William Kentridge’s Other Faces: Politics and Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa

By Daniel Solecki

          The latest installment of film and drawings from South African artist William Kentridge’s Drawing for Projection series has opened at the Marian Goodman Gallery (on view May 6 - June 18, 2011). Called “Other Faces”, the show focuses itself on questions of memory, perception, and coming to terms with life in post-Apartheid South Africa. It is anchored by an animated film that synthesizes Kentridge’s charcoal drawings into a narrative. The protagonist of the story is the white South African miner and industrialist Soho Eckstein who, at the start of the film, gets into a car accident with a black South African preacher in front of a mega-church in downtown Johannesburg. The two men get into a furious argument, causing an angry crowd of black African churchgoers to form around them. The film then dissolves into the thoughts of Eckstein as he contemplates his memories, his interaction with the preacher, and constant interruption with his financial work. 

             The film constantly oscillates perspective—at times we are seeing the drawings of the narrative and at others, visions and visualizations of Eckstein’s thoughts. The charcoal drawings that compose both the memories and the narrative are wild and complex, exaggerating rough edges and textures to an impassioned impressionism. An advertisement for the preacher’s event at the mega-church is seen torn at the edges. Winds blow over veldt landscapes, spreadsheets marred with red pen come alive with movement of abstract shapes and red lines, human figures from Eckstein’s childhood—his mother, his African nannies—emerge and recede from smudges and erasures, a drive-in theater is deserted and empty except for a single figure watching the screen filled with spreadsheets and red lines, an impressionistically rendered bird takes flight, and a black African mine worker swings his shovels about, his movements tracked by erasures and multiplied until his shovels become wings. Some of the drawings are reminiscent of Anselm Kiefer’s paintings of concentration camps; others seem to be psychological offshoots of Italian Futurism. The maps and over-head distended views of the city of Johannesburg seem to taken right from Pissarro’s visions of 19^th century Paris. The images of the memories are all marked by Eckstein’s spreadsheet’s red pen, which in the animations, seems to be trying desperately to make mathematical sense of the images, interrupting the smudgy, chaotic charcoal with harsh red line segments and arcs. Everything feels mutable, changeable, chaotic, subject to erasure or strike-through at a whim and yet always beyond complete erasure or oblivion.

    

Anselm Kiefer, "Abendland (Twilight of the West)" (1989);
synthetic polymer paint, ash, plaster, cement, earth, varnish
on canvas and wood, approx. 13' 2" x 12' 6"

As Eckstein tries to make sense of his past, it becomes evident that his memories—what defines himself—are chaotic and intangible; his attempts to make sense of their complexity using the spreadsheet logic of the red line, or any logic at all, are futile and baseless. The futility of self-comprehension is set in contrast with Eckstein’s violent encounter with the preacher. Both men are frayed at the edges (like the erasures in Eckstein’s memory and the torn sign for the preacher’s rally) and do not fully understand themselves.  

            It becomes readily obvious that it’s not the car accident that the men are angry about, but their failure to understand the jagged edges of their own pasts and of their own nation’s history. The frantic movement of red pen over Eckstein memories becomes actualized in the narrative when he screams in anger at the preacher and the crowd roars back. Like Kiefer, the Futurists, and others, Kentridge uses his art to build the bridge between the internal realm of human psychology and the external world of politics—the relationship between the memories of individuals and the collective memories of nations; the inner search for truth and a nation’s search for identity.