William Kentridge : the Museum of Modern Art, April 15-June 8, 1999 [Lilian Tone]

Projects 68 : William Kentridge : the Museum of Modern Art, April 15-June 8, 1999 [Lilian Tone] Author Kentridge, William, 1955- Date 1999 Publisher The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/188 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art william kentridge The Museum of Modern Art, New York Archive MoMA 1830 AWive MoMA lived in, my school, studio, have all been within three kilometers of /rs6 each other. And in the end all my work is rooted in this rather des perate provincial city. I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and films are certainlyspawned by and feed off the brutalized society left in its wake. I am interested in a o STEREOSCOPE political art, that is to sayan art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncom o 2 pleted gestures and uncertain endings." Kentridge's work has >» iL CsS always avoided the prescriptiveapproach of propaganda, drawing .a c on uncertaintiesand vacillations, particularly since the abolition of a o apartheid has dissolvedpreviously clear-cut oppositions. COa Kentridge'smost recent animated film, Stereoscope,is the eighth in William Kentridge'sfilmed drawings, or drawn films, inhabit a CD a decade-long seriesfeaturing the same evolving character, Soho curiousstate of suspensionbetween static and time-based,still Eckstein.A possiblesurrogate for the artist, Soho also suggeststhe and moving. These "drawings in motion" undergo constant archetypal businessman,for he can always be identified by his pin change and constant redefinition, yet the projection of their striped suit. The stereoscopeis a devicewhich makesimages appear luscious charcoal surfaces somehow retains the tactility of three-dimensional by presenting each eye with a slightly different stillness. Smoky grounds and rough-hewn marks morph into point of view of the same scene. In attempting to reconcile the an incessant,though not seamless,flow of free associations difference, the eye is tricked into seeing volume. In Stereoscope, that evoke fleeting hypnagogic images. Bodiesmelt into land the artist reversesthis maneuver,using a split screento dismember scape;a cat turns into a typewriter, into a reel-to-reelrecorder, three-dimensional reality into two complementary but unsynchro- into a bomb; full becomesvoid with the sweep of a sleeve.The nized realities. In the following interview made on February 22, allure of Kentridge's animations lies in their unequivocal 1999, William Kentridge discussesthe making of Stereoscopeand relianceon the continuing presentand in the uncannysense of its relation to his other films. artistic creation and audience reception happening at once. Lilian Tone Kentridge'sfilms owe their distinctiveappearance to the artist's AssistantCurator homemade animation technique, which he describes as Department of Painting and Sculpture "stone-age filmmaking." Each of his film-related drawings representsthe last in a seriesof states produced by successive Lilian Tone: In this exhibition, on view along with Stereoscopeare marksand erasuresthat, operating on the limits of discernibility, drawings that went into its preparation. How do your films relate are permanently on the verge of metamorphosis.The anima to the drawings made for them? Do you consider the drawings tions are painstakingly built by photographing each transitory subsidiaryto the films, or are they interdependent? state; traces accumulate on the paper surface, each final William Kentridge: The films started off initially as a way of drawing a palimpsest retaining the residual memory of its examining the drawings, but then the narrative element came in, sequence. The result is a projected charcoal drawing where and the drawings were at the service of the film. The first Soho the line unfolds mysteriously on the screen with a will of its Ecksteinfilm was a very distinct practicefrom the activity of making own, the artist's hand unseen. In the 1950s,filmmakers Stan drawings, which I was still doing. Only after severalyears of making VanDerBeekand Robert Breer's "time paintings" sought to films did I show any of their drawings as drawings. The drawings capture the creation of paintings on camera. But rather than and the films interrelate in two ways: first, the drawings are the left relating to that moment in film history, Kentridge's work overs from the making of the films. There are not thousands of evokes late silent Russiancinema and German Expressionist drawings, only 20 to 40 different ones, whatever is left at the end films, most directly in the predominance of black and white, of a sequence.Secondly, the actual demands of the film, its actual the absenceof dialogue, and the use of intertitles. narrative, bring into being a whole set of imagesthat I would never Kentridgelives and works in Johannesburg,where he was born have arrived at otherwise. This is true not only in terms of subject in 1955 into a South Africa ruled by a repressiveconservative matter but also in terms of surface, since they are worked on quite state. Describinghis childhood background as "a comfortable quickly. And, becauseof their use in the films, the drawings con suburban life," he sees himself as "part of a privileged white tain the traces of the whole progress of each sequence—a lot of elite that hasseen and been aware of what was happening but rubbing out and ghost imagesare built into them. 1 never bore the brunt of the might of the state." His films are LT: When you first told me about your ideasfor Stereoscope,you deeply affected by the landscape and social memory of his were not sure if you would be using your usual characters,or any birthplace and allude to his country's struggle to overcome characters, but later somehow Soho made his way into the film. the divisivenessof apartheid. Embedded in the events that How have the characters of Felix Teitlebaum and Soho Eckstein unfold as Kentridge's marks materialize is an undercurrent of evolved over the past ten years? references, accessibleto varying degrees depending on the viewer, to his country's contemporary social history. "I have WK: Initially I would always conceiveSoho as an other, as an alien, been unable to escapeJohannesburg. The four housesI have very much basedon imagesof rapaciousindustrialists from Russian and early Futurist propagandadrawings, of George Groszand Ger coreof thosefilms, and what I was thinking about when making man Expressionism.But after a few films I understoodthat in many them. But that is not to saythat what I am thinking about when ways he looked like my paternal grandfather,and, in fact, yearsago making the films is what is there when they are finished. I am I had made some drawings of my grandfather in his suit on the thinking about what I can do with this extraordinaryblue pastel beach that looked just like Soho. This made me understand that that I brought from London,but that is not a questionthat some maybehe was not as far from me as I had anticipated.Over the next body askswhen they are watching the film. It also hasto do with few films, up to Weighing.. and Wanting, I understood Soho and various sets of meaning that I have to take responsibility for. Felixmuch more as two different sidesof one characterrather than Some people give a quite narrow political reading and say this two fundamentally different characters. correspondsto this moment in SouthAfrica. But I think there are other peoplewho do saythat the films are about the spacebe LT: How much of Stereoscopedid you have in mind before you tween the political world and the personal, and the extent to began to draw? which politicsdoes or doesnot find its way into the privaterealm. WK: Stereoscopehad an uncertain beginning. There were several LT: My impressionis that your films have become more asso images that I knew I wanted, but I was not quite sure how they ciative and ambiguous. related to each other. It took severalmonths of working on the film to understandhow they would finally come together. I had a section WK: Yes,I think so. And in a way I hope so, but it is not inten of the film that had to do with a vision of points of connection and tional. Sometimesthey seemto have to continue a socialsaga, disconnection,in which the work of Mayakovskywas an influence. but that is not how they started out, and it seemsa dangerous I always wanted to do a production of Vladimir Mayakovsky: A way to try to lead them. It has more to do with changes in Tragedy.I think Stereoscopeis the closest I have come to that. To myself.Things that seemed more certain eight yearsago seem that vision of the city. I also knew that I needed a very full room and an empty room as the key components of the film, and it was quite clear that they had to do with the senseof dis ,<JL ~i76)o iCjlAW quiet that I was feeling, ranging from feeling very overcrowded in the world to the world feeling very empty. LT: Looking back at your eight films, do you detect threads, do you see them following one another? WK: I see them unable to get away from the samething again and again. That is always the difficulty. I think I am making a different film, and suddenly I realize I've used the same ideas again. In retrospect, maybe one cannot draw a very clear line between them. What is clear is that there are different momentsof South African political unfolding lesscertain now. Politically,it has certainly become much more which seemed peripheralto the projectswhile I was making them, complex.

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