A post-modern and post-structural reading of Drawings for Projection by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in her “In Conversation with William Kentridge,” (included in the publication William Kentridge, 1999)
deals with Drawings for Projection from a post-modern and post-structural point of view. In her interview, Christov-Bakargiev wants
to focus the reader’s attention on how Kentridge embraces at the same time the post-modern ideas of otherness, diversity, de-centering,
displacement, strangeness, the marginalized and the subaltern, and a post-structural approach in representing his South African
identity.

The theoretical approach of post-structuralism was developed out of a profound skepticism of total theory. The central idea argues
for a double articulation of said and unsaid of all texts, and looks specifically at the significant discourses surrounding the text as well
as those found within the text.  This approach has focused on some post-structural principles. First, the spectator’s identification and
reading of the work of art. Second, the importance of the context of a text: the social, cultural, and historical contexts. In this specific case,
the texts are the films that comprise the Drawings for Projection series, and the context is South Africa during apartheid and post-apartheid
time. South Africa’s political, historical and social milieu not only provided context for Kentridge’s works. He was highly critical of the events
that were being practiced in South Africa at the time of making these films.  Third, the post-structural principle that a text is never
transparent, innocent, or natural. Therefore it has to be deconstructed or unpacked in order to understand its modes of representation.
Fourth, a text contains no fixed meaning and is open to a multiplicity of interpretations.

Christov-Bakargiev has observed that Kentridge addresses uncertainty and process because they allow the Self to approach the world
with humility and openness to change, rather than with preconceptions and authority. He is able to avoid the authoritarian modern gaze,
the Panopticon , by splitting the Self into many different voices and identities: Soho, Felix, Nandi, Harry, etc.  Like his undefined drawing
style, these selves are never fixed, but constantly shifting, splitting, condensing and dividing.

Christov-Bakargiev continues focusing on how Kentridge contributed with his work to the conversation about ‘otherness’: local and
global, center and periphery asserting that the roots of today’s debate are the post-war narratives of national liberation that emerged at the
close of colonialism as well as feminist discourse in the 1970s and 1980s.

Another aspect that makes William Kentridge a representative of the post-modern and post-structural time according to 
Christov-Bakargiev is his own view and opinion on history and History. History has traditionally been written with a capital H, and has 
always been considered to be the evidentiary, factual, official or objectively, externally verifiable, documented truth. The post-modernist 
critique of history is that it is almost always ideological, politically motivated and subjective.  
Post-modernists also argue that history, as a text, therefore contains no one fixed meaning and is therefore open to many multiple and 
inter-textual meanings.  History is not definitive and is open to many readings.

Kentridge’s documenting of South Africa’s past and present, including all its horrors, introduces a post-modern idea of history. In other 
words, it posits South African history as many histories, both public and personal, and it refuses a grand narrative of South African history.   

Christov-Bakargiev focuses especially on Kentridge narrative style, a mixture of African story telling and process oriented narrative that 
make his work a cultural, international hybrid, as well as a reaction to nineteen century nationalism.  

Kentridge, in fact, always focuses on the personal narrative, the private story of the individual, as opposed to the grand, abstract accounts 
of South Africa or apartheid. In keeping with a post-modern historiography, Kentridge’s films are important because they portray the same
 identical images that emerged out of apartheid. At the same time, the images continue to shock and disgust, resulting in fresh empathy for 
the victims of this violent regime.  Kentridge’s films leave the viewer astonished and repulsed, causing the audience to re-identify with those 
violated by apartheid.  He shocks the spectator out of their complacency.  

  Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “In Conversation with William Kentridge,” in William Kentridge (London: Phaidon, 1999), 22

  The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the 
 design is to allow a single watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. 

  Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, 1999, 34.