Where Shall we Place our Hope?: William Kentridge

William Kentridge
Where Shall We Place Our Hope? (2020
Indian ink, charcoal and red pencil on found ledger pages
46 x 63 cm

Commentaries by Pamela Allara and Mark Auslander

Overview: William Kentridge has generously donated to The Lockdown Collection a work on paper, "Where shall we place our hope?" (2020).. The image is closely related to those created to serve in backdrop projections in Kentridge's production of the opera "Waiting for Sibyl," performed at La Scala and elsewhere around the world. On an archival ledger dated January 1897, the artist has painted a tree in full bloom with lush vegetative growth in the background behind a low wall.  On the wall is inscribed the title of the piece, "Where shall we place our hope?”

Pamela Allara: When we see an image of a tree, a flower, or other image from nature, we usually think, ”How nice!” We may have a similar response to this image initially, but it will be blocked in short order. William Kentridge has depicted landscapes throughout his career, eschewing  the European tradition for the stark, barren landscape of the highveld around his native Johannesburg. As Dan Cameron has written, “The history of Johannesburg, richest city on the  continent, is an unbroken tale of rapid, wholesale exploitation of the land for its material wealth…it is no surprise then that the bereft landscape, plundered and ravaged, is a prominent motif in virtually all the films made by Kentridge between 1989 and 1996.” (Cameron 1999: 47).

By contrast, several of Kentridge’s drawings of his own home or other modernist homes occupied by the privileged white minority do include its lush, ‘European-style’ plantings. And so, I can’t help but wonder if this vigorous little tree, filled with the energy of healthy growth, may have come from Kentridge’s own yard. In all of his charming drawings and prints of single trees, Kentridge insists on placing them, not in a natural surround, but on pages of books or on found bills or ledgers; these are the trees of the colonizers. And so, this tree is walled off, protected from the wild undergrowth beyond. However, the wall is low and easily broached. “Where Shall We Place Our Hope?” Who is asking that question: the wild plants beyond the wall or the carefully tended and protected one inside it?

Kentridge believes that nothing is ever fixed, and in the clips from the chamber opera, “Waiting for Sybil, (2019), the tree, like the Sibyl’s leaves, blows away, to be replaced by a leafless, lifeless tree, and finally a trunk from which hangs a noose. The decorative planting has become a vehicle for violent death.  And the hanging tree then morphs into an ampersand: violence begets violence. Healthy, vigorous growth: at what cost?

Mark Auslander: In discussing his most famous work, "Waiting for Godot," Samuel Beckett remarked, "If I had known who Godot was, I would have said so."  Prophetic utterances are invariably enigmatic, elliptical, and elusive, and this general principle is made abundantly clear (or unclear!) in William Kentridge’s "Waiting for Sibyl" (2019) project, a chamber opera inspired by the ancient Greek prophetess, the Sybil of Cumae, who notably appears in Book Six of Virgil's Aeneid, as Aeneas seeks guidance on how to descend into the Underworld. The oracle instructs Aeneas to pluck  from a special tree a golden bough. Aeneas finds the "tree through whose branches flashed the contrasting glimmer of gold," extracts the golden bough and with the Sibyl presents the branch to Hades' gatekeeper in order to enter the passage to the Underworld.

J. M. W. Turner
The Golden Bough  (1834)
Tate Gallery. Source: Wikicommons

The golden bough incident is famously depicted in an 1834 painting by J.M.W. Turner; the painting in turn inspired the title of Sir James Frazer's "The Golden Bough," (1890) the foundational anthropological study of world mythology. 

[Amidst her prophetic "frenzy," the Sibyl foresees the coming of a great hero, a prophecy which Christian theologians later understood to anticipate the coming of Jesus; hence, Dante in The Divine Comedy chooses Virgil to guide him through the mysteries of the Underworld.]

The Cumaean Sybil is said to have written her prophecies on the leaves of an oak tree, gathered at the mouth of her cave. Winds would chaotically rearrange the leaf messages, rendering those seeking guidance from the diviner uncertain as to which message might be intended for them. Kentridge has suggested that this classical image has new resonance in the late modern information age, in which complex big data sets and algorithms obliquely determine our life possibilities, through incessant streams of digital data that are utterly obscure and similarly seem to scatter in the winds of cyberspace.

Kentridge's opera was developed as a dialogue, across a half century, with Alexander Calder's 1968 ballet project, Works in Progress, initially staged at the Teatro dell’Opera of Rome. The Kentridge production evokes Calder's famous rotating mobiles, thorough circling sculptural tree-like set piece, evoking the swirling, ancient winds that tossed the Sibyl's fragmentary prophecies hither and yon. In the opera, I believe, this tree drawing, or one quite like it, is projected on a rear screen, fleetingly; written messages, many of them enigmatic, are placed in sequence on a surface by a person’s hand, but then scatter, a bit like blown leaves or peeled bark, revealing the tree for a moment. The words "Where shall we place our hope?" are glimpsed as well. The tree and this haunting phrase were featured in "To What End?"  a nocturnal "Midnight Moment" installation in December 2019 on the electronic billboards of New York City's Times Square, crossroads of the world.

The haunting question, "Where shall we place our hope?" is perhaps the oldest human plaintive laments. It echoes the opening of the 121st Psalm, “I lift up my eyes to the mountains— where does my help come from?"   This interrogative takes on particular poignancy in Kentridge's home city of Johannesburg, a metropolis built on the backbreaking labor of millions of African migrants, who toiled in the gold mines, driven by dreams of a better life that were often unrealized, even as they and their descendants forged a vibrant spectrum of urban subcultures, including the extraordinary musical creativity that is echoed in the opera’s painfully beautiful score. The deep shafts and tunnels they created are perhaps here resonant with the Sybil's ancient cave, in which profound meaning was always hinted at, but invariably elusive.

Appropriately, the beautiful, leaf-filled tree that dominates this image is painted over an archival ledger page, dated January 1897, evidently from the assay office that supervised mining operations, at a time when perhaps the largest concentration of capital on the planet was being marshaled to extract South Africa’s mineral wealth (through the massive extraction of African labor power). References on the ledger sheet are made to water supply, married quarters, and other projects, with expenditures recorded in the right column. Here we get a glimpse of the vast, churning matrix of the mining industry, which governed the lives of so many for so long. In this visual retelling, each puzzling ledger entry, joined to the tree by radiating straight lines, takes on qualities of the Sybil's ancient inscriptions, freighted with meanings that hover just beyond our capacity to decipher.

Kentridge's tree presumably draws on many sources, including the classical story of the Sybil's wind-tossed leaves and the tree from which Aeneas plucked the Golden Bough.  I too, with Pam, would love to know if it signals for the artist a "colonial" tree close to home. Speculatively, we might note that the Sybil of Cumae makes frequent appearance in Christian iconography, as having been thought, as noted above, to prophesize the coming of Jesus as the Messiah.  Most famously, the Ingeborg Psalter (now conserved in Chantilly, France)  depicts a great “Jesse Tree," the family tree of Jesus tracing a line of descent back to Jesse, the father of King David. This tree, which references both the tree in the Garden of Eden and the tree upon which Jesus was crucified, contains an image of the Sybil of Cumae, who “reminds the reader of the finiteness of all creation.” (Roten, n.d.)  Perhaps this is one of the many sources for Kentridge’s beautiful, enigmatic arbor.  (I also find myself thinking of the World Tree in many spiritual traditions around the world, through which devotees are given healing and transformative glimpses of the full range of cosmic space and time.)

What in turn are we to make of the low wall behind the tree, on which is inscribed the eponymous phrase, "Where shall we place our hope?”--behind which is glimpsed a riotous proliferation of plant growth? Might there be echoes of the wall that in some commentaries circled the Garden of Eden,or the Tree of Knowledge itself in Genesis 2-3? The many walls in mining compounds that separated white mining officials and their families from black miners in hostels?  The thousands of walls, many topped with shards of broken glass, that encircle private dwellings around Johannesburg? The western wall in Jerusalem, remnants of the long vanished Temple, into which the faithful insert their written prayers?  Whatever the precise referents, the wall seems to be more than a convenient space of inscription, but a near-sanctified marker of separation between the conventional world and a sacred precinct.

Although this drawing and the opera in which its cousins appear were created before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this image does seem to speak urgently to our current moment. Who among us has not wondered during these strange recent weeks, ”Where shall we place our hope?”  Confined to our homes, largely separated from nature and our neighbors, this grand tree in full foliage gives us a glimpse of continued life and regeneration. Kentridge’s image, characteristically, offers us no definitive answers to the questions that now haunt us in the age of the virus. Yet the fulsome leaves of his towering tree do offer us a tantalizing surface on which we might scribble our queries, as we wait to see how, in turn, the coming storm might wondrously re-mix the oracle’s enigmatic written pronouncements.

References

Cameron, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and J.M. Coetzee (1999). William Kentridge. London: Phaidon Press Limited.

Roten, Johann G.,  .Jesse Tree: Ingeborg Psalter
https://udayton.edu/imri/mary/j/jesse-tree-ingeborg-psalter.php