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| William Kentridge Other Faces 2011 |
William Kentridge – The Dreamer of the Stone Age
by
Yiannis Toumazis
“I am only an artist; my work is to make
drawings, not to make sense.” [1]
Multitalented and
versatile, South African artist William Kentridge experienced apartheid at an
early age. This happened in a peculiar way because, although he was white, his
parents, dynamic members of a tiny liberal élite, were leading lawyers who
undertook the defence of black victims of racist violence. Through his parents’
litigations, Kentridge became acquainted with the guilty proceedings of his
country. As he says, in a car ride with his grandfather when he was young, he
saw five people kicking another one in the head, a memory, which has since been
deeply engraved on his memory.[2]
How can people do
such things to each other, he wondered throughout his childhood. Or even when
looking in the drawers of his father's desk, hoping to find chocolates –as he
recalls– he discovered a folder.[3]
Opening it, he saw the photographs of the dead bodies of 69 black protesters
who had been shot by the police in the Sharpenville massacre on 21 March 1960.
He says: “But it was even more of a shock to see the difference between an
entry wound, just a dark little hole in the back of someone’s jacket, and the
next photo of the person rolled over, with an exit wound that was the whole
chest exploded. […] That the adult world could be this violent – it didn’t fit
any conceivable notion. It was one of those moments when one’s understanding of
the world turns a sharp corner.” [4]
Besides the
childhood memories of racist violence, Kentridge’s family too suffered
political persecution. Kentridge has Jewish ancestry. His great-grandparents
were Lithuanian Jews who were forced to immigrate in order to escape the wave
of pogroms in the last decades of the 19th century. Perhaps this explains the
fascination Modernism and the Russian Avant-Garde have had on him and his work.
Indeed, an important moment in his career was when he directed and designed Dmitri
Shostakovich’s satirical opera “The Nose”, based on Nikolai Gogol’s novel with
the same name, at the Metropolitan Opera of New York, in 2010. Through a
constructivist approach, Kentridge gives a new perspective to the opera, the
curtain of which came down just days after its stage premiere in January 1930,
as Stalin’s regime had branded the famous composer as “formalist”. Kentridge
says about the project: “It’s about a world gone awry, about dislocated logic
and a driven irrationality where language stops making sense”[5]
This is more or
less how he sees South Africa, through his diverse and multifaceted work,
especially with the animated films, which he has systematically produced. His
rhetoric is again critically agreeable: “I was reduced to being an artist,” [6]
he says sarcastically, while he waited for society to change before deciding
what he will finally make with his life, in the isolation of the racist regime
of South Africa. When this change did finally come, Kentridge was already an
artist, an actor, a filmmaker, a playwright, a puppeteer, a director of opera.
And then, the outside world got to know his talent and ranked him as perhaps
the most important living artist of his country.
Above all,
however, Kentridge became known for his animations, a series of animated films
that started from charcoal drawings. This is how the series Nine Drawings for Projection and A Journey to the Moon came into being,
a touching reference to George Méliès’ amazing film Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip
to the Moon), in 1902, considered by many as the first science fiction
film, which combined the magic of the camera and the theatrical set, creating
some of the most compelling images in the early history of experimental cinema.
In his version, Kentridge uses his own studio as the setting for the film.
There he sets his own fantasy world, where the role of the spaceship is taken
by a typical Italian coffee percolator, while the espresso cup is the telescope
of the solitary artist-astronaut, who manages to escape from the world or even
from his own studio, which sometimes, as we know, becomes the artist’s “prison”.
The project alludes to Jackson Pollock and his relationship with his studio and
the studio-films of Bruce Nauman. As Adrian Searle says: “In this way Kentridge
echoes not just Nauman or Pollock but also Ilya Kabakov’s drawings and
installation about escaping his Moscow flat during the Soviet era in a homemade
spaceship.” [7]
The main
protagonist, however, besides Kentridge himself, is his charcoal drawings, his
absolute alter ego, in which life is blown through various peculiar techniques
he uses. Drawing is, in other words, the primary weapon in Kentridge’s arsenal.
On converting his drawings into animation, the artist says: “The first animated
films I made were done on the basis of trying to get away from a program in
which I could see my life heading out ahead of me {thirteen solo exhibitions of
charcoal drawings!}. So I decided I had to do something that couldn’t possible
fit into that context, that wasn’t going to be in a gallery – something for my
own interest and pleasure.”[8]
These strange and
uncannily fascinating films attract the viewer in a mysterious way. They are
not exactly direct sociopolitical comments about the situation prevailing in
South Africa. Undoubtedly, you feel that this is inherent everywhere in his
work and is dominantly apparent, a vital protagonist in his films, together
with an intense existential angst. Furthermore, the technique of making these
films is particularly interesting: Kentridge starts –using charcoal as his main
material– by creating a single drawing, which he then films. Then, he alters it,
by smudging, erasing, cutting and adding numerous times, which he meticulously films
again and again. Occasionally, he adds a little blue or red pastel. In fact, he
uses an old-fashioned technique, that of stop-motion, to create his films. He calls
his method “stone-age animation”.[9]
It is a series of palimpsests, with an unrefined intensity, like that which one
finds in the works of artists he admires most, such as Goya, Max Beckmann and
Picasso, which are activated and tell peculiar stories about a dark,
underground, incomplete world. A world full of avarice, sadness, anxiety and
with an uncertain ending.
Through the
corpus of these films, two main characters are revealed: Soho Eckstein, a character
in a pin-striped suit, a capitalist bourgeois businessman and mine owner, and
Felix Teitlebaum, a sensitive poet and dreamer who always appears without
clothes. Between them Kentridge placed a woman, Mrs. Eckstein, whose lover is
Felix. Felix and Mrs. Eckstein appear in only three of the nine films, while
Soho appears in all of them. Before long one realises how the two main
characters bear autobiographical elements of the artist, two poles that reflect
a strong emotional and political struggle in a world that is coming to an end,
in a country undergoing profound social change. Kentridge’s “polis” is neither
the earthly paradise of white nor the black hellhole. It is a landscape
transformed incessantly by human acts and actions, a landscape that reflects
the social abuse, which it hosts. Kentridge says: “In the same way that there
is a human act of dismembering the past, there is a natural process in the
terrain through erosion, growth, dilapidation that also seeks to blot out
events. In South Africa this process has other dimensions. The very term ‘new
South Africa’ has within it the idea of a painting over the old, the natural
process of dismembering, the naturalization of things new.”[10]
William
Kentridge’s world does not seek a raison d’etre. It just exists, without a
programme and with no predefined course. Kentridge’s world does not illustrate
facts, but it is born and illustrated by the raw material that determines it. It
is an empowered world.
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| Art Theorist Yiannis Toumazis introduces William Kentridge's work |
[1] Performance by William
Kentridge in the film: William Kentridge, Anything
is Possible. Director: Charles Atlas, art21 PBS, 2010.
[2] Excerpt from an interview with
William Kentridge in the film: William Kentridge, Anything is Possible. Director: Charles Atlas, art21 PBS, 2010.
[3] Calvin Tomkins “Lines of
Resistance: William Kentridge’s Rough Magic”.
The New Yorker, 18 January
2010, p. 55.
[4] Calvin Tomkins “Lines of
Resistance: William Kentridge’s Rough Magic”.
The New Yorker, 18 January
2010, p. 55.
[5] Calvin Tomkins “Lines of
Resistance: William Kentridge’s Rough Magic”.
The New Yorker, 18 January
2010, p. 58.
[6] Excerpt from an interview
with William Kentridge in the film: William Kentridge, Anything is Possible. Director: Charles Atlas, art21 PBS, 2010.
[7] Adrian Searle, “The stone-age
auteur”, The Guardian, 20 November
2007. Source: www.guardian,co.uk/artanddesign/2007/nov/20/art.southafrica.
Retrieved on 20 May 2013.
[8] Excerpt from an interview
with William Kentridge in the film: William Kentridge, Anything is Possible. Director: Charles Atlas, art21 PBS, 2010.
[9] Calvin Tomkins “Lines of
Resistance: William Kentridge’s Rough Magic”.
The New Yorker, 18 January
2010, σ. 55.
[10] Excerpt from an interview with William
Kentridge in the film: William Kentridge, Anything
is Possible. Director: Charles Atlas, art21 PBS, 2010.
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