INSOURCING

RAMSES McGLAZER

A CLIPPING, AT A CLIP

On Friday, February 27, the International Herald Tribune ran an editorial by Thomas L. Friedman entitled "The silver lining of outsourcing overseas." 1  I read it on my way to William Kentridge's recent retrospective at the Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, just outside Turin, Italy.

Writing from Bangalore, India, and seeking to highlight the reciprocal benefits of relocating United States white-collar jobs abroad, Friedman takes the field of animation and the nation of India to be cases in point.   In addition to telemarketing and providing technical support for American companies, countless Indian workers are now employed by companies like Jadoo Works, based in Bangalore, engaged daily in drawing and hand-painting American cartoon characters.   Many, at least according to Friedman, are especially skilled at such tasks, owing to their ancestral and artisinal training in Hindu temples, painting devotional miniatures.   Friedman concludes, "[T]he two skills [miniature painting and digitized animation] reinforce each other."   Which conclusion is well and good, but I wondered whether they didn't also inform each other.   Could one practice be left truly intact while the other makes its daily demands?   "What goes around comes around," Friedman offers, in one of several banalized reformulations of karma.   (He begins his article with the suspect admission, "I've been in India for only a few days and I am already thinking about reincarnation.")   Friedman writes, "Thanks to globalization, a whole new generation of Indian traditional artists can keep up their craft rather than drive taxis for a living."   As though those were the only two options--to practice a compromised craft or, compromised, to chauffeur.   But perhaps those are the only options, in fairness to Friedman and his fellow proponents of globalization, the acceptance of which always seems to require the admission of such painful truths.

For the rest of the train ride to Turin, I dozed between stops without dreaming.

ON WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

Medicine Chest (2001) signals an intimate and sculptural turn in Kentridge's widely acclaimed work.   It comprises a series of video-recorded drawings rear-projected onto a medicine cabinet, with its mirror divided by two horizontal glass shelves.   For just under six minutes, discontinuous charcoal-drawn images emerge and shape-shift, dissolve and re-emerge, unaccompanied by score or sound effects.   Several morning scenes materialize: A faucet leaks; flies surround an electric light, their trajectories indexed in grey arabesques.   Medicine bottles with illegible labels give way to arid and melancholy landscapes in which featureless figures sometimes pace.   A headless woman's torso eventually bears an enigmatic male trophy head of sorts, only to resurface, moments later, unadorned.   Headline fragments and prescription codes intermittently disrupt the makeshift flow of unconnected images with their black uncompromising typeface, announcing wryly and with seeming arbitrariness, "NIL PER MOUTH," "SEALED CONTAINER RIDDLE," "WORLD'S BEAUTIES TRAPPED ON ALCATRAZ," "FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY," "KNOWN BUT NOT SEEN."

I

In the work, Kentridge, a Johannesburg-based, white South-African artist, stays true to his famous and famously outdated animation practice: Working on a single sheet of paper at a time (several in succession for each film), the artist photographs his drawing, then makes one barely discernable change to it at a time, proceeding to re-photograph it, while it retains the traces of all his erasures and adjustments like so many pentimenti . 2  In Medicine Chest 's montage, however, many such drawings alternate and overlap.   At times, the projected images respect the shelves' partitions of the mirror, as when the vessels lifted from some Chardin still life are arrayed neatly in three rows.   At other times, Kentridge ignores the internal, three-dimensional dividers, as when an image of his own face appears, occupying the cabinet mirror's entire surface, unbroken.   But the objects, texts, and figures depicted, even when they ignore or seek to ignore these shelves, never transgress the cabinet's outside edges, the works framing edges which become its containing edges.

This faithfulness to the frame is made plain by one sequence of the work in particular, one that warrants singling out: Midway through Medicine Chest , a black bird turns up, perched on the medicine chest's middle glass shelf as on a wire or branch.   It quickly takes wing, but runs up against the cabinet's top edge, then its side edge.   Re-perching, the crow (or raven) repeats the attempt, and repeats it, and again and again meets with these same obstacles--the top of the cabinet, its sides, its bottom.   All the while it leaves the charcoal traces of its false starts, its failures.

Here the texts, seemingly "automatic" in the surrealist sense, and therefore unrelated, re-enter.   The bird's abortive attempts at flight show them to be united by and to obey an underlying logic, which opens Medicine Chest to an allegorical reading.   To be both explicit and exhaustive, at the risk of depriving the work of much of its subtlety and lastingness: The work itself--as it constitutes the barriers to the bird's getaway--is a "sealed container," incapable of exceeding its own confines.   It is destined, ultimately, to misfire, like one of Austin's infelicitous performatives.   For this very reason, it is its own kind of "riddle."   Although it may be consumed in a mercantile (or in an art mercantile) sense, it can never be properly internalized (ingested "per mouth" and integrated").   Vying with innumerable digitized, spectacularized distractions for the viewer's attention, it is relegated to "external use."   (It seems telling that the Castello di Rivoli mounted an exhibition wholly to advertising, to TV commercials, to run concurrently with Kentridge's retrospective.   At least on the day of my visit, the former drew far more sizeable crowds and elicited far more enthused responses.)   A work of art that regards itself and thereby allegorizes art making, Medicine Chest is irremediably and solitarily confined--an Alcatraz beauty pacing her prison cell, a bird in a cage, a heart, even, in a rib cage.  

For the female torso that surfaces at several points during the course of the projection makes plain the punning status of Kentridge's title: at stake is the chest as limit to understanding the other, that which prevents departure from the self in all its bodily dumbness.   The torso also implicitly links Medicine Chest to Heart Drawing , an outdoor installation that Kentridge executed with Doris Bloom in 1995 as part of a multimedia series entitled Memory and Geography : An anatomical heart drawn in chalk directly onto the rural landscape outside of Johannesburg, just barely, at the edge of one of its chambers, breached the broken-line square that bounded it. 3  By now, then, Medicine Chest can be seen undeniably to stand for Kentridge's entire self-reflexive enterprise, up to and including its oft-praised "push into formal issues of form and narrative." 4  The work cannot but fail in its aim of expressing things "known but not seen."   And this last textual insert--"KNOWN BUT NOT SEEN"--is the only one in the work to characterize it, to self-refer, negatively, registering whit is missing from it rather than what it is ("SEALED CONTAINER RIDDLE") or how it works ("FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY").   The known but not seen is markedly absent from Medicine Chest , which can only traffic in visibles.   The text calls attention to this inevitable absence.   Kentridge thus cannily refuses to make his language accord wholly with his drawings, disrupting the viewer's gradually gained understanding of the texts' role.   He denies any straightforward distillation of his work (this account notwithstanding) down to a complete, decidable "message."

An allegory, then, of unbelief as well as of art making, Medicine Chest delivers only a message of nondelivery, of nontranscendence.   Still, Kentridge has recourse to sentiment and elegy, to the tropes of lyric poetry even while he illustrates the impossibility of lyric transport.   In its blend of sculpture and projection and its treatment of the self that yearns to surpass its own limits (by means of parataxis, no less), Medicine Chest is unmistakably (Robert) Whitmanesque.

Despite the mournful, melancholic isolation of his work--despite the fact that he is mournful in acknowledging his own isolation--Kentridge refuses to yield to pessimism or to inaction.   In fact, Medicine Chest itself stands (unheroically, though) as proof of this refusal, as do the artist's ongoing activist engagements with contemporary South African politics.   In a place of power that he cannot cede, the artist is driven by a guilt that he cannot shed.   (And here the viewer approaches pentimenti in an etymological sense.)   All the same, Kentridge tries to accommodate the other, to redress apartheid and its legacy of inequality without trying to live it down or to rewrite it.  

In a lecture delivered in 1986, Kentridge maintained,

Kentridge reacts to the inhumanity of such insensitivity even while addressing its inevitability and thereby moving within its space.   He seeks to restore feeling to his viewers, to bring make them face the "violence and misery" without simply representing it for their voyeuristic gratification.   Rather he negotiates its effects, its everyday aftershocks.   This section of his speech--tellingly abridged in the Turin catalogue--Kentridge called "White Guilt, Come Home."

CHARGED

"The in- and outflowing waves of the current, dreamy and lullaby- heimlich ."

  Given as an exemplary usage in Daniel Sanders's definition of Heimlich , cited in its entirety by Sigmund Freud in "The 'Uncanny'" 6

Newspapers, as Walter Benjamin knew, remove their readers from the events they describe, serving to provide the illusion of connectivity.   They cushion, they soften reality's blows.   One of Kentridge's photographs of Johannesburg's outskirts reproduced (without explanatory text) in his retrospective's catalogue shows a woman lying in bed at home, her walls covered with newspapers, wallpaper presumably doubling as makeshift insulation.   (White guilt, come home?)   The newspaper emerges only obliquely in Medicine Chest , taking the form of disembodied headlines, but receives more explicit and sustained treatment in Tide Table (2003), Kentridge's most recent "drawing for projection."   While working on Tide Table , Kentridge wrote identified an anecdotal piece of news as one of his points of departure: "A story reported from the eastern coast of the country.   A child drowned in the sea.   So a cow was driven into the waves and made to swim out to sea.   (I do not have details of the event.   But I think I want to draw the cow swimming out to sea.)" 7  The work, which premiered in Turin and was subsequently shown, from March 4 to April 10, at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, consists of approximately fifty drawings--again, photographed, minutely altered, and re-photographed, seemingly ad infinitum , then assembled in video montage to create a halting but continuous eight-minute animation.  

At first, the viewer sees only cliffs and sand and a calm sea: It could be any coastline.   Then gradually bungalows, beach chairs, and breaking waves come into view.   Soho Eckstein, the pinstriped protagonist of Kentridge's most celebrated films, an apartheid-era industrial tycoon, (re)appears, leaning pensively over a hotel balcony, wielding, without meaning to, his gaze of power.   Solitary, Soho descends to the shore to read his morning paper, in one quadrant= of which the daily (titular) "TIDE TABLE" is shown.   (Kentridge has thematized modes of measurement, especially in its state-sanctioned guises, in Felix in Exile , among other works.)   The graph quickly comes to occupy the entire frame, after a gradual zoom by means of which Kentridge foregrounds the (video-recording) camera's presence, as he does at several points during the course of the film.   He employs horizontal and diagonal pans as well as zooms, elements new to his animation, to expose the "apparatus" subtending his work more explicitly than he has previously done.   The graph--the tide table--soon takes on a life of their own, undulating and intersecting rhythmically.   (Animated, they become animate.)   The viewer soon realizes that they, too, are waves, corresponding somehow, strangely, even in their two-dimensionality, to the ebb and flow at Soho's feet.   Intermittently, newspaper titles come into view, sometimes accompanied by times and dates: "Minimum Indolence," "Provisional Purchase," "Sale in Execution."   They serve as intertitles of sorts, akin to Medicine Chest 's fragmented headlines, bespeak the cryptic cruelties and the alienations of the market economy.   Soho himself (magnate that he is) has a drawn-photographic cameo in the daily.

To the sounds of Franco's "Likambo Ya Ngana" (1972), a piece of instrumental, up-tempo indigenous jazz punctuated by a recurring adagio choral dirge, the businessman falls asleep in his beach chair, behind his broadsheet.   Whereupon his surroundings are slowly but surely activated, either in some increasingly vivid dream of Soho's or in a reality to which he remains oblivious.   At one point, a black woman, with her back (drawn) to the camera, soothes the sleeping visitor, her humming "lullaby- heimlich ."   The resort bungalows behind Soho are suddenly seen in cross section.   One beach chair, suddenly animate, begins to dance.   Beside it, another one breaks.   Cattle appear within the structures-on-sand, in one instance as the miraculous yield of an indoor shower's droplets.   The cows are drowned, slaughtered, and summarily hung on meat racks by some invisible hands.   More cattle die out at sea, their carcasses washed ashore.   Time, or dream-time, passes more and more rapidly, more and more relentlessly.   A child builds a sandcastle, then pushes a playmate in a wheelbarrow.   Back in the bungalows, hospital beds begin to accumulate, unbeknownst to Soho.   They are filled to overflowing; they darken.   Apparent AIDS patients abound.   Some are carried in on a wheelbarrow--no longer a toy, now a tool, an ad hoc wheelchair.   The once-empty on-shore shacks can no longer accommodate the sick and dying.   All the while, these figures, expiring or barely breathing, leave their trademark traces.

A solemn baptismal procession follows on the heels of this suffering.   A cross and a Star of David adorn the backs of two neighbouring ocean-goers' garments.   Two bare black feet, in (drawn) close-up, tread heavily on a discarded newspaper in the sand.   The papers that remain are blown away in the wind, just as death comes to claim a victim nearby--one who couldn't find room indoors.   His body is taken by the tide.   Its remnants, however, are transformed: A wheelbarrow remains in his resting place.   And with the (second) recurrence of this implement, its reappearance as an anonymous memorial manifest in the literal wake of an all too avoidable death, Kentridge underlines his film's "message," again undeliverable.   Tide Table seeks to make the weight of all human suffering--and of all bystanding --felt.   The film's metamorphoses, chief among them the transformation of the dead body into the wheelbarrow-- vehicle, if not beast, of burden--lay bare and attempt to convey the magnitude of bystanderly responsibility, even as they register the partnership of play and peril, laughter and death.   (In the room adjoining Tide Table and its mining of indigence and immunodeficiency, Kentridge could be seen playing and playing the magician on screen in his homages to Georges Meliès.)   The work's tidal rhythms--the dirge that follows on the heels of the dance--evoke an eternal return and cyclical time of degeneration and regeneration.   But they do not call for a surrender or foreclose intervention; they call for some action, however unheroic.   They call for a stone-casting or for a drawing.

At last, just awake, Soho Eckstein looks through a pair of binoculars whose lenses blink with the closing and opening of his own eyes.   The apparatus thus bears the bodily imprint and comportment of its wielder, just Kentridge foregrounds, in his animated works, his own relentless, bodily back-and-forth on foot, his trips from the drawing to the camera and back again. 8  The artist incorporates the purportedly neutral technologies of power in order to expose their partiality.   Still brooding, still alone, and still absurdly pinstriped, Soho casts a stone out to sea, beneath cliffs and crags that themselves (it dawns on the viewer) may once have been bodies.   Thus, Medicine Chest and Tide Table alike reveal Kentridge's to be a rigorously ethical art,    a charged art that charges, that reaches out--in an age of outreach and at a time of outsourcing--precisely in its inwardness.

NOTES

1 Friedman, Thomas L. "The silver lining of outsourcing overseas." International Herald Tribune 27 February 2004. 6.

2 For an account and interpretation of this procedure, see Rosalind Krauss. "'The Rock': William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection." October 92 (Spring 2000), 3-35.

3 Reproduced in William Kentridge . ex. cat. Milan: Skira, 2004. 38

4 So Katy Siegel characterizes the la test phase in the "evolution" of the artist's work, echoing Krauss and others in what is now a commonplace.   I would argue, however, that is this very "push," presumably unidirectional, into the formal (as it has been lapped up by critics and curators worldwide) that Medicine Chest complicates and seems to redirect without necessarily reversing.   See "William Kentridge" in the "Preview Winter 2004" feature, Artforum January 2004, 79.

5William Kentridge ex. cat. 69.

6 Freud, Sigmund. "The 'Uncanny.'"

7William Kentridge ex. cat. 201.

8 See Krauss. "'The Rock.'"