William Kentridge in New York

Draftsman, printmaker, animator, filmmaker, set designer, opera director, performer, and more—William Kentridge is impossible to categorize. His multivalent work probes the social, racial, and political issues of his native South Africa, along with ideas about meaning and the absurd that transcend regional or national boundaries. He is preoccupied, too, with more intimate questions about our interior and emotional lives, with ruminations about self-definition, memory, dreams, aging, love, and loss. He is fascinated by layering—of both meaning and image—by instability, and by technology that creates illusions: miniature theaters, anamorphic images whose distortions resolve when seen from the right perspective, films that apparently record the impossible; he is an admirer of the pioneer special effects filmmaker Georges Méliès and has dedicated a series of film fragments to him.

Each of Kentridge’s ventures into new terrain seems driven not by a search for novelty but by a desire to investigate the fresh expression that untried techniques might permit or provoke. The only constant, no matter what the means of presentation, is the paramount importance of drawing and the hand, absent any conventional conceptions of good draftsmanship. Drawing, for Kentridge, is an intensely human, contingent activity, usually manifest as smudgy marks that evoke things seen, but which are subject to erasure, cancellation, reconsideration, and change. Even his stop-action animations—products of what Kentridge describes as “stone age film technology”—are made by a laborious process of pacing back and forth between the gradually evolving series of drawings and the camera: drawing with charcoal (or arranging torn pieces of paper), capturing an image, altering the drawing, capturing the result, and so on. Small wonder that Kentridge describes being in the studio as “Walking, thinking, stalking the image.”

Small wonder, too, that the vexed notion of identity is one of Kentridge’s frequent themes, addressed with his usual sense of mutable possibilities. In his drawings and the films made with his drawings, he has created a cast of recurring characters who enact ambiguous dramas: the greedy tycoon Soho Eckstein; the dreamy artist Felix Teitelbaum; Soho’s wife and Felix’s lover, Mrs. Eckstein, whose first name we never learn; an agile, metamorphosing cat; a horde of nameless black persons, at once vividly individualized and emblematic of the masses. It doesn’t take long to realize that Soho, in his natty suit, and Felix, usually portrayed nude, resemble not only each other but also their author—all of them burly, thickset men with strong features, sensuous mouths, and receding hairlines. A version of this beefy male, a pale nude scratched and swiped out of a dark ground, appears in a lush series of prints titled Ubu Tells the Truth; the aggressively un-buff protagonist—yet another surrogate self-portrait—is encased within the generous outlines of Alfred Jarry’s grotesque character. In recent films, multiple Kentridges often appear, all dressed in the artist’s habitual open-collared white shirt and black pants, chiding one another, performing music together on unlikely instruments, collaborating on improbable tasks. The curator Michael Auping notes, in the introduction to a published dialogue in which the artist commented extensively on his original statements, “As with his alter egos Felix and Soho, Kentridge in essence doubles himself in this interview by not only answering my original questions but also questioning his answers.” This combination of doubling and questioning could describe most of Kentridge’s practice.

In New York last spring, it seemed not only possible or even probable that multiple Kentridges existed, but downright necessary, given the apparent ubiquity of the man and his work. He staged and created décor for Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose (based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story) at the Metropolitan Opera. He spoke at such varied institutions as Cooper Union, the New York Public Library, and the New York Studio School. William Kentridge: Five Themes, an ambitious survey exhibition organized by Mark Rosenthal and the artist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art, in Florida, was seen at the Museum of Modern Art, part of an extended...