The philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin was fond of asking questions at parties in order to baffle, amuse, and stimulate conversation. One of his questions was: “Who is the second greatest Portuguese poet of the twentieth-century?” I’m not sure whether there was the unanimity then as there is now as to who the greatest one is (Fernando Pessoa), but I take it that then as now most of us non-Portuguese have no opinion on the second greatest, even in the unusual case that one knows another modern Portuguese poet. To my mind the question “Who is the second greatest contemporary visual artist?” has no evident answer; but the answer as to who the greatest has the same force, though probably not the unanimity, of the Portuguese question. The South African drawing artist William Kentridge initially rose to international prominence with his small number of animated films made over a decade starting in the early 1990s (I give an account of these in the first chapter of Rapko (2014)). In the past two decades he has continued making films, mostly shorts featuring himself in the studio, as well as drawings, sculptures, installations, designing and producing productions of operas, and writing and directing theatrical productions. He does not paint, and his artistic world is black: black charcoal on smudged whites, with rare instances of patches of blue and red. His artistic sources are mostly explicit in his work, with images from Dziga Vertov and Tatlin, the style of Max Beckmann, and techniques of staging associated with Meyerhold and Brecht. One negative feature of his work, practically an oasis in the desert of contemporary art, is the freedom from the models of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, and the impoverishing ideologies and artistic mechanisms associated with them. So there is nothing hinting at the contemporary commonplace that what makes an artifact a work of art is some single decision or choice by the artist. Likewise nothing in Kentridge turns on the simple separation of the institution of art from other spheres of value or of everyday life, and so a fortiori there is nothing of the recent, yet tired, appeal to the alleged frisson of ‘questioning’ that separation.
One central part of the ideologies of contemporary art that Kentridge does fully embrace is the idea that there is a peculiar freedom in contemporary visual art to treat any material as a part or the whole of an artistic vehicle or medium. A dance, in however an expanded sense, will always center on corporeal movement; if a contemporary dance lacks movement, or lacks human bodies, those absences are marked as oppositions to the primordial convention of dance as structured movement. Similarly with music conceived as organized sound; John Cage’s silence is a limit case that throws unorganized sounds into the foreground. By contrast contemporary visual art treats anything, not just materials that afford encounters through visual perception, as a (potential) artistic vehicle. For visual art there is nothing analogous to the oppositions of corporeal movement and its contraries, or of organized sound and silence. The prototypical work of visual art is a static, bounded artifact, with actual works clustering around the two cores of marked surfaces (much of the world’s drawings and paintings) and three-dimensional figures and patternings (most of the world’s sculptures). Contemporary art extends these classifications to include non-perceptual objects (conceptual art) and non-static works (film and performance). So too Kentridge, with his animations and performances. But do these performances embody conceptions of artistic making independent of Kentridge’s impulse to draw? Or are they rather extensions and elaborations of drawing?
In his published discussions with the anthropologist Rosalind Morris, Kentridge himself has pointed to an answer to the question of the so to speak ‘drawing nature’ of his theater. Kentridge has repeatedly characterized his conception of the studio as ‘a safe space for stupidity’. Part of what this means is that he conceives of the studio as the place where one struggles to formulate questions, struggles to turn those questions into programs of making, proposes ideas that turn out to be ‘less good’, sees that what one has done is not what one intended to do, sees that the result is nevertheless interesting in a different way that what one had envisioned, and where one combines, juxtaposes, obscures, erases, and re-figures the ongoing results of these struggles. He hopes that at the level of the exhibition, these struggles are ‘made visible’. (Kentridge & Morris (8)) Now, one aspect of drawing is ‘play’, which evokes the contingencies, unpredictabilities, dead-ends, interactions, and sudden revelations of the drawing process. But another aspect of drawing is its ‘performance’, which is given by the sense that in drawing there are many personages present: the maker occupied with sheer marking; the reflective viewer who monitors the marking instant-by-instant; the viewers who raise questions about what is being done, what its effects, for the most part unintended, are. (11) ‘Theater’ means a place for viewing, and all the personages are viewers with distinctive concerns. The pressure to ‘make visible’ such a conception of drawing motivates, and almost necessitates, live performances as part of Kentridge’s artistic practice.
About a decade ago Kentridge began including the recitation of part of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate as part of his own lecture-performances. Starting in 2017 he has given a number of full performances of the piece as an instance of theater. In my next post I’ll give an account of his recent performance of the piece at UC Berkeley, and consider his motivation for and meaning in turning the poem from a piece to be recited to a piece to be performed.
References:
William Kentridge & Rosalind C. Morris, That which is not Drawn: Conversations (2014)
John Rapko, Logro, fracaso, aspiración: Tres intentos de entender el arte contemporáneo (2014)