William Kentridge: Ghosts and Erasures - animated films

Since 1989 Johannesburg native William Kentridge has been making short, animated films from charcoal drawings that he alters and erases in the course of filming. Like close insistent poems, the films impel through time on the impetus of associations, loves, fears and memories exhum the couple willfully and reflexively. Like Kentridge's animation proces itself--born of the desire to hold alive the transient, evolutionary stages of his drawings--the unscripted narratives of the films compute with the tenuous nature of memory, the two personal and historical. How abundant are we to hold onto the past as a way of navigating the futurity and how much to give permission to it go or suppress it as an impediment to progress?

Kentridge (b 1955) disentangleed the rich technique used in the "drawings for projection" above the course of apartheid's collapse and the establishment of a democratic southern Africa--a period, ongoing still, of flow and revelation. The state-sanctioned violence of the 1980 the so-called decade of emergencies, has been suppressed but the resulting dead have not stayed buried, nor the buried dead. Dozens of apartheid victims were exhum this year and last, for a like reason their wounds could serve as testimony in the hearings of the fact and Reconciliation Commission, a tribunal locate up, like Kentridge's camera, to position the brutalities of the past in the near and future.

"The disaster always takes place after having taken place."[1] What Maurice Blanchot has written in relation to the Holocaust pertains as well to more new human-generated cataclysms in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Bosnia, southern Africa. Closure is unthinkable after of the like kind societal trauma, and Kentridge's work, startling still suffused with familiar gestures and everyday regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements reflects this lack of fixity. With its transmutations and erasures--a cat metamorphoses into a telephone cigar sooty vapor materializes as a typewriter clicking without messages--Kentridge's work epitomizes the provisionality of being, in what manner becoming necessitates both doing and undoing.

Kentridge's drawings for projection chronicle, upon a visceral level, his country's transitions. After decades below a cruelly rigid template, southern Africa is now drawing itself, drafting, erasing and reformulating its constructions of power, its social relations, its combination of parts to form a wholes of rights, benefits and protections. "South Africanness now," as the expatriate author of poems Breyten Breytenbach puts it, "is an itinerary (and a topography) of becoming in the making."[2]

concerns to particular social and political circumstances abound in Kentridge's films, as well as in his prints, drawings and theater productions. His art is permeated with the fabric of resistance, yet it remains open-end and thus is antithetical to propaganda. While it does share with classic agitprop art an immediacy, emotional pressing want and accessibility, it targets no particular someone class or regime as plenteous as the broader, erosive power of forgetting, the phenomenon of "disremembering."

The moral dimensions of memory, the discontinuities it excites the burden of its light (or shadow) are all near in Kentridge's deeply affecting films. Their continual erasures, yielding spirits traces, stains, evoke both memory's natural stoppage and a more calculated form of amnesia. bring under rule matter and Kentridge's own personal concerns root the work in Johannesburg, on the other hand its broad appeal testifies to by what mode closely aligned the personal and the universal can be upon the continuum of human experience. In the last small in number years, Kentridge has been welcomed enthusiastically into an international art community as receptive to issues of memory as the literary world is awash in memoir. He showed South Africa at the 1993 Venice Biennale and at Documenta X last year. His work was seen at biennials in Istanbul, Havana, Sydney and Johannesburg in the past not many years, and in shows at Houston's FotoFest, SITE Santa Fe and the Drawing Center in of recent origin York. Early this year, director Hugh Davies of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, curated Kentridge's first one-person museum show; around the same time, he was named a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum's next to the first Hugo Boss Prize.

The fluidity and contingency of drawing lie at the heart of all of Kentridge's art of the past 20 years, not just his work upon paper. In the films, however, an unusual, reciprocal dynamic draw nears into play between the drawings that comprise the visual fabric of the films and the films themselves. Unlike conventional cel animation, which fuses thousands of drawings into a slick, seamlessly continuous whole, Kentridge's proces is overtly raw and hand-wrought. For each film (all are beneath 10 minutes) Kentridge makes about 20 drawings, which be exposed to continual addition, permutation and erasure, the traces of which are plainly visible, yielding an impression of time and space as viscous, invariably altered through every arrival and departure. "You could direct the eye at the drawings as indicative of the proces and the road to making the film," he says. You can also diocese the finished film as the complicated way of arriving at that particular suite of drawings."[3]