Awakenings: the Art of Lionel Davis, African Arts, Autumn 2019

book review Two recently published volumes on the Hence the title of her concluding chapter, work of William Kentridge and Lionel Davis “Being Contemporary Up South.” respectively take on this challenge and, in Maltz-Leca’s central task in this hefty but doing so, contribute significantly to the beautifully illustrated volume is to examine historiography of art in South Africa. Though Kentridge’s process, not his biography per neither work is a biography, both demonstrate se. Perhaps nothing illustrates Kentridge’s the value of locating individual artists’ works concern with process better than the image within a richly nuanced understanding of that graces its cover—erratic, almost scrib- their contexts—the process of their produc- bled lines tracing the artist’s physical (and tion at both the micro and macro levels, both emotional) movements back and forth like a inside and outside the studio. While each caged animal, an image taken from Kentridge’s book has its own idiosyncrasies, they speak 2008 book Everyone Their Own Projector. This William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor powerfully to Africanist scholars concerned kind of explicit metacommentary, however, & Other Doubtful Enterprises with history, memory, and the place of art is only part of what Maltz-Leca is driving at. by Leora Maltz-Leca between fact and fiction, truth and fantasy. Locating Kentridge’s artistic coming-of-age Berkeley: University of California Press, For the authors of both volumes, art acts as amid late twentieth century debates surround- 2018. 400 pp., 237 color ill., notes. far more than grist for the academic mill: it ing “Greenbergian formalism” and the place of US$49.95, UK£40.00, hardcover can profoundly reshape our understanding of politics in modern art, she affirms Kentridge’s Awakenings: The Art of Lionel Davis history and its methodology. By examining process as a “promiscuous metaphor” with the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/afar/article-pdf/52/3/86/1814151/afar_r_00488.pdf by guest on 23 August 2021 edited by Mario Pissarra art, artist, and process at a granular level, they potential to echo and refract through multiple Cape Town, SA: Africa South Art succeed in a formidable task: producing the layers of a single work. Initiative, 2017. 224 pp., 169 color kind of rich and multidimensional analyses In the five essays that constitute the heart ill., 12 b/w ill., selected biblio. R495, that their subjects, as two of the most cele- of Process as Metaphor, Maltz-Leca zeroes in paperback brated artists South Africa has ever produced, on individual elements of Kentridge’s oeuvre, plainly demand. from the palimpsestic erasures that haunt his reviewed by Robin K. Crigler William Kentridge is probably the most animations to his engagement with process famous South African visual artist on the itself: both the process of creating art and The German philosopher Günter Grass once world stage today, and with good reason. Since the phenomenon of the procession, which is referred to literature as “a kind of stopgap, step- the 1970s, keen to make a name for himself revealed as a distinct concern of Kentridge’s ping in when necessary to give people without a independent of his parents—both prominent work in the wake of South Africa’s democratic voice the chance to speak” (Bourdieu and Grass civil rights lawyers who defended Nelson transition. Drawing on an eclectic, almost 2002: 69). Historians, he argued, were limited in Mandela and others from the predations of encyclopedic sample of his output, Maltz-Leca what they could say about the past; fiction could the apartheid state—Kentridge is best known represents Kentridge as a self-aware postmod- often present truer and more multidimensional for films such as Felix in Exile (1994) and Ubu ernist alive to both the power and the irony representations of history than nonfiction, and the Truth Commission (1997) that feature of metaphor. Just as postmodern trends in which was warped by the biases and silences of distinctive animations in charcoal. However, scholarship scrutinized the conditions under the documentary record. This seeming paradox as art historian Leora Maltz-Leca attests in her which knowledge is produced and affirmed, been noted with great urgency in South Africa ambitious study William Kentridge: Process as Kentridge’s art continually references and where, since the end of apartheid in 1994, fierce Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises, Ken- critiques its own actuating circumstances— debates have taken place both within and out- tridge has experimented over the decades with the simultaneous power and impotence of side the academy on the role of history and the a multitude of different techniques and media. the artist, the multilevel symbolism of the limitations of the (post)colonial archive. Art— Although Kentridge was certainly a vocal critic projector, the process of erasure, and the trial visual and dramatic as well as literary—would of apartheid—a constant theme of his work— and error involved in the act of drawing, not seem to provide the way out of a discursive Maltz-Leca’s text is timely and sophisticated in to mention Kentridge’s many alter egos (Zeno, morass where, as writers like Njabulo Ndebele positioning Kentridge as both a South African the indecisive diarist; Soho, the cruel industri- and Jacob Dlamini have lamented, contem- artist par excellence and a global artist at the alist; Felix, the homesick exile, inter alia). porary politics served as the single yardstick forefront of international trends and debates. While all parts of Process as Metaphor make against which all productions were to be judged. Though he has been based in Johannesburg valuable contributions to Kentridge scholar- At its worst, this view, which was common for virtually his entire career, Kentridge’s ship, the first two chapters—“The Politics of enough in the 1970s and 1980s, tarred all but privileged position as a white South African Metaphor” and “History as Process”—have the most demonstrative and ideological works male of considerable fame might seem to sit the broadest scholarly appeal. Lamenting that as decadent, leaving little space for the complex awkwardly at the intersection of “African” and “modern and contemporary art history has lives of Grass’s voiceless people. “Western” art. For Maltz-Leca, however, herself dispensed with metaphor by aligning it with Cultural studies that approach art through of South African descent, this is an asset rather the literary, the narrative, and the illustrative,” such a narrow and instrumental lens can than an impediment, for in “The Politics of Metaphor” Maltz-Leca actually do violence to the works they seek to launches a stirring defense of visual metaphor interrogate. Paintings and novels alike contain [i]f Kentridge’s position, squeezed in between as “obliqueness, which indexes both the rest- worlds of meaning within themselves; reductive a rock and a hard place, between Scylla and lessness of thought and the flux of the world Charybdis, as he put it, conveys his equivocal analyses inevitably reveal more about the preju- itself” (p. 43). Awareness of this flux in all its relationship to the Euro-American tradition, it is dices of the writer than the subject at hand. The inconsistency and contradiction is revealed issue might best be understood as a problem equally his deep investment in the specific social and political matrix of the postcolony—of which everywhere in Maltz-Leca’s analysis, devel- of medium, not unlike the reductive enterprise the South African postcolony is but one config- oped further in intricate but rewarding prose of mapping: flattening curves and concealing uration of a larger continental condition—that as evidence of Kentridge’s African-inflected distortions in an attempt to impose scholarly defines him as a contemporary African artist (p. Hegelianism, where history is “a churning narrative on a painting, sculpture, or piece of 16; emphasis in original). process of unfolding dialectics, animated by music that actively defies narrative conventions. 86 | african arts AUTUMN 2019 VOL. 52, NO. 3 the movement of seeming antipodes toward important artist. foreword, a consummate “composite artist, each other” (p. 87). From his vantage point Yet there are also clear similarities in the one for whom the work of art is already an “up south,” Maltz-Leca insists, Kentridge’s two artists’ styles and concerns. History and act of shared commitment” (p. 11). Given the methodologies enable him to represent memory loom large, as attested by Davis’s distinct stylistic similarities between Davis profound truths about the South African tributes to the hidden legacy of the Khoisan in and Kentridge—their mutual fascination with experience that conventional scholars could Cape Town and their descendants in District concealed pasts, collage, incomplete erasures, never hope to articulate. The richness of her Six, such as his collage Footprints on Robben and found materials—it is tempting to wonder engagement with just one man’s oeuvre should Island (1993) and his 2005 print Reclamation, about Davis’s view of individual process and be enough to give any nonspecialist scholar both of which powerfully mix text and image. Kentridge’s understanding of community in pause about invoking art as an accessory Equally significant is Davis’s unapologetic re- the life of an artist, topics about which the two or afterthought to some other, more “seri- fusal to water down his work for the benefit of books are mostly silent. There is much that ous” thesis. prescriptivist critics with strong views on what remains to explore here. Maltz-Leca’s profound familiarity with did or did not constitute revolutionary aesthet- The arrival of these two volumes bodes posi- William Kentridge’s life and work is never in ics. As Patricia de Villiers notes in her chapter, tively for scholarship on art in South Africa.

Load more