Indeed, this notion of the city as a site of contestation is possibly the one thing common to the way each generation has chosen to represent it: from Mongane Wally Serote’s ‘dry like death’ landscape of ‘neon flowers’ and ‘electrical wind’, and Warrick Sony’s paranoid dystopia peopled by ‘gentlemen in gun black suits’, to David Goldblatt’s restless tracing of its competing inhabitants across the length and breadth of the city over five decades.
In the visual arts it is arguably possible to trace a contemporary fascination with Johannesburg back to two major trailblazers: Goldblatt and William Kentridge. And as much as Kentridge’s focus has shifted away from direct engagement with the city in the past five or so years, during which he was concerned with Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose, a narrative of power gone awry in post-Revolutionary Russia, this latest show proves that his has always been a project of redefining the manner in which we make meaning of Johannesburg.
His most recent exhibition, ‘Other Faces’, shown at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg during November and December 2011, extends on the narrative terms established by films like Mine, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris and Felix in Exile. In those films, Kentridge pictures Johannesburg as a city of industry, but also as the backdrop against which apartheid’s death-throes and the accompanying social shift occurred. In this latest body of work, a film and the drawings used in its making, he returns to the dichotomous relationship between the city centre and its outskirts, and also between the races of its inhabitants.
Where the crowd in Kentridge’s films once functioned as a softened yet enveloping presence, moving across the landscape and through the city to deliver messages, sonic and visual, of resistance and paradigm shift, in Other Faces the crowd is less symbolic and more real: and really threatening for the figure of Soho Eckstein, who crashes his car against that of his black counterpart protagonist in the city centre. The CBD, which Randlords like Eckstein once dominated, has morphed into an altogether different landscape, someone else’s turf. The black, often foreign inhabitants now herald their presence with a new generation of signage - SURGERY DOKOTELA, HORN OF AFRICA and ADDIS ABABA WHOLESALE - and are none too pleased with Eckstein’s presence there. Their words spew forth in support of Eckstein’s rival, culminating in the appellation ‘You fucken white man!’
Some heavy-handed metaphors are deployed in this film: a text drawing with the words ‘Drawn Overdrawn’ is as much a self-conscious explication of Kentridge’s process as it is a play on the notion of fiscal imbalance. Similarly, the use of the ledger, with its unequivocal headings of Debit and Credit seems like a fairly obvious manner in which to signal post-apartheid social indebtedness and the paradigm shift.
And, of course, the perennial bugbear of Kentridge’s take on Johannesburg is his depiction of the black subject. Somehow, in a city where the contestation of which Von Holdt speaks is beginning to radically benefit many nouveau riche recipients, Kentridge continues to represent the black subject as downtrodden and embittered.
But ultimately the poetry of the sparse sections of the work, scored by Philip Miller’s music and soundscapes, makes the excesses forgivable. Kentridge’s gift, beyond his endlessly charming technique of animation, is in rendering the anonymous spaces of this fundamentally ugly city with reverence, gravitas and, dare I say it, beauty.
