Kentridge and South African Political Art

Stephanie McKee
African Cities Course
Johns Hopkins University
April 2009

In his political artwork, William Kentridge takes on the difficult task of "making sense of South Africa." Until recently, scholars have failed to describe the complex order of the past and chaos of the present South Africa, which changes daily with the human experience. Using Kentridge's work as evidence, I would argue that such a "completely heterogeneous cocktail of discord, assemblage, bricolage, metamorphosis, and epistemological erasure" (Boris, 36) can only be successfully described through the arts and humanities.

Form and content go hand in hand in Kentridge's work. His interest in process and change is reflected in both the erasing/remarking technique of charcoal animation and his description of South Africa. He uses a media of transition to describe the "shifting character of the (East Rand) landscape and the ephemeral nature of memory" (Boris, 31). His use of symbolism, extended metaphor, and crude, colorless markings all seem appropriate for a political art that "is to say, an art of ambiguity...in which optimism is kept at bay" (Godby, 83)

Kentridge's critique of the apartheid state is similar to the second half of "Writing the World from an African Metropolis." His work shows South Africa's spatial dislocation (focusing more on natural landscapes then the urban metropolis in the film Felix in Exile), racial polarization, and class differentiation, which, in its most current form, results from the new socioeconomic formation of capitalism. Because of the time period in which his films were created, they don't include specific modern developments of post-apartheid South Africa, like the rise of the black suburban middle class or the "architecture of hysteria" discussed in Mbembe's "Aesthetics of Superfluity." Exact details however, have never been Kentridge's main focus. In fact, another reason for the success of his work is the worldwide relevance of his themes (Godby, 85). In "The Process of Change," Boris describes how the dead bodies in "Felix in Exile" might recall the Holocaust, or even a Romanian situation. Kentridge's work is insistent on open-endedness, and can be associated with any moment in history.

Mbembe states that the modern South African metropolis is "fundamentally fragmented and kaleidoscopic - not as an art form but as a compositional process that is theatrical and marked by polyphonic dissonances." Kentridge's charcoal animations are less like traditionally static art and more like theater - able to capture those varied dissonances. The form and content of his films speak of transition, ambiguity, spatial dislocation, racial polarization, class differentiation, and universal themes, making Kentridge's work a more successful description of modern South Africa than those offered by scholars of his time.