Los Angeles Times : Why artist William Kentridge is embracing shadows in his new Broad show (by Leah Ollman)

**Artist William Kentridge, photographed at the the Broad museum on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2022 in Los Angeles. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)**

In his 2013 video “Second-Hand Reading,” South African artist William Kentridge appears as if walking across the pages of a dictionary. Beside him, as he makes this contemplative passage, words in black block letters briefly overlay the alphabetic entries: “WHICHEVER PAGE YOU OPEN,/THERE YOU ARE.”

It’s classic Kentridge — the artist tweaking scale and space to physically occupy an authoritative text, both locating and implicating himself within. His work over the last four decades has been an ongoing, material-driven inquiry into how we make sense of the world, visually, intellectually and emotionally, how we come to understand what presents itself as fact, and as history. Through drawing, printmaking, collage, hand-drawn animation, tapestry, installation, sculpture, opera and theater, Kentridge dismantles stories and assumptions, reassembling them with the newly conspicuous glue of personal and collective responsibility.

His coupling of accretive intelligence and on-the-spot, real-time generation of form is part of what sustains the artist’s relevance, says Ed Schad, curator of “William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows,” which opened recently at the Broad.

“The way that art is made right now, there is always an effort for the artwork not to be fully disclosed, not to be sealed by its own form. There is an emphasis on improvisation and keeping meaning moving, not fully defined,” Schad says. “William’s work is a revelation on that front. It’s a road map to how a studio can function and how an artist can think through substantial social issues and bigger historical narratives without being didactic.”

**“William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows” presents a retrospective of the South African artist. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)**

Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, where he lives and works, Kentridge has exhibited at major venues internationally and received an array of notable honors, including the Kyoto Prize and the Carnegie Prize, as well as numerous honorary doctorates. He has mounted productions at the Sydney Opera House, New National Theater Tokyo, Teatro Dell'Opera in Rome, New York’s Metropolitan Opera and more.

It’s been 20 years since his last sizable show in Los Angeles, however, and visitors to the Broad might be experiencing their first — or first comprehensive — encounter with the artist’s work. “In Praise of Shadows” is a feast of an introduction, with roughly 130 works dating from 1975 to 2020. His signature “Drawings for Projection,” short animated films in which charcoal figures and scenes are continually erased and redrawn, are complemented by a full range of work in other media, from a collaged diagram of the meandering loops the artist traces in the studio as he releases thought through movement, to a trio of manual sewing machines affixed with turning loudspeakers that periodically emit song.

Many of the works come from the the Broad’s own collection, including “The Refusal of Time” (2012), an immersive, gloriously unwieldy, five-channel video installation in a large room invoking a workshop or laboratory, where experimentation happens, and stuff — like how time operates — is ever in the messy process of getting figured out. A large wooden-ribbed device sits in the heart of the space, a breathing machine whose steady, open-and-close rhythm is countered by the layered, asynchronous images and sounds all around it, making their case against linearity, order and standardization.

**In addition to his show at the Broad museum, William Kentridge recently premiered a new play he directed, “Houseboy,” at REDCAT. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)**

In 2016, Kentridge co-founded the Centre for the Less Good Idea, a Johannesburg space for the incubation of collaborative art and performance. Shortly after the opening of the Broad exhibition, the Centre’s production of “Houseboy” by Ferdinand Oyono, directed by Kentridge, premiered at REDCAT. Based on a 1956 novel, “Houseboy” adopts the intimate form of a young man’s diary to tell of the brutal power imbalances and racial oppression in colonial Cameroon.

South Africa’s own physical and political landscape suffuses Kentridge’s work, which has evolved in tandem with the ongoing, essential, imperfect dismantling of apartheid. But the work has never been solely about South Africa, as “Houseboy” and the breadth of the Broad show demonstrate. Following the lead of Dadaists a century ago, Kentridge confronts an inexplicably mad world with his own robust commitment to absurdity, doubt and fearless reinvention.

Looking the everyman in his uniform of black slacks and white dress shirt — fedora near at hand — Kentridge spoke with The Times in the Broad’s offices a few days before the public opening of his show.

This exhibition, “In Praise of Shadows,” borrows its title from a book on Japanese aesthetics by Junichiro Tanizaki. Your attention to the indeterminate and obscured brings to mind another source, the poet Paul Celan, who wrote: “Speaks true who speaks shadows.” What is it about shadows that captivates you?

In Western philosophy, shadows are to be avoided. The whole trajectory of life is to move out of the shadows, out of darkness, into the light. In Plato’s metaphor of the cave and the whole Enlightenment project, the metaphor is one of light dispelling darkness. The colonial justification to itself is one of bringing light to the dark continents. In fact, we need a kind of darkness and a mixture to make sense of the world.

The title has to do with knowing how little we see when we see a shadow. When you see an actual object, you assume you’re seeing everything about the object. When you see a shadow, you understand you’re seeing a very limited part and you have to fill in the rest yourself. You immediately become complicit in making the meaning.

Provisionality, incompleteness and unknowing are so fundamental to your work. It can read as a kind of paean to the uncertain.

I can’t see how anybody can speak with complete certainty without understanding the aggression in that certainty. One thinks of the 20th century and the cataclysmic disasters brought about by people who have been certain of their plans for their country, how they will rescue humanity, or how the world should be organized — the Khmer Rouge, Mao’s China, Germany. All of these certainties have brought calamity because at a certain point the certainty can only be bolstered with an army of soldiers pointing guns at the populace.

The certainty of optimism, of writers in the 1920s, for instance, also feels completely impossible now. If we can’t have those certainties, how do we operate? By looking for much more local, particular solutions, from the margins. Keeping a position of openness and doubt all the way through.

The Centre for the Less Good Idea seems to bear, in its very name, that humility and receptivity you’re talking about.

The title comes from a Tswana proverb: If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor. When the grand ideas don’t work, you’ve got to find other ideas at the edges, at the sides — which has a political element to it, but primarily it’s strategic. It’s about ways of making work.

One often starts with the idea, which we call a good idea, but actually putting it on the ground, on a stage to rehearse it, on the canvas to paint it — cracks start appearing. What seemed such a clear idea in fact has gaps and illogics and things that won’t mesh. You can either push it into shape or you can allow other things to emerge from those cracks, recognize other peripheral ideas, connections you hadn’t expected.