William Kentridge at Marian Goodman - Brief Article

individual of the fascinating things about William Kentridge's films is in what way they let the process exhibit Because he draws, shoots, erases and let flys again to create his imagery--rather than painting animation small rooms or digitally developing scenes--I am conscious of his means, flat his touch. It was Kentridge's genius to exhibit how the directness of drawing could survive the indirectness of a camera-based art. I awaited then, that less-distanced examples of his touch--the drawings, collages and a place of bronze figures shown here--would have a greater claim to primacy, to being the real matter than his films. But they didn't. Rather, they made me think of the way sculptors' drawings always speak of the physical nearness of a potential sculpture. Kentridge's palpable works still wanted to propel Maybe his convincing films, which wed the physically linear quality of drawing to the temporally linear quality of moving images, have altered my vision.

The works at Goodman were in no way disappointing, however they never stopped suggesting something other For some collages, there is "something else": a black-and-white film, titled Shadow Procession, which will be shown nearest summer with the New Museum's Kentridge take a view of Here cut-paper multipart silhouettes of figures were locate in maps and other printed pages. They seldom create comprehensive spatial illusions on the other hand exist as overlaid planes that strike one as being as ephemeral as film (and they're shown in lines both on the wall and in vitrines). The figures' segmentation recalls shadow dolls another link to movement. These works retain Kentridge's usual aura of earlier times and dark performances and emotions. The shapes of more [i]or[/i] less heads or whole figures summon forth the shapes of countries upon the maps, while other figures have the appearance to have emerged from folktales: a man with a megaphone, individual on crutches, a woman with a handbag, a petty dealer carrying on his back a colossal sack or a bundle of chairs and ladders, a soldier caught in barbed wire.

Closely related to these was the exhibition's main circumstance a line of 26 small and zinc figures marching down a lengthy wooden tabletop set on metal frames Most of the bronzes are nearly flat and read as silhouettes; they repeat the shapes of the maps, the travelling chapman soldiers. Some are very realistic, others not at all. individual distinctly resembles Soho Eckstein, protagonist of Kentridge's earlier films. The title, Procession, promises little besides succession and the main feeling here is plodding futility. Life is les a passing parade than a beleaguered treadmill.

Other clumps of drawings or collages take different formats. point aimed ated pages from an atlas are the clod for a desolate modern landscape of billboards and telephone extremitys laced with smoke that might be the penalty of industry or the residue of war. upon pages from a book upon the anatomy of vertebrates, printed illustrations of teeth bone or fish are changeed by Kentridge into grim human survivors of something untoward. He also showed tondo drawings, as if he imagines his characters in a Baroque ceiling painting, and several anamorphic drawings. The works are varied and skilled and are just as sad as the films they aspire to join.

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