The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Kentridge · the cycle of nine animated films made in Johannesburg from 1989 to 2003, scored as one work, from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris to Tide Table · charcoal, with some blue and red pastel, on paper, each scene drawn on one sheet or a few, photographed by a fixed camera, erased, redrawn and photographed again · about an hour in all, with music and ambient sound · the films in video transfer, the drawings their residue
Mode
Animated film made by drawing and erasure; satire and lament in one hand, from inside the complicit class
Mythos
The divided man, owner and dreamer as one self; the descent into the mine as an underworld; the flood as judgment; the carrier made a statue of his own burden
Phase
Nine films over fourteen years, 1989 to 2003, across the end of apartheid and the years of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; made without a plan, each film added to the last
Presentation
Charcoal and pastel on paper, each scene one sheet altered under a fixed camera; the films shown in video transfer, about an hour in all, with music and ambient sound
Register
A grave grey lament, now and then flooded with colour, broken by broad satire of a fat man at a desk
Scale
Two men, a wife, a woman who surveys the land, the miners, the city and the veld of the East Rand; about an hour
Governing Proposition
Nine short films, made one at a time in Johannesburg between 1989 and 2003, follow Soho Eckstein, a property developer and mine owner in a pinstripe suit, and Felix Teitlebaum, his naked, dreaming double and rival in love, through the last years of apartheid and the years after it. Every scene is one charcoal drawing altered under the camera, so that what is rubbed out stays on the sheet as a grey ghost. The wager of the cycle is that a society forgets by erasing and that erasure leaves a mark, that the comfort of the owner rests on the bodies under the ground, and that a drawing which keeps its own past can show both from inside the man who profits.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
William Kentridge, born in Johannesburg in 1955, made the films of Drawings for Projection in that city from 1989 to 2003, one at a time and without a plan. There are nine: Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, the first, of 1989; Monument; Mine; Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old; Felix in Exile; History of the Main Complaint; WEIGHING... and WANTING; Stereoscope; and Tide Table, the last, of 2003. Together they run about an hour. The work scored is the cycle as one work. The later films that carry the same name and characters, the drawings as objects exhibited and sold in their own right, and Kentridge’s theatre, his Faustus and Ubu projects and his later installations stand outside it.
Every scene is made on one sheet of paper, or a few, in charcoal with some blue and red pastel. The sheet is drawn, photographed a frame or a few frames at a time by a camera fixed above it, then altered by erasure and redrawing, and photographed again. The erased states survive only in the film. What remains on the paper is the last state, with the grey ghosts of the earlier ones. The films are shown in video transfer, with music and ambient sound, and the drawings that remain are the residue of the films and weigh here only as their record.
Two men run through the cycle. Soho Eckstein is a property developer and mine owner in a pinstripe suit, fat, at a desk, telephones ringing. Felix Teitlebaum is his naked, dreaming double, the man in the bath, and his rival for Mrs Eckstein. In Felix in Exile a third figure enters, Nandi, a woman who surveys the land. Owner and dreamer are one self divided, and the cycle carries that division by its structure rather than by allusion: across fourteen years the two compete, part and collapse into each other, until in Stereoscope Soho is split into two rooms and two selves.
Movement II
In Monument Soho unveils a statue as a gift to the city. It is the figure of a man carrying a load, carved in the act of carrying. Then the statue opens its eyes and breathes under the weight. The film is the unveiling and that one movement, and nothing in it could go. The cycle builds here the figure who carries the world’s weight and is made a statue of his own burden; it is terror and grief at once, and among the cycle’s heights.
Around such moments the cycle gives a good part of its time to satire: Soho eating, Soho at his desk, the megaphone, the love triangle of the first films. The caricature of the fat capitalist is taken up whole from the satirical drawing of Goya, Daumier, Beckmann and Grosz, and it is broad. Passages of melodrama in Johannesburg and Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old could be cut without loss to the arc, and the earliest films are rougher in timing and in the cut than the later. This is the satire of a fat man at a desk, and it does not try to rise.
What the cycle departs from is larger than its debts. The animated film’s norm was the cel and the clean line, one drawing replacing another; this is animation made by altering one drawing, so that the film carries its own past on its surface. The political art of South Africa in the 1980s was mostly the resistance poster and the protest image; this speaks from inside the guilty class, in grey and doubt. The method is slow and unforgiving, since a mistake can only be covered, not undone; animation stood outside the gallery’s high art; and Kentridge was in his thirties, in a marginal city under a state of emergency, with no international audience for the first films.
Movement III
In Mine Soho takes breakfast, and the plunger of his coffee pot goes down through the breakfast tray into the shafts of the mine and the bunks of the miners. It is the cycle’s argument in one movement: the owner’s morning and the labour under him are one physical continuity. Take the plunger away and the film loses its hinge. What the cycle discloses first is here: the wealth and comfort of white Johannesburg stood directly on the bodies of the black men under the ground.
The descent goes below the bed into the earth and returns with a beast: a rhinoceros is carried up from the shafts to Soho’s desk. The mine is built as an underworld, a descent and a return, and in the same film a ship’s plan of bodies laid in rows turns the mine into a hold. The plunger, the rhinoceros and the rows of bodies are among the cycle’s heights, and the drawing is at its best here and in Felix in Exile: charcoal handled for mass and tone, the figures sure in a few marks.
The miners are seen, not entered. The disclosure belongs to one class and one conscience, the owner’s and his double’s, and it is the beneficiary’s truth that the cycle tells, not the hero’s or the victim’s. It does not speak for the men in the bunks; it shows the comfort resting on them. That is a truth told from inside complicity, and it can be stated and holds. It is also why the cycle does not enter the inner life of anyone but Soho and Felix, and why the labour it holds is held from above the ground.
Movement IV
In Felix in Exile Nandi surveys the land. Bodies lie on the veld, and each is drawn, covered by paper, by the survey marks and then by the earth; the film is the passage from one drawing to the next, and none can go. The land covers the dead and keeps them. Blue water rises through the drawing and carries Nandi’s figure away. Water rises in nearly every film of the cycle and is always the moment of release, and here, with the bodies sinking into the land, the lament reaches its height.
The film is where the form and the knowledge are plainest one thing. A society forgets by erasing, and erasure leaves a trace: on every sheet the rubbed-out states still show, so that every frame carries the ghost of the frames before it. Told in cel animation, in live film or in finished drawings, the burial of the dead in the land would be a statement about memory. Here it is an act of it. The landscape changes by the eraser’s pressure, at the speed of a man drawing, and a land under someone’s hand is the cycle’s political claim.
The making bears the meaning. The mine dumps, pylons and flat veld of the East Rand are given weight and light with the side of the charcoal stick and a rag. The eraser’s trace is controlled, so that a ghost stays exactly as strong as the scene needs; the rate of the camera is varied, so that change comes slowly or abruptly; the blue and red pastel are rationed to the water and the wound, and therefore carry. The visible hand has its cost elsewhere in the cycle, where it can cover moments less exactly built than the surface suggests; here it does not.
Movement V
In History of the Main Complaint Soho lies in a coma and is examined by X-ray and scan, and what is found inside him is the memory of a road, a windscreen and a man struck. The cycle was made across the end of apartheid and the years of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and this is its account of that moment from inside the beneficiary: the complicit man, who is both Soho and Felix, carries the struck man within him. By this film and by Stereoscope the double has collapsed inward, and Soho is split into two rooms and two selves.
The cycle accumulates rather than resolves. Its films were added one to another over fourteen years, and the later films change the terms; Tide Table adds as much as it completes, and the arc closes by addition, not by design. What holds the nine together is a law of making. Every image is a drawing that changes into another under the same hand and keeps the trace of what it was, and every change is a passage between the owner’s world and what it rests on: the desk becomes the city, the coffee pot the mine, a cat a telephone, the land the dead. Satire and lament are two speeds of the same transformation.
The cycle has outlived apartheid and the transition and is still shown as the account of them: in museum showings and surveys continuously since the late 1990s, in the writing on post-apartheid art, on animation and on drawing, and in Kentridge’s lectures, which return to these films as their ground; his operas, installations and processions grow from them. Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977, fifteen grey paintings of a political death, also stands at 8.5: ahead on The Made, at 8.8, and The Inner Law, at 9.0, and behind on The Encompassed, at 7.5 to this cycle’s 8.2. J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, of the same country and the same years, stands at 8.6, stronger on The Unconcealment and The Inevitable, its structure designed. The cycle stands at 8.5, in Tier IV.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is run on the film and on the cycle. Within the strongest films nothing idles. In Mine the plunger of Soho’s coffee pot goes down through the breakfast tray into the shafts and the bunks of the miners: take it away and the film loses the hinge between the owner’s morning and the labour under him. In Felix in Exile every drawing of a body on the veld, covered by paper, by survey marks and then by the earth, is required. The cycle is weaker on the test. Its films were made one at a time, without a plan, over fourteen years, and it gathers rather than resolves: the love triangle and the megaphone in Johannesburg and Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old could go without loss to the arc, and Tide Table adds as much as it completes.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What the cycle brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. First: the wealth and comfort of white Johannesburg stood on the bodies of the black men under the ground, shown as one physical continuity, the coffee plunger reaching the stopes, the ledger on the desk becoming the landscape. Second, and deeper: a society forgets by erasing, and erasure leaves a trace. The bodies in Felix in Exile are covered by the land, and the land keeps them. Made across the end of apartheid and the years of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the cycle discloses that moment from inside the beneficiary: the complicit man’s truth, not the hero’s or the victim’s. What holds the axis is that one class and one conscience carry the disclosure; the miners are seen, not entered.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is real, recurrent and of one register: a grave grey lament, now and then flooded with colour. The heights: the bodies in Felix in Exile sinking into the land, and the blue water rising through the drawing that carries Nandi’s figure away; the statue in Monument opening its eyes under the weight it was carved carrying, terror and grief in a moment; in Mine, a rhinoceros carried up from the shafts to Soho’s desk, and a ship’s plan of bodies laid in rows that turns the mine into a hold. Water rises in nearly every film. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is the narrow register, a long sorrowful meditation, and the running time given to satire of a fat man at a desk, which does not try to rise.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Built in places, evoked elsewhere. What is built is the double: Soho and Felix, the owner and the dreamer, the man in the pinstripe suit and the naked man in the bath, one self divided, rivals for one woman, collapsing into each other by History of the Main Complaint and Stereoscope, where Soho is split into two rooms and two selves. The structure of the whole cycle carries it, not allusion. The mine is built as an underworld: the descent in Mine goes below the bed into the earth and returns with a beast. The flood recurs as judgment, and Monument builds the carrier made a statue of his own burden. The Faustian bargain and the deluge are summoned, not built, and not every part is the myth.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is threefold: the satirical drawing of Goya, Daumier, Beckmann and Grosz, with its caricature of the fat capitalist; the animated film, whose norm was the cel, the clean line and one drawing replacing another; and the South African political art of the 1980s, mostly the resistance poster and the protest image. The departure: an animation made by altering one drawing rather than replacing it, so that the film carries its own past on its surface, and a political art spoken from inside the guilty class in grey and doubt rather than in the slogan’s red and black. The trace of the eraser becomes a grammar, and charcoal a medium of time. The stake was real. The debts show, in Soho above all, and the method grew from the maker’s theatre and printmaking.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Everything. The cycle knows that history is made by erasure and that erasure leaves a mark, and the form is that knowledge made physical: each scene is one sheet on which earlier states are rubbed out and still show, so every frame carries the ghost of the frames before it. In cel animation, in live film or in a set of finished drawings the theme would become a statement about memory instead of an act of it. The landscape changes by the eraser’s pressure, at the speed of a man drawing: land under someone’s hand, which is the political claim. A desk becomes a city, a cat a telephone, a body the veld, because one mark serves each in turn. Only the sound and the episodic sequence are less necessary than the drawn surface.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence first: twenty-three to thirty-seven years of return, in exhibitions, in the writing on post-apartheid art, on animation and on drawing, and in Kentridge’s own lectures, which come back to these films as their ground. The questions have not closed. Is Soho the guilty capitalist, the artist, or the white South African who must outlive the end of his world? What binds Felix’s grief to Soho’s ledger? Is the erasure a figure of memory or of amnesia, of the Commission’s disclosure or of its forgetting? On return the films yield in detail: the ghosts of earlier states, a drawn object reappearing in another film, the music under the images. Held below the top by the short span, and because much of the return runs through the artist’s own commentary and career rather than the cycle alone.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of South African art of the late 1980s and 1990s and of drawing and the animated film shown in the gallery in the same years. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of possibility. The cycle made drawing a medium of time, made the animated film a serious form of contemporary art, and showed a political art working through the conscience of the complicit rather than the poster of the resistance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: these films became the visual art by which the end of apartheid was seen abroad, they shaped how drawing and the moving image were taken up in the gallery in South Africa, and Kentridge’s later operas, installations and processions grow from them. Discounted because the reach is recent, lies largely within one maker’s practice and one country’s reception, and cannot be named in particular later works by other hands.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The cycle was complete as named in 2003; its first film is thirty-seven years old, its last twenty-three. Form: whole. The films survive as films and in video transfer, and nothing of the cycle’s arrangement is known to be lost. The intermediate states of each drawing were destroyed by the method and survive only in the film: that is how the work was made, not a loss after it. Presence: wide and continuous since the late 1990s, in museum showings, surveys and the literature, and the cycle has outlived apartheid and the transition and is still shown as the account of them. Fabric: moving-image formats face obsolescence, the smallest charge; the charcoal sheets are fragile, but the sheets are not the work. A short record, with the widest presence.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of drawing and of the animated film. The drawing is a master’s: charcoal handled for mass and tone as much as for line, the mine dumps, pylons and flat veld of the East Rand given weight and light with the side of the stick and a rag, Soho and Felix sure in a few marks. The making of the films bears load: the eraser’s trace is controlled so that a ghost stays exactly as strong as the scene needs, the camera’s rate varies so that change comes slowly or abruptly as the feeling requires, and the blue and red pastel are rationed to the water and the wound, and therefore carry. The costs: the earliest films are rougher in timing and in the cut, some caricature is broad, and the visible hand can cover moments less exactly built than the surface suggests.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the broad satire of Soho at his desk, fat and pinstriped, telephones ringing, and the bodies of the dead covered by the land in Felix in Exile. They obey one law: every image is a drawing that changes into another under the same hand and keeps the trace of what it was, and every change is a passage between the owner’s world and what it rests on. The desk becomes the city, the coffee pot the mine, the land the dead; satire and lament are two speeds of one transformation. The law reaches across nine films and fourteen years, through characters who change and a country that changed under them. Held below 9 because the cycle was made without a plan: the later films change the terms, and the arc closes by addition, not by design.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held are many, and one transformation integrates them. Consciousness: Soho’s coma and the divided self. Love and the family: Soho, Mrs Eckstein and Felix, the marriage, the affair and the return. Labour: the miners, the bunks, the shafts, the carrier under the load. The state and history: apartheid, the dead in the land, the transition, the years of the Commission. Capital and property: Soho’s empire, the ledger, the city. The natural order: the veld, the water, the land as witness. The body: the X-ray, the scan, the wound. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is the sacred and the cosmic, present only as the flood and the judgment of water, and the inner life of everyone but Soho and Felix, which the cycle does not enter.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.0, then The Swerve at 8.7 and The Made at 8.7. A form in which each sheet keeps the ghosts of its erased states, so that memory and burial are enacted frame by frame rather than stated; an animation that alters one drawing instead of replacing it, and a political art spoken from inside the guilty class; and charcoal handled for mass and tone, with the eraser’s trace held exactly as strong as each scene needs.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 8.2 and The Encompassed at 8.2: a grave grey lament, high in its recurring heights and narrow in register, with much of its time given to satire that does not try to rise; and many orders held in one transformation, with the sacred present only as the flood and no inner life entered but Soho’s and Felix’s. Just above them, The Inevitable at 8.3: nine films made without a plan, gathered rather than resolved, with passages that could go.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.7, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition, each at 8.4, fall one tenth short, the double and the descent built and the rest summoned, the reach recent and largely one maker’s own. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest axis it counts is The Sublime at 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 102.1, an average of 8.51 that displays 8.5, in Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the nine films of Drawings for Projection, made by William Kentridge in Johannesburg from 1989 to 2003, and of how they were made and received; the films were not to hand, and no image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the cycle of nine animated films as one work, as it stands now: the films survive as films and in video transfer, and nothing of the cycle’s arrangement is known to be lost. The intermediate states of each drawing were destroyed by the method itself and survive only in the film; that is how the work was made, not a loss after it. The drawings that remain hold the last state of each sheet with the ghosts of the earlier ones; they are the residue of the films, weighed only as record, and their market is set aside. The later films that carry the same name and characters, Kentridge’s theatre, the Faustus and Ubu projects and his later installations are context, and are not scored. The titles are certain; the punctuation of two of them is not certain. No words of Kentridge’s are quoted, and no document is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the years of the seven films between the first and the last, the running time of each film, the number of drawings in each, the composer of the scores and the recordings used, whether any words are spoken, the titles and dates of the later films, the source of the ship’s plan in Mine, the account of whose features Soho and Felix bear, the matter of Tide Table and WEIGHING... and WANTING beyond their place in the cycle, the exhibitions at which the cycle was first shown abroad, the later works by other hands that descend from the method, and the ownership of each sheet.