William
Kentridge: Films and Prints, 1989-99
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College,
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., 777-7790.
Closes Dec. 31.
South African artist William Kentridge deftly mixes the political
with the poetic. He is best known for his short animated films,
seven of which are on display at Reed College, though his
prints are also included in this show. Like some poetry, the
films are cyclical and metaphorical, non-linear narratives
that contain both the specific and the oblique.
The films revolve around the fictional character Soho Eckstein,
a cigar-smoking industrialist dressed in a pinstripe suit.
But Soho seems to have no memory, no past whatsoever. He
is all present and progress--the easier for him to build
an unjust society. His antithesis, a mercurial figure who
stands in for the artist himself, is Felix Teitlebaum. Felix
is always naked, his sensitivity and vulnerability in sharp
contrast to Eckstein's swagger. In Johannesburg, Second
Greatest City after Paris, accompanying text introduces
Felix, "whose anxiety flooded half the house." To counter
the self-imposed amnesia of national reconciliation, Felix's
reflectiveness is like a binder that glues together the
country's memory of abuse. Felix seems to be a stand-in
for Kentridge, the artist-witness. The characters Felix
and Soho play themselves out against a grimy industrial
background that recalls Johannesburg's poorest districts.
The films are based on charcoal drawings that Kentridge
calls his "drawings for projection." Unlike cell animation,
in which hundreds of individual cells make up the action,
Kentridge literally erases or adds onto the drawings. We
are essentially watching the creation of a drawing. Since
charcoal never erases cleanly, the ghosts of previous images
remain. This is an apt metaphor for South Africa's predicament:
Erasure is never complete. In Felix in Exile, one
image changes into another. Newspaper flies about covering
the dead; the lines left by the sheets of paper look like
phantom birds fluttering across the screen. The films' soundtracks
are spare, usually a string quartet or solo voice singing.
Slight sound effects, like water pouring or paper crinkling,
are used to enhance the shifting images.
Kentridge is dealing specifically with the politics of
South Africa, but the work takes on a universal human resonance.
Unlike the artist Sue Coe, whose political paintings can
be didactic, Kentridge lets a rounded human story emerge.
Even Soho Eckstein is somewhat sympathetic in History
of the Main Complaint, made in 1996, after the end of
apartheid. As he lies in a hospital bed, surrounded
by a cadre of doctors dressed just like him, his seemingly
forgotten past intrudes upon him. In one scene Soho is trying
to "disremember" a black man who is being bludgeoned to
death by three other men while he drives past. Each strike
of a club is represented by a red X on an x-ray of Eckstein's
body. His pain merges with that of the formerly oppressed.
It is Felix, though, who is the humanist soul inhabiting
the work. In his slouching nudity and his longing, Felix
embodies the vulnerability and hope of everyday experience.
His desire for Soho's wife appears in the Johannesburg
film as a dream in which a fish swims first in his
hand as it fills with water, then, as the water becomes
a deluge, to a waiting Mrs. Eckstein. In the same film,
Felix and Eckstein wrestle like giants in the industrial
wasteland as a line of black marchers files up the hill.
Kentridge's drawing style recalls that of German Expressionists
like Kathe Kollwitz and George Grosz. Like Kollwitz's refugees,
their specificity is transcended by a wider human suffering.
They are stand-ins for all the dispossessed. Likewise, the
procession of marching workers that appears in several of
Kentridge's films are not just South Africa's, but all the
downtrodden that must eventually rise up.
Throughout the films, equilibrium wrestles with imbalance
as images morph and merge. In Weighing...and Wanting,
Eckstein finds a rock that mutates into a boulder that
embeds shards of Eckstein's broken relationship with his
wife. The landscape shivers with Eckstein's psychological
dismemberment. In Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old,
the buildings created by Eckstein dissolve in the water
created by the consummated love of Felix and Mrs. Eckstein.
The personal markers of Kentridge's life entangle themselves
with the larger strains of South African history and shake
the very ground that supports them. It is this entanglement
that invests the films with such poignancy and immediacy.
The gallery also displays some of Kentridge's prints that
complement the films. The nude Felix is one of Kentridge's
leitmotifs. In the etching Man with Megaphone, a
nude wearing a hat stands in front of a huge megaphone.
A blue line drawn down the middle of the picture separates
man and megaphone. The picture is an allegory of the artist
striving to communicate with the world via the imprecise,
one-way medium of visual art. Throughout all of Kentridge's
films and prints, a stubborn resistance is evident. It is
the bullheaded human spirit resisting forgetfulness, refusing
to be beaten or molded neatly. The artist stands witness
to this, imploring us through his megaphone not to forget.
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Willamette Week | originally
published November 23,
1999
|
