Terra Nulla: Contesting the South African Colonial Landscape

Miriam Aronowicz, University of Toronto To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld. Each time one of us touches the soil of this land, we feel a sense of personal renewal. The national mood changes as the seasons change. We are moved by a sense of joy and exhilaration when the grass turns green and the flowers bloom. That spiritual and physical oneness we all share with this common homeland explains the depth of the pain we all carried in our hearts as we saw our country tear itself apart in a terrible conflict, and as we saw it spurned, outlawed and isolated by the peoples of the world, precisely because it has become the universal base of the pernicious ideology and practice of racism and racial oppression.

- Nelson Mandela, Inauguration Address, Pretoria, South Africa, 10 May 1994

When one speaks of landscape, or a landscape tradition, it is generally in reference to the

European concept of placing land at a distance in order to look upon it. The term does not have

an equivalent in any of the indigenous South African languages.i Nonetheless, landscape, land,

and habitat are indelibly connected to the South African psyche and sense of place. Yet

landscape as a field of artistic inquiry is still dominated by European models. Therefore, the

African landscapes that most commonly circulate are generally pastoral or plantation scenes

created by Europeans for Western audiences, or images embedded with a problematic colonial

gaze. Unquestionably, these types of work are crucial to the larger narrative but their over

representation continues to bolster the myths of the colonial imagination while reinforcing a

primitive paradigm. The notion that non-western peoples are marginal to the advancing world

and remain represented, collected, and studied as distantly eroded cultures of the past is what

James Clifford calls the “salvage/pastoral setup,” something this paper aims to avoid.ii

i Jennifer Beningfield, The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2006), 229. ii James Clifford, “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,” in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 122.

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Essentially always an “instrument or agent of cultural power,” landscape is now accepted

as an active rather than passive entity.iii The postmodernization of the field has demonstrated that

issues of race, class, and gender are always interwoven and encoded into the physical terrain.iv

Thereby, any image of landscape is always a representation of itself and simultaneously an

image of something else.v

Far before the establishment of any South African landscape tradition, South Africa’s

problematic history of segregation was intimately tied to the nationalization of nature. Hence, the

remnant of a hedge of almonds that now stands in Cape Town’s Kirstenbosch Gardens remains

one of the most pertinent symbols of the land’s relationship to imperial power. The story of the

hedge begins in 1660 when the first settler Jan van Riebeek planted it. Initially the Khoikhoi,

who inhabited the land upon the Dutch arrival, willingly traded their sheep and cattle for the

tobacco and copper offered to them by the Dutch East India Company. In 1659 when the

Khoikhoi realized that the Dutch settlement was a permanent encroachment on their land they

attacked the settlements in fierce resistance. The conflict led Jan van Riebeek to plant the nine-

kilometer long wild almond hedge to protect the Dutch settlement from the “African Hottentots.”

Only granting the Khoikhoi limited access to the land through select checkpoints along the

hedge’s borders, the almond hedge became the epitome of landscape as a tool of social control.

David Goldblatt’s photograph of this tangled semi-tended bush belies what is namely a

cordon sanitaire, the original symbol of oppression and containment that characterized the South

African landscape.vi The historical specificity of his title, Remnant of a hedge planted in 1660 to

iii W.J.T. Mitchell, introduction to Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1-2. 4 Dianne Harris, “The Postmodernization of Landscape: A Critical Historiography,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58:3 (1999): 435. Harris describes the postmodernization of landscape as a broad range of theoretical developments that include semiotic and linguistic theories which stress the contextualization of texts, feminist and postcolonial theories which focus on the margins of society; poststructuralism works to unmask the pretended neutrality of a space, as well as variations of theories of relativism and Marxism. See Harris, 435. v .J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscapes,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T Mitchell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 8. Wvi Okwui Enwezor, “The Enigma of the Rainbow Nation: Contemporary South African Art at the Crossroads of History,” in Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, ed. Sophie Perryer (New York: Museum for African Art, 2004), 28.

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keep the indigenous Khoikhoi out of the first European settlement in South Africa (1993), also

clearly illustrates Mitchell’s argument that the image of landscape is essentially always a

representation of something else. In this example it becomes the symbol for the intersections of

land, space, place, and power that defined South Africa for centuries.

To quote Michel de Certeau, for the purpose of this paper “space is a practiced place.”vii

In addition, Irit Rogoff states that “power produces a space which then gets materialized as

place.”viii Thus, essentially the South African landscape is a place that becomes an activated

space through movement, narration, symbolism, and signs. Since the end of apartheid, the South

African landscape legally became a shared place. This paper begins to address the ways in which

modern and contemporary South African artists use the land as a tool to renegotiate space and

place in the country’s post-apartheid terrain. Beginning with South Africa’s early colonial

landscape tradition and moving on to consider South Africa’s most prominent contemporary

artist, William Kentridge, I explore landscapes as spaces of memory. Departing from the early

colonial landscapes artists’ problematic renderings of space, I address how contemporary artists

reclaim the genre, finding their own tools and languages with which to speak to the land and

reactivate its sites of trauma.

The trajectory of South African colonial landscape art is often compared to the colonial

art of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.ix Its national landscapes are problematic

constructions of colonial spaces rendered through naturalized idyllic and emptied nature. The

earliest documented landscape paintings in the western sense of the term date to the arrival of the

first South African settlers in 1652, and were basically travelogues and documentary images of

vii W.J.T. Mitchell, preface to Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), x. viii Irit Rogoff, introduction to Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), 22. ix For more information see Annie E. Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

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the new uncharted lands.x As the tradition of landscape painting began to gain prominence in

Europe, documents began to emerge indicating an artistic crisis in the colonies. According to

nineteenth-century sources there was an inability to locate established European painting

conventions within the new African terrain.

One of the first explorers to leave a comprehensive account of his experience in the vast

hinterland of South Africa was the British researcher and painter William Burchell. Arriving at

the Cape of Good Hope between 1811 and 1813, his initial stop was in the place that is now the

Botanic Gardens, on which he commented:

The view from this spot…is the most picturesque of any I had seen in the vicinity of Cape Town. The beauties here displayed to the eye could scarcely be represented by the most skillful pencil; for this landscape possessed a character that would require the combined talents of a Claude and a Both.xi

His initial reactions to the South African landscape are recorded only in words, yet in the

words of an enthusiast whose first descriptions seemed to have located the Western tradition of

the picturesque. Yet, as soon as Burchell left Cape Town his writing changed, showing

disenchantment with the “desolate, wild and singular landscape,” that characterized the majority

of the land. He writes, “in Africa we look in vain for those mellow beautiful tints with which the

sun dyes the forests of England.”xii Thus, despite his initial exposure to the land, the majority of

Africa did not correspond with the established conventions of the British picturesque. According

to Burchell it was missing the deep greens that characterized northern European landscapes, the

foliage lacked luster because of the dry climate, the light was too bright and the absence of water

created a lack of reflective surfaces and atmospheric moisture. The significance of Burchell’s

x For the purpose of this paper I am beginning the history of landscape tradition in South Africa with the first European settlement. Yet, as a disclaimer, that is not to say that the history prior to the settlement is not worth studying. There are studies on South African indigenous San Rock Art which point to a long-standing tradition of art on the continent prior to the first settlement. It is in this spirit, that despite that starting point of my study I caution against the long standing view that history begins once the continent is colonized, and the problematic tendency to view the colonized people as not inhabiting history but as living in some type of anterior prehistoric time. xi J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 36. xii Ibid.

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observations locate him as one of the earliest painters to note that African landscape called for a

modified European picturesque in order to become desirable for European eyes.xiii

Ten years after the arrival of Burchell, the English romantic writer Thomas Pringle also

arrived at the Cape of Good Hope. His writings demonstrate the first attempts to adapt British

notions of the picturesque to the local conditions, essentially turning the South African landscape

into a transitional object, a landscape of transactions between metropolitan conventions and

colonial conditions.xiv For example, the Encampment in the Great Namaqua Country is an

image that is ordered by the syntax of the picturesque yet imagines Le Vaillant in a parkland

environment pursuing the aristocratic activity of hunting. He stands in the foreground as a

symbol of modernity overlooking a colonial village scene, the antithesis of everything he stands

for, the pre-modern and the exotic. The African community is represented as a background

spectacle, seen from a safe distance but still clearly falling under Le Vaillant’s domain. It is

within this transitional space that the politics of representation and spatialization truly merge for

the first time within the formal conventions of the picturesque.

Following the establishment of this modified picturesque, a trajectory begins with images

of battle scenes against the indigenous, followed by battles against the animals, until we are

finally left with an empty idealized landscape.xv Considered the fathers of South African

landscape painting, the canonical works of J.H. Pierneef and Jan Ernst Abraham Volschenk

epitomize the height of this colonial tradition. Pierneef’s altered cubism and Volschenk’s

naturalism both present the South African landscape as visions of pure, idyllic nature, and more

significantly a land with no trace of history and empty of inhabitants. Hence, the absence of the

xiii Ibid. xiv David Bunn, “Our Wattled Cot: Mercantile and Domestic Space in Thomas Pringle’s African Landscapes,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T.Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 136. xv Dan Cameron, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and J.M Coetzee, William Kentridge (London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1999), 109.

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native from its land reinforces Mitchell’s assertion of the landscape as a construction directly

associated with European imperialism.xvi

The colonial spaces that Pierneef and Volschenk portray in their landscapes are the terra

incognita and the terra nulla.xvii The terra incognita is the recurring colonial myth that the land

is empty upon discovery, what de Certeau famously described as the non-place, from which all

history then begins.xviii Hence, Pierneef’s painting of Rustenburgkloof is an empty space, there

are no visual markers of trauma or signs of the displacement of people from the sites he paints.

Moreover, the colonial space is also terra nulla, a carte blanche, an empty landscape scene, an

open background on which progress and modernization begins.

The reclamation of space in contemporary South African landscape painting begins from

the terra incognita and terra nulla of colonial paintings. The colonial space is empty, but not

devoid of meaning. Thus, the role of the contemporary landscape artist is to reactivate the

meaning and memories from within these voids. Starting with de Certeau’s non-place many

contemporary South African artists are beginning counter-histories, post-memories of

traumatographyxix onto the space of the land emptied through colonial art history.

The end of apartheid opened up the types of spaces that artists could access in their

representation of the land. Under the official laws of segregation some of South Africa’s most

admired and represented landscapes, for example the view of Table Bay, became fundamentally

inaccessible to any non-white artist.xx Thus, for the black artists working near the end of

apartheid, the places they painted were often spaces of “intangible heritage.”xxi For the artists

xvi Mitchell, 5. xvii Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 356. xviii Ibid. xix The term ‘traumatography’ is taken from Enwezor’s discussion of the monument and memorial in “The Enigma of the Rainbow Nation,” 25. xx David Koloane, “Moments in Art,” in Seven Stories: About Modern Art in Africa, edited by Clémentine Deliss (Paris: Flammarrion, 1995), 150. xxi The term ‘Intangible Heritage’ has been referred to by Phakamani Buthelezi of the South African Heritage Agency and is taken from Jennifer Beningfield, The Frightened Land: Land Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2006), 276.

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working from contained urban settlements, the displaced homeland became a hybrid site of

violence and memory, a space only accessible through imagination.

Images such as Kevin Atkinson’s White African Landscape represent the imagination as

an alternative site of resistance and reclamation of space. Atkinson was an artist of the Thupelo

Art Projects, a group initiated in the early 1980s by artist, curator, and critic David Koloane and

the late Bill Ainslie. The Thupelo Art Projects were workshops based on the Triangle Workshop

in New York City, initially aimed at widening the scope of artists working under apartheid by

providing them with the opportunity to produce original art. At first, the workshop focused on an

Abstract Expressionist technique, and many of its earliest participants created works within this

stylistic framework.xxii It was a unique movement because it was one of the first black art

movements within South Africa that broke from categories of primitivism, negritude and the

romantic colonial perceptions of “the homeland.”xxiii

Landscape was an integral theme to many of the works produced in the Thupelo Art

Projects, and it is hardly surprising that the black South African artists working under apartheid,

unlike Pierneef and Volschenk, were not concerned with nature in its splendor but with the

common urban landscapes of deprivation that they were accustomed to. Norman Catherine’s

Animal Instinct is an example of the dehumanizing social space that apartheid townships became.

His rows upon rows of monotonous, uniform, gray abstract shapes create a partially figurative

abstract expression of the dreary landscape of segregated settlements.

Thus, to return to the words of Edward Said, for black artists working under the

oppressive apartheid regime the imagination became the alternative site for habitation.

xxii The Thupelo Art Projects were heavily criticized for its mimicry of Abstract Expressionism. The criticisms were similar to those put forth by Franz Fanon that the colonized intellectual who borrows from the language of his oppressor/imperialism is nothing more than a ‘vulgar opportunist.’ See Franz Fanon, “On National Culture: Mutual Foundations for National Culture and Liberation Struggles,” in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 160. xxiii Koloane, 275.

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Reclaiming “geographic identity” linked the violence and isolation of a physical space with a

stable space created in the mind.xxiv For these artists, unlike the early canonical landscape

painters, representations of imagined landscapes were never pure empty spaces, for they were

always overlaid with dreams, visions, memories and constructions. The Thupelo Art Projects and

other black art movements working under apartheid reclaimed the landscape genre as their own

space of cultural negotiation. The images created by artists like Atkinson and Catherine present a

counter memory to the landscape portrayed in the images by Pierneef and Volschenk. Drawing

on the language of Abstract Expressionism, these artists activate the land as a fundamentally

psychological space, beyond its physical borders, the South African land became a space and

symbol of trauma, torture, and suppression.

Working at the same time as the artists of the Thupelo Art Projects, albeit in a very

different style, is the artist William Kentridge. Like the aforementioned artists, Kentridge dealt

with the common references of space, place, and landscape, and similarly felt he was working

against a tradition with which he could not identify.xxv But as a white Jewish male of European

identity, Kentridge falls into Homi K, Bhabha’s conception of the Third Space, a site between

the oppositions of self/other and colonizer/colonized.xxvi Unlike Atkinson or Catherine,

Kentridge was not oppressed, yet as a staunch anti-apartheid activist he was technically n

an oppressor. To complicate matters further, he felt a palpable irony as a South African Jew, a

identity that was historically oppressed but by racial association now linked to the oppressor.

Essentially, Kentridge occupied an interesting space characterized by a “double bind.”

either

n

xxvii

xxiv Beningfield, 229. xxv When asked about his own memories of South African landscapes Kentridge replied, “I felt that the landscape around me was a lie, as if I had been cheated. Rather than growing up thinking that these green hills in that book [a book on European landscape painting] were a fiction, I believed they were real. The South African landscape wasn’t less real; it was more like a disaster zone. When I first started drawing I depicted the local landscapes I knew, rather than those utopian lush landscape faraway.” Taken from Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev and Coetzee. xxvi habha, The Location of Culture, 218. Bxxvii Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge (Turin: Skira Editore S.p.A. and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte, 2004), 31.

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As an artist of this Third Space, Kentridge represents the South African landscape with a

“critical language of duality.”xxviii Hence, his mimicry of the pastoral landscape tradition

hybridized with elements of Abstract Expressionism, creates a style that falls within the

interstitial space of Africa and the West. Kentridge deliberately uses Western landscape

conventions and styles as a reflexive tool to think critically about Africa. If the early colonial

landscape painters shaped the national memory of the South African landscape, Kentridge, like

many of his contemporaries, works to reclaim these spaces. Yet, Kentridge’s renegotiation of the

contested African landscape occurs within a Third Space both in his role as an artist and in the

styles he employs, a place where he is effectively able to speak to the other without relinquishing

his own language and tradition.

Landscape prevails throughout most of Kentridge’s oeuvre. Yet, the logical starting point

for any exploration of his work on landscape is his 1995 charcoal on paper series titled Colonial

Landscapes (figs. 1 and 2). These landscapes refer to the early colonial illustrations created for

European audiences desiring images of a lush, distant, and exotic Africa. Kentridge reproduces

this place yet simultaneously renegotiates their space, suggesting that these nostalgic visions of

Africa were neither realized nor possible.

His starting point is the image Falls of an African River (fig. 3), taken from the

nineteenth century publication, Africa and its Exploration as told by its Explorers. Kentridge’s

Falls of an African River is an almost identical recreation of the colonial image on a larger scale

with charcoal rather than ink. On top of the landscape he adds red surveyor’s marks demarcating

the colonial projections onto the land, as well their sites of pillage, plunder and even murder. The

xxviii Bhabha, 218.

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landscape Kentridge represents is a place that is not neutral but both a witness and victim of

South Africa’s tormented history.xxix

While both images are of the same waterfall, Kentridge alters the physical structure of the

terrain. In the contemporary work the falls have thinned out and a plateau juts into the

foreground of the image. Hence, Kentridge is demonstrating how colonialism not only shaped

the country’s psyche but also its physical land through traces of mining, civil engineering and

resource extraction. Therefore, many of the landforms that are taken for granted as natural are

actually social constructions, left over mine dumps, tailings, and culverts. In Kentridge’s words,

“it has become clear that the variety of the ephemera of human intervention on the landscape is

far greater than anything the land itself has to offer.”xxx

To paraphrase Simon Schama, national identity is bolstered by the mystiques of its

particular landscape traditions.xxxi Hence, Kentridge’s landscapes are deliberate deconstructions

of the colonial landscapes initiated by the first settlers and culminating with the works of

Pierneef and Volschenk. Since national identity becomes linked to a country’s particular

landscape traditions, by activating the colonial site and problematizing its neutrality Kentridge is

able to consequently question South African identity. For Kentridge the original colonial

landscapes, what he calls “paintings in a state of grace,” are deliberate acts of

“disremembering.”xxxii Kentridge tactfully employs the term “disremembering” rather than

forgetting, because it signals an active agency to paint over the truth, to create and manipulate

history. To return to Irit Rogoff’s conception mentioned earlier, if power creates space and is

then materialized as place, “disremembering” is the way those in power created neutral spaces

xxix Staci Boris, “The Process of Change: Landscape, Memory, Animation and Felix in Exile.” in William Kentridge, ed. Michael Sittenfeld (New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), 24. xxx Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev and Coetzee, 110. xxxi Simon Schama, introduction to Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 15. xxxii Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev and Coetzee, 109.

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and consequently, landscape as impartial places. Even without human intervention the land is

always only a provisional reservoir of memory and history, for the state of landscape is in a

constant flux, it continuously regenerates and grows over itself, and over the weeks, months and

years the terrain hides its own history.xxxiii

It is not a coincidence that the Colonial Landscape series was created in 1995, the same

year South Africa began to deconstruct its national history of apartheid with the beginning of

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, an assembly that was seen as crucial to the transition of

South Africa into a democratic state. Kentridge’s drawings echo the political climate of their

time, and the idea that memories and myths must be exposed and recorded before South Africa

can become a democratic space.

The surveyor marks that Kentridge draws onto his Colonial Landscapes are a means of

activating space as a site of social, economic, and political intersection. They are “deliberate

attempts to move away from the plague of the picturesque.”xxxiv Hence, to use Emily Apter’s

term, Kentridge works less in “landscape” than in the genre of the radical pastoral, an art

informed by geopolitics and ecologically engaged conceptualism.xxxv According to Apter,

Kentridge creates images of “critical habitats,” sites where economics and finance are embedded

into the aesthetic signifying practices. His works embody “a concept that explores the links

between territorial habitat and intellectual habitus, between physical place and ideological

forcefield, between economy and ecology.”xxxvi

Furthermore, Kentridge’s “critical habitats” begin to represent this very crisis of

objectivity that Bruno Latour claims characterizes political ecology today. This crisis is defined

xxxiii Boris, 38. xxxiv id., 22. Ibxxxv Emily Apter, “The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats,” October 99 (Winter 2002): 21. xxxvi Ibid., 21.

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by the shifting of matters of fact into matters of concern.xxxvii For instance, in the initial waterfall

rendering these peaceful spaces are simply matters of fact, objective snap shots of the land, yet

years later, when Kentridge revisits these sites he reclaims these spaces as matters of concern.

Sites that were at one time seemingly neutral are now deeply problematic. Although the matters

of fact/risk free objects are created as objective things with a well-defined essence, after a certain

time these objects sometimes have unexpected consequences. Yet these cataclysmic results have

no retroactive effects on the object’s responsibilities, and those who activated or created these

objects remain invisible. The red markings in Kentridge’s works can be seen as illustrating

Latour’s warning that the proliferation of matters of concern can lead to an ecological crisis.

Latour specifically uses asbestos as the ideal example of a risk free object that is now a

matter of concern. To quote the author, “it was a perfect substance, at once inert, effective, and

profitable. It took decades before the public health consequences of its diffusion were finally

attributed to it…once an ideal inert material; it became a nightmarish imbroglio of law, hygiene

and risk.”xxxviii The case of asbestos is especially relevant to the study of South Africa’s

landscape history because of the extensive mining of blue asbestos within the region. David

Goldblatt quite literally represents the ecological crisis that the risk free, asbestos, has created for

South Africa. Two of his most powerful images dealing with the subject are Blue asbestos fibers

on a tailings dump at the Owendale Asbestos Mine. The mine has closed but its waste remains.

One of these fibers inhaled by a susceptible person could cause fatal cancer and Fernando

Augusto Luta washes his clothes while Augusto Mokinda, Ze Jano, and Ze Ndala pose for a

photograph in the water in which they swim in a disused mineshaft of the Pomfret Blue Asbestos

Mine, Pomfret, Northern Cape, 25 December 2002. Goldblatt’s titles succinctly summarize the

xxxvii Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 22. xxxviii Ibid., 23.

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content of his images and blatantly illustrate Latour’s argument. Furthermore, if Kentridge marks

off a certain place in the land with a red line, cross, x or dot, Godlblatt’s images serve as

figurative representations of the types of spaces that Kentridge is activating.

This crisis of objectivity points to the correlations between the changing characteristics of

landscapes and the course of memory, and Kentridge’s interests in these processes likewise lead

him to animation, an art form in constant motion.xxxix The later half of this paper will explore

Kentridge’s fifth animated film in his Drawings for Projection series, the film Felix in Exile. The

film unites the experiences of the white, melancholic, observer Felix Teitlebaum with one of

Kentridge’ s new characters Nandi, a black woman who surveys the land. The always-nude Felix

occupies an enclosed space that is refereed to as a hotel room in Paris,xl while Nandi travels

within the East Rand, an area near Johannesburg once used for mining. Nandi’s role is that of the

surveyor of the land. She draws pictures of what she sees, emphasizing the human interventions

on the land and marking these sites of violence with the same red markers the Kentridge uses in

his Colonial Landscape series. Felix remains isolated in the interior space of his hotel room

bonded to Nandi through her sketches of the land. There is a moment in the film when the two

characters converge as Felix looks into the mirror while shaving. Felix’s mirror image is

replaced by Nandi’s face, met eye to eye through a double-ended telescope. It is at this moment

that Felix’s vision shifts to the East Rand. The bond between Nandi and Felix grows stronger

until the moment Nandi is shot, falling to the ground her body merges into the earth leaving

nothing but a heap of dirt, rocks, wood, and steel poles. She succumbs to the same fate as the

countless nameless victims before her. At this point Felix is transported from his room into deep

xxxix Boris, 31. xl One knows Felix’s room is a hotel room in Paris because of a reference to location in a previous film from Drawings for Projection. Staci Boris notes that the source for Felix’s room was a photograph of Kasimir Malevich’s group exhibition (fig. 14 in Boris) for the Suprematist and Constructivist movements, which was a symbol of the ultimate utopian hope for the power of art to change official politics. (See Staci Boris for a further discussion).

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water flushed over Nandi’s remains. The film ends with Felix staring off into the distant

landscape even more alone and helpless than ever.

One of the reoccurring images in the film is the disintegration of bodies into the land,

leaving nothing more than traces of rocks, puddles of water, and other ambiguous markings.

With these images Kentridge is exploring landscape’s ability to neutralize its own space, to hide

its trauma and to wash away its truths. He states, “the difficulty we have in …the way that

things that seem so indelibly imprinted on our memories become illusive, memory is mirrored in

the way in which the terrain itself cannot hold onto the events played upon it.”xli Kentridge’s

film is a traumatography of the land, the writing of forgotten trauma back into the space in whic

it occurred.

h

In the words of Julia Kristeva, “the corpse seen without God and outside of science, is the

utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.”xlii Drawing on the pictorial traditions of

Goya and Mantegna the images of the corpse, the abject, lie scattered throughout the East Rand.

Since the abject, the corpse, is death infecting life, and for Kentridge the land is the life upon

which death lies, then the body’s absorption into the land literally represents death infecting the

strata of land. Whether or not the natural patterns of growth blot out the bloodstains and the

traces of trauma, Kentridge is demonstrating that the land is contaminated through its history. He

is showing that before one is able to rebuild an equitable space within the land one must activate

the memory of the foundation that it is constructed upon. Furthermore, the abject is positioned

between the unconscious/conscious, and it manifests itself between the I/Other and the

Inside/Outside. In Felix in Exile, Kentridge explores how the land itself has become abject

through the merging of the corpse into the African soil. Thus, he is demonstrating how the land

xli Ibid. xlii Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

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is inseparable from its inhabitants, making it both subject and object much like conception of the

abject itself.

The preoccupation with the interiority of the landscape and imagery of the underground

extends back to the earliest colonial drawings and writing by settlers on the land.xliii By Western

European standards the African landscape was barren and empty, thus its meaning could never

come from its surface. “The poet scans the landscape with his hermeneutic gaze, but it remains

trackless, refuses to emerge into meaningless as a landscape of signs. He speaks, but the stones

are silent, they will not come to life.”xliv The image of the victims in Felix in Exile merging into

the ground and turning into piles of rocks, dust and dirt reference the early colonial visions of the

empty land. Yet, unlike the early settlers Kentridge finds ways to make these stones speak.

Hence, in Felix in Exile they speak as memorials in a space that was traditionally rendered silent.

The physical image of the stone then becomes the reoccurring symbol for memory and

land throughout Kentridge’s entire Drawing for Projection series.xlv In Felix in Exile, he

explores how the events that reoccur in the space of the land are sedimented into the p

constructions of the landscape. However, this connection is perhaps most evident in his later film

Weighing... and Wanting, which explores the reoccurring character Soho Eckstein, a cruel and

controlling mine owner working in Johannesburg. Weighing… and Wanting picks up from his

earlier film and continues the exploration of the mind as a geological metaphor.

hysical

xlvi Here the

images of Soho’s scanned brain transform into porous rock. The layers of his memory stratify

into layers of stone like fossilized records of past histories, a quite literal representation of the

links between memory and land that Kentridge explores in his earlier work. There is the idea that

xliii Coetzee, 9. xliv Ibid. xlv While the stone as memory is a powerful symbol for Kentridge, the links between strata of rock and strata of memory are not unique to his work. Simon Schama prefaces his book Landscape and Memory with a similar conception stating that, “before it can ever be a repose for the sense, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.” xlvi Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev and Coetzee, 71.

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Soho’s interior life, like the mineral wealth he has accumulated, requires excavation.xlvii Again,

this reinforces Apter’s notion of the “critical habitat,” and the inability to reactivate the memory

of the land without awareness of its economic and political spatial constructions.

To return to Felix in Exile, Kentridge also activates political memories of the land

through his character Nandi, the female observer. As a surveyor and documenter of the landscape

Nandi’s drawings become the tools with which Felix accesses the land. She views the land

through a telescope, a tool of observation, turning the empty landscape into a space of

surveillance. Nandi’s place in the land points to the panoptical structures of colonial spaces.

Kentridge refuses to see the “empty” African landscape as a terra nulla but as an ultimate space

of control.

By contrast, Felix, who sits isolated in his hotel room, observes the land inconspicuously.

He represents the archetypal passive observer, the person who inhabits the ambiguous space

between victim and perpetrator. His bunker mentality lasts until the moment that he is confronted

by Nandi through a double-edged telescope as he stands shaving in front of the mirror. At this

point there is a general breakdown in boundaries with respect to the landscape: pictures of South

Africa begin to float around the room, Nandi’s landscape sketches start to infiltrate the space and

water pours through the mirror until his room is ultimately flooded. This fateful moment of

mirror identification signals the breakdown between the internal spaces of the mind, which are

represented by Felix in his enclosed room, and the outer landscape of the earth that Nandi

inhabits. This moment is a literal representation of Lacan’s mirror stage, the moment at which

the I (ego) is formed as an ideal self-sufficient entity.xlviii Felix’s Innenwalt, his inner world,

thoughts and memories become dialectically connected to the umwelt, the outer world, the

xlvii Ibid., xlviii Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 97.

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landscape, the environment, through the moment he looks into the mirror and sees Nandi’s face

gazing back at him.

Felix in Exile was created in 1994 the same year that South Africa held its first

democratic elections after apartheid. “This blurred distinction between self and other, experience

by Felix in the fateful moment of mirror-identification, serves as an apt metaphor for the civic

transformation that the nation was about to undergo, in which the color line, previously the all-

important factor in determining one’s status, would all but vanish as a legal issue.”xlix Thus,

Felix in Exile is a film in which Kentridge explores how the dichotomy of self and other is a

division linked to the land, its space and who has the power to create it as place.

While Kentridge works in a variety of media, both his works on paper and animated films

are often created by drawing with charcoal. In the words of the artist:

First, the drawing doesn’t being as a moral project; it starts from the pleasure of putting charcoal marks on paper. You immediately see two things: a sheet of paper with charcoal and dust across its surface, and the evocation of a landscape with a dark sky. There is a simple alchemy in the transformation of the paper into something else, just as there is in filmmaking or any other work…Built into the very immediacy of drawing is both an evocation and a reflection or comment…The ethical or moral questions which are already in our heads seem to rise to the surface as a consequence of this process. Initially I just wanted to draw landscape, then I realized that the drawings, in themselves, evoked these larger questions.l

There is a strong emphasis on Kentridge’s process of drawing and the meanings that are

subconsciously manifested within these actions. He calls his process fortuna, the idea that his

drawing occupies a space in between pure chance and rational control.li The landscapes he

represents, like his technique of drawing, embody this element of fortuna, as well as being

amalgamations of natural chance and rational constructions. For Kentridge, drawing remains the

most effective way to create a language that is suitable for representing the critical terrain.

xlix Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev and Coetze, 86. l Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev and Coetzee, 119. li Kentridge defines his process of Fortuna in his artists writings found in Cameron, Christov-Bkargiev and Coetzee’s monograph William Kentridge, 118.

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Kentridge’s animations are derivatives of his drawings. Thus, his films are not animated

movies but Drawings for Projection. His process of animation is essentially a projection of

twenty to twenty-five frames while recording his successive phases of drawing onto the paper,

ultimately generating the sense of a single work. In Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of Kentridge’s

animations she refers to his technique as a paradigm of the palimpsest, the creation of diverse

layers of meaning hidden within the larger image.lii Through Kentridge’s style of drawing over

and erasing the charcoal markings on his projections, he creates an image of history built from a

multi-layered collage of meaning, with no single central truth. In his words, “arriving at the

image is a process, not a frozen instant. There may be a vague sense of what you are going to

draw but things occur during the process the may modify it.”liii The palimpsest becomes a means

for Kentridge to further formally reinforce his content. Henceforth, the landscape itself is a

palimpsest, a repository of meaning with no central truth, composed of multiple layers of growth,

overgrowth and erasure.

Clearly, the palimpsest is an effective tool for Kentridge to reclaim the South African

landscape tradition as a site of critical inquiry. As an abstract form implying a residue, it is

neither subject nor object. According to Krauss, it disperses the field of the subject, leaving only

traces of a series of events it disenables anything we might call an object. “The palimpsest, we

could say, is thus the emblematic form of the temporal and as such it is the abstraction of

narrative, of history of biography – the latter implying a subject seen not from its own point of

view but from that of the third, objectivized viewer, an outsider.”liv Thus, the palimpsest is the

ideal tool for an artists like Kentridge, an artist of the Third Space, for it presents a third position

outside the dichotomies of subject/object that he continuously negotiates. It becomes a way to

lii Krauss, “The Rock,” 21. liii Cameron, Christov-Bakargiev and Coetzee, William Kentridge, 118. liv Krauss elaborates on the ideas put forth by Benjamin Bucholz, 24.

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create a new abstract language with which one can begin to renegotiate space in a temporal

dimension.

The power of Kentridge’s works lie in his ability to amalgamate simplistic style and form

with complex subject matter. In the age of technology and globalization he is an artist that

remains committed to the use of simplistic medium, charcoal and paper. His social realist and

expressionistic style is deliberately outmoded, yet there is an efficacy to the anachronistic spaces

he creates. He works against the global trends in contemporary art by returning to a style that is

seemingly exhausted. Although he is a cosmopolitan artist, in terms of his placement in the

market, museums and literature, he is in a sense still working from the periphery.lv But rather

than seeing this periphery as a marginalized space, it becomes the platform, “from which to see

universal themes – something which the so-called ‘centers’ now seem incapable of.”lvi

Contemporary South African landscapes are faced with the task of reclaiming a place that

for years was a space of disremembering. In the postcolonial context the terra nulla is being

reinscribed with meaning and memory, as different artists struggle to find their own language

with which they can speak to Africa. The renegotiation of landscape represents the heightened

awareness that, “space is fundamental in any form of communal life; Space is fundamental in

any exercise of power.”lvii Reclaiming and reinscribing the South African space with a counter

memory, or post memory, are ways these artists begin to reclaim their own histories. Like the

early colonial explorers, these artists are still attempting to speak the language of the landscape

without renouncing their own. And in order to effect this translation, their common reference

lv Periphery defined not only as a geographic location but also as a state of mind. See: Ian McLean, “Postcolonial Traffic: William Kentridge and Aboriginal Desert Painters,” Third Text 17.3 (September 2003): 227-240. lvi McLean, 233. lvii Max Andrews ed., Land Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, (London: Arts Council England, 2006), 202.

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henceforth makes an appeal to a language that cannot be found, a language at once very old, older than

Europe, but for that very reason to be invented once more.lviii

lviii Jacques Derrida, “Racism’s Last Word,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985), 294.

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Figures

Figure 1: William Kentridge, from Colonial Landscapes, 1995 – 1996, Charcoal and pastel on paper. 120 x 160 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Figure 2: William Kentridge, from Colonial Landscapes, 1995 – 1996, Charcoal and pastel on paper. 120 x 160 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Figure 3: William Kentridge, Falls of an African River from Colonial Landscapes, 1995 – 1996, Charcoal and pastel on paper. 120 x 160 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.

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