We express what we know in words, judgements, concepts, while we depict what we see in images. But what is common to both of them, as Automatic Writing seems to imply, is the moving line. The short films begins with tentative drawings of curls that are quickly erased, leaving only a trace. But does one of these curls, which seems ornamental at first, not look a lot like the word “el” — and does this word, associated with the First Book of Moses, not conceptually introduce the theme of beginning (see the film still above)? This would seem accidental, if the same process didn’t repeat constantly throughout the film: Moving lines are sometimes becoming letters or numbers (conceptual plane), and sometimes figures or shapes (visual plane). The figure of the reading woman (see the cover picture above) disintegrates into lines that turn into words — maybe the words of what she is reading — that once again become lines and transform into a shape, her sleeping figure. Words and images are antithetical unfoldings of the line, towards the visible or the conceptual, originating in a flowing movement, the movement of the artist’s hand.

But if the process of differentiation is traced back to the moving line, then where does this movement come from in the first place? It is a well-known method of overcoming a creative block to just draw circles that can become doodles or words; but what comes first here is the urge to create, even before you have decided what is to come out of it. Something anticipates the intention of putting specific ideas or images to paper, because otherwise, we wouldn’t feel compelled to overcome the creative block at all:

The themes in my work do not really constitute its starting point, which is always the desire to draw (ibid.: 1f.) [T]he drawing doesn’t begin as a moral project; it starts from the pleasure of putting charcoal marks on paper (ibid.: 12).

Due to the artistic method, Kentridge’s use of charcoal, the unfoldings into words or images can always be reversed, where the erasure leaves a trace and can become the foundation for a new image or word. In the usual artistic practice, the sketch is a mere means to an end, where the end result hides all its traces of processuality. For the Surrealists, it has become a method, but we are still presented with the final work and can only guess how the associations have come to be. What makes Kentridge’s short unique is that the process of creation, the search for the creative motor, remains visible in the final art work. We can indeed watch the latter and enjoy it for its visual qualities, and we can talk about it, judge or interpret it — but what we see there, are neither fully-formed images nor fleshed-out ideas, but an attempt to bring forward that which causes the artist’s hand to move in the first place, namely the desire to draw.

One might be tempted to read this urge in a psychoanalytic way, as an attempt to resolve certain inner conflicts. This connection cannot be denied, considering that the method of association is prominent in automatic writing, and the various images (the fountain, the interior, the houses) that appear in the film can be read as repressed childhood memories that have been freed up by the process. But then we would expect a more linear progression, where the inner conflict is steered towards its resolution. Instead, the process of unfolding and erasure, of replacing a word with an image and an image with a word is constantly repeated throughout the film, so that it is rather the relation of the hand to the paper, the artist to the work that is of primary interest here. In other words, the locus of desire is not the artist’s inner life, but the frontier between the inner and the outer, the movement of the hand and the traces that it leaves on the paper.

Desire and movement are thereby not two distinct elements, with the movement being a mere result of the desire; they coincide. The piece of paper becomes a mind screen, something that belongs both to the inner and to the outer spheres. Association kicks in once the artist has already started moving his hand, where the curls might remind him of curly hair and become the doodle of a face. The unfolding of the line into words or into images, as much as the differentiation of the two in the final product that we can appreciate on a visual and conceptual level, prolongs the desire to create and fulfils its inner potential. At the same time, it is only through the process of drawing that the inner and the outer spheres are differentiated, where the final work becomes an object to look at and the artist the subject that only looks at it once it is completed. We can therefore say that the movement of desire gives rise to differentiations on three different levels: 1) In the artistic process, the line can unfold into either a word or an image; 2) The final work can be read either on a visual (concrete) or conceptual (general) level; 3) The unity of the artist and the work, as his hand holds the charcoal and moves on the paper, gets separated into the observing subject and the observed object once the process is completed, where the art work is completely externalised from the artist’s interiority.

We have now talked about the artistic process, but what does that teach us about vitalism as a philosophical position?