Under Erasure: William Kentridge, Derrida, and Post-Apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article aims to read the work of South African artist William Kentridge through the prism of Jacques Derrida’s notion of trace. Kentridge utilizes a unique style of filmic animation: charcoal pictures drawn on a single piece of paper, where the animation is achieved by erasing and re-drawing parts of the picture, and then filming the image again. I will argue that this technique, as well as Kentridge’s focus on deferral, memory, and identity, share an affinity with the philosophical, aesthetic, ethical, and political aspects of Derrida’s trace. Drawing attention to the trace—a paradox of presence, where motion is achieved precisely by the deferred nonpresence in each drawing—Kentridge acknowledges, in a similar way to Derrida, the impossibility of ontological thought and knowing. In post-apartheid South Africa, this is not only an aesthetic statement but a political one as well. By maintaining the traces, Kentridge concedes that knowing should be deferred, acknowledging that what we know about the other is limited, if not impossible, and that the apartheid regime’s attempt to master the other was violent and erroneous.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my master’s thesis advisors: Dr. Amit Pinchevski and Dr. Aner Preminger. I would also like to thank my dissertation advisor, Dr. Elliot Jurist.

Notes

¹ David Farrell Krell has coined this myth of the origin of drawing as an iconography of “love on the verge of separation, loss, mourning” very much like the love of Echo for Narcissus (Krell, 2000, p. 51).

² Kristina Maria Hagstrom has commented on the deconstructive potential of Kentridge’s technique for the illusion of seamlessness. She argues that his technique illustrates, more so than conventional animation or film, a notion of repetitive interruption (Hagstrom, 2006, p. 152). Hagstrom also likens Kentridge’s motion back and forth from the drawing to the camera (“stalking the drawing”) to a similar process of interruption and fluidity, very much like the movements of the camera, which, opening and shutting, “manifests the movement of interruption” (p. 151).

³ Commenting on the aesthetic aspect of this point, Hagstrom (2006) concludes that there is no origin in Kentridge’s work as “aspects of the process of the creation refer to each other….” What she means by this is that his work is a body of traces, as the photograph records the drawing and the drawing itself is a residue of the film, consequently “both the photograph and the drawing relate to something other than themselves — the other, each other” (Hagstrom, 2006, p. 153).

⁴ The choice of term here is complex. Derek Hook (2013) has commented on the use of ‘post-apartheid’ as a less ambiguous term compared to his choice to use (post)apartheid which signifies a definitive break but at the same time a subcategory of apartheid itself.

⁵ In her dissertation on Kentridge and his metaphor of process, Leora Maltz discusses the politic relevance of black squares and erasure in Kentridge’s work as metaphors for the effects of censorship on journalism. She mentions that between 1985–1986, South African liberal newspaper editors placed black triangles in the place of censored text, literally to mark the place of erasure. This practice was eventually banned in 1986 by the Censorship board (Maltz, 2008, p. 63).

⁶ The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up by the Government of National Unity at the end of apartheid. It was a judicial body and anyone who felt victimized by apartheid could come forth and testify. Perpetrators could testify at the TRC hearings in return for amnesty.

⁷ Indeed, curiously, Kentridge mentions an unnamed documentary he saw on television showing visuals of forests in Poland where people were gassed in trucks in the 1940s. He remarks: “The traces in the landscape are thin […] a section of the forest where new planted trees in straight rows are not yet as tall as those around them” (quoted in Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev, & Coetzee, 1999, p. 111). Notably, he comments on the striking similarity between the flat landscapes in the film where the Auschwitz crematoria was and the flat landscapes of Wadeville and Vereeniging.

⁸ These marks are identical to the ones marking the landscape in Felix in Exile.

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Notes on contributors

Natalie Haziza

Natalie Haziza, M.A., is a doctoral student of clinical psychology at The Graduate Center –City College of New York. She is an almunus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Sapir College film school in Israel.