Drawing is an activity that hinges upon physical mark-making most often, although not always, on paper. An activity that generates (albeit through a process of the accumulation of marks) iconic signs. 2
Kentridge identifies the indeterminacy of drawing as having the ability to evoke images that are not intentional but ‘arrive’, as if by chance, or what he terms fortuna. For Kentridge, like the writer Robert Handke, the detour through the ground of existent signifiers is a ‘way out’ of determinacy. Such drawing activity cannot involve a deliberation about ends, but about the means to ends that remain unforeseen. At the same time, as Kentridge mentioned in a talk he gave in the BurgTheater in Vienna in 2017 that I attended, the artist is simultaneously someone who is making and someone who is watching what is coming into appearance, someone who steps back in a critical stance, or distance to what has appeared (Pigrum, 2021, p. 115).
There is no model or idea that pre-exists in the mind of either Benjamin, Warburg or Kentridge. The notion, as Agamben states, of the idea pre-existent in the mind of the artist ‘derives from the disastrous transposition of a theological vocabulary of creation onto the activity of the artist.’ (Agamben, 2019, p. 8)
There is then no pre-existent ideal, completed state, either in the drawings of Kentridge, Benjamin’s dialectical images or Warburg’s dynamograms, but rather a generation, or liberation of a potential that exists in the distance between the out-of-date pages of printed artifacts, the citations and visual material that Benjamin collected and collated, and the intervals or distance between images pinned to the black hessian stretchers of Warburg’s Atlas panels.
Prior to Kentridge’s drawing upon them, the pages of the illustrated encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas or ledger in their executant reality, have a particular level of reference that places them at a distance from the drawing process. However, the process of being drawn upon, in the words of Baert’s, ‘forces us to think about the relationship between pre-figuration and figuration. Let loose between these two realms or “visual fields” is an energy that constantly moves between them as in the promise that a figure will appear…out of…the consolidated figure/figuration itself.’ (Baert, 2023, pp. 58–59)
It is in the zwischenraum, or ‘in the energy between’, Kentridge’s drawing and the pre-existent signs on the page, that fortuna arrives as a recognition of something unforeseen, an emergence of something that he did not anticipate. An arrival enhanced by Kentridge’s use of charcoal and the spectrum of marks that it can make ranging from an indistinct veil at one end of the spectrum, to very precise hard edged marks and an intense opacity at the other. It is between the transitive marks of the ‘visual field’ of drawing in charcoal, and its inherent indeterminacy, and the determinate pre-existent signs on the page that generates fortuna.
An alternative way of looking at the pages with pre-existent signs that Kentridge draws upon would be Kant’s parega, or ‘that which is not internal to the entire representation of the object as a constituent.’ (Kant, 1790 [2000], pp. 110–111)
In other words the pre-existent print media on the page is extrinsic to the drawing. However, if we follow Jirsa on Derrida and Kant’s parega, then the page would be in a dialectical relationship between its determinate signs and the indeterminacy of the drawing process in which Kentridge’s drawing involves both the distance between the drawing and the pre-existent signifiers on the page and the ‘now’ of fortuna that, in the words of Hayden White in a different context, ‘directs attention to the effective conditions of possibility of both thought and action, consciousness and praxis.’ (Jirsa, 2021, pp. 50–51; White, 2010, p. 240)
Krauss, writing about Kentridge’s drawings states, they ‘belong neither to the world of the subject nor the object’ (but) as the possible deposit of many markers it so disperses the field of the subject as utterly to depersonalize it. And as the trace of events, it eats away at the substance of anything we might call an object.’ (Krauss, 2000 p. 38) Krauss, however, equates fortuna with that automatism central to Lacan use of this term and its relation to tuché where tuché is the encounter with the real or the absent cause of a given sequence, and automaton the process of repetition with difference (Lacan, 1977, pp. 53–66).
If we develop this idea along the lines that Cheah does in an essay where he outlines Derrida’s approach to deconstruction, then Kentridge’s drawing and the ‘arrival’ of fortuna would, in Derrida’s view, be ‘a true gift of time...a pure event…that leaves a trace in the order of presence…The very event-ness of an event consists in its…not being identified in advance, something is not an event if we can tell when and from where it will be coming…’ (Phen, 2010, pp. 70–91, 75), and on the same and the following page Cheah quotes Derrida as stating the event must ‘therefore be understood through the figure of the impossible, that which we cannot imagine or figure within the realm of the possible...the affirmation of the impossible (is) always put forward in the name of the real …the real as the coming of the event… This non-negative impossible …is what happens, as an eruption within the order of presence.’ (Ibid. pp. 75–76) It is beyond the scope of the present paper to attempt to describe in any detail the highly complex Lacanian notion of the real, but it should be understood that it does not refer to reality, but to durable residues in the unconscious where, ‘caught up in the network of signifiers… the mind makes contact with the limits of its power, with that which its structure cannot structure.’(Bowie, 1991, p. 105)
Derrida identities three motifs that we might apply to the sudden recognition of Benjamin’s dialectical image, Warburg’s Dynamogram and Kentridge’s fortuna: ‘openness to the gift of time’ or, to use Nussbaum’s phrase, in relation to tuchè, to ‘what the world bestows’; ‘a structure of precipitation or urgency,’ or the ‘now’ of recognizability. For Derrida, this involves the rethinking of the philosophy of decision, potentiality and actuality requiring a complete departure from a view of creative agency that involves the projection of an ideal end, but instead one where agency can flourish unrestrictedly in a ceaseless trajectory between the existent and the superimposed, past and present, the conscious and the unconscious echoed in Agamben’s notion of ‘...a potential that does not precede the work, but accompanies it, makes it live, and opens it to possibilities.’ (Agamben, 2019, p. 27)
If we were to attempt to provide a concrete example of what Warburg meant by a dynamogram, and Benjamin a dialectical image we might juxtapose Eugene Atget’s photograph of a rag-pickers yard in the Paris of the 1880s to that of the painter Francis Bacon’s studio in the 1960’s about which I am at present writing a paper. Here the dialectic would be between the detritus of consumerism in the Paris of the period of the arcades and the detritus of the ankle deep strew of photographic print material in Bacon’s studio, a large part of which were depictions of the traumatic historical events of the twentieth century. Both are images of litter that I use to generate a theoretical text that, although beyond the scope of the present paper to develop in any detail, might like Benjamin asks of Baudelaire, does Bacon ‘recognize himself in the figure of the ragman.’ (Benjamin, 2002, p. 350) At a fundamental level it might serve the generation of theory to juxtapose both images and the German word Stoff, which designates both textile and subject matter, and the way both the ragpicker and Bacon the artist represent ways of collecting and using visual and textile material. The ragpicker’s ‘rags’ are made up of the interstices between threads. Here it might be of use to look at Didi-Huberman’s exegesis on ‘the four square centimeters of silk Goethe had in his ‘cabinet of marvels as ‘almost nothing and an almost everything (that)... if we give it the attention it deserves, to understand fully what a “form” is, what a “formation” is, a “creation,” or “metamorphosis.” ’ (Didi-Huberman, 2018, p. 129) The ankle deep clutter of photographic material in Bacon’s studio underwent change due to Bacon’s movement, but at some point he would look down, pick up two overlapping creased, torn or blemished images and carefully pin them together. How he then used these fragments in relation to his painting we do not know.
In Kentridge’s case the drawings superimposed and juxtaposed to the printed matter on the page is stop-frame filmed in a back and forth process involving a temporal interval, or distance between the drawing and the filming which, when projected, shows the assembling, disassembling and reassembling of the drawing, as a continuous jerky doing, undoing and redoing. What Warburg called ‘dynamography,’ is, following Didi- Huberman founded ‘on a play of constantly moving polarities:…’ (Ibid.) like those between Kentridge’s drawing and the disappearance or withdrawal of the printed matter on the page. Here we have a parallel to Benjamin’s ‘fundamental methodological interest in the appearance of things in the moment they are about to disappear.’ (Richter, 2006, pp. 132–156, 147)