William Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time at the Met

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A recent acquisition by the Met, William Kentridge’s five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time is currently on display until late Spring. Like his work in general, I love it and highly recommend you go see it. It is drawing-based, as his work tends to be, intentionally rough to look handmade and refer to the process of making and artist himself. Kentridge makes an appearance as the artist, and orchestrator of this immersive video installation that harnesses both sound and movement to call on all your senses. While he does so, though, he locks you into the chairs screwed to the floor, so that your view is limited, and uses all the walls of the gallery so that it is physically impossible for the viewer to see it all. It becomes a manifestation of time and its refusal to be contained.

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There is a narrative, although despite having sat through it twice I couldn’t outline it for you. It involves, yes, time, but also colonization and South Africa, an implied romance, the proliferation of knowledge and the ambitions of man. Its crescendo and finale is an energetic march of silhouetted characters, who pump instruments, take showers, and dance to the inevitable and unstoppable march of time.

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Perhaps a solid criticism would be that Kentridge has matured into a recognizable style, with reoccurring motifs, and rather than innovate he uses his success to do more lavish versions of the same thing. A friend of mine argued that the essence of his work remains in the early drawings and films. Maybe that is true, but I think one reason people might distrust his work is because it is so enjoyable. There’s a sense that it can’t be “serious” or “good” art if the viewer can just lose themselves in the experience: that to do so is shallow. To my mind, that doesn’t do justify to a work that is slippery, unstable, philosophical, and complex even while it lulls you into pleasurable viewing.

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Process and Play: Alem Korkut

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In this temporary exhibition at the Split Art Gallery, the elements of process and play in Alem Korkut‘s work came to the forefront. The installation of slingshots, above, are at once reminiscent of childhood games and of walking through landmines. In addition to the playfulness on display, Korkut, currently living and working in Zagreb, also notably uses new media in his sculptural and installation artwork.

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I also enjoyed his merging of video and drawing, both in Birds and in Vibradrawings. In both, the end result is the product of traces of things, be they birds or chalkballs, and the course chartered is one of chance, not predetermined by the artist.

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His drawings also highlight process and sequence. Above, a series of photographs taken from a 360-degree point of view of a city square are mirrored by his chalk drawings below. The sheer number of images suggest a full, time-aware narration of the scene, almost like a film. The graphite sketches below also build on each other sequentially. In the first installation image, the drawings are in a linear row where each selects a landscape element to finally form a composite image. Beyond the row of them in the next gallery, you can see a large woodcut of the final composition of this artfully composed scene.

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Neon Strings

I enjoyed the blurred neon vision of this string installation at Chicago gallery Carrie Secrist’s Pulse booth space. Anne Lindberg created this site-specific installation for the fair.

The neon strings above are visually similar to the drawing below despite being in different mediums.

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