design odyssey beyond 2010

[ by Katerina Kyselica] He draws, records, erases, draws some more and records again. He goes on and on until a film comes to life—and it is living with movement generated within itself.  Although a political message is present in his work, the native South African’s rough lines reveal an inner struggle of man that can be understood well beyond borders.

MoMA presents “William Kentridge: Five Themes” on a grand scale. Out of ten galleries devoted to the oeuvre of this consummate South African artist, seven project short animations on walls with towering ceilings. The floor-to-ceiling projection draws viewers like a magnet inside each gallery to experience the sincerity and depth of Kentridge’s animated stories.

view at the exhibition showing floor-to-ceiling projection / photo: Katerina Kyselica

The hand drawn film animation, which Kentridge calls “drawings for projection,” is a distinctive technique he created and began using in the 1990s. The animations comprise rough charcoal drawings and collages that Kentridge painstakingly creates, reworks, moves, and then films each step along the way—ultimately projecting the drawings as moving images. The camera serves merely to record the progression. There is no script. Movement is generated within the image by Kentridge’s hand. As such, the animations reveal a tension between material objects and time-based performance, uniquely capturing the artist’s process while telling poignant stories.   Unlike conventional cell animation, which fuses thousands of drawings into a slick, seamless, continuous whole, Kentridge’s process is overtly raw and hand-wrought. For each film Kentridge makes about 20 and 40 drawings. The traces of the continual addition, permutation and erasure are plainly visible, yielding an impression of time and space invariably altered by every arrival and departure.

Kentridge notes, “You could look at the drawings as indicative of the process and the route to making the film. You can also see the finished film as the complicated way of arriving at that particular suite of drawings.”

series of eight aquatint, etching, and engravings 'Ubu Tells the Truth', William Kentridge / photo: Katerina Kyselica

linocuts 'Walking Man' and 'Telephone Lady' by William Kentridge / photo: Katerina Kyselica

William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa. He earned a BA in Politics and African Studies from the University of Witwatersrand and a diploma in fine Arts from the Johannesburg Art Foundation.  In the early 80s he studied mime and theater at the L’Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

Kentridge explains, “I was fortunate to discover at a theatre school that I was so bad an actor [... that] I was reduced to an artist, and I made my peace with it.”

Although he did not become a professional artist, he entered the actor’s realm through his animated drawings. He uses his self-portrait to physically depict his characters in the movies and the drawings. He was also involved in theatre. His new projects are dramatically larger in scope, such as The Nose – a full scale opera by Russian composer Shostakovich, which Kentridge directed and designed. The opera made its world premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in March 2010.

A theme running through all of Kentridge’s work is his peculiar way of representing his birthplace, South Africa. While he does not portray it as the militant or oppressive place that it was for black people, he does not emphasize the picturesque state of living that white people enjoyed during apartheid either; he presents instead a city in which the duality of man is exposed. In interview for Interview Magazine in 2001 Kentridge explains:

I live in Johannesburg. All the places I’ve lived are within a four or five-kilometer radius of each other. Like most South African Jews, my grandparents and great grandparents came from Lithuania at the turn of the century. I grew up in a liberal family with politically involved parents who were lawyers. I can’t remember a stage where I was not aware of living in an unnatural place. There was so much dinner table conversation about the inequities of the society we were living in–that was a kind of daily bread and butter. This is not unique, but it was less than common in white society. There was always a sense growing up of living in a society that was waiting to become an adult, to change. During the 1970s and ’80s that seemed completely intractable, and it’s that sense of waiting—which existed throughout my childhood—that had been a false expectation. Then when the transformation came in 1989 through 1994, this was a kind of vindication of all those expectations of childhood.

MoMA’s curator Mark Rosenthal organized the retrospective, “William Kentridge: Five Themes”, into five themes chronologically as they appear throughout Kentridge’s career. More than 120 works range in mediums such as drawings, prints, theater models, books and animated movies. The centerpiece is a series of nine short films entitled, “9 Drawings for Projection” where Kentridge introduces two characters – Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum. Soho Eckstein is a wealthy industrialist whose troubled conscious reflects the reality of contemporary South Africa.  Felix Teitlebaum suffers for Eckstein’s wife and serves as Eckstein’s sensitive alter ego. The series include the following movies: Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), Monument (1990), Mine (1991), Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991), Felix in Exile (1994), History of the Main Complaint (1996, Weighing and Wanting (1998), Stereoscope (1999) and Tide Table (2003).

I’ve selected the “History of the Main Complaint” and “Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old” for you to view.  Kentridge selects masterly music for his films that connect the viewer emotionally with the story. For “Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old,” Kentridge chose String Quartet in F, Opus 96 by Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, choral music of South Africa, and the M’appari aria from Martha by Friedrich von Flotow, sung by Enrico Caruso.

A short reflection of Kentridge on his work:

In recent years, Kentridge’s thematic concerns have expanded to include his own studio practice. “Journey to the Moon” (2003) is an example of a short animation from the suite of seven films, “7 Fragments for George Melies”—homage to the early French film director, a pioneer of science fiction in film. Here Kentridge combines animation with performance art and, once again, excels in selection of music, which he entrusted to South African composer Philip Miller.

With “William Kentridge: Five Themes,” MoMA put on a great show that allows visitors to truly experience the depth of Kentridge’s work. The use of semi-open galleries for floor-to-ceiling film projections—only partially separated from galleries displaying drawings and prints—could have ended up in a chaotic presentation of variety of mediums with sound bouncing throughout. Instead, with carefully considered acoustical installation, the film galleries create dynamic connections with a variety of other mediums, all the while luring in visitors with surprisingly large moving images.

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Katerina Kyselica practices interior architecture, travels, writes, photographs and creates. Retired from Czech legal practice, she landed in the US, and later found her way to New York City. She prefers listening to her surroundings to clogging her ears with headphones. She sees good design as smart, sustainable, perceptive and thoroughly thought through.

Filed under: Art, New York City Tagged: | Animation, Art, Drawings, Film, MoMA, New York City, Review