Now to the art! Although I fell into a tired slump afterwards my artist-self, that part of me that lies down last, felt renewed, refreshed, re-energised on a deep level. That I did not see what I expected turned out to be a good thing, made me think harder. I only know of William Kentridge’s stop-motion animation work, put together from charcoal drawings in a kind of obsessive palimpsest process as he keeps reworking the same image (one per scene), erasing parts, drawing into and over. It’s a fascinating and poignant way to investigate memory: each new image carries within itself the previous, more or less visibly so. The stories he tells are rooted in the history of South Africa (he doesn’t shy away from the fact that as a white South African he is implicated in the country’s apartheid-stained past) – they are dark and unsettling, and the telling is beautiful, haunting, intimate. It moves me.
I am not me, the horse is not mine, his eight screen video-installation in Tate Modern’s Tanks, is very different, huge in scope and scale, much more abstract and impersonal (although he appears in it). The piece, while clearly situated in the Soviet Union in the 1930s under Stalin, has no straightforward narrative thread. I won’t even attempt to describe all its elements (performance, drawing, snippets of film of the time, collage, dance, text, sound), or its scope. The work assails you from all sides, disturbs, disorients; and although there are little breathing spaces when the mood momentarily changes you daren’t relax. This seemingly chaotic but tightly organized sideways look at history, with its mix of the real and the fantastical, makes for a much more pessimistic work, and the viewer can’t ever settle – not least because you can’t revel in (or escape into?) the beauty of the medium. Even if fragments look beautiful, or funny, the ground under your feet keeps shaking because of the execution and context of the piece. I may have forgotten more than I remember, but I can still feels its hysterical, hypnotic grip. In the middle of it all I watched a little girl, 2 – 3 years old, running around in the space, trying to touch the flickering images, and envied her innocence, her lack of knowledge about the world, about what we are capable of.
WK’s talk centered around Gogol’s short story The Nose which has fuelled a multitude of explorations in various media (WK directed Shostakovich’s opera The Nose at the Met/NY and seems to have gone at it with everything he had – drawing and painting, improvisation, performance, writing, said video-installation and the talk itself), each maybe yet another stepping stone in this terrified and terrifying scrutiny of a historical moment. It was demanding, at times over my head, and illuminating, and I wish I’d had the energy to go back and look at the work once more. What proved most meaningful to me in terms of my own, very small-scale, intimate art-practice was how he talked about the absurd as a form of knowledge – at this point my heart started beating faster as I’ve been hesitantly, cautiously thinking about the absurd in relation to a new, also history-based project (part of the Grants for the Arts-application I’ve mentioned before). Maybe now I’ll have the courage to play with something I’ve felt unsure about, while staying unsure about it, if you know what I mean.
So you see how rousing my well-planned outing turned out to be. And what a relief to be able to sink into the auditorium’s deep red plush seats, rest my tired body while my mind tried hard to scale intriguing heights.
PS. Click here to see WK talking very movingly about drawing
