A video still from Notes Towards a Model Opera by William Kentridge
(Picture: Courtesy of the artist)It’s a mark of the relentless productivity of the South African artist William Kentridge that this vast show misses out works that I think of as his masterpieces. Yet it doesn’t suffer for it.
It’s a retrospective of sorts, in that we follow Kentridge from his early, snarling and visceral charcoal and pastel drawings of the apartheid era in the 1980s through his animation of those drawings on film and into the extraordinary diversity of forms of expression of recent years – video installation, performance, opera and music, shadow-play and puppetry, sometimes all at once. But such is the depth of his work and the consistency of his language that he’s able to call on pieces mostly unseen in London, or certainly not seen here for a long time, and the show remains testament to a genuinely unique, coruscating and consistently surprising vision.
As with all Kentridge shows, it teems with imagery and ideas from the start. Those 1980s charcoal drawings are arguably the simplest things here in that they’re made in a single medium, but they’re loaded with complexity in symbolism and mood. Prowling hyenas, for instance, evoke the brutality of apartheid’s enforcers. But it’s crucial to know that Kentridge’s art is as elusive as it is allusive: to find precise meanings here is not the point and would probably drive you mad. And Kentridge is a great absurdist; hence the hyena on roller-skates in one of the drawings.
It is, I think, crucial to know about Kentridge’s distinguished family. Now 67, he was born in Johannesburg to two lawyers and great opponents of apartheid, Sydney Kentridge and Felicia Geffen. Felicia co-founded the Legal Resources Centre, which attempted to provide judicial fairness for Black South Africans. Sydney defended Nelson Mandela in his 1956 treason trial, as well as Desmond Tutu and the family of Steve Biko, who died due to police brutality in Johannesburg in 1977.
By all accounts William, who studied political science and African studies as well as art, was well suited to lawyerly debate, and was a committed student activist in the 1970s. But ultimately he chose instead to interrogate ideas through art. He’s one of the most erudite of all contemporary artists. One feels him taking on ideas from politics, philosophy, literature and, of course, art—some overtly referenced, others glimpsed or overheard—and toying with them, figuring out where they sit in his world and how he can respond to them.
In his breakthrough works, short animated films that Kentridge calls Drawings for Projection, you see this discursive process at work. Five of the 11 films in this series are here, from the first, made in 1989, to the most recent, from 2020. Based in Johannesburg, and freighted with evocations of South Africa’s past and present, they have a loose connecting narrative relating to a property tycoon called Soho Eckstein, but are shot-through with autobiography in the form of Soho’s alter-ego Felix Teitelbaum, who physically resembles Kentridge.
Accompanied by stirring music and sound, they’re mesmerising. Kentridge begins with a charcoal drawing and then painstaking adds to and removes from it, capturing each change on a frame of film. In the process, imagery bursts into view, fades to a ghostly trace, and often reappears. Marvellous things happen through this process: waves on a beach in Tide Table (2003) repeatedly wipe the paper clean; as Kentridge fills his image with the black charcoal in City Deep (2020), it becomes a tunnel in a mine; in the same film, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, which Kentridge pictures Felix/himself walking around, looking at the art, falls apart and dissolves into charcoal smudge. Making and meaning are one.
We’re always conscious of Kentridge’s hand, his presence. To accompany another early film, Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), he has drawn imagery from it, including symbols that recur in his work like a loudhailer, a film camera and a rhino, directly on the walls surrounding the projection. There are a couple of his Drawing Lessons, too: short videos where Kentridge appears in dialogue with himself as he works and thinks, questioning what it is to be an artist, acknowledging the absurdity of the creative act.
But the work needs this sense of Kentridge’s physical involvement: a series of beautiful tapestries, the most recent works in the show, are admirable feats of craft, and striking in their imagery, but curiously lacking in the energy and dynamism of everything else here, including one of the collages on which the tapestries are based.
Given the intensity of Kentridge’s practice, the exhibition is necessarily well paced. None of the films is too long – the lengthiest, at 22 minutes, is Black Box/Chambre Noire, a moving mechanised miniature theatre puppet show and video piece exploring the Namibian genocide of the early 20th century. Installations in darkened spaces are broken up with light rooms filled with drawings, sketches and sculptures.
Kentridge has become increasingly ambitious with his works on paper in recent years. Vast flowers are painted in ink on sheets torn from encyclopaedias and dictionaries, evocative of both Chinese painting and of Edouart Manet’s floral still lifes – Kentridge paints a photo of Manet beneath one of the vases. A series of trees in Indian ink, again towering in scale, are even closer to Asian techniques, made with Chinese brushes, and elegantly notational. But they sit in a landscape that recalls the environment in those early Johannesburg drawings and animations. Kentridge seems always to root his work in autobiography.
The trees are accompanied by pithy texts, from plaintive to obscure, relating to what Kentridge calls his ‘Rubrics’, notes made from poems and proverbs that are shown as standalone slogans elsewhere. These appear with devastating power in the final room, in the multimedia installation Sibyl, made to accompany a chamber opera Kentridge developed in Rome in 2019. The title relates to the Cumean Sibyl, the figure at the entrance to the Underworld in Virgil’s The Aeneid, who wrote the fates of those entering the cave on oak leaves that were then blown and dispersed by the wind, ensuring that fate remained a tantalising mystery.
In the opera, Kentridge loosely transposed that story to 20th-century South Africa, but here, to me, it brought it slap bang into the present, and our own uncertain fate amid the climate emergency. Images of trees and the oak leaves and Kentridge’s beautiful drawings of dancing figures and faces – some from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel sybils – flash before us on the pages of books.
The poetic snippets veer from ominous to comforting – “Start dying/assiduously/wisely/optimistically/Waste no time”; “But Joy will overtake Fear/No protection but each others’ limbs”. And all this is accompanied by the astonishingly beautiful song of Nhlanhla Mahlangu. It is a solemn and stunning end to a dazzling, endlessly stimulating show.
Royal Academy, from Saturdya until 11 Dec; royalacademy.org.uk
