The William Kentridge Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art this past year demonstrated the cumulative weight of the South African artist's work over the past twenty years, including his animated drawings, designs for theatrical sets and props, collages, and large drawings. For me, the animated drawings are by far his strongest suit, artistically speaking, for in them we see the most fully elaborated of Kentridge's thoughts and dreams. While his set designs for Shostakovich's "The Nose," and Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" are amusing and clever, and the large drawings, especially "Middle-Aged Love," can be poignant, Kentridge's animated drawings attain something more complex and much more compelling, possessing a unique poetry that engraves them in the viewer's brain.
I first encountered Kentridge's work at a show entitled "Animated Paintings" at the San Diego Museum of Art two winters ago. The exhibit itself was beautifully curated, including contributions from a number of exciting artists; that, and the fact that there were also three other intelligently conceived exhibits at the Museum at the same time, definitely laid bare my East Coast provinciality -- I simply had not expected to see so much exciting art in San Diego, of all places (shameful, I know). The Kentridge piece in the animated painting exhibit, "Tide Table" (2003) was a revelation. I had not heard of the artist when I came into the darkened viewing room, and watched, entranced, as charcoal drawings morphed from image to image, telling the story of Soho Eckstein, one of Kentridge's artistic alter egos, in his South African milieu. When the film ended, I watched it two more times because, as fascinating as the unfolding "story" was, the images themselves were so beautifully drawn as to demand a longer look.
Certain motifs predominate in "Tide Table": cattle, in various stages of plumpness and dessication, wave patterns in the ocean, military dictators with binoculars, middle-aged men in cabana chairs hiding behind newspapers, African children dancing in the surf. In one of the most charming passages -- though with a somewhat grisly conclusion -- a cabana chair does a Keatonesque dance in its tent by the beach, folding and unfolding, transforming itself over and over, only to finally become Rembrandt's butchered cow carcass, hung from above. The themes seem germane to Kentridge's liberal South African roots: the observing and the observed, victimizers and victims, cycles of time, guilt and denial, freedom and slavery.
An important motif that recurs in several other films with Kentridge's alter egos is the folded newspaper, which covers and uncovers, physically engulfing the viewer and thus also obscuring his view. For me, it is very reminiscent of the scene in Terry Gilliam's movie "Brazil," in which Robert DeNiro's character is rapidly engulfed in a chaotic tornado of papers which start out, innocuously enough, as a stack on a kitchen table. In this scene, as in Kentridge's animated drawings, what begins as a quotidian banality suddenly and unpredictably becomes a terrifying force of nature.
This motif is quite central in Kentridge's "Felix in Exile" (1994) in which his other alter ego, Felix Teitelbaum, also uses newspapers first as a buffer or defensive shell, until they blow away from him out of control in a maelstrom. Also out of control is the water tap in Felix's room, whose blue pigment pervades and then overflows the otherwise black and white space where Felix lives, while an image of Felix's African lover appears mournfully in his mirror. The papers blow out into the countryside, covering and burying fallen young African men; his lover gazes up into the constellations of an endless black sky. In the hands of another artist this could be melodrama, but Kentridge's mute images question and suggest; they don't simplify, and therein lies their poetry and their beauty.
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