William Kentridge
Scribble, smudge, repeat: the passage of time and the emergence and dissipation of information conveys the difficult work of experiencing coherence and retaining memory.
Two art exhibitions in New York should be seen multiple times. Each will deepen your appreciation of a great artist. Neither is mobbed with visitors. Each, in this wildly overpriced city, is absolutely free.
The nine-part film series focuses on the artist in his studio in Johannesburg. We see William Kentridge as he draws, paints, designs, paces the floor, and thinks out loud — among other things.
Michael Gordon’s score for The Unchanging Sea works better as soundtrack than a concert work; Harmonia mundi releases a DVD of William Kentridge’s powerful staging of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.
Both of these exhibitions challenge our very notions of time and identity and the social structures around us.
Over the past 6 weeks William Kentridge has shown the form of the lecture itself to be obsolete. But over the course of his returns to the podium, he has shown us that the lecture’s fate is not so dire as he had induced us —- for seventy minutes at a stretch -— to believe.
Mistranslation weaves through this lecture, for every translation is a mistranslation. But that is what makes them fruitful. As soon as we mis-hear or fail to understand, the brain constructs an instant bit of narrative to bridge the gap in understanding.
William Kentridge spoke of the value of using a mirror to re-learn what he already knew how to do; the clear implication was that we are daily surrounded by mirror-images that we do not see for themselves but that hold the potential to alter our relationships to our tools and to our visions.
The decisions William Kentridge makes in his minute to-ings and fro-ings are akin to the decisions a poet makes as she works her measure over and over again.
For William Kentridge history accrues, falls dead, is born, washes up, piles up, and may be artfully arranged, but the most powerful place that this accretion might happen is in the artist’s studio, which is a metonym for the human mind.
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