Music, Migration, & Revolution: William Kentridge at Marian Goodman Gallery

Installation view of More Sweetly Play the Dance

Installation view of More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Two film installations by William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance and Notes Toward a Model Opera, are currently on view at Marian Goodman Gallery and well worth a trek into midtown. Black-and-white animation drawn by hand and painstakingly constructed–so recognizable as the artist’s aesthetic–here gets a jolt of music, filmed actors, and, in the latter, color. The artist’s layered, complex approach to film here speaks to the broader sociopolitical contexts of migration and revolution.

Installation Detail, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Installation Detail, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Across a set of screens running the length of a room, disparate characters form a jangly, disconcerting procession in More Sweetly Play the Dance. Walking, dancing, limping, or strutting, these largely silhouetted forms brings a macabre energy to what resembles a funeral procession with the weird energy of a brass band propelling it. In addition to musicians, there are dancers in traditional African dress and people on medical drips. Kentridge’s trademark charcoal stop-motion animations form the backdrop for the silhouetted characters, who are like shadows on a forced march. The work functions not as a representation of a specific funeral as much as metaphor for the forces of migration. It feels apt to the current refugee crisis, and Kentridge, born in 1955 in Johannesburg to liberal Jewish parents who were active anti-apartheid attorneys, does not shy away from the sociopolitical. Indeed, meditations on subjects like apartheid in his native South Africa have appeared in his non-linear narratives with a beautiful obliqueness.

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Installation view, detail, Notes Toward a Model Opera, 2015

Notes Toward a Model Opera takes China’s cultural revolution as its subject matter, keying off of Madame Mao’s Eight Model Revolutionary Operas–what was allowed as popular entertainment in China during Mao’s reign. Kentridge reckons with the promise of this historical moment in China with a flurry of political slogans from the failed revolution, maps, and documentary photographs of deprivation against which figures proclaim, dance, or sing in the foreground. Images such as a bird drawn in charcoal flying across all three screens act as momentary pauses in this rush of imagery.

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Notes Toward a Model Opera implicates a contemporary South Africa and revolution writ large in addition to China’s cultural revolution through a multivalent set of signs. The same dancer from More Sweetly Play the Dance, the noted South African ballerina Dada Masilo, appears here with a rifle in pointe shoes, dancing in front of maps with China characters and slogans in English. Her costume suggests a military uniform and her gestures suggests combat as much as ballet. Text and image, English and Chinese, live dancer and documentary photo, merge in and out to a changing soundtrack. The great promises of the revolution are presented as a cacophony of paper fragments and chants. Instead of complete, as Madame Mao made her operas, Kentridge’s work remains open-ended–only “Notes”–as if acknowledging the impossibility of ever completing the utopian project of cultural revolution.

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The exhibition is on view at Marian Goodman gallery through February 20, 2016.

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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