Getting behind William Kentridge’s largest retrospective exhibition “Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work” at the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town.

South African artist, William Kentridge has been hosted by the most prestigious cultural and academic institutions in the world – including the Museum of Modern Art New York, Tate Modern, Louvre, Metropolitan Opera, Rome Opera, and even Harvard University where he was in residence and guest lecturer. A multi-disciplinary artist, cultural commentator and intellectual, Kentridge has been awarded the Carnegie prize, an Honorary Doctorate, and Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, among the pages of accolades. Kentridge is currently exhibiting in Australia and Basel, preparing for two operas - to debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma this year.

In August 2019 Kentridge returned to South Africa to mount his largest retrospective exhibition ever on show in Cape Town -  which, according to the artist, only covers 5-10% of his output. The exhibition continues to March 2020.

Kathryn Berman takes us through the teaming exhibition and the history that produced it.

South Africa had to wait for four decades to experience the largest retrospective exhibition of our most globally acclaimed living artist, William Kentridge, on home turf. And it comes in twos: The primary exhibition at the Zeitz MOCAA Museum of Contemporary African Art, in the Cape Waterfront, extends over three of the seven floors of Sir Thomas Heatherwick’s spectacularly converted grain silos, and takes in the full sweep of Kentridge’s prolific career, from the start of his professional career in the 1980s, up to his most current operas, installations, tapestries, films, performances and drawings. The year-old Norval Foundation in the Steenberg winelands focuses solely on his sculptural output and includes a new collection of mammoth bronzes. While Kentridge and curators have thematically focused on art as process and Kentridge as maker, this document looks to providing context to his work – steeped as it is in history, politics, literature, theatre and art history.

Starting on the third floor of the Zeitz MOCAA, the chronologically, and thematically, curated multimedia exhibition runs from Rooms 1 to 11 and begins at the time when Kentridge first came to prominence as a visual artist. It was midway through the ‘80s. And South Africa was burning. The first State of Emergency was declared on 20 July 1985, and the second imposed in June 1988. As weekdays rolled out in teargas-choking hazes, and stocatto-deafening gunshots, and weekends echoed with the dirge of mass funerals in the sealed-off townships, the theatres and galleries in the cities became the gathering halls for artists, activists and humanitarians.

It was at this time that Kentridge’s seminal works roared into the spotlight, in protest against the chaotic, censored battlefields that defined the South African socio-political and cultural landscape

Kentridge’s award-winning triptych for the South African Triennial “The Conservationist’s Ball” (on loan to an exhibition in Basel, but which shares the same context as “Luncheon of the Boating Party”, 1985, on the Zeitz MOCAA exhibition), was a searing, dark satire borrowing from the German Expressionists - Otto Dix, George Grosz: The pale bloated Belle du Monde greedily filling their bellies at a teeming banquet while, all around them, the post-apocalyptic landscape was exploding: The barren Highveld landscape; the hyenas feasting off the decaying city carcasses; the detritus of both colonial and Apartheid excess. It was, at that time, a brave choice as award-winner, for an exhibition sponsored by the the Rembrandt Foundation, funded by the headline family of establishment South Africa,  

Other works from that period, on display in Room 1, include the triptych Art in a State of Grace, Hope and Siege; and the deeply ironic  “Casspirs Full of Love”, 1989, the title of which was borrowed by Kentridge from a sign-off in a letter read on the radio programme, Forces Favourites broadcast weekly to “our boys on the border” of then South West Africa, now Namibia. The work was created at the height of the second State of Emergency, when those ubiquitous “mellow yellows” - military vehicles filled with young white servicemen - were dispatched into the fortressed townships to enforce ‘law and order’ for the regime. The stark, longitudinal, claustrophobic, monochromatic charcoal work depicted disembodied heads, crammed into air-tight vehicles propelling forward to deliver domestic warfare.

No stranger to politics, William Kentridge, was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, and is the son of South Africa’s famed political lawyer, Sir Sydney Kentridge, QC and Felicia Kentridge, also a lawyer and prominent anti-apartheid activist. His grandfather, Morris, a Jewish immigrant, had served as a Member of Parliament in the mid-twentieth Century – but notably was a member of the Labour Party representing Johannesburg from 1920 to 1958. He was a champion of the workers during the 1922 miner’s strike and spent time in detention as a result. So Witwatersrand, mines and worker rights were part of Kentridge’s everyday domestic reality growing up.

Kentridge graduated in Politics and African studies in Johannesburg in 1973, and completed a Diploma in fine art at the Art Foundation. Established by artist and activist Bill Ainsley, the foundation served as a haven for both black and white artists - David Koloane, Helen Sibidi, Sam Nhlengethwa -at a time when black artists were forbidden to work with white artists, or exhibit in, “white” areas.

Kentridge went on to study theatre and mime at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in 1982. On his return, he began to dabble in both theatre and art, with the Junction Avenue Theatre Company. A theatre company nestled in an aging Victorian mansion, on the Parktown ridge, where the first mining Randlords made their sumptuous homes away from the dusty mining camps, it served as home, and refuge, for a multi-racial company that lived and worked together in contravention of Apartheid laws.

Junction Avenue practiced and espoused the revolutionary ideologies and aesthetics of the Russian Constructivists, German Expressionists, Bertolt Brecht, and others, and many of their works were staged at the burgeoning Market Theatre then.  

Kentridge moved smoothly between theatre and fine art, puppetry and performing, and his iconic poster-making - on metres-long brown paper sheets (Silkscreens on the exhibition: “Art in a State of Grace, Hope and Siege”, 1988). It was at that time, that Kentridge began to experiment with altering his charcoal images, frame by frame, into his uniquely-honed animated films, which continue to be edited by Catherine Myburgh. The series of animated films, 9 Drawings for Projection, has been shown across the world and is on view on the ground floor of the Zeitz MOCAA.

Intimate, social, and brutally funny, the series of animated films initially starred the fictitious duo the Mining magnates, Soho Eckstein, and his alter ego, Felix Teitlebaum, inflated and importantly counting their riches, while anonymous miners work ceaselessly in the earth below creating their wealth. By this time, Kentridge was living in down-town Doornfontein, where the sounds and sights of the city - workers warming themselves on metal braziers in winter - provided inspiration for these early films, and theatre tableaux, which continue to this day. The magnificently constructed soundtracks, composed by long-time collaborator, Philip Miller, were punctuated with the operatic cries of a disposable working class, whose daily lives provided a choral backdrop to their daily work. Where Athold Fugard’s Boesman of Boesman and Lena instructs Lena to “put your life on your head and walk” Kentridge’s Brechtian Jo’burg proletariat trudge resignedly onwards with the burden of their lives – their life possessions and demarcation of station – atop their heads, in an infinite circular march to and from work, into and out of the city. And life.

But it is not only Johannesburg’s day labourers, who gather to return home to their homes on the outskirts of the city – Soweto, Katlehong, Sebokeng, Orange Farm - who are his subject. The proletariat procession is a recurring refrain. And crosses territories and histories.

In his recent opera The Head and the Load (2018) which celebrates an overlooked army in history - the fallen black heroes of World War 1 (the sherpas / carriers of provisions for the “real soldiers”) the procession continues.  Over 1 million Africans died in the “war to end all wars”. The original maquette for the final 55m long stage piece for 40 performers, is reconstructed here as a video installation, KABOOM! with music by Philip Miller. A triptych of drawings alongside the installation, which forms the base for the final images for the moving tableau. Here lie fallen heroes - their corpses disembodied and reminiscent of the Casspirs full of Love. The Head and the Load (2018) was first performed at the Tate Modern in London in July 2018, and continued to the Armory Show in New York in December 2018, and MassMOCAA and Holland Festival this year.

It is with Il Sole 24 Ore and What will Come (has already come) (2007) that Kentridge creates what, for this viewer, has always been one of the most sublime commentaries on politics and war - and the devastation suffered by ordinary people. An utterly exquisite mirrored table-top projection which holds the viewer enrapt in the sheer beauty of design, forms a visual roundabout for an horrific, animated film on the devastation of colonial wars on the East African people. Using Eritrean folk songs countered by the politesse of Shostakovich, it is devastating, and places the viewer in the playground of gross war – the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy in1935 – where 275 000 Ethiopians lost their lives. But it could be 2015. And it could be Syria. Or 2019 Yemen.

Kentridge’s relentless gaze turns to another contemporary Colonialism - Chinese African colonialism. The colonialism of extraction, imposition and excision of indigenous culture: Two portraits of Chairman and Mrs. Mao exquisitely rendered on his trademark “found” literary paper  - this time with Chinese script - accompany a massive three-screen video installation, Notes Towards a Model Opera (2011) Chinese agit-prop images and anthems inter-cut with contemporary dancer, Dado Masilo dancing with a red flag - on pointe.

The 2015 installation for the Istanbul Bienniale, O Sentimental Machine is reconstructed specially for this exhibition, and exploits Kentridge’s fascination with mechanical sound machines. Parody and wit abound in a Surreal and Dada-esque installation depicting Trostky and his devoted secretary. Based on a real incident when Leon Trostky, in exile had moved to an island outside of Istanbul, Kentridge reconstructed the Hotel Splendid where Trotsky stayed. The “Sentimental Machine” is Kentridge’s recurring symbol for autocratic persecution - the megaphone - a synecdoche for power. The self-animated object is repeated regularly not only here, but in the sculpture exhibition where mechanical sculptures come to life in a Constructivist cacophony.

But it is in the comfort of a re-constructed print studio on the first floor, (the third floor hosts a staged studio and library) the last themed installation, that Kentridge’s punch to the solar plexus lands. Commissioned to do a 550 m frieze Triumphs and Laments, on the banks of the Tiber in Rome, in 2016, Kentridge scanned the centuries of Italian history. From Garibaldi onwards. While Kentridge could so easily be tempted by Fascist history as one of flamboyant artifice, power and hypocrisy, his gaze lands squarely on the little island of Lampedusa, the Southernmost tip of Italy. And contemporary hypocrisy.

That formerly idyllic holiday island which African migrants now treat as their entry point to a new life, becomes the placeholder for his procession. Images of boats, and refugees with their possessions on their heads, grace these walls. The exhibition guide-notes indicate that the commissioned frieze alongside the Tiber was etched into polluted layers on the walls (it also formed a backdrop to a spectacular live opening performance in 2016) and will disappear with time, covered over by “fresh” pollution. Thus, only the source etchings and art works will remain on, after the frieze is eroded by pollution.

And that is Kentridge’s primary message: Transience; Time; History; Transmutation. And the Cruelty of History and Power in the wrong hands. And, of course, the converse: The dignity of poverty and the ordinary person. A passing procession/parade. Present, but absent from historical narratives. And soon to be erased once more.

As the unsuspecting viewer looks up from the printer’s plates, which demonstrate the collaborative art-making process, an apparent dense doodle on the wall comes into focus. A two-dimensional flat steel cut-out sculpture morphs into an indelible image:  of the three-year-old Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body was washed up onto a Turkish beach in 2015. As the European MP, Dr. Pietro Bartolo, who claimed in a recent interview to have treated 300 000 migrants from Libya over 30 years, noted: “For thirty years, I've been coming here every night, waiting for all these people. I have seen so much suffering, so much horror, so many deaths on this pier... so many deaths…We are responsible for that. It is us who bring wars, it's us who provoke hunger, who provoke violence. We have the duty and the responsibility to help them."

There is no relief as the viewer heads into the final hall. More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), the mammoth multi-screen video installation, staged for the opening of the Zeitz MOCAA is now expanded to its original size. And engulf the viewer. With the iconic megaphones in hand, the procession of the walking dead passes before us, wheeling medical drips – history in the making (the Ebola epidemic at that time). Again, this work hearkens back to the 1980s – circularly evoking the infinite procession depicted in the films and theatre in the 1980s where Kentridge used the haunting melodies of African choral syncopation as political commentary. And on to the procession of the Great War, the marching dead, the lines of migrants. Endless echoes of repetitive Holocausts, a bleak recurring refrain: migration from and to political oppression.

The exhibition closes off with a hall filled with Stephens’ massive tapestries - woollen testimonies to Kentridge’s sweeping history, concluding with the most recent 2019 tapestry, “And when he returned”, depicting Kentridge’s migrant silhouettes against a polar map.

And indeed, Kentridge continues to return – everywhere, across the globe. The remainder of his schedule this year takes in a broad geographical – and artistic - sweep, with exhibitions running currently at the Basel Kunstmuseum, and the Art Gallery of Southern Australia; 10 Films for Projection are on show at the Eye Film Festival as part of the Holland Festival, where Kentridge was Associate Artist. Debuting in September at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma Teatro Costanzi is his most recent opera commission Waiting for the Sibyl. Closing off the year, for the Metropolitan Opera in New York is Kentridge’s production of Berg’s opera Wozzeck, which played at the Salzburg Festival in 2017.

Somewhere in between Kentridge returns home to his studio in Johannesburg, where he continues to conceive, draw and evolve his work with a collective of artists, many of whom have worked exclusively with him for three decades or more, in a space he has called, the Centre for the Less Good Idea, located in the gentrified art district, Maboneng, in downtown Johannesburg.

By way of post-script: It is indeed because of our dual reality that South Africa can produce an artist of such gravitas and prodigiousness, whose inspiration comes from our gross economic distortions, while simultaneously welcoming – through generous tax incentives – art philanthropists from across the globe to make both the Western Cape and Gauteng the home for some of the most significant museums, and art fairs on the cultural landscape today, and, thankfully, hosting on-shore the most substantial cultural statements in contemporary history.  

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