According to Richter, Benjamin was preoccupied with the right distance (rechten Abstand) and the correct angle of vision (Richtigen Blickwinkel). Richter writes that when these are achieved, ‘we see the human head and the animal body in the rock formation.’ (Richter, 2006 pp. 132–156, 146) The reference here is to both paleolithic cave painting and the human propensity to see faces and other forms in irregular surfaces or patterns1. In essence, it is precisely this ability that generates the arrival of Kentridge’s fortuna. In other words, something in the mark-making with charcoal is suggestive of a form other than the one intended, opening the way to further elaboration. As Kentridge commences to draw, some of the pre-existent signs on the page disappear beneath the opaque density of charcoal while others only partially disappear, and yet others remain visible through the veil of erased charcoal; a veil, that, as Benjamin states in his Arcades project, ‘is an old accomplice of distance.’ (Benjamin, 2002, p. 350)
What shows through from the past in Kentridge’s series of drawings on the ledgers of a mining company are the indexical signs indicating ‘monetary calculations’ related to names and dates. The drawings should be understood apart from any ideological, or psychobiographical context as an exploration of the distance and proximity of the symbolic and indexical sign to that of the iconic sign of the drawing (see fig.1 below).
Kentridge is particularly interested in the cursive script that appears in the ledger entries. I am typing the present paper from notebook entries in black ink and in cursive script, a script that is seldom taught anymore in either primary or secondary education. I learned to write in cursive script using a nib attached to a wooden holder and dipped into ink in a porcelain inkwell in a desk of massive oak engraved with the names of former students in a Willesden primary school in the 1950s, where I recall there was a teacher solely responsible for teaching handwriting. Kentridge, according to Morris, links years of handwriting to his drawing practices and his interest in the ledger’s as a ground for drawing as a manifestation of the ‘labor of writing’ that like drawing involves an emphasis on the handmade, the action of the hand, the arm and the body.
The relation of what is on the page of the ledger, the illustrated dictionary, or encyclopedia to the ‘now’ of drawing is not like that of drawing on a blank sheet of paper. Once the drawing commences the signs already printed on the surface take on an alterity, or distance constituted by the pre-existent print media that is traversed and transgressed by the otherness of drawing. The suddenness with which fortuna appears for Kentridge, the dialectical image for Benjamin and the dynamogram for Warburg share an otherness generated by what- has- been in its relation to the now of recognizability, or a new constellation. Richter writes, Benjamin’s ‘fundamental methodological interest was in the appearance of things in the moment when they were about to disappear.’ (Ibid., p. 147).
Benjamin famously stated, ‘It is not, that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present casts it light on what is past: rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.’ (Ibid., p. 47–48).
For Benjamin, this ‘new constellation is the dialectical image, for Warburg the theorization generated by the dynamogram and for Kentridge the sudden arrival of fortuna.
Didi-Huberman writes about Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne and its ‘affinity in the distant past to ‘ancient divinatory “tables”(and) to baroque “theaters” of memory’ (Didi-Hubermann, 2018, p. 247) drawing out a relation of these with the arts of montage, certain works of Duchamp, Malevich, the dadaist handatlas of 1919-1920, the albums of Hanna Höch, George Grosz, and more recently the panels of Broodthaer and the Atlas of Gerhard Richter that all hinge on the notion of an archive. Didi-Huberman identifies montage, and in particular the Atlas Mnemosyne, as based on a cinematographic paradigm. It does not come as a surprise therefore that, although they do not have the outward appearance of the Atlas Mnemosyne, or come to that of any of the artistic uses of montage mentioned, there is a parallel between Kentridge's use of physical atlases and Warburg’s use of the word “Atlas” for his panels. If we follow Didi-Huberman, Warburg’s use of the Atlas was to achieve a glimpse of ‘the working of time in the visible world.’(Ibid., p. 48) The same might be said for Kentridge, for a physical Atlas, like the pages of an out-of-date illustrated dictionary, encyclopedia or ledger, are the locus of a knowledge that belongs to the past. What both Warburg, Benjamin and Kentridge do, in their different ways, is to defamiliarize our way of looking at these images or pages. All three are involved in acts of doing, undoing and redoing, of constantly dismantling and reassembling ‘heterogeneous images’ so as to create unforeseen configurations and affinities. Following Nietzsche, Didi-Huberman states, ‘it is necessary to arrange things in such a way as to make their strangeness appear within their contact with each other’ (Ibid., p. 91) or, to return to the idea of an in-between space, a Zwischenraum, within the distance between them. A strangeness that distances us from them but, at the same time, keeps alive that anxiety that Lacan, in his seminar on anxiety and in relation to the task and desire, relates to an ‘open(ing) up, affording a view ... of the unexpected’, that ‘can branch off in every direction’ and from which ‘action borrows its cause ... To act is to bring about a transfer of anxiety’ (italics are mine) (Pigrum, 2021, p.21). If we recall, that Individuation is achieved by what Winnicott calls a ‘transitional object’, and Lacan a ‘yieldable object’ then Integral to both is the function of expendability. The anxiety inherent in artistic practices is for Lacan ‘not knowing’. The recourse to expendability in artistic practices allows for what Lacan calls, ‘phases of abeyance, wrong turns, false trails’ (Lacan, 2017, p. 319) where the agent can fail with impunity and then pick up the thread and continue seeking, where the expendability diffuses the anxiety of ‘not knowing’ because devoid of the pressure of preservation.