USC Annenberg Media : The exploitation of laborers is an artistic focal point in William Kentridge’s work (by Charlotte Phillipp)
William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows exhibition at The Broad, Los Angeles, November 12, 2022–April 9, 2023. Artwork: City Deep,2020. HD video. Courtesy of the artist. © William Kentridge.
In a loud, buzzing gallery room that overwhelms the senses at the Broad Museum, five projectors whir throughout an almost pitch-black room. They play five different short films, some animated, using stop-motion depicting laborers hard at work, others are live action in black-and-white and show household workers making beds or even dancing. Steel contraptions, described as a “breathing machine” that combine parts such as pneumatic pipes and megaphone-like objects, pump away loudly. The room is frenzied yet calculated, creating an all-encompassing work that uses tools of industry to invoke both harmony and chaos.
This piece, “The Refusal of Time,” is one of 130 featured works of South African-born artist William Kentridge on display in a new Broad retrospective, “In Praise of Shadows.” Meant to encapsulate Kentridge’s career, the exhibition runs through April 2023 and includes the 13 pieces by the artist already in the museum’s collection.
It’s not a coincidence that Kentridge’s works are appearing in such a significant way in Los Angeles today. L.A. and Johannesburg, Kentridge hailing from the latter, are both cities of industry built on the labor of oppressed peoples, according to exhibition curator Ed Schad. Additionally, cinema as both an art form and an industry, which is particularly significant in L.A., take precedence in Kentridge’s works.
“I thought it would be interesting to show Kentridge’s studio in utter contrast to the big-budget cinema, as we typically understand it here in our city,” said Schad at the exhibit’s opening. Harkening to works such as the films in “The Refusal of Time,” as well as his 2003 shorts “Day for Night” and “Journey to the Moon” — which both play with themes and concepts used in early cinema like drawings and camera tricks — Schad said, “I wanted it to be a celebration of the intimacy and ambition of cinema from a new point of view.”
Film is hardly the only art form that Kentridge practices, though. Active since the 1980s, the artist has worked in everything from printing to opera. Currently, Kentridge works out of Johannesburg’s Centre for the Less Good Idea — inspired by a Tswana proverb that says, “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.” Both a studio for his physical endeavors such as painting and sculpting, the center also houses performance spaces for actors and other performance artists. Much of his multi-hyphenate artistic practice focuses on charcoal drawings, sculpting with metal, and theater — including a new production, “HOUSEBOY,” that premiered at L.A.’s REDCAT in mid-November of last year.
One series on view at the Broad, “Drawings for Projection,” spans much of the artist’s career. Beginning in 1989 and ending with works created in 2011, the metaphor of Kentridge’s use of charcoal comes across the strongest. A common appearance in his works, many of these drawings depict workers such as miners, as well as their bosses, which is why his use of charcoal reflects such a strong theme of labor. Typically, Kentridge works by drawing with charcoal and then attempting to remove it from the page to create shadows. As described in the exhibit, “Once touched to paper, charcoal cannot be entirely erased.” Such is the impact of labor on the people of cities such as Johannesburg.
Kentridge drew some of these works for various animated films, including “Other Faces” and “Weighing… and Wanting,” both of which are on view in the exhibition. The former, using the charcoal drawing method to create crude, shadowy, and almost faceless black-and-white human figures, illustrates Kentridge’s striking work through specific characters, such as the fictional mining magnate, Soho Eckstein. Most of the time wearing a pinstripe suit, the large and cruel Eckstein is present in many of Kentridge’s pieces. The industrialist often appears as a caricature of the colonial presence in South Africa. His evil can be likened to that of a villainous Shakespearean king. “Weighing… and Wanting” explores Eckstein’s fall from grace. Without Apartheid to run his industry, he is without a place in the world.
Notably, colonialism and industrialization are always thematically present in Kentridge’s work. The son of a Jewish family of anti-Apartheid activists and lawyers who lived for many years in South Africa, Kentridge’s work explores the impact of colonialism both past and present. His films, as well as many of his other works, probe the social and political consequences of the transition from Apartheid to democracy in South Africa, as well as the mundane state of being that came with this oppression.
Depictions of characters that Kentridge has created, such as Eckstein and another called Felix Teitelbaum, portray the stain that colonialism leaves on oppressed peoples. In works such as his 1980-1981 series of etchings and drawings titled simply “Domestic Scenes,” Black workers are portrayed as “frenetic and madcap,” as the Broad’s catalog states. They labor in mines. They do housework. They pose near their horses. They sit solemnly on the couch after a long, hard day’s work.
Themes of colonialism also emerge in his 1997 work of printing and line drawings titled “Ubu Tells the Truth,” albeit in a different way. Named after “Ubu Roi,” a 19th-century French parody of “Macbeth,” the nature of the character Ubu is grotesque and satirizes the gluttonous monarchy. Here, Kentridge repurposes the theatrical representation of King Ubu through drawing, this time depicting him as a disgusting, excessive industrialist. Playing with texture, Kentridge represents human skin through rough line drawings so as to capture the humanity taken away from those oppressed by Apartheid and colonialism.
But workers are the heart of the stories that Kentridge tells, not their oppressors.
“The work of William finds the evidence of this history and the landscape in the maps, but it also finds in the work in individual consciousness,” said curator Schad, “both in revolt against apartheid and as well as consciousness that’s complicit with its interests. This story is a fraught and rich one.”
Just down the road from the Broad, at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), Kentridge put his multimedia theatrical experience to work.
Based on the 1956 novel of the same name by Cameroonian diplomat Ferdinand Oyono, Kentridge’s “HOUSEBOY” follows the early life of Toundi, a young boy who cycles through various jobs in the residences of wealthy, white colonialists in Cameroon.
The play is told as a staged reading of sorts, with an older version of Toundi acting as the narrator and reading from the novel. A younger Toundi, joined by the many characters who follow him through his journey, interjects with dialogue and acts out the story.
For the most part, the stage is bare except for chairs for each of the actors to use when they’re not taking part in the story, plus a few select props — including fine glassware on silver platters, a large stick that Toundi’s father threatens to beat him with, and a wooden broom.
The story of Toundi is written in diary entries from his older self’s perspective as he is kicked out of his home by his parents. His journey as a “house boy” begins as he is brought into the home of a French Catholic priest as a servant. There, he becomes religious and learns the trade of running a home.
“I was going to learn about the white men and live like them. I caught myself thinking I was like one of the wild parrots we used to attract in the village with grains of maize. They were captured through their greediness. My mother often used to say, laughing, ‘Toundi, what will your greediness bring you to…?’ My parents are dead. I have never been back to the village.”
“I was going to learn about the city and white men and live like them. I caught myself thinking I was like one of the wild parrots we used to attract in the village with grains of maize. They were captured through their greediness. My mother often used to say, laughing, ‘Toundi, what will your greediness bring you to…?’
My parents are dead. I have never been back to the village.”
— Houseboy, Ferdinand Oyono
Despite the difficult and troubling story, the young Toundi is played by Alfred Motlhapi with earnestness and almost a sense of whimsy (at least at the beginning of his tale). Such is the case of much of the highly-stylized play. There are scenes, such as when Toundi and Father Gilbert, the aforementioned priest, take a motorcycle ride singing Édith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien,” where the staging is simply the two actors on chairs, swaying side-to-side as if they’re going around sharp bends.
After the priest’s death (by motorcycle, spoiling one of the show’s purest moments), Toundi is then brought into the home of a colonial commandant and his wife.
One of the most sincere (and funniest) moments of the show occurs during the conversation about Toundi being hired by the commandant. When asked if he is a thief, Toundi responds no, stating that he is Christian and doesn’t want to go to hell. He wonders aloud if hell is nearby.
Played by Sue Pam-Grant, the commandant’s wife, simply referred to by Toundi as “Madame” throughout the show, is one of the most stylized characters of all. At all times, she holds a long cigarette between her fingers, and her bright red lipstick stands out against her all-white costume. It’s made very clear to the audience from the beginning that she is beautiful, smart, kind and — most importantly — powerful. Her story and Toundi’s are often intertwined, and her downfall later in the story reflects his.
Although she initially treats Toundi kindly, the commandant becomes notably distant as he’s away traveling. The beginning of the end arrives when Madame starts an affair with one of the most notorious, brutal characters in the show — the head of the local prison, known for beating the locals nearly to death.
Madame turns on Toundi as she becomes dissatisfied with her life during the affair. Her charming conversation with Toundi about his goals to become wealthy and start a family turns into screaming at him. Toundi, once the devout Catholic, loses his faith as well as his goals to become successful like Madame and her husband.
Just as in his visual art, Kentridge is highly experienced in theatrical works, including everything from opera to staged readings. Nearly all of his performance work comes from the aforementioned Centre for the Less Good Idea. An organization run by Kentridge and his team, the Centre is where many of his theatrical productions are developed. Although his theatrical works are thematically similar to his visual art, there is one key difference — every work produced through the Centre is collaborative.
At the talkback after the performance, Kentridge recalled when “HOUSEBOY” was in development in the Centre’s last season before COVID-19, the original cast in South Africa was able to play with the story in such a way that some of their own elements still remained in the Los Angeles performance.
“When we started reading and playing with it, [William Harding, who plays the priest] speaks very fluent and easy French. And so he said, ‘Oh, let’s put some of it back into French,’” Kentridge recalled. “We managed to find Jean [an actor from the original South African cast who] is from the Cameroon and could bring in phrases of Ewondo, though it’s not so familiar to him. But he knew a lot of old songs … In the middle of a rehearsal, he suddenly said, ‘Stop, stop,’ and he’d take out his phone and he’d phone through to some uncle in the Cameroon and sing the song over the phone.”
This pre-COVID season at the Centre attempted to reinterpret the act of performance.
“We called the season ‘what of text,’ and the idea was to look at existing text to take what exists on the page in the way that it is read, and to think about an audience as the reader,” said Bronwyn Lace, a colleague and collaborator of Kentridge’s, at the talkback. “What we know is that this dynamic exists all over the world and it’s not only particular to the colonial period, it’s particular to our contemporary world, too. So this is, I think, what the novel allows for, and then the performed reading of the novel extends that.”
The story is one of pain and sadness, all told through the lens of an intimate look at colonial life. Most significantly, from an artistic perspective, this show sees Kentridge turning text into live performance. As he writes in the REDCAT program, “let this be a provocation, let us see what emerges.”
Article published on : https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com