[New York Peasant: March 1, 2010]
To the buzzing halls of MoMA for a preview of "William Kentridge: Five Themes" and a few glasses of hospitality courtesy of the museum. What a stunning show it is, and an instructive comparison with the Tim Burton extravaganza which fills much of the rest of the building.
I had thought I'd come to Kentridge late when I saw his exhibition at the Drawing Center in 1998. Here, I thought, was an established artist who'd never run across my horizon before. In fact, it was Kentridge who came to art comparatively late, following a career in theater and art direction for television; he didn't exhibit until in his forties.
Kentridge, therefore, who does feature in his work - without filters, or in thin disguise - has seemed a perpetually middle-aged figure. Lugubrious of expression, and blessed with a comfortable embonpoint, you first confront him in this show in nude self-portrait - riding an exercise bike, for example - his shape and melancholic expression imbuing the images with self-deprecation and irony. These are, essentially, large scale drawings - Kentridge is no painter. His methods encompass etchings, linocuts and collage - he constructs theatrical models and cuts out paper shapes - but he's very much an artist of the line, often the line erased and redrawn repeatedly.
His art also resists stasis. He seems happiest working in forward, narrative motion, from the comic strip to to video to designing and directing live opera. The highlights of this show, and the high points of his career so far, are animated movies. He uses a variation of the stop-motion technique: rather than shooting brief frames of countless different drawings, to create the illusion of animation, he works over the same drawing again and again, rubbing out and replacing. The monochrome images blossom and vary and fade and are reborn. The approach is seen to powerful effect in the short movie Mine, a meditation on the conditions of black mine-workers in South Africa, in which images are pushed through the earth; the movie ends with the surreal movements and machinations of the white boss at his desk, a sinister yet - in his power of metamorphosis - almost a godlike figure.
The Soho and Felix series of nine movies gives this technique a broader canvas. Kentridge can show a whole city flooded and collapsing, or focus on the surreal detail of a character interacting with surreal images in his bathroom mirror. The thematic backdrop, as so often, is South African politics, but the characters in these movies suffer as individuals - the "Her Absence Filled the World" sequence is a moving expression of loss. And indeed these characters seem to fold back into the artist himself and out again, and all seem to revert and re-emerge from the fictional character of Père Ubu, the tubby, foolish, vulgar king and cuckold of Jarry's pre-surrealist Ubu Roi - a touchstone figure for Kentridge and the subject of "Ubu and the Procession," a manic dance of silhouettes which can't help but recall the closing sequence of Bergman's The Seventh Seal.
It's worth devoting more time than usual to this show, actually sitting to watch the movies through, and spending time to in the engaging "Artist in his Studio" installation; a room in which you are surrounded on all sides by video of Kentridge pacing his studio, making works and ripping them up again, all in an apparent mood of resolute melancholy (his signature animal is the rhinoceros).
Being emotionally detached from opera, for better or worse, I can't say much about his recent engagement with opera design and direction. He mounted an acclaimed production of The Magic Flute, not only dressing the characters and sets, but projecting his art over and around them. One large room at MoMA is devoted to a sort of puppet theater sketch of that work, and opera fans perhaps might understand what is going on with the little models and robots. His work in progress is a production of The Nose, the Shostakovitch opera based on Gogol's story of a nose which takes on a life of its own. It seems perfect for Kentridge.
Among all this theatricality, don't miss individual works on paper. "Casspirs Full of Love," for example, a work of political protest but also an expression of almost unimaginable grief. And then take a few minutes, if you've seen the Burton show, to make a comparison. It seems hardly unfair: two artists who have worked prolifically on paper and in animated movies. There won't be lines for the Kentridge show, or timed tickets. I hope it attracts sufficient attention. But it seems to me right and timely that MoMA mounts the Kentridge show, where I detected cynicism in the deployment of Burton's high profile name and work.
Trying to identify the difference, I kept coming back to the term "texture." The texture of a Kentridge image - the visual depth - is protean, almost inexhaustible. His lines keep you looking. A Burton image is striking, often funny, and your eyes glide easily to the next one. But there's also a texture of feeling in Kentridge's work - the expression of deep, complicated, and often uncomfortable emotions about both the political and the emotional. This is a show for those who are not satisfied with surface simplicity.
The exhibition webpage is here, and it runs through May 17.
