William Kentridge wows Miami

6 December 2005

William Kentridge, a South African artist, is taking the US art fraternity by storm with a major retrospective exhibition at the Miami Art Central gallery.

Johannesburg-born Kentridge is the only contemporary artist from South Africa to have an international following. The opening of the travelling retrospective last week attracted so many people the Miami police got to test their crowd-control skills, according to Business Day.

Marian Goodman, Kentridge's New York dealer, says prices for his work - which includes sculpture, drawings and films - start at US$3 000 (R19 000) and go as high as $700 000 (R4.4-million).

He uses an essentially simple technique - charcoal drawings with touches of pastel colour. With these he has created an astonishing body of work.

Since the 1990s, Kentridge has gained international recognition for his animated short films based on "erasure": drawing in charcoal, filming a few frames, erasing, then drawing some more.

He has called the labour-intensive process by which he makes his films "stone-age filmmaking" - neither animation nor traditional techniques but a unique art he pioneered.

His work also includes powerful etchings, lithographs, silkscreens, collage and sculpture.

South Africa and the US South
Barely known outside of South Africa until the late 1990s, Kentridge is the first South African artist to receive widespread international acclaim in the post-apartheid era that began in 1994, the year Nelson Mandela became the country's first democratically elected president.

"For me, William is one of the most interesting contemporary artists right now," Rina Carvajal, chief curator of Miami Art Central, told the Miami Herald. "The issues he addresses in his work connect somehow with the history of the South in the US - issues of race and ethnicity."

The retrospective includes over 70 drawings made by Kentridge since 1979, 15 animated films, sculpture with projections onto objects, and Tide Table (2003-2004), his newest film.

It was first curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev for the Castello di Rivoli in Turin in early 2004. Later that year and in 2005 it was seen in Düsseldorf, Sydney and Montreal. It comes to Miami, where it runs until March 2006, after two months in Kentridge's home town, Johannesburg.

A survey of Kentridge's body of work with a particular focus on recent art, the retrospective has drawings by the artist dating as far back as 1979, major early animated films, and a selection of projections onto objects and furniture. Recent works based on the artist's interest in shadows as well as in the techniques of early cinema are also on exhibit.

It includes a set of short films, Seven Fragments for Georges Melies, and the large bronzes, Shadow Quartet. Kentridge's more familiar films, charcoal drawings and shadow sculptures, are also on display.

Also included is Kentridge's late-1980s series of short films, Johannesburg, Second Greatest City after Paris. Featuring the artist's characters, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum, the films explore the dark and complex times of late-apartheid South Africa.

Memory and forgetting
Critics believe Kentridge's art transcends its specific context of South Africa, evoking universal battles with memory, as memory and forgetting are folded into experiences of loss, anger, despair, and feelings of renewal.

These experiences show up in telling incidents, such as those in Tide Table, when Eckstein remembers his youth and sees a young boy and skeletons of cattle lapped by tides washing up on the beach.

"I think there are a lot of people for whom it's important to try to forget their past,'' Kentridge told the Miami Herald. "In South Africa it's very hard to find white people who did not support the previous government, and that's been the theme of some of the films.

"There's a narrow band of memory that we can sustain," he said. "If you have too much, it creates a kind of post-traumatic-stress syndrome. It is paralyzing, and then the society cannot get past its past. On the other hand, you can have a kind of social Alzheimer's, when there is no sense of the past."

But the artist is rather amazed at the way South Africans have dealt with their past.

"What is most astonishing is that white people have gotten off scot-free for 300 years of oppression," he told Business Day. "No one has lost a home or a bank account or a life.

"I ascribe it to the strong democratic structures that exist throughout South African society. It is a Christian, but not afundamentalist society.

"A large number of people have shared the philosophy of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. There has been a large desire for things to work."

William Kentridge
Kentridge (50) has roots in South Africa dating back several generations. Both his great-grandfathers settled there in the late 19th century. Kentridge's father is Sir Sidney Kentridge, a distinguished lawyer in the anti-apartheid movement who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1999 and who has represented Nelson Mandela and the family of the late activist Steve Biko.

He was born in Johannesburg, where he continues to live and work today, and earned a BA in politics and African studies in 1976 from the University of the Witwatersrand.

From 1976 to 1978 he studied fine art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, where he later taught printmaking. In 1981 and 82 he completed a course in mime and theatre at L'Ecole Jacques LeCoq in Paris.

Throughout his career, Kentridge has moved between film, drawing and theatre. Since participating in Dokumenta X in Kassel in 1997, solo shows of his work have been hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and MCA San Diego.

In 1998 and 1999 a survey exhibition of his work was seen in Brussels, Munich, Barcelona, London, Marseille and Graz. In 1999 he was awarded the Carnegie Medal at the Carnegie International 1999/2000.

In 2001 a survey show of Kentridge's was launched in Washington, moving to New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Cape Town. A shadow oratorio, Confessions of Zeno, was created for Documenta XI in 2002. In October 2003 Kentridge received the Goslar Kaisserring in recognition of his contribution to contemporary art.

• The William Kentridge Retrospective runs at Miami Art Central from 30 November 2005 to 5 March 2006.