“The light at the end of the tunnel turns too quickly into the interrogator’s spotlight,” writes William Kentridge in his essay “In Praise of Shadows”. The sentence encapsulates the ideas that motivated the South African artist’s new show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, entitled Thick Time.
For this is an exhibition both in and of the shadows. Ostensibly, its opening work is a sculpture of a bicycle wheel framed by two megaphones and mounted on a tripod. But our first encounter is with that object’s projection on the wall: a silent, ghost-grey silhouette whose immateriality undercuts not only its original source, which stands to one side, but also hints that the art to come may be a chimera.
Perhaps that’s a blessing given how much darkness is coiled at the root of Kentridge’s vision today. The first major work here, a five-screen projection entitled “The Refusal of Time” (2012), takes us on a rollercoaster journey through the highways and byways of what is best described as anti-history. Inspired by a dialogue Kentridge had with science historian Peter Galison, the work leans on 19th-century German scientific theory that dislocations of time due to the speed of light mean that past, present and future are phantoms. If you happened to be near a star 2,000 light years away, so the theory goes, you could still see Christ on the cross.
Unfolding around a set of wooden bellows that pump noisily in and out like a pair of rickety lungs, while a tuba-driven soundtrack by composer Philip Miller thumps out an apocalyptic message of despair, the images reel past as if floating untethered in outer space. Essentially, Kentridge is ripping up the European knowledge centres that justified colonial savagery. Dispossessed scraps of metronomes, clocks and maps reduce to fragments those hubs of Cartesian reason such as Paris’s Bureau des Longitudes whose studies of shipping routes, astronomy and mapmaking set the co-ordinates for French power in Africa. At times we are tugged into Dantesque workshops where instruments of measurement whirr and tick around wild-eyed figures, played by black actors, stirring vats of venomous broth. In this rogues’ gallery of the Enlightenment, no one’s in charge, no one’s responsible. The world is up for grabs.
Just as our head is spinning with (anti)information overload, the figurative scenes dissolve into an abstract army of white vertical dashes that float downwards through blackness. These, a male voice tells us, are “the vibrating strings of information” to which all matter is reduced as it approaches the Black Hole.
Perhaps this is Kentridge’s notion of hell but, after the previous hullabaloo, it feels like paradise. However, it’s too peaceful for us to stay for long. Soon, we’re thrust into a cacophonous cavalcade of shadow-figures. Yoked, burdened, blinded, stumbling, occasionally dancing with masochistic triumph, they evoke a glut of sinister associations from medieval dances of death to slave processions, Goya’s humiliated pilgrims, Nazi death marches and today’s refugee exoduses. Most clearly, however, they return us to Plato’s cave: the place where shackled prisoners mistook shadows for reality and from which it was the duty of the philosopher to liberate them into the light of truth.
We are tugged into Dantesque workshops where instruments of measurement whirr and tick around wild-eyed figures
For Kentridge, who is as near to a philosopher as any artist working today, man’s bid for reason and certainty was a licence for violence. The colonial invaders, for example, justified their brutality on the basis that ultimately they would improve the lot of the people they had subjugated by offering them an education and religion that was superior to their existing culture.
Born in South Africa in 1955, Kentridge grew up in a world where such values had rotted society to its core. In a place where authority is a synonym for oppression and injustice, the only sane approach is anarchy. Little wonder his gods are the rebels of art history: Goya, Dada, the transgressive, thunder-black drolleries of Weimar Germany’s Neue Sachlichkeit movement. Over the years, he has drawn on an astonishingly varied repertoire. As familiar with the stage — he has directed both theatre and opera — as he is with the gallery space, his materials encompass drawing, animation, tapestry, puppets, and live actors and dancers.
When, as with “The Refusal of Time”, he yokes many of these elements into a single installation, the results can be breathtaking. But they are also exhausting. To watch this piece from the beginning to the end of its 30 minutes — and curiously, given Kentridge’s apparent suspicion of temporal chronology, it demands linear engagement — is as stimulating and draining as it is to sit through a great theatrical performance.
At the Whitechapel, however, you’ve only just begun. There are three more extremely demanding installations to come, including Kentridge’s most recent work, “Right Into Her Arms” (2016). Inspired by his experience in 2015 of directing Alban Berg’s 1930s opera Lulu, it is a hybrid of puppet-theatre and cinema in which panels of corrugated cardboard serve as screens for projected images. From a real ballet dancer in a paper tutu who writhes about as jerkily as a marionette, to Kentridge’s own ink drawings of Berg’s bob-haired femme fatale, and sinister phrases such as “Can you just lift your skirt a little higher?”, its decadent, cabaret-noir mood evokes the paranoid, amoral wasteland of 1930s Germany as it slid towards Nazi horror. Although the execution is technically dazzling, the Brechtian gloom is far from new. What is innovative is the way Kentridge also uses the panels themselves to act out the drama. At times bare of all imagery, the scruffy cardboard rectangles slide back and forth in a coquettish lovers’ waltz. It’s faintly reminiscent of the way Russian Suprematism imbued abstract shapes with emotional life, but the conviction with which Kentridge pursues this moment of whimsy renders it refreshingly perplexing.
By now, we really need a moment of stillness and reflection in which to absorb so much highly orchestrated kinetic chaos. Kentridge draws like an expressionist angel. Why couldn’t the curators add a room of his works on paper? (There are three vast tapestry works present but their imagery is so densely layered it requires deciphering rather than contemplating.)
In the final film installation, (7 Fragment for Georges Melies, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, 2003) there is footage of Kentridge drawing in his studio. His bold, luscious, Indian-ink studies of birds, trees, coffee-pots and horses come to life on paper with a defiant loveliness that undermines his determination to trample on such outmoded virtues as truth and beauty.
In 2016, few of us need artists to tell us that the world is run by fools. Like Plato’s prisoners, we’re already dazzled by too much reality. What would feel revolutionary, right now, is an art that not only exposes humanity’s capacity for evil, but also keeps faith with the possibility of goodness. However fast light travels, we’re not ready to do without it.
‘William Kentridge: Thick Time’, Whitechapel Gallery, to January 15 2017 whitechapelgallery.org
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