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“Act III, Scene 9” (1996) from William Kentridge’s portfolio of eight etchings “Ubu Tells the Truth,”
© 2010 William Kentridge. Photo: John Hodgkiss. |
The South African artist William Kentridge has made politics his theme ever since the era of apartheid, but those of you who share my general distaste for mixing art and …
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“Act III, Scene 9” (1996) from William Kentridge’s portfolio of eight etchings “Ubu Tells the Truth,”
© 2010 William Kentridge. Photo: John Hodgkiss. |
The South African artist William Kentridge has made politics his theme ever since the era of apartheid, but those of you who share my general distaste for mixing art and politics need not fear. Kentridge is a real artist with a matter-of-fact, non-sentimental approach that transcends the political message, and, since the end of apartheid, he has been dealing with more universal issues. He also has a sense of humor, unlike many artists who deal directly with politics in their work.
The traveling exhibition “William Kentridge: Five Themes,” which has already been presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is currently stopping at Paris’s Jeu de Paume.
Since most of the show consists of films of varying lengths, it can take some time to see, but even if you are in a hurry, make sure you take the time to watch two recent works based on Mozart’s The Magic Flute. They are not films per se, but “projections” of Kentridge’s drawings onto the deep stages of two roughly built mini-theaters on stilts, which are also occasionally inhabited by animated mechanical puppets. These spellbinding multimedia film/performances are by turns poetic and sad. One is set to extracts of Mozart’s opera and the other to haunting pieces of music of various origins. Kentridge creates brilliant starry firmaments with animated drawings consisting of little more than white dots and lines on a black background, adding depth with the use of scrims, and draws the viewer into another world while transforming one thing or being into another: a graceful dancing rhino, for example, might morph into oil derricks beating people into the ground.
In another room is an eight-screen installation based on “The Nose,” the Gogol story about a detached nose that takes on a life of its own. These are variations on the sets Kentridge designed for this year’s production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s’s opera of the same name at the Metropolitan Opera House, to great acclaim. One screen quotes Bukharin’s testimony from a transcript of the Plenum of the Central committee on February 26, 1937, including the statement: “Whatever they are testifying against me is not true.”
A self-referring artist, Kentridge often appears in his own work, sometimes doubled. In one amusing filmed sequence, he covertly follows himself on tiptoe. His 1989 film “Johannesburg, Second Greatest City in the World after Paris” (he was born in Johannesburg in 1955) can be viewed, along with several of his other short films, in the Jeu de Paume’s basement auditorium (a cool and comfortable refuge on a hot day). The exhibition also presents some of this multifaceted artist’s sculptures and drawings.
Jeu de Paume: 1, place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris. Métro: Concorde. Open Tuesday, noon-9pm; Wednesday-Friday, noon-7pm; Saturday-Sunday, 10am-7pm. Admission: 7. Through September 5. www.jeudepaume.org
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© 2010 Paris Update
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