In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • William Kentridge: Five Themes
  • Erica Ando
William Kentridge: Five Themes. Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 24-May 17, 2010.

Political art that is suggestive of utopia has been viewed with jaded suspicion since the futile attempts of early modernists to use art as an instrument of sociopolitical change. William Kentridge: Five Themes, recently shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, presents a retrospective of Kentridge's work, revealing opportunities for the transformation of collective history and the development of utopianism within the oeuvre of this Jewish South African artist. On view are 130 animated films, drawings, prints, sculptures, and theater models from the late 1980s to today, bringing together works from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. Five themes organize the works, which range from the more overtly political pieces (Ubu Tells the Truth and 9 Drawings for Projection) through the newer, lesser-known projects (films that focus on Kentridge's creative process, Artist in the Studio, and his adaptation of Mozart's Magic Flute) and most recently, to his New York Metropolitan Opera production of Shostakovich's The Nose (also the title of the fifth theme). Through the chronology of Kentridge's work, we see faint traces of hope intensify into reflections on utopianism, conveying the importance of a utopian impulse in a global condition marked with continuing discrimination and violence.

Born in Johannesburg in 1955 to two prominent anti-apartheid lawyers, Kentridge studied political science and African studies before turning to theater and art. Early in his career as he sought to find an appropriate visual language with which to confront his position toward South African politics, Kentridge turned to Constructivist artists of postrevolutionary Russia such as Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, who had embraced abstraction to [End Page 332] express their utopianism. Although sustained by the motivations of these artists, Kentridge did not adopt abstraction, perhaps because their exuberant utopianism was beyond his imagination.1 Instead, he turned to figuration and narration to communicate concepts of memory, loss, and change that characterized his social and political landscape.

In the exhibition, the films Ubu Tells the Truth (1997) and Shadow Procession (1999) introduce Kentridge's work. Combining elements of Alfred Jarry's absurdist Ubu Roi with archival testimony from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which recorded the experiences of witnesses of human rights violations under apartheid, Ubu presents us with Kentridge's recurring preoccupations: his incisive political concerns, support of unheard and oppressed voices, and integration of theatrical and graphic arts, as well as drawing (and erasing) and torn paper as elements of his visual and metaphoric language.

Kentridge's short animated films first attracted international attention in the early 1990s for their political content in conjunction with the breakdown of apartheid. Equally acclaimed was his signature method of animation, a painstakingly slow process created by drawing with black charcoal, photographing a couple of stills of the drawing, erasing and slightly altering the existing drawing, again shooting a couple of stills, and continuing this process of drawing and erasing and shooting while developing a narrative based on characters derived from Kentridge's South Africa. While using the conventional technique of charcoal drawing, the effect is that of staggering metamorphoses and incongruous changes, highlighting the volatility of situations, places, and people. Kentridge's animation technique acts as a metaphor for human transformation, the visible erasure marks symbolizing memory that cannot be completely erased.

These early animated films (begun in 1989) are collectively titled 9 Drawings for Projection and are presented in the exhibition alongside the large charcoal drawings that went into making them. The narratives of these films chronicle the lives of two recurring characters: Soho Eckstein, a powerful and callous industrialist; and Felix Teitelbaum, a sensitive artist who is also the lover of Soho's wife. Throughout the films, which are shown in succession, we see Soho's crumbling self-confidence and increasing self-questioning, his identity becoming more and more unstable with the disintegration of apartheid. Soho's despicable acts of inhumanity, for example, throwing greasy meat bones he has chewed at an endless line of oppressed black workers or [End Page 333] erecting a monument to himself...

pdf