William Kentridge
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The delirious sensuality and immediacy of Kentridge’s moving drawings lure the viewer into something very serious: contemporary South African politics. Disappearing and reappearing are images of a corpulent, aging mine owner and of devastated landscapes with immense groups of people on the march. “Drawings for Projection,” produced between 1990 and 1994, consists of a set of very short films: Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris; Monument; Mine; Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old; and Felix in Exile. All connect a businessman, the mine owner; his wife; the artist’s double, Felix; and the literal and economic landscape of South Africa. Kentridge’s early work recalls the humanistic expressionist political language we associate with George Grosz, KŠthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, and–since Kentridge has done extensive work in the theater–Brecht. This exhibit charts his emergence from a figurative language linked to the old formulas for political organizing to a very complex postmodern statement about our experience of politics and economics.
In Mine a portly businessman looks out variously on a landscape of oil and diamond mines, a table filled with too much food, a desk, his bed. It seems Africa is invading his space–or that he’s consuming Africa. The ribbon on his adding machine takes on a life of its own and pours from its holder, looping in disorder over his desk among other office machines, ashtrays, and busts of Africans. It’s not clear whether they’re objets d’art or decapitated heads. In one sequence, a head that workers bring out of a mine explodes and reassembles itself on the desk. Kentridge makes mercilessly clear the connection between the site of the production of wealth, its management, and the human costs. A mine shaft cuts into the earth from the mine owner’s comfortable bed while the miners sleep in cramped dormitories.
In this segregated city, in a state where two-thirds of the people on death row are people of color, art so clearly engaged in sorting out the aftermath of apartheid seems particularly urgent. Seeing Kentridge’s simple Shadow Procession, I no longer felt an outsider, no longer a passive observer. I was swept up in a long, mysterious march.
