“Hogarth between London and Johannesburg. A serpentine progress through the metropolis of past and present”

The exhibition Hogarth in Johannesburg (1987–1988) marked the first seminal collaborative project between three contemporary South African artists, Robert Hodgins, Deborah Bell and William Kentridge. It was shown at Malcolm Christian’s Caversham Press studio in the midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, with the aim of exploring the work of ‘old masters’ in the tense context of the contentious apartheid regime that prevailed in South Africa in the late 1980s. Each of the participating artists worked with a particular series created by Hogarth, and used it as a model to address the everyday imbalances and failures of the abusive state apparatus. Hodgins chose A Rake’s Progress (1735); Bell took inspiration from Marriage A-la-Mode (1745) and Kentridge revisited Industry and Idleness (1747). Drawing on a rich array of topical satiric allusions and self-consciously reflexive frames characterizing both the Hogarthian cycles and the new South African reworkings, the essay highlights the influence of Hogarth’s perspectival subtlety and exuberant intertextuality on Kentridge’s juxtaposition of the lives of two protagonists, one black and the other white. In both cases, printmaking seems particularly suitable to bring out the ambiguities and contradictions of a ‘modern’ urban aesthetic of punishment and surveillance. Both series are deeply imbued with a sense of the absurd, and largely rely on depictions of the crowd’s reckless energies and activities. Hogarth’s ironical paradigm of the two apprentices’ correlative progress is thus translated into the discriminatory ‘plot’ of apartheid, bringing to the fore a similarly complicated pattern of indulgent self-reference, theatricality and fateful vulnerability.