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"I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged - the same house, the same people - and then realised that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated."
 
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Gollancz, 1951.
 
These words are taken from the opening lines of Nabokov's extraordinary work of introspective exhibitionism, Speak, Memory (1951). The narrator looks back upon the moment of horror when as a boy he realises that the world had existed prior to his birth. Moreover his parents seem to be coping, despite his absence. The shock is akin to vertigo, as he stares into the abyss of his own finitude. Intolerable! But it is not the spectre of death which alarms him, but rather it is the mute 'nihilo' of that eternity preceding his existence which precipitates the young Nabokov's crisis. What the writer discovers is summed up succinctly: 'the prison of time is spherical and without exits.'
 
There is something here in the combination of play and intellectual brio that anticipates the spirit of William Kentridge's creative enterprise. Moreover a striking resonance is evident between these lines and Kentridge's assertion of selfhood found in the slim volume of dialogues, William Kentridge Thinking Aloud: Conversations with Angela Breidbach (2006).
 
During these interviews Kentridge characteristically draws while speaking, allowing his hand to inform his words, and the text is peppered with small sketches, as the artist finds an image upon which to hang his thoughts. As indicated through the formal layout, the verbal hierarchy cataloguing the loco-descriptive self (extending outward from William Kentridge as monad through to the unknowable reaches of the universe) is paired alongside a visual diagram. The linguistic chain-of-being originates with the single point of the self leading to an ever-expanding totality, while the sketch, strikingly, inverts this sequence.
 
In the artist's little rough drawing, the annotation for the self ('William Kentridge') is positioned alongside the widest element of the wedge, while 'The universe' stands at its narrow apex.
 
Kentridge abashedly comments that this inversion is a simple error arising from the differences between text and illustration; that when we 'picture' the cosmos we necessarily look up from a single point on a horizon line toward the expanding eternity above us. (Hence the inverted pyramid in the drawing.) Of course, he laughingly concedes that perhaps the error is just an effect of massive grandiosity.
 
This meditation about the solipsistic self ('His Majesty the Baby!' ) is in some ways an inevitable beginning for the analysis of the anamorphic arts which inform the making of WHAT WILL COME (HAS ALREADY COME).  At the same time, the organising principle of this 16th Sydney Biennale, 'Revolutions', provides a key way of considering what anamorphosis suggests of the epistemological upheaval in representation that was a precondition for modernity and its practices within the time/space continuum.
 
Anamorphism is a theoretical and technical rejoinder to Renaissance perspective  even while it is its apotheosis. An accomplished piece of anamorphic art is an assertion of consummate virtuosity, certainly, but it is also an instrument of ideas. In the Renaissance it participated in the emergence of the ideological enterprise of realism.
 
Over the past two hundred years the anamorphic riddle has fallen out of favour, giving way to technologies that fixed the image world ever more persuasively through a three-dimensional stability. Within the post-realist moment of late capitalism, anamorphism has begun to re-emerge as an instrument which reminds the viewer of the constructed order of the world, while it assaults the hegemonic assumptions about what is central and what is peripheral to visual value. It also gestures toward a revolution within the unconscious in so far as the anamorphic image is a figure for that which is 'seen-but-not-seen'; or 'known-yet-not-known.' The anamorphic work confirms our ability to find the recognisable figure implicit within the distorted drawing. The order of knowledge is teased by an order of intuition.
As Kentridge has said, 'Any point of origin which is not over-determined cannot be true'.
 
The questions which he is addressing in WHAT WILL COME (HAS ALREADY COME) are, on one hand, technical ('how does one make an anamorphic film?'); while at the same time he is engaged in an ongoing debate with a significant body of intellectual work interpreting the psychological and political meanings of anamorphic art and what it suggests about the conditions of modern vision; yet simultaneously he is also explicitly and implicitly addressing the lineage of experiments in perspective and aesthetic form. Anamorphic art is (perhaps inevitably) both at the centre and at the edge of such enquiries.
 
Kentridge's own account of the origins of his anamorphic experiments is that while participating in an artistic residency at Umbria's Civitella Ranieri Centre in 1996, he visited the Science Museum in Florence where he examined early Renaissance anamorphic works. On returning to his lodgings he discovered that by happy chance a local artisan was at work repairing the radiators at his lodgings (in preparation for the approaching winter, perhaps). As a result, various lengths of bright and shiny piping were cluttering the corridors. Kentridge seized the opportunity, and an experiment was born, as he began sketching images which could only be coherently interpreted via the reflective surface of the cylinder. His first serious attempt to manipulate the image through distortion was a print of the head of Medusa in 2000.
 
Here the convergence of several seemingly random motifs begins. Personal mythology of course plays its part, but so too does classical myth. Medusa was slain by Perseus, this much we know, yet just what the figure of Perseus signifies for Kentridge is a complex affair, as is evident in his conversations with German critic Angela Breidbach.
 
...
  
Through his account of the story of Perseus, Kentridge describes the necessarily circular structure of his narratives. In the end, he asserts, they all inform us about himself: they are, he says, 'a kind of self-portraiture'.  His own animation art depends on a metaphorics through which individual images perpetually mutate into new forms through his signature technique of erased and modified line. When a cat becomes a suitcase, there seems to be an internal compulsion at work, as if there is a necessary relation between images. At the beginning of a cycle of transformation, it is impossible to predict where the drawing may be going, but once, say, a telephone has transformed itself into a hat, the relationship has become a necessary one.
 
A decade ago, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's overview essay for the catalogue of the William Kentridge exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, points to modernism's imperative of nation formation, a project premised upon the ideological legitimising of racism. She quotes George Steiner's comment that '[m]en are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent'.
 
Her comments have particular relevance for a consideration of modern statehood in an Age of Terror. Our contract with modernity is such that citizens are called upon to look away when the dispossessed are systematically reviled. Increasingly citizenship is conferred on those who marshal the borders and who, once inside its precinct, will fight to barricade the gates. Ultimately it is only by jeopardizing our own rights as citizens that we can become witnesses to the violence of exclusion exercised against others. This is a question of attention, of attending.
 
The figure of the witness is repeatedly evoked in Kentridge's films. For instance in the History of the Main Complaint (1996) the protagonist Soho Eckstein from inside his automobile, observes a man being violently beaten as he drives past. The bloody beating which Soho observes becomes a determining force in the narrative of his subjectivity. The episode is lodged inside him as a central, not a peripheral event in the production of the self. The recurring motif is of Soho's eyes staring out at us from his rearview mirror, suggesting a refracted view in which the 'other' is enclaved from the self. This is perhaps a metaphor for the 'oblique view' of political collusion.
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2008 issue.