A modest room of small pictures, Mira Schor’s project space exhibition, The Red Tie Paintings, pulsates with lyrical fury. These Goyaesque allegories exude shamanic urgency, as if painted for purposes of exorcism. The artist does indeed describe a cathartic functionality for these works: “A day in the studio begins with the instantaneity of response to that day’s repellent news, which I can articulate very freely in ink and gouache on paper.” Red and black are at once symbolically charged and formally potent chromatic choices. The dramatis personae in this fiery suite include limp dicks, a melting swastika, eyes that are also vaginas and bleed, the Owl of Minerva (she who rises only at dusk) and the eponymous, synechdochal necktie that comes to menacing, serpentine life, a device that recalls anthropomorphized props in a William Kentridge animation. Artistic sisters channeled include Charlotte Salomon, Nancy Spero and Sue Coe. At once deeply personal and fiercely political, this is poetry meets therapy meets agit prop meets magic.
On view through January 7, 2018, 106 Forsyth Street at Broome Street, lylesandking.com

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artcritical writers on William Kentridge:

Eric Gelber, 2001
Amber Ladd, 2003
John Goodrich, 2006
David Cohen, 2008
David Brody, 2010
Anne Sassoon, 2011
David Plante and Rosalind E. Krauss, 2013
David Carrier, 2013

The Review Panel: James Gardner, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr discussed Kentridge and others with David Cohen in February 2008

More information on the artist can be found at Marian Goodman Gallery

Full index entry for “Kentridge” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

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William Kentridge: Second-hand Reading at Marian Goodman Gallery
September 17 to October 26, 2013
24 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212-977-7160

In Praise of Shadows: William Kentridge in the Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
26th August, 2013 to 2 February, 2014

There is a lot to see in Second-hand Reading. And hear. Mounted high at the entrance is Untitled (Drum Machine) (2012), a noisy drum rack. Scattered throughout the front gallery are sculptures, several made of megaphone sentinels: Untitled (Singer Choir/Chorus) (2013), for instance, displays six modified Singer sewing machines with horns attached on a long, narrow table that, when activated, broadcast a common song. On one wall are large ink drawings of African trees on pages torn from an encyclopedia; on another, smaller drawings for Kentridge’s flipbook films. NO IT IS, a triptych of flip book-based films, comprised of Workshop Receipts, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Practical Enquiries (2012), is shown in a sectioned-off gallery on three flat screens. And in the back (South) gallery you find more drawings; Rebus (2013), a set of nine bronze sculptures; and Second-Hand Reading (2013) a seven minute long video with music by Neo Muyanga. In Praise of Shadows, a display at the Metropolitan Museum of works from their collections, is a useful supplement to the experience of these new works, providing an effective record of his earlier development.

Kentridge is fascinated by recycled materials like the dictionary and book pages he draws on; by the old fashioned sewing machines employed in his sculptures; and by the primitive visual technology of the flip book. He works with these archaic materials using self-imposed limitations: making drawings, not painting; mostly using just black, white and gray—the silkscreened Rubics (2013) are in red; creating videos, which are not proper movies. In a broader sense, too, Kentridge is a self-consciously anachronistic artist: his art has nothing directly to do with the 1970s worlds of conceptual art, pop art or minimalism. His magnificent tree drawings could be precursors of Mondrian’s early paintings—and his sculptures might have been made before Duchamp created his readymades. Kentridge speaks to this concern when he links together the components of Second-hand Reading with reference to “requisitioning of old forms for new uses: encyclopedias are supports for drawings, sewing machines and a bicycle become sculpture,” and so on.

Since South Africa is a modernized capitalist state which until recently had regressive racial politics, I used to believe that Kentridge’s marvelous flipbook-based videos made a political comment. He creatively used old-fashioned materials, I supposed, as an effective way to highlight these contradictions. In my happy memory, his earlier Marian Goodman exhibitions were dominated by the videos, which had marvelous narrative force. His drawings are charming, but they basically are the raw materials for the films—and once you’ve seen five, you’ve seen them all. I liked every part of this exhibition, but this time I was puzzled—for the whole was less than the sum of its parts.  He appeals to a concept of “formal mistranslations,” which creates, he says, “the pressure that imperfect understanding gives to the act of imagination.” He is “taking nonsense and seeing if sense can be constructed from it.” Good enough, but the problem, still, is that this suggestive verbal formulation didn’t inspire a satisfying visual experience- it doesn’t effectively unify this exhibition.  

Looking for more to read?  William Kentridge is one of the most frequently reviewed and discussed artists at artcritical; some fine, early takes elude our usually very efficient tagging system!  Check out our “hub” for William Kentridge.

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Author’s note: I interviewed Rosalind in my apartment in New York, in October, 2003, typed out the interview, then cut myself out and somewhat edited Rosalind’s responses to my questions, eliminating the hems and haws and tightening the syntax a little. As Rosalind is very articulate, this was no problem. Curiously, what I remember vividly of the interview is the way Rosalind gestured elegantly with her hands, her long fingernails clearly lacquered, sometimes delicately touching her cheek or lips with an index finger. I can’t recall which publication the interview was meant for.  DP

When I was a child, in Washington, D.C., I painted in a way a lot of children do. My parents took this very seriously and sent me to art school. My father was an attorney for the Department of Justice, which was down town right next to the National Gallery of Art, where he and I would have lunch together then go through the galleries. In the modern galleries, my father would make objections to the works and I would defend them.  I adopted a certain militancy, for I had to try to convince my father that these modern works of art were not phoney, that they were really important. This sharpened my desire to explain.

Also, I was introduced to the Phillips Collection, in the most wonderful 19^th century house.  This big house, generally empty of people, was filled with furniture and pictures.  Over the piano in the dining room was Renoir’s remarkable Luncheon of the Boaters, which was like sunlight in the room. Upstairs in the bedrooms was a collection of paintings by Klee, a lot of very beautiful Braque and late Cubist paintings, and I would sit on the nice carpets on the floors of these bedrooms and look at these works, completely enchanted by them.

Later, I tried to deal with the work of Mark Rothko hanging in the Phillips Collection.  I found the paintings very beautiful and at the same time very difficult.  I read all the critical literature, which was taking me nowhere until I came across a chapter of a wonderful book by Adrian Stokes in which he wrote about the difference between surface colour and film colour. It was very clear to me that film colour was a way of describing Rothko’s colour. I felt that Stokes was developing a very beautiful, very pertinent critical vocabulary.

As an undergraduate at Wellesley College, I studied art history, and I at first accepted that the way art history was taught accounted for or didn’t account for art. I became very aware of this accepted way of looking at art when I decided to do my senior thesis on the work of Willem de Kooning.  I realized that nothing I had been taught at Wellesley up until then had given me any kind of access to his work, which I thought very important. Access came to me with the just published book of Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, and in reading Art and Culture I began to understand what the vocabulary had to be in order to account for the power of De Kooning’s work. I understood that certain formulations of pictorial structure  — such as analytic cubism — are what later artists like De Kooning call on, and, like De Kooning, are essentially dependent upon.

When I went to Harvard as a graduate student, I was introduced to Clem and we became friends. My break with him was complicated. It was pretty much over the Vietnamese War. He was a big hawk on Vietnam and of course I was a dove. I found conversations with him increasingly painful because they were political, and his politics were very distasteful to me. What really did it was, in New York, where I went every month from Cambridge in order to review for Artforum where I was on the editoral board, I began to be very, very convinced about the work of Richard Serra, which Clem dismissed as he dismissed all of Minimalism.  I thought he was wrong. So we had a parting of the ways about contemporary work and about politics.

Everything I understood about sculpture had to do with the externalisation of an internal armature that is put into stress by the relationship of weight and gravity, with the internal armature that resists weight and gravity, and that’s what I saw in Serra’s work. In fact, I saw his work as hooking itself onto the most important traditions of Renaissance sculpture. I thought Clem’s hostility to it was just not appropriate, not for me.

I think he was hostile to the work because its materiality offended him. Clem’s whole relationship to art was incredibly teleological. His idea was that art had to end up in a certain place, and if it didn’t contribute to that trajectory then he dismissed it. The extreme materiality of Serra’s work, I think, transgressed Clem’s notion that sculpture was moving increasingly toward what he called opticality—to a kind of diaphanous quality, which he found in the work of David Smith.

My first book was on David Smith. At Harvard, I was worried about what I was going to do my dissertation on because I was married to a former husband and because it was complicated for me to go to Europe to work on a European subject.  I woke up one morning to the clock radio announcing that a sculptor had been killed in Bennington, Vermont. I was very upset because I thought that must have been Tony Caro who lived in Bennington, but I heard it was David Smith who had died and I jumped out of bed thinking, ‘Gee, I have my dissertation topic—an American sculptor I can work with it’. So that was it – pure opportunism. I finished it. It was published. Clem, who was an executor of the Smith estate, liked it, though I don’t have the same teleological vision that Clem had.

I think what I’m more interested in is stumbling on work that for one reason or another I recognise as genuine and then I try to understand where it comes from and what it is that secures the notion of it as authentic.  I don’t think there’s a development in my work because I’m very opportunistic in terms of the kinds of arguments that seem to me to be helpful to demonstrate whatever it is I’m trying to demonstrate, so if there are gaps I don’t really care. Each individual artist presents to me a different problem. When I became convinced about the importance of the work of William Kentridge, I took his work as a very special problem.

At the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, called MACBA, where I was doing some work, there was an exhibition of the work of William Kentridge.  I had seen one of Kentridge’s films before but not enough to have a kind of collective sense of the real ambition and importance of his work. Over the course of the four or five days that I spent at the museum, I looked at his work every day, and I left feeling that I had discovered another major artist. The question for me was, how do I explain to other people – most primitively, I guess, my father – why Kentridge is a really important artist, why his work is the genuine article?  Stanley Cavell, the philosopher, says that the problem of modern art is a problem of fraudulence. The traditional way of rejecting the avant garde was for the audience to get up and shout ‘phoney, fraud, fake, this isn’t the real thing’ and storm out, which was of course what my father would say when we were in the National Gallery. So the problem the critic has is how to convince the viewer who’s saying ‘phoney, fake, inauthentic’ that the work is authentic, that this is the real thing, that here is a real example of what art is.

I believed that the work of the Irish artist James Coleman is the real thing when I saw it. Outraged people weren’t saying ‘fake and phoney’, but the critical arguments for the work were themselves, I felt, fake and phoney. The defence of the work was made on grounds that I thought were irrelevant to the interest of the work. The grounds were national identity, the construction of identity, all this constructionalist stuff, which I thought had nothing to do with the work. What had to do with the work was the fact that he had essentially invented a medium. He invented a medium as the technical support for the work. Oil and canvas are a technical support. The armature and clay plaster of the sculpture are another technical support. Greenberg’s position on Modernist painting is that a work of art essentially secures its meaning by specifying its medium and by essentially securing something new about the nature of the medium, and this seems to me to be irrefutable. In most work that we know and respect, particularly abstract art which has broken all kinds of links with the observed world, and which could be said to be about the nature of the medium itself– the two dimensional canvas, the colours, the drawing, the frame of the canvas—the medium is absolutely essential – is crucial — in terms of my appreciation of a work of art.  This appreciation really comes from my relation to Clem, because one of Clem’s most important essays is called Modernist Painting, in which he writes that in Modernism the work of art has to secure itself by demonstrating the nature of its medium. The issue of the medium was thoroughly inbred to his idea of art, was made absolutely central to the possibility of the work meaning anything at all.  I think anything can be a work of art, but only if that thing has been worked on in such a way that it becomes a technical support, in other words a medium. You have to keep working on it. A medium is a little bit like a language—you can’t just speak it once, it is repeated. The way that an artist secures the nature of his support as a medium is to continue to work at it, repeating it. The repetition is very important. This became clear to me seeing the work of James Coleman, who has invented a medium because the slide tape, which is the technical support for his work, is repeated over and over and over again.

Yet, I have to say I hate the medium of printmaking.  The only artist I can think of who is an interesting printmaker is Ellsworth Kelly; otherwise I think that prints have nothing to do with Modernism and therefore I’m not interested in them as a medium. Other forms of reproducibility interest me, like photography and various decorative arts. Photography has a certain distance from Modernism, which creates an interesting tension between the two. In my book L’Amour Fou, about photography, I found it paradoxical that Surrealism, which we think of as courting states of psychological indeterminacy such as dreaming or whatever form the unconscious takes to manifest itself, should be celebrated in the very mechanical medium of photography. It was the paradox of the Surrealists acceptance of photography that interested me. I seem to be attracted to paradoxical conditions in art. Salvador Dalí is one example of a Surrealist working in the medium of photography. Miró is another one. And there is a deeper paradox in Miró. Everybody thinks of his work as childish, or childlike and comical, but I think of it as violent and sexual, which is not at all the popular conception of Miró. When I was analysing surrealist photography, it seemed to me that those photographers were attracted to strategies for undermining categories, so, for instance, in the Man Ray photographs of hats the categories of male and female are undermined. The condition of the formless, which is to say the collapse of oppositional categories, is the basis of my analysis of surrealist photography. But as I began to move from area to area where the collapse of categories was important, form became important, emerged as a major resource, intellectual resource, conceptual resource.

I don’t really like video very much. I don’t know any video work that I find interesting. William Kentridge works in film, not video. I think my most instinctive connection is with painting, and I also I think I’m very instinctive to sculpture, but I’ve had a very long and intense experience of film. At a certain point in the late sixties,  I decided I wanted to teach film, so I had to teach myself the history of film. I was in Paris one summer and every day I went to the Cinémathèque and tried to experience the whole history of film. The kind of film that particularly interested me was American independent cinema, Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, all these people. When I moved to New York to teach at Princeton, the first subject I taught was American independent film. This interest took me to the anthology film archives in New York, where I went every night.  There would be Richard Serra and Bob Smithson and Carl Andre and all of these American artists watching the cycle go around and around and around all over again.  This gave me an instinctive connection to their work.

I hate installation art, and my hatred energises me in relation to the book I’m now writing on the medium. I just hate it. I think it’s pandering, like belly dancers shaking their stuff and trying to seduce the viewer. I find it utterly meretricious. I especially hate the installations of Louise Bourgeois, a not very interesting artist who has been hyped up partly because she’s an old lady. So irritated by the endless, what seemed to be completely trumped up, exhibitions of this or that person’s installation,  I  decided that it was important to polemicize against these by making the medium, as I’ve said, crucial to the work of art. Installation art professes a contempt for painting, but nonetheless embodies the pictorial within its space. I think of an essay by Jacques Lacan, Seminar on the Purloined Letter, about the Poe story “The Purloined Letter,” in which a letter to a queen stolen by a minister ends up with the detective Dupin, each one of whom becomes effeminised or castrated, so passive that each one allows herself or himself to be the victim of a theft. Lacan’s argument is that the letter is the signifier of effeminacy and castration, and as it circulates among the various figures they each become the subject of that signifier and are marked by it.  The parallel with installation art that does interest me to argue against is that each of the installation artists, like Rebecca Horn or Jessica Stockholder, becomes marked by the very thing they wish to repress, namely painting, so in a sense they become the subject of (subjected to) painting. There seems to me to be a certain strange paradox in installation art in that it continues to refer to painting.

Why I don’t like conceptual art is because it is pretty simple-minded in condemning the medium, the specificity of the medium.

After my first book, my dissertation on David Smith, was published, I decided that all the essays that I had been publishing in magazines should be anthologized, but it was very hard for me to get a publisher to agree to this. I guess they thought, who was I?  it would never sell. Finally MIT Press agreed to publish it:  The Originality of the Avant Garde. At MIT I had taught a course on sculpture, and it seemed to me that the critical vocabulary in relationship to sculpture was very underdeveloped and that it would be worth writing a book, which would address the history of 20th century sculpture. My books take up the various gaps in the discourse on contemporary art that I encounter from time to time.

I sometimes use diagrams in my writing. It amuses me to use them because people – especially students – freak out when they see diagrams and think they can’t understand, and artists think seeing art in terms of diagrams is a gas. When I was learning about structuralism I got very turned on by the diagrams. I thought it was amazing that you could say something true about the history of something with something as static and two-dimensional as a diagram.  I learned all of this from Fred Jameson’s book The Political Unconscious, in which he uses diagrams.  I thought this remarkable, and, trying to imitate him, I found diagrams incredibly satisfying. They are not, the diagrams, about a given work, but more about how to understand something as seemingly complex as deconstruction. It is possible to understand that through a diagram. In my book The Optical Unconscious, I tried to show Modernism through diagrams.  In this case, Mondrian’s was the specific work. I tried to show Modernism’s withdrawal from the world, from the political/ historical context, into a state of art for art’s sake. That seemed to me to be something that the frame of the diagram captures and in a way I felt that it was interesting that the diagram could stand for various very important aspects of the modernist situation, that it could withdraw into the sanctified ground of the work of art, and also such issues as the importance of formal conditions like figure ground relations.

After my aneurism, which washed away synapses of my brain in blood, I went to sessions of cognitive therapy, where I was taught about memory. Essentially, what I was told was that “if you can remember who you are you can teach yourself to remember anything!” the “who you are” is a kind of scaffolding onto which bits of new information can be attached or to which they can be associated. So, for instance, they used flash cards to teach me, and sometimes the flash cards had little drawings, one, that I remembered showed a tennis player and a zipper – tennis player and a zipper, why? Because I play tennis, I know that as a tennis player you never wear clothes with a zipper. Once I’d made this connection with my own experience, boom, I was able to identify the things on the flash card. This connection led to the title of my book, Under Blue Cup, (2011) which didn’t come from a drawing on a flash card, but from a disconnected bit of text. My husband, Denis Hollier, every morning brought to the hospital my breakfast—coffee and a little sweet roll from a coffee shop he passed called A Kind of Blue, and knowing this made it easy for me to think of the title, Under Blue Cup. The subject of Under Blue Cup is the medium, the specificity of a work of art in terms of its medium.

I don’t think you can understand Malevich’s White on White painting without seeing the degree to which the specificity of the canvas and the specificity of the frame are paramount to him. Malevich is an artist for whom the specificity of painting is primary. It seems to be obvious.

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Two famous artists with nothing in common spoke about their work to invited audiences in Jerusalem in recent weeks, and both were happy with their audiences. “You couldn’t get 200 people like that in New York,” Philip Pearlstein told a friend after his talk at the Jerusalem Studio School, where he found himself surrounded by fans. Packed audiences are a regular occurrence for William Kentridge, who spoke at the preview of ‘Five Themes’, his exhibition that opened at MoMA a year ago and is now at the Israel Museum – but he said he really enjoyed the responsiveness of this audience.

As a fellow South African, I am familiar with Kentridge’s Johannesburg, but I have an outsider’s view of Pearlstein’s New York. Listening to Pearlstein, and later talking with his wife Dorothy, also a painter, threw light on a few mysteries – which could all be covered by one question: What makes Pearlstein closer as an artist to his old friend Andy Warhol than to the painter with whom he is usually compared – Lucien Freud? In other words, what is so different about painting in New York and London?

Asked how he relates to Freud, Pearlstein said: “I don’t know anything about him but when we went to London in the 1970s, someone said ‘Why do we need Pearlstein when we’ve got Freud?’ “ Then he said with a smile: ” All I know is, since MoMA bought Freud, my work is in storage.”

Dorothy Pearlstein used the word ‘pragmatic’ about the American approach to art. And she said that for Pearlstein it is very important not to “leave a bit of himself on the canvas” – brush marks, fingerprints, or lumps of paint, in the way of European expressionism.

Pearlstein’s decision to make huge paintings was pragmatic from the start – he had to, he said, or they wouldn’t be noticed. His interest in the gleaming nudes that he paints, with the translucent light and shadow moving over them, is unashamedly skin deep. And yet Pearlstein speaks about the people he paints with pride and admiration for their achievements – off the canvas.

He creates a smooth, impeccable, impenetrable surface that removes all evidence of the artist from the work and keeps the viewer at a distance. Elizabeth Taylor’s projected image comes to mind: seamless glamour devoid of irony, simplistic to the point of hick. But it’s New York hick, that moves easily from hick to cool to very sophisticated, and seems so enviable and unattainable to non-New Yorkers

For Kentridge, art is not about making an object to be treasured. His theatricality and love of trickery give a feeling of circus entertainment to his show. He made his audience rock with laughter at a split screen film interview between himself as two competing personae of the artist: the fumbling creative side and the scornful self-critic – while also expressing some of the most pertinent comments about the making and viewing of art.

Self-portraiture is at the heart of Kentridge’s work – a dramatised, evolving self-portrait that he uses in rather the same manner as an author like Philip Roth, where the main protagonist is not exactly him but reflects him; and where real life intertwines with fiction. In his early videos, based on charcoal drawings, Kentridge depicts himself in a pinstriped suit, or vulnerably naked, taking the part of two characters whose names, he says, came to him in a dream. Felix is a romantic lover and Soho is a heartless tycoon, but both are lonely figures in an unreliable world. The charcoal itself is vulnerable, smudgy and ephemeral, adding its own sense of romance and nostalgia.

At the preview, Kentridge repeated the remarkable speech he gave when he received the Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy in November 2010, in which he expressed his strong feelings for Johannesburg, the city where he was born, and where he still lives and works. He has made his home and main studio in the graceful colonial family house where he grew up, on the crest of a hill overlooking the leafy suburbs. There is a buzz of creativity in Johannesburg, embattled though it has always been by politics or crime – but free, gutsy and self-ironical in terms of its people and its culture. Kentridge plugs into this creativity, working with local artists and musicians, and capturing and expressing the fun as well as the toughness of it in his work.

What does link Pearlstein and Kentridge – apart from being hard working, ambitious and impeccably professional – is that both communicate their enjoyment of making art.

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In the space of about ten years, William Kentridge has moved from exotic outsider to center-stage.  His MoMA/Met double billing is unprecedented (David Hockney’s Met/ Met moments didn’t overlap).  It is a measure of Kentridge’s star effect that when people spoke of The Nose, the usual hierarchy was inverted: it was a Kentridge event; then, a meditation on the proto-Surrealism of Gogol; and only lastly the overdue New York premiere of an opera from the youthful genius of Shostakovich.

So many intelligent critics and journalists have written about Kentridge, and he is himself so graciously articulate about the meanings and non-meanings of his work, that there might seem little left to discuss.  But the fine retrospective at MoMA provides an opportunity to re-examine the consensus surrounding his work.  For one thing, the seal of approval on Kentridge’s political bona fides, despite his embrace of the personal, the cryptic and the absurd, is a little too easy, and we might ask ourselves: what would be left of Kentridge’s great force if we decided he really wasn’t political, that he only played to an expedient degree with political forms?  This is not to question his sincerity, but rather our own.

Opinions do diverge, sometimes drastically, about Kentridge’s worth as a draftsman, and at MoMA we could consider side by side the merits of a range of nuanced, masterful prints, self-contained drawings, and far cruder drawings for film.  Or, call them drawings as film, jumping ahead to the decisive novelty of Kentridge’s work, and here  an intriguing question arises as to where to locate his sequential, continuous drawing practice within the eye-popping history of drawn animation.  A little research suggests he gets credit for reinventing the wheel, and maybe not nearly enough for repairing it with spit and glue, and getting down the road.

Politics first.  There is no doubt that Kentridge voiced outrage in the form of blunt caricature against the cruelties and absurdities of everyday life under apartheid and its miserable aftermath.  Mine, for example, made three years before Mandela’s 1994 election, connects the dots of capitalism and colonial exploitation with urgent ridicule.  Monument, in 1990, displayed the literal shackles at the base of the apartheid pyramid scheme.  The march of silhouetted refugees in 1999’s Shadow Procession is scored to a rousing people’s anthem of African folk music that functions elegiacally, but unconquerably –– much like “Red River Valley” at the end of The Grapes of Wrath.  (More on Kentridge’s vivid sound design later.)  I don’t have a clear picture of how these works were first shown and to whom –– how participatory they were, or how risky it was for a white artist thus to protest state violence; later, perhaps, state neglect –– but people have been blacklisted, jailed and disappeared for less.  If not outright agitprop, Kentridge’s films are a long way from head-in-the-sand “bourgeois formalism” (Shostakovich’s counter-revolutionary sin, according to Stalinist bullying).

The films go deep, moreover, because Kentridge implicates himself in order to redeem us all; he conducts, one might say, his own Truth Commission.  Though we are told again and again of Kentridge’s heroically anti-apartheid lawyer parents, we are less often reminded that generations of what was once the Kantorowitz family from Lithuania have been very prominent insiders of government and commerce in a brazenly racist state.  Kentridge’s choice of Ashkenazic surnames for his recurring protagonists, Eckstein and Teitelbaum, tells this truth emphatically, chafing at an anti-Semitic stereotype by the desperate measure of exploiting it.  Soho Eckstein has “bought half of” Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989).  He loves only numbers, money.  In Mine he casts gold ingots from the flesh of the masses.  In Stereoscope (1998-99), Soho is more reflective, and sees how blue lines of implication reach from his antique office machinery to beatings, tortures, murders, bombings, and environmental wastage.  His striped suit pockets overflow with the wages of his sins to flood the world.  That apartheid and its multiple miseries are laid at the door of a Jewish industrialist has provoked strangely scant attention.  Could this bloodletting be requisite to the resounding international acceptance of Kentridge’s work?  Do Kara Walker’s far more elegantly brutal transgressions serve a related purpose?  In different ways, you could say they prime the art culture’s guilt-trip rinse cycle –– a bit of a dirty job, but it all comes out in the wash, messier than when it went in, precisely as planned.

Henceforth, Kentridge gets a free pass to cultivate his garden with tangled meanings.  In fact, it would take pages, not the usual two-sentence summation, to catalogue the stream-of-charcoal convolutions of a Kentridge film.  The consensus seems to be that the later films are political art in the best sense, more rueful than actionable interweavings of obsession and observation, history and fiction. By working as cryptic elegies, apolitically political, they make even the edgiest art-world cynics feel better about themselves.  You could call this a legitimate instance of the healing powers of art.  Or, you could call it wishful thinking.

Kentridge the shamanic humanist, or Kentridge the Gogolian satirist; either way, he will take the world by drawing.  As for how he draws, it is as resourcefully old-fashioned as the what and why.  Kentridge assumes the prerogative of an expressionist tradition that begins with unfinishable Michelangelo meltdowns, goes through Goya’s séances and Daumier’s distillations, explodes with Picasso, takes a left turn at Kollwitz’s anguish and Grosz’s speediness, burns intensely with Guston’s and Giacometti’s doubt, and thereafter fizzles into a thousand points of self-consciousness.  Kentridge has said, with equal measures of humility and hubris, that “even if quaintness was the price one paid,” he would pick this dropped fruit off the ground.  He does come away with the pith, if less often the flesh, of what the experimental-existential tradition is all about –– keeping things dangerously open in order to catch a vision, then clamping down like a steel trap.  It needn’t be pretty.  It might be gorgeous.  It must be real.

Before seeing the show, I had the opinion that Kentridge’s stubborn, insistent manner could at best be called stolid.  But I was mostly aware of his film drawings, whereas the balance point between skill, risk, and habit adjusts with graphic mode.  His marvelous large drawing of a skewered globe striding forth on electrical-tower legs projects confident savvy, part Grandville, part Disasters of War.  Two prints of a nude man with a megaphone have a fascinating texture and a sense of exactitude in motion.  Now comes the controversy over his ability, for the megaphone prints were hung next to a related drawing that actually is in motion, the ending state of a scene from Stereoscope.  Here the megaphone man is sketchier (though more well-rehearsed than Kentridge’s usual film figures), while the landscape around him is typically hurried, provisional, and uninflected –– to the point that Ben Katchor’s abject cartoon noir, which it resembles, puts it to shame for competence.  Kentridge’s graphic powers, when he focuses them in a single slice, are formidable; the drawings from films are best seen as artifacts that once had a job to do (and a smaller proportion of these would have sufficed.  Is a Tim Burton/ Pixar mindset taking hold at MoMA?)

It is no insult to call the film drawings unimpressive as drawings per se, so long as we properly appreciate what their two-fisted job really is: to reclaim animation from technical perfectionism, arrested development, gee-whiz ingenuity, and artiness.  In this they succeed, by returning us to the moment before Modernist imagism and film moved to distant neighborhoods.

The early history of motion pictures, indeed its pre-history in zoetropes, praxinoscopes and the like, is inseparable from sequential drawing.  It was natural that outer-circle followers of Kandinsky should experiment in the 1920’s with pure spirit-matter in motion, but the paradox is that the great accomplishments in art animation always seem to come from visionary innocents like Oskar Fischinger or Norman McLaren, complete originals who epitomize experimental animation’s wary distance from avant-garde polemics.  From the 1930’s until their deaths in 1967 and 1987, respectively, Fischinger and McLaren made brilliant time-based essays in hand-me-down geometric abstraction that seems eager to please and delight rather than to transcend.  To be sure, there is a mismatch of artistic temperament between the dogged, do-it-yourself ingenuity of animation, on the one hand, and on the other, the empirical and psychic friction by which Kandinsky and Malevich, Mondrian and Miró pared down their hard-ass idioms.  But it goes deeper than matters of taste: fundamentally, the smooth, cool glide of the moving image is antagonistic to the willful autonomy of drawing and painting.  Movement is at cross purposes to eternity.

Without understanding this antagonism, and its history, we can appreciate neither Kentridge’s accomplishment nor his limitations.  Only an absurdly foreshortened sketch is possible here of animation’s lineage of great draftsmanship, so let’s just say that between Winsor McCay and The Secret of Kells, a million professionally excellent drawings have been made whose duty is bound fore and aft, a link in a chain; while in experimental art animation, drawing has taken on broader freedoms, borrowed from the Modernist demolition of conventional notions of finish.  Fischinger, McLaren, Alexandre Alexeieff and Clair Parker, Lotte Reininger, Len Lye, Harry Smith, Yuriy Norshteyn, Faith and John Hubley, Jules Engel, Caroline Leaf, Kathy Rose, Dennis Pies, George Griffin, and Paul Glabicki, all pushed the pipe dream of the moving drawing into astonishing territory.  Numerous works could be cited as technical precursors to Kentridge’s continuous drawing and erasure, in particular Fischinger’s glorious 1943 Motion Painting #1, a painting on glass frame-by-framed over six months; Alexeieff and Parker’s 1963 pinscreen masterpiece The Nose (yes, that Nose), a haunting graphic novel with the texture of a moving mezzotint; and Leaf’s The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa, 1973, also a “motion painting” on glass, devastatingly melancholic.  These great films and many more whose technique is farther afield (not excluding wonders in solid and computer animation) would be well worth comparing in detail with Kentridge’s work on another occasion.  For now we can say that Kentridge’s mise-en-scène is static and jagged compared to the fluid metamorphosis achieved by masters of continuous imagery.  But Kentridge is less concerned with fluidity, and more with the autonomous integrity of the drawing process, in which visual form leads, rather than follows, narrative function.

Imagine Michelangelo or Goya taking on animated sequences –– nudes turning sculpturally in space, figures hatching from void: mind-blowing, certainly, but only insofar as their eagle-eyed opportunism was suppressed, made to yield to their inner Disney. What we truly value in their work, to the contrary, is how they fuse depth and still movement.  How they transform the multiverse into a singularity.  For Goya to be Goya, each flicker of light must contradict the past and alter the future.

Henri Bergson, philosopher of time for the dawn of cinema, warned repeatedly about picturing the future as a reel of film that waits to unspool; time as dimension was an illusion we succumbed to, implying fate, blocking us from the experience of creation as something new and unpredictable at every moment.  Great works of painting and drawing get at this truth by condensing existence into a refracting diamond of gestalt.  What they refuse to do is be constrained by external “fates,” fore and aft. (A sequential lithograph of a bull by Picasso, concurrently on display at MoMA, proves the rule; the 14 states morph too ferociously to animate.)

Kentridge embraces crudeness with confident pragmatism in order to split the difference, as no one has before, between drawing as tough-minded singularity, yet also as the sequential driver of cinematic experience.  It is precisely crudeness that animation cannot abide; if it appears at all, it tends to transmute into affectation, a cartoon of art –– either as parody or, alas, with the best of intentions.  Kentridge’s films can accommodate a refreshing degree of impulsiveness of drawing without turning, on the other hand, into flickering anarchy for connoisseurs of the phenomenological (for an extreme case, see Stan Brakhage’s feral take on animation in The Dante Quartet), and this is because continuous drawing is but one technique for impelling a Kentridge film forward.  Little has been written about the integral contributions of montage and sound to Kentridge’s cinematic oeuvre, but his opportune collaborations with Angus Gibson and Catherine Meyburg as editors and William Schübel as sound designer ought to be fully credited for their share in the dramatic intensity, mystery, and rhythm of the films, indeed with their structural logic.  Tide Table, for example, is a complex mosaic, but intercut from a mere 8 or 10 metamorphic drawings.   Certain kinds of transitions are built into the sequences, and often Kentridge ports motifs from scene to scene with montage aforethought, but the rest is splicing; it’s the combination that twists the narrative kaleidoscope into mesmerizing, if somewhat dutiful, cinema.  As for sound, it delineates cinematic mood the way smell distinguishes the taste of onions from strawberries.  Kentridge makes lavish, theatrical use of sound effects and music: water splashing, paper crinkling, maudlin string quartet (from composer Phillip Miller), crackly Caruso records, pencil-scrape, trolley bell.  By aural design we are transported into his imagery like lambs to the slaughter.

Kentridge calls what he does “stone age” technology, but maybe we should call it “golden age.”  His 7 Fragments for George Méliès (2003) revisits an ancestral state of grace, where all moving images were magical.  Now, thanks in no small part to Kentridge’s efforts, that lost potential has been, if you will, reanimated –– not just in Burbank and at the National Film Board of Canada, but in Chelsea and Basel too, with plenty more in the pipeline from MacPros in grad schools across the globe.  Kentridge continues leading the charge with his geeky side –– it was already there in Shadow Procession’s articulated cutouts, but now witness the crackerjack animatronics of his Magic Flute black boxes –– so perhaps we can expect him to contend one day with the myriad ingenuities of McLaren, Fischinger, et al., as he has done Méliès.  Likewise, his metamorphic drawing powers grow in ambition.  In Tide Table, feet walk with the chewy graphic fiber of a moving woodcut across a panning collage of newspapers, and figures flinging stones stand out for their fluid disposition of mass –– maybe achieved via Muybridge or rotoscope, and why not?  Only a mannerism of the rough-hewn would prevent Kentridge from reaching for more moments of expertise like these.

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February 8, 2008 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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James Gardner, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr joined David Cohen to review Ellen Berkenbilt at Anton Kern, Katy Grannan at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and at Salon 94 Freemans, Jane Freilicher at Tibor de Nagy, William Kentridge at Marian Goodman and Chris Martin at Michell-Innes & Nash.

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January 16 to February 16, 2008
24 West 57th Street, New York City

William Kentridge seems to have a problem few contemporary artists are even eligible to suffer — a surfeit of genius.

The G-word is never to be used lightly, but in relation to the South African draftsman, printmaker, filmmaker, sculptor, opera designer, theater producer, and political activist, resistance to the moniker seems churlish. Besides being a polymath, he enjoys several other attributes of genius. He is inventive, prolific, multifaceted, and highly dexterous. He has a style unmistakably his own. He frequently bridges the divide between artistic and scientific inquiry. And he can move people to tears.

His latest exhibition at Marian Goodman is packed with technical departures that offer elaborations of his trademark idiom: imagery transmogrified. His show fills several rooms of this sprawling, floor-through gallery, as well as an ancillary space on a floor below. Besides a broad array of mediums, which include works on paper, projections, sculpture, prints, and even a tapestry, individual projects display technically intricate and sophisticated realization.

There is a series of stereoscopic prints, for instance, in which, hovering over the twin impressions of seemingly identical images that are placed adjacent to one another on tables, are special viewing lenses under which the images coalesce to a single, 3-D image of receding planes.

A pair of mammoth charcoal drawings of a rhinoceros, each just under 7 feet by 8 feet, face each other and resolve in the reflection of a V-shaped mirror viewed head-on. They are variants of imagery familiar from Dürer, whose famous print, “Melancholia,” hangs on an adjacent wall.

And three circular tables present further explorations of anamorphism with images from a project titled “What Will Come” (2007). On each table, a circular drawing, in charcoal on paper, is reflected in a mirrored steel cylinder placed at its center. In one piece, forms taken from Mr. Kentridge’s body of film animations, such as a gas mask and a world on legs, appear outlandishly bulbous on the page and resolve to a legible scale in the reflection. As the viewer circumnavigates the table, these forms seem to chase each other in a spin. In a separate, darkened viewing space, a film animation that featured these preparatory drawings is presented in similar fashion: The 8-minute film is beamed onto a table, and this projection then reflects in a central cylinder. Here the forms metamorphose back and forth with Mr. Kentridge’s characteristic fusion of surreal humor and historic gravitas. The film is accompanied by a stirring, jingoistic vintage soundtrack featuring music associated with the Italian war against Abyssinia.

In some respects, this new body of work represents business as usual for Mr. Kentridge in its mix of wizardry and warmth. The technical feats are prodigious. The drawing at the core of Mr. Kentridge’s activity, meanwhile, is powerful, direct, and personal — its combination of realism and expressionism recalling George Grosz and Max Beckmann. But there seems to be a shift in the balance of power, within his work, between the poles of expression and ingenuity. In earlier work, it seemed that the technical presentation was at the service of the drawn aspect. His animation technique was defiantly low-tech, deliberately emphasizing the handmadeness of the images, in contrast to the seamlessness of digital animation. Now it feels that drawing is almost incidental, and the main event is the presentation. The tables and viewing paraphernalia are artfully crafted, quite apart from the skill with which they operate, to create a theatrical, cabinet-of-curiosities atmosphere to the exhibition.

It could be argued, of course, that a distinction between handmade and engineered elements is spurious, especially if it assigns greater expressivity or authenticity to the drawn element — making a fetish of the hand, and casting the technical stuff as somehow less “honest.” A work of art is a complete package that comes off or does not. But with this greater emphasis on the viewing context and its clever play with optics, there seems to be a loss of narrative richness. The new emphasis is on static objects, albeit ones around which the viewer must move for that stasis to resolve. The actual point of the exceedingly clever anamorphism is never fully established.

In the film animations that secured his reputation in the last decade, there was a sense of fragility and urgency, as if the rubbing-away charcoal was of a piece with an agitprop sensibility, linked somehow to the work’s relationship to history and politics. Without resorting to overt propaganda or sloganeering, Mr. Kentridge’s fantasy realism scenarios, staffed with the recurring, poignant characters Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum — a property tycoon and a dreaming artist, respectively — dealt in a highly personal fashion with South Africa’s legacy of exploitation and greed. By making his characters Jewish, like himself, Mr. Kentridge bridged a divide between the personal and the political, although to some the Jewish identification of a rapacious capitalist and a woolly idealist traded in problematic stereotypes.

Where Mr. Kentridge’s dramatic or narrative impulses used to find their outlets in animated films, recently his energies have been more focused on the stage, especially opera. He produced a spectacular “Magic Flute” for Brussels that came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music briefly last year, and many of the prints in the current exhibition use stereoscopics to delve into a proscenium space. A room of sculptures is preparation for a production of Shostakovich’s “The Nose (Horse)” — raucous, absurdist inventions that make lively with broken forms. In a way that recalls the pentimenti in his rubbed-away charcoal drawings, these sculptures make expressive play of the simple mechanics of their open construction. The sculptures, a departure in Mr. Kentridge’s oeuvre (though recalling his puppetry of a few years ago), are the highlight of this exhibition, both in terms of invention and resolution.

At times, though, this noisy, intriguing show, with its complex of projects, each in itself quite complex, feels a bit like hearing an orchestra tuning its instruments while the singers warm up their voices. On the evidence of past quality and current ambition, something substantial can be expected when the conductor finally taps his baton.

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CHAIM GROSS: REINVENTING FORM
Forum Gallery

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: THE MAGIC FLUTE, DRAWINGS AND PROJECTIONS
Marian Goodman Gallery

Not many contemporary artists came as close as Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000) to the virtuosic rendering of early Renaissance painting, and none took these talents in so unsettling a direction. The thirty-odd paintings at Forum Gallery span his career, highlighting the frantic variety of his work and its unique blend of delicate fantasy and raw provocation.

Early works have the jewel-like precision of van Eyck, though not quite the same gravity of color and space–and certainly not the same uplifting tone; several small, meticulous panels from the 60s depict raunchy sex scenes, while “Soccer Star” (1968) pictures an athlete who smiles obligingly as his abdomen splits open to reveal his entrails.

Mr. Gillespie went on to exploit a bewildering variety of subjects and techniques.  Celtic manuscript ornamentation, ceremonial Japanese costumes and Hindu tantric symbols appear, often in fantastical landscapes or eerie interiors. Many pieces are built up with thick applications of paint, sometimes sanded or scraped to reveal underlying layers; in others, real bits of wood and metal are combined with obsessively painted images of tiled walls and floors.

A rare tenderness prevails in the warmly smiling portrait, “My Aunt” (1988). More often, though, the artist seems determined to provoke. In “Bread Shrine” (1969) several tiny figures engage in obscure sex acts beneath a kind of industrial breadbox, on which the figure of Christ has been affixed like a decal. Was the artist hoping to expunge his strict Catholic upbringing? The passages of radiant, dainty modeling suggest something else—he’s intent on reclaiming the sacred for himself, by means of these luminous but mordantly disjointed images.

Presiding over the exhibition is the nearly eight-foot tall “Self-Portrait with Bread and Chakras” (1987-88). From an altar-like studio, the artist stares out dully, naked from the waist up and covered with emblems of mandalas and female genitalia. Behind him an ethereal Buddha competes with the carefully modeled forms of a telephone, hammer and visor. A darkly, closely worked panel attached below depicts what seems to be a disemboweled woman. Another panel, pure white, features a clock-like circle with knotted masses of paint for hands. Atop this sits a tiny, beautifully rendered female nude, exquisite in its detail and coloration, apparently cut out from another work—in fact, another world.

What does it all mean? Mr. Gillespie’s images rivet, but they refuse to edify the way van Eyck’s do. Clarification may be too much to ask of these memorable paintings—or from the artist’s feverish point of view, too little.

One floor above, the exhibition in Forum Gallery’s fifth floor space could hardly differ more in spirit. Here the lifework of Chaim Gross (1904-1991) unfolds as an act of affirmation, his pleasure evident in nearly twenty sculptures of acrobats and mothers with children. These works include wood sculptures from his early years, as well as the bronzes he turned to after the mid50s.

In the diminutive “Vanity” (1941), the wood grain enthusiastically follows a female nude’s rounding hips, their surfaces flirtatiously polished. “Baby Balancing on Feet” (1950), a supple, curving pillar of cocobolo wood, entices in a different way; at the top, emerging from the quickening curves, there appears a placid face—a poignant note that startles all the more when one realizes it belongs to a baby, balanced on the sinuous form of the upside-down mother.

In several stone pieces, broad, Mayan-like faces emerge evocatively from masses of onyx and alabaster. Mr. Gross’s inventions are less inspired in some of the bronze pieces; the six-foot tall “Three Acrobats on a Unicycle” (1957) depicts another column of athletic figures, but its even, chunky pacing feels less buoyant, as if the first fanciful conception had bogged down in its incarnation.

But even if Mr. Gross’s bronzes don’t have the rhythmic heft of Lipchitz’s, their humor is infectious. They hum with what Smithsonian director Joshua Taylor aptly called an “unqualified, exuberant enjoyment of life.”

Many famous painters have designed theatre sets, but artist William Kentridge has gone a step further: he’s also directing the production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” that premiered last year in Brussels and is now touring internationally.

A white South African, Mr. Kentridge had worked for many years in theatre and as a printmaker before gaining wide acclaim for his animation art in the 90s. The fifty pastel and charcoal drawings now at Marian Goodman served as the basis for “The Magic Flute’s” sets and animations.

Except for stray red marks, the drawings are executed completely in black pastel and charcoal. Rich tones, however, give a panoramic depth to backdrops of classical landscapes, some of them elaborated with Egyptian temples and astronomical diagrams. In smaller drawings of birds and cages, erasures demonstrate how these single sheets became the working arenas for animations. A model theatre about five feet wide handily shows the drawings at work. Illuminated by projections from the front and rear, the set comes alive with animations of dancing guardsmen, frolicking animals, and orbiting planets, all synchronized with portions of the opera’s soundtrack. Comets spiral and stream during the Queen of the Night’s climactic Act II aria.

Even without the benefit of color, this intimate mini-production charms. How does the full-size production look and sound? Opera-goers can see for themselves in April, 2007, when “The Magic Flute” comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Gillespie and Gross until February 25 (745 Fifth Avenue between 57th and 58th Streets, 212-355-4545).

Kentridge until February 25 (24 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-977-7160).

A version of these reviews first appeared in the New York Sun, February 2, 2006

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‘Zeno Writing’, a multi-media project by South African artist William Kentridge which included a short animated film and supporting drawings, recently on show at Marian Goodman, is based on Italo Svevo’s 1923 novel Confessions of Zeno. The novel, set against the backdrop of industrial development and war in the early decades of the last century, centers on an individual living through extreme social transformation. Zeno is an individual caught in the fray, continually frustrated in his aspirations. He has strong passions, but he is too weak in character to stand up for them. Thus, he is set on a repetitive pattern of understanding his shortcomings and covering them up. Instead of dealing with the chaos, he uses distractions as a way of balancing his psyche and, seemingly, the world around him.

Technically humble in their composition, Kentridge’s films are rich in meaning and vision. He begins with a single sheet of paper, laboriously erasing and reworking the image, photographing each drawing after its alteration. Kentridge’s figures, all of them in silhouette, might bring to mind the work of Kara Walker at least in format, but his figures are merely half-human and appear so from only one point of view. As they turn and shift throughout the course of the film, they reveal themselves to be mechanical apparatuses, not really human at all.

The music accompanying the film is at first slow and pulsing, and creates a dismal tone that is reinforced by the monochromatic, edgy scenery. The landscape scrolls to melodic chanting, “Zeno, . . .Zeno.” It then rises to a furious tempo, the soprano’s voice rings out in a crescendo, and the dark figures are thrust toward the front of the screen. Then, just as quickly, they are pushed to the back. Numbers and letters scrawl angrily across ledger paper only to rundown the screen in a wet mess as background imagery flits by in quick succession.

Mimicked by the flutter of cigarette smoke and by the looping of warplanes, the writing draws attention to the film’s title. Zeno, encouraged by his psychiatrist, writes his autobiography, a stream-of-consciousness project that Kentridge translates into visual form. A typewriter’s phalangeal fingers dance rigidly as the sound of the carriage return rings out. The landscape scrolls horizontally, mimicking the movement of words across the page. The landscape starts as a picket-fenced yard, and then is zapped into barren land encased in barbed wire. The transformation alludes to the dichotomy between the idyllic life Zeno wants to lead and the brutal reality of the war that surrounds him.

All of this back and forth, pushing and pulling, stopping and starting blatantly exposes the inherent uncertainty of the modern world. The figures have holes -they are uncertain creatures in their make up. “I promise my wife to stop smoking at 2 pm.” Even this is uncertain. Is he going to make his promise at 2 pm or stop smoking at 2 pm?
The film plays on a loop in a small room off the North Gallery, while the drawings used for the film are tacked up with push pins in the gallery’s main space. The cold gray and white of the gallery resonates with the melancholic sound of the film; viewing the drawings with this soundtrack is like watching the film in slow motion. What you get is an in-depth look at Kentridge’s process. The tape marks on the edges of the pager where it has been secured in place are clearly visible, the chalk dust making a distinction between clean paper and worked surface. In Trieste Drawing 1 and II, two cemetery scenes, red editing lines charge through the blackness of the charcoal, rubber eraser marks dash across the grass. Kentridge has even made notes to himself in the upper right corner. The charcoal is feathery, allowing not only for quick erasure and change, but also for delicate build up, which creates an extreme sense of depth through intense chiaroscuro. In Landscape, text fragments, the charcoal delineates the ledger lines crisply. Yet, the faint remnants of script, erased again and again, create a gray haze like the smoke on the battlefield. The text fragments appear as strange hieroglyphs superimposed over an apocalyptic landscape. Again, uncertainty takes hold. Is the scene old, current, or futuristic?

On another wall, four machine drawings dominate with their deep, rich black backgrounds, the machines’ stark whiteness hinting at their metallic nature. Their names reveal their use: Object-Pressure Plant, Object-Telescope, etc. Technically sound, and fully rendered, in these Kentridge manages to evoke not only the scientific drawings of da Vinci but also the machine drawings of Picabia and the readymades of Duchamp.

Most stunning are the Ledger series and the adjacent suite of photogravures. Encased in a glass vitrine on yellowed book pages, the Ledger images appear as relics, the aged script drawing attention to just how far away we have moved, in this computer age, from the “good hand” required for calligraphy (and, some would argue, for art.) In these drawings, we see Kentridge’s process for morphing his figures into human-mechanic collaborations. A woman, over two or three successive doodles, becomes the scissor-legged creature we see in the film’s beginning. The photogravures are haunting, layered and dense. In one, the hazy smoke from Zeno’s perpetual cigarette habit is captured with a Hitchcockian film noir feel that the film’s jerky imagery cannot capture.

Kentridge makes Zeno’s uncertainty and self-destructive behavior look gorgeous. That’s not really his intention, but the sensuousness of the imagery diverts attention from the true, depressed nature of the message. That, however, is the point – of discovering our vulnerabilities and consistently covering them up with something more beautiful. Whereas most artists reveal to us the personality and change in our society after the fact, Kentridge reveals what is constant-our continuous search for balance. It is this aspect of Kentridge’s work that makes it so important, and its intelligence is reinforced by his ability to relay visually the literal ideas of the book in a way that is imaginative, technically marvelous, approachable, timeless and conceptually rich.

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