William
Kentridge has become celebrated in recent years primarily for his
short animation films, which are often exhibited in conjunction with
the drawings from which they are created. Kentridge works in a singular
manner, rejecting the conventional technique by which thousands of
cells are drawn, each limning a minute change in, say, the gesture
or pose of a character, or the background setting. Typically, Kentridge
confines himself to one drawing for each scene. On a single sheet
of good quality paper he draws the motif or mise-en-scene: as he adds
or erases elements he records each change with a 35mm camera, building
up the whole episode frame by frame.
Kentridge’s subjects tend to be narrative or quasi narrative
explorations of a certain state of mind or condition, which in turn
becomes the premise for a larger metaphysic: a moral dilemma, an ethical
predicament, an ungoverned fantasy… Their settings or circumstances
arise from his immediate everyday experience, living in Johannesburg
through the aftermath of the apartheid era. Ranging from highly personal
introspection to overtly political drama Kentridge’s tales occasionally
are cloaked in the guise of a traditional story or literary (anti-)hero:
Faustus, Woyzek and Zeno have all provided fertile prototypes. Since
drawing and motion photography form the basis of his practice as a
visual artist, he has looked closely at a range of progenitors who
were also fascinated by black and white graphic media: Beckman and
Goya as well as film makers Dziga Vertov and, most recently, Georges
Melies.
Invited to exhibit at Baltic Art Center, Kentridge has taken advantage
of certain circumstances and conditions determining this exhibition;
the character of the gallery, which is a single voluminous space;
the opportunity to exhibit a body of new work; the possibility of
continuing a dialogue we began years ago about taking such an occasion
as a laboratory, or even a surrogate studio, in which to experiment,
and to propose not works in process (which is the normal result of
such an assumption) but sketches/studies that collectively create
an entity, a composite work made of parts and fragments. Congruent
with this approach is the thematic underpinning these brief gestes:
the fundaments and paradigms of his practice as a visual artist/filmmaker
who, working alone in his studio improvises make-shift props from
what is to hand, devises new sleights of hand, tests the possibilities
offered by different types of equipment, and, within the flow of daily
events, capitalizes spontaneously on chance and accident – in
this instance, the arrival of the ants.
Not only Melies but Bruce Nauman is a formidable forbear in this endeavor.
Not coincidently, Nauman revisited this archetypal predicament several
years ago, when his studio was invaded by mice. The result, a multi-screen
projection installation, was entitled “Mapping the studio”.
Kentridge’s new suite of works could be read as both homage and
riposte. Where Nauman, in typically laconic fashion, absented himself
leaving the rodents free reign for their nocturnal adventures Kentridge,
by contrast, sought to cajole his visitors to perform novel feats,
imagining opportunities which result in magical rather than melancholy
ruminations. Whereas Nauman’s work is often haunted by unmitigated
longuers and seeming inactivity, redolent with the shadowy spectre
of Beckett, Melies is Kentridge’s familiar. In these disarmingly
slight, fragmentary works wit and whimsy elide into unbridled fantasy
and dream which, for Kentridge, are as much the stuff of studio life
as more mundane practical tasks; for him, periods of waiting, parsing
boredom, erupt into wondrous visions.
Lynne Cooke |
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JOURNEY TO THE MOON and SEVEN FRAGMENTS FOR GEORGES
MÉLIÈS (plus DAY FOR NIGHT) DAY FOR NIGHT
We
have had a summer plague of ants in Johannesburg, thin trails of
them exploring different shelves of the kitchen every night, a syrup
stain on a breadboard, a moving black patch in the morning. Examining
one such patch I was struck by how the ants themselves made a kind
of proto- living drawing, and I videoed this. I was in the middle
of work on the fragments for Méliès.
I was behind schedule and should not have been doing anything except
work on these films, but the ants were intriguing. The fact that
they were looked at and filmed from above made the surface they
were on a flat plane. The first thing I filmed was a breadboard,
but it could have been a piece of paper. The second association
was that of surveillance, of a satellite scrutinizing the world
below. Zooming in on the ants, the black shape or line seen from
afar (about one meter) changed. Close-up the ants at the edge of
the sugar resembled an aerial photo of cars lined up at a shopping
mall. I started filming the ants in parallel to working on the Méliès
films.
The first day of drawing with ants was spent laying a trail for
them from the garden to the studio; it took about three hours from
the first ant finding the sugar-water solution on the paper on the
floor to there being a solid stream of ants. The first project I
attempted was to teach the ants calligraphy. This related to a family
nostrum, my father’s story of an ink-blotched scratchy piece
of work he handed to his teacher at the age of eight, which was
held out to his class with the words, “Look, Kentridge has
had his homework done by an army of trained ants.” But I found
when I tried to film them writing an entire sentence, the ants would
congregate around three or four letters - which would be clearly
visible - and stay until they had consumed all the sugar on these
letters, then move onto other words. In retrospect, a complicated
time-delay overlap would have revealed the whole text, but this
will be for another project. I then tried some simple line-drawing,
an Ubu spiral-bellied man which the ants successfully made, but
which was unremarkable except for the fact it had been drawn by
ants. At this stage I was working on Journey to the Moon, the penultimate
and most complicated of the Méliès pieces, when it
struck me that I could reverse the film and use the ants for some
of the night sequences in the journey.
I had been thinking of reversals all along, but up till then in
terms of reversals of time, rather than reversals of tonality. I
reversed the film, the white of the paper becoming the dark of the
night sky and the black of the ants becoming white dots that would
coalesce into galaxies or constellations. For the rest of the week
I continued filming ants, three short fragments of which were used
in Journey to the Moon. The other fragments of which I think will
become a large scale projection, a proto-planetarium – a wall-sized
screensaver.
As with many of the fragments, although filmed using 16mm or 35mm
film cameras and referring to the early film work of George Méliès,
many of the ideas or approaches I employed, such as the reversal
of time and the reversal in tone, were tested using a domestic digital
video camera which functioned as a kind of sketch-book.
MÉLIÈS, POLLOCK, NAUMAN
Last year I spent some time looking at the early films of Bruce
Nauman, films of him walking backwards and forwards in his studio,
of him bouncing a ball, walking in slow motion, walking with contra-posto,
doing a ‘Beckett’ walk. Perhaps it was the athletic body
in jeans and T-shirt that reminded me of the films of Jackson Pollock
painting in his studio. It was as if Pollock’s canvas had been
taken away and Nauman’s left, with the studio as canvas and
himself as brush and mark in one. When I saw the films of George
Méliès I was struck by the continuity. Méliès’
films are studio films par excellence. The artist Méliès
is in the studio performing in front of his paintings. Although
Méliès’ films had many subjects - with a predilection
for devils, romantic classics, conjuring tricks performed in front
of the camera - the central subject is always Méliès
and his painted sets, the artist using the images he has made to
try and see himself. When I came to work on the fragments for Méliès,
the given, the parameter, was the artist in the studio. I kept hoping
the fragments would expand beyond this tight world, but somehow
all of them, even Journey to the Moon, kept within this frame.
SLOW-MOTION ACTING AND FORCED DEXTERITY
The fragments were made using a 16mm camera that ran at normal speed
i.e. 24 frames per second and a 35mm animation camera that would
only shoot one frame at a time, approximately one frame each second.
So some of the movements are performed at a normal speed but many
– the pacings to-and-fro across the studio - were performed
at an extreme slowness. Ideally they should have been a 1/24th of
normal speed so that when the film was projected the appearance
would match that of the film shot in real time. It demanded a kind
of controlled movement, slow and even more exact than Nauman at
his most minimal. A physical control I by no means had. In the end
I had to compensate by slowing my movement down even further, by
transferring the film to its final form on video at half or quarter
of the normal speed. The record of these performances at an 8th
or a 12th of normal speed - a catatonic death march - is, I suspect,
material for another project.
In making some of the material in Tabula Rasa I and in Journey to
the Moon, in which there is a combination of seeing a hand drawing
and lines drawing themselves, I was forced into a further reversal.
To do the animation I needed my dominant right hand to be free to
make the drawings frame by frame. I held a stick of charcoal in
my left hand. It appears to be drawing, but in fact is mostly still
or moved imperceptibly, without making a mark. To make it appear
correct when projected, I swapped the watch to my right wrist, used
- when I remembered - a mirror script, and when the film was finished,
flipped it from left to right, so I appeared right-handed again;
except that on screen my left hand does a very unconvincing performance
as my right.
GEORGE MÉLIÈS
I was told by an encyclopedia of film that Méliès
was the son of a wealthy footwear manufacturer born in Paris in
1861, studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, saw a stage conjurer
in London in 1884, left his father’s business and bought the
theatre of Robert Houdin in 1888, performed acts of conjuring and
illusion in his theatres, saw some of the early films of the Lumière
brothers, started showing some films in his theatre as part of his
act in 1896 started making his own films, producing 78 in 1897 alone,
started making films indoors with the aid of artificial lighting,
developed a wide range of tricks and effects using stop-motion,
dissolves and multiple exposures, achieved great popularity by 1903,
was bankrupt by 1915, made a living in his later years by running
a toy concession with his wife at the Montparnasse railway station.
Among his films were Séance de Prestidigitation, Tribulations
d’un Concierge, Exécution d’un Espion, La Cigale
et la Fourni, Magie Diabolique, L’Homme-Orchestre, La Maison
Tranquille, Le Voyage dans la Lune, La Femme Volante, L’Equilibre
Impossible, Le Cake-Walk Infernal.DOMESTIC REVERSALS
While playing with the controls of a new domestic video camera,
I played some tape in reverse and was held by what was revealed
(I am certainly aware I am only one of a legion of artists playing
with film reversals). Does all this come from what was immediately
at hand or possible with low to medium technology? Is our work so
much determined by current simple technical possibility? I raise
my hand guilty as charged on this count.
At first I had thought to do a whole series of films running backwards;
Reversals of Fortune or Anti-entropy it was to be called. The technique
or possibility is used a lot in the Méliès fragments,
but not in the exclusive way as I had first imagined. I suppose
the possibility of reversing film or tape is so seductive because
of its immediately revealing what the world is like if time is reversed,
what it would be like if we could remember the future. Film reversed
shows an utopian perfection of one’s skills. Throw a pot of
paint and when you catch it in reverse, not a single drop is spilt.
Tear a sheet of paper in half and it restores itself without the
smallest crease. There is an extreme politeness of objects; pull
a book out of a shelf and when you replace it, the books at each
side at the last instance shift just the right amount to make space.
From chaos there is return to order. The page of text returns letter
by letter, word by word into the pen, leaving the load of ink pregnant
with infinite possibilities.
PERFORMERS AND SCREEN
In the theatre projects I have been working on for the last decade
I have been exploring, with The Handspring Puppet Company, the relationship
between actors, puppets, and moving projections, making plays using
a combination of these elements. Sometimes the screen has functioned
simply as a backdrop to the performers, as a painted set would,
but often it has functioned in a more direct way; both because images
are moving on the screen and because images themselves become part
of the narrative of the theatre piece. The audience is asked to
make an elision between the actor and the screen. Largely through
the use of shadow-figures or filmed silhouettes, we have been working
toward a kind of live cinema in which the images on screen are constructed
in the moment. One of the starting points for the fragments for
Méliès come out of a desire to bring the theatre world
back into the studio. Perhaps having worked on a production of Faustus
there is a certain affinity with Méliès - who made
no fewer than six films based on Faustus: Le Cabinet de Méphistopheles,
Faust et Marguerite 1897 , Damnation de Faust, Les Filles du Diable,
Faust aux Enfers, Damnation du Docteur Faust.
JOURNEY TO THE MOON
A bullet-shaped rocket crashes into the surface of the moon, a fat
cigar plunged into a round face. When I watched the Méliès
film for the first time at the start of this project, I realised
that I knew this image from years before I had heard of Méliès.
I was far advanced in the making of the fragments for Méliès.
I had resisted any narrative pressure, making the premise of the
series, what arrives when the artist wanders around his studio.
What arrived was the need to do at least one film which surrendered
to narrative push. The various props accumulated in the six weeks
of making the other fragments threw themselves forward. The espresso
pot and cup from Tabula Rasa became respectively the rocket ship
and telescope, the rubbed-out landscapes from Moveable Assets the
basis for the moon landscape, the reversed catching skills from
Auto-Didact the metaphor for weightlessness, and the dark shape
that becomes the window of the rocket was one of the messy sheets
of Tabula Rasa II (‘good housekeeping’) which perforce
meant the inside of the studio was the inside of the rocket. Méliès’
moon is of course a late 19th century colonial moon, an image of
difficult terrain and savages. My lunar landscape is Gerimiston,
just outside Johannesburg; in effect the same landscape from which
the rocket takes off. In my head while making the film, there was
inescapably Jules Verne’s book (which I don’t think I
have ever read but for which I have seen illustrations), 2001 A
Space Odyssey - there is a momentary reference to this - the Wallace
& Grommit film, A Grand Day Out, and of course Méliès.
It strikes me now that he also uses live performers as planets and
stars; although my ants were smaller and more numerous than his
showgirls. If the seven earlier fragments are about wandering around
the studio waiting for something to happen, Journey to the Moon
was an attempt to escape. Méliès’ hero returns
to a civic celebration; mine is still stuck in his rocket.
MIDDLE-AGED LOVE
Using the video camera as a sketch-book and reference point, I have
been recording and drawing a series of Muybridge-like images of
Anne, my wife, climbing into a bath. A series of drawings meant
to be read as the pages of a impossible flip-book. I made another
series, a dancing couple – embracing or wrestling the drawing
is not clear enough to show.
When starting Journey to Moon, I had thought that the people on
the moon - that is the people around Johannesburg - would be shown
using torn black paper cut-outs, as they are. But when I tried to
bring some of the shadow figures inside the rocket, they appeared
ill at ease, forced. Instead, I wanted a close-up of my feet in
their shapeless boots walking across the studio; at which point
it became clear whose feet needed to accompany them.
William Kentridge
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