William Kentridge at Syracuse

Recently I somehow missed a visit to UofR by William Kentridge. This is the final week of this exhibition of his recent work at the Syracuse University Art Galleries. I know that at this time of the year much attention at our nearest ACC institution is focused on basketball. But should you be looking to take a break, this is a good bet.

A Petit Digest

Political Economy: An Op-Ed here from Dani Rodrik on comparative - and inauspicious - patterns of de-industrialization in developed economies and another here by Joseph Stiglitz on the unimpressive economic 'recovery' in the US.

Art: A really nice feature here in The New York Times of William Kentridge discussing the work of an Indian artist, Nasreen Maohamdi, about whom I knew nothing until this afternoon.

Anything is Possible

I have posted here several times on William Kentridge and his work. Tomorrow night my visit with August will be over and I will be driving up I-5 from Ashland to Portland when this film is aired. So I will miss it, however not nearly as much as I will miss August. Pretty obvious, I hope. But spending time with my boy like I have this week convinces me that while the title of the film may not be literally true, it pushes us in the right direction - in politics, in art, and in life. That is something I plan to remind August of as he gets bigger.

"Promiscuously Putting Things Together" ~ A Conversation with William Kentridge

I stumbled across this interview with William Kentridge at The Financial Times and thought I would point out a couple of the interesting bits. The first is about seeing as an activity.

“A lot of my recent work is to do with seeing as an activity, rather than a passive reception of the world . . . What clues do you need to make sense of something? Things come together and there is an instant when you recognise, oh yes, a rider on a horse. It’s about acknowledging and celebrating that double nature of seeing, the impurity of seeing: I know that it’s pieces of wire and black paper but I can’t stop myself seeing a face.

An abstract painter might insist their work is just paint but I am saying that’s a complete distortion of what it is to be human. It’s not a mistake to see a shape in the cloud. That’s what it is to be alive with your eyes open: to be constantly, promiscuously putting things together, getting shapes to have a coherence. It’s a kind of act of aggression against the self to try to stop that. A sort of Zen purity. I am so against that!”

From a philosophical point of view this claim deflates criticisms of what has been called the spectator theory of knowledge not by rehabilitating a naive view of disengaged viewing but by insisting that spectatorship itself necessarily is an activity.

Then, speaking of the artistic avant-garde in Russia of the 1920s and 1930s, Kentridge draws an analogy to himself and other post-apartheid South African artists.

“For me, the question was: what was the relationship between that energy and inventiveness and the belief in politics by the artist? There was something about the belief in the possibilities of revolution that was part of the energy inside their work.”

“How do you keep a sense of utopian optimism, but at the same time understand the disastrous history of utopias? I don’t pretend to have an answer, but that is the space in which you work.”

A well-stated question and the pretty much the only right answer.

David Goldblatt in NYC

"Goldblatt, who never really considered himself a photojournalist, divides his work into two categories: the professional and the personal. The professional was what he did on assignment for some editor or corporation. . . . The personal was what he did out of his own deeply felt need to engage his tumultuous land and its people. It’s an engagement that went far beyond racial conflict and oppression without ever becoming distanced from those unavoidable realities. His way was always to go deeper, to find an oblique angle that went right to the heart of the matter: an image bespeaking loneliness, stunted aspiration, fragile pride on both sides of the racial divide, not infrequently with an intimation of imminent violence, or its result." ~ Joseph Lelyveld

Mofolo South, Soweto, September 1972.
Photograph © David Goldblatt.

I've mentioned South African photographer David Goldblatt here a number of times. Yet another exhibition of his work is running in NYC this summer. You can find an appreciation and slide show here at the NYRB blog. (The Goldblatt show is running in Tandem with an exhibition of films by fellow South African William Kentridge.)

William Kentridge (2)

" I. The Dead

A heap of forensic photographs, almost impossible to look through. A man half tumbled out of bed, pyjamas pock-marked with bullet holes, blood on the floor below. A close-up of a man's head in a pool of blood, one cheek swollen - his jaw shattered. Someone - Man? Woman? - under newspapers, one hand sticking out. As specific photographs, it was extremely difficult to look at any of them. In the act of drawing from these images, the photos change. It is not simply that they become a series of greys, and tonal gradations and contours; but rather, the horror of their origin is put on hold."

~ William Kentridge, (2006). From
"Two Thoughts on Drawing Beauty."

Sontag, among many others, worries about photographic depictions of human pain and suffering. In particular, such critics worry about what happens when such depictions project what has been called "beautiful suffering." How does the move from photographic depiction to drawings change things? Why are our assessments different? Is the horror, as Kentridge suggests, really "put on hold"? If so, how?

William Kentridge

"I have been unable to escape Johannesburg. The four houses I have lived in, my school, studio, have all been within three kilometers of each other. And in the end all my work is rooted in this rather desperate provincial city. I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and films are certainly spawned by and feed off the brutalized society left in its wake. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures, and uncertain endings; an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay”
~ William Kentridge

Untitled (chairs) [2003, Photogravure with drypoint] © William Kentridge

Not too long ago I posted this rather pejorative assessment of the major art institutions, and especially the Memorial Art Gallery, here in Rochester. Well Marjorie Searl, who is the Chief Curator at the MAG emailed me with an invitation to have coffee, which we did - joined by Jess Marten, who works for Margie as Assistant Curator. Who thought anyone actually read this blog! And who thought anyone at the MAG in particular would not only notice but respond so graciously? Well, we had what I thought was a terrific conversation and have been exchanging irregular emails since.

Zeno at 4am ( 9 prints on one sheet )
[2001, Etching and sugarlift]
© William Kentridge

Yesterday Margie sent me this link to work by South African artist William Kentridge from which I borrowed (and corrected and expanded) the comment at the start of this post. There Kentridge both notes how his art is grounded locally and offers what I take to be an extremely articulate characterization of how art and politics intersect. The latter is germane to my concerns on this blog generally, but to recent discussions of art and politics in particular. I am totally unfamiliar with Kentridge's work which appears to straddle the line between drawing and projection and printmaking and film in really quite remarkable ways. So now I have to find out some more about Kentridge. Thanks Margie!