In my previous post I considered the question of why and how the artist William Kentridge, who has repeatedly said that all of his work begins with the impulse to draw, could view theatrical performances as part of a drawing-based artistic practices. My suggestion there is that such performances are practically inevitable given Kentridge’s conception of drawing and of an exhibition of drawing. On his conception, drawing is implicitly ‘performative’, and exhibitions are governed by an imperative to ‘make visible’, where what is to be made visible is first of all the temporally extended process wherein the drawing is made. It seems to me that there is nothing idiosyncratic about Kentridge’s conceptions here; they can plausibly be thought to draw out and articulate certain very basic, one might even say primordial, conventions in the making of visual art.
To see this, consider the philosopher Richard Wollheim’s account of painting as an artistic activity. Wollheim proposes a model of what he calls ‘ur-painting’, a conceptual model that attempts to capture the marks of the basic capacities that are employed in artistic painting. At the most fundamental level, the artist marks a surface. And, primordially, the artist marks the surface with her eyes open so as to monitor the emergent expressiveness of the marking. Marking and observing are conceptually distinct though practically fused in a relation of feedback: the artist simultaneously marks, observes, responds to her marks, alters her marks, and further responds. Kentridge’s practical conception of drawing is two short steps in elaborating this: first, the conceptually distinct agents are figured, made visible in visually discernible iterations of Kentridge, with their roles saliently differentiated. Then, the figure of the observer can be multiplied, at least implicitly, to admit the further iterations of viewers outside the immediate moment of making in the studio—viewers past, present, and future. As Freud suggested, in dreams every person is (part of) oneself; so to every figure in a Kentridge performance is an aspect of Kentridge qua maker-artist. The palpable physical reality of the other performers relieves this conception of the threat of inflated narcissism, and secretes the opposed sense of the artist’s self arising in processes of inter-subjective and social play. This latter sense is perhaps most familiar from the pragmatist philosophy of G. H. Mead, or in the arts in the Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the polyphonic novel.
I shall return to and elaborate Kentridge’s conception of performance in the next post on his ‘Waiting for the Sibyl’. I turn now to his recent performance of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate. The visual artist and poet Schwitters was a participant in the Dada movement by 1920. He termed his art ‘Merz’ and incorporated into this new conception motifs introduced by Richard Wagner in the mid-19th century under the term ‘Gesamtkunst’ (total work of art), wherewith Wagner aimed at a new kind of opera of literary and theatrical elements fusing with the music into a quasi-ritualistic total spectacle. In the early 1920s many Dadaists either abandoned Dada altogether or at least significantly altered their practices. Schwitters continued making collages, but he renounced the aggressively non- or anti-sensical character of much Dadaist art. His artistic thinking generally took on a Constructivist dimension involving reduction of materials to visually simple or primitive elements, arrangement of such elements in arrays reminiscent of primordial patterns of center and margin, foreground and background, and primary, secondary, and tertiary salience. In searching for a kind of Gesamtkunst with his poetry, Schwitters looked to cabaret performance. With his visual art, Schwitters treated a ‘Merz-ian’ Gesamtkunst as ultimately an architectural construction with interior elements of traditional and novel visual arts. He wrote the Ursonate, a poem of nonsense syllables meant for performance, over a decade and published it in 1932. The poem was structured in a traditional musical sonata form of four movements with a coda. Schwitters claimed that the vowels were derived from simple German, and that the consonants were likewise ‘simple’. Schwitters recorded a performance of the poem, and it has been performed numerous times by others. Such performances were then instances of a music-centered Gesamtkunst, and usually emphasized rhythmic patterning of the nonsense syllables and salient micro-patterning through alliteration. Broad-scale structure is seemingly derived almost automatically through the appeal to the traditional, indeed ossified, sonata structural elements of first and second themes, variations, and an ordered sequence of movements including from allegro through scherzo to finale. (For the canonical exposition of sonata form and principle, see Rosen (1971)) This is no so much Constructivist but rather, as Schwitters explicitly stated, of a piece with the 1920’s ‘call to order’ in the arts whose greatest artistic achievements included Picasso’s and Stravinsky’s neo-classical works of that decade.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kentridge largely replaces Schwitters’s music-based conception of the piece with the distinctive performative conception most characteristic of the theater of academic life: the lecture. Kentridge recites the piece from a lectern, while a film of his drawings on what seem to be pages of dictionaries and encyclopedias plays on a large screen behind him. With a repertoire of gestures, intonations, and phrasing, he works against the tendency of the piece to become musical, and instead expresses the nonsense sentences as if making a point, acknowledging the need for a qualification, digressing, refuting, and summarizing. This continues for much of the performance, until towards the end a very different conception literally breaks through: a saw from behind the projection pokes through the screen and cuts slashes; a trombonist enters from the side; another reciter approaches the stage from the audience. These figures join Kentridge on stage and each contributes their distinctive expressiveness, with the stroke of genius of the saw played as a musical instrument. Kentridge continues his nonsense lecturer, but is plainly pushed into secondary status by the more musical recitations of the other speaker, along with the spectacle of trombone and musical saw. Cabaret overwhelms the academy; life breaks in.
In Kentridge’s hands, then, Ursonate is a self-undermining lecture, a piece of theater that is undermining by a resurgent theatricality, a lecture on life overwhelmed by life. Still, it’s a kind of demonstration piece of Kentridge’s poetics, perhaps appropriately, as he originally performed bits of it during lectures, but which then has something of the narrowness of focus that arises from trying to make a point. For a much richer and fuller realization of Kentridge’s conception of performance, I turn in the next blog post to his ‘Waiting for the Sibyl’.
References and Sources:
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1963)
John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters (1985)
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
George Herbert, Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (1934)
Charles Rosen, The Classical Style; Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (1971)
Kurt Schwitters, ‘My Sonata in Ur-Sounds’ (1927) and ‘Key for Reading Sound Poems’ (1946), in Myself and My Aims: Writings on Art and Criticism (2021)
Richard Wagner, ‘The Artwork of the Future’ (1849)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)