“I have been unable to escape Johannesburg,” the multimedia artist has said. “The four houses I have lived in, my school, studio, have all been within three kilometers of each other. And in the end all my work is rooted within this rather desperate provincial city.” He is, nevertheless, an internationally renowned draftsman and filmmaker. And, in my opinion, his political art is among the world’s most beautiful and moving.
When Kentridge was a young artist somewhat taken with conceptualism in the early 1980s, abstract painting was still king of the hill in the almost totally white, behind-the-times South African art world. He was at loggerheads about what to do. As Kentridge told an interviewer, “Nonfigurative work looked so apolitical to me that painting seemed an impossible activity…. I was intrigued by Joseph Beuys … but even Beuys’s work seemed an indulgence from the vantage point of South Africa, where the political struggles were so serious.”
Then in 1985, Kentridge began to record on film the almost stroke-by-stroke development of his large charcoal drawings, imagery of which included everything from billboards, sports stadiums, barbed wire and giant steel towers with spotlights on top. The artist noticed that the drawings seemed to hit an esthetic peak about halfway through, so he started playing with sequence of the film frames. Out of this experimentation-and the magical revelation that the additions and, particularly, the erasures of charcoal marks had lives of their own-came the short (three- to eight-minute) films, and many constituent drawings, that form the heart of the exhibition.
There’s a lot more than technical wizardry in Kentridge’s work, however. He was born in 1955 into a Lithuanian-Jewish family (which was, Kentridge notes, an emphatic minority within the minority of South Africa’s white population) and his father-Sydney Kentridge, one of South Africa’s most prominent human-rights lawyers-represented the families of some victims of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre of black protesters by white police. When he was 6, Kentridge peeked into a box of evidentiary photographs on his father’s desk and saw shocking images of a woman with half her head blown off, another missing part of her back. The horrific images must have stayed with Kentridge on one level of consciousness or another, through his university studies (a degree in politics from the University of the Witwatersrand), theater directing in the late ’70s (Jarry, Brecht and Beckett), acting classes in Paris and a stint as an art director in commercial movies. The graphic pictures finally returned with a quiet vengeance in Kentridge’s 1994 film, “Felix in Exile.”
Most of the films tell stories about Felix Teitelbaum, a fictional artist, and the pin-stripe-suited Soho Eckstein, Kentridge’s semiautobiographical central character. Eckstein, like Kentridge, is a native white South African who was raised in money and safety. He acquires an industrial empire and a loving wife, only to watch one crumble amidst civil discord and the other leave him for artist Felix. In Kentridge’s films, Eckstein is an obvious symbol for South Africa in the convulsions of apartheid’s overthrow; his wife for the basic human decency so inevitably at risk in even the most noble revolutions, and Felix-hardly a reach-for artists who must necessarily question their own usefulness in the whole drama. What gives the films their emotional gravity is Kentridge’s wedding of his characters to a rich and amazing inventiveness. X-rays and MRI’s probe Eckstein’s body, then explode into kaleidoscopic fantasies. Wipers on Soho’s car in the rain clear away water in exact synch with Kentridge’s hand erasing the gray windshield.
When Felix’s own drawings emerge from a suitcase in a flooded hotel room to attach themselves to the walls-and then float away again-their wistful flight paths are successions of ghost-sheets of paper, hovering momentarily in the air. As Kentridge says in the catalog interview, “This is how the effect of erasure and the effect of imperfect erasure puts on to the very surface and into the heart of the drawing or piece of the film itself the fact of time passing, but also makes visible something that is normally invisible.” In Kentridge’s viscerally black charcoal strokes, the invisible made manifest is not just a neutral abstraction like the passage of time, but also the tearing apart, and reconstruction, of human souls.
There’s an additional satisfaction for the viewer in emerging from the exhibition’s screening rooms into galleries where some of the works that went into the films are on dignified display. Kentridge’s drawings, on their own, are full-blown art: meaty, nuanced, operatic and bold. And they’re political in the most powerful sense, not just because they illustrate the painful transformation of South Africa, but because they embody that kind of struggle for the long run. As Kentridge has put it, “I am interested in a political art; that is to say, an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.” The Kentridge exhibition just might be the show of the year.
