William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera 0996215603, 9780996215602

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This electronic version of the hard-copy of this book is produced by Shevon Silva.

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~-~Qii&lTiJWS flying through the din of the pots and ~~lies and private histories.

CONTENTS 25 William in Exile: Thoughts on Failed Utopias Andrew Solomon 81

Peripheral Thinking William Kentridge

155 Notes on "Notes Towards a Model Opera" Philip Tinari 209 Kentridge and Chinese Literati Painting Alfreda M urck 229 Works in the Exhibition 261 Biography 262 Acknowledgments 265 Contributors

Andrew Solomon

WILLIAM IN EXILE: THOUGHTS ON FAILED UTOPIAS

I ends in brutality; doubt is the precondition of humanism. inhabits this conundrum; he has a strong ethical ~. ...~,p.:wy ..... ,. , from persuasion. The inherent danger of work's only surety. He is secure in his lii;ll1mels the patron saint of ambigu~~~~:Qr..f}ljlQue of doamat1lsm.

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OOEl OPERA Johannesburg. 2 0 14

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al o the la e ollar f tl1 inlarlfa. '"I I~at is tl • natur of Jllf seeing nd of our b lief."'i vVhat males I'"entridge's sl igt t I' han J camp !ling is that it is unabashedly a sleight of hand. The f' Ila y of art, in his view, is to take everything away from the tree xcept the tree itself; the triumph, to invite every association, because when we s e only the tree, we see nothing at all. We are bound to construct logic out of the fragments we are given, and the visibility of Kentridge's evolution illuminates the. viewer's progression towards intelligibility. "How we apprehend art is a model of how we apprehend the world," he told me." Demonstrating the process is part of the argument. I will show you how this is done, and it will still work That's not the willing suspension of disbelief; it's unwilling suspension. You will never stop trying to make coherence of the world coming towards you." Kentridge's predilection for the domestic, the personal, and the internal is balanced in his work by an equal preoccupation with the political, the social, and the universal. It is often unclear in a given drawing or sequence whether we are seeing an inner world or an outer one, since neither can be relied on for narrative coherence. "The activities of the studio, which sometimes seem so uncertain, can be a way of understanding the fragility outside the studio," he explained to me. He seduces his viewers with scraps oflucidity; it is hard to tear yourself away from one of his films even if you can't decipher the meaning of its successive images. He labors to malN

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m 1 n1 b U1 h rn( n ideals 'n turn so vigorous that it becomes I m it •If. "But what ernains for mP is a caution about large certain-

n a ) hef in construe lve small-scale coherences," Kentridge has ntt n. "A belief in the provisionality of moments of meaning. It is not a ue tion of constructing points of resemblance or affinity, so much as being open to recognizing them after the event, and perhaps integrating them." 6 We have, he acl nowledges, an /(irrepressible human need of making sense of the world," 7 but he resists that imperative. He both represents and embodies a deliberate incoherence, making sense of the world by embracing its senselessness, but keeping the possibilities of meaning open. He does not provide order, but neither does he dismiss the chance that it exists. "I argue here for something that is neither individual psychology nor a universality, but something I would call a recognised particularity," he writes. 8 His process of discovery is often painful, but his actual discoveries are at least fleetingly satisfying. His imagery is always overdetermined, drawing on personal references, on other works of art, on politics, on words-on what it means to strive towards moral decisions in a relativistic world. The philosopher Karl Popper wrote, "Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve." 9 In reifying that treachery of perception, Kentridge secures his artistic authority.

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I first met Kentridge in London in rg88. His work appeared almost reactiOnary to me: realistic charcoal portraits and landscapes seemed hardly The drawings I viewed were mostly evocative but they neither portrayed the tears shed in reform They conjured the demoralizing nna,n detritus of racism, black and white, situ1.\lJrftf,fldlr.nlre. More from the perspective of ~taese semi--apocalyptic scenes embody

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the blealrness of the many on which relies the indulgence of the few. Yet his ability to sketch horror genially was already striking; a surprising generosity is hidden in these pictures. I visited South Africa for the first time in rgg2. Apartheid had been officially abolished the year before but was still in the last of its glory days, and the country seemed fe arful and uncertain about whether any peaceful system could be forged in the aftermath of five vicious decades. O ne of the wages of institutionalized violence is the dread that if it is relaxed, a reciprocal carnage will take its place. White-on-black, black-on-black, and black-on-white militarism all appeared to be escalating. Nelson Mandela would win the N obel Prize the following year, and his passage to secular beatification was well under way, but how his aspirations to peace would play out was anyone's guess. Kentridge countenanced the possibility that his home and way of life would soon vanish; his moral insistence on ambiguity met a pragmatic anxiety about an unknowable crucible in the sweep of history. He continued to draw impeccable dreamscapes of casual ferocity and raped land. This work reflected the legacy of racism, and of the exploitation of natural resources that gave rise to Johannesburg, a town that exists on the earth's surface thanks only to the gold that is nearly gone from underneath it. When I returned in 1993 to write about South African artists for the New York Times, I faced an impossible situation. By then I had cut my teeth describing how intellectuals stanch oppression, writing first about artists in late Soviet Russia and then about the emerging Chinese avantgarde. In those days, most Western critics did not acknowledge even the possibility that interesting new art could come from non-Western contexts. The standard argument was that such work either resembled work in the West, in which case it was derivative, or differed from it, in which case it was provincial. With some youthful bravado, I had set out to disrupt that parocblalism and had found ~at I could translate fluently between ':•Hn.· a~ietia and my own. Q2~CfViitt Russia or post-Maoist China, there were essentially two drde that accepted or celebrated the existing power

• • tcMmterrevolutionary underground whose members

ILLI MINEXILE:THOUGHTS ONFAILEDUT PIAS

mem·pted to redeem their own identities from a dehumanizing regime. In ~llltllAfrica, however, a good-guys-versus-bad-guys scenario could not b .l l"f-•Uift so readily The regime had not insisted on cultural propaganda, """-lri4·" and Chinese had, and no substantive body of pictures defend d ·-·...•~id status quo. The artists I met all aspired to a more just society, •II'Wa••work manifested a blend of outrage, anxiety, and hope as th leealtY lumbered towards its first free elections. Some of those artist ;.::••tldiCkand some were white. By law, they had been forbidd en to mix, st had done so regardless. Black artists were presumed to be ••evenifnaive;white artists, to be hypocritical even if sophisticated. Mt"'~1R artists such as William Kentridge, I was repeatedly advised, . . .l\pjlon the right positions but had not offered to die for justice. -~!ll'Jeftm to those artists themselves how much they would do from hegemony. ,..,.,..- had supposed that I was a party member, and for a R.ed Guard, but in] ohannesburg, I ,(Qllltlltct.Allowed to go where ~JIIID.Qcer.tce. I was not an

m a country of COQ.KJ.be carjacked ---be certain

ANDREW SOL f'viON

Video stills from MINE, I 991

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lo ta Ion-finds his coffeepot monument he builds turns ad of glorifying him; the ~~~ JlliUt 1Wtting, and loudspeakers. I the world, and black re Is no chance of DlaC:k people, but because the rw.~~e~~ Is b on a foundation WJkt Clwel the Jhaking of stories; CV.IN 'ill'lltlly labor-intensive; ~~~~~.A powerful ten~-mdthe

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r i el£ He constantly assembles and disas embl s imag s, making us utely aware that apparently complete works can be easily smudged into aa•LU'ow. The erasure makes us more conscious of the pictures we would :,. "ni•VP liked to sustain. The final drawing of any of these sequences may be t' xhibited, but the other high moments in the progression are gone ___ __ .,..Who is to say that we wouldn't have preferred the Mona Lisa Jl(JC)ketd a week before Leonardo finished it? At least we don't he painted out. In Felix in Exile (1994), landscapes and ......, .....__reconstituted, expunged and reconstituted. The · the humble bleed slowly to death, alone. The llrnve rhythm manifest even in the blood that ~;; Q!leh,J-:orpse~q~t:~a~d by sheets of

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Production still from WOYZECK ON THE HIGHVELD, 2008 Theater performance in Johannesburg with puppets, hve actors, and projection

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Ill Mamvartists dream of achievements beyond the realm ofth ir primL ry tal ut few are able to master multiple art forms. When painter p rform, n poets illustrate their own work, when composers write librettos, th 1'~~.\:_;~" Jest.tlts are often lackluster; most talent is singular, and love for anoth r ~,{~:.Jlrtec:Uwnofexpression is not to be confused with skill in it. Even filmmak r 1s\•rhn·direct stage plays stumble, and few great dancers show comparabl in choreography. Performance artists can nosedive when th y p rriil;8ome~thiln2 other than their own art, and architects who undertak often misapprehend theater's intimate scale. The ambition to -~t.tumtweJr-Jt. a total work of art that encompasses all media, p,·~.. talent is overshadowed by aspirational ones. ~~ll.$ ve'ntures have succeeded because they ..-1aA

set of skills. His theater and opera lelltalrutilng of how beauty infiltrates ~lllrea~etLs every native joy; of ofth porality of t[a!lOlQIIUB. W.hi·1eh

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Drewfn&s for IL RITORNO D'ULISSE, 1998

top Charcoal on paper, 55 x 66 cm m: Put 1on black papel 85 x 415 cm

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n"ta' r1 1 '- lie I it I r dr 11 c w 'uld be ridiculous, but in a t [ 1 wn I ' 1 wodd, ~ 1 c: rti· t C< tn defin e a lec t Ire he has written or an ~ 1 h h I tgn da hi"laJt. A children seel'" limi tsagainstwhichthey r pu h I nt tdg k r pite from his 1 elentless imagination in the k )f h r p opl , whi h 1 ce hi s vision to shift. Operas provide an x 1 I( t n f 1 his insights. An opera production is no.t a diversion from h1 "owr "worl, but, rather, another path into it. H ls work in th e genre has g n r t d film , lectures, drawings; those components are inco rp orated 1nto the op ras. It is an elegant reciprocity. Nor does Kentridge's wo rk on op ~rJ compete with the content provided by librettists and composers; rath r, it subsumes their vision. His approach is both radical and scholarly. In his second major opera production, Mozart's Die Zauberflote The Magic Flute~ 2005), he engaged with the ultimate fallacies of the Age of Re son, noting how very exciting it is to impose order on the moral or natural worlds, and how soon that order collapses. Mozart's music is an aural apotheosis of equilibrium in which Kentridge delights; his animations ffectionately call to mind the tools of navigation, astronomy, and mathematics that were being developed and refined around the time of the opera's premiere in 1791. Having foresworn his own sense of coherence, Kentridge enjoys borrowing someone else's, but the arrangement is temporary; he holds at bay Mozart's confident assertion of the possibility of divine symmetries. Kentridge is appalled by Sarastro's benevolent tyranny, but he is not immune to its seductions. Pamina's kidnapping into light is pertinent to the current vogue for "bringing democracy" to societies that have sho\vn no active inclination towards it; Sarastro shares modern leaders' failure to grasp that forced liberalism is an oyxmoron. Such quandaries dance around Kentridge's Magic Flute, lending it a surprising modernity-not through updated sets and costumes, but through a hard-won, twenty-first-century skepticism. The Maoic Flute epitomizes orderliness; The Nose (2010) is exactly its opposite. Shostakovich's score is not easy, an exercise in high drama interJaced with alanning explosions of sound. Fortunately, Kentridge's affection for disharmony dovetails with the avant-garde; he extracts the delicacy coiled :'