Apartheid as art

Noted South African artist and filmmaker William Kentridge acknowledges that he faced a quandary over whether to exhibit his works in Israel. "I am very aware of the general calls to boycott Israel, and the personal appeals asking me not to come here," he says. "I gave a lot of thought to this, and I chose not to agree with these calls."

His exhibition, "William Kentridge: Five Themes," is perhaps the most political event to be showcased at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in quite a while. James Snyder, the museum director, told a press conference marking its opening that Kentridge's work features "a kind of beautiful sadness." He also drew a comparison between the all-encompassing nature of the museum and the interdisciplinary quality of Kentridge's work, noting that both the museum and Kentridge are committed to the pursuit of beauty. Ironically, as Snyder made these remarks, one could see behind him a prominent display of disturbing images of apartheid in South Africa, and of poverty and violence in other parts of the world.

	South African artist William Kentridge.
	Photo by: Tomer Appelbaum

"It would be crazy not to show the works here," declares Kentridge. "Even though the show is not about Jewishness, it raises questions relevant to a Jewish background, questions about historical memory and historical forgetting."

Kentridge is not prepared to compare South Africa's apartheid regime to Israel's occupation in the Palestinian territories, although he believes the two situations raise similar issues.

"Both in Africa and the Middle East, people wonder about the extent [to which] one needs to hang on to the past in order to justify our existence, and how much we need to forget, in order to move forward," he says.

The "Five Themes" exhibition, curated by Mark Rosenthal, is a retrospective, but the works it includes - drawings, prints, animated films and sculpture - are not displayed in chronological order. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida, and has already been shown at both these venues. It has also been shown in Vienna, Paris and New York; Jerusalem is the final destination of the retrospective, which is on until June. In 2009, the International Association of Art Critics named it the best exhibition in the monographic museum category. That year, Kentridge and his exhibition also appeared on Time Magazine's list of the 100 most important persons and events.

As a young man, Kentridge participated in protests against apartheid. As an artist, he looks at the past from the perspective of the present, and criticizes the paternalistic, colonialist and corrupt nature of white, Western society.

How do you feel about exhibiting your ideas in Israel?

Kentridge: "That's a question I pose to you. All of the works exhibited in this event rely on a combination of what I present and what the viewer brings from his own memories, thoughts and knowledge. Only when these things converge, they supplement one another and create art."

This is not the first time that Kentridge, who is Jewish, has visited and shown his work in Israel. In addition to being featured in several group exhibitions, his work was showcased in solo shows in 2000 and 2005 in Tel Aviv.

"It's complicated," he explains. "I'm very happy with the immediate response that people have to the works. And it is very local - the Ashkenazi audience [in Israel] is not very different than the European audience in South Africa."

Still, the decision to come to Israel was not simple: "I have sympathy for a lot of the reasons that lead people to call for the boycott. There is a section of Israeli life that is very close and similar to my own life, and there are parts of life in Israel that are controlled by religious extremism and are racially intolerant, and I find these parts very offensive. In Jerusalem, you have this mixture. So I always have had an ambiguous relationship with Jerusalem."

Literary encounter

When he eventually decided to make the trip, Kentridge asked to meet with writer David Grossman and to visit East Jerusalem. "I joined a friend of mine, a South African artist, in demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah. It was very interesting to see how similar, and different, it is from South Africa, and to hear people yelling and using the word 'apartheid.'"

The demonstration Kentridge joined - last Friday - was especially violent, with masked policemen using brute force against protesters.

Kentridge lives in Johannesburg with his wife, a physician, and three children. He was born in 1954, six years after the apartheid regime took hold; he lived under the system until it was eliminated in 1990. He doubts that the cultural boycott imposed on South Africa was effective.

"There's never been a real analysis of the costs and benefits," he notes. "I don't think it was part of what transformed the society. It was not the cultural boycott that changed the government's views."

Kentridge's mother was a lawyer who worked for a prominent firm, and his father was a well-known member of the anti-apartheid movement.

"I'm sure my family was also vital in terms of giving a different perspective on South African life," he observes. "For many white children it was natural to see the world in terms of black people being servants and white people going to white schools. My family was made aware of how unnatural the reality was."

After finishing high school and a year of mandatory military service, he went on to study political science and African studies, then fine arts, and later pantomime and theater in Paris. For a time, he dreamed of becoming an actor but eventually concluded he lacked sufficient talent for the stage (though in the past three years, he has started to appear before audiences , giving something between a lecture and a performance).

From a young age, Kentridge had a political agenda: He attended demonstrations, directed plays that had clear political messages, and designed flyers for black union members. He began to create his figurative charcoal drawings in the 1980s.

"There was a strong tradition among black South African artists of figurative drawings," he recalls. "So in the 1970s, at the time when I was an art student, there was a clear division between white artists who liked working in American field paintings and different types of abstract art. There was a strong tradition among black South African artists to do figurative drawings. So in the 1970s, the time I was an art student, there was a division between a white artist who very likely was working in American color field painting, different forms of abstraction, and [black] artists who lived in the townships and were working on depictions from their own lives, or an imaginary projection of their lives."

Constant metamorphosis

Inspired by random footage taken with a 16mm camera, Kentridge discovered the hidden qualities of film - what he calls "Stone Age animation." It involves filming a drawing, making erasures and alterations, and filming it again. Traces of what has been erased are still visible to the viewer. He continues this process, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way. The drawings are later displayed along with the film footage as finished pieces of art. His works evoke early, silent Russian or German films that featured impressionist images, captions and music.

One of Kentridge's first animated films, "Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris" (1989), introduced viewers to characters who would later star in his "Drawings for Projection" series. Among them were Soho Eckstein - a capitalist, scientist and real estate tycoon whose political and social struggles reflect many aspects of life in South Africa, from the latter days of apartheid to the present - and Eckstein's alter ego, Felix Teitelbaum, who lusts after Soho's wife.

"I never tried to do illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and films were definitely born and fostered by the cruelly beaten society which apartheid created," he explains. The film series brought Kentridge international recognition for the first time. One of the most conspicuous elements of this sort of work is the constant sense of metamorphosis; everything is fluid, evolving constantly. A telephone turns into a black cat, which transforms into a calculator; a megaphone leaves the hand of a character and turns into a speaker - and so on.

"The medium always presents a type of theme, and this theme glides toward a medium," Kentridge says.

He is not accustomed to working with a script. An image or two provides the seed for a film, and from this point on, he describes the evolution of his art as a "short film that strips."

These works do not really have a coherent narrative. They are more like fragments, whose endings always seem mysterious or ambiguous. Kentridge is the first to acknowledge this: "How do I know when the films have ended? I always draw the last frame at the beginning, and so what remains is to fill in the gap in the middle. After about a third of the film, [this gap] presents itself."

He works often with a composer and a musical director, and both classical music and South African music are fused into his films. Although his work focuses on the historical and social circumstances existing in a specific geographical region, it also addresses universal issues. Asked about the power of art, in general, Kentridge replies: "I do believe in culture and art, but in a very roundabout way. I believe in them strongly in the sense that the way we constitute ourselves as individuals in the world is grounded in the things we've seen, in a confirmation of who we are from books, stories or films. In the end, it's not the artistic work that ends up taking part in a particular process, but culture comes to be made up of individuals who construct themselves in this complicated way. I have great belief in the vital importance of art - in writing, and creative, productive capacity. In a noninstrumental, indirect way, I absolutely believe [that art] is not just decoration."

After years of spotlighting apartheid and its consequences, Kentridge began to focus on events triggered by colonialist brutality in other parts of Africa at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century. Asked whether it is easier for him to deal with the past than with the present, Kentridge says: "It is, even though a new film I've been working on also looks at events in Johannesburg that have occurred over the last two or three years. Many artists do that. I think that artists are always in conversation with the artistic past - both the formal, documented past, such as image making, filmmaking and photography, and the past in general. There is always a dialogue.

"For example, I'm interested in a small work - I don't know if I'll do it, but I'm interested in a medieval piece. It has to do with one of the sultans of one of the empires from the Byzantine era who is captured in one of the Crusades, a thousand years ago, and taken back to France and held as a political prisoner for 27 years in France. So that relates to the concept of political imprisonment in the remote past - it relates to what it feels like to pass thousands of days, waiting for negotiations to happen that eventually will lead to your release."

In addition to showcasing his animated films, the Jerusalem exhibition features some of Kentridge's most important and ambitious works in other realms as well. A segment of the exhibition focuses on works inspired by Mozart's The Magic Flute. It includes two beautiful miniature theaters and a flute lesson projected on a screen-like installation. The projected images convey both implicit and explicit criticism of the perception of morality during the Enlightenment, as well as the colonial period in Africa, which can be seen as an outgrowth of it.

The most recent work in the exhibition is called "Learning from the Absurd: The Nose" and is based on "The Nose" - a short story written by the Russian author Nikolai Gogol. It involves eight different projections that explore the Russian avant-garde at the start of the 20th century, its visual language and graphic images, and its violent repression in the 1930s. Asked how historical works of art inspire his own work, Kentridge says his creative renditions of the past partly examine "the mechanical explanation of the world. When there were mechanical technologies, you could see the logic of one thing touching something else, and how that connection would make things move. Today you have cellular phones - you hold them and trust they will work and connect you to different people, whereas with the old-fashioned telephone, you could see a string being taken from one connection and pulled through a hole."

Referring to his relationship with Johannesburg, a city that continues to serve as a creative power in his films, Kentridge notes: "It's a relationship of love and hate. There are things that draw you very strongly [to the city], but other things make you wonder, why on earth am I living in this dump? But I have lived there for 55 years, so I guess I have to take responsibility for being there, and not somewhere else."