Three major New York cultural institutions have hosted William Kentridge this year. The Museum of Modern Art put up a retrospective exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes this spring. Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera The Nose produced by Kentridge was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in February; the preparatory work is on view at the Gallery Met through the end of the season. And the artist’s four films make up the ongoing exhibition South African Projections: Films by William Kentridge at the Jewish Museum.
The five themes of the exhibition at the Modern set forth the five dominant themes of Kentridge’s work at large: Parcours D’Atelier, or Artist in the Studio (1979 – 2003), The Nose opera production and the related work (2008 – 2010), The Magic Flute opera production and the surrounding projects (2003 – 2007), and the films and drawings from the two series, Soho and Felix (1989 – 2003) and Ubu and the Procession (1990 – 2002). But the show reveals another, discrete, set of five themes - five leitmotifs that interlace through the artist’s work in both realms, of ideas and of forms, and weave the dominant themes into a seamless fabric. These crosscut themes are: body, shadow, destruction, transformation, and history.
Thinking with the body
To me, Parcours D’Atelier, or Artist in the Studio was the voice leading the show because it encapsulated the artist’s creative effort as it took form and became tangible. Kentridge described his process:
Walking, thinking, stalking the image. Many of the hours spent in the studio are hours of walking, pacing back and forth across the space gathering energy, the clarity to make the first mark. It is not so much a period of planning as a time of allowing the ideas surrounding the project to percolate. A space for many different possible trajectories of an image, where sequences can suggest themselves, to be tested as internal projections.[i]
Watching Kentridge in his studio in the film installation 7 Fragments for George Méliès, 2003, was an almost carnal event which heightened my awareness of the artist’s body. Kentridge was far from being physically intense in the studio; he was not constantly moving, but was often sitting down and sometimes slouching in his chair. Yet his body was constantly negotiating space in a similar way to an artist’s brush making advances on a fresh canvas or paper. Perhaps, it is the legacy of Kentridge’s theater past, but before he thinks with the brush, he seems to think with his body. His brush is aware of this. The body in each of the Ubu Drawings (Bicycle, Dancing Man, Listening Man, and Sleeper), 1997 – 1998, struggles to fit within the sheet of paper in a way similar to Kentridge physically testing the continuum of his studio. The character in these drawings looks remarkably like the artist himself, but they are not self-portraits. I found these works to be impersonations: the artist’s brush recorded the artist’s corporeal absorption in his subject.
Sometimes a naked woman (the artist’s wife?) subtly appears as if from nowhere; she sails in from behind and clings to the artist with her whole body or lightly touches him on the shoulder, but before he turns, she is gone. Sometimes he looks through a telescope only to see her slowly moving further and further away. Who is she? An apparition? A fantasy? A muse? A pause? Her appearances ruptures the course of his working and thinking, but it doesn’t feel to be a distraction, rather as a sudden shift elsewhere. She always brings an abrupt stillness, a cessation of time, even if for a second. Her body is disembodied; she is weightless and does not seem to obey the gravity that holds the artist. Is she, paradoxically, an expression of the moment when he abandons his body for the brush?
Up and down the stairs
In the 7 Fragments Kentridge frequently carries, moves around, and then goes up and down a ladder. Much of the popular ladder symbolism derives from the Genesis story of Jacob’s ladder. The ladder represents communication with higher powers, connection between the two worlds, ascent and descent, gaining of experience, and movement between different levels of consciousness. All of these meanings, as inescapable collective assets, are present in Kentridge’s work. But the artist does not go up this ladder – he takes it out of his studio, breaks it apart and reinvents it. As always, he confronts meaning through conversion of form.
In the performance I am not me the horse is not mine, 2008 – 2010, there are two characters on stage: the artist himself and the platform step ladder. The performance is no monologue: Kentridge engages with the ladder as if it were his interlocutor (or interlocutress for that matter). That conversation is spatial, gestural and motoric. Or, perhaps, it is the artist’s conversation with himself, the ladder being his inanimate alter ego? As if in contrast to impersonation, this time he de-personates.
This performance (and the identically titled related cinematic installation of eight projections) is part of Kentridge’s work surrounding Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera The Nose which is based on Nikolai Gogol’s story of the same title. The performance and the installation relate to the opera tangentially: they explore the years surrounding the opera’s creation – 1920s and 1930s in Russia, the absurdity of the original story and the relationship between source(s), interpretation and reality(ies). Kentridge describes this work as “an elegy (perhaps loud for an elegy) both for the formal artistic language that was crushed in the 1920s and for the possibilities of human transformation so many hoped for and believed in during the revolution.”[ii] The transformation turned into destruction: freedom (creative and human) and many lives were shattered during these years. In the installation, the viewer is a witness to one of the lives about to become a body: Nikolai Bukharin’s (one of the most prominent Soviet politicians of these years) 1937 interrogation transcript is running on one of the screens.
The ladder was the building block of the opera production; it was disassembled and recast as steps, stairs, platforms, ramps and landings. Those fractured the three-dimensional space of the stage and the continuous opera time into many concurrent worlds: the whole was functioning as a universe full of different “planets” that the artist would zoom into when the time came. Gogol’s story, Shostakovich’s opera and the Soviet history of the period merged into a single continuum at a relative loss of narrative continuity which translated into a conceptual and visual state of fluctuation, with each image and form constantly evolving into something else. The ladder in its perpetual unwinding embodied the transformation, in both its creative and negative dimensions.
Past (and present)
History is the subject of two other bodies of work, Ubu and the Procession and Soho and Felix. But this time Kentridge was (and is) a witness; apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its aftermath were (and are) his present, and he observes it from two different perspectives, both existentially and formally.
Kentridge looks at the past intimately through the eyes of two fictional personas, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitelbaum, in the eight films shown at the Modern, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, 1989; Monument, 1990; Mine, 1991; Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old, 1991; Felix in Exile, 1994; History of the Main Complaint, 1996; WEIGHING…. And WANTING, 1997; Tide Table, 2003 (the first four are on view at the Jewish Museum through September 17th). He touches the communal Past and History via his own private and creative history. These films inscroll the least visible dimension of Kentridge’s work: destruction, undoing, and re-creation. The viewer is witnessing the development of an image - drawing, erasing, correcting, and over-painting, - as if he is watching an artist’s hand at work. If 7 Fragments make the percolation of ideas visible, then Soho and Felix make the process of ‘thinking with the brush’ unfold in front of our eyes. The films are loosely autobiographical; they are not only about his life, but also about fantasies, dreams, lives unlived, and lives of others. The creation, destruction, and re-creation of images become a metaphor to (re)creation and/or forgetting of the past, both publicly and individually, and, simultaneously, to the possibility of transformation. Soho and Felix (Kentridge’s alter egos, or simply his fractions) personify duality, but, if to speak in terms of light and dark, the artist focuses on shadows. The two characters intersect in a third one, Mrs. Eckstein who is Felix’s lover. She is less ethereal than the woman in the 7 Fragments – she makes love – but, similarly, she softly appears and shortly is gone.
In Ubu and the Procession films, Kentridge’s “viewfinder” is akin to the one he uses for the work related to The Nose; vice-versa actually, since the former was the earlier undertaking. Just as with Soviet history, Kentridge peers through the prism of another work of art of which absurdity is also a denominator - Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (Ubu the King). The objects constantly reconfigure themselves in the film Ubu Tells the Truth: a lounge chair folds and unfolds never quite finding another form; a pair of compasses turn into a menacing creature and back into an instrument once again; the objects take on human qualities and humans become objects. The transformation is never allowed to take place; its aspects of re-configuration and destruction are dominant.
The Nose is in many ways the same train of thought taken further. The intermediary story (or stories) of both works also functions as a lens revealing several questions Kentridge, as an artist, cannot bypass: a freedom that an artist (and/or a person) can or cannot claim; creative (and personal) compromise; the (im?)possibility of transformation through art; and the (im)possibility of representation of humanity’s horrors in visual art. Possibly, the 1920s and 1930s in Russia, being more distant from Kentridge, in some way, bring these questions closer, because the “mediator”, composer Shostakovich, was himself swept up by the political absurdity of his times (as well as many other avant-garde artists for whom, initially, the Revolution meant new beginnings in life and in art). Or it may seem so to me, since the Soviet history integral part of my universe.
Shadows of the Past
In the Shadow Procession film and works on paper, shadow becomes a visual trope. Kentridge’s shadows are composed from torn pieces of paper which endow them with movement and autonomy from the body. But unlike the tale of Hans Christian Andersen, in Kentridge’s work it is not the body that lost its shadow, but it is the shadow that lost its body. In The Nose the loss becomes complete. In contrast to Kovalyov’s nose, the shadow never returns to where it belongs, but forms a parallel reality that is not a reflection of the tangible one. In the performance, as the artist was moving around the stage, his projection on the background screen was pacing back and forth, carrying a chair, moving a stepladder, and was followed by yet another replica of himself. The screen “twins” of the artist had no shadows, which emphasized the shadows of the artist and the stepladder on stage turning the floor into a horizontal plane full of intense visual action. In the opera, the projected shadows were inverted – they were light – running counter to the real shadows on stage, perhaps, testifying to the absurdity that was the subject of the work, and drawing a parallel with the central theme of the artist’s previous opera production, The Magic Flute.
The history as subject – public, private and creative - that was explored concurrently, yet separately, in the Felix and Soho, Ubu, and Shadow Procession, was no longer divisible in The Nose; it all collided in the opera production and related work. Even if it was, indeed, an elegy for the crushed possibilities of transformation, paradoxically (and wisely) it was written in the language of transformation.
Transformation, particularly inversion as its manifestation, is a subject of the work surrounding Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute: two miniature theaters (Learning the Flute and Black Box / Chambre Noire) and the film Preparing the Flute. In his film and the opera miniature theater, Kentridge works tonally, in black and white, often inverting and transposing light and dark. He talks about his film Learning the Flute which takes the form of a blackboard chalk drawing and is the initial, pre-production, project in this body of work:
The shifting from positive to negative and back again gave me the photographic language and the theme of the subsequent work, but it also became a way of thinking of darkness and light, of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, priest of the Sun.[iii]
The two post-production miniature theaters, the Learning the Flute and the Black Box separate light and darkness into two distinct worlds: in the installation at MOMA they were placed opposite each other across the room with the benches for the audience in between; the Flute was shown first, followed by the Black Box. But together they explored shadow as light’s companion. As Kentridge himself expressed it:
In Mozart’s opera there are hints at the dangers and limitations of Sarastro and his certainties. In Black Box I wanted to look at the political unconscious of The Magic Flute – at the damages of colonialism, which described its predations to itself as bringing enlightenment to the Dark Continent.[iv]
The past seems to be always present in Kentridge’s work (and life).
The other side
Kentridge’s near obsession with light and dark (and shadows, of course) is in many ways not surprising: he came from the world divided into black and white. I feel that for the artist in him, this split anchors the very act of looking and seeing. What do we see? How much do we see? What is possible to see? What is hidden from us? What can we not look at directly? What blinds us? Are we able to perceive change? I think that Kentridge records his act of looking through transformation. When one thinks about it, much of the visual art is about stopping the time that is condensing the change it brings, “stilling” life. And the most eye-opening understanding of the still-life as a genre (the genre of “stop”) I came across was a colleague’s parallel to a universe, as if objects were planets or celestial bodies slowly affecting and transforming each other, and the artist’s job was to register this ongoing change. For Kentridge, transformation is different; it is not limited to what is seen, but embraces what is unseen, what is impossible to see, and what makes one want to avert his or her eyes. Poignantly, an eye is a character in the Ubu films.
I think Kentridge disagrees with the viewpoint that an empty piece of paper or canvas is one of the scariest, even if recurring, events for an artist. I hear him say that in a way, there’s never a tabula rasa for an artist; there’s always the other, unseen, side of the sheet.
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. (betweeen 6th and 5th Avenues)
New York, NY 10019
Hours: Wed – Mon 10:30 am – 5:30pm, Fri 10:30 am – 8:00 pm, closed Tue
William Kentridge: Five Themes
The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street
New York, NY 10128
Hours: Sun – Tue 11:00 am – 5:45 pm, Thur 11:00 am – 8:00 pm, closed Wed, Sat (3/13/10 – 11/01/10) 11:00 am – 5:45 pm
Gallery Met @ Lincoln Center
Hours: Mon - Fri: 6pm – last intermission, Sat noon – last intermission, closed Sun
http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/news/features/detail.aspx?id=11230
New York Public Library
LEARNING FROM THE ABSURD: A Conversation with William Kentridge hosted by
Paul Holdengräber
http://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2010/03/12/william-kentridge-paul-holdengraber
[i] William Kentridge: Five Themes, the San Franciso Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2010, p. 13
[ii] Ibid., p. 204
[iii] Ibid., p. 170
[iv] Ibid.
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