new
york feature : : eric gelber
first
american retrospective of william kentridge
New
Museum of Contemporary Art 583 Broadway, New York, NY
June 2 - September 16,
2001
The first
American Retrospective of William Kentridge at the New Contemporary Museum is
a moving experience. His art does not become the 'kitchen help of politics.' His
animated films and related drawings are filled with innumerable permutations.
He turned to film in order to preserve the spontaneous gestures and accidents
that occur during the drawing process.
Before
he begins a charcoal drawing he likes to have his cat or children muck up the
blank surface. Sometimes his children ride a tricycle over the sheet of paper.
He prefers charcoal because it is friable. He likes being able to move shapes
and lines with ease, or to obliterate them with a brush or puff of air. The revisions
become part of the finished drawing. They maintain a ghostly presence and provide
texture. Kentridge deforms and rearranges space to suit his emotional needs, and
working in film allows him to preserve every part of the drawing's life cycle.
Film fundamentally
altered his ideas about drawing. It made him realize that he could create a completely
artificial sense of space and light on a two dimensional surface. In fact he began
using a "multiplicity of vanishing points" [1] and shifting perspectives
in his drawings and etchings, and no longer felt confined to one point perspective,
which he used in his early monotypes and etchings. His novel use of space makes
the political content more ambiguous, allows personal poetry to blend with the
terrible reality of apartheid South Africa. Harold Rosenberg has stated, "Styles
carry emotions of their own, apart from what is said through them" [2].
Kentridge
lived in Johannesburg his entire life, and stated that the second biggest influence
upon his art was a political science class he took in college. As a child, he
longed for beautiful vistas, lush greenery, and as an adult artist he sought "revenge
against the nothingness" of the Johannesburg landscape, against the 'civil
engineering detritus'; pylons, power stations, abandoned concrete pipes, half
built highways, and mine dumps. Alfred Jarry said, "Nowhere is everywhere, but
most of all it is the country we happen to be in at the moment" [3]. By portraying
a landscape he initially deplored he began to see beauty in it. That's not say
that he beautifies his subject matter. He prefers marred surfaces and roughness
which make traces of the past visible.
medicine
chest 2000, a sculptural installation put together especially for this show
is intimate, and to my mind original. Projecting animations from the wall into
the interior of a closed medicine cabinet, the artist uses film to make a transformative
self portrait. In this "two dimensional drawing moving through time,"
we see a thick necked and wrinkled white man staring out at us. The horizontal
shelves within the closed medicine chest are cleverly integrated into the compositions.
A black bird sits on a shelf/wire and tries to fly out of the rectangular space.
The smudges left over from the multiple images crowd the bird in. The normal contents
of a medicine chest appear intermittently throughout the film, along with barren
fields with solitary figures walking through them, a flittering black colored
bird. The film has the feel of a daydream, a stream of consciousness.
In
Kentridge's film work, recurring symbols and constantly flickering or moving lines
provide forward momentum. Instead of a sequential narrative, there is a nonsensical
flow of imagery; repetitions and a continuous transformation of formal elements.
A minimal amount of narrative elements are used. There are no dramatic resolutions
to the tenuous "plots", but there is continuity through movement and
culminating moments.
Kentridge's
films embody his complex political beliefs perfectly, without becoming didactic.
They are also autobiographic. His films, intimately connected to the drawing process,
are amalgamations. Recurring tropes in his films include the following: 1. interiors
dissolve or transform into an outdoor terrain (This often happens in the films
of Maya Deren.), 2. the human form is obliterated before our eyes and something
new appears in its place, such as a pile of newspapers or endless rows of numbers;
3. interior spaces become flooded with water. These might seem typical dream events,
but interestingly, according to the artist, they were inspired by conscious impulses
and accidents.
The
drawing process itself dictates the imagery, and this is different from automatism.
These films gain power from the use of surrealist imagery and social realist caricature.
The portrayal of societal inequalities in the films may seem simplistic at times,
but the clusters of ambiguous actions and symbols resonate with possible meanings.
He is a master of timing: transitions between scenes are fluid; the pace at which
images come and go is satisfying. It may not always be clear what is happening,
but the design elements hold together perfectly and there is just enough continuity
for the viewer to maintain focus. The morphing panoramas come to symbolize South
Africa's violent changes.
The
two main characters in Kentridge's first six films are Soho Eckstein, an overweight
CEO, and Felix Teitlebaum, an artist lost in his thoughts. Eckstein doesn't enjoy
his privileged existence very much. He is a caricature, a flabby, bored out of
his mind capitalist, with an adulterous wife, and a complete lack of interest
in the plight of the worker. He is alienated from the common man and his facial
expressions indicate remorse and inwardness. Teitlebaum is comically powerless,
lost in his art. He sits in an overflowing tub of water, daydreaming about Eckstein's
wife. In a land with a scarce supply of water this could mean any number of things.
Although charges
of anti-Semitism could be brought against Kentridge, the big nosed Eckstein, and
the other overweight, balding white men that appear in many of the drawings, etchings
and films, should be considered self portraits or actors modeled on the artist.
Kentridge admitted to using himself as a model out of convenience. A sleek and
shifty eyed cat appears in all of these films and is a transitional device, connecting
each tableau. The cat represents domesticity, the artist's personal life, and
becomes an extension of the main characters.
Another
important personage in Kentridge's universe is Alfred Jarry's conscienceless and
absurdist Ubu. The drawings for the film ubu tells the truth, 1997, are
done on black paper, and a reduction of formal elements generates new concepts
of space. Kentridge based some of the characters appearing in his drawings and
films on the comically rotund and hooded figures Jarry repeatedly used in his
graphic work.
What
do well-fed, self satisfied Caucasians, who make up a major portion of the audience
viewing this retrospective, take away with them; memories of a pleasing aesthetic
experience or empathy for the plight of the oppressed? As of April 2001 the situation
in Johannesburg looked grim in many ways: "Black ownership on the Johannesburg
stock exchange is estimated at less than 2%, while unemployment among young black
South Africans is estimated at as high as 40%" [4]. "One in four South African
men surveyed in a three-year study by the Johannesburg City Council said they
had committed rape before they were 18" [5].
We
should be happy that someone is calling attention to South African history and
politics, and at the same time, creating fascinating and expressive art. Kentridge's
political content is not merely an appendage or self conscious gesture. Having
grown up in apartheid South Africa, images of oppression and alienation were deeply
embedded in his psyche. The drawings, which are at the heart of every project
the artist gets involved in, are "evocations of a fractured world." A growing
restlessness with the static image led him to take photographs of the drawing
in progress and to edit the entire collection of images. Unlike Matisse and Picasso,
who allowed themselves to be filmed while constructing a drawing, mostly for historical
purposes, Kentridge worked in film in order to liberate technique, and to irrevocably
alter what the final product would look like. "The only hope of generating an
idea is in the physical process of working."
An
interactive CD-ROM, published by David Krut, is being sold by the museum in conjunction
with the retrospective. It was created, in collaboration with Kentridge, by staff
and students of the MultiMedia Department of CityVarsity in Cape Town, and includes
reproductions of drawings and prints, excerpts from the animated films, excerpts
from the filming of theatre productions, text and reviews of the work, and writing
and transcripts of lectures by the artist. You hear narration by the artist when
specific links are opened.
Unfortunately,
however, the reproductions of the drawings, etchings and monotypes on the CD-ROM
are lackluster, and lose out to the embossed pages of the printed catalogue. Computer
screens are still inferior to print resources when it comes to reproductions of
visual art. When opening various links melancholic music begins to play. If you
are going from one link to another quickly, the restarting of the soundtrack becomes
quite annoying. There is an option available that allows the user to turn off
Kentridge's voice over, but there is no way to turn off the intermittent musical
accompaniment. But still, these technical caveats aside, the CD-ROM is a nice
memento of a memorable show.
[1].
All quotes by the artist are taken from the interactive CD-ROM William Kentridge;
David Krut Publishing; 1997.
[2].
Rosenberg, H (1973); The Anxious Object. Collier Books, New York p.215.
[3]. Jarry, A
(1965). Shattuck, Roger, and Taylor S.W.(eds.) Selected Works of Alfred Jarry.
Grove Press, Inc. New York p. 79.
[4].
Retrieved from the World Wide Web http://www.namibian.com.na/2001/March/marketplace/01DDFB6BF9.html
accessed 22 July 2001.
[5].
Retrieved from the World Wide Web http://www.mg.co.za/mg/za/archive/2001mar/27marpm-news.html;
accessed 22 July 2001.
