ART-PRESENTATION: William Kentridge-Let Us Try for Once
William Kentridge’s work crosses a diverse range of artistic media such as drawing, performance, film, printmaking, sculpture, painting. Kentridge has also directed a number of operas and theatrical productions. In his work William Kentridge explores time, the history of colonialism, and the aspirations and failures of revolutionary politics. His practice addresses the nature of human emotions and memory, as well as the relationship between desire, ethics, and responsibility.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery
William Kentridge in his solo exhibition “Let Us Try for Once”, at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, presents a new film, drawings and sculpture related to three major performance projects from the past two years. These include the epic theatrical tour “The Head & the Load”, the production of Alban Berg’s opera “Wozzeck” and “Ursonate” a performance of Kurt Schwitters’ 1932 sound poem of the same title, presented at Performa Biennial New York, in 2017. “KABOOM!” (2018) that inaugurates the exhibition is a three-channel work projected onto a model scaled to the stage of “The Head & the Load”, alongside charcoal drawings used in the production. Birds, soldiers, historical figures, waterfalls, and landscapes recreate an imaginative topography. It can be difficult to comprehend how easily Africa has been erased from world history. One powerful example is its involvement in World War I, which has been virtually forgotten, despite the fact that an estimated 2 million Africans were pulled into the conflict as soldiers, workers, and personnel both in Europe and in Africa, according to historians. Unlike the fighting in Europe, which mainly took place in trenches, the war in Africa took place over long stretches of land. The lack of roads and railroads, combined with the fact that most horses fell victim to the Tsetse fly, prompted German, French, and British forces to use African porters (four to every soldier) to carry supplies and machinery parts. “The Head & the Load” tells the story of the nearly 2 million African porters and carriers used by the British, French and Germans during the World War I in Africa through music, dance, film projections, mechanised sculptures and shadow-play. Invoking war and history itself as a subject, the charcoal drawings for projection provide a backdrop to Kentridge’s signature trope of procession, a pageant of “what we’ve chosen not to remember”: porters bearing the physical load that was carried all across Africa, but also the historical legacy and paradoxes of colonialism, magnified by the war. Kentridge arrived at a project about war as a result of having finished a production of Alban Berg’s opera “Wozzeck” in 2017, at the Salzburg Festival. The charcoal drawings used in the design of “Wozzeck”, a bridge to subsequent projects–are on view in the North Gallery Viewing room and continue into the South Gallery. Re-inscribing a world historically transformed by conflict, these grainy charcoal drawings echo the music, but also the world they are depicting, of things transforming, of sounds under the earth”, and are drawn from documentary photographs of the ravaged First World War battlefields of Flanders. The composer Alban Berg brought his own experience of the Front to Wozzeck, written between 1914-22 and based on Georg Büchner’s 19th Century play “Woyzeck”. Additionally, several years prior, in 1992, Kentridge had adapted the drama as Woyzeck on the Highveld in a collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Theater Company of Johannesburg. In the Third Floor Project Space are drawings comprised of bold grids of color, text, truncated syllables, and figures and objects. A film diptych, “Ursonate” (2018-19) relates to Kentridge’s performance of Kurt Schwitters’ 1932 sound poem “Ursonate” at the Performa Biennial in the Harlem Parish Church, New York in 2017. Reiterating the idea of history as a strange relationship of written words to the world, Kentridge’s invocation of the Dadaist legacy of illogic and absurdity are brought to light in this performance. Also Kentridge brings the viewer full circle with “Lexicon” a group of individual bronze sculptures which populate the exhibition, and are accompanied by “Paragraph II”. Based on a catalogue of forms both ancient and modern, from art history and from his own encyclopedic concordance of images, they range from relics of “The Head & the Load” to ubiquitous characters from a panoply of films. From carrier pigeon, pre-radar listening device, gas mask, war horse, and tank, to a cat, reclining nude, flowers, a fan, and Durer’s rhino, Kentridge proposes a universal archive of possible ideas. His interest is in the spaces of ambiguity, of provisionality, the possibility that a landscape of objects can be a rebus waiting to be read, images to be arranged and interpreted in different ways.
Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, New York, Duration: 1/3-20/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.mariangoodman.com
