The horse, after all, was his own
William Kentridge on transformation, quarantine and the properties of paper
MúzeumCafé 27.
“We artists can contribute to looking at the past full in the face. This is the key to avoiding mistakes in the future.” So asserts the South African artist of Lithuanian Jewish descent William Kentridge, who uses a variety of objects or simply the tried and tested means of pencil and rubber to help him construct films, sculptures and set designs. Having prepared to be a conductor, started out as an actor but also studied political science and painting, his first successes were due to his involvement with the 1997 Documenta in Kassel. He feels he was lucky since his works created in the apartheid era and thus isolated reached an international audience. Last year saw a retrospective of his work in the Louvre, prior to that there were exhibitions at Tate Britain, MoMA and the Albertina, while most recently one of his animations has been presented at Budapest’s Fine Arts Museum. His grandmother was South Africa’s first female lawyer and his parents – also lawyers – were opponents of apartheid. Kentridge, with different means, followed in their footsteps. As a child he absorbed the intellectual atmosphere at home, experiencing the tension resulting from the absurd social situation. His family, as part of Johannesburg’s white elite and as a minority of the minority reacted against intolerance, institutional racism and the humiliation of the black population. Meanwhile, amidst European cultural traditions they lived a Western lifestyle in the luxury quarantine of the whites, the cosy absurdity which characterised Johannesburg’s social structure enshrined by law. The apartheid situation became the starting point of almost all his work. Johannesburg comes to life in his dramatic fables, and well as in his animations based on charcoal drawings. As a theatre director he moves the German soldier Woyczek, now an African migrant, into the company of self-designed puppets to Johannesburg; he has Ulysses lie in a Johannesburg hospital bed; in the figure of Sarastro from Mozart’s Magic Flute we see the embodiment of the tyrant, aware of enlightenment, colonisation and knowledge; and his animation created for a Shostakovich opera based on a Gogol novel speaks of totalitarianism and oppression. Interestingly, the South African problems and issues honed for being universal strike a cord in different countries and relate to local problems in France, Switzerland and even Japan. In the 1980s he abandoned oil painting and rediscovered charcoal and drawing, evoking the winters in Johannesburg when, following the fires of its great aridity, everything turns black, as if all was charcoal. Only the finality of the images, the rigidity of the moment have weighed on him heavily, which doesn’t reflect the continuously changing concepts necessary for understanding the world. Pictures in school notebooks came to his mind, coming to life, and short films were fashioned based on drawn lines, which he made at the age of 14 with a Super 8 camera. Thus was born the idea that pictures drawn on white sheets of paper and sometimes erased and changed would come to life as a film. For a long time animation was mistakenly regarded as a type of children’s genre. And for a long while William Kentridge himself didn’t believe that this medium could soon step over into the category of high art, that museums would collect such works, that animation could come of age. The Budapest exhibition showed an animation series based on Gogol’s short story The Nose, which depicts the spiritual distortion of the little man, the stupefying effects of a totalitarian system and the dilemma of adjusting to such a situation. For this he has used archive film recordings, for example Bukharin’s defence speech, and marching shadow figures make an appearance, as does a dancing Nose in the form of the famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, as well as a horse partly formed from shredded black paper, partly from the artist’s own figure bent into a horse. In the title of the series the question of avoiding responsibility is emphasised by the Russian saying: “Neither am I here, nor is the horse mine.” The extremely striking animation reflects the influence of the Russian avant-garde, as if making an endeavour for its resurrection. The entire range of his earlier works is referred to as prefiguration, echoing the German Expressionists Otto Dix and George Grosz, and often Hogarth and Picasso, though as a theatrical predecessor Brecht’s political drama is also mentioned. His European roots bind him to European traditions in the arts. His ancestors who left Lithuania bequeathed two important things to their offspring – education (learning and continuous self-education) and a sensitivity for the arts and culture, together with a basic knowledge and appreciation of those. Kentridge has interlaced European references and perspectives with his African heritage, in the process creating defining elements of a universal understanding. Recently he has taken an interest in the Hungarian artist György Kovásznai, who was known in the 1960s and 1970s as an innovative genius, then forgotten, but who is being rediscovered today. Kovásznai’s painted films and social animations.