Archive of Darkness: William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noire
2018; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 51; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/afar_a_00389
ISSN1937-2108
Autores Tópico(s)Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
ResumoFerdinand de Jongall photos courtesy of the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, except where otherwise notedWe have reached a point where all destinations, all bright lights, arouse mistrust.William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons (2014)Since the Holocaust was recognized as a historical calamity without precedent, Germany has publicly atoned for its history through official apologies, financial reparations, and public commemoration. While the Holocaust has been acknowledged as a crime against humanity, atrocities perpetrated under German colonialism slipped from public attention and were subject to colonial aphasia. Ironically, the memorial politics commonly referred to as Vergangenheitsbewältigung have obscured German involvement in atrocities perpetrated in the colonies. Apart from a memorial stone in Berlin's Neuköln neighborhood and a rededicated statue of an elephant in Bremen, no permanent display currently bears testament to the genocide of the Herero perpetrated in German South-West Africa.1 However, in response to political demands by the descendants of the Herero victims for recognition of atrocities committed and legal procedures for reparation payments, Germany's colonial past is receiving increased public attention. In this context, the question arises: What art can contribute to the calibration and commemoration of colonial pasts? This article examines the intervention of one work of art in the public debate about Germany's colonial past. It suggests that Black Box/Chambre Noire by the South African artist William Kentridge has provided a forum for the calibration of archival evidence and ethical considerations on reparation, reconciliation and forgiveness.Black Box is a piece William Kentridge produced after he had been working on an interpretation of Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte. Drawing upon the history of cinema, theater, and opera, Black Box/Chambre Noire is a tightly packed play of automata that perform against a backdrop screen on which images are projected to a haunting soundtrack composed by Phillip Miller. Lasting for 22 minutes, the performance tells the history of the Herero genocide perpetrated by the German army in German South-West Africa. Recasting Mozart's Magic Flute as a shadow play in a miniature theater, Black Box/Chambre Noire reflects on the opera's associations with the Enlightenment. Illuminating its shadows cast in the colonial encounter in Africa, Black Box revisits established views on the Enlightenment as a project of human progress and perpetuates a critical inquiry launched by the members of the Frankfurt School.Tellingly, the work is entitled Black Box/Chambre Noire, referencing the camera obscura, the room of shadow plays that served scientists since the second half of the sixteenth century as a technology for the exploration of vision (Crary 1992). The term chambre noire also references the main chamber of the analog camera, through which light falls on the photographic plate, but the title's references are multiple and are not confined to the field of vision. In aviation technology, the black box is a device designed to record conversations of the flight crew in a cockpit. Installed in anticipation of disaster, it is a technology to answer questions about the operation of the aircraft when its pilots are no longer alive to give testimony. Finally, the title also references the black box theater as it was designed for experimental theater pieces in the 1960s and 1970s. Typically, this kind of theater was constructed to enable the audience to have a full view of the stage and to break down the boundaries between performers and audience. Referencing different technologies of vision, the piece situates itself in a history of reflection on light and shadow and engages with Plato's allegory of the cave, which has served as a pivotal metaphor for enlightenment since antiquity. In short, Black Box/Chambre Noire examines techniques that shed light on what is cast in darkness and subjects to scrutiny how they affect perception, an epistemological exploration appropriate to the examination of forgotten histories.Black Box uses a range of technologies to commemorate the Herero genocide, perpetrated by the German army between 1904 and 1908 in what was then German South-West Africa (Fig. 1). When Deutsche Bank commissioned a work by William Kentridge, it did not quite anticipate the occult subject matter of Black Box.2 Exhibited in Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin in 2005, the moment of the work's installation coincided with an emergent public debate on Germany's historical culpability and its responsibility for reparation payments to the Herero people. In a speech given at the centennial commemoration of the Battle of Waterberg in 2004, the German Minister for Development and Economic Cooperation, Heidemarie Wieckorek-Zeul, had publicly acknowledged Germany's moral responsibility for the genocide. Although this statement did not represent the position of the German government, its Foreign Office confirmed in 2015 that "the 1904 to 1908 war of extermination in Namibia was a war crime and genocide." Since then the German government has negotiated with the Namibian government over the terms and conditions of an official apology and reparation payments, but such negotiations seem to have stalled.3 However, as expected, the admission of guilt fueled Herero demands for reparation payments (Zimmerer and Schaller 2008:476).In spite of its critical success, Black Box has not generated much scholarly interest.4 This article proposes to situate Black Box in a wider category of contemporary art that engages with the ghosts of the colonial archive. In recent decades, artists-as-archivists have started to explore the poetics of the spectral in an attempt to work through the dark legacies of colonialism (Foster 2004; Enwezor 2008; Spieker 2008; Buchloh 2009; Demos 2013; Garb 2013; van Alphen 2014; de Jong and Harney 2015; de Jong 2016). Engaging a politics of temporality that goes beyond a determined future, their reassembling of archival images "functions as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future" (Foster 2004:15). Such archival reassemblage has its historical precedents, set in states of emergency, that retain their relevance today. In its accumulation of photographic reproductions, Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1929) was one of the first modern attempts to construct an assemblage of reproductions for future remembrance. Archival art has retained this reliance on reproductions, even after Auschwitz (Didi-Huberman 2003). Archival images of trauma that were initially subjected to a Bilderverbot have been reproduced and recirculated for the purpose of transforming the spectator's gaze (Guerin and Hallas 2007). Revisiting the past to reanimate a historical memory, Hal Foster reminds us, the archival impulse is often directed at a "recovery of the utopian demand" (2004:22).Conventionally imagined as a technology for storing traces of the past, the archive is thus reconceptualized as a site to reopen the future. However, rather than provide us with more linear metanarratives, the archive's found objects enable artists to work in nonlinear ways (van Alphan 2014:235–36). Indeed, Foster (2004) has suggested that the fragmentation characteristic of archival art rejects linear models. Digging through strata of imperial debris, artists excavate colonial archives as construction sites for new narrations. This article aims to demonstrate that Black Box breaks new ground in animating archival fragments and, through a multiplicity of techniques, affords an affective engagement with the ghosts of the colonial archive.Made of pinewood, the physical contraption of Black Box measures approximately two meters in height, width, and depth. The box looks like a puppet theater, with a proscenium covered with reproduced maps that carries the inscription "The Gazetteer of Principles." Adorned with cardboard curtains, the theater also resembles a miniature opera house, and because the side curtains are very roughly cut and resemble rock, the setting simultaneously invokes the shape of a cave. Puppet theater, opera house, and cave, this theater hosts multiple temporalities that unfold in their entangled performance. Within this miniature theater, several rails facilitate the movement of automata performing different characters. Shaped as a sandwich-board man, rhinoceros, skull, and a Herero woman, these automata engage in a shadow play against a backdrop screen on which film images are projected. During the performance, a front screen is lifted to reveal a stage that reveals another, transparent screen, onto which images are projected by two digital projectors, placed in front and behind the wooden contraption. Black Box is built up of several screens and coulisses, creating a multilayered space extending both inwards and outwards to the setting in which it performs (Fig. 2). To synchronize the performance of the automata, music, and projected images, the choreography is orchestrated through digital technology, subjecting the mechanical puppets to the discipline of the digital clock. As a highly sophisticated installation, Black Box's technicality assists in defining its subject matter. Staged in museums around the world, this black box also raises questions about the role of cinema in the white cube.With his signature technology widely known as "drawings for projection," William Kentridge has established himself as one of today's most innovative artists. Understood as a particular filmic practice, his technology consists of a time-consuming process whereby the artist drafts images that he reproduces through photography. In his studio, Kentridge draws a scene on paper, which he photographs. The artist then changes the drawing by erasing and redrawing it, and makes another photograph. By repeating this process, a series of photographs is produced which the artist turns into a sequence to be projected as a film. The process is not dissimilar to animation, yet distinguished from it in several ways. First, rather than producing an endless series of slightly different drawings resulting in a moving image in which the original process of making is effaced, Kentridge works with a limited number of drawings, each of which is reworked to ensure that traces of the previous image remain visible in the new image, resulting in a palimpsest image that shows its own erasures. By photographing a limited number of such drawings, the illusion of a smooth transformation that is achieved in animation is deliberately avoided. Drawing attention to its own "erasures," the resulting palimpsest distinguishes itself from conventional animation through its ruptures and the revelation of the process of its own making.To be clear, this process relies both on the hand of the artist and the process of mechanical reproduction, a technique Rosalind Krauss has extensively explored for its obvious engagement with the history of cinema and its function in the public sphere. Although Kentridge's drawings for projection look back at early black-and-white cinema and risk inducing nostalgia for the lost promises of film's utopian potential, she suggests that his palimpsests actually aspire to reclaim that medium's utopian possibilities. Precisely because he employs outmoded technologies for his drawings for projection, Krauss suggests that Kentridge's art "attempts to undermine a certain kind of spectacularization of memory" as it prevailed in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee (Krauss 2000:29–35).5 Interestingly, by transposing the problem of truth and reconciliation from South Africa to Namibia and Germany, this article examines how Kentridge's images for projection address the issue of the global circulation of models for reconciliation by providing a very thoughtful response to it through revisiting the historical debate on the utopian possibilities of cinema conducted between Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.6Because of Germany's role in the extermination of the Jews under the Nazi regime, its Vergangenheitsbewältigung (past mastering) has focused on the Shoah. In the post-World War II era Germany's colonial past was largely forgotten and atrocities committed during its colonial history received scant attention. To recall the obscured past of the Herero genocide, let us briefly review its history and the role documents played in its perpetration. The colonization of the territory Germans named South-West Africa was initiated by the Rhineland Missionary Society, eager to convert the native population and lift their souls. To protect the interests of the missionaries, the German army established in 1885 the protectorate Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika to support the conversion of colonial subjects into enlightened Christians. The German government also encouraged white settlement, expropriating the land of the Hereros. To respond to their increased marginalization and the manipulation of contracts about land reserves, the Herero chief Samuel Maharero ordered an attack against the Germans in which an estimated 130 Germans were killed. This incident initiated the German-Herero War (1904–1908), which quickly culminated in the inconclusive battle at Waterberg, after which the Herero fled into the Omaheke desert. On their flight through the desert, thousands of Herero died because their wells were deliberately poisoned by the German army.The German Reichskanzler encouraged the survivors to surrender and ordered them to register in concentration camps (Konzentrationslagern), located in various parts of the country (Fig. 3) (Gewald 1999:186). Famished and hunted like animals, many Herero wound up in the camps, from where they were distributed as slave laborers to both civilian employers and the German army. The conditions in the camps were atrocious, echoing those in the British camps for Boer captives during the Boer War and foreshadowing the conditions of the infamous camps erected several decades later in Europe. Recording the state of the starving population, the administrators of the camps kept records to discriminate between those prisoners fit for labor (Arbeitsfähig) and unfit for labor (Unfähig). The administration also produced so-called Totenliste, lists recording prisoners' causes of death as exhaustion, heart failure, bronchitis, or scurvy (Gewald 1999:189).7 With hindsight, we can see that German South-West Africa served as a laboratory for the bureaucratic administration of death.8 The Herero genocide was the first genocide recorded through bookkeeping: It raises questions about the history of bureaucracy.Towards the end of World War I, the Union of South Africa invaded the German colony and called for an examination of the German atrocities (Silvester and Gewald 2003:xxvii). Incoming South African forces found files detailing practices of incarceration in concentration camps and glass plate negatives that displayed the flayed backs of victims exposed to "paternal correction" (Silvester and Gewald 2003:xvii). As a matter of urgency, South African Major Thomas Leslie O'Reilly was ordered to compile a report on the German treatment of its native subjects. Published in 1918, the Blue Book blocked Germany's attempts to retain control over Namibia. However, although it contained incriminating evidence, the Germans dismissed the Blue Book as "a bulky bit of propaganda" and no German officers were ever prosecuted (Silvester and Gewald 2003:xix). Moreover, when the first all-white assembly for South-West Africa met in 1926, it adopted a motion to destroy all copies of the Blue Book. Throughout South Africa and Namibia, copies of the Blue Book were systematically removed from public libraries because, as Silvester and Gewald put it, "The dead of the Herero genocide and other atrocities were dismissed and forgotten in the interest of white settler reconciliation" (2003:xxxii). An archive of darkness was summarily suppressed.As in other colonies, German colonization resulted in a visual economy in which images of "the primitive" circulated for purposes ranging from scientific research to strategic geopolitics (Hayes, Silvester, and Hartmann 2002; Hartmann, Silvester, and Hayes 1998). Black Box relies extensively on this colonial archive of historical images, including photographs reproduced in the Blue Book (Silvester and Gewald 2003:xxxii). One of the most shocking images incorporated in Black Box is that of Herero men, stripped and lynched, hanging from trees.9Black Box also reproduces historical photographs of skulls removed from the corpses of Herero prisoners and sent to Kaiser Wilhelm's Institute for Physical Anthropology in Berlin where, mounted on stands as material evidence for theories of racial genetics, they served to demonstrate the superiority of the German "race" over black Namibians (Geldenhuys 2007).10 However, the archive of historical images Kentridge draws upon is not confined to the Herero genocide and explores other possible historical relationships. In Black Box, portraits of General Lothar von Trotha and Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi are projected alongside several anonymous skulls (Fig. 4). Cut in slices, both horizontally and vertically, the projected images of the skulls of the historical protagonists resemble and reference the photographic representations used by German forensic scientist Richard Helmer to certify Josef Mengele's death. When Mengele's skull was found in a graveyard in Brazil in 1985, Helmer developed a technology to identify this skull by superimposing portrait photographs of Mengele on photographs of his skull (Keenan and Weizman 2012). The likeness this produced was considered positive proof of Mengele's death and provided a new technology for the identification of skulls. In subsequent legal research into the fate of the victims of political repression in other Latin American states, the International Criminal Court used this forensic technology to identify the skulls of activists gone missing. Referencing the photographs made of Mengele's skull, Black Box captures various registers of research on human remains and suggests that they were historically connected in rather uncanny ways (Fig. 5). Superimposing historical images in a palimpsest that references both classical works of art and forensic aesthetics, the installation questions the binary oppositions of victim versus perpetrator, art versus popular culture, vanitas paintings versus postmortem inquiry. Raising questions about the ethics of these interrelated fields of research and representation, Black Box points to the ambivalences and ambiguities in the scientific and judicial quest for truth, culpability, and justice.Just as the projected images of the decapitated heads reference the scientific research to which the inmates of the concentration camps were subjected, Black Box reproduces the Totenliste that the German army kept in the concentration camps. Incorporating reproductions of these Totenliste, with names and numbers crossed out, effaced, corrected, and reinscribed, these palimpsest drawings reenact the body counts performed in the concentration camps. Incidentally, the revisions inscribed on these lists recall the revisionist debates about the actual numbers of victims of the genocide that sections of the German-speaking population of Namibia continue to contest today (Kössler 2008). Engaging the debate on numbers, the aesthetics of the charts drawn by Kentridge do not so much reproduce the accuracy of bookkeeping as convey the artifice of counting—and the inherent perversity of accounting for genocide. Projecting the names of the victims on lists, Black Box follows the convention of listing the victims' names on memorials as it was established for (European) victims of World War I. With the lists of names fading into the future, Black Box situates the viewer in the presence of the dead, insinuating a temporality of future hauntings.The projected images in Black Box reference specific images and texts in histories of art, science, biology, anthropometry, cartography, and imperialism. Deliberately blurring the boundaries of established genres, Black Box also marches Surrealist automata in its shadow play and juxtaposes Mozart's arias with a Herero lament (Fig. 6). The archive of documents that Black Box relies on is vast and varied: I have extracted a few examples from a long list of documents used by the artist, provided by the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, which exhibited Black Box in 2012:In addition to these texts and maps, Black Box's sound track plays several excerpts from Mozart's Magic Flute, including its most famous arias, from a 1937 recording of Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the Berlin Philharmonic for the assembled Nazi leadership. The music score also incorporates original compositions by the Johannesburg-based composer Philip Miller, as well as a fragment of a Herero lament, a traditional Herero praise song, and traditional Namibian music for the musical bow. Miller's sound track reassembles fragments from different sound archives in an uncanny encounter. Understood as an opera that celebrates the spirit of the Enlightenment, the use of music taken from The Magic Flute in Black Box is intended to set up a contrast. As Kentridge himself states, "if The Magic Flute suggests the utopian moment of the Enlightenment, Black Box represents the other end of the spectrum" (Kentridge and Villaseñor 2005:51).Some of these archival fragments have a straightforward relation to the Herero genocide, but others have been produced at some remove from its direct context. With a sense for paradox, Hartmann's maps of German South-West Africa capture the colonial incursions into African territories, while the 1910 edition of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management indexes the sensibilities cultivated in the capital of the British Empire. By including a wide range of documents, Black Box creates an archive in which the sciences are presented as complicit in the colonial project. Geography, for instance, emerged as one of the sciences that used the colonies as a theater for its investigations (Dirks 1992:6). Not only was the space of the colonies thereby appropriated for a European project, Europe's Enlightenment was in fact conceived in relation to the allegedly primitive populations that inhabited this space. Indeed, the Enlightenment trope of progress was rooted in a comparison between the enlightened institutions of Europe and the subject populations of the colonies that allegedly lived in a state of Nature (Withers and Livingstone 1999:14). During the eighteenth century, the map was regarded as the epitome of encyclopedic knowledge, serving the Enlightenment's self-image of rationality by positing the colonial space as one to be rationalized (Edney 1999:173). The production of geographic representations in the eighteenth century legitimated a particular social order (Edney 1999:165). Black Box incorporates several maps that serve as foils for the reenactment of scientific explorations. In a disproportionate size, the place name "Berlin" is written over the map of South Africa, no doubt to remind the audience that in 1884–85 Europe's colonial powers assembled at a conference in the German capital to divide up access to the continent's territories.Interestingly, none of the footage or documents reproduced in Black Box is rendered in its "original" form. As drawings for projection, they are the products of both draftsmanship and mechanical reproduction. It is important to emphasize that these drawings for projection obliterate the distinction between "originals" and "copies"—as the process of transmission depends on mechanical reproduction. To convey this in the register of an exhibitionary complex, documents that have served as the substrates for the drawings for projection in Black Box are displayed in glass cases in the gallery space in which Black Box is staged (Figs. 7–8).11 Turning documentary evidence into an object of aesthetic contemplation, Black Box questions the authority of historical documents and the role they have played in the colonial encounter, not by presenting more "truthful" documents, but by interrogating their role in the authorization of genocide (Demos 2013:60). As self-proclaimed fabrications, these "documents" draw attention to their historical conditions of possibility. By incorporating both official, historical documents and contemporary Herero laments that remember the "darkness" of genocide, Black Box goes beyond the verification of artifacts towards an inquiry into the very structures of transmission of trauma.12Black Box is not an archive of authentic documents of the Herero genocide, but an archival simulacrum that investigates the conditions of possibility of genocide and its remembrance.In its archival exploration, Black Box explicitly questions the authority attributed to writing, print, and the dissemination of documents in the imperial public sphere. Inserting the documents of death into a wider archive of arts, science, and visual culture, Black Box provides an epistemological context for the Herero genocide. Such a wide range of documents recalls the conditions of possibility Michael Rothberg has delineated for the making of multidirectional memory. In his thoughtful and highly acclaimed study on multidirectional memory, Rothberg claims that the spread of Holocaust memory and consciousness around the world has set the stage for a competition between different victimage memories. However, such memories need not necessarily be in conflict, and Rothberg suggests that the acknowledgment of Holocaust memory has in fact enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization (2009:6). His model of multidirectional memory proposes that memories and commemoration of the slave trade, colonialism, and the Holocaust have actually enabled each others' recognition beyond national identifications and narrow political affiliations. Following this argumentation, one might ask whether the Herero genocide also owes its recognition to the multidirectionality of Holocaust memory. However, as I have argued throughout, Germany's Holocaust Vergangenheitsbewältigung has in fact obliterated engagement with its colonial history. Only after the completion of the process of German unification did some space for public debate on this subject emerge, even though public interest in it remains restricted to this day. Nonetheless, the public acknowledgment of different victimage memories proceeds apace in a process that is truly multidirectional in Rothberg's sense. For instance, German diplomatic demands that Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide have instigated retorts from the Turkish government demanding German acknowledgment of the Herero genocide (Zimmerer 2016). Genocides committed in the Age of Empire are subject to political negotiations between successor nation-states that may favor national "forgetting," but historians working on the Herero genocide have established that Namibian and German pasts are intricately entangled and acknowledge that its commemoration, too, is interdependent (Kössler 2008:314, 2015; Zimmerer 2008; Eckert 2016; see the bibliography in Kössler 2015 for more extensive discussion in German). To demonstrate such entanglement of history and memory, the archival documentation required is of course not to be found in a single archive. Rothberg argues that, "Far from being situated—either physically or discursively—in any single institution or site, the archive of multidirectional memory is irreducibly transversal; it cuts across genres, national contexts, periods, and cultural traditions" (2009:18). Here, I have demonstrated that Black Box mobilizes such a transversal archive for the remembrance of the Herero genocide in multidirectional commemorations. By including maps, shares of mines, technologies in eugenics, and the forensics of Mengele's skull, Black Box's archival fragments interrogate transversal forms of objectification and enter unexpected conversations with other specters of the Enlightenment.In Black Box, Kentridge transposes his signature technique onto a new set of media. Situating itself in histories of opera, installation art, cinema, popular theater, and forensics, the piece raises questions about screens, exhibition space, site-specificity, spectatorship, and spectrality. Any analysis of Black Box has to privilege a particular genealogy of the work over others that might be equally justified, and an evaluation of the work's accomplishments will be inflected by this choice. As a multimedia work, it distances itself from modernist media-specificity and intervenes in debates about intermediality and the crossover between media. This is particularly apparent in the way in which the work situates itself in parallel genealogies of screen-based installation art and post-cinema. This particular art form that, says Alison Butler, "cannot quite articulate its name" (2011:531), is situated between the history of experimental art studied by art historians and expanded cinema studied by film theorists. It is a field mined with opinions entrenched in separate critical histories. In this minefield, Black Box addresses the debate about the illusionary nature of cinema and its anti-illusionary critique as it has set the parameters for the entry of cinema into the gallery space.The art form without name examines the site-specificity of the screen in the "post-medium condition" where moving images have become ubiquitous and their materiality has taken many forms. In this respect, the complexity of Black Box as a multimedia installation and its multiplicity of frames and screens merit some attention. With projectors situated both before and behind the box, the installation's moving images are projected on proscenium, coulisses, and front and back screens. Doub
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