­ at once bound to and freed from external reference. . . . Words as words cannot speak for or be subordinated to the image.10 Vertov’s “theory of intervals,” Trinh expounds, “once saved cinematography from ‘the frightful venom of habit.’ His powerful insight turned on the idea of the ‘interval,’ that meaning is made in the spaces between: ‘upon a movement between the pieces, the frames; upon the proportions of these pieces between themselves, upon the transitions from one visual impulse to the one following it.’” Shostakovich’s first experiment in writing an original film score was with the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS). Founded by Leonid Trauberg, Grigori Kozintsev, Sergei Yutkevich, and Georgi Kryzhitsky, FEKS set out to assault; using a combination of Americanisms and demotic arts, their Manifesto, published in Eccentropolis (their name for Petrograd), “flings the galoshes of prosperity and good taste into the faces of the deserving.”11 Their 1922 stage production of Gogol’s The Marriage: A Gag in Three Acts incorporated clips from Charlie Chaplin movies. This playful engagement with 13

7. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007), 155. 8. S. M. Eisenstein, G. V. Alexandrov, and V. I. Pudovkin, “Statement on Sound,” in S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 1, Writings 1922–­1934, ed. and trans. R. Taylor (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 113–­14. See John Riley, Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 4-­5. 9. Riley, Shostakovich, 5. 10. Trinh T. Minh-­Ha, Cinema Interval (New York: Routledge, 1999), 110. The following quotation is from page xii. 11. Riley, Shostakovich, 5.

Hollywood cinema surely was not an internationalism such as Lenin and Trotsky had anticipated. In 1929 Shostakovich composed his first musical score, for New Babylon, a FEKS film about the Paris Commune. The work was immensely controversial, provoking outrage in many quarters (it was denounced by the Communist Youth International, though other groups, such as the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, defended it.)12 Shostakovich tried to use the opportunity to educate general readers and viewers about cinema sound, arguing that the musical environment should not simply illustrate the action but at times be expressly at odds with it. He cited a scene of the protagonist’s despair in which the music is “more and more cheerful,” culminating in an “almost obscene” waltz. The film screened was not the cut to which Shostakovich had structured his music, and so at the screening the sound pieces were often incoherent and incomprehensible, and would have been so even for a less hostile audience.13 This fragment of history points up not only the distinctions between different arts but those between different artists. Vertov seems to have been advocating a random relation between image and sound; while Shostakovich, though eschewing illustration, imagined a dialectical approach, with the media in a contrapuntal, interrogative relation with one another. Kentridge’s animations, projections, and shadows for The Nose parade up and down on an enormous screen, radically exploring the limits and conventions of live arts through shifting the idioms of the operatic form toward the cinematic. Perhaps Kentridge is expressly considering how Shostakovich’s own years as a composer of film scores would have informed his operatic imagination. Indeed, biographer Elizabeth Wilson writes, “In 1933 Shostakovich embarked on a work for a ‘Cinema opera’ based on Pushkin’s poem ‘The Priest and His Servant Balda’ with the director and animator Mikhail Tsekhanovsky. Shostakovich, much taken by this new form, completed the music ahead of the animation.”14 In all likelihood, it was the interrelation between media that provoked Shostakovich’s interest. In this regard his musical sensibility anticipated those of the later twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, and made his work so often unintelligible to his contemporaries, many of whom were attached to modernist conceptions of pure musicality. The cinema opera project foundered when the director’s contract was annulled by the producers; nonetheless Shostakovich valued the score enough to turn it into a concert suite of the same name. (The animation footage, we are told, was largely destroyed during the Second World War.)

14

In the musical/political historiography of recent years, Shostakovich’s miserable experiences under Stalin’s dictatorship have dominated the narrative. There is no question that the composer was subjected to bullying abuse and manipulation, and yet he persisted in using his creative autonomy to critique the state. The conductor Kirill Kondrashin recalls the ethos: I know that the district Party secretary was heard to complain later on, “This is outrageous, we let Shostakovich join the Party, and then he goes and presents us with a symphony about Jews.”15 Yet what of the composer’s convictions about a potential Soviet avant-­garde? It is not impossible to imagine Shostakovich as an artist who experiments with the new forms

15

Workshop projection experiments in early stages of design. A vast drawn faux newspaper provides the screen for the projection. 12. Riley, Shostakovich, 7. 13. A re-­edit of the score and the film was made possible through the restoration undertaken by Marek Pytel (see http://www .newbabylon.co.uk). An extract is available on YouTube. 14. Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 119. 15. Wilson, Shostakovich, 408. The symphony alluded to is Babi Yar.

arising out of modernization and urbanization, while at the same time remaining critical of tyrannical excesses of power, as located in the person of Stalin and as distributed through the dictator’s cabal. In other words, Dmitri Dmitriyevich may have had an ambiguous relation, not to tyranny, but to the aesthetic explorations of a modernizing state, which ironically and tragically, became assimilated into the person of the tyrant, Stalin. The record suggests a great deal of defensive ambiguity in assessments of Shostakovich. Wilson quotes the Leningrad pianist Mikhail Semyonovich Druskin, who was a close friend of the composer in the 1920s. Druskin’s judgment was that Shostakovich “had no interest in following avant-­garde trends in art.” It is difficult to assess such observations. Druskin tells us that “Shostakovich met Mayakovsky when he wrote the music for The Bedbug, but he failed to establish a personal contact with him.”16 Still, Shostakovich knew the poet well enough to draw an analogy between them, describing the finale of his First Symphony as “pretty gloomy—­almost like Mayakovsky, who takes the cake in gloominess.” Wilson also reports that Shostakovich stayed in Meyerhold’s apartment in Moscow and that the director “was greatly impressed by the young composer’s talent.”17 This is hardly someone unaware of the Soviet aesthetic avant-­garde. Solomon Volkov has played a significant role in the assessment of the composer’s relation to his aesthetic and political context. Seeking to demonstrate that Shostakovich had scant sympathy for the Soviet project, Volkov (once a student of Shostakovitch) produced an archive of materials that he asserted showed the composer to have been only and always against Stalin and Soviet purposes. Skeptics have claimed that Testimony, the memoir Volkov produced, is largely fabricated, while others say it rings true.18 This is a vexed musicological as well as a politico-­historical discussion, because the composer’s relation to the Soviet state becomes a factor in assessing his compositions. His musical displays of pomp and militaristic bravura have one set of meanings if interpreted as the outpourings of a docile and subjugated sensibility, and quite a different set if understood as ironic expressions of an artist seeking out new aural idioms with which to satirize the arts that had become instruments of Soviet militaristic ambition. As in South Africa, the aesthetic questions are in many ways embedded within the political. Volkov’s published interventions have to some extent constrained our grasp of the contradictions in the composer’s life and work.19 Nonetheless, some commentators (including Shostakovich himself) have remarked on

16

his ambivalence.20 I am not gainsaying Vladimir Ashkenazy’s insistence that Testimony “is authentic Shostakovich,” nor Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov’s concurrent resolution that “Shostakovich in Testimony was the real Shostakovich.”21 And I do not have the competence to engage with the enormous body of discussion about the standing of Volkov’s assertions. Rather I am suggesting that the Shostakovich he presents does not exclude the possibility of another Shostakovich. Shostakovich was both an idealist and a realist, a strong-­willed and autonomous creative artist who nonetheless had a keen grasp of patronage relations, an awareness of the extent to which his work was captive to state support, an understanding that he needed an audience. He had, after all, grown up in a deeply political family who had lived amid risk and resistance for generations. Frequent instances of his apparent public obeisance to Stalin exist alongside covert articulations of disquiet at his own compliance. These tensions suggest that the young composer of The Nose was drawing on the Gogol story in order to explore something of the schizoid character of the life he would be compelled to live as a creative artist inside Stalin’s domain.22 The “doubling” implicit in this discussion resonates with the forms under discussion in this study: Kovalev and his nose. Well, there we have it. Shostakovitch’s affection for the odd Gogol tale ceases to be quite so incomprehensible. Who is the copy, who the original? That disquiet prompts the forms of my discussion, as the footnotes threaten to undermine the coherence of the text, and claim authority of their own. Wilson’s study, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, draws on letters and interviews from an extensive range of people who knew the composer. That in itself is suggestive, premised as it is on the principle that one comes to know an individual through the voices of others. Using these multiple voices she points to the extensive parody in the composer’s letters. Parody is, of course, very difficult to locate, because it

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16. Wilson, Shostakovich, 49. 17. Wilson, Shostakovich, 52 (Mayakovsky), 83, 88 (Meyerhold). 18. Volkov represents Testimony: The Memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov (New York: Limelight, 1979) as a memoir that Shostakovich recounted to him between 1971 and 1974. Laurel E. Fay was the first to question the archive’s status, and debate has since raged about the so-­called signed orthographic pages, as well as extensive verbatim quotes in the memoir from Shostakovich’s own published papers. See Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 19. Volkov’s Testimony is very uneasy with the idea that Shostakovich had any engagement with the Soviet Union and the Communist utopianism. 20. Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper, 2009) outlines the textures of Lady Macbeth: “The composer called it a ‘Tragedy-­Satire,’ and that ambiguity sets the tone; nothing can be taken entirely at face value” (247). 21. Both in Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, Shostakovich Reconsidered (New York: Toccata Press, 1998); Ashkenazy’s assessment is from the book’s “Overture” (11), Ho and Feofanov’s from p. 19. 21. Kentridge’s series of drawings Everyone Their Own Projector arises in many ways from his visual explorations of how to figure the Nose as a character. The collection is presented in book form, generally with some kind of doubled interplay between the images on facing pages. The final drawing, on a verso, breaks with that convention. Because the work is the last in the book, the right-­hand page is blank. Where the other images in the collection are based on two-­page spreads, this drawing can be seen as compressing verso and recto pages, as if the recto figure had superimposed itself onto the verso.

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This image may also be informed by a sculpture of Shostakovich by the Soviet artist Ernst Neizvestny. The sculpture is in the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, a venue where Kentridge has staged productions on several occasions. This sculpture, too, strives to catch the spirit of Shostakovich as a split subject. ME. Does this seem right to you? Do you

know the Neizevstny piece? HE. No, I don’t. ME. But isn’t it likely that you would have seen

it at the Kennedy Center? HE. Yes, it is. ME. So it may well have informed your

thinking about the artist? HE. Yes, it may well have.

There is as much pleasing ambiguity in that exchange as anyone might wish for. Kentridge begins to experiment with double-­ faceted sculptural busts that partake of this dual identity. No doubt, the philosophical question for Kentridge is also an aesthetic and a formal one. The “illusion” of a three-­dimensional sculptural form is invoked even as it is avoided. The “sculpture” consists of two planes that intersect at right angles, and the “portrait” can thus be read from two entirely different perspectives. There is some interesting material problem-­solving here, as the two-­dimensional sketch seeks to inhabit the three-­dimensional sculptural form.

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is one of the “weapons of the weak,” to use James Scott’s phrase.23 Double entendre is deployed, relying on a certain quality in tone or a particular inflection that is all but impossible to detect in print; it is an invaluable instrument in absolutist cultures. Often it becomes manifest as a difficulty in performing a unified self, as the “subject” in question is called upon to address both an internal and an external authority.24 This “double identity” that I am seeking to identify has characterized representations of Shostakovich; it is not that there is one “true self” and another dissembler. This is precisely the matter raised with such sardonic wit in The Nose. Wilson’s introduction points to such contraries: The composer’s vivid epistolary style is reminiscent of his music, for his language bristles with understated sardonic humour, rhythmic repetitions and a parodying use of Soviet officialese.25 In the context of Stalin’s Soviet Union, as Orlando Figes’s suggestive study The Whisperers indicates, the culture of surveillance precipitates a conspiracy of secrecy and innuendo, with a schism between private life and society. Ernst Neizvestny, who sculpted the portrait bust of Shostakovich, had what seems to have been a notoriously acrimonious relationship with the Soviet state. As late as 1962 Khrushchev threatened to send him to the salt mines. Neizvestny’s response is reported to have been, “You are talking to a man who is perfectly capable of killing himself at any moment. Your threats mean nothing to me.” Khrushchev and Neizvestny engage in a discussion about aesthetics and Soviet art: k: What do you think of the art produced under Stalin? n: I think it was rotten and the same kind of artists are still deceiving you. k: The methods Stalin used were wrong, but the art itself was not. n: I do not know how, as Marxists, we can think like that. The methods Stalin used served the cult of personality and this became the content of the art he allowed. Therefore the art was rotten too.26 Flora Litvanova’s reminiscences link this paranoid ethos to the particular and bizarre experiments in Gogol’s writing in Tzarist Russia: Shostakovich adored Gogol and Chekhov. . . . But in the long run it was Gogol whom Dmitri Dmitriyevich loved better than all other Russian writers. In my opinion it is Gogol who is closest to Shostakovich by

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the nonparticular assertion “Here lie Russians and Ukranians / With Jews they lie in the same earth.” Shostakovich’s melancholy brief comment contains the following shamed observation: “I evidently lost heart.” The words indicate a kind of dissociated being; a man who is at a loss to interpret his own behavior (Fay, Shostakovich: A Life, 236). 24. I have written extensively on this as it relates to the emergence of the idea of “sincerity” in the early modern era in the West, particularly during the crisis of authority that exemplifies England in the Reformation. As Henry VIII splits from Rome, the Christian faithful are called upon to make a judgment about the staging of a set of convictions. It’s not just the crisis over the supreme head of the church; individuals and families are, over the next hundred years, going to have to come to terms with evolving conceptions of internal authority, as the Protestant conscience becomes an urgent presence. Thomas More, one of the most complex of God’s, the Pope’s, and Henry’s instruments, captures something of this complexity in his letters. In a letter to Erasmus from 1533, More writes, “I considered it my duty to protect the integrity of my reputation” (Selected Letters [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967], 179). Integrity is something that has come to be associated with the internal world of the self, while reputation is associated with a regard for an external observer. More skillfully manages to posit that, as a good servant, it is his “duty” to defend both integrity and reputation. I am not suggesting that More’s situation and Shostakovich’s are the same, nor are their responses; rather I am exploring the ways in which it becomes possible to resolve the threat to coherence by embracing a double task for a single self. See, too, page 137, note 14. 25. Wilson, Shostakovich, xii. 26. Berger, Art and Revolution, 84.

23. James C. Scott’s classic ethnographic study of peasant resistance in rural Malaysia seeks to demonstrate that the evidence of resistance historical and social studies look for is in certain situations not visible (Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985]). Resistance can, in contexts of absolutist power, deploy strategies such as joking, or storytelling, or time-­wasting, in order to undermine the will to domination of a dictatorial force. Shostakovich was not one of the “weak” in these terms. His strategic engagements as a young man show a remarkable degree of resourcefulness and an energy for controversy. Fay discusses his early open critique of the Soviet musical education, and the need to study Western composers (Shostakovich: A Life, 88). This was, of course, before the traumas of his career beat him, before the execution of so many of his friends and family members. The later years are marked by ghastly controversy; at times Shostakovich seems to respond to terror with all of the independence and resourcefulness one could wish; at times his compliance is engineered (as when his name appeared on a list of composers who condemned the anti-­Soviet behavior of dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov); but it is clear that Shostakovich was himself vexed by his captivity to Soviet demands. When he and Yevgeny Yevtushenko were composing Babi Yar, they were compelled to change the lines dealing with the slaughter of Jews that took place on the outskirts of Kiev by the Germans occupying the region. The lines were altered to imply that the killings were directed against the whole population, though the explicit policy was to exterminate all Jews living in Kiev. Some 100,000 to 150,000 were killed. The passage “I imagine that I am now a Jew, / Here I wander through ancient Egypt. And here, I am crucified on the cross and die, / and still bear the marks of the nails. / And I become like a long, soundless scream /Above the thousand thousands here interred. / I am each old man shot dead here, / I am each child shot dead here” was changed to

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nature of his talent and his personality. His penetrating insight, his qualities of sarcasm, anger, and the grotesque were combined with an infinite and aching compassion for people. On my rough bookcase were the few books I had brought with me; six volumes of Pushkin, War and Peace, some Tyutchev poems, Pasternak’s translations, Burns’s poems translated by Marshak, Gogol’s stories and two volumes of Chekhov. Dmitri Dmitriyevich borrowed them all. Once, while reading Gogol’s “The Portrait” out loud, he said, “When I was writing my opera The Nose, I kept thinking that I must write something on ‘The Portrait’, on the theme of the artist who sells himself.” I then said that I had never heard The Nose. “In that case, let’s go,” he said, and we went downstairs, and Dmitri Dmitriyevich sat at the piano and sang long extracts from his opera.27 The Nose is a youthful exuberance, and as such it has a musical and philosophical self-­confidence that would become increasingly defensive during the years under Stalin. An understanding of a growing culture of paranoia, terror, and tyranny helps with an interpretation of Shostakovich’s marvelously playful score for the eccentric ballet The Bolt (1930–­1931), a wry piece about a taciturn factory worker who attempts to sabotage industrial power by throwing a bolt into a machine. The day and the machine are saved by a group of young communists. It seems here as if Shostakovich is engaging in an aural experiment, reveling in the rhythms and sounds of industrial modernity, while insinuating a satirical undercutting of pomp. Tones of fugitive insistence agitate below the surface bravado. The initial grandeur in the overture is undercut by flatulent notes on a tuba in a sketch of “the Bureaucrat.” A rather panicky urgency takes over, communicating a keen sense of “the task at hand.” These dynamics in the music are well suggested in the felicitous formulation in the blog The Exhaustive Shostakovich, which refers to the composer’s “kinetic early style.”28 His music was often incomprehensible to his peers. The composer Grigory Frid recalled that he understood Shostakovich’s Romances “poorly at the time,” though his Fifth Symphony had a huge impact on him. Nikolai Zhilyayev’s judgment was that the Romances “retained traces of hooliganism,” but he too conceded that the Fifth Symphony was a work of genius.29 The choreography for The Bolt, by the gifted dance theorist and teacher Fedor Lopukhov (1886–­1973), was complemented by the striking set designs of Constructivists Tatiana Bruni and her husband Georgii Korshukov. They mimicked 22

the movement of the machine and invoked Constructivist aesthetics. Shostakovich’s music is witty, full of passions, play, and parody. It deploys the composer’s characteristic switching of styles and rhythms; the “simultaneity” of events and of persons is suggested. (Here there is a strong sympathy with the cinematic techniques of Vertov, with his evocation of the principle of the “interval,” where meaning arises somehow from the movement between given points.30) There is a “scene” and a juxtaposed “meanwhile”; it is in some ways a very dialectic mode of composition, a kind of musical montage. Thus Shostakovich suggests the complex and often contradictory textures of modernity, switching our attention from, say, “The Polka” to the “Drayman’s Dance”–­ the latter a thrilling and joyful celebration of robust energy and knockabout pleasure, such as one might associate with Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. If Shostakovich intended The Bolt as covert satire, its strike was too overt to escape the ire of the party faithful. The work was reviled as anticommunist, banned after the first performance and not staged again for over seventy years. Here is the grim condemnation in the press: “The Bolt was a flop and should serve as a last warning to the composer.”31 Of course, Shostakovich grasped the threat implicit in that formulation, “a last warning.” This texture, of living with menace, formed and deformed Shostakovich’s creative life. We hear in the music composed across his career a strength of creative independence, but we know, too, how the omnipotent state sought to erode him. A consideration of his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies can give us some insight into these contrary forces. Symphony no. 4 faltered due to political antagonism from Stalin and his cohort in response to Shostakovich’s recent avant-­garde operatic work, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The anxiety arising from Stalin’s belligerent critique had a profound effect on the composer’s health and sensibility. It also had an impact on his subsequent musical composition. While he was working on that Fourth Symphony, a review had 23

27. Wilson, Shostakovich, 192. 28. https://exhaustiveshostakovich.word press.com (accessed August 30, 2014). 29. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life, 99. 30. See the discussion on page 000, above. 31. Review in Rabochii i Teatr, quoted in Wilson, Shostakovich, 104.

appeared in Pravda denouncing Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as a muddle, not music. The rumor at the time was that the review had been penned by Stalin himself. At a meeting of the Composers’ Union weeks after the Pravda article, Lev Knipper, Boris Asafiev, and Ivan Dzerzhinsky suggested that Shostakovich should be helped to “straighten himself out.” He became something of a nonperson, we are told, and sought the help of his long-­standing friend and patron Mikhail Tukachevsky, a high-­ranking Red Army official—­but Tukachevsky was himself picked up on a charge of treason and shot.32 Shostakovich confided that he had been summoned to NKVD headquarters and interrogated about his association with Tukachevsky.33 Apparently there had been an ostensible assassination attempt against Stalin. Deeply distressed and increasingly anxious, Shostakovich tried to continue working on the symphony, but ultimately he withdrew the work and it was not performed until 1961. Terrified of reprisals, he allegedly began to sleep in the stairwell of his apartment so that his family would not be traumatized were he arrested in the middle of the night.34 Meanwhile he worked on film commissions, and also turned to the composition of his Fifth Symphony. One often reads that he himself subtitled it “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism,” but Elizabeth Wilson indicates that the phrase was coined by a journalist and was not used until the Moscow premiere in January 1938. In a letter, Prokofiev remarked that he “was extremely impressed by many parts of the symphony, although it became clear to me that it is praised not for the things that it should be praised for, which probably go unnoticed.”35 Perhaps Shostakovich understood that the “just criticism” formulation might ultimately keep him alive and free, and so allowed it to become assumed into his own voice? During this period any number of his friends and family were detained: his brother-­in-­law, mother-­in-­law, sister, and uncle were all imprisoned. Galina Serebryakova, who had observed the making of Lady Macbeth, was sent to the gulag for two decades.36 Many other artistic peers were terrorized or died violent deaths. It is to honor them that one names Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, Malevich, Mandelstam, remembering the many artists not named here who were victims, in one way or another, of Stalin’s Terror. The two symphonies (the Fourth and the Fifth) are informed by one another. The opening movement of the Fourth is filled with a dramatized pomposity and clamor that suggest the cartoonish absolutism of, say, the person of Stalin, though the rowdy showiness could also have been interpreted as a celebration of Soviet might. It is a massive piece, scored for as many as 130 players.37 Alex Ross has described the Fifth, by contrast, as structurally conservative, following “an 24

ordinary four-­movement pattern,” proceeding “from tragic minor to exultant major.”38 I would suggest that another interpretation is possible, and that the musical changes we detect arise from several intersecting factors. It is altogether possible that, in the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich is retreating from the innovative form of the Fourth, but it seems also that he has by then learned a great deal from cinematic languages, and that in this sense the Fifth is an advance. In other words, the composer is reconsidering his own musical idioms and decisions in relation to the structure of tyranny, and he is also considering the aural field in relation to new visual languages. The distinctive shift between the two symphonies is perhaps a creative and interpretive choice, not simply something that the composer has been driven to inauthentically. What we hear in the opening of the Fifth is a very uneasy mood piece. The menace in the music is not personalized or staged, as it is in the Fourth. Rather, there is a pervasive mood of diffused threat, a menace that is insidious, creeping. The symphonic opening has the fundamentally dispersed qualities of a film score, with the sense of threat arising within the listener, from an internalized mood of dread and foreboding. This is the effect, such as Foucault describes, when accusation and surveillance arise internally, from a policing of the self, an internal regulating anxiety, rather than from a manifest external enemy. In such terms, the Fifth Symphony sounds like something striking and radical.39 These experiments within the sound-­field are in step with what was at the time the profoundly innovative field of cinema art. Leonardo Quaresima’s comments on early cinema make much the same case: What films reflect are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions—­those deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness.40 Biographies of Shostakovich do suggest that after the critical reaction to the Fourth, he “turned aside” for some while, 25

32. Wilson, Shostakovich, 146. 33. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life, 99. 34. This according to a 2009 episode of the PBS series Keeping Score dedicated to Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5; http:// www.pbs.org/keepingscore/shostakovich -­symphony-­5.html. 35. Wilson, Shostakovich, 152. 36. Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 252. 37. This is one of the inherent contradictions. A composer working in large forms such as the symphony is necessarily dependent on patronage. The work does not exist satisfactorily as pure idea, as “composition.” The performance is what gives it existence, credibility. And this need for performance positions even the most wayward of composers in a relation of dependency—­in Shostakovich’s case, reliance on Stalin’s indulgence. Mahler, who is in ways the creative voice informing Shostakovich at this time, had himself been caught in just such an agonistic relation to state patronage. 38. Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 255. 39. In 1936 Shostakovich, working through the reaction to his Fourth Symphony, produced few new works, outside of his film compositions. He did, however, write his Romances on (4) Poems by Pushkin, songs for voice and piano. The first song in the cycle, “Regeneration” (also known as “Rebirth”), is a striking piece about an artist whose work is over-­painted by a “barbarian”: A barbarian artist uses his indolent brush To blacken out a genius’s picture And his own illicit drawing He traces senselessly over it. Ultimately the lyric speaker in the poem has the satisfaction of anticipating a time in which his work will be vindicated, and the barbarian’s paint flakes off to reveal the original work of genius that it had masked: Thus disappear the delusions From my tormented soul,

suggesting something of the ebb and flow of iconographies in time. Excavate I depicts a sculptural fragment, Excavate II a collection of shards. Kentridge filmed the process of over-­painting, and reversed it so that the illusion presented by the film is of large drawings emerging, fully formed, from a black ground. In the first of these images, Kentridge mimics the scientific endeavors of the surveyor; while at the same time evoking the pseudoscientific endeavors of the “pataphysician,” Alfred Jarry, the absurdist who has so influenced him. It is, of course, impossible to tell from the external traces whether the endeavor is earnest or ridiculous. That is its weakness; that is its power. This is much the same ambiguity implicit in Shostakovich’s survival strategy as composer inside (yet outside) the Stalinist regime. As Kentridge peers at the blackened image in front of him, it is impossible to know whether the work is legible or illegible to him. It is of wry historical interest that Trotsky, in his paper “The Class Nature of the Soviet State” (1933), referred to the “counterrevolution” he perceived in the Soviet Union in the following terms: “He who asserts that the Soviet government had been gradually changed from proletarian to bourgeois is only, so to speak, running backwards the film of reformism” (Trotsky Internet Archive; accessed August 20, 2014). This suggests the dominance of the aesthetic of film in the Soviet Union, and the idea of time as encoded within film’s passage. In a telephone conversation, Kentridge comments that he subsequently redrew the two works he had painted out, but that the new drawings were less successful than the original images which he had, in an act of personal vandalism, painted over, and which survive only as filmed and digital traces. Is the black paper more meaningful, more valuable, because of the image concealed beneath? Having just visited the remarkable Malevich exhibition at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, I am reminded of how compelling a painting of a black square might be:

And there arise within it visions Of my innocent primal days. (Prose translation by Laurence R. Richter, in Shostakovich’s Complete Song Texts [New York: Leyerle Publications, 2007].) The first four notes of the composer’s setting of the poem provide the opening fanfare of the last movement of his Fifth Symphony. See, for further discussion, The Exhaustive Shostakovich, https://exhaustiveshostakovich.wordpress.com. Kentridge has engaged with this motif of the “painted-­over” work of art. For his vast exhibition at the Louvre (2010), he made two drawings of antiquities, which he then painted over,

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ME. Is there a conscious allusion to the

(Details on the Domestic Departures works are from personal communication with Rosenclaire, Cape Town, 2014.) Somewhere behind these images is the wry and intuitive cunning of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), a work that is the (more or less) blank framed square that remained after Rauschenberg persuaded Willem de Kooning to give him an artwork, knowing that Rauschenberg would erase it. Losses can, in such terms, be gains, and in fact can generate value and surpluses. Rauschenberg’s work exploded with significant meaning into the art world, provoking enormous debate about value, supplements, erasure. Adding to the explicit excess, the hand-­scripted title of the work, incorporated into the framing, was written by Jasper Johns, and the whole is emblematic of the intensely energizing rivalries and collaborations (largely male) that characterized much of the art-­making world in New York in the 1950s. Rauschenberg’s proposition in 1953 was that the erased de Kooning conferred value to his endeavor. Kentridge, by contrast, has spent the past several decades erasing his own work in the processes of animation. His rather enigmatic determination is that the value inherent in his painting-­over is that he has painted over his own drawings. Is this a postcolonial gesture, through which he asserts himself to be both the found object and its originator? Or is this the canny economics of the artist living in South Africa engaged in manipulating the New York art market? Or is it both? Rosenclaire’s overtly “domesticated” artwork both affirms and negates Kentridge’s place as masculinist heir in that tradition, while engaging in a discursive playfulness about women and their given responsibility for domestic activities, cleaning up the mess that men make. 40. Quaresima, introduction to Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 6.

Pushkin poem and the Shostakovich song cycle in your painting-­over? HE. No. But then HE. In fact there is an equivalent of that

barbarian hand of Pushkin’s that I was aware of. Stalin’s censors used black ink to obliterate text and images that they wanted to erase, and that the black ink was referred to as “caviar.” There is an allusion to this censorship in the drawing from Everyone Their Own Projector on page 144, below. The political dimensions of such acts of erasure as considered by Pushkin (and interpreted via Shostakovich’s songs), are never far from Kentridge’s attention: HE. The famous Black Square that was

Malevich’s signature work was first used in his theater designs for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. So it takes the bastard art form, theater, to allow for the aesthetic breakthrough. ME. His signature? That black square is what he literally uses as his signature in his late figurative ethnographic studies. Kentridge’s own painted-­over works were in a dialogue of sorts with a collaborative project he had undertaken in 2007 with the artists Rosenclaire (Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky), who had, for a feminist exhibition (Domestic Departures at California State, Fullerton), invited Kentridge to do two large charcoal drawings, Inhale and Exhale. Using a miniature vacuum cleaner, in an ironic comment on what might be interpreted as the dialectic between women’s work and men’s play, they then vacuumed the surface of Inhale. This of course alludes directly to Kentridge’s own time-­ intensive activities as a filmmaker, namely his processes of making animated scenes through filming, drawing, and erasing his charcoal marks.

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composing film music, an activity that would leave him less vulnerable to political judgment; nonetheless, this period informed his creative instincts. The 1930s would bring an increasingly hegemonic and proscriptive conception of Soviet Realism as the only legitimate art form. The terms for the new aesthetic were apparently formulated in a gathering at the home of Maxim Gorky in 1932. Stalin’s provocative assertion that writers should be “engineers of human souls” prompted an attempt to interpret the principles of the revolution in aesthetic terms. Socialist Realism was the resulting platform, in which subjects were to be handled, somehow, both heroically and realistically, “as if from the socialist utopia to come.”41 Experimental and skeptical art lost political support across more or less all platforms. Shostakovich can be seen to respond to political imperatives, but he is not wholly dominated by them. His musical sensibility is attentive to new influences. In particular, the impact of film on his compositional practice is substantial, arising from economic necessity as well as creative inclination. Documented biographical details give us an indication of how he anticipated himself into the role of film composer. In 1923 Shostakovich took the exam the art workers’ union had introduced in hopes of regulating the quality of the musical performances that would accompany the much-­revered films that were being circulated.42 His father had died in 1922, and the household economy was meager indeed. Film accompaniment surely provoked the young composer’s sensibility. He played the piano at various cinemas, including the Barricada, the Piccadilly cinema on Nevsky Prospect, and the Bright Reel and Splendid Palace cinemas.43 Such compositions would be largely improvisational, and would have trained his ear and his sense of aural form. The experience also seems to have nurtured an inclination to disrupt the naturalized relation between image and sound, and he notes his pleasure at having “managed to exasperate the cinemagoers.”44 Kentridge’s own interest in Soviet-­era art is explicitly informed by the work of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whose cinematically inventive film The Man with a Movie Camera is a Kentridge favorite. Vertov fragments and disperses the stable, integrated viewer, “making an enthusiastic distinction between the cinema eye and the human eye.”45 Finding any number of platforms for the camera, he is interested in perspectives that are effectively impossible for the human witness to achieve.46 The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) has influenced Kentridge’s thinking about Soviet modernity: for Vertov the individual “self” was a fiction; he was interested in constructing a new film language that fragmented point of view, to show the event as mediated via the camera lens. Vertov had a Soviet 28

in permanent motion, as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera which permanently shifts in distance and direction. . . . Not only do solid bodies move in space, but space itself moves, changing, turning, dissolving and recrystallizing” (from Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures,” in transition [1937], 124–­25). Quaresima argues that German film was the first to render the camera completely mobile (p. 3). The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was a radical innovator in 1920, and subsequently German expressionist camera work amazed the film world. The French filmmakers were not far behind. In 1927 Abel Gance’s Napoleon was a massive work full of invention that destabilized the movie lens, with the director filming sequences from the backs of moving horses, on swings, and so on. Gance’s film is a study in grandiosity and heroism, with Napoleon treated as a superhuman subject who ultimately cannot be contained within the constraints of a more conventional film format. By contrast, Russian filmmakers emphasized the collective character of filmmaking and used the art form to divert attention from the heroic individualism implicit in Gance’s film. Vertov’s camera work serves completely different ends to those of Gance. The Soviet filmmaker desubjectized the visual field, gave us a disembodied viewing-­effect.

41. Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 246. 42. This makes manifest the misunderstanding implicit in the term “silent film.” Such films had a musical accompaniment that varied in quality and coherence. Shostakovich’s performances were celebrated for their interpretive distinction (Wilson, Shostakovich, 69–­70). On his taking the exam, see Riley, Shostakovich, 2. 43. The Leningrad pianist Nathan Perelman notes, “We all played at various cinemas to earn money.” He describes with wry humor how he “arranged a mirror at the piano which reflected the screen, and this allowed me to read a book simultaneously. . . . It meant that I often played music that didn’t fit the action” (Wilson, Shostakovich, 68–­69). This detail helps us to capture something of the significance of cinema in the emergence of musical idioms in the Soviet Union. It also suggests why the art workers’ union might decide an exam was needed to regulate the quality of film accompaniment! Photographer Kata Chilingiri has a number of evocative family and archival photographs, including an image of the fine and imperial façade of the Barricada Cinema, in the Shostakovich “gallery” on her website, http:// katyachilingiri.com. 44. Wilson, Shostakovich, 68, 70. The Soviet film industry is in some measure integral to the modernist shift in musical and sound languages. In their “Statement on Sound,” Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov opposed realistic sound, advocating a “counterpoint” between sound and image: “The first experiments in sound must aim at a sharp discord with the visual images.” (Riley, Shostakovich, 4, quoting Eisenstein, et al., “Statement on Sound,” 113–­14.) For a discussion of Vertov, see page 000 above. 45. Trinh T. Minh-­Ha, Cinema Interval, xii. 46. Quaresima, introducing Krakauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, cites an important early lecture, published in 1937 in the avant-­garde literary magazine transition, in which Erwin Panofsky describes the “dynamisation of space.” “In a movie theater . . . the spectator has a fixed seat, but only physically. . . . Aesthetically, he is

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modernist’s engagement with the aesthetic as an effect of the material. He had studied medicine at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg.47 His youthful writings are filled with questions about visual perception and “qualia,” the sensory experience of a thing. Within a decade after the film was produced, the Central Committee denounced, as formalism, the montage filmmaking practice of Eisenstein, Vertov, and their comrades. Vertov was stunned by the perceived betrayal. Idealistically, he had named his film newsreel series Kino-­Pravda, in tribute to Pravda, the political newspaper started by the Communist Party of the Russian federation in 1912, and subsequently the official newspaper of the Soviet state. Vertov initially persisted in his art, though he ultimately capitulated and in his last embittered years made conventional realist newsreels that were effectively state propaganda instruments.48 That sketch of a Soviet artistic life is particularly resonant with the narrative of oppositional arts in South Africa over the past six decades. Kentridge’s engagement with the Soviet experiment arises at least in part from this aspect of his political biography. Various aesthetic experiments in South Africa foundered because artists were denounced for formalism, although in these instances it was not the state doing the denouncing, but rather the cultural desk within the anti-­ Apartheid movement of the African National Congress. As a result, particular modes of literalist naturalism came to dominate many aspects of creative work, from theater to visual arts to literature. Experimental work in South Africa was also spurned as bourgeois, because intellectually demanding. An anti-­intellectual populism came to dominate many aspects of the cultural arena in the 1980s, particularly in the aftermath of the schools boycott in South Africa. Education was seen, in much of the mass movement, as a drag on the revolutionary potential of an alienated youth culture.49 The fallacious argument was that realism is “transparent,” proximate to the real, and thus a better instrument for political change, available to all audiences, all readers. A more plausible assertion is that realism can be deployed with relative ease as an instrument of populist propaganda. Despite the global impact of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 denouncing Stalin, and despite the Prague Spring, during which Dubcek attempted to liberate Czechoslovakia from centralized Soviet authority, South African Communist Party loyalists until the late 1980s denied as Western propaganda the disclosures about the Soviet Terror. The particular conditions of racial capitalism as practiced by the Apartheid state allowed for the information embargo that sustained repressive elements within the South African workerist movement. The 30

Soviet Union and Cuba, moreover, were funding resistance groups and providing munitions for the liberation struggle. In effect, then, the South African left retained its loyalist relation to the Soviet state. During the last years of Apartheid in South Africa, there was a certain Stalinist legacy that resisted the country’s reintegration into the global arena. The African National Congress and its partners characterized the situation as a “colonialism of a special type,” calling for ongoing boycott and isolation. Culture increasingly overtly became a political instrument, and the liberation movement sought to determine what was good art, and to compel artists to follow its precepts. It is not surprising that “good art” was art that was politically aligned with the anti-­Apartheid movement.50 While art practices that advocate the oppression of one community by another cannot be imagined as aesthetically or ethically credible, it is worth asserting that works that have a political conscience are not necessarily good art. Kentridge, like all serious artists from South Africa in recent decades, has lived with the expectation that his work will be in the service of political justice. This level of political engagement means, at one level, that South African arts have existed outside of the aesthetics dominating the global arena. The question of the untimeliness of South African “political art” is addressed expressly by Kentridge, as he tries to hold onto ambiguity, notwithstanding the obligation to be politically aligned. His purpose has resolved itself into a tough-­minded yet elegant formulation: what he is reaching for is “an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.”51 This formalism gives rise to Kentridge’s question: Can one find an art which relates to politics, in which the same ambiguities and uncertainties that one finds when describing the rest of the world also exist in the political and social questions that one is depicting? That’s not the norm in political art.52

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47. Born David Abelevich Kaufman, Vertov came from a Jewish family and converted, entering into mainstream culture. He studied music at the Bialystok conservatory in Poland until the family fled the Germans, settled in Moscow in 1915, and was at the Psychoneurological Institute between 1916 and 1917. The differences are as meaningful as the echoes in comparing Kentridge’s and Vertov’s family histories. Whereas Kaufman self-­consciously reinvented himself, taking the name Dziga Vertov, William Kentridge inherited a name change; his family had changed its name from Kantorovich some generations before the artist was born. Like Vertov, though, Kentridge has been driven by an interest in examining the technologies of vision. 48. Ironically, it was through Pravda that Stalin and his cohort accused Shostakovich of formalism, subjecting the composer to a campaign of psychological terror. 49. I have written about this elsewhere. See the introduction to D. Bunn and J. Taylor, eds., From South Africa: New Writings, Photographs, and Art (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987). 50. When the boycott against South Africa became “total” (proscribing cultural exchanges as well as economic and military-­industrial transactions), a “cultural desk” was established to determine which individuals or arts groups had sufficient political credibility to be indemnified against the boycott. In other words the boycott was actually never “total” in a meaningful way. The screening of artists was always a highly contentious question, and there was locally a generally skeptical attitude toward the uneven distribution of opportunities to party favorites. 51. Artist’s statement on final page of the catalogue William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection, with text by Michael Godby (Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, 1992). 52. See William Kentridge, “Anything Is Possible,” http://www.art21.org/anythingis possible/slideshow/on-­politics, slide 1.

Even so, he has asserted that he has always made the work that he needs to make, noting that it is good fortune that these works are interesting to others. Kentridge’s commitment to exploring the potential of the visual languages that arose from the Constructivist and Suprematist movements is, in part, a reconsideration of the diverted experimentalism of South African revolutionary art. Nonetheless, there is an ambiguity about naturalism and the abstractionism of the modernist experiments. This is a question I will explore through a consideration of two images from Kentridge’s Everyone Their Own Projector. These two plates are printed on facing pages of a book. Several of Kentridge’s recent projects have used such verso-­recto relations. The drawings or prints or conceived in pairs, images with an internal dialogue, one image weighing against another, as Kentridge presses ever further the “debit” and “credit” logics of the accounting books that inform so much of his thinking. The detail of these images is worth considering. What exactly do we see on the front page of the newspaper being examined in the verso image? The cartoonish “Nose” figure is reading a text that carries the signs of the red square and the black cross so well known from Malevich’s iconography. Is abstraction here being rendered as information, as history and event? Are formalist and political contents being brought together?

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Perhaps he is reading an artifice rather than something that could claim the status of “news,” because the news pages here are based on graphics Kentridge made for the Sunday edition of Domenica, in which the Nose is revealed as an agent of mayhem. The Nose, then, is within an intertextual allusion, the art/ history dyad self-­consciously troubling itself. What’s more, the faux newsprint images here belong to a series of scenes on the theme of “the Slaughter of the Innocents,” an association that situates the works yet more deliberately within an iconographic tradition.

The circuitous and erratic red lines of energy across the drawn newspaper page seem to be corridors of activity yoking together abstract signs, cartoonish incident, a landscape. The line (a bloody trail?) is a kind of subliminal forensic trace of global activity—­though it could as easily signify nothing more substantial than the activity of the eye itself, as it scans and surveys the news. These pages are, perhaps, evidence of the activities of the Nose, either as fact or as fantasy. Among them, in the center of the left-­hand column, is an accusing eye looking back out at us. That image has complex allusions, ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the iconography of Freemasonry. Within the modernist/ absurdist traditions, the close-­up of the eye has been a much exploited motif, suggesting a complex nexus of scrutiny and self-­scrutiny, as modernity precipitates an increasingly vertiginous narcissism as the supplement to a culture of witnessing and accusation. The close-­up of the eye, integral to the design and staging choices for Kentridge’s 1990s theater production Ubu and the Truth Commission, invokes our increasingly powerful entanglement with the figure of “the Witness” as a repository of history.53 Ubu and the Truth Commission embellished Alfred Jarry’s classic image of Ubu Roi, a rotund figure with a conical head that is certainly a kind of representation of the Nose. The Ubu iconography informs Kentridge’s Nose drawings, linking the production for the Met to a long tradition of bawdy political satire associated with Jarry. Kentridge’s production thus alludes to both Russian and Western European anti-­ authoritarian aesthetics. The Metropolitan Opera production of The Nose provided Kentridge with the opportunity to use antinaturalistic strategies to confront and resolve several creative concerns. Much of the work is acute satire, addressing the brutalism of the Soviet state, in particular its vehemence against artistic autonomy. I will be tracking Kentridge’s method for explorPa Ubu, in Ubu and the Truth Commission, ing the dialogue between formal and political questions testifies beneath an interrogating eye. through his interpretation of the production. In particular, I will analyze the way in which a formal enquiry about (say) medium, or scale, or pace, gets triggered as he scrutinizes the technologies and meanings of the opera in toto. The playful citing of Soviet formalism in Kentridge’s scenography for the opera is itself a tacit tribute to the idea of form as content. 34

There is, in the Kentridge creative oeuvre, a calculus, a curiously Protestant, almost Weberian economic logic, that regularly computes the costs to his overall endeavor of a momentary diversion: experiment is ongoing, but with an understanding that there is always a paymaster at the door. The frolic must contribute to the work of the whole. The accounting scheme is not so much literal as metaphysical, arising from an awareness that work (even if it is just the work of attention) is what legitimates being. This is an inherited trait. Among his father’s favorite adages is a formulation from Francis Bacon, that “every man is a debtor to his profession.”54 Kentridge père passed on to Kentridge fils a sense of obligation to do something in the world; that is one of the burdens/gifts transacted between father and son. Yet we feel, inside the spaces that William constructs, that work legitimates play. The rigor and discipline of his labor become evident as a great exuberance and abandon inside the process of making. Recently he has commented to me about the level of deliberate commitment to the daily task of application and practice: his focus and discipline are as integral to his achievement as are his gifts and intuition. What astounds the observer is the pace and rate of production, the wild exuberant tumbling of experiment from out of Kentridge. (This energy is despite a rather sober and mild demeanor in the artist himself. There is in the activity a sense of perpetual riot, but it is conducted with considerable seriousness.) The activity of making, at this level, is a kind of “thinking aloud” not unrelated to the process of sketching while talking that is evident in the book of interviews by Angela Breidbach, during which Kentridge annotates his verbal articulations with occasional doodles or maps.55 His hand punctuates, drives, his thought. Thought process is embedded in, arises from, activity. The mark is thought, and the hand is thinking, in a profound and instructive way. Kentridge’s unconscious is structured 35

53. Ubu and the Truth Commission, directed by William Kentridge, with play text by Jane Taylor and puppets and performance by Handspring Puppet Company; originally produced in 1997. The noses at lower left in the newspaper graphic above (page 33) could as easily be studies for the Kentridge graphics of Pa Ubu, traditionally represented as a nose-­shaped wedge figure. 54. See David Lammy, “My Legal Hero: Sir Sydney Kentridge,” Guardian, October 7, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/law/series/legal -­heroes (accessed September 10, 2015). 55. The book is titled simply William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud.

like a visual language, one that deploys condensation and displacement in constant punning.56 For Kentridge, the question “What does it mean if I . . . ?” arises as the action in his hand (in a series of dashes and arcs), a gestural question or an interpretation that falls upon a scrap of paper, sometimes as a drawing but often as a minimal schematic. During the activities of planning and of making he “punctuates” his conversation with himself in the form of a sign or ideogram, a brief note that will serve as a mnemonic for him to return to later in the artistic process. His personal notebooks are scrappy and irregular affairs that give little indication of the elusive mind that uses them as a minimal crutch. Most often, there will be a column of words or idioms (he is thinking with visual puns); sometimes, there are rows of numbers—­he is “marking time”—­estimating how long a sequence should take in the filming. There may be an occasional instruction to himself—­ “make a drawing of a telephonist’s exchange” or some such—­but all similar instruction is very scarce. More common are sets of puns. Sometimes, a minimal idea about the next project. The thinking and planning seem mainly to happen while he is filming and drawing. The activity of making is what gives rise to the question and the conceptual apparatus. Let me give an example: Kentridge might make a gestural sketch of what the human leg does when it climbs a step. He is thinking inside activity, and at each point in the process the practice of the art precedes the intellectual purpose. He is not, at this point, concerned with the question “What might a man climbing steps mean?” He begins to explore the event dynamically, to see what it looks like, and how to represent it within the picture plane. “How to draw a man climbing stairs?” The ideas to be explored arise, as it were, outside of the formal work of the studio, and will subsequently fold back into the work and give the artistry its bite. (“Ah yes, that is Bukharin’s progress,” he notes to himself, of the man ascending the stairs.)57 He will recognize the signifying meaning of a sequence once it is the right shape and pace, because up until that moment it lacks the affective charge to carry complex thought.58 The poignancy, the anguish of Bukharin, is for Kentridge not provoked by the image until the drawing is resolved. It is only once the drawing is adequately “charged” that he can expect it to signify.59 One of the most striking pieces from Kentridge’s exhibition I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine (an installation of films generated during the making of The Nose) is a text-­based work that recapitulates the grim interrogation by the Central Committee of Nikolai Bukharin, Bolshevik ideologue and Stalin’s sometime hatchet man. (See page 37, note 57.) 36

56. I am invoking condensation and displacement in psychoanalytic terms. Kentridge has on occasion expressly invoked Freudian concepts in exploring how an image or figure becomes amplified in meaning, with an individual symbol taking on multiple potential references, or is displaced as a particular figure slips along a chain of related signifiers. Kentridge’s animation experiments have been associated with metonymy (Verschiebung, often characterized as arising from displacements) as well as metaphor (Verdichtung). The linguist Roman Jakobson’s key paper “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (reprinted in Roman Jakobson, ed. Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-­ Burston, 115–­33 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995]) posited from clinical research that mental operations are structured around two distinct poles, one of which makes associations based on condensation possible, the other of which is responsible for displacements. These in Jakobson are the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic operations of substitution. All encoding and decoding of language is based on these operations, with terms identified either through similarity or by association. All aphasic disorders, for Jakobson, are failures of one or the other of these substitutional processes. In other words, it is absolutely fundamental to intellectual processes for the mind to group figures, to classify them, either based on relative degrees of identity, or as linked via relations of proximity. This essay is useful here because Kentridge, as an animation artist, depends on his viewers anticipating what transformations are going to be activated in any advancing of the action. One chain of ideas is implied while another may be realized, and the desire and anticipation of the viewer become stitched into the shape of the film, with directions and misdirections always part of the affect the film generates. Chance associations have to straddle the transitions that seem to be generating necessary meaning. We, while we watch, are invested in following the metonymic

and metaphoric habits of our own emotional worlds. Along with the unfolding plot, we watch our own psychic universe. 57. Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888–­1938) was a leading Moscow Bolshevik after the 1917 revolution. He rose to become chair of the Communist International and editor of Pravda, the official newspaper that would exercise such a terrifying hold over the young Shostakovich and, more generally, a party instrument that managed the public vicissitudes of political destinies. His formulation “Socialism in One Country” was adopted by Stalin, and he was one of the members of the Soviet Writers’ Congress that in 1934 debated Socialist Realism and the aesthetics of modernism. (That same year Bukharin had taken over as editor of Izvestia, the second most important daily paper in the Soviet Union.) The key argument made by Gorky at the Congress was that a new, “unified” Soviet literature was emerging. Bukharin’s discussion of poetry received tumultuous applause, which by all accounts left him anxious and shaken. Rumors about a “Bukharin faction” were clearly placing him in a situation of jeopardy, even though he was perceived in certain quarters to be close to Stalin. (When Osip Mandelstam was arrested his wife approached Bukharin and asked him to intervene with Stalin.) Bukharin’s speech to the Writers’ Congress draws on a surprising diversity of literature: he cites both the classical skeptic Lucretius (his De Rerum Natura) and “the blessed Augustine” (Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934, ed. H. G. Scott [London: Lawrence, and Wishart, 1977], 195,). Lucretius and Augustine are unlikely bedfellows, and their juxtaposition suggests something of the complexity and ambiguity of Bukharin. When he later fell from grace, he was subjected to torture and terror, put on trial, and drawn into a confession that he subsequently withdrew. Pitiful engagements, in a series of correspondences with Stalin, saw him begging for a reprieve. “Koba, why do you need me to die?” he wrote to Stalin before he was executed in 1938. (Z. A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev,

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The Nose on the ladder.

58. There is an animation sequence of Kentridge with a giant nose superimposed over his upper torso, climbing a stepladder in his studio. In the process of making this small film, he realized that the work was a satirical allegory of Bukharin’s snakes-­and-­ladders pursuit within Stalin’s coven. The screen here bears the text “The shadow of a Shadow,” a phrase that we have previously seen in the recto frame of the paired Nose drawings from Everyone Their Own Projector (page 32). 59. It is interesting, in such terms, to consider the recent series of linocuts in which what start out as well-­defined drawings are incrementally stripped down to more and more meager outlines, until they shift from figural drawings into personal hieroglyphics, a group of characters or ideograms. Kentridge is clearly playing with these both as forms and as

The Unknown Stalin, trans. Ellen Dahrendorf [London: I. B. Tauris, 2003], 296.) These were the purges associated with Stalin’s regime, but it is of great historical interest that the “purge” identified with managing heresy and orthodoxy was a regularized practice in canon law. The word, first recorded in English in 1297, is from the Latin poena, meaning punishment or penalty. Thomas More was a keen advocate of the practice, which required anyone suspected of holding dubious theological opinions to find exemplary witnesses who would testify on their behalf, even when nothing had been found against the individual. The fact of suspicion was enough to require purgation. See Lorna Hutson, “From Penitent to Suspect: Law, Purgatory, and Renaissance Drama,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, no 3/ 4 (2002): 295–­319.

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ideas. Here the linocuts themselves mimic the brushwork of Japanese or Chinese calligraphic signatures, in a looping pun about the status of the print as allographic, reproducible. The fact that these prints are multiple is effaced, obscured by the faux features of what appear as a singular act of the brush and the hand. Linocut techniques are an outflow from woodcut traditions; indeed, when linocuts were first produced by the modernist artists of Die Brücke, they were referred to as woodcuts. There is, then, in Kentridge’s renewed interest in linocuts, an allusion to a continuous tradition linking him to the classical master printer Dürer, whose work is constantly cited by Kentridge. (The rhinoceros is perhaps the most obvious of the iconic allusions, though recent Kentridge experiments addressing the history of vision also invoke Dürer’s theoretical and practical exploration of perspective.) Kentridge’s early sketches for the set design of Berg’s Lulu use brush and ink drawings that mimic the cut line of the linoprint; here he inverts the logic, with hand drawings mimicking printed forms. Through an additional process these “one-­offs” are translated into digital or printed idioms. The linocut has a distinct and local set of meanings. It was the medium favored by the anti-­Apartheid arts collectives that proliferated during the 1980s in South Africa, in the years of Apartheid’s declared State of Emergency. Inspired both by the German modernist political arts of the Weimar Republic and Soviet revolutionary printmaking, anti-­Apartheid activist artists volunteered as teachers in progressive art programs that sprang up in cities around the country, and the visual field was dominated by black and white (occasionally multicolored) images of townships under siege. These works no doubt had a substantial impact on Kentridge, who was himself emerging as an artist of the suburbs while also teaching art to young township artists.

His aesthetic sensibility seems in some defining way to have been informed by these experiences. Line is of overwhelming significance in Kentridge’s work, but as he has become increasingly adept he has been ever more reckless and abandoned in what he allows his line to do. This is all suggestive of a growing confidence at gauging the limits of interpretation. He is insistently interested in the human habit of “seeing-­in”—­a kind of projective hermeneutics that imposes meaning and interpretation on visual incoherence. His experiments with torn black paper scraps that are assembled into figures willfully rely on the reading habits of the viewer. Kentridge still characterizes himself as a poor colorist, although color is increasingly meaningful for him. Still, color is often disobedient in his work, as it streaks across lines and marks made in black on white; swatches of color often stain an area regardless of the signifying content of the image. Simply put, the color will not go where it should; rather, it leaches out of images, spills and tints in random blotches, across and between figures or outlines. Perhaps this is a psychic utopia, an unbounded free play of colors and spaces in defiance of the constraints of the racialized geographies of his childhood.

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In 2012, when Kentridge was invited to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard University, he defined each of the six talks as a “drawing lesson.”60 There is real substance to the multiple meanings in that phrase.61 A drawing lesson, classically conceived, is a class in “how to draw,” but for Kentridge it is a lesson learned from the act of drawing. For him, thinking does not instruct the charcoal; rather, ideas flow upward to the brain from the hand, and thus the mind is prompted by the haptic and phenomenological. The dynamic recursive flow between mind and hand could be read as part of the dialectical method in Kentridge’s work, as each synthesis sets up a subsequent propositional experiment.62 As I have suggested, frequently a work-­in-­progress will give rise to a formal or technical exploration: Kentridge is, say, trying to determine how to work a scene in an opera. It has become for him, perhaps, a matter of pace, or of scale, or of a metaphoric leap. In solving the puzzle he will arrive at a strategy that depends on a kind of illusionistic “reveal,” as the scene suddenly coheres, “clicks into place.” (Here again the instance of “Bukharin’s progress” provides an apt example. The complexity and persuasiveness of meaning will be determined by the artist’s regard for detail.) The sequence will resolve itself, feel “necessary” to the whole, through any number of strategies: a cunning displacement, as the narrative is carried via a “sliding” between scenes; or a metaphoric set of associations; or a juxtaposition of dreamlike (or nightmarish) contraries with one logic overthrowing another. These contiguities provide a kind of “unconscious” to the scene, a macabre joke, perhaps, that unlocks meaning through a surcharge of affect—­here one might think of Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. That detailed event seizes Kentridge’s attention, provokes his imagination, and becomes a diversion, while managing to stay within the larger scheme of his creative endeavor. Thus a formal enquiry about (say) medium, or scale, or pace, means one thing when he scrutinizes it as a freestanding artistic exploration, and something 41

60. The invitation implies that the lecturer is deemed to be a cultural interpreter of some significance, with a particular capacity to communicate something distinctive about creative processes. Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, T. S. Eliot, and Leonard Bernstein were among previous honorees. Kentridge’s lectures were published as Six Drawing Lessons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 61. Kentridge is always alert to such multiple meanings, deploying palindromes, cockney rhyming slang, and other wordplay to allow his mind to free associate. In this he is the exemplary disciple of Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 62. I will return to this consideration of the dialectical in my discussion of Kentridge’s slippage between the still and the moving image.

else when it figures as a minor element of the technologies and ideas of the work in toto. Exploring the precise enquiry, it might jostle about for some while at the corner of his mind until it asserts itself, occupies his attention, at which point it becomes a deliberation, taking over his aesthetic and intellectual foreground. Often at this point it will place pressure on his more general practice, modifying his habitual visual languages. Something in his mode of representation changes. In other words, the Nose momentarily displaces the rest of the face, nay, the whole body. Experiments that arose as strategic “five-­finger exercises” shift from the margins to occupy the main frame. This tendency to allow contingency to determine the shape of a work has long been evident in Kentridge’s oeuvre. Working as he does on the boundary between landscape and portraiture, Kentridge in his films frequently destabilizes the relation between figure and ground. This may well arise from the vigilance of a child who attempted to attend both to his own world and to that of his parents. Kentridge has discussed how, in part, his art-­making was driven by the desire to console his mother. (“Console” may well be the wrong word here, but it is certainly in the spirit of reparation.) Let me describe Kentridge’s classic filmmaking method as “forensic.” The task of Kentridge the filmmaker is akin to that of the viewers: both he and they are trying to make sense of sequences of film. Here is something of the procedure: Once a body of drawings has been completed, filmed, manipulated, refilmed, the artist reviews the footage, interpreting the traces to see whether they have the potential to generate a coherent account. Generally he discovers that supplementary images are needed to give legible meaning to the whole. This is not unlike the process of “secondary revision” described by Freud. Secondary revision is a process through which meaning floods into the world, via an observing intelligence who amends and manipulates what was observed or “remembered” in order to paper over the cracks. Generally the process is unwitting, unconscious. Freud describes those occasions when the mind overwrites the fragmentary chaos that it finds, displacing it, through a process something like a “rationalization.” Of course the “reality” that arises is replete with significance, plenitude, as Freud notes: There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one.63

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In other words, our desire for hermeneutic certainty and wholeness will override the need to see things as they are, which is often partial or illegible, consisting of fragmentary traces.64 Kentridge’s filmmaking strategies seem to be in sympathy with such Freudian fundamentals. In the process of making a film, he has, as he has pointed out in several statements, no predefined storyboard to chart the filmic narrative. Rather, the shape is constructed inside the temporal moment of drawing, through spontaneous links between discrete drawings, which get woven together by the artist-­director working intuitively, sometimes with his own metonymic associations, sometimes with metaphoric leaps. The “through-­line” (such as it is) arises inside the act of construction. The film viewer is prompted to ask, “What might I deduce from this chain of evidence?” But there is no actual chain, only isolated events and episodes. The relation between them is postulated by the viewer, who seeks to make coherence out of fragments: “the absurd, with its ruptured rationality . . . is in fact an accurate and productive way of understanding the world.”65 Through a kind of psychic editing, meaning rushes into the world via an observing intelligence who amends and manipulates whatever was observed or partially “remembered.”66 There is something of the texture of the forensic investigation here, and so the images that Kentridge has drawn of the Nose with his magnifying glass probing into various “scenes of the crime” are also at some level autobiographical, self-­portraits of the artist at work.

In this respect it would seem that Kentridge’s endeavor is keenly self-­aware, with the artist quick to note the meanings generated through accident or through play, but also through his own psychic attachments (as well as those the images activate in his audience).67

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63. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913; London: Psychology Press, 1999), 95. 64. This no doubt is in part what accounts for the “Loftus misinformation effect” through which a process of “retroactive interference” will often, in all good faith, disrupt recollections of events or scenes. 65. “William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible” http://www.art21.org/anythingispossible/ slideshow/the-­nose/, slide 17 (accessed January 7, 2012). 66. The American cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus provides substantial evidence of the human capacity to manipulate memory. Her research demonstrates how after-­the-­fact distortions can make eyewitness accounts unreliable, or result in false memories, precisely because we are likely to embrace suggestion as the Real or to alter what we know based on subsequent knowledge. 67. The striking conjunction of the erotic and the forensic is given something of an etiology in a discussion on page 106, below, in which William Kentridge and his father, Sydney Kentridge, QC, discuss a box of photographs of the Sharpeville Massacre that Sydney repeatedly scrutinized while acting on behalf of the families of victims, and that, because they were proscribed to him, held a fascination for the young William.

In the first of the second pair of scenes above (page 39), the red circle (a classic motif of Soviet Constructivist arts), is poorly mirrored when refracted through the magnifying glass. There, in the glass, instead of a circle or ovoid shape, is a pair of asymmetrical red crescentlike blotches, enigmatic and illegible except in relation to the circle. This is the effect of the distorting lens that has only a tangential relation to the object world when held at an oblique angle. Here Kentridge refers, perhaps unconsciously, to his procedures when working with anamorphic drawings, images that are illegible until their distorted reflection is viewed in a cylindrical mirror. (See discussion on page 92, below.) In the second image, the Nose leans in to view the corpse, the “live” dead body. It is as if he seeks to smell the scene of the crime, given that he is all olfactory. With the lens no longer in the frame, the abstract marks become a portrait and a part-­body. Curiously, the printed paper that Kentridge has used to collage his Nose character creates the impression of ridges, and the oddly shaped blob that is the Nose appears in a way to be a fingerprint, giving the images an enigmatic ambiguity, with a fingerprint looking at fingerprints. This too recapitulates the familiar experience of projection and introjection, with the world as repetition of the self. That idea is reminiscent in curious ways of Dürer’s rhinoceros. We know from the archive that Dürer had never seen a rhinoceros when he made this image. The work is based on notes and a sketch by an artist in Lisbon, and is the result of a discursive field of representations.

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Robert Hooke’s engraving of a flea.

An image of a flea captured through an electron microscope reveals how much detail Hooke was able to capture using his lenses, drawing, and printmaking techniques

Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, by contrast, is grounded in direct observation. Brilliant as it is in technical and aesthetic achievement, it produces images of the flea that bear no relation, effectively, to our experience of that diminutive parasite. An image of a flea captured through an electron microscope reveals how much detail Hooke was able to capture using his lenses, drawing, and printmaking techniques. Hooke’s world is in other ways linked to Kentridge’s. Kentridge, like Hooke, is a scholar of the field of vision, a drawer and a printmaker who engages in the activity of making viewing devices in order to confirm propositions about the eye. Hooke’s microscopic world had him stalking about in his world (a studio, of a kind), looking for subjects appropriate for scrutiny. Nothing, it seems, is too lowly for Hooke’s gaze. Thus there are etchings of “the mouth-­parts of a snail” and the “Six-­branched figure form’d on the Surface of Urine by freezing.” The visual language of the microcosmic as it overreaches itself to become the macrocosmic provides Kentridge with his visual language in the “Queen of the Night” sequence in his production of The Magic Flute, with electrons depicted orbiting nuclei as if they were planets trapped in a cosmic dance. Hooke’s version of this exploration of scale resonates with Kentridge’s work. It is as well to remember that Hooke, as a master lens-­maker, was responsible for making not only the microscope, to view the world in miniature, but many of the great telescopes that enabled his peers to view the planets in their motion. 45

Kentridge in his studio, peering into a stereoscopic device of his own invention.

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Kentridge’s modernity sets him apart from Dürer and from Hooke, and the sense of a “return” is in many ways key to Kentridge’s practice. Time and Generation are key materials in Kentridge’s studio. Temporality is effectively a medium in the conception and form of the works. A scene is drawn, filmed, partially erased, redrawn, filmed, partially erased, filmed, redrawn, filmed.68 These shifts create the illusion of the flow of time. (That is, after all, in the nature of motion pictures. That term, “motion pictures,” and its popular slang, “the movies,” actually misrepresent the case. Films are a projected series of stills, flickering past the dreaming porthole of the eye in such a way and at such a pace as to create the illusion of movement for the mind. So through Kentridge’s scenographic modifications, each scene becomes a sequence, and each sequence will be intercut with a second one (and a third, and a fourth), each based on permutations of a separate drawing. These events get spliced together, weaving persons and places into a dynamic unit that seems, in a way, to “disclose” how they are interrelated, whereas actually that relation is teased into the work, after the fact, through a series of tweaks that rely on the logic of “secondary revision, in the viewer as well as in the artist.” Accidental synchronies, metaphoric leaps, and substitutions begin to seem necessary, and any lapses or elisions get papered over into a coherence. To repeat, Kentridge has no detailed foreknowledge of how elements will coalesce when he starts a film. Beginning with a handful of preliminary images, he looks for threads that interweave the elements. The rather random materials become filled with relational significance, as it were, through an act of interpretation that imposes meaning onto the works. Causality is inferred between the elements, occasionally with the viewer inventing narrative links, but also frequently as an effect of contiguity and resemblance. And here is a clue to Kentridge’s love of punning, rhyming slang, and rebuses. Accidental relations assert themselves as determined. Displacement and substitution are in fact key elements of meaning in Kentridge’s art. 47

68. The images from Tide Table (page 86) provide a clear instance of the principle of the erased mark as a residue of time.

Even the consolidated, conventional protagonist in the films on occasion gets undermined, with multiples splintering off as shards. Most obviously, Kentridge’s Soho and Felix figures were, in the early films, two facets of a complex self-­representation, and subsequently Kentridge avatars have proliferated. Recently there is an unabashed delight in testing the limits of the autonomous self in relation to the “made” world of the “not-­self,” in exploring the human subject and its objects. At this moment in the oeuvre the delirium of the double becomes a productive bliss, and the doppelganger arises as an object with claims to its own agency or even “personhood.” The intellectual and aesthetic question always confronts its limits when it becomes an ethics, and the recent film Other Faces is perhaps Kentridge’s most explicit consideration of the entanglement of these questions.69

It is worth considering some of the method of an unmethodical man. How does Kentridge initiate a new aesthetic enquiry? Here is a sketch of some of what I have observed in the relation between his theatrical work and his studio practice. When working on a large-­scale project, he will on occasion arrive at a question, needing to solve a particular formal creative puzzle. He might allow his attention to be diverted from the core pursuit in order to apprehend and engage with the detailed properties of a discrete “second-­order” question, say, about shadows and two-­dimensional form. The secondary question may spring from something barely visible, but at some point such a technical enquiry can change its status and become the “figure” in the scheme of visual thinking, no longer obscured as part of the “ground.” What had been glimpsed only obliquely becomes the focal aesthetic question. It begins to renew his visual language and, in the best situations, generates a distinctive new material language. That newly focused scrutiny produces a detailed knowledge of some fragment, or part, while the oblique glance gives rise to a totalized gestalt that may well not be seen so much as inferred, or presumed to have been seen. Vision generally relies on a synthesis of these operations: the detail and the whole arise from within one another. Cinematic techniques such as the zoom and the cut compel us to infer what is contiguous with what we have seen, and many cinematic narratives rely on our capacity to deceive ourselves through supplementing the scene with matter arising from our own lexicon of images. This occurs at both physiological and psychological levels.

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In the information-­saturated contemporary world we inhabit, there is frequently a sense of both knowing and not knowing that is an effect of the “oblique glance” at a world-­historical event. This can result in a kind of bad faith, because we resist knowing the full substance of how we live and its implications for others. Kentridge’s method, characteristically, is to work inside a range of small-­scale experimental propositions and to allow these to inform the emergence of meaning. As he explores any precise enquiry, it might jostle about for some while at the corner of his mind until it asserts itself, occupies his attention, and becomes deliberation, at which point it takes over his aesthetic and intellectual foreground. The tension between “diversion” and “scrutiny” generates a distinctive method, a dialectics of making that insists that “detail” and “the whole” arise from and within one another. Experiments that might have originated as fragments of a larger enquiry shift into the main frame, become the content of the work. Kentridge gets diverted, as it were, and will pursue a detailed or formal pursuit for some time, transforming technical enquiries into autonomous works of art. Thus, for instance, his fixed attention on one formal question (“How far can I fracture this line and still have it appear as unified for the viewer?”) will become its own justification, and so give rise to freestanding aesthetic projects. This latitude gives rise to a sense of indeterminacy, informing how Kentridge considers his own aesthetic engagement. He discusses (in the section of Five Themes called “Learning from the Absurd”) how there is in his work “a need for provisionality, a need for judgment to be deferred and for redemption to be always possible.” This suspension of determinacy is, he speculates, what has defined his working habits, and his aesthetic medium. “Animation is my way in which all stages of the drawing are legitimated and I don’t have to judge when a drawing is finished.”70

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69. See the discussion of this film in chapter 3. 70. In Mark Rosenthal, William Kentridge: Five Themes (San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 240.

Papier-­mâché noses from one to three feet high begin to clutter the studio.

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So when he asks himself, “How do I perform the Nose on stage as an autonomous three-­dimensional form as well as a two-­dimensional projected animation figure?” his strategy is to inaugurate a marvelously idiosyncratic sculptural language, modeling various noses in a range of glamorous and ludicrous pursuits. He then casts them in bronze, astride power pylons or on horseback. As I am suggesting, Kentridge has a distinctive habit of testing ideas via making, and so each large-­scale work becomes a program of aesthetic activity. Generally such latitude and play give rise in Kentridge’s oeuvre to a self-­legitimating project. An incidental or supplementary enquiry provides the basis for a series of prints, or an animation experiment, or an exhibition, or a book, or three-­dimensional sculptural forms, or, latterly, a lecture-­ performance. (Kentridge oversaw the production of several of each of these while nonetheless working in an almost furiously focused way on the opera. These inventions were “embodied thinking,” as it were, which allows, contradictorily, for a marvelous concentration and focusing of activity. What the evidence asserts is the high status of process for Kentridge. None of these sketches, or experiments in method, is discarded; none is insignificant.) 71

Kentridge’s film The History of the Main Complaint, which explores precisely this question of the oblique glance, is an important point of origin for many of his subsequent enquiries into the multiplicity of the self. We watch a middle-­aged man who lies in a hospital bed wearing a pin-­striped suit. Between conscious and unconscious states he recalls events from his life. A Kentridge avatar, he is both Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitelbaum. In time his bed becomes surrounded by multiples of himself, all of whom take on the function of doctor, examining himself as patient. There is an absolute resonance here with Kentridge’s comments on The Nose:

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71. In psychoanalytic terms, this is the well-­ raised child, who is nourished by the secret knowledge that everything he produces, even his feces, delights the parent.

In The Nose, the body’s in conflict with itself. That’s a way of understanding the world and our selves as not schizophrenically divided, but fundamentally divided. That every self is a series of contradictory impulses held together and given a sense of coherence.72 The Soho/Felix figure drives along a road, and we see his eyes in the rear-­view mirror, as he looks ahead.

The eyes of Soho/Felix in rearview mirror.

The driver, in other words, effectively looks ahead of and behind himself in the same moment. He happens to witness an assault going on at the side of the road. Subsequently his car accidentally strikes a man who runs across the road in front of him. These recollected events—­a brutal scene witnessed in which there is malevolent intent (though not his own), and an accident in which he is involved without guilt—­are affectively assimilated one into another, and a generalized feeling of culpability enters the man. This is the “main complaint” that blights him: a characteristic feeling of responsibility without limit such as undermines the liberal South African.73 The colonial subject is heir to a history, is implicated even in actions where he is not an agent. There is a strikingly analogous scene described in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, in which two

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persons are conflated in a dream through the agency of condensation. One of these is Freud’s Uncle Josef, who got himself into legal trouble through trying to counterfeit rubles. (Freud’s father is described as having gone gray with worry during this time.) In a dream, Freud conflates his uncle with a friend, R, who has been convicted of knocking over an apprentice with his bicycle. As Freud notes, the comparison is certainly not fair to his friend, whose “criminal” record arises from an accident rather than a willful act. The dream interpretation has too many meandering turns to summarize here, but what is striking is the attachment of two figures to one another through an affective charge.74 The earlier Kentridge films depended for their meaning on a rather Manichean split between the self and its enemies. With History of the Main Complaint, the contrary forces of good and of evil are no longer posited as distinct personifications; instead there is a single individual (someone who is roughly a self-­portrait of the artist), and that figure is held accountable. The accuser is somehow a persona of the accused. The “split between” has become a “split within.” This mention of “persona” invokes a tremendously significant film that provoked a generation of 1970s South African filmgoers, and filmmakers: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. In that film two women, played by Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson, are complementary figures, caught in a mesmerizing erotics of exchange as they provoke and tease autobiographical traces from one another, constructing themselves through dialogue with a mirrorlike relation to themselves. A searing moment is constructed around a fragment of archival film that Bergman inserts into his movie. The fragment documents the self-­immolation of a Buddhist priest who is protesting against the war in Vietnam. It is shocking to watch the event; it is shocking to watch the event being watched.75 In reviewing this text with Kentridge, I ask him about Bergson’s Persona:

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72. From William Kentridge, “Anything Is Possible” http://www.art21.org/anything ispossible/slideshow/the-­nose, slide 15 (accessed January 7, 2012). 73. The work was exhibited as one of the core installations for the Fault Lines exhibition I curated in the Cape Town Castle in June 1996. 74. For a detailed account, see John Forrester’s introduction to Interpreting Dreams (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2006). 75. I have commented elsewhere on Kentridge’s exploration of the role of the witness, with specific relation to the film Tide Table. The obligation to witness is the psychic territory of Michael Herr in his celebrated account of his experiences in the Vietnam War. In Herr’s terms, it would no longer be significant whether Soho is implicated in the violent episodes he recalls, or they are traces of a collective or national biography. Herr comments that his generation was to discover that it carried the guilt not only for what it had done but for what it had seen. This, he writes, accounts for a kind of temporal “doubling,” upon which trauma is premised: It took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes.

This fragment is the epigraph to Cathy Caruth’s essay “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History” (Yale French Studies, no. 79 [“Literature and the Ethical Question”; 1991], 181–­92. Herr’s book, Dispatches (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1977), was substantially published in New American Review, Esquire, and Rolling Stone before being issued in book form. Herr’s insight is part of what seems to me a newly articulated sense of the obligation of the eyewitness. What is modern in his exploration is the conclusion that the witness is “responsible for” what she or he sees. Implicit is the idea

me. Did the film inform your thinking about the double, and witnesses? he. I know I must have seen the film, and I hardly remembered it. But I do remember the image of the Buddhist monk in flames. That is both because of the shock of the image but also because of a strange autobiographical link. The car in the background of the press image of that burning man was an Austin 95 Westminster. That was our family car. The scene always seemed strangely personal to me. It is significant that Kentridge’s History of the Main Complaint was made in the year South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its public hearings into human rights violations in that country. The national mood was a kind of melancholia because of the narratives we were hearing about ourselves. That film is of central interest to me, and to this book, because it suggests a particular etiology of the split subject (in its political dimensions). In pursuing Kentridge’s artistic and intellectual processes in The Nose, I am wandering down several of the corridors that seem to have informed his intellectual and creative architecture. How do the formal/technical experiments give rise to his philosophical and intellectual enquiry as he attests? How does The Nose come to have the resonances that it does? What is the archive of an idea within Kentridge’s art-­making? There is in Kentridge a highly theorized skepticism about theory. He privileges the making of the mark as primary in his own activity of thinking. His robust commitment to contingency and materiality in the studio has led him to insist that his mind follows his hand. In his images, words are often traces of a visual field of meaning, rather than transparent signifiers. This is difficult to describe, but it is evident perhaps in the ways that Kentridge uses palindromes, rebuses, and rhyming slang as textual graphics in his prints.76 In 2012 he began to make a new body of small-­scale constructions, with enigmatic “integers” combined in mathematical riddles. So a head is linked to a bird with a plus sign. On being asked what the puzzle is, Kentridge replies that that will emerge as an aftereffect, rather than as the point of origin of the link.77 Here he is drawing attention to the materiality of language, minimizing what Jakobson would describe as its referential function, heightening language’s poetic density, its formal and aesthetic properties. He is relying on the logic of the unconscious to make its own associative patterns. What this

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asserts is that the habits of interpretation that govern usual reading practice are at a threshold between the profoundly idiosyncratic and private, on the one hand, and the generatively social and dialogical, on the other. His images are coherent for a generalizable audience because they are full of the potentiality of associative symbolic logic, and are rule-­ governed, not because the links are “natural.” These types of leaps make it possible to stitch together a unity of meaning, or a narrative, to set up chains of signification that seem simultaneously inevitable and randomly sequenced. Kentridge thus posits that coherence is an effect of desire rather than history. Structures of provisional incoherence are very much within the idioms of the modernist avant-­garde,78 and Shostakovich’s The Nose is assembled out of several rather disjointed and loosely linked episodes. This engagement with incoherence is part of Kentridge’s long-­term strategy of grasping the incomprehensibility of the world through an aesthetics of the absurd: The extraordinary nonsense hierarchy of apartheid in South Africa made one understand the absurd not as a peripheral mistake at the edge of a society, but at the central point of construction. So the absurd always, for me, is a species of realism rather than a species of joke or fun. And that’s why one can take the joke of The Nose very seriously.79 he. What interests me now much more than ever is how a series of texts breaks into, disrupts a single idea.80 That’s all very well, I think to myself. Your work arises through associative turns and metaphoric tumbles. I worry about the shape of my scholarly pedantry, which does not happily catch the arabesque. How can one take the discipline of footnoting seriously after that assertion from Kentridge, lauding eruptions, disruptions, corruptions?

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that the witness becomes a repository of history, a kind of “history machine.” I recently discussed the ethical dimensions to this activity of “witnessing”: Our contract with modernity is such that citizens are called upon to look away when the dispossessed are systematically reviled. Increasingly citizenship is conferred on those who marshal the borders and who, once inside its precinct, will fight to barricade the gates. Ultimately it is only by jeopardizing our own rights as citizens that we can become witnesses to the violence of exclusion exercised against others. This is a question of attention, of attending. (Taylor, “Spherical and Without Exits: Thoughts on William Kentridge’s Anamorphic Film,” Art and Australia [2008], 610–­15)

76. These are not unsubstantiated claims: a small print from the series “Thinking Aloud: Small Thoughts” is titled Cockney Rhyming Slang; it has an image of an apple and a pear, linked via a vector-­mark to a drawing of a stair. The eighth print in the series “Give and Take” is an image of a man sitting with his back against a boulder, with the word PALINDROME suspended in the air above him. 77. The structuralist anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote a groundbreaking exploration of the significance of the riddle of the Sphinx, seeing in the riddle form a figure for the transgressive yoking of entities, in violation of norms. Sameness becomes difference and difference sameness, with a disruption of principles of singularity. This, for Leach, is an emblem of the structural form of incest, that taboo broken by Oedipus—­he who is set the puzzle by the Sphinx. See Edmund Leach, Levi-­Strauss (London: Fintana/Collins, 1970). 78. See note 22, above. 79. “William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible. http://www.art21.org/anythingis possible/slideshow/the-­nose, slide 8 (accessed January 7, 2012). 80. Personal communication, June 30, 2010.

Can I write a book that is intelligible, yet nonetheless true to the sensibility of Gogol’s bizarre tale of a man whose nose absconds in order to usurp his place? It is a story about divided selves, authority, jealousy, projection, displacement. It is about doubles, and double entendres. Is it possible to reassure the reader that the text is coherent while regarding Kentridge’s own commitment to disruption? It is my hypothesis that Gogol’s bizarre story, of a man whose nose becomes a free agent, is in ways deeply harmonious with the mode of Kentridge’s creative processes. The story provides something of an allegory for his working dynamics.81

So this is my resolve. Quiet my notes will not be, nor my dialogues with Kentridge’s own commentaries, because all of his meanderings are so many, so diverse, so plentiful. His breadth of allusion makes its own claim, driving interpretation ever sideways into corridors of infinite number. My considerations, trudging after his associative leaps, will perforce have to follow several paths, as I engage with a plurality of Kentridge avatars who present themselves along the way. Necessarily, he must increase while I must decrease.

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81. That emboldens my strategy of deploying footnotes that periodically claim center stage, in much the way that Kentridge’s small aesthetic experiments divert his attention from a major project. So too, the Nose begins to dominate the face of Kovalev. It occurs to me as I write this that this is Kentridge’s general method. The work “upon which he works” becomes subordinated to his purposes, and this may account for some of the frustration from his critics. A Kentridge production is, in strong ways, a rewriting; thus Kentridge’s The Nose is not Gogol’s nor is it Shostakovich’s. It is Kentridge’s. He remakes the work in his own image.

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2 Nose Bleeds

Several key works flow from The Nose, so that is where my scrutiny begins. This brief chapter provides a summation of the range of media, the formal “enthusiasms,” the various visual propositions that Kentridge tested while making preparatory drawings, films, and machineries that were ultimately, in varying degrees, deployed in the making of The Nose. The production of the opera is more than the sum of its parts. I do not mean this in the Wagnerian sense, in which opera is imagined as the Gesamkunstwerk, the emergence of something distinctive through the conjoining of all of the arts. Rather, the method of Kentridge’s program of work could be described as synecdochic. This seems apposite, as the Nose is itself a synecdoche, the part standing in for the whole (and everyone from a fifteen-­year-­old schoolboy to Cyrano de Bergerac knows pretty readily the part for which it stands.1) I am struck to read that this synechdochic method seems to have been integral to Shostakovich’s construction of the opera, which Laurel E. Fay characterizes as a “literary montage.”2 This was in fact a description the composer himself had used.3 Caryl Emerson has written in detail about the modes of borrowing and citation that occur in the opera. An unusual form of intertextuality arises. Shostakovich evokes various texts, such as Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the source of a maudlin song that he gives a word-­for-­word setting:4 By an invincible force I am bound to my dearie. Lord have mercy on her and on me, on her and on me, On her and on me. In the opera these lines are sung by Ivan, Kovalev’s servant, who becomes “contaminated” through intertextuality. The servile Smerdiakov, who sings the lines in Dostoyevsky, is a “lackey of the new revolutionary type: impudent, craven, an embittered bastard and a parricide,” who commits murder, implicates two Karamazov brothers, and hangs himself.5 This gives some insight into the ironic method of the 61

1. Perhaps that fifteen-­year-­old is the young William Kentridge: HE. In Standard Nine, in high school, I had

volunteered to perform Cyrano de Bergerac. I understood that I wouldn’t need to use a prosthetic nose to play the role. 2. Laurel E. Fay, ed., Shostakovich and His World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 193–­94. 3. Caryl Emerson, “Shostakovich and the Russian Literary Tradition,” in Fay, Shostakvich and His World, 191. 4. Fay, Shostakovich and His World, 193. Shostakovich’s treatment places a very grim figure from Dostoyevsky within a ridiculous setting in The Nose, his sense of irony again his great defensive weapon. 5. Emerson, “Shostakovich,” 193.

composer as librettist, relying on allusion to import a layer of meaning that exceeds and undercuts the overt sentiment of the scene. Emerson notes, too, the textual borrowing from different editions of Gogol. This may have been an instrument set to keep in place a defensive ambiguity as the political climate became more orthodox. At the time debate raged over the extent of Gogol’s deployment of satire, and he had a complex and varied reputation: Large chunks of Gogol’s prose are declaimed or sung as arioso almost unchanged. Frequently what appear to be changes in the early-­Soviet-­era canonical text of “The Nose” are in fact variant lines taken by the librettists from earlier nineteenth-­century editions of Gogol (1842, 1855), where some passages are given in a colloquial style more amenable to first-­person—­and thus to operatic—­delivery.6 Emerson also comments usefully on Eikenbaum’s essay “How Gogol’s Overcoat Was Made” (1918/1924), a piece written during the rise of the Soviet state, which argues that the novelist’s interest was directed less to character or event than to poetics and soundscapes, and that naturalism and the grotesque exist side by side. This set of insights opens suggestions of the literary context of Gogol’s writing within the Soviet arts debate—­the arena into which Shostakovich would have been inserting himself as a critical interpreter. It also suggests a mixture of modes that both Shostakovich and Kentridge seem to find amenable.

So much for the context of Shostakovich’s composition; let us return to a consideration of Kentridge’s processes. During the period of preparing for The Nose, he is also working on other large-­scale commissions in a variety of media. I list here those that become events through which he tests images or idioms for The Nose: • A series of drawings for the Sunday edition of Domenica, an Italian newspaper, results in the first drawings of the Nose as imperial ruler, striding across the globe, contemptuous of human suffering. The works invoke the trope of “the Slaughter of the Innocents.” Kentridge cites Giotto as the primary source for his aesthetic thinking while making the image of the Slaughter. It is evident too that the drawing is indebted to Picasso’s Guernica, evoking its shocking images—­arms outstretched in a shriek of distress, an infant corpse, drawn foreshortened, dangling across its mother’s arm are evoked.

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The jumble of limbs and the streaming grief throw the world into despair. While making these works, Kentridge has a headline clipped from a recent newspaper pinned to his studio wall: “Pope asks for forgiveness,” an allusion to the then-­current disclosure of sexual abuse of the young by clerics. • An anamorphic film, What Will Come (Has Already Come), about the aerial bombardment of Abyssinia by the Italian fascists, gives rise to the first sketches of the Nose’s global ambitions. • A series of bronze sculptures model the Nose in three dimensions, as Kentridge tests how he will stage the bizarre physical presence. • Tapestries and ink drawings represent the Nose astride his nag on campaigns of European conquest.7 • A series of flat-­surfaced sculptural maquettes was based on the costume designs for the production. • A series of Calderesque sculptures that revolve, casting shadows that (at only one point in the 360° revolve) project a coherent graphic form in two dimensions, one of the most carefully executed is a portrait of Shostakovich.8 The film arising from these, (repeat) from the beginning, forms the basis of the screen projection Kentridge was commissioned to project on the fire curtain of La Fenice in 2008. It is an experiment for the musical overture for The Nose. • Several animated films, in the style of rather anarchic “cartoons” made of geometric forms dancing in stop-­ frame sequences, tell whimsical tales of loves lost, as well as of random acts of violence. • In any number of prints and sketches, the Nose is observed in scurrilous adventures, from the pornographic to the forensic. • A spoken and musical performance, Telegrams from the Nose with composer Francois Sarhan, tests many of the elements for the production of The Nose.9

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6. Fay, Shostakovich and His World, 193. 7. The horse of these artworks is pretty well recognizable as Rosinante, the wretched old creature ridden by Don Quixote. It is a far cry from Alexander the Great’s war horse, Bucephalus, immortalized by Kafka in his story “The New Lawyer.” In Kafka’s tale Bucephalus has taken on the role of a lawyer at the bar, far from the battlefield. This enigmatic displacement itself is reminiscent of the Nose, who usurps the place of Kovalev, his “master,” as it were. Kafka surely has Gogol at the back of his mind, and so it is curiously meaningful that Kentridge’s images of the Nose cast him so frequently as an equestrian statue. It is as if the man/ horse sculptural tradition provides an aesthetic unconscious of the idea of the double. Moreover, Kentridge’s use of shadow effectively stitches the two beings into one, pointing in enigmatic ways to the centaur, the conglomerate of man and his beast that we know from classical mythology. Along with the minotaur, the centaur seems to conjoin human intellectual capacity and the brute strength of, respectively, the bull and the horse, surely the major bases of strength outside of the slave classes. There is as well, among Kentridge’s horses, at least one representation of the horse as idealized energy-­field, a tapestry of the horse astride the map of Moscow.

Kentridge’s essay “In Praise of Shadows” informs him here. He has, for well over a decade, been engaged in countering the Platonist bias that situates a cluster of terms (the shadow/ representation/art) as illusory and negative because less than the substantial “thing in the world,” which itself is merely a shadow of that “ideal Real.” Kentridge has argued very explicitly that the shadow of an apple in ways conjures up a more powerful sense of “appleness” than the fruit itself because the form of the apple itself is too familiar for us to attend to it. The image of the apple is evocative, appealing, while the apple itself is somehow less captivating, more elusive. The apple is less “apple” when it wears its own skin. The artist, then, heightens rather than diminishes the intensity of the encounter with that apple. 9. Sarhan performs on the stroh violin, a string instrument, patented at the end of the nineteenth century, with a metal funnel used to amplify the sound rather than the wooden resonating box of the conventional violin. Visually it is a combination violin/victrola. This curiosity invokes the megaphone so often deployed as a stage element by Kentridge. Sarhan reads selections from the poetry of the avant-­garde Soviet poet Daniil Kharms, who was detained and died in an asylum.

8. In a conversation in his Johannesburg studio several years ago, Kentridge discussed with me the making of these forms, and the discussion has relevance for a consideration of cinematic versus stage presences in the production of The Nose. He begins by discussing making puppets alongside Adrian Kohler, master puppet-­maker from Handspring Puppet Company: There is a 3-­D knowledge which Adrian has, both from knowing it and from working so closely in it for forty years. Even when I do sculptural works they are all essentially 2-­D pieces; even though they are made in three dimensions, their look is about arriving at a two-­dimensional image. So now I am making three-­dimensional forms which are broken into chaos to be able to view them as two-­dimensional figures. It is the opposite of the pursuit for 3-­D meaning in a 2-­D painting. Here you have real 3-­D figures in a 3-­D space being forced to give you a completely flat 2-­D image.

These revolving sculptures do not themselves become integrated as images. The little figures are sculpted out of scraps of card and wire, elements held in fixed relations to one another. What conjures up the image we see as a resolved line drawing is an illusion. At one point in the sculpture’s rotation, the shadow it casts on the wall creates the visual impression of a figure. Here the image is a portrait of Shostakovich; in others it is an opera singer, a conductor.

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A Calderesque revolve. First state.

Second state of Calderesque revolve.

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Third state of Calderesque revolve. Shostakovich portrait now clear.

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The Nose having sex.

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• I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, a lecture-­performance in which Kentridge talks through the procedures and research informing his production, deploys some of the formal solutions achieved in Telegrams from the Nose, which featured on-­screen and live versions of himself in dialogue. Here Kentridge is himself present onstage giving the lecture, against a field of anarchic visual elements. When Kentridge returned to South Africa after delivering his Norton Lectures at Harvard, he brought with him the rumor of an invitation from a German theater company to stage a production with an actor doing a performance of William delivering the lectures. The Austrian actor Joachim Meyerhoff has since performed the lectures at the Hamburg city theater. The piece was first performed in February 2014. What an apotheosis!10 In recent years Kentridge has delivered several lectures in which on-­screen projections of himself play now with, now against, his actual presence, underscoring some comments while ironizing others.11 It seems appropriate that an actor will at last perform that William Kentridge, artist, who was himself recently at Harvard performing the academician.12 And this is a point that I have just raised as a question with Kentridge: me. What we note here is that a substantial and experimental lecture performance staged at the Goethe-­Institut in Johannesburg actually undergoes a kind of cell division, giving rise to two autonomous works. Does that seem accurate to you? And thus this story of the Nose is already a double-­story, a triple-­story. It is Gogol, plus Shostakovich, plus several William Kentridges (at the very least).

element of the early experiment generated the lecture-­performance I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine that Kentridge took part in at the Sydney Biennale later that year; while Telegrams from the Nose became a distinct, freestanding work, without the Kentridge lecture component, but incorporating visual elements for the Met production, and using animations, shadow puppets, and fragments of literary texts. 11. I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine is perhaps the most resolved of these events to date. It is a performance piece in which

10. This is distinct from the small-­scale Telegrams from the Nose production directed, written, and conceived by Kentridge. That work also arose as a 3-­D working sketchbook for The Nose. The composer Francois Sarhan performs, but he is not “performing Kentridge”; rather he is performing a set of ideas that Kentridge used as technical experiments for the Met production. When the Sarhan performance was staged for the first time at the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg (April 2008), Kentridge did give a fragment of a lecture. In effect, that lecture

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Kentridge gives an account of many of the meanderings that emerged from the research undertaken in preparing himself for his encounter with Gogol and Shostakovich. For that performance he stages a live lecture, while three projections of himself emerge like ectoplasm, haunting the projection screen. The result is something of a spoof, a bit of a parlor game, with resonances of the séance. This technique had arisen in his making of the films 7 Fragments for George Méliès, though it became associated with the splitting of the self in the works derived from the experiments around The Nose, and the frolics proliferated in various ways, across several small playful excursions. In 2010 he developed a new way of engaging with far-­flung digital selves. When he could not attend the opening of the substantial retrospective exhibition at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, he was asked to send a video greeting. What resulted showed affectionate regard for the curator, Shinji Kohmoto, as well as the curatorial team. Kentridge delivered a letter of greeting filmed with three video selves. There were moments during the video for his comments to be translated by Mr. Kohmoto’s curatorial assistant, Ellie Nagata. As the first Kentridge projection spoke, its avatars disrupted and disfigured the event by contradicting one another:

in its virtual mediated idiom, yet backward in its dignity, its politesse and urbanity. This double temporality is one of the signatures of Kentridge’s work, as he cites idioms that gesture to an archaic, handmade world of detailed care, while floating with apparently effortless ease in the slipstream of new technologies. He is meaningfully the child of an age of transition who carries a legacy of rupture internal to himself. His art speaks in a dual address both to the future and to the past: in formal, aesthetic terms, in technological terms, and also in and with regard to content. He exemplifies the generation of South Africans whose lives were marked by Apartheid and its fall, whose lives have been defined by a sense of self as multiple, split. 12. I recently saw the rather extraordinary biopic A Piece of Work, in which Joan Rivers described herself as “an actress playing a comedienne.” Kentridge’s account of his cycle of Norton Lectures suggests that he was both surprised and moved to be embraced by the academy, and to find that he was for the occasion an intellectual performing the artist. He has frequently given accounts of his uneasy relation to knowledge and information, which he wryly implies leaks through him like water. His anxiety has often manifested itself, playfully, as a fear of being caught in a fraudulent claim to authority: he eschewed the academic career because his propensity to “wing it” would not hold. He has just been nominated to the American Philosophical Society, which, he notes, advocates the promotion of useful knowledge! His self-­conscious skepticism is, I would suggest, a healthy response to what he has experienced as the current popular habit of mistaking celebrity for authority. Nonetheless, he does have an exceptional intellectual capacity to grasp and interpret objects, experiences, texts; and to process these elements and absorb them into his oeuvre, his life, his self. This synthetic gift is increasingly informing his aesthetic and formal experiments.

The artist is delighted to be able to send this greeting to you; WK TWO. The artist is very upset at not being present . . . WK THREE. The artist is aware that every translation is a mistranslation. WK ONE.

The video was a whimsical tribute. It staged Kentridge’s absence, through his distinctly wry digital presences; the projected Kentridges apologized for his “no-­show” while forging a community of regard with those who had been constituted by the opening as his advocates and followers. The small performance was a postmodern greeting, a carte de visite, looking forward and backward at the same time: forward

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3 A Special Theory of Relativity

The One is necessarily always the Many. This much we know. And we know that part of our plurality of being is vertical, running through generations, embedding us across time, via memory as well as biology. In such terms, the split self in Kentridge is a figure of biological as well as of artistic lineages. The murderous world in which a “double” threatens to displace us is not always a story about siblings: Jacob and Esau. Indeed, as Freud demonstrated, the most universal of such contests of power is about time. The doubles are at least as likely to be father and son: Laius and Oedipus. It would be all but impossible to overestimate the claim of family and generation in Kentridge’s work, and an understanding of The Nose that does not take account of this would be inadequate to a substantial consideration of his exploration of identity. Parentage is a question of matter as well as symbol, so let me begin by considering the symbolic, the aesthetic, and the intellectual lineage. Kentridge’s intellectual sport I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine demonstrates Gogol to be arising out of Cervantes and Sterne. Without doubt Cervantes had a significant impact on Sterne, and the Spaniard’s presence is evident throughout The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, a work that in turn captivated Gogol. Kentridge is reading Don Quixote while he writes the script, and cites the lineage in his performance.1 For others, Gogol is as likely to be cited as the ostensible point of origins: “We all come out from Gogol’s overcoat.” (Even that quote has a double-­story: it is attributed to Dostoyevsky but also to Turgenev, who is himself father of Fathers and Sons.2) Kentridge’s The Nose, then, has a bridge reaching backward from Gogol to Sterne to Cervantes. That is the literary inheritance; but there is also a very significant literal trajectory of generation that has produced Kentridge as a father/son/ grandson in a complex account of embedded being.3 Lineages matter, and that matter concerns paternity. William Kentridge is the son of Sydney Kentridge, who is the

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1. From chapter 14, “The Adventure of the Knight of the Grove”: “The first thing that presented itself was the Squire of the Grove’s nose, which was so big that it almost overshadowed his whole body. It is, in fact, stated, that it was of enormous size, hooked in the middle, covered with warts, and of a mulberry colour like an egg-­plant . . . the extraordinary nose of the Squire presented itself to Don Quixote’s view, and he was no less amazed than Sancho at the sight.” 2. There are several sources for this assertion. See, for one, the notes on Gogol’s story “The Overcoat” at http://www.enotes.com/ overcoat (accessed August 22, 2014). 3. “The Child is father of the Man” is a line from Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” (1802), and is used as part of his epigraph to Ode: Intimations of Immortality.

son of . . . 4 Is William using the I Am Not Me performance as a pretext for exploring anxieties of influence? Patriarchs cast big shadows in the Kentridge family. I raise the question: me. What is the shape of that debt from Cervantes to Gogol? Is it substantial and literal, in your understanding? he. The real evidence of the debt is that there is an identifiable line of writers here who are skeptical about the role of the author. Kentridge’s response is not the one I had anticipated. Over the years he has become pursued, almost possessed, by his own obligations and rights as “originator.”5 Yet his comment here focuses on a history of authors disavowing the author-­function. His interpretation is skeptical of a natural literary intertextuality looping him backward, and it seems to show a strong theoretical self-­awareness. In identifying with a tradition of doubt, he sets in place a metacritical writing that is driven by, yet detached from, his psychological imperatives. Kentridge here positions himself both within and outside of the tradition he is identifying, following Gogol and Sterne who, like Cervantes, find the Artistic Self to be implausible.6 Authorship and authority are at play in Gogol, as they are in William Kentridge. As is so often the case, his formal and theoretical interests inform one another. It is well known that Kentridge has a marked philosophical and aesthetic commitment to the handmade and the archaic. As a result, his work is “out of time,” almost as if the aesthetic that he has produced allows him to author himself through becoming a member of the previous generation. His filmmaking techniques (which he characterizes as “stone-­age”) situate him as an anachronism. There is something of the “belatedness” of the Apartheid culture in this. The repressive regime, for example, proscribed television until 1976, the first time broadcast television became accessible to South Africans inside the country. “Elsewhere” became the place of sophistication, and image-­making was somehow “from abroad.”7 Furthermore, it has often been noted that Kentridge’s iconography arises from a temporal anomaly. The household appliances and set elements that fill his landscapes tend to be from the 1940s and 1950s. Robust black Bakelite telephones, old radio sets, and the domestic devices of his father’s era populate his contrived world,8 and romance often associated with the generation before that. In other words, the temporal geography of the works is anachronistic. Still, for all the resistance to the postmodern in his vocabulary of images, his own world

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of practice is thoroughly digital. The studio is aesthetically a tribute to a certain temporal unruliness, with laptops, video minicams, MP3 players, digital projectors, and other high-­ tech devices alongside stacks of seventeenth-­century books,9 classic film cameras, and wooden tripods. Aesthetically and intellectually he inhabits several geographical environments, and temporally lives the same way. Kentridge is not a typical filmmaker. He is also a printmaker, engaged in an elaborate love affair with the handmade and artisanal.10 His work-­world derives in part from a curious old alchemy using dyes, inks, waxes, gum and chemical baths, burins, and etching plates. At the same time he fluently manages a hyperglobal practice that makes its demands in virtual terms as a kind of hailing between continents and time zones. The Houghton studio is a hub with links to Paris, Calcutta, New York, Bogota, Sydney, Kassel, Chicago, Hiroshima, London, Boston, Rome, Brussels, Kyoto, Barcelona. The syncretism of the studio space and of the artworks gestures toward the archaic even as it embraces the contemporary. That contradiction is sustained through the materialist’s relish in the substance of form. Kentridge’s animation film Tide Table is about fathers and sons. A middle-­aged figure in a pin-­striped suit sits in a deckchair on some postcolonial beach, while a blithe boy frolics at the water’s edge, scrambles across the rocks, skips stones into the sea.11 The patriarch, meanwhile, reads reports of global financial rises and falls in a newspaper where the graphic line of the stock market is overlaid upon the tumescence and detumescence of waves on the shoreline.

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4. Sydney Kentridge is a renowned civil rights lawyer from South Africa (now QC in the UK) who in his early career was associated with landmark cases in the history of the anti-­ Apartheid movement. He was described by Lord Phillips, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, as “the most brilliant lawyer of his generation, or perhaps of his generations.” This monumental figure is writ large indeed in William’s art and philosophy. The Kentridge name, however, does not go “all the way down.” The patronym was invented, in 1908, and changed from Kantorovich in an act of assimilation. 5. This sense of Self as Ur-­presence, or Prime Mover, is marked at the start of the anamorphic film What Will Come (Has Already Come), made while working on his first drawings of the Nose. The film opens in cosmological time, with planets spiraling in space; into that constellation of deep time, Kentridge has filmed (barely visible) his own arm, triggering a kind of event-­horizon. He is the sovereign at the edge of the world; yet throughout the works he is also somehow the captive of the city, subject of time (fixed geographically and temporally). The contrary impulses signal both potency and futility, twin terms in a dual psychic inheritance. In other words, he has in his armature both affirmation and critique. The markers of the child’s grandiosity are held in check by his relation to his father. And here I think of the wonderful playfulness of Freud’s formulation “his majesty the baby” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The economical phrase captures both the infant’s sense of its limitless power, and the wry parent who holds the baby’s delusions. 6. For a detailed discussion of such lines of descent, see Neil Stewart, “Notes on Noses: Laurence Stern and Nikolai Gogol,” Arcadia 36 (2001): 143–­55. Kentridge has wrestled from the start with skepticism about any rights to his status as

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artist. When starting his career, he felt explicitly that he did not have sufficient justification to claim the role. Here we should note the place of performance as well as the visual arts in the emergence of the self as artist. Goya is an influence from the start, but so is Moliere, both strands implicit in Kentridge’s early etchings of theater sets within which clusters of persons perform for and against one another. Schiller wrote, “Every individual human being, one must say, carries within him, potentially and prescriptively, an ideal man, the archetype of a human being, and it is his life’s task to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the un-­changing unity of this ideal” (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and trans. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry [London: Oxford University Press, 1950], 483.) That formulation—­the “unchanging unity” of the “individual human being” despite “changing manifestations”—­is part of an ideological platform for Romantic conceptions of personhood. The Romantic proposition is that the human is singular and thus not necessarily inside the multiple. As if to underscore its weight, Schiller inserts the redundant phrase, “one must say.” 7. As a result, even those thresholds that were crossed in South Africa were not mediatized locally. When Christiaan Barnard undertook the first successful heart transplant in the country, in 1967, television networks from around the world sent crews to document the event, but none of their programming could be seen be South Africans at home. 8. The “family home” still defines Kentridge’s living environment. For many years after their marriage, he and his wife lived in a house some miles from the home in which he grew up. However, he retained his studio in that family home. In the past two decades, he has moved back into that family house to live, building a studio space separate from the main house but on the same property. This is where he maintains his core creative practice, rising routinely to draw and film from dawn to dusk. In the past

five years or so, he has set up a second studio, downtown in an arts precinct in what had been a derelict neighborhood in Johannesburg. That venue now houses a workshop of engineers, technical assistants, and artistic interns who engage in various ways with making the mad machineries for Kentridge’s performance projects and sculptural works. Over and over then, the act of doubling, of splitting, defines the life. There seems to be a habit of mind and of being that locates this artist across and between geographies and identities, in keeping with many of his aesthetic forms as well as themes. Kentridge’s sustained work with stereoscopes provides one instance; pairing images that straddle recto-­verso page spreads is another. The very activity of printmaking is not “singular,” as other art forms may be. The work is always multiple, and implicit in the activity is a recognition that every image will emerge as a reversed reflection of itself, as the plate and the print are stitched together along a seam. 9. The pages are pulled from their bindings and plundered as paper, overprinted, with the preexistent text and images serving as “found ground” for an infinite number of witty prints that bear an often oblique or tangential relation to the original. This results in a kind of distinctive frottage (a practice deployed by Max Ernst, who took rubbings of textured surfaces, then “found” images that surfaced, pretty much randomly, through that action itself). The randomness of these creative strategies is in sympathy with Kentridge’s commitment to avant-­garde practices deploying contingency and chance. 10. The designation of this creative bond as a “love affair” is not facetious. I am invoking Kentridge’s own wry account of the sexualized process of printmaking. His free-­verse piece in the little book William Kentridge: Nose (Johannesburg: David Krut, 2010) gives us this cycle of events: PREPARING THE BED

The hard ground The clean sheet.

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The dry point The spit bite The foul bite The hand wipe.

warned by the oracle that his grandson will kill him. Of course this is the business undertaken by time. A grandchild is born to displace, and to do so in a more radical way even than a child, because the action is more displaced, further removed, and thus less motivated than the intimate conflict between parent and child. This remoteness is evident in the story of Perseus and Acrisius, where the old man is slain by a discus thrown into the air: the missile is not directed at the grandfather but finds its own mark, as it were. (I discuss this further toward the end of this chapter.) Of course, this does not rule out the Oedipal conflict between father and son. In 2013 Kentridge’s father, at the age of ninety, indicated that he was considering retirement. William tells me that his immediate response was to ask himself, “How then will I go on working?”

The stained blanket. The fingerprint in the margin. 11. These two, boy and man, are at one level biographical sketches of William and his son Sam; however, within the logic and modeling of personhood in the film, the pairing seems more compellingly that of grandfather and grandson. In fact, William recently told me that the images of the boy are based on a photograph of his father as a lad, sitting beside his father (William’s grandfather) on the beach. In that photo, the grandfather wears a striped shirt, the stripes seeming to arise from graphic necessity. His suit is not the pin-­striped suit of Soho Eckstein—­ it appears as a solid block of black—­yet he is of the world of pin-­stripes. Not just his shirt but his hatband is striped, and his canvas chair. Kentridge’s recollection was mistaken: HE. I remembered him as wearing a

pin-­striped suit. I addressed this question of the aesthetic and the historically accurate in discussing the figuration of the man climbing the stairs (page 32, above). So here there is a cross-­generational enigma. William’s father as child is an avatar of William’s child in an image that casts William as patriarch. It is as if Kentridge has transposed his Oedipal relation with his father onto a scene played out across complex temporalities. This is, of course, the way time moves on, inexorably in one direction but looping back on itself in arcing returns. The Ur-­myth that organizes Kentridge’s Refusal of Time performance-­lecture, as well as the construction of ideas in his “Thinking Aloud” dialogues with Angela Breidbach, is, however, not an Oedipal one. Rather, it is the story of Perseus and his will-­to-­power battle with his grandfather Acrisius, who has been

Kentridge’s grandfather.

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The two figures, boy and man, are flanked by local religious celebrants engaged in some kind of spiritual progress, baptizing one another at the sea’s edge.12 We watch these scenes via a sketched rendering of a “naturalistic” event; and we are uncannily witnesses, too, to a catastrophe somehow taking place simultaneously, where rows of dying figures lie in untended beds.13 All of these moments are musically stitched together with a lilting calypso.14 It is unclear, in the shape of this film, whether the man and boy are father and son or motifs of time present and time past, the figure of the boy capturing the playful dance of some prior selfhood recalled by the man. Is the boy, in other words, the man’s heir of a ghost of the boy the man once had been? Is he the future or the past, or perhaps both?

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In Tide Table, Kentridge’s signature aesthetic language of supplementation and erasure works consummately, the animations of the boy playing at the tide’s edge produced through the familiar medium of the drawn and removed mark. The boy crouches on the rocks, selects a stone, rises, arcs his arm to throw: the event is made of friezes melded together, stitching one instant into the next through repetitions of drawing, filming, erasing, redrawing, refilming, erasing, and so on. These scenes exist only as a series of anticipations, of lost events; the film is actually a palimpsest, the archive of a cycle of drawings that have left little material form other than the recorded proof that they once existed.15 Here we are in the realm of the historical dialectic, as outlined by Adorno, with fragmentary observation and totalizing interpretation in alternating play: In accordance with this, we might say that history is discontinuous in the sense that it represents life perennially disrupted. However, because history constantly repeats this process of disruption, and because it clings to the resulting fragments instead of its deceptive surface unity, the philosophical interpretation of history, in other words, the construction of history, acquires a view of the totality that the totality fails to provide at first sight.16 The dispute between Heraclitus and Parmenides is staged here in contemporary terms: all is change, and all change is illusion.

An analysis of the most recent of the Soho Eckstein films, Other Faces (2011), provides instructive insights into Kentridge’s evolving methodological enquiry counterpointing subjective and historical narratives of subject formation.17 More specifically, the film juxtaposes the two distinct

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12. It is evident from the costumes worn and the rites in the waves that these are ZCC (Zion Christian Church) believers, African Christians whose faith is based in a syncretism that marries local practice with Christian fundamentals. (This motif of “assimilation” will bother us throughout my considerations.) 13. It comes as no surprise that the film was made in 2003, at the height of the controversies around then-­president Thabo Mbeki’s denialist stance on HIV-­AIDS. With the catastrophe of AIDS arising so soon after the liberation of South Africa from Apartheid, it struck observers that Mbeki’s position manifested, at least in part, a resistance to the surrendering up of a utopianism. A discourse against Western colonial science emerged as a kind of reaction-­ formation. The consequence was a failure to tackle the AIDS crisis with full alacrity. 14. Likambo Ya Ngana, by the late legendary Franco, who himself died of AIDS and was a campaigner disseminating information about the disease. 15. This is in some ways Freud’s “mystic writing pad” (a child’s toy that can be marked up and cleared an infinite number of times, though the impressions of previous marks remain on the surface of the tablet itself, below the sheet upon which the marks were made. 16. Theodor W. Adorno, “Lecture 10 (10 December, 1964),” in History and Freedom: Lectures, 1964–­1965, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rory Tiedemann (New York: Polity, 2001), 91. This is of course also a description of film, which creates the illusion of duration and time’s flow through activating a series of stills. Perhaps, as Zeno posited, there is no duration, and time consists of moments recollected as if continuous. 17. Soho Eckstein, always represented as wearing a pin-­striped suit, whether in bed, on the beach, or in the city, is one of two protagonists who provide the dramatic conflict in Kentridge’s early films. At one point it seemed that Felix Teitelbaum (a generally naked romancer) might

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spheres of political transition and familial inheritance, two different models of patriarchy under pressure. Like so many of Kentridge’s projects, it relies structurally on a doubling; and this arises from, and retrospectively comments on, the saga of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev and his Nose. The narrative of Other Faces opens with the pages of an old accounting book, but there is a rapid cut to a characteristic Kentridge landscape. A sound texture, dominated by vocalized clicks, is overlaid on the images.18 The landscape is dramatically transformed into an urban street map, and we see from above a crude map of intersecting roads, with two vehicles on a collision course. The image is in a visual dialogue with the “modeling” that one understands from accounts of the “war room,” in which scenarios are enacted as games. The map appears here as a kind of animated board game. The visual language situates the urban event as a site of combat. The film cuts to a naturalized street scene, where the familiar Soho Eckstein figure, in his pin-­striped suit, is involved in a minor automobile accident with an African man, similarly dressed. The scene of the collision is downtown Johannesburg, and on hand, as witnesses, are the entrepreneurial street photographers often found on the city’s streets, ready to “capture,” in a small photo booth, the urban emergent middle-­c lass Africans whose self-­ fashioning is buttressed by the photographic image. The street photographers, snapping photos of their clients, are accidental archivists.19 The two businessmen engage in a violent display of mutual verbal abuse, a moment of commonplace “road rage” coded here as a civil war between colonizer and colonized. The figures merge into one another, and their identical costuming provides an oblique suggestion that the colonial contest has, at least sartorially, been won by the figure of Western capital. The pin-­striped suit becomes a sheath that enfolds both men into a single Janus-­faced entity.

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be the protagonist, and Soho his bête noire; however, it did not take long for the film cycle to establish the patriarch (not the romantic youth) as the real “hero” of the films. Felix disappears from the narrative arc with The History of the Main Complaint (1996), an important film made in the year of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which the central figure has to “own” his dual role: as witness to he is also culpable for acts of violence. Here the split “between” (Felix and Soho) becomes the split “within” (with Soho becoming both witness and perpetrator). 18. Philip Miller, who has composed much of the music for Kentridge’s films over the past decade, discusses the evolution of the distinctive sound arena with me. Designing a sound environment for Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time, working with metronomes and voices, he tries to find the right vocal qualities and coaches the singer, Anne Masina, with whom he is recording, to reach for smaller and smaller sounds. “No . . . smaller,” he urges, “smaller.” In the end, all that is left of the voice is a series of small moans and clicks, vestigial traces of communication. Kentridge, on hearing the sound-­field, immediately associated the noises with his mother (at one time a leading human rights lawyer, she was for several years in an advanced dementia, her speech reduced to minimal moans and nonlinguistic murmuring; she died in 2015). The improvisations become the aural world of Other Faces, a film in which Kentridge explores the nexus of ideas around questions of priority, heritage, and identity by overlaying national and familial structures of power. It becomes ultimately impossible to tell whether the film is a domestic or a political drama—­it is in some way a treatise on the imbricated logic of family as politics. 19. There is a lively and distinctive urban South African tradition of street photographers who will for a small fee take a portrait. The photograph historically carried considerable prestige, signaling the worth of the constructed

This image from Other Faces arises so directly out of the experiments in the film What Will Come (Has Already Come) (2007) that it is impossible to imagine Kentridge is not enmeshed in self-­aware scrutiny. The earlier film was one of the testing grounds for The Nose when he first received the commission from the Met. It set out formally to test the proposition that it would be possible to make a film requiring anamorphic reflection to be legible. Specifically, the projections would be unreadable unless rendered on the curved, distorting surface of a polished cylinder. In other words, that film is an extension of his exploration of perspective and the picture plane. It is thus coherent and credible to suggest that Other Faces, too, is a study of perspective, except that now perspective is rendered as a philosophical or political idea, rather than a technological one.20 90

and staged self. Part of that prestige arose from the fact that the photograph was a distinctive signifier of modernity. This unique aspect of the South African visual field is being transformed surely and rapidly with the advent of digital imaging and the proliferation of cellular phones across southern Africa. The portraiture traditions, once so powerful in the modeling of subjectivity in a dialogic circuit of representation and reception, have been in large measure displaced by “selfies,” in which the photographer is the subject of the image. The selfie is taken in a context with inherent interest—­either because of its remoteness, or because of its associations, or because it is in the proximity of a celebrity—­ and the “self” is thus presumed to have stature. Nonetheless, to date, there still is a role for the street photographer in South Africa. Historically the textures of everyday life under Apartheid gave rise to a powerful documentary imperative, as photographers of conscience embraced the obligation of recording the historical realities of the citizenry. 20. Johannes Fabian’s now classic study Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) makes the case that integral to Western imperialism is a conception of time as a unidirectional teleological trajectory. The phrase “what will come, has already come” is a Ghanaian idiom, and Kentridge clearly uses it to critique the grandiosity of the colonial enterprise with its justificatory historical logic. Hegel notoriously observed that Africans had no part in world history. The substance of Kentridge’s short anamorphic film is the aerial bombardment of Abyssinia by Italy (a people without history being subjected to murderous assault by a colonial force with a great deal of history).

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In What Will Come (Has Already Come), Kentridge, his self-­portrait coded as a Jewish “type” with a sharp and impressive nose, peers at a portrait of a similarly typological African man. Here the two faces are anamorphically “corrected” when viewed on a polished cylinder. The degree to which the rivalrous mirroring in the Janus figure from Other Faces draws on this precursor becomes clear in the image from What Will Come . . . The two views reproduced here show the heads of the two men, as reflected in the viewing cylinder and as drawn on paper.

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What Will Come (Has Already Come) was part of the body of works Kentridge made when he first imagined his figure of the Nose as a kind of malevolent world-­ spirit casting itself abroad as a determined will-­to-­power. Cut into Other Faces as well are sketches Kentridge had drawn using images from family photographs. At first impression, the association between the street scene and the domestic arena seems arbitrary, perversely opaque. The portraits here are figured as if projected on the screen of a drive-­in theater, but the content of the film is based on the “family album” and suggests intimate nurture: in the drawing shown here, and the photograph that is one of its points of origin, mother embraces a boyish figure from behind as she looks over his shoulder toward the viewer. The image provides, very economically, a graphic representation of the “doubling” of identity that happens through a “vertical” plane, via the transmission from parent to child.

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This rather tender image gives rise to a pair of drawings, one for Kentridge’s 2010 show at the Louvre, the other from Other Faces, in which Kentridge considers himself in relation to relation; in particular, here, to his mother. The drawing for the Louvre show is a startling drawing of himself holding in his arms an infant morphed into the form of a griffin or sphinx. Here he obliquely alludes to the riddle solved by Oedipus about the phases of human life. In recent years, his mother’s illness has transformed Felicia Kentridge into a rather defenseless infant, with no further role as caregiver. In Kentridge’s drawing the roles of parent and child are reversed. The verticality of the image emphasizes the relation of son-­as-­father, and the drawing recurs in Other Faces. A second “memory trace” gives rise to a series of drawn images evoking another brief film of the “home movie” type, in which an African woman is sketched as caregiver; she is evidently a nanny. Marvelously, Kentridge has visualized this relation too as a vertical one, with the caretaker hovering above the child as a benign spirit.

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The complexity of master-­servant relations in South Africa has been carefully explored in social theory.21 A particular texture of the fugitive memory trace is suggested by Kentridge’s drawing here. The nanny leans steeply to her left. Is she lurching, using her body weight to impel the baby carriage? Is the carriage rocking with childish energies? Either way, we get the impression of dynamic movement. A small swirl of dark lines in front of the child’s chest suggests a toy, a rattle. Kentridge is prompting us to read crude charcoal marks as mimetic traces. At some level, he is once again testing the limits of representation. How crudely can he gesture toward a figural trace and still have it make meaning for us? As an animator, he is acutely aware of the ways in which any one image takes its legibility from the images that precede and follow it; an affective charge will inform what it is that we can read. The image is darkened toward the edges, holding the vivid scene in a kind of oriel of radiant light at the center, with the focal point held in the mind’s eye through recollection. The ground is rendered with coarse, ill-­defined marks, suggesting that the mind holds that which is emotionally charged in the scene, the quality of the relation.

A celebrated photograph by Peter Magubane captures the distinctive set of bonds, an uneasy balance of tenderness and tyranny, surrounding the nurture provided by women who were migrant workers tolerated in the “white” cities for their labor power. Taken in 1956, just at the start of the era of grand Apartheid, 98

it shows a young white girl sits on a bench marked “Europeans Only”; her black caregiver, seated behind the bench that excludes her, looks at the child with an expression that one reads as deep affection, though perhaps she is thinking of her own girlhood, or of her own child she has left elsewhere in order to pursue her job as child-­minder in the white suburbs. The psychic operations of Subject/Object formation in Other Faces is various and complex, with the self precipitated into being through any number of key relations. This further complicates the account as sketched in the early Manichean representations of Soho and his alter ego. Indigenous figures, both as collectives and as individuals, have been significant presences across Kentridge’s oeuvre, and in this film the triangulations are multiple. A series of drawings, variously fugitive, suggests the mother-­child dyad as viewed from slightly shifting perspectives—­whether those of the father or of a sibling or of an other, who can say?

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21. The classic text on the subject is Jacklyn Cock’s groundbreaking study Maids and Madams (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980).

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Ultimately the image dissolves completely, leaving no more than scratched traces of something that once existed inside the frame.

It is possible (just) to interpret these marks. The straight red lines are deliberate enough to signify meaning—­or at least human action.22 So too the undulating mark across the ground may signify a horizon line. In Johannesburg, Kentridge’s city, the horizon has been meaningfully defined as the result of gold-­mining activity, which has left the plane reshaped by hillocks. So enigmatically, even this apparently empty trace could be suggestive of human activity. The blackened upright might be a blasted tree from Delville Wood, or a boundary marker, or a scratch on the film; so too the energetic blur/blob may suggest a fleeting consciousness, or nothing at all.

In Other Faces, Kentridge suggests various interwoven relations that stand in for a plotline, or for a structural form. One body of drawings depicts two men caught in a dispute following a car accident;these are contrasted with the moody nostalgia of the family portraits, domestic scenes of a mother and child. The separate 101

arcs are intercut, woven together in the postproduction edit. These webs of entanglement hold the elements together, oh, so tenuously. The juxtapositions do not make meaning in any traditional narrative terms; rather each field of signification is there as an emotional precipitate. Our impulse to interpret what we see drives us to provide connecting threads. If the colonial encounter is about Self versus Not-­Self (Soho versus the “driver of the other car”), Kentridge is asserting that the familial matrix, too, is about Self versus Other.23 Kentridge adds another dimension of meaning by inserting scenes (snapshots) of an African child-­minder with her ward. In personal communication, he notes that the child in the baby carriage was his brother, not himself, thereby adding sibling rivalry to the Oedipal complex in play. Weaving these distinct threads together, Kentridge explores, on the one hand, the psychological production of the human subject through the mirroring relation between caregiver and infant and, on the other, the dialectical drama between self and other inside the colonial context. By interleaving these strands he implies that these narratives are mutually entailed. Each is political, each is psychological, in that both serve the solipsism of the self and its obligations to its others. Emmanuel Levinas and Frantz Fanon lay out the philosophical and psychological origins of our obligation to recognize the likeness of ourselves in “other faces.” Lines of text are inserted within the visual field of the film, and we make intuitive interpretations as to whose thoughts these might be, though this is a careless presumption. The film retains an ambiguity. Is it the dispossessed African or the entitled European who generates the line of text that is overprinted on a page from a used mining accounts book? i am nothing & should be everything The phrase occurs in Marx’s “Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right,’” a text that deals with the family and civil society as structures of the state. The materiality invoked here, of an actual check transacting the value of human life, of human time, is an anchor of a kind, urging the viewer to recall this visual field as more than that—­more than just a graphic effect, or a visual field. It stitches us back into history. Kentridge has recently produced a series of images on the pages of found, used mining accounts books; the enumeration of commercial transaction and persons on these pages provides a graphic ground for the image-­making. By contrast here, there seems to be an urgency because the individuals represented by so many transactions, so many listed names, are not drawn to mind as they 102

are in this instance, where we hear the outraged voice speaking back at us. This, for me, gives the image a dynamism, a vertiginous power, that seems to resist the sense of the inevitable. What Kentridge’s film suggests is that the narcissism of the nurtured infant ironically produces the insatiable demand and need articulated in that phrase, “I am nothing, and should be everything.” That is at the level of the psychic drama that Freud refers to as the “family romance.” At the same time, dispossession and colonial alienation from property generates a feeling of catastrophe inside the colonized. The child born as inheritor of colonial dispossession internalizes the distress of experiencing itself as vile to the other, and is in distinct ways robbed of well-­being. Yet somehow the colonizer too carries the wound of the lack. In complex relations of projection and introjection, the nanny/surrogate is doomed to fail the absolute demands of the maternal function. The dual inflection of such wounds, for colonizer and 103

22. I am thinking of James Elkins’s essay about hermeneutics and meaning-­making in Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997). Elkins is interested there in considering the tests that we, as “readers” employ to determine whether ancient marks on rock or bark or hide are evidence of human “writing” or are random accidents. I also am reminded of the random red lines that mark up the Kentridge newspaper page (see page 33, above), which can be interpreted as traces signifying either the plotted action of the Nose or the wandering gaze of the viewer. 23. The entanglements here are thematically and aesthetically linked to Kentridge’s earlier film The History of the Main Complaint, discussed above. There I point to the diffuse and pervasive aura of guilt that is the texture of relations as experienced by liberal South Africans (page 52).

for colonized, each arising from different world-­historical circumstances, suggests that while the technology of the nuclear family is neither the same as nor a metaphor for the matrix of power that produces selves in the colonial context, grief and hurt are the precipitates of self-­other relations at both the familial and the political level. The line “i am nothing & should be everything” is flung across the screen between the two pin-­striped men as they fulminate over their smashed cars. The phrase encapsulates the dangerous experiential grief of masculinities in conflict, whether between fathers and sons or colonial antagonists. Metaphoric transformations are integral to Kentridge’s work, yet this film reveals the extent to which he makes it difficult for a viewer to “interpret” his metaphorics. Is this a film “about” colonial relations, explored through the figure of the bourgeois family? Or is it a meditation on the family romance, refracted through the metaphor of the postcolony? It seems all but impossible to determine which cluster of images is the vehicle and which the tenor, to use I. A. Richards’s terms for the components of a metaphor. “The tenor,” Encyclopaedia Brittanica explains, “refer[s] to the concept, object, or person meant,” with “the vehicle being the image that carries the weight of the comparison.” One conclusion implicit in the film is that the two vectors (vehicle and tenor) are embedded in each other, that actually, for the bourgeois subject at least, they impel each other. The narcissistic wound arising from Oedipal grief and family repression gives rise to a compensatory deadening of sensibility that enables the structural oppression and domination of others. In other words, bluntly stated, psychological misery arising out of the repressive logic of the nuclear family exorcises itself through asserting power elsewhere, against the yet more powerless. This seems knowable terrain. Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality posited that sadism and masochism are tightly compressed in the production of the subject—­so much so that it is not possible to identify which is primary: whether sadism precedes masochism, or masochism gives rise to sadism. Sadism and ruthlessness are the expression of a primal hurt. In other words, it is not possible to resolve whether the subject can think the suffering of the other through his or her own understanding of pain, or whether it becomes possible to fantasize the suffering of the other because of one’s own misery. Other Faces explores the relation between the production of subjectivities under Apartheid, linking it to an Oedipal wound. In some ways this is the argument in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents: “It is impossible to ignore the extent to which civilization is built up on renunciation of instinctual gratifications.” Further, Freud suggests: 104

The tendency of culture to set restrictions upon sexual life is no less evident than its other aim of widening its sphere of operations. Even the earliest phase of it, the totemic, brought in its train the prohibition against incestuous object-­choice, perhaps the most maiming wound ever inflicted throughout the ages on the erotic life (page 51). The rather high grandiosity of Freud’s cultural critique may not have the standing that it once did; nonetheless, it seems entirely plausible that human communities are structured along powerful logics of taboo and constraint, and that such repressions result in the brutalizing of human sensibilities. One must imagine that in the contexts of the colonial encounter the suppression of human fellow-­feeling surely is brought to a high art, as the colonial imperative is to possess places and to dispossess persons. Perhaps, too, the political unconscious of the film is at some level a consideration of the meaning of metaphoric practices themselves? Is it metaphoric thinking as such that teaches us to behave as if one sphere of being naturally is subordinated to another? (“My love is like a red, red, rose” is about my love, never that very red rose to which she is compared.) Thus one group “lives through” another, almost as if metaphor itself mimics a master-­slave dialectic. Habits of mind are learned across the system of language. Does the Nose understand itself to be the center of the Face? The dilemma between Kovalev and his nose is the problem of vehicle and tenor. me. The line of text that you included in the film, “I am nothing and should be everything,” is as much about the infant ego in relation to the parent as it is about the colonial conflict. That is why it is so intractable. he. (bemused) And to think that when I wrote that line, I had not understood that it might refer to Soho, or to me! 105

24. On March 21, 1960, a group of protestors in the township of Sharpeville was fired upon by the police in South Africa. Sixty-­nine people were killed. The public conversation took place April 26, 2013, in Berlin; the exhibition was at Haus der Kunst, Münich.

Recently, in a public conversation marking the launch of an exhibition of photographs titled The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, Kentridge narrated a formative “event” from his boyhood, a moment that was constitutive of who he is now, and which I recall as I write this. When his father was the lawyer acting on behalf of the families of victims of the Sharpeville Massacre,24 the young William became aware of a box of photographs that his father was covertly exploring. The activity struck the boy as illicit. Sneaking into his father’s study, he found the box—­which contained forensic photographs of the people slain by the police. His father, who was sharing the stage, said he had heard this description from his son before and would like publicly to apologize for having “left the photographs where a boy might find them.” That line is, of course, the exemplary apology about the “accidental” transaction of pornography between father and son. Wryly here, Sydney Kentridge was acknowledging the burden of being the son of a man of principle, though I speculate later in this essay that there are traces, in William Kentridge’s work, of a co-­articulation (a “quilting,” in Lacan’s terms) of the forensic and the erotic. he. It was one thing that I had seen the photographs. It was another that my father had seen them. And I had seen that my father had seen them. That meant something too. So then, the forensic information establishes a complicity between father and son, human rights lawyer and artist. A private sensation (a kind of “covert knowing”) is shared between two witnesses. His father’s legal work had been the source of a foundational pun for Kentridge as a child. Between 1958 (when William was three years old) and 1961 his father traveled daily to Pretoria, the judicial capital of South Africa, where he was working on the Treason Trial, acting for Mandela and the anti-­Apartheid activists accused of attempting to overthrow the South African state. The young William heard the description of the case as “trees and tiles,” and naturalized the phrase through an image of his father working to manage the fir trees at the edge of the property, and somehow involving himself with the large mosaic garden table. When he told me this anecdote, Kentridge was involved in several large-­ scale drawings of trees, each a mosaic-­like assemblage of fragments on separate squares of paper. “Trees and tiles,” he tells me.25

Kentridge’s creative striving to escape the Law of the Father has recently culminated in a sublime work of performance anarchy, his dance-­opera-­lecture The 106

Refusal of Time. The work arose in part out of a commission for dOCUMENTA (13) but also comes via his intellectual engagement with scholar Peter Galison, a historian of science.26 The performance situates temporality at the center of the field of enquiry and incorporates a small experimental piece in which a cinematic version of Kentridge, acting the buffoon, frolics on film with the immensely talented and innovative dancer-­choreographer Dada Masilo, with Kentridge very inadequately mimicking Masilo’s grandiloquent moves. The name of this segment of the work, “Dancing with Dada,” does more than play off Masilo’s personal and professional name; Kentridge is also invoking the subversive potential of the early twentieth-­century absurdist aesthetic movement associated with Tristan Tzara and the Cabaret Voltaire. That Dada set itself up to sabotage traditions and to protest against militarism and orthodoxies, and ironically took as its name the sign of patriarchy, a child’s affectionate name for a father. The compression of all of these ideas, along the lines of a Freudian “condensation,” places the scene in a kind of dream time, where the principles of temporality, generation, priority, and repetition can all be explored. Implicitly here the seeds of destruction are within masculinist culture itself, as Dadaism inseminates modernity. The lecture wrapped around the dance routine draws on Galison’s exploration of Einstein’s work on relativity, as well as several mysterious conceptions of time and deep space. In the fully staged version of this work Kentridge “performs” a lecture that begins with several strands of thinking about time. He recounts a Greek myth that he has invoked in a number of contexts. Perseus’s grandfather sealed up his daughter, Danaë, in order to escape the fate foretold by the oracle that her offspring will kill him; Zeus bypasses the locks and impregnates her in a shower of gold. (“Dada” finds a way in.) The story of Perseus, trapped inside his destiny to be his grandfather’s slayer, floods Kentridge with a kind of horror. 107

25. Kentridge’s conviction is that he produces a much “truer” tree when it arises through some such covert method, with fragments assembled in a slightly imperfect fit. The occasionally broken or slightly misaligned paper “tile” captures the vitality of the tree, and it seems no longer inert. Looking at these works, I am prompted to think about Chuck Close’s experiments with what we may call “pixelated” paintings, works composed of disaggregated dots of color, sometimes referred to as “mosaic” paintings. Close’s pixelated portraits arose in part from a physical imperative; after his stroke, he has been afflicted with prosopagnosia, a difficulty with identifying faces. But his solutions were never simply strategic; or rather, his strategic choice compelled the works to challenge naturalized modes of representation. His earlier canvases have an uncanny hyperrealism, and over the past few decades he has compelled viewers to reappraise their naturalized viewing habits. It is instructive to think of his use of pixelated images as an antinaturalistic strategy in close. The large-­scale mosaic-­like paper tiles in Kentridge’s work perhaps serve a similar antinaturalistic purpose. 26. dOCUMENTA (13) was curated by Kentridge’s longtime friend and collaborator, Italian intellectual/visual theorist/curator Carolyn Christov-­Bakargiev. Kentridge’s contribution was a site-­specific screening of the installation The Refusal of Time. (2012).

Invoking all of the grim detail, he recounts the story of the youthful exiled warrior who wanders into an athletic arena, where he proves himself by flinging a discus out into the amphitheater. That discus delivers a mortal blow, as it strikes and kills an old man who has strayed in to watch the sport. It is Acrisius, grandfather of Perseus.

Kentridge has enmeshed the complex cross-­generational allusion to grandfathers in his visual field. It is his grandfather who sits in a formal suit and striped shirt in an early linocut of a family group on Muizenberg beach. (See the detailed discussion on page 85, above.) The pin-­striped suit become the signifier of Soho Eckstein, the protocapitalist who is the key protagonist in the majority of Kentridge’s animated films. The artist’s grandfather, shown as a crumpled figure sitting rather awkwardly at the center of the linocut image, is, you might recall, invoked by Kentridge within the dialogue in my opening pages, when he discusses his own pince-­ nez, and suddenly recalls those worn by his grandfather. Is he, in wearing the rather “perfumed” eyepieces, performing the quaint archaism of his grandfather’s ostentatious orientalism, his premodern Jewishness? In at least one of the scenes in Other Faces, the shouting Soho figure is (inexplicably) wearing a pince-­ nez. Is this William, or is it his grandfather?

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4 Object Lessons

While first thinking about the shape of this text, I became aware of the significance in Kentridge’s work of the exploration of the principle of an internal contradiction. This is how I settled on the form of the dialogue. That paradigm of ambiguity seems to drive Kentridge’s oeuvre and is an idea thematized most overtly in his film Stereoscope (1999).1

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he. Stereoscope had an uncertain beginning. There were several images that I knew I wanted, but I was not quite sure how they related to one another. It took several months of working on the film to understand how they would finally come together. I had a section of the film that had to do with a vision of points of connection and disconnection, in which the work of Mayakovsky was an influence. I always wanted to do a production of “Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy.” I think Stereoscope is the closest I have come to that.2 This is a striking observation. Stereoscope does not seem at first sight to be a film arising out of Soviet aesthetics, yet for Kentridge, apparently, it is in explicit dialogue with Mayakovsky. It is worth tarrying a moment, to try to interpret what Kentridge might be telling us with this.

On the One Hand— Kentridge’s interpretation of Shostakovich’s The Nose seems to be pointing towards the impossibility of the resolution of contradiction. He deploys a nonunitary understanding of existence as a generative source. Well, that comes as no surprise. The divided self is at the heart of the Gogol story.3 It is perhaps also at the heart of the human communicative gesture, marked as it is by a longing for transparency at the same time as it is defined by an aptitude for dissembling, doubling, and disguise.4 It is evident from several of the drawings in the series Everyone Their Own Projector (which arose while Kentridge worked on The Nose) that there is an ongoing dialogue informed by his stereoscopic experiments. The stereoscope provided Kentridge with an instrument through which to bring together aesthetic, scientific, psychological, and philosophic metaphors about doubles. The two halves of a stereoscopic image are separated by the natural distance between the human eyes: one side is “as if” viewed by the left eye, the other “as if” by the right. The two, minimally different images, when viewed through the stereoscope, are overlaid one on the other and seem to merge, creating a three-­dimensional view. Kentridge’s wry comment is that the distance between the two eyes is the Nose.

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What begins as a philosophical and psychological meditation, embedded within a metaphorics of the double, leads Kentridge to an enquiry into the technology of binocular vision. A principle of “double vision” is increasingly realized in devices that are produced to serve the philosophical underpinning of his thinking, and that ultimately will provide a language for thinking about the Nose as a figure of the divided self. He invents a strategy through which he can replicate stereoscopic drawings, by making images that are almost identical doubles, yet which, when viewed through a stereoscopic device, create a single 3-­D image. The image shown here of a doubled rhinoceros also pays homage to Dürer, artist and printmaker extraordinaire, and one of the early theorists on perspective, whose own drawing of a rhinoceros (which we saw on page 000) is part of Kentridge’s sensibility. When the double images pinned on the wall behind Kentridge are perfectly aligned and viewed through a stereoscopic device he 1. A stereoscope is a Victorian viewing device that holds, side by side, two almost identical images (recorded from vantage points separated by the natural distance between the human eyes); when viewed through the lenses, the images seem to merge to create a three-­dimensional view. The paired images mimic the plane as seen by our two eyes; their minimal differences are what conjures up three-­dimensional space and hence depth of field. Depth of field has evolved as a particular attribute of predators such as ourselves. Flight animals generally have one eye on either side of the head and thus do not have binocular vision. 2. My sense of the strong line of enquiry between Stereoscope and The Nose is implicit in this observation, I think, and I was pleased to find Kentridge’s ruminations on Stereoscope and Mayakovsky. (The comment can be found in the exhibition brochure by Lilian Tone for the William Kentridge exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999, http://artarchives. net/artarchives/liliantone/tonekentridge.html.) The film seems to allude to Mayakovsky’s place in the history of revolutionary aesthetics. His

futurist manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” has been used as a phrase to describe Shostakovich’s compositional languages. There is a kind of incendiary anarchism imaged in the film, with a cartoonish round bomb as one of the motifs driving events. Kentridge’s explorations when making Refusal of Time returned to the caricature of the anarchist bomber from Conrad’s The Secret Agent, who is determined to blow up Greenwhich Observatory and is thus, for Kentridge, identified with an anticolonial revolt against dominant Western systems, the system of Time in particular. 3. This was Kentridge’s interpretation at the time of the discussion, but I wouldn’t hold him to it. See his comments in “Performa 09: William Kentridge on Divided Selves,” ArtsBeat (blog), November 11, 2009, NYTimes.com (accessed January 7, 2012). 4. And here even my formulation shifted register, drawing attention to the materiality of language, as it somehow summoned up the rhetorical uses of alliteration to capture that idea of a “staged” utterance.

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designed, a single rhino is “visualized” straight ahead of the viewer, in three dimensions. (An informal photo on page 46 shows Kentridge looking through the device; it features a refracting mirror, with reflective surfaces angled at 90 degrees to one another and the apex—­or intersection—­of the two mirrors positioned directly between one’s eyes.) Another Kentridge image of a rhinoceros, this one drawn face-­on, is also at some level a joke about the Nose, because here its Nose is rendered invisible.5 (We are reminded of the operation of rhinoplasty. Kentridge commented to me early in the process of considering this book that “a Jew is a Wasp with a big Nose”).

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he. I don’t remember saying that. What I would say, is a Wasp is a Jew with a small nose. It is at first sight difficult to interpret the drawing because the animal’s signifying marks, the nose and horn, are rendered frontally, rather than in profile, almost like a contour map. Here Kentridge is engaging in a joke as well as a technical experiment, creating a compressed image relying on Albertian perspective. The “set” for Kentridge’s stereoscopic rhino—­the image of doubled photogravures, above—­has the head of an artist peering into the illusionistic space in which the rhino stands. That relation, of spectator staring into a cube that contains the subject of scrutiny, is modeled with reference to Dürer’s image, from his Painter’s Manual, of an artist at work using various perspective and surveying instruments to gauge scale and distance. Dürer’s image becomes curiously productive of a certain mode of thinking about Kentridge’s stereoscopic images. The split frame of his horizontal drawing can be considered a pair of images, with verso and recto “pages” divided by the viewing device. Such an apprehension helps us to think with Kentridge in some of the more enigmatic of his stereoscopic images; it becomes evident that pairings can be understood either as doublings, or, as in the logic here, as philosophico-­aesthetic enquiries, in which one image scrutinizes the other, and meaning arises out of a

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5. Kentridge has reworked the image of the rhinoceros in various media. It occurs in his film Mine and his design for the theatrical production of Woyzeck on the Highveldt (an adaptation of Buchner’s stageplay Woyzeck, with Handspring Puppet Company).

kind of dialectical mutuality that is more complex, more various and productive, than a literal mirroring. The circuit of images and aesthetic enquiry moves between artists and centuries. Dürer’s Painter’s Manual, from 1525, demonstrates the impact of the theory in Alberti’s Della Pitura. In a sense, then, Kentridge’s photogravures of the rhinoceros activate an iconographic jest in order to point to an aesthetic lineage between himself and the great master printmaker, Dürer.6 Kentridge’s reiterated references to the rhino acknowledge Dürer’s celebrated study of the marvelous animal and, further, invoke the Renaissance artist’s place as one of the fabricators of a way of seeing and of reading that will become grafted onto the 3-­D modeling of form that is integral to early modern ways of seeing.

The dialogic: the back-­and-­forth of exchange is also a meditation on the Subject and its relation to its Objects, which, from another point of view, might well consider themselves to be Subjects. These ongoing “conversations with Kentridge,” are in a conversation with other such conversations.7 Each conversation is in conversation with other conversations. I would describe Kentridge’s classic filmmaking method as itself internally dialogic. What might that mean? Let me recapitulate some of the ground already covered. Over the past several years Kentridge has figured himself as multiple, most often through the motif of the Double. That formal figure seems to become too constraining for his creative strategies. The dual persons of Kentridge, filmmaker, and Kentridge, fine artist, somehow constitute meaning between them. Kentridge has written and spoken extensively of these dual modes, noting the merits of the complexity implicit in such an ambiguous creative process. As he comments to Rosalind Morris in That Which Is Not Drawn, at one stage he apprehended this multiplicity as a delinquency to be avoided: “When I went to theatre school, I tried not to draw anything and I tried not to do theatre when I was doing drawings.”8 In this remark, Kentridge, characteristically self-­conscious, describes “doubling” in pragmatic terms that capture it as a pair of creative modes, not explicitly linking the two creative roles (theater maker and visual artist) to those “dual persons” that have become so familiar in his visual worlds. I would like to posit a link between this strategic description and the philosophical resonances for his distinctive image-­making process. How is it that the work retains such a sense of abandoned play within what is obviously a significantly disciplined and strategic set of creative processes? 120

It seems, from looking into his habits of creative production, that “the one who draws” is somehow remote from as well as involved in the activity that becomes the raw material for “the one who makes film.” In other words, the process of drawing is an activity unto itself. At the same time, drawing is the activity that generates the material of the unedited film stock. In other words, not only are there two visual media in play, but it is as if two distinct faculties, the critical and the creative, are two “persons.” The Kentridge who draws is distinct from the Kentridge who critiques and edits the drawings, and the former holds his own critical function at a temporal remove from creative gesture. This has in all probability been a necessary process for the artist, in generating responses that can be both affirming and critical. The critical and the creative impulses are in some way strategically held in separate spheres. One result of this is a high spirit of license in the working process, often commented upon by observers of Kentridge’s art-­making. In the studio, while he produces images, the activity of critique is in some meaningful way held in abeyance by an agency that arises from somewhere within a realm of exuberant play.9 “Kentridge the filmmaker” works with the images that “Kentridge the artist” has generated: the drawings are raw material, in a way. The filmmaker interprets disparate drawings made by the artist-­self, and impels the images toward one another, contriving links that become set as “necessary,” through manipulation of line and volume, imposing meaning as an act of interpretation, allowing synchronies and displacements to fill the gaps in order to assert a narrative, or a series of metaphoric substitutions that imply an emotional arc. Then, through watching his own partially edited rushes, Kentridge begins to apprehend what the film means. Although of course, there was already a vague, generalized conception that impelled the process at the start. That is something of the procedure: it is in the mode of repair, of 121

6. Bear in mind that Dürer is himself the great self-­portraitist. Joseph Leo Koerner’s fine study The Moment of Self-­Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) identifies Dürer as the exemplary, even originary, self-­portraitist of the early modern era. The exploration of the image of the self is, then, somehow entailed in the theoretical considerations of perspective and point of view. 7. See, for example, Angela Breidbach, William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud. Conversations with Angela Breidbach (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2006), and William Kentridge and Rosalind Morris, That Which Is Not Drawn: Conversations (Calcutta: Seagull, 2014. And my darling brother James died this morning and it would not be honest to carry on writing here without acknowledging that fact; he who held me for so many years, from girl to woman.

8. Kentridge and Rosalind Morris, That Which Is Not Drawn, 86. 9. Kentridge’s parents both provided impressive, yet somehow not oppressive, superegos. His reading of Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place becomes an opportunity to think about the unanticipated emergence of his mother as a figure within the film Other Faces, which started out as a film about two men in Johannesburg. Reflecting back on his mother’s claim in his life, he turns, in an unguarded moment, to evoke a scene from Said’s boyhood, then falters, as he returns to himself: [Said] describes his mother shouting at all the children about how terrible they are, about what a grave disappointment they are. And he recalls thinking, “But not me, it can’t be me.” . . . Where did we start with this? (Kentridge and Morris, That Which Is Not Drawn, 80)

The evocation of the scene is remarkable, both accusing and defending the self. The very fact that the event from Said’s memoir seems to

“accuse” (in Kentridge’s terms) suggests that there is some transference, some projective identification from Kentridge; yet integral to that accusation, for the artist, is the right to deny the force of such a maternal accusation in his own life: “it can’t be me.” On rereading Said’s text, I cannot find quite this iteration of the boy’s experience, though there is a recurrent recitation of how Said’s mother chastised him for being “naughty.” There is, though, a profound and moving sketch in Said’s memoir that is suggestive: My mother seemed unconsciously to take away from my achievements after initially celebrating them, by saying, “Of course you’re clever, you’re so so intelligent, but”—­and here I was brought up short—­ “but that isn’t a real accomplishment of yours since God gave you those gifts.” Unlike my father, she communicated a kind of melting softness and supportive sentiment that sustained me for as long as it lasted. In her eyes, I felt, I was blessed, whole, marvelous. One compliment from her about my brightness, or my musicality, or my face caused me such a lift as momentarily to give me a feeling of actually belonging somewhere good and solid, although, alas, I soon became aware of how brief that feeling would be. Immediately then I would start to worry about whether I could give myself permission to be secure, and pretty soon I had lost confidence again . . . . in some unspoken and mysterious way she was deeply critical of me. (Out of Place [New York: Vintage, 2000], 45)

Poignantly the author outlines the doubling of his self in relation to the mother’s ambivalence: “You’re very clever,” I’d be told over and over, “but you have no character, you’re lazy, you’re naughty,” etc.—­and [I] was also made aware of an earlier Edward, sometimes referred to as “Eduardo Bianco,” whose exploits, gifts, and accomplishments were recounted to me as signs of pre-­1942 early promise betrayed . . . except for the odd use of “you” for “me,” Edward spoke perfect sentences in English and Arabic by the age of fifteen months. (27)

Of course I am not suggesting that Kentridge’s experience is the same as that of Said, nor that the psychic formations of the two men are in some way equivalent. What I am noting is Kentridge’s own attachment to a particular structure of maternal affection, and a simultaneous sense of disappointment, that he finds evoked, for him, through his reading of Said’s memoir. I discuss these thoughts with Kentridge, and his sense of that “it can’t be me” is unshakable. His mother’s disappointments, such as they were, he says, arose from frustrations within the legal system in South Africa, not from any of her children, though he does recollect that she did experience frustration at “the limited opportunities she had to practice law during my childhood.”

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reparation, rather than invention. This is an elaboration of a set of ideas explored on page 52, above. The doubled activity, deploying creative and critical faculties as distinct resources, sets up something of an internal contradiction, a principle that, after all, drives Kentridge’s enquiry. The idea of such a split is thematized, before the making of The Nose, most overtly in his film Stereoscope (1999). The points of connection and disconnection between characters in Stereoscope are structured through the technological device invoked throughout the work, an old-­fashioned telephone switchboard. Soho Eckstein is seen standing alone in an anonymous room, engaging with someone who is not present. He is on the telephone, and we see cables of connection figured in an in electric blue—­a kind of ultramarine.

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The blue line here is not wholly different in kind from the red line we observed in Other Faces, where it seems to serve as a signifier of minimal human activity (page 49 above), or in the newspaper prints showing the activities of the Nose around the world. The Soho figure listens with rapt attention, generally to the phone call but occasionally through his coffee cup, which he holds tentatively to his ear like a kind of urban seashell. This series of metaphors “grounds” the work, locating it in a modernist materialism that predates the world of ephemera associated with digital, cellular modes of communication. The cords and cables of classic telephony are ties that bind; the fibers that reach through space and link persons are substantial. Soho’s psychic inner universe is, through the cables, splayed out across the city (one thinks of T. S. Eliot’s “patient etherized upon a table”). Elsewhere in the picture plane we occasionally see a woman, also alone, who engages in what we take to be a dialogue with the man. His pockets begin overflowing with blue, and the room fills with water, presumably tears (whether hers or his is not clear).

What is clear, though, is the split nature of being, with longing and resolution in two distinct spheres. The aesthetic of the film is driven by a gestural allusion to the stereoscopic double image, with two Sohos standing side by side, each in a minimally different room.

We must assume that whatever choices Soho has made (will make) arise from and would result in similar states of irresolution, with a self at odds with its choices.10 Moreover, that split “within” the self is counterpoised against a split “between,” because filtered into these scenes of a doubled internal universe are episodes in which violence and mayhem threaten to overrun the streets. In the public spaces represented in the film, anarchists bearing bombs run amok, and mobs threaten order on the streets. Whatever riot is going on internally, within the protagonists, is seen against political mayhem arising from an event-­driven external world, the stage (if you will) of history. The year in which the film was made (1999) was marked by the war in Kosovo, a ruthless saga of ethnic violence that 126

precipitated the breakup of the Balkan states. This set of conflicts became synecdochic for the failure of national identity, and “disintegration” was one of the dominant ideas associated with these times.

In a series of deliberately provocative images, Kentridge figures the Nose in various scurrilous sexual encounters. The often prurient subject matter of Kentridge’s stereoscopic images invokes the erotics of the Victorian photographic traditions; at the same time it puns on the idea of the Nose/ phallus as a free agent. The dalliances figured in these prints are, as Kentridge indicates, “the journey of the independent Nose.”11

To repeat, the divided self is at the heart of the The Nose, both Gogol’s story and Shostakovich’s opera. It remains central to Kentridge’s interpretation, which also draws on his earlier stereoscopic experiments. The drawings from Stereoscope pair two versions of what is effectively the same scene, with only traces of difference, for example, in the “ghosting” effects around the figure of Soho Eckstein seated at his desk. Compare this to a pair of the Nose images. What do we have here? Is this one or two noses? Is this one or two women? Are these simultaneous scenes, or are they sequential? What the works make evident, as much as anything, is that reading and interpretation are conventional and rule-­ governed activities that are nonetheless filled with ambiguity and uncertainty. The drawings also suggest that no sexual moment is complete unto itself. There is always an imaginative, phantasmatic content that attaches itself to the Real, that is somehow more or less than the event, and desire strays back and forth along that boundary seeking “what is longed for,” a something that is not quite identical to “what is.” There 127

10. In the pursuit of origins and precursors, it is worth citing a scene from the Kentridge/ Handspring staging of Woyzeck on the Highveld. In that production, the Doctor inspects Woyzeck through an otoscope (the device for viewing inside the ear is familiar, even if we don’t know what it is called). The activity, rather bizarrely, keeps inserting the good doctor into a different sound universe: when the otoscope is placed inside his own ear, he hears baroque music; when inserted into Woyzeck’s ear, the sounds are those of African street musicians. The double-­doubling here is cunning, as the otoscope is a viewing device, yet Kentridge persistently has the thing generate disruptive sound textures. 11. The utopianism of that illusory escape, with the Nose liberated from its captivity on the face of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev, sums up the blissful abandonment of the Self to the erotic, as if there is a Self to know and be known that is not also harnessed by its repressive inhibitions and moral urges. We sneer, look down our nose at others, smell their weakness or corruption. To be idiomatically “in bad odor,” as we know, is to be out of favor, the object of moral censure, while a literal bad odor is a sign of a disordered self. In many ways the olfactory sense has been cultivated to sniff out our decadence. Alain Corbin’s archaeology of odor points to the “education of the nose” as integral to modernity and the containment of the self: As several critics have pointed out, the marginalization of smell can be linked to the goal of the Enlightenment project to deodorize and standardize the public and the private spheres and to the general tendency to privilege the intellect at the cost of the body. (Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], 5)

See also Danuta Fjellestad, “Towards an Aesthetics of Smell, or, the Foul and the Fragrant in Contemporary Literature,” CAUCE, Revista de Filologia y su Didactica 24 (2001): 637–­51.

Video still from Stereoscope (1999).

Drawings from Everyone Their Own Projector; preparatory ideas for the making of The Nose. The Nose, wearing a pin-­ striped suit, is a kind of avatar of Soho Eckstein.

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are gestural distinctions in the attitudes represented by these two drawings—­ the woman’s foot curled backward in the first implies impetuous abandon; her angled body in the second suggests an opening of the self: these shifts evoke distinct erotics. The supplicant body of the Nose is likewise positioned, in the two images, in slightly different planes with relation to the viewer. Meaning arises from the differential constellation of such marks. Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow (from t. s. eliot, the hollow men)

My early conversation with Kentridge about the form of this book, invoked the dialogue, and I quickly asserted that Diderot rather than Socrates was my point of reference. Diderot’s first novel, Les bijoux indiscrets (1748), is a curious work. Published anonymously, its premise is so ludicrous, so “absurd,” if you will, that it is hard to imagine that it would now be attributed to the serious thinker of the Salons and the Encyclopédie, were it not for the penchant Diderot elsewhere demonstrated for wild thinking. In the novel, the Sultan, Mangogul (worrying about woman’s alleged tendency toward sexual promiscuity), obtains a magic ring that enables him to transform women’s sex organs into organs of speech, so that while they might attest with their mouths to their loyalty to their partners, their genitals testify to their licentiousness. Shoshana Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body advances a tradition of enquiry into the uneasy disruption between the expressive semiotics of the body (presumed to be on the side of Truth) and the slippery, evasive deceptions that creep in through language and representational arts. The body, it is assumed, cannot but speak true. Here Diderot has put his finger on it! The story is necessarily about many things; and one of them is the politics of gender. Somehow verity can be discovered through acquaintance with a woman’s vagina. Diderot’s text provides us with some ways of thinking about several of the wry and somewhat facetious scenes in which Kentridge reveals the Nose engaging in various sexual exploits. Kentridge, who recently has made several 129

provocations under the rubric of “Learning from the Absurd,” shows, by shifting between visual languages, that the art historical tradition has been based on the attempt to find Truth through considering the woman as Subject and Object of male desire. The first image here, in a verso-­recto pair from Everyone Their Own Projector, is within the traditions of sentimental impressionism; it is not impossible, though, to interpret the face of the girl on the left as covered in a mask. Because of the handling of the ink, the face is rendered several tones darker than the rest of her body. In some ways it is like the conventional “toilette” scene, as if the nakedness of the girl is unknown to herself. She is caught unawares, looking off to the right, as if unaware of our spectatorial presence. Yet she makes herself available for reading, by that look askance, and is caught in profile.12 In the second image, a cartoonish figure in pin-­striped trousers, is leering at the

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woman’s crotch. Because her head is rendered as a simple circle, it is more or less impossible to tell whether she looks at him or at us. The asymmetrical shoulder straps of her dress suggest that she is looking down to her right, at the little lothario who gratifies her, but the neutral rendition of that melonlike orb of a head insists that any such reading is a projection on the part of the viewer. The lover’s neat little posterior places him within a comic rather than a sadistic tradition. He is, of course, the Nose, that nose that, with the tongue, is the prosthesis for the penis in cunnilingus. The woman in this schematic drawing is positioned candidly addressing the viewer, the artist. The image is reminiscent of Kentridge’s rather wry treatment of the perspective device imaged by Dürer, with the artist positioned looking up and into the groin of his female subject.13 The self-­portrait on the back wall of this scene appears also as an autonomous image in the series Everyone Their Own Projector, captioned “You will find no new lands. You will find no other seas,” recalls the head of the artist peering into the frame in the twin rhinoceros drawings, above, and implies that the order of enquiry, for Kentridge, is always necessarily autobiographical. Kentridge’s films have, in increasingly complex ways, considered the fragmentation of the subject. The early films, made during the State of Emergency in the last days of Apartheid, are marked by a Manichean dualism, premised upon a feud between a protagonist and his antagonist (roughly and very loosely identified with African workers, politicos, or peasants, on the one hand, and capitalist bosses, on the other. Such a model of political interpretation derives largely from Marxist readings of South Africa, with Apartheid understood to be an instrument of economic oppression in the first instance, with race theory deployed in order to set members of the working class against each other. Classic Marxist historiography in South Africa in the 1980s pointed to the ways in which colonial capitalism set black against white workers in order to fend off an all but inevitable class war 131

12. The figure of the masked nude is central to the opening argument of Susan Stewart’s Crimes of Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). She discusses an image by Thomas Eakins, Nude Woman Seated Wearing a Mask (1874–­1876), considering the image’s power to figure a being that is seen without seeing (vii). The conceit was apparently in place in order to protect the identity of the model; and, of course, “all concerned” (vii). The nude in Kentridge’s sketch here is, significantly, looking to the side, and her body does not address the artist except obliquely. In the figure on the recto page, though, the nude presents herself directly to the viewer/artist, while her genitals are presented to the Nose, a parodic mediator between the viewer and the artist. This “scene” is dealt with in “art historical” terms in the following image, a work that alludes to Dürer’s study of perspective. Kentridge’s image does any number of things at once. It invokes the Dürer, but it also manipulates the perspectival effect, positioning the woman’s breasts in a picture plane that addresses the viewer, even while her torso is in profile. The effect is something of a play on Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Kentridge’s own portrait can be seen in a miniature profile pasted onto the hypothesized back wall of the scene. In this “modernist” pastiche, the figure of the woman is contorted, captured both in profile and as a full frontal nude, her breasts and face toward the viewer but her groin “facing” the male gaze. This male is a surrogate for the artist, but the artist (Kentridge) is in fact (of course) looking onto the scene from the broken “fourth wall” of the little theater, and his own portrait in profile hangs on the back wall opposite us. The theater is, as it were, an emanation from his mind, and the radiating lines of perspective lead us to the Kentridge-­dome. 13. See my discussion in chapter 5.

against mine bosses. This dualism of good and bad forces is, in later Kentridge films, reworked into an internal split, an ambiguity and a crisis within the protagonist. Many of the formal difficulties that arise from attempting to figure this shift in Kentridge’s own perspective, are resolved through the visual device of the stereoscope. That strategy, for Kentridge, pertains to the theoretical and philosophical question. The film Stereoscope alludes to, but does not technically achieve, the resolution Kentridge begins to pursue. Technically the visual illusion in the film is a kind of bluff, with the stereoscopic idea achieved only metaphorically. We do not see the images in 3-­D, through some kind of viewing device. Our attention is drawn to the doubling up of the space, such as one might see in a Victorian stereoscopic photograph, rather than the collapsing of two realms into one. In other words the “doubled space” is a device for suggesting Soho’s ambivalence. Rather than a technological investigation into the physics of vision, it is an enquiry into the metaphorics of subjectivity. The technological enquiry is realized several years later during the period in which Kentridge is making The Nose. As I noted earlier, what had arisen as a philosophical and psychological meditation leads Kentridge into a technological enquiry. 132

The invention or reinvention of strange viewing devices becomes integral to Kentridge’s exhibitions at this time, and they are incorporated as structural elements in the display, as well as technologies used in the making of images and films. Kentridge is engaging with questions about the “techniques of the observer,” to use terms that were being developed in the work of art theorist Jonathan Crary. Crary’s analysis of representation leads him to argue that shifts in perspective, in aesthetic modeling, in formal aptitude, were in actuality effects arising from changes in viewing technologies that effectively altered the ways of seeing available to previous generations. As a kind of retroactive pioneer, Kentridge introduces 1990s digital audiences to various machineries of archaic practice. His “retrospective specularity” allows a generation accustomed to a naturalized virtualism (in other words, those for whom the virtual is a given) to understand the exploratory lineages of

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illusionism upon which the new media are founded. The hardware/software split that has become familiar parlance is, through his research and artistic practice—­ his sustained use of hardware that manipulates vision physically—­reconstituted as an aesthetics and technics of seeing and believing. A rather childlike delight in illusionism marks the shows Kentridge produces while making these works. One great aesthetic and technological leap is precipitated by his Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès, a suite of films dedicated to foolish play and sleight of hand, tricks of the eye. Méliès was committed to the fakery of his studio practice, and in such terms was more or less at the opposite end of the creative spectrum from fellow film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière. The Lumière brothers saw the film camera as an instrument that could “capture” the ebb and flow of the everyday. The movie camera, if positioned on a street corner, would automatically fill its eye with an endless stream of such incident as would always interest the audience. Méliès, by contradistinction, sought to invent a world of illusionistic tricks, using his camera as a magic box. Inside the studio, Méliès took a trip to the moon and conjured in any number of startling ways, with no pretense of contriving the Real. In such terms, he is Kentridge’s progenitor. In working toward one of the Seven Fragments, Kentridge tears up a life-­size charcoal drawing of himself. When the film is screened, that clip is reversed, and he appears meticulously to reconstitute the figure of himself into a whole by pinching the paper along a torn edge such that it repairs itself. Of course, it is a trick, an illusion based upon a simple inversion, yet this whimsically hopeful gesture, a world turned upside down through an assertion of will, is fragile play set off against a grim realism in Kentridge’s art. Here is an instance of the strong intellectual continuity across various works, revealing the Méliès films as forerunners to, as well as antidotes for, The Nose. Through the utopian folly of doubling mischance that teases the audience in the Seven Fragments, the staging of “paper men,” Kentridge is exploring related puzzles that have to do with identity and aggressive mimicry, but that are, at the same time, witticisms, enchantments, and frolics. In The Nose, by contrast, doubles explore the desperate acts of humor that arise from the brutalism of the Soviet era, and they carry a sense of the intractability of misery. There are no miraculous reversals possible, only a relentless long march within the shadow of the gulag. Bukharin’s arduous ascent up a flight of stairs leads to a mortal fall, not a cat-­and-­mouse tumble. It is a one-­way trajectory with little redemptive possibility. 134

There is a short piece of film in the multiple-­screen projections that make up the visual installation for I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine, in which Kentridge cites the grim progress of the purging of Bukharin during the notorious Moscow Trials. I discuss the fragment with Kentridge, ask him for a title of the fragment: me. What is that short film called, in which you explore the interrogation of Bukharin? he. That is just one of the . . . It’s a section of . . .—­“Plenum of the Central Committee.” me. Is that what it’s called? he. No. That’s just a name I am giving it for you now. Oh, no, of course, it does have a name. It does have a name. Its name is the text that returns on the screen between sections. Do you not have the . . . ? I can’t remember. me. No, I don’t have a copy. he. . . . “Sighs of Repentance.” me. “Signs of Repentence?” he. No, “Sighs.” It’s called “Sighs of Repentance.” 135

My momentary incomprehension at the title suggests the oddness of the formulation. What I recall is that Bukharin famously became a byword for insincerity, and so this trope of “sighs of repentance” provides a figure for the inauthenticity of many such deathbed conversions. This was terrain that Kentridge and I had explored together before when working on the making of Ubu and the Truth Commission.14 The question of “sincerity” dominated many minds during the 1990s in South Africa, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings took place. The commission was established during the negotiations that preceded the first nonracial elections in the country, and was devised as an instrument through which to generate an archive of the dirty tricks, cross-­border raids into neighboring countries, and gross human rights violations associated with the racialized legal-­political system of Apartheid. Amnesty applicants who testified before the commission were not compelled, under the terms of its mandate, to demonstrate remorse. The decision to exclude such a requirement arose from a general repugnance at the idea of eliciting staged pieties and instituting an ethos that valorized dissembling. Of course, this demonstrates that what was in place, in the ideological underpinning of the commission, was an assumption that authenticity is an attainable ideal, and that it is desirable to aspire toward a selfhood that is internally coherent and consistent. It is not wholly surprising then, to discover that the visual field of The Nose is informed by Kentridge’s production from 1996, dealing with the testimony emerging from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Ubu and the Truth Commission situates a large bulbous figure as the shadowy demon that represents the spirit of Apartheid tyranny. The form of the figure has much less to do with the “Pa Ubu” character as originally sketched by its author, Alfred Jarry, than it has to do with the Nose. It is as if, in an uncanny inversion of time, Kentridge’s images of Pa Ubu in 1996 were preparatory drawings for The Nose. Clearly, too, Kentridge’s interpretation of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was informed, at least in part, by his scrutiny of the Stalinist purges of the party faithful. In I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine, Kentridge explores this conception of sincerity through his recital of transcripts from “the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, February 1937.” The figure central in his enquiry is Bukharin, the onetime intellectual leader of the leftist Bolsheviks in Moscow who formulated the principle of “Socialism in One Country,” a platform that Stalin was to adopt in 1924. By 136

1937 Stalin was brokering his pact with Hitler. This made the navigating of ideology, policy, and pragmatics all the more lethal. Vadim Rogovin has sketched some of the detail of these lethal times in 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror.15 Everyone was always on the threshold of a mortal fall from favor. Khrushchev’s description of these times is telling: Many members of the CC who attended one session did not come to the second; they ended up as “enemies of the people” and were arrested.16 The performance is part of I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine, a multimedia work combining film, live performance, and sound. For this work, there are three Kentridge avatars, a live performance of Kentridge (played by himself) as well as two videotaped versions of Kentridge playing himself:17 WK pushes an upholstered chair into the center of the screen. WK sits on the chair. [He reads from a black notebook]. bukharin. Whatever they are testifying against me is not true. (Laughter, noise in the room.) Why are you laughing? There is nothing funny in all this. But I cannot admit, either today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, anything which I am not guilty of. (Noise in the room.) I feel compelled to recall a certain ditty, which was published in its time in the now defunct Russian Gazette. “They may beat me senseless, they may beat me to a pulp. But nobody’s gonna kill this kid, not with a stick, a bat, or a stone.” (Laughter breaks out throughout the room.) I cannot say, however, that “nobody is gonna kill me.” The performance becomes a grotesque investigation of terror and its technologies of power. At one point Kentridge lies 137

14. Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997) is a theatrical collaboration between Kentridge, Handspring, and myself, that explored testimony being generated through the public hearings at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. 15. Osip Piatnitsky was one of those selected to safeguard the new Germano-­Soviet alliance. Rogovin provides a detailed account of the Piatnitsky case for what it reveals about internal fractures within the Soviet state, bad faith, and the uses of terror within the Comintern. He begins by citing a report on the hidden purposes behind the persecution of Piatnitsky, assembled in the summer of 1937: The Yezhov provocation against Piatnitsky pursues one goal—­to compromise a prominent Bolshevik who has known too many of the secrets of the Kremlin-­Comintern . . . his removal was an unavoidable condition of establishing more intimate contacts between Stalin and Hitler. For a long time, Piatnitsky held in his hands all the ties and all the agents of international Bolshevism. His fall and arrest signify the sunset of the Comintern’s activity. Now Stalin will proceed with his imperial policy after having made Hitler his ally.

These comments are very revealing. The Comintern cadres were raised in an uncompromisingly antifascist spirit. Without a bloody purge of these cadres, it would have been impossible to force the foreign communist parties to support the deal between Stalin and Hitler, as was done in 1939 (Vadim Rogovin. 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror [Sheffield: Mehring Books, 1998], 494–­95). Rogovin’s discussion provides strong insights into the escalation of witch hunts in the late 1930s, and it is easy enough to apprehend how, once a logic of murderous intimacy is established, it necessarily escalates in order to efface any traces that might remain to accuse. There ceases to be a motive force driving the executions, outside of self-­preservation: The Piatnitsky case was supposed to evolve into a “Comintern trial.” This was prevented by Piatnitsky’s amazing fortitude; as was revealed during the

on a chaise lounge, much as if on a psychoanalyst’s couch. He speaks in various voices, re-­creating the interrogation:18 bukharin. Comrades, I implore you not to interrupt me, because it is difficult for me, it is simply physically hard for me to speak. I will answer any question posed to me, but please, do not interrupt me just now. I won’t shoot myself, because then people will say I killed myself [so] as to harm the party. But if I die, as it were, from an illness, then what will you lose by it? (Laughter.) voroshilov. Did you hear that: “I won’t shoot myself, but I will die”?! bukharin. It’s easy for you to talk about me. What will you lose, after all? Look, if I am a saboteur, a son of a bitch, then why spare me? I make no claims to anything. I am just describing what’s on my mind, what I am going through. If this in any way entails any political damage, however minute, then, no question about it, I’ll do whatever you say. (Laughter.) Why are you laughing? There is absolutely nothing funny about any of this. . . . Please permit me to finish and explain this whole business to the best of my ability. kaganovich. You are not very good at explaining it—­that’s the whole point. The chaise lounge slowly splits in two. WK is balanced across the two halves. bukharin. Whether I explain it well or poorly, I am speaking sincerely, my thoughts are sincere. kaganovich. Not every act of sincerity is correct. bukharin. In any case, I am speaking sincerely. molotov. And we too are criticizing you sincerely. (Laughter, Uproar in the room.)19 This texture of intimate slaughter drove Shostakovich to become a fugitive being. When Stalin set his face against him, the composer took to sleeping in the stairwell of his own apartment in order to defend his children against the potential trauma of having their father arrested in the middle of the night in their own home. There are few blithe moments in Shostakovich’s music that are not crossed by a mood of foreboding and wretched irony. The brilliant madcap 138

music of the opera carries many sinister undertones, and these are amplified (visually) through the omnipresence of Kentridge’s animated figures of the Nose as he insinuates himself into scenes of Soviet life. Manipulating archival footage, Kentridge attaches him to the head of the dancing Anna Pavlova, and he is superimposed onto Shostakovich playing the piano. This sequence in particular is sinister and malevolent if one bears in mind the wretched role of demeaning supplication that characterized the composer’s life under Stalin. Political interpretations of the Shostakovich legacy are notoriously vexed, and there are ongoing disputes over the extent of his capacity and will to resist Soviet tyranny.20 This principle of “double vision” is increasingly realized by Kentridge in devices produced to serve the philosophical underpinning of his thinking, and ultimately it will provide a language for deploying the Nose as a figure of the divided self. me. I want to ask you a question about the motif of the cat in Stereoscope. The cat that meanders back and forth between frames: is that in any way an allusion to Schrödinger’s cat? Schrödinger uses the cat to make an argument about entanglements. Is your cat entangling the “possibilities” that are the varieties of the self? So that the split images of Soho become figures for the versions of the cat, the dead cat and the live cat, that Schrödinger postulates are simultaneous hypothetical actualities? he. (smiling) Well, I suppose if we can have Wittgenstein’s rhinoceros, we can have Schrödinger’s cat.21 But, no, actually. I wasn’t in any particular way thinking of Schrödinger’s cat. It is just a cat.22

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investigation into his case, he was subjected to two hundred twenty hours of interrogation accompanied by torture. Piatnitsky, who never belonged to any opposition, chose as a weapon of defense at the investigation to express his irreconcilability toward “Trotskyism.” On 23 January 1938 he handed his investigator Laftang a letter, addressed to the Politburo, in which he said: “I have been in prison for six and one-­half months already. I have lived with the hope that the investigation will establish my innocence. Now, apparently, everything is lost. I am seized by the horror . . . I cannot, I do not want to, and I should not sit in a Soviet prison and be tried for Right-­Trotskyist counterrevolution, to which I never belonged: I fought against it.” This letter never arrived where it was intended; it was discovered only twenty years later during Laftang’s arrest. All that time he had kept the letter to himself. (495)

16. From Voprosy istorii, nos. 2–­3 (1992): 98. Cited in Rogovin, 1937, 492. 17. Recall again the late Joan Rivers’s comment that she was “an actress playing a comedienne.” (See discussion on page 75, note 12.) 18. Having seen the performance and its doublings, I mention to Kentridge the line “he do the Police in different voices.” The odd phrase, apparently T. S. Eliot’s original title for The Waste Land, comes from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, specifically Betty Higden’s praise of the reading skills of Sloppy, a foundling who reads to her from the newspapers. 19. This matter of the performance of sincerity has interested me for some years. I have traced the circulation of the trope in the English tradition, from theology, to statecraft, and to acting manuals in the early modern era, particularly in response to the Reformation and Counter-­Reformation. I have also written about the staging of selves during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Kentridge’s interest in the subject informs his highly theatricalized portraits and character studies. His recent comments on watching his first grandson are telling. The boy, only three months old is, for Kentridge, exploring his own

expressive capacity: the child is testing “what is real fear, what is recreational fear.” The infant pulls a face. Is he anxious? Kentridge’s understanding is that at times it is evident that the lad is experiencing a moment of anxiety, but on occasion he is testing to see whether he can show a look of anxiety. The two events seem at times to flow one into the other. Is it a joke? The child’s cheek is pinched, and he is startled; but later he will show a similar startled face in another context. Of course, all of this is not just the infant at work and at play; it is also Kentridge engaged in the business of observation and interpretation. This seamless circuit, from the inspirational affective moment to its expressive simulacrum, and the vigilance of the viewer, is integral to the production of meaning for Kentridge. 20. As noted in the extended discussion in chapter 1, Solomon Volkov has played a key role in these disputes. His Testimony: The Memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov (New York: Limelight, 1979) has been lauded by some as a revelation about the composer’s experiences under tyranny, denounced by others as an act of ventriloquism, if not fraud. At the same time, some critics of his Shostakovich and Stalin (New York: Knopf, 2004) have accused Volkov of fabricating materials in order to depict the composer as an outright critic of Stalin, rather than an uneasy sometime pawn manipulated by the Soviet state in staging its relations to the West. 21. One of the earliest encounters between the young Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell centered on the “fact” of a propositional rhinoceros. Wittgenstein refused to accept that it was certain that there was no rhino in the room; Russell waggishly looked under the desks to prove it. Wittgenstein was at the time arguing

that all that existed in the world was “asserted propositions.” My question prompted Kentridge to consider Schrödinger’s cat in relation to the tactics of animation and material shifts across the arc of time in his drawing; and he responded waggishly by alluding to Wittgenstein’s rhinoceros: “If Wittgenstein’s rhinoceros is under the table, then Schrödinger’s cat may well be in the box.” (The image on page 118 is called Wittgenstein’s Rhinoceros.) 22. Locke may well provide the original of the discursive figure of the corporeal and the notional cat as a being across time, such as is now associated with the philosophical lexicon via Schrödinger, who imagines a hypothetical cat in a box that may well be either dead or alive. In Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), the thought experiment on identity and continuity turns on the figure of his cat, Electra: “Identity” is the result of a comparison in the mind of an idea of a thing that exists at a particular time and place, that is, my cat Electra sitting on a chair in my study at 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, with the idea of a thing that exists in a different time in a particular time and place, that is, my cat Electra sitting on a chair in my study at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday afternoon. I compare the “very being of things,” which I take in this case to mean that I compare “Electra the cat” with “Electra the cat.” If the two ideas of “Electra the cat” do not vary in any significant way, then Electra at 4:15 is said to be the same as Electra at 4:00. (bk. 2, chap. 27)

I cite this illustration as a trace of a history of an idea—­thinking through the self as copresent and as coextensive with its self, while differing substantially from such a self.

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5 Collegiate Assessments

wk: And eventually when he finds his nose, to his horror he discovers that his nose is now a higher bureaucratic rank than he is, and his nose refuses to speak to him. So it is both about what constitutes a person, how singular are we, and how much are we divided against ourselves, how coherent are we? And it’s also about the terrors of hierarchy.1 Kentridge’s observations on The Nose are doubled from the start. He identifies both “bureaucratic rank” and uniqueness as concerns at the heart of Gogol’s story.2 His awareness of the two formulations together is itself a kind of doubling, and thus, the second term “How singular are we?”) determines a “privileging” of one of the two instruments of interpretation. In other words, the fact that the “motive question” driving Kentridge’s enquiry is actually two questions points to the doubled character of our singularity. Preoccupation with rank and prestige was perhaps the foremost concern of early modern consciousness, as the volatile mobility of nascent capitalism threatened traditional feudal relations. As wealth was invented, bubbles swelled, and commodity markets puffed up economies, it became increasingly difficult to test or hold onto essential notions of status and “place” in society.3 In the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, by contrast, this contest “between” persons has been superceded by a conflict “within,” an anxiety about the viability of a substantial and internally coherent self. The dominant metaphors of modernity and postmodernity concern the figure of the divided being. Rather marvelously, this pairing (the split subject versus social hierarchy) is wittily invoked, as are hierarchy or rank, in a pair of images from Kentridge’s Everyone Their Own Projector (2008).

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1. “An Interview with William Kentridge on The Nose (Met Opera).” YouTube, uploaded February 18, 2010. 2. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the great early modern exploration of the puzzle of identity and singularity: “Thus everyone finds, that whilst comprehended under that consciousness, the little Finger is as much a part of it self, as what is most so. Upon separation of this little Finger, should this consciousness go along with the little Finger, and leave the rest of the Body, ’tis evident the little Finger would be the Person, the same Person; and self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the Body” (bk. 2, chap. 27.17). Locke, as a “natural philosopher,” is carefully trying to institute a sphere for philosophy and empirical enquiry that is somehow isolated from the constraints of theology, which had over the previous centuries been deployed in a mortal battle to defend the emerging Trinitarian orthodoxies. The irrationality and excesses of the mysterious three-­personed god must have served a particular principle of metaphysical longing that was emerging in the early modern era alongside its antithesis, science. Many who challenged the principle of the Trinity (from scientists to anatomists and philosophers, as well as honest believers) lost their lives in a battle with zealotry. Locke’s complex metaphorics of identity, person, and fragmentation in his Essay provide us with an exemplary demonstration that the lunacy of Gogol’s tale arises from a series of foundational meditations about personhood and matter within the Western philosophical tradition. I am at present writing about the art historical puzzle of the Trinity in relation to the question of personhood and singularity in the early modern era, when Albertian perspective is beginning to impose new rules about place and persons. In other words, this question of a person that is made up of parts that might themselves claim the status of person is not new to modernity

Both images in the spread shown here obliquely invoke the act of censorship, albeit parodically, as random blots obliterate portions of the page. The censor is an agency of the repressive state, at its most efficient when it persuades the hapless citizen into acts of ever-­deeper capitulation along the road to self-­ censorship. Shostakovich’s dependency and captivity to Stalin has been often noted in biographies.4 In psychoanalytic terms, the censor is one of the agencies of the modern mind.5 It is the censor that allows for the simultaneous “knowing-­and-­not-­ knowing” that we associate with complex subjectivity, which, if left unaddressed, gives rise to what critic Lionel Trilling describes as “a profound inauthenticity of the mental life,” resulting in neurosis. Trilling continues, in terms strikingly congruous with Gogol’s tale, “The neurosis is a Tartuffian deceit practiced by one part of the mind upon another.”6 144

and the absurd—­or, alternatively, the absurd has been integral to formulations of selfhood for centuries. 3. Several interesting studies trace this new sense of turmoil. Terry Castle’s Masquerade and Civilization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986) is a now classic work exploring the social appetite for “dressing up” precipitated in the early modern era. Beverly Lemire’s “The Theft of Clothes and Popular Consumerism in Early Modern England” (Journal of Social History 24, no. 2 [Winter 1990]: 255–­76) points to some of the illicit mechanisms through which persons might dissemble to be someone other than themselves—­whatever such “selves” might be. The finding that “clothing was the most sought-­after, and at the same time, the most easily disposable commodity in this period” (257) grounds an argument about identity theft and dissimulation as part of an emerging modernity, as people sought to insert themselves into new ranks in the social order. 4. For example, Marina Sabinina reports Shostakovich’s account of a confessional hearing before the Union of Composers Congress in 1948, at which the “formalists” were required to engage in self-­criticism. Shostakovich, as ventriloquized by Sabanina, recalls, “I shouldn’t have gone. Prokofiev was more intelligent than me, he sent a letter excusing himself—­a rather dry, cold letter in which he, as it were, agreed that he was guilty of certain errors.” As Shostakovich walks to the podium he is given a sheet of paper with instructions to Just Read It. As he reads he finds that the document is an attack on formalism in composition, such as he himself was perennially accused of. He comments afterward, “I read like the most paltry wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-­out doll on a string.” (In Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered [New York: Faber and Faber, 1994], 335.) I have worked with puppets long enough (often with Kentridge) to consider some of the complex ways in which the puppet provides an emblem of the human subject’s frustration inside

speech. We necessarily speak borrowed words; that is the given of language. The gestures and structures of representation necessarily inhabit us as if from elsewhere. Though absurd and impossible, the story of “a nose with a will of its own” is nonetheless a universal tale, and it is instructive that this story gave rise to Shostakovich’s first operatic endeavor, a work that did not please the censor: “Too much formalism.” 5. The censor is described in some detail in Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, part 2, “The Dream,” chap. 9, “The Dream Censor” (1920). On December 22, 1897, Freud had written to Wilhelm Fliess deploying the figure of the censor for the first time: Have you ever seen a foreign newspaper which passed Russian censorship at the frontier? Words, whole clauses and sentences are blacked out so that the rest becomes unintelligible. A Russian censorship of that kind comes about in psychoses and produces the apparently meaningless deliria.

For Freud, the Russian censor is clearly tropological, a particular figure of pathological violence. Freud’s musings suggest that he had had firsthand experience of the Russian strategy of political repression; they thus also remind us of a now almost-­irrecoverable sense of the proximity of Russia to Europe in the 1890s. Of course, Freud’s periodic treatment of the Wolfman (beginning in 1910) reaffirms this link, for Freud, in the early twentieth century. The censor in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) provides an intellectual instrument that will be integral to Freudian modernism. This history is detailed in John Forrester’s fascinating paper “Dream Readers,” in Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Laura Marcus (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), 83–­122. 6. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 144. All of this gets discussed in an exegesis on Sartre’s conception of “bad faith.”

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Kentridge’s structural device of “doubling, with difference” relies on the juxtaposition of a verso and a recto page. At times the images are paired in a figure-­ground relation; at times they are thesis and antithesis; at times they embody a pun or a rebus. Always the relation is driven by a sense of formal and aesthetic pleasure. Always, too, there is a dialogue between the two. It is through thinking about Diderot and his ironic “staging” of the Socratic dialogue, that I arrived at one of the opening salvos of chapter 1 of this study, imagining a man and his nose as two characters in a great dramatic exchange. On the recto half of the double-­page spread shown on page 144, a sardonic “Great Chain of Being” is invoked.7 Emperor Peter I (“the Great”: that most feudal of czars) had overseen the drawing up of a “Table of Ranks” that, when confirmed in 1722, nominated 262 ranks and positions whereby Russians were to be classified. The Table of Ranks was abolished by Soviet decree in the revolutionary idealism of 1917. It seems, however, that the egalitarian experiment lapsed, as Stalin’s power became absolute and hierarchy re-­entrenched. The elites who took over the administration of the Soviet state—­referred to as the nomenclatura—­ were proven party loyalists who oversaw all facets, from agriculture to industry and government. Trotsky referred to them as a caste rather than a class. Kentridge, in interviews, refers deliberately to the tragicomic protagonist of The Nose as “Collegiate Assessor Koyalyov,” emphasizing that Kovalev 8 would cease to exist without his nominated rank. In Kentridge’s film projections, the Nose is seen in ceaseless attempts to ascend a flight of steps, from which he inevitably tumbles, in a Chaplinesque pratfall or an endless game of snakes-­and-­ladders. In other words, the two-­page spread contains just that dual identification implicit in Kentridge’s interview about his interpretation of the Gogol tale: the obsession with rank (the split “between”), on the one hand, and a divided consciousness (the split “within,” figured here through the work of the “censor”), on the other. That censor, it bears repeating, can be either a state or a psychic functionary. At one level these images are tragic in their import, but Gogol’s genius is to apprehend the comedy in them. He captures with deft economy Kovalev’s preoccupation with his own dignity: Here let me add something which may enable the reader to perceive just what the Collegiate Assessor was like. Of course, it goes without saying that Collegiate Assessors who acquire the title with the help of academic diplomas cannot be compared with Collegiate Assessors who become Collegiate

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Assessors through service in the Caucasus, for the two species are wholly distinct, they are —­—­Stay, though. Russia is so strange a country that, let one but say anything about any one Collegiate Assessor, and the rest, from Riga to Kamchatka, at once apply the remark to themselves—­for all titles and all ranks it means the same thing. Now, Kovalev was a “Caucasian” Collegiate Assessor, and had, as yet, borne the title for two years only. Hence, unable ever to forget it, he sought the more to give himself dignity and weight by calling himself, in addition to “Collegiate Assessor,” “Major.”9 The “of course” and “it goes without saying” capture the gossipy, rumormongering feel of the narrator’s voice, suggesting the insidious malice of collusion, the atmosphere of preferment and patronage that must have characterized much of the texture of the lived experience of life under the tyranny of Czar Peter; but it also suggests something of Stalinist Soviet life. Orlando Figes’s chilling study The Whisperers captures such a mood, with everyone apparently subject to the surveillance of a neighbor. The quotation from Kentridge at the head of this section is from an interview in a short film released some months before the premiere of The Nose at the Met. I think that the timing here is meaningful. It seems to me that in some ways Kentridge is acutely aware, as he works his way toward the production, of the complex tensions within his interpretation—­the pull between, say, his reading of the allegorical and hence generalized exploration of the contradictory subjectivity associated with modernity, on the one hand, and, on the other, his grasp of the historically specific terrors of the Stalinist regime and arbitrary power. Will the two interpretive frames constitute a plausible whole? Can allegory and history be viewed through a single frame? Will that hold? This question lurks behind his assured exegesis.

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7. The “Great Chain of Being,” a trope of the given order as hierarchical and immutable, derives from Plato and Aristotle and becomes a structuring idea of Neoplatonism. Arthur O. Lovejoy’s study takes this figure as constitutive of the premodern worldview. 8. Spellings of the name are variable. 9. Gogol, “The Nose,” http://h42day .100megsfree5.com/texts/russia/gogol/ nose.html.

On the Other Hand— My use of the formulation “on the one hand” and “on the other hand” is not wholly innocent. I am invoking an earlier animation experiment in which state tyranny is satirized as a giant self-­impelled hand. In the Claymation film The Hand (1965), the Czech puppet master Jiri Trnka tells the tale of a ceramic artist making pots in his home, whose work is disrupted by the intrusion of a massive gloved hand. Each time he tries to make a vessel, the giant hand seizes the wedge of clay and transforms it into a likeness of itself: a clay hand. Trnka’s artistry has been significant in the imaginative lives of Handspring Puppet Company, Kentridge’s longtime partners and collaborators. Many commentators consider Trnka to have been one of the most important animators of all time. His playful exploration of the grim mindlessness of an immense Hand wielding total power without consciouness surely informs Kentridge’s Nose, though Kentridge adds complexities to the malevolence of Trnka’s totalitarian brute. The Nose is undeniably a “sense” organ, and a sensual, sexy one; its violent swaggering is jaunty, with a boastful, manipulative charm. In Kentridge’s etchings and his varied images associated with the theatrical production, the Nose becomes a kind of roaming phallus, now poring over naked torsos, now between the thighs of swooning women. The literary lineage that informs Kentridge’s vision brings the eccentricity of Cervantes, Sterne, and Gogol into central focus. These writers’ resourceful deployment of folly, from the Quixotic to the absurd, is humanely defiant as it stands against murderous absolutism. Shostakovich’s music, so incomprehensible to the orthodox Soviet imagination, is exuberantly anarchic, and Kentridge’s elaborations on the figure of the Nose allow the character to be all the more dangerous because all the more amusing and engaging. The Nose, then, is another element in the aesthetic resolution of the dialectical in Kentridge’s oeuvre. Across the past several decades, the Manichean “Good” and “Evil” figures schematized in his early films (most familiar as the characters Felix Teitelbaum and Soho Eckstein) become more ambiguous. Evil as total power persuades others that it is irresistible; Good turns out to be flawed, through vanity or carelessness or limited imagination. Even piety can be malevolent. As Lacan has suggested, there is aggression in even the most Samaritan of aid. Trnka’s animated film explores some of these ambiguities too, in the construction of his emblematic tyrant. The Hand appears first in a satiny white glove, which at times is sheathed in a metal gauntlet, but at one moment it appears clad 148

in gauzy net, each of its digits circled in a lace garter, dancing seductively, beckoning at the lowly assaulted artist with a come-­hither languor. In the stage set for The Nose, Kentridge has included, as integral to the design of the opera curtain, a sketched portrait of Stalin puffing at his pipe. The image manages to be both familial and repugnant. Accounts from the Stalinist era suggest a surprisingly oft-­cited ambivalence toward Stalin; attraction and repulsion are both commonly associated with his power, though as Stalin became more vehement, his paranoid manias more oppressive, so his personal attractions disappeared. The attributes associated with his regime are said to have initially incorporated a volatile blend of seduction and bullying ruthlessness, but these resolved themselves down to a total will-­to-­power. The dialectical is fundamental to Kentridge’s art and informs his political critique; it also is integral to his aesthetic strategies. In the production of The Nose, he tests to an extreme measure those apparently contradictory principles of theater and filmmaking that have defined much of his oeuvre. It has often been remarked that the idioms of film and of theater art, while they may have arisen from a shared performance tradition, have veered apart, becoming fundamentally opposed aesthetic practices. Kentridge, strikingly, is engaged simultaneously in a constant and exorbitant exploration of film art, with its flickering ephemeral tricking of the eye, and in an examination of the substantial materiality and corporeality of the live performer. His operatic interpretations are in ways poised along the seam between cinematic illusion and stage presence. And here I would suggest that Kentridge’s pairing of film and stage provides a more universal figure for perennial contradictions within what I will call “the operatic unconscious.” There is particular philosophical work undertaken within opera, wherein the sublime voice and the manifest (frequently unlovely) body of the singer are in a standoff. What is more, alongside the expressive rapture of voice, the staging of the live performance event is often experienced as a kind of superfluity, at best, or, at worst, as farce, sentiment, and orgy. That tension, between “voice as will and idea” and “body as brute matter,” exemplifies a perennial contradiction within Western philosophy concerning the dialectical entanglement of thought and substance, soul and flesh. This is the metaphysics informing the figure of “the nose,” that organ that has for millennia served as the ludicrous simulacrum of the transcendental phallus, sign of patriarchy and absolutism. Jests without number rely on its size and similitude. 149

The design of Kentridge’s production suggests a similar dialectical tension between the embodied and the disembodied. The set is at times dominated by a projection onto vast flats of urban high-­rise apartments, with cubes of light suggesting balconies or apartment windows, through which shadow puppets of the Nose can at times be glimpsed, between which city dwellers can harangue one another.10 When, by contrast, we are allowed to look into the dwelling of Kovalev, he turns out to live in a traditional shtetl, fully three-­dimensional. There is, in the design of this element of the “world-­of-­the-­play,” such ethnographic particularism as marks many conventional operatic stagings: the operatic form itself is an aesthetic argument that has been integrally linked to the emergence of national types in the nineteenth century. Opera has generated countless Gypsies and Italian peasants. It is almost as if The Nose itself as a production calls up a trace of the European Jew.

150

Despite the avant-­garde absurdity of the piece—­the men singing in the shtetl are not engaged in evening prayers; rather, they are addressing a “nose”—­the set design for Kovalev’s home is banal, rich in quirky (if unlikely) naturalistic detail: the iron bed, modest yet charming wallpaper, period lamp, and wardrobe. A small cluster of photographs on the wall creates a “contained” window onto modernity in the outmoded room. In the scene pictured here, the interaction turns around the miscreant nose. The claims of the set in some way demand that we take the absurd event seriously. By contrast, Soviet modernity is aesthetically interpreted through cinematic references, with anonymous, vast projected blocks of light and shade. The contradictory idioms used in the staging seem almost to heighten one another. It is almost impossible to reconcile these two scenes as 151

10. These shadow figures are themselves illusions of illusions. Rather than glimpses of live shadow puppetry, which Kentridge has explored in several productions with Handspring Puppet Company, these are prefilmed projections of figures made from black construction paper. Kentridge has long been exploring shadows and their substance. Over the past fifteen years, he has made several memorable “Shadow Processions” that manifest human communities on the move, as conglomerates of migrants, refugees, rogues, and lovers. When he first started casting bronzes, these were, strikingly, of shadows. I have written about the contradiction implicit in these bronzes—­the embrace of sculptural form to cast two-­dimensional images as three-­dimensional objects. That essay,

coexisting within a single aesthetic unity. However, the newspaper office that Kovalev visits, intending to place an advert about his absconded nose, is in some ways a dialectical resolution of the two extremes. Here we see the disconsolate protagonist wander away from the storefront, which is in ways realistically figured, painted in a vivid red. The façade “belongs to” the aesthetic language of Kovalev’s lodgings; it is of traditional operatic ethnographic style (except perhaps for the singer who crouches inside the window frame as a kind of malevolent sprite). The news workshop itself, by contrast, is constructed in a wildly schematic idiom, with the upstage wall imagined as a two-­ dimensional picture plane, clad in a graphic that mimics newsprint. A cluster of artisanal printers in period costume perch, as if supernaturally held aloft, like a parodic angelic choir.11 The singers are treated here as design elements, plastered onto the set as if devoid of dimension or personhood. This is, in a way, the theatrical suggestion of cinematic montage, with individual frames alongside one another suggesting a simultaneity and a multiplicity at once. It is the 152

eye, rather than the camera, that cuts from image to image, stitching the fragments together into a unified event through juxtaposition. These figures are not seen from above, nor are they fully realized as from a naturalized horizontal viewing plane; as a result, there is radical instability.

* * * he. So that sense of things that seem solid being very evanescent, is an ongoing theme that I am interested in. Kentridge’s interest in the ephemeral is no surprise, of course, given that his most deft drawing tool is the eraser: his primary film oeuvre consists of a cycle of works that he refers to as “Drawings for Projection,” with charcoal vignettes animated through a complex process of erasure and amendment. It gives rise to an ethics of provisionality. At the same time, he is celebrating the artist as fabricator and illusionist. Recently, there has been a variety of experiment using motifs of loss and recovery, as for example, when films incorporate sequences in which temporal order is reversed. So, for example, libraries of books are, one after another, torn up on camera by the artist, tossed page by page into the air, where they flutter out of the frame. Kentridge stands at the center of a whirlwind. When the film is constructed in postproduction, the sequence is screened in reverse, and the wild flying leaves of books assemble themselves, miraculously, slipping mysteriously between the covers held within the artist’s hand. All shall be well. All manner of things shall be well. And here again is that gestural tribute of the artist to his own hand as instrument of generative creation, an emblem we see at the start of the anamorphic film What Will Come

153

“The Shadow of a Doubt: William Kentridge’s Bronze Age,” is in the catalogue for the exhibition WILLIAM KENTRIDGE (Castello di Rivoli, Turino), ed. Carolyn Christov-­Bakargiev, 41–­58 (Skira, 2004). The shadow work seems to me to be the inverse of Kentridge’s work with stereoscopes. In the latter, he explores the ways in which binocular vision makes possible the illusion of a three-­dimensional figure formed from two-­ dimensional images. With shadows, Kentridge is exploring the ways in which a three-­dimensional multicolored form can still be legible when rendered as a two-­dimensional monochromatic shadow. His essay “In Praise of Shadows” is an anti-­Platonic celebration of the figural, seeking to overthrow the moral claims that shadows are poor figures or shams that undermine “the Real.” The substance of that argument became the basis of his first of the Norton Lectures (“Drawing Lesson One”) at Harvard in 2013. It is in this form that the essay is readily available. His most extended exploration of shadow puppetry and its illusionism is the opera Confessions of Zeno (2001–­2002; with Handspring Puppet Company, composer Kevin Volans, libretto by Jane Taylor). In this show, the audience witnesses both live shadow puppetry and a live streaming video projection of the puppets. See the discussion of shadows above. 11. That “period costume” is sufficiently ambiguous for the printers to look as if they might have stepped out of Dürer’s workshop, although clearly there are suggestions of Soviet style.

(Has Already Come).12 This is Kentridge’s response to Trnka’s totalitarian hand. It is the hand of the trickster. His hand and arm serve as a writhing serpent in his production of The Magic Flute. And the Image is profoundly ambiguous: the arm performs a manipulated shadow-­dance, which is then screened in negative. The trick transforms the negative of the shadow as serpent into a positive—­a wraith of light.13

12. In What Will Come (Has Already Come), Kentridge allows his arm to be filmed, a force that is a kind of prime mover stirring a primordial cosmic soup, as the world comes into being. See discussion on page 45. 13. Kentridge in conversation frequently figures his own drawing art as something that arises from the arm, not the hand. When giving basic advice on drawing his urging is always that the drawing begins at the shoulder and not the wrist. He will demonstrate with a gesture: any line that arises from the hand is for Kentridge too tight, too managed.

154

Acknowledgments

Gogol has made it clear that none of us wholly acknowledge the significance of attachments. I would like to acknowledge some of the extraordinary generosity that has sustained my working and my playing while writing this book. In the first instance, my thanks go to William Kentridge, who was such an openhanded interlocutor, and whose self-­awareness inside his creative processes continues to startle and challenge assumptions about the act of making. My thanks too, to the diligent and careful intelligences who sustain the Kentridge studio practice: to Anne McIllerin, who on countless occasion tracked down images despite my often partial memory; to Linda Liebowitz, who provided oversight and artfully artless generosity in facilitating my visits; to Natalie Dembo, who managed to sustain the working ease in countless time-­constrained situations; to the Kentridge family, who have increasingly over the past two decades been generous and responsive in enacting the open-­door policy of the Kentridge studio, and who have participated in much of the aesthetic enquiry that has vitalized William Kentridge in his practice. I have had several fine interlocutors during the writing of this book, and I am grateful for the quality of intellectual acuity that I have in some measure taken for granted. My thanks to Bill Brown, Bradin Cormack, Jim Chandler, and David Nirenberg, who had a keen interest in Kentridge’s experimentalism and were ready for dialogue whenever I was at the University of Chicago. My thanks to Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler from Handspring Puppet Company, who have a profound depth of experience working within Kentridge’s theatrical invention, and have been friends and companions of a distinctive kind. I would like to thank the Marian Goodman Gallery of London for their support for this publication, as well as the Goodman Gallery, South Africa. Each has provided financial backing in order to enable the rich visual materials presented here. A version of some of the material in this book was presented at a public seminar on Kentridge at the Goodman Gallery, South Africa, at Liza Essers’s invitation. I have also presented some of this material at the Cabinet in New York 155

and the Franke Institute at the University of Chicago. Each of these contexts provided an environment of reconsideration and challenge: what one knows and says about a subject in foreign contexts is not wholly the same as that which one knows (and says) at home. My warm thanks go to my editor, Susan Bielstein of the University of Chicago Press. She has been a most meaningful ally and sensibility, sustaining an optimism about this endeavor from its first conception. My thanks, too, to James Whitman Toftness, from the press, for his close reading, and to Joel Score, who gave his scrupulous attention and care to the editing of my prose, imparting a clean clarity wherever he found congestion. These collaborators demonstrate the principle espoused by Gogol, and Shostakovich, and Kentridge: that each of us is multiple. Cape Town 2016

156

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 87 Alberti, Leon Battista, 120 Alexandrov, Vasilyevich Alexander, 13, 29 Ashkenazy, Vladimir, 17 Augustine of Hippo, 37

Eakins, Thomas, 131 Eisenstein, Sergei, 13, 29 Eliot, T. S., 41, 125, 129 Elkins, James, 103 Emerson, Caryl, 61, 62

Bacon, Francis, 35 Barnard, Christiaan, 84 Berg, Alban, 40 Berger, John, 10, 21 Bergman, Ingmar, 53 Bernstein, Leonard, 41 Breidbach, Angela, 35, 85, 121 Brücke, Die, 40 Bruni, Tatiana, 22 Bukharin, Nikolai, 36, 37, 38, 41, 135, 138

Fabian, Johannes, 91 Fanon, Frantz, 102 Fay, Laurel E., 17, 21, 23, 25 FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor), 13 Felman, Shoshana, 129 Feofanov, Dmitry, 17 Figes, Orlando, 12, 13, 20, 146 Fjellestad, Danuta, 127 Forrester, John, 53, 145 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 42, 81, 104, 105, 145 Frid, Grigory, 22

Caruth, Cathy, 53 Castle, Terry, 145 Cervantes, Miguel de, 79, 153 Chaplin, Charlie, 13, 23 Chekhov, Anton, 20, 22 Chilingiri, Kata, 29 Christov-­Bakargiev, Carolyn, 107, 153 Close, Chuck, 107 Cock, Jacklyn, 99 Composers’ Union, 24 Conrad, Joseph, 115

Galison, Peter, 107 Gance, Abel, 29 Gavronsky, Claire, 27 Godby, Michael, 31 Gogol, Nikolai, 13, 20, 56, 62, 74, 79, 80, 114, 127, 143, 146 Gorky, Maxim, 28 Handspring Puppet Company, 151 Hegel, Georg, 102 Herr, Michael, 53 Ho, Alan B., 17 Hooke, Robert, 45, 47 Hutson, Lorna, 38

De Kooning, Willem, 27 Diderot, Denis, 7, 9, 10, 129, 146 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 61, 79 Druskin, Mikhail Semyonovich, 16 Dubcek, Alexander, 30 Dürer, Albrecht, 44, 47, 119, 153 Dzerzhinsky, Felix, 24

Jakobson, Roman, 37, 54 Jarry, Alfred, 26, 34 Johns, Jasper, 27

161

Medvedev, Z. A. and Roy A., 37 Meyerhoff, Joachim, 74 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 24 Miller, Philip, 89 Morris, Rosalind, 120, 121 Mozart, Amadeus, 45

Kafka, Franz, 65 Kentridge, Sydney, 43, 79, 81, 106 Kentridge, William, works: Art in A State of Siege; Grace; Hope, 1; Comrade Mauser, You Have the Floor, Sir, 7; Everyone Their Own Projector, 27; Excavate I and Excavate II, 26; History of the Main Complaint, 51–­54; I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, 36, 74, 75, 79, 80, 137; Inhale I and Inhale II, 26; Nose (book), 84–­87; The Nose (opera production), passim; Other Faces, 87–­89; 94–­105; Refusal of Time, 85; REPEAT (from the beginning), 65; 7 Fragments for George Méliès, 75, 134; Stereoscope, 114–­27; Telegrams from the Nose, 65; Thinking Aloud and Small Thoughts, 55; Tide Table, 81; What Will Come (Has Already Come), 65, 81, 80–­92 Kharms, Daniel, 66 Khrushchev, Nikita, 20, 30, 137 Koerner, Joseph Leo, 121 Kohler, Adrian, 66 Kohomoto, Shinji, 75 Kondrashin, Kirill, 15 Korshukov, Georgii, 22 Kozintsev, Grigori, 13 Krakauer, Siegfried, 27 Kryzhitsky, Georgi, 13

Neizvestny, Ernst, 10, 19, 20 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10 Panofsky, Erwin, 29 Pasternak, Boris, 22 Perelman, Nathan, 29 Peter the Great, 146 Piatnitsky, Osip, 137 Prokofiev, Sergei, 11, 24 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 13, 29 Pushkin, Alexander, 13, 29 Quaresima, Leonardo, 27, 29, 40 Rauschenberg, Robert, 27 Riley, John, 13, 29 Rivers, Joan, 75 Rogovin, Vadim, 137 Rosenclaire, 27 Rosenthal, Mark, 49 Ross, Alex, 17, 24, 25, 29 Russel, Bertrand, 140

Lacan, Jacques, 146 Lamire, Beverly, 145 Lammy, David, 35 Leach, Edmond, 55 Levinas, Emmanuel, 102 Litvanova, Flora, 20 Locke, John, 140, 143 Loftus, Elizabeth, 43 Lopukhov, Fyodor, 22 Lucretius, 37

Sabinana, Marina, 145 Said, Edward, 122 Sakharov, Andrei, 21 Sarhan, Francois, 65, 66, 75 Schiller, Friedrich, 84 Scott, James C., 21 Schrödinger, Erwin, 140 Serebryakova, Galina, 24 Shakinovsky, Rose, 27 Shostakovich, Dimitri, works: Babi Yar, 21; The Bedbug, 16; The Bolt, 22, 23; Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, 24, 25; Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, 23, 24; The Nose, passim Socrates, 7, 10 Stalin, Joseph, 31, 36–­38, 136–­38, passim Stewart, Neil, 81 Stewart, Susan, 131 Sterne, Laurence, 146 Stravinsky, Igor, 11

Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 3 Magubane, Peter, 98 Mahler, Gustav, 25 Malevich, Kazimir, 24, 26, 32 Mandela, Nelson, 106 Mandlestam, Osip, 24, 37 Marx, Karl, 102 Masilo, Dada, 107 Masina, Anne, 89 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 16, 24, 114, 115 Mbeki, Thabo, 87

162

Tatlin, Vladimir, 1 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 11 Tone, Lillian, 115 Trauberg, Leonid, 13 Trilling, Lionel, 143 Trnka, Jiri, 146 Trotsky, Leon, 26 Tukachevsky, Mikhail, 24 Tyutchev, Fyodor, 22 Tzara, Tristan, 107 Vertov, Dziga, 13, 28, 29, 30, 31 Volans, Kevin, 153 Volkov, Solomon, 16, 17, 140 Voroshilov, Kliment, 138 Wilson, Elizabeth, 14, 15, 20, 21, 23, 29, 35, 145 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 140 Wordsworth, William, 79 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 21 Yutkevich, Sergei, 13 Zhilyayev, Nikolai, 22

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ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­44404-­8

(e-­book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226444048.001.0001 Cover image: William Kentridge, Electrical Industries (Rodchenko). Drawing for artist’s book Everyone Their Own Projector, 2008. Photo: John Hodgkiss. Courtesy of the artist. Book and cover design by Index Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Taylor, Jane, 1956– author. Title: William Kentridge : being led by The Nose / Jane Taylor. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016054303 | ISBN 9780226791203 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226444048 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Kentridge, William, 1955– —Criticism and interpretation. | Shostakovich, Dmitrii Dmitrievich, 1906–1975. Nos. | Opera— Stage-setting and scenery—New York (State)—New York. | Metropolitan Opera (New York, N.Y.) Classification: LCC N7396.K45 T39 2017 MT955 | DDC 700.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054303   ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992

(Permanence of Paper).