William Kentridge Five Themes 29 June – 5 September 2010 Invisible Mending, from the Installation 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, 2003
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# 68 Concorde William Kentridge Five Themes 29 June – 5 September 2010 Invisible Mending, from the installation 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, 2003 South African artist William Kentridge (born between them, shifting from theatre to drawing 1955) first achieved international recognition or from drawing to film. Though his work in the 1990s with a series of what he called resonates with the South African experience, “drawings for projection”: short animated films Kentridge also draws on varied European based on everyday life under apartheid. Since sources, including literature, opera, theatre and then, Kentridge has widened his thematic range, early cinema, to create a complex universe expanding beyond his immediate environment where good and evil are complementary and to examine other political conflicts. His oeuvre inseparable forces. charts a universal history of war and revolution, An important conceptual development in evoking the complexities and tensions of Kentridge’s practice of recent years is the artist’s postcolonial memory and imaging the residual self-reflexive yet playful focus on his relationship traces of devastating policies and regimes. to the world. Whereas the early charcoal The first retrospective in France devoted to the animations operated with a cast of fictional artist is centred on the broad themes that have characters, Kentridge himself now appears as motivated Kentridge during his career, through the principal character in his own creations. By a large choice of works dating from the late referencing optical illusion and the mechanics 1980s to today. While putting the accent on of perception, in his latest works, Kentridge recent pieces, it highlights the broad scope moves beyond the characteristic manipulations of Kentridge’s artistic practice and diversity of animation to create a world conceived as a of media, including drawing, film, collage, theatre of memory. printmaking, sculpture and stage design. Kentridge’s longstanding interest in theatre – Parcours d’Atelier: Artist in the Studio nurtured in South Africa in the 1970s, when In these works Kentridge uses the classic genre of he co-founded the Junction Avenue Theatre self-portraiture to explore the unfolding of his artistic Company, and invigorated by more recent process within the parameters of the studio. Here he collaborations with the Handspring Puppet becomes his own unabashed subject, dramatising Company – informs the dramatic character of and portraying his creative work. As Kentridge his art. He remains one of the rare figures to notes: “The studio is an enclosed space, not just successfully bridge the fields of visual art, film physically but also psychically, like an enlarged and theatre. Instead of simply alternating these head; the pacing in the studio is the equivalent of artistic means of expression, he moves freely ideas spinning round in one’s head.” History of the Main Complaint, 1996 The process that precedes the making of an which are shown here, follow Soho and Felix as artwork is the theme of 7 Fragments for Georges they struggle to navigate the political and social Méliès (2003), a homage to the early French film climate of Johannesburg during the final decade director known for his cinematic tricks. Kentridge of apartheid. It was with these films that Kentridge pays tribute to Méliès’ silent movies, such as a trip established his improvisational working method and to the Moon (1902), in which the director himself signature use of stop-motion animation. Through performed in front of painted sets. The films day for the movement of successive charcoal-drawn images Night and Journey to the Moon (2003) demonstrate he evokes the local mining industry, suggesting an exchange between process and product that is eroding landscapes with a continual process of echoed in Kentridge’s games with reversals of time wiping away and reworking. The final state of and tone. In one example, inverted footage of ants each drawing becomes a record of this painstaking transforms into a bright constellation of stars in a process of erasure and addition – a palimpsest night sky. In another, the artist dramatises his “studio of the emotional tension between forgetting and walks”, pacing back and forth between his camera remembering. and the wall where the drawings that become his animations are pinned. Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession Thick Time: Soho and Felix In 1975 Kentridge acted in Ubu Rex, an adaptation In 1989, with the creation of Johannesburg, 2nd of Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry’s 1888 satire about a Greatest City after Paris, Kentridge launched a corrupt and cowardly despot. Twenty years later cycle of short animated films (presented in the Kentridge returned to this material, grounding it in a auditorium of the Jeu de Paume) that introduce new context: the public hearings held by the Truth us to his iconic fictional characters Soho Eckstein, and Reconciliation Commission in the mid-1990s to a greedy capitalist and property tycoon whose investigate human rights abuses under apartheid. troubled conscience reflects certain aspects of “From a South African perspective,” he explains, contemporary South Africa, and his sensitive alter “Ubu is a particularly powerful metaphor for the ego, Felix Teitlebaum, who pines for Soho’s wife. insane policy of apartheid, presented by the state Felix often functions as a surrogate for the artist as a rational system.” himself but, as Kentridge says of his characters, In 1996, Kentridge developed a series of “There’s part of me in each of them... or they’re both etchings entitled Ubu tells the truth, in which he in me.” Nine films, some preparatory drawings for monumentalised the figure of Ubu. Each etching Portage (detail), 2000 superimposes two representations of Ubu: the first darker side of its political trajectories. According to is inspired by photographs that the artist took of Kentridge, this installation looks at “the damages of himself playing the role in his studio and the second, colonialism, which described its predations to itself apparently drawn in chalk, is based on Jarry’s own as bringing enlightenment to the Dark Continent.” drawings of his blunt and absurd literary character. To that end, Black Box references the 1904-07 In his multipanel collages and bronze sculptures, the rebellion and subsequent genocide of the Herero procession of black figures evokes the political and peoples in German South-West Africa (present-day cultural volatility of that moment in South African Namibia). Acting as a coda to the Magic Flute, the history, while also alluding to universal conditions of installation What Will Come (has already come) (2007) protest and migration. considers Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935 during the Italian fascist era. Warped Sarastro and the Master’s Voice: The Magic Flute images projected onto a flat surface reconstitute The works presented here evolved from Kentridge’s themselves in a cylindrical mirror, suggesting the 2005 production of Mozart’s opera the Magic Flute. cyclical nature of history and its potential for Three sculptural objects – two miniature theatres distortion. and a film installation – alternate projections to create an extended theatrical cycle. Learning the Learning from the Absurd: The Nose Flute (2003) serves as the overture or introductory Kentridge’s most recent work relates to his staging act. Projected onto a blackboard, the film becomes of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera the Nose at the a sketchbook for the production as a whole. Metropolitan Opera in New York in spring 2010. Preparing the Flute (2005) was originally created as a First performed in 1930, the opera based on Nikolai large-scale model for testing the projections central Gogol’s absurdist short story of 1836 concerns a to Kentridge’s staging of the opera. By contrasting Saint Petersburg official whose nose disappears one positive and negative film and emphasising the morning, only to turn up as a higher-ranking official symbolic conflict between the Queen of the Night who refuses to return to his face. With I am not me, and Sarastro, the high priest of light, these projects the horse is not mine (2008), an installation made up explore the dualistic terms of Enlightenment morality of eight film fragments, Kentridge notes that it “takes dramatised by Mozart. Gogol’s short story, its literary forebears, and its If the Flute works engage the dialectics of the possible future histories as the basis for looking at Enlightenment, a second miniature theatre, Black the formal inventiveness of the different strains of Box / Chambre Noire (2005), demonstrates the Russian modernism, and also at the calamitous end His Majesty, the Nose, from the installation I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008 of the Russian avant-garde.” The work’s title comes autour de l’exposition from a traditional Russian saying used to deny guilt, z book signing with William Kentridge which Kentridge found in the transcripts of Nikolai at Jeu de Paume bookstore Bukharin’s 1937 testimony before the Central Tuesday 29 June, 6 pm Committee of the Soviet Communist party. (One of the films presents excerpts from these transcripts.) z conversation* between William Kentridge and Drawing on the bold graphic sensibility of Russian Denis Hirson, writer, in the auditorium constructivist art, Kentridge combines stop-motion Tuesday 29 June, 7 pm animation of paper cutout figures with archival footage and live-action film to create vibrant z “Le temps, un processus de création chez William imagery