William Kentridge: Five Themes at the MoMA
“…circumscribing his own work to a world haunted by the invisible powers of the Other”1 seems to be a part of the art practice of William Kentridge. In his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on show until the 17th of May, his five most recurrent themes lead us into a universe of frenzied gestures, which are not usually the ones chosen to convey a violent and paradoxical social-political reality.
A white native of Johannesburg, born in 1955, when apartheid was at its most corrosive, Kentridge describes himself as a citizen “at the edge of huge social upheavals, but also outside them”. He studied politics and art in South Africa before travelling to Paris in the 1980s to study mime and drama. Upon his return, he began making the animated films which are still a central part of his work.
Kentridge’s animations, which are deliberately “primitive”, are made by means of a laborious process in which he draws, erases and draws again, with charcoal, on a single piece of paper. In this way, the images, which are filmed at each step, do not move as much as transform into marvellous and profoundly melancholy transitions. The novelty of this show lies in the fact that we can look at the drawings in each process, palimpsests which accumulate the gestuality of an artist who conceives drawing as a way of understanding who we are and how we operate in the world, and whose weakness, perhaps, is hope –which he is both suspicious of and seduced by.
The exhibition begins with two series of anti-apartheid works. Ubu and the Procession centres on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established by South Africa to deal with the crimes of apartheid, and reveals the spontaneity of Kentridge’s work: pieces of black paper and other elements configure a sort of collage, articulating highly realistic outlines and images. The second series, under the theme Thick Time: Soho and Felix, is made up of nine films grouped under the title 9 Drawings for Projection (1989-2003). This is almost certainly one of the most powerful, dramatic and well-known pieces in the exhibition. Here, Kentridge introduces us to his two alter egos: Soho Eckstein, a voracious businessman, and Felix Teitlebaum, a melancholy character who longs to possess the sensual wife of Eckstein. These inherently political works, the fruit of his non-conformity, today reflect a profound existential anguish.
The third part, The Artist in the Studio, presents a “sorcerer” Kentridge, far from political upheaval, who performs several animation tricks, in homage to Georges Méliès, famous for his early special effects.
The last two parts of the show focus on the least known side of the artist, his drama work. The Magic Flute welcomes us with two puppet theatres, in which a play produced to represent Mozart’s opera is articulated and projected, in a reflection on the gaining of wisdom.
Learning from The Absurd: The Nose closes the show, using the absurd to explore the Russian avant garde from the 1920s and 1930s and its subsequent suppression. In this way Kentridge offers his own version of Shostakovich’s opera, based on a story by Nikolai Gogol from 1836 which tells the story of a bureaucrat who awakes one morning to find his nose has abandoned him, and gone in search of social ascent. The piece was recently performed at the Metropolitan Opera of New York, in a show which, likes Kentridge’s animations, proves that nothing is stable and that everything can come undone–but that it can also be rebuilt.
1. Michel de Certeau, “De las prácticas cotidianas de oposición”, in Paloma Blanco ed. Al., Modos de hacer: arte crítico, esfera pública y acción directa, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, 2001, p. 400.
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