Representing the South African landscape: Coetzee, Kentridge, and the ecocritical enterprise *.

Summary

South African artist William Kentridge's Soho Series takes place inside a representation of a Johannesburg mine-landscape. It is a post-industrial and postcolonial landscape of exploitation both of the citizens of the country and of the natural environment. This article considers how the representation of the South African landscape by Kentridge can be seen as part of a continuum of landscape representation in South Africa originating from an initial "wilderness" encounter of a stranger with a new environment. The article traces the movement of landscape representation from those moments when writers and painters, schooled in a particular tradition of representational practices, find themselves forced to create new ways of representing the environment in which they find themselves to a contemporary moment where Kentridge's engagement with landscape representations can be seen as both ecocritical and environmentalist.

Opsomming

Die Suid-Afrikaanse kunstenaar William Kentridge se Soho Series speel af binne 'n voorstelling van Johannesburg se mynlandskap. Dit is 'n post-industriele en postkoloniale landskap wat getuig van die uitbuiting van sowel die landsburgers as die natuurlike omgewing. Die artikel handel oor hoe die voorstelling van die Suid-Afrikaanse landskap deur Kentridge gesien word as deel van 'n kontinuum van landskapvoorstelling in Suid-Afrika wat spruit uit die eerste "wildernis"-ervaring van 'n vreemdeling met 'n nuwe omgewing. In die artikel word die ontwikkeling van 'n beweging van landskapvoorstelling gevolg vanaf die momente waar skrywers en skilders wat in 'n bepaalde tradisie van voorstellingspraktyke geskool is, hulself gedwonge voel om nuwe maniere te skep om die landskap waarin hulle hulself bevind voor te stel, tot die kontemporere moment waar Kentridge se betrokkenheid by landskapsvoorstelling as beide ekokrities en omgewingsbewus vertolk kan word.

Introduction

A few themes, and the aesthetic and political questions that inevitably accompany them, fall as unambiguously within the ambit of ecocriticism as those concerned with the representation of landscape. Similarly few representations of landscape attract the attention of those concerned with ecological movements as strongly as those that evoke, and condemn in doing so, the destruction or degradation of the natural world by its human inhabitants.

The growing body of ecocritcial work in the area of landscape reveals that some of its most interesting questions arise in association with human movement, at first perhaps, with those associated with travel, but thereafter with the more substantial and sustained consequences of this movement that manifest as colonisation. At these moments those engaged in representing the physical world (in the broadest sense of the phrase) be they writers, painters or film-makers, schooled in one set of representational practices, themselves reflecting a particular relation to the natural world, find themselves in a setting or landscape so different from that with which they are familiar, that they are forced to forge not just new orientations to that world but also new modes of representing it. Furthermore it is under these circumstances--those that arise primarily in the early colonial period--that new stylistic and ideological questions associated with the new landscape arise.

A full understanding of the significance of questions of this kind, of those characterised here as those of landscape, is predicated on looking carefully at the implications of the term "landscape" itself. Our deep, and commonsensical notion that human beings are naturally and unproblematically surrounded by a physical world, by what could be described in a number of ways including words such as physical environment, setting or terrain, tends to blunt an understanding of the extent to which all ways of representing this world are necessarily permeated by representational codes and conventions, which originate in particular physical and historical contexts, which stamp them in ways that attest not only to their origins in (a particular form of) nature but also in a particular cultural configuration. In fact, as art historians such as Ann Bermingham (1986) make clear, it is only at first glance that the word "landscape" can legitimately be used interchangeably with words such as "nature" or "terrain". The concept landscape art for example already implies more than a type of subject matter or content. A landscape painting is the result of a set of culturally specific ways of seeing, depicting and valuing the natural world that encompasses both the natural world itself and the history of its representations in visual terms.

Against this background, this paper examines two particular instances located in different historical moments in South African cultural history in which questions of landscape come to the fore in particularly interesting and vivid forms.

The first concerns the moment at which painters and writers accompanied by a set of styles and orientations to the natural world that originated in Europe, travel to South Africa and encounter a landscape very different from the one with which they are familiar. This encounter is discussed here primarily in the light of J.M. Coetzee's prescient 1980s work White Writing (1988). This work, concerned as it is with questions of landscape in the strong sense of the term, unquestionably falls under the broad umbrella of what is now called ecocriticism. Coetzee's analysis engages directly with what Greg Gerrard (2004) calls "the wilderness moment" in South African painting and writing and in doing so brings to the fore the demand for forging new ways of representing landscape as well as the social and political questions that always accompany the challenges to traditional representational practices that arise from changes in what can be simply described, but are never simply experienced, as changes in the sense of place.

The second example, the one central to this paper, concerns the extent to which contemporary South African artist William Kentridge's work can be construed as not only concerned with the aesthetics and the associated politics of representing landscape, and in this sense is squarely ecocritical, but may also be interpreted as having vivid, if latent environmentalist affiliations. Kentridge's work, it will be argued here, can be described as environmentalist where the term suggests a concern with the destructive effects of the human plundering and degradation of the environment, seen in its own terms, as also having value in itself.

Representing Landscape: The Picturesque/Pastoral Configuration

Any attempt to characterise, in unashamedly schematic terms, the relation to landscape and the representational practices that European painters and writers bring with them to South Africa during the early colonial period might refer to the picturesque/pastoral configuration. As these terms suggest, the painters and writers that come to South Africa in this period bring with them, on the basis of their common European origins, what would subsequently be described as the basically idealising relation to the environment, later often associated with Romanticism, coupled with an already established repertoire of representational resources. They come in addition, as Gerrard suggests (2004: 33), with a strong affiliation to the natural as opposed to the cultural-as-urban, and a sense that the natural world and the values it enshrines is (already) endangered by industrialisation and urbanisation.

A brief history of the picturesque in particular is a useful way of framing the questions of landscape as raised by the work of William Kentridge. According to Malcolm Andrews (1999), early picturesque works have been identified in scenic stage paintings as used in the theatre during the Renaissance. The important move from the appreciation of landscapes as mere backdrops to religious or mythological narratives to stand-alone representations of the beauties of the natural world, is expressed in the development of the picturesque style, which took place towards the end of the eighteenth century and has been linked to inter-European travel, to the opening up of the border between European countries and Britain (Coetzee 1988: 39) with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. During this period "landscape enthusiasts" from Britain were introduced to and influenced by leading picturesque painters from Europe, such as Clause Lorraine. This style carried the mark of taste and sophistication until the end of the century in Britain and significantly for, as Coetzee puts it "at least another half century in the colonies and ex-colonies" (p. 39). Furthermore, the eighteenth century saw the phenomenon of the "picturesque tourist" (1999:115), travelling through "England's Lake District armed with their Claude glasses", portable instruments consisting of a convex glass in a frame, which, when held against the countryside, would transform the view into a picturesque landscape.

The increasing mobility between nations and continents during this period clearly played a part in making the picturesque such a widely influential genre and explained why it is that landscape artists arrived in South Africa accompanied by the tools (often in the literal sense) of the picturesque as the dominant paradigm governing ways of representing the natural world. Coetzee (1988) draws attention to the fact that William Gilpin, an enthusiast and art critic of this style has written some of these "tools" and "ingredients" as composed of the following elements: "The ideally picturesque view ... (1) contained distant mountains, (2) a lake in the middle distance, (3) and a foreground of rocks, woods, broken ground, cascades, or ruins, (4) this foreground to be characterised by 'force and richness', by 'roughness' of texture, in contrast to the 'tenderness' of the middle and far ground" (Coetzee 1988: 39, 40; my numbering).

It is a particular relation to these particular tools and ingredients that makes, it will be argued here, William Kentridge's filmic landscapes particularly interesting to ecocriticism in the wide sense of the term.

J.M. Coetzee and the "Wilderness" Moment

Using a phrase, borrowed from Greg Gerrard, what he describes as the "wilderness moment" is a useful way of approaching J.M. Coetzee's White Writing (1988), because it foregrounds Coetzee's fine engagement with a particular point in which questions of representing landscape come to the fore. Gerrard's (2004) cogent book on ecocriticism in the New Critical Idiom series, contains two successive chapters, entitled "Pastoral" and "Wilderness", that can respectively be seen as suggesting the end points of a continuum describing representations of landscape that run from the more established, perhaps "domesticated" overtones surrounding the picturesque/pastoral configuration, to the contrasting endpoint suggested by the term wilderness as a landscape which has not (as yet) been appropriated by humans, and the culture-specific representational repertoires they bring with them. The wilderness theme arises then when Europe moves outside of its borders in order to explore and eventually inhabit other "terrains", bringing with it the challenge of either extending or abandoning this repertoire in the face of alien worlds. It is exactly such a wilderness moment that European painters and writers encounter in South Africa.

In specific terms Gerrard, when discussing Wordsworth as a poet who he uses to best exemplify what could be called the pastoral-romantic, refers to the deep sense of belonging, of being at home, in the lake district which provides subject matter for his poetry. This sense of belonging and familiarity produces, Gerrard suggests, truly "ecological" poetry (2004: 42) in that it involves the production of "a logos of the iocos" (p. 42). The wilderness moment by contrast can be encapsulated as an encounter with the absence of a "logos" in the face of an alien "iocos".

Interestingly, Coetzee embarks on his exploration of landscape representation in the wilderness by way of an analysis of a painterly moment. He (1988: 36) uses the figure of scientist and amateur landscape painter William Burchell to introduce the concept of "white writing" in South Africa. Burchell's experience as a landscape artist in South Africa is the key to this discussion as he was primarily concerned with the rendering of a given landscape as picturesque and so provides a reference to ground an analysis of the "landscape work" of William Kentridge.

Burchell travelled across the Cape colony and beyond in the writing of his Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa in 1822. He saw much that pleased his picturesque eye in the Cape colony, but became troubled beyond its borders as he recognised less and less that which fitted his understanding of what constituted a "landscape" worth appreciating and rendering. His art terminology is telling, as he mused that the brand of beauty he was confronted with in the interior of South Africa might have been one to which the European "training" might have been "blind" (Burchell in Coetzee 1988: 38). Burchell, himself, described his findings as: "In the character of this landscape and its peculiar tints, a painter would find much to admire, though it differs entirely from the species known by the term 'picturesque'" (Burchell quoted in Coetzee 1988: 38).

Burchell then set himself the task of somehow devising a form of painting this alien landscape so that it could be appreciated by Europeans. He realised that this could only be done in the language that the Europeans could read, which in practice meant seeking a "parallel" to the "Claudian schema of the picturesque" (p. 41). Coetzee deems Burchell's "modified European picturesque" a failure, doomed to be so from the outset for reasons related to both the visual and cultural which now sat uneasily with this new world. The details making up Burchell's dilemma reveal the lineaments of the picturesque's problematic relation to the wilderness. Four key areas inform Coetzee's analysis, all of which relate to climatology:

First is the difference in tonal values, especially the lack of green. Burchell exclaimed: "The lively yellow green [of the willows] ... [on the banks of the Gariep] had a cheerful effect on the spirits and relieved the eye by a hue most soothing and grateful" (p. 42). This, the area around the Gariep Dam, is one instance of some green hues, yet on the whole, the South African interior is composed of "more subdued tonal values" (p. 42). Coetzee attributes this tonal schema to the lack of moisture in the air, as it is through moisture that the light produces colours that are deeply saturated and brilliant. Secondly, and related to moisture, the foliage "lacks lustre". Thirdly, the quality of light is not soft but harsh, bright and uninterrupted, in opposition to the great variety of luminance values created by the light quality in more moist conditions. The European countries, where the picturesque originated, receive higher annual rainfall so that the skies are forever full of cloud formations that move continually in the wind, creating an apparently animated interplay between light and shadow on leaves and grass.

Finally, in South Africa, there is a lack of a most essential ingredient of the picturesque, the body of surface water. The abundance of surface water in Europe and Britain creates a point of focus and light in a pictorial composition, but is also unlimited in its metaphoric possibilities for the endowing of the picturesque. The metaphoric connotations of surface water that are crucial to the understanding of the picturesque mode include: tranquility; transparency, where nature yields to man; reflectivity, where man can gaze into his soul (1988: 44). When considering the overwhelming dryness of what William Burchell was faced with in South Africa, Coetzee states:

   What concerns us here is, by contrast, the near absence of surface
   water in the South African plateau, and the consequent lacuna in
   the repertoire of the artist (painter, but also writer) wishing to
   give meaningful (meaning-filled) representation to that landscape
   within the schema he has carried over from European art.

   (Coetzee 1988: 44)

The dryness of the setting then becomes a quality that surpasses significance as "merely technical", but becomes a sign of a specific "cultural outlook" (p. 43). Thus when Coetzee asks in relation to the South African landscape work: "How are we to read the landscape we find ourselves in?" (1988: 166), he alludes to the confrontation with an alien terrain on two levels. Firstly, it highlights the semiotics inscribed in the act of looking at a landscape. Secondly it suggests a reading of a landscape that happens subsequent to a writing. Coetzee's text is premised on this notion of "white writing"; of European ideas writing themselves into the colonial context in an attempt to come to terms with the landscape (1988: 2).

The "Colonial Moment"--Writing the Landscape

If the first "moment" in the problematic of landscape representation in South Africa can be termed the "wilderness" moment, characterised by the artist as a stranger in a wilderness, faced with the task and the wish to "Europeanise" the environment, the second could be described as the "colonial" moment proper. At this point, the wilderness has been colonised, producing artists who try to make the landscape their own yet are still speaking in and to the European representational tradition. The artists concerned with landscape at this moment who have developed a reflective, critical relation to the natural environment are particularly interesting to Coetzee in White Writing.

According to Coetzee, those located in the colonial moment face two options, one being a "more and more frenzied application of European metaphors to Africa", the other, "the abandonment of defeated European categories in favor of a putative naturally expressive African language" (p. 165). This second option corresponds to the colonial moment and has to do with the question of a generation of South African poets whose nature-writing tradition is drawn primarily from Europe with its strong connotation of the pastoral, and concerns the finding of a style.

Subsequent to his discussion of Burchell as a painter, Coetzee engages with Thomas Pringle as a poet who attempts to apply the European model to evoke the South African landscape. By way of Pringle, Coetzee explores the literary equivalent of the painterly picturesque tradition. What the examples of Burchell and Pringle have in common is that both confront an unknown terrain and the problems it presents for those equipped with different representational tools.

Subsequently, Coetzee discusses those writers who attempt to forge a style without drawing on a representational landscape that can easily be transplanted or reconfigured. Coetzee captures this later moment as that which involves the fundamental understanding that, as he puts it, "the veld is unresponsive to language" (p. 165). For Guy Butler, in particular, the problem relates to what Coetzee describes as the realisation that "[t]he African landscape just is" (p. 170). Similarly, when referring to Sydney Clout, the way in which the African landscape ought to be portrayed, involves resisting the taking of a position altogether. Instead, for Clout, the only response that the African landscape allows is one in which it is not the poet but the land itself that assumes the dominant position.

Coetzee suggests that poets, novelists and artists in the colonial period were struggling to write on the basis of an indigenous, what he calls geological, gaze, as opposed to the botanical gaze of the Europeans, which in some sense disguises and silences the earth. In this they were attempting to represent the landscape in a way that did not display the key features of the traveller genre understood as metonymic of the "imperial eye--the eye that by seeing names and dominates" (p. 174).

It is only after this point that could be described as postcolonial with some of the irony and reflexivity suggested by postmodernism as its aesthetic counterpart, that it becomes possible to quote rather than resist the representational repertoire associated with the European picturesque and pastoral.

William Kentridge--The Postcolonial Moment

What I have called the third, or postcolonial moment, is explored through the "landscape work" of South African artist William Kentridge. Historically the colonial moment has been superceded by what could be called the postcolonial period, in which artists have a very different relation to the environment. They are no longer faced with an alien territory or wilderness, no longer merely colonisers, struggling to engage in novel ways with the South African landscape. The landscape work of William Kentridge provides an interesting example of many of the features that characterise the third moment in landscape representation, which, it will be argued, is underpinned by a sense of responsibility. Placing this lens over Kentridge's landscape work produces two possibly novel readings of the body of work making up 9 Films produced between 1989-1999, often referred to as the Soho Series.

The first refers back to William Burchell's project of an African picturesque, arguing that Kentridge's landscapes display many of the ingredients Burchell sets out characterising both the style and the content of the picturesque, and in doing so displays a subtly ironic relationship to this, one of the West's most influential landscape traditions. The interesting feature of this work is the manner in which Kentridge quotes the representational repertoire of the picturesque, while simultaneously evoking an indigenously South African landscape. No longer somewhat earnestly engaged in trying to speak to and for South African landscapes in a way that appears beholden to European precedents, Kentridge can now play with and comment upon the picturesque canon, using all the resources of visual irony.

The second, perhaps more interesting, question emerges in relation to a possibly controversial reading, which attempts to show that despite this playful quoting and ironic referencing to picturesque landscapes in some of his filmic works, Kentridge also displays a concern with the fate of the natural environment itself which aligns these landscapes to the environmental rather than merely ecocritical endeavour.

Kentridge's 9 Films is unquestionably "littered" with landscapes in the simple sense that he depicts large stretches of exterior spaces. Yet, the critical appropriations of these works have traditionally focused on the human implications of the context he is depicting--that of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Traditional, art-historical understandings of his work, such as that by Dan Cameron (1999: 49) have focused on his political commitments, where the landscapes he portrays are seen as psychic burial grounds for mutilated bodies which disappear into the earth leaving the terrain unchanged. These traditional appropriations read landscapes primarily in metaphoric or instrumental terms as the visual means by which individuals and their psyches are engulfed by a defensive forgetfulness. Moreover, the focus has been on the angst, guilt and desires of the white Jewish male protagonist--uncomfortable, yet passive in an apartheid South Africa. While these readings are in my view valid, they do little to draw our attention to the compositional and stylistic choices displayed in Kentridge's representations of landscape.

By contrast, the focus here will be upon the formal ingredients of the landscapes themselves, particularly those in the animated film Felix in Exile (1994), produced in the year that South Africa held its first democratic elections. It is important however, to place this more formal reading of Kentridge against the background of his continual engagements with questions surrounding representations of landscape that he had in common with the poets of what has been called here, the colonial moment.

In a discussion with Carolyn Christov Bakargiev, Kentridge refers to his relationship with the major traditions of landscape art. He expresses both his engagement with, and refers to his interest in, but frustration with the portrayals of English landscapes of streams and meadows to which he was exposed in his youth: "I felt that the landscape around me was a lie, that I had been cheated. Rather than growing up thinking that these green hills in that book were fiction, I believed they were real. The South African landscape wasn't less real; it was more like a disaster zone" (Kentridge 1999: 22).

It is ironically an interest in, and preoccupation with, these disaster zones that come to characterise some of Kentridge's strongest and most interesting work. Kentridge's landscape works, unlike those characterised here as belonging to the colonial moment, are not concerned with natural scenes untouched by man but with a world that visibly reveals the hand of man. Kentridge's is clearly a radically contemporary scenario--a post-industrial space of plunder.

Importantly, what differentiates Kentridge from, for example, the poets discussed by Coetzee, is that he is not searching for a new language with which to represent this new landscape. Kentridge does not attempt to forge a different style, one apparently appropriate for his different context, he refers back to an earlier tradition in order to insert an ironic take on the task of representing a new "terrain". What Kentridge does, it will be argued here, is the result of an ironic appropriation, perhaps subversion, of the picturesque, deployed to evoke the industrial realities of the postcolony.

Two levels of reference to the picturesque can be identified in landscape works from Felix in Exile (1994): The first level is a quoting of the picturesque formula as laid out by William Gilpin. Viewed in formal terms, one can observe specific traces of the compositional "rules" of traditional picturesque landscape art. In the Kentridge scholarship, very little attention is paid to these technical aspects of the work and it is therefore worth doing so in some detail here. One drawing will be singled out for the purposes of demonstrating this simultaneous "homage" to, and the subversion of, the picturesque. In the second last drawing of the last sequence of Felix in Exile (1994), the composition can be identified as consisting of the following ingredients.

Using the very words of Gilpin the composition can be described as: (1) a large, mesa shape on the horizon, or "farground" that designates a mine dump; (2) a pool of water in the "middle distance", (3) "broken ground" in the foreground, immediately in front of the lake; (4) the middle and far grounds are "tender" in that they have no detail, they are lighter in comparison to other tones in the frame and are "in contrast" to the "rough texture" of the messy foreground. Here the viewer's gaze is abruptly cut off by the frontal view of the large mesa on the horizon. Another key element in the traditional composition of the picturesque is described by Burchell in his proposed African picturesque as "long streaks of bushes ... gradually fading into the distance" (Burchell quoted in Coetzee 1988: 41). Instead of these bushes, Kentridge places dead or dry sticks protruding from the earth to suggest height into the picture plane and to lead the eye into the distance.

The second way in which Kentridge's landscape is reminiscent of the picturesque, is the manner in which subject matter has been rendered. The treatment of material and form suggests further implications for landscape representation. Like the picturesque, in which the naturalistic content is rendered in ways that still draw attention to the elements of style and technique that affirm its status as painting, Kentridge draws attention to the drawing itself. Like the picturesque, Kentridge's treatment is still naturalistic in some sense; regardless of the fact that the marks are loose, they remain illustrative.

What are the effects of rendering this landscape, the Johannesburg, disused mine landscape, in the picturesque tradition--not as Burchell's modified European model searching for matching European subject matter but an actual African, contemporary, industrial setting? One of the effects is to subvert the seamless representation of the environment by traditional landscape art; turning the model of the picturesque, where nature has traditionally been moulded, either physically or stylistically, to perform particular functions to align it with the picturesque, inside out. Kentridge, by contrast to the tradition, moulds the picturesque, as a style, to perform the functions of representing a non-picturesque reality.

The second point emphasised in this paper is one made almost in passing by Staci Boris in a catalogue on Kentridge's work. "Not only is Kentridge signalling that this ruined vista is as much his cultural inheritance as the idyllic Eden was to his forebears, but in his refusal to ascribe any ideological position to nature he is also pointing out the inherent connection between ecology and civil rights." (Boris 1999: 49)

In order to situate this relation between ecology and civil rights, one should direct attention once again to some of the essential qualities of the picturesque that the South African landscape falls short of, and how these have been appropriated by Kentridge. In his work, one can detect a number of significant variations of the traditional schema of traditional landscape representation. The distant rolling hills have been replaced by mine dumps, which ceaselessly appear to emit pollutants into the sky above; the living trees have been replaced by dead wood sticking out of the ground as if the burnt-out remnants of a stockade; the pure, mirroring surface of a lake, have now become the slime dam.

The ingredients of landscape cease, it is being argued here, to operate as merely markers of what is distinctive of Johannesburg, but also suggest concerns with the environment itself. Kentridge does not, to my knowledge, consciously align himself with a "green" movement or any obvious environmentalism. It is also true that a mere substitution of the traditional content of the picturesque landscape with the very different elements that make up the markers of place that suggest South Africa, Johannesburg in particular, would not be enough to indicate an environmental concern. However, Kentridge's choices seem to suggest something more than a concern with the familiarly local. It is the form and detail of this replacement which suggest an environmental project.

It is not insignificant, or merely a given that in Johannesburg, the rolling hills should be replaced by a mine mesa, nor that the picturesque lake is now a slime dam. These are features that foreground the consequences for the natural of the exploitation of Johannesburg as industrial city. Dead wood has replaced green trees fading off into the distance, suggesting that the landscape yields no life. The mine in the "farground" seems to be emitting a constant smoulder into the air, suggesting a constant force of pollution. This landscape is severely menacing and has become hostile to humans, ironically, precisely because of their destructive and invasive relation to it. To paraphrase a point made by Lawrence Buell (2005), human history has in this case, negatively, been implicated in natural history. As Boris suggests, the questions of civil rights are never very far from Kentridge's concern, but they are, however, intimately connected to those of ecology--a connection about which the drawing displays a refined and intuitive understanding.

Conclusion

If questions of landscape are central to the ecocritical enterprise itself, then changes in the way in which humans represent the natural and physical world in which they live are interestingly foregrounded at those moments at which the representational practices forged in one world confront the "realities" of another. The ways in which South African artists and writers responded to the "wilderness moments", the colonial era and the postcolonial period represent particularly revealing instances of the consequences of human movement insofar as they allow one to trace the unfolding of a trajectory encompassing bewilderment, defiance and, finally, irony. In this, the landscape work of William Kentridge displays not merely an artistic project strongly imbued with a sense of inhabiting a country of one's own but also a sense of the price paid for human ownership itself and the way in which this threatens the natural world. The dead and dying earth and its manifestations inscribed in Felix in Exile (1994) act as powerful reminders of the especially close connection between human and environmental exploitation in South Africa's history.

References

Andrews, M. 1999 Landscape and Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benezra, N., Cameron, D. & Staci, B. (curators)

2003 William Kentridge, Castello di Ravoli. Musee d'Arte Contemporarea. Milan: Skira Editore S.P.A.

Bermingham, A. 1986 Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1780-1860. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Buell, L. 2005 The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. USA, UK, Australia: Blackwell.

Cameron, D., Christov-Bakargiev, C. & Coetzee, J.M. 1999 William Kentridge. London: Phaidon.

Coetzee, J.M. 1988 White Writing, On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven & London: Yale University.

Gerrard, G. 2004 Ecocriticism. London, New York: Routledge.

* This article is a product of the Wits Graduate School Student Publication Project. I would like to acknowledge the input and assistance of Dr Susan van Zyl in the realization of the article.