Archive | May, 2009

Artist Profile: Michael Stevens

Artist Profile: Michael Stevens

Posted on 28 May 2009
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Dick and Jane

For more than three decades, Michael Stevens has used nostalgic images and icons of American middle-class life from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s to create theatrical works that blend painting and sculpture to explore the contradictions of our national character. His works, which are on view at Braustein/Quay Gallery, through June 20, combine good and evil and innocence and guilt in equal parts. A subtle and sometimes savage mix of comedy and gravity, they address universal issues that transcend the uniquely American milieu from which they arise.  Few artists manage this feat with as much wit and material invention, and in this show, "One Act Plays", Stevens, 63, is in top form.

Though deeply influenced by the wood sculpture of H.C. Westerman, the surrealists Max Ernst and Rene Magritte, the collage wizard Jess Collins and his college mentor, Tony Berlant*, Stevens is a self-constructed hybrid. “I got my MA in painting,” he points out, so “I’m more about composition than about form and structure. Most sculptors see things in the round. I want to see things the way the audience sees them, as a spectator watching a play or a TV show.”
L to R: After the Hunt in E Minor; Three Wishes
   
Stevens typically sets wood-carved cartoon characters of his own invention against mass-produced landscape paintings culled from thrift shops which he modifies to establish the dramatic (and sometimes searing) counter narratives that have become his trademark. He carves animals and people from pine and applies a high-gloss finish. The paintings, which function as backdrops for the sculptural elements, depict idyllic rural scenes of the sort found in motels and diners, although Stevens occasionally throws in classically themed pictures.
  
In this Howdy Doody-meets-Alfred Hitchcock universe, demons lurk behind white picket fences, and the works carry appropriately ominous titles, like “Cliff Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and “Snake Bit”. The latter, in which a cat’s curled tail doubles as a noose, can easily be read as a suicidal thought. Others, like “After the Hunt in E Minor”, pull from obscure art-historical references (in this case the 19th century trompe-lóeil painting by William Michael Harnett);while still others remain inscrutable, sometimes even to the artist himself. In the main, though, his mix of middle-brow aesthetics, finely hewed craft and psychological intrigue centers on betrayals, disappointments and various non-specific (and sometimes very specific) threats.
Snake Bit
 
In the show’s signature piece, “Dick and Jane”, we confront two wall-sized cutouts of the familiar school-primer characters. Their silhouettes are rendered as a layered composite of kitschy landscape swatches; they’re the same idealized images seen in the Stevens’ backdrops. Close inspection, however, reveals that the figures are riddled with bullet holes – a reference to Columbine and other school-yard massacres.   
 
This bait-and-switch visual strategy mirrors Stevens’ own loss of innocence. For example, by giving an object a glossy finish, “I set something up to look really attractive. It’s like giving a juicy piece of candy to a kid. Once you draw them in you set the trap. And then, once they get involved and think there’s something there, I want to take it away from them. It seems kind of vindictive. But not everything is polished, not everything is good.” 
The Vicar’s Pup
 In “The Falsetto’s Kitty”, an obvious play on “The Sopranos”, Stevens again conflates opposites by setting a found painting of a thug (or at least a guy who looks like one) against a collection of glass bric-a-brac. This contradiction between monstrosity and domesticity is a consistent theme in Stevens’ uniquely polarized oeuvre, and it often involves animals who appear as silent or bemused witnesses to the foibles of their human masters. “The Vicar’s Pup”, for example, features the cut-out form of a fox terrier set against a bucolic landscape topped by a wooden cross – a reference to the artist’s time in Catholic school, where the harsh discipline imposed by nuns felt like "my first meeting with Darth Vader.”
 
“What I do as an artist,” he explains, “is attach my childhood to my adulthood because there are a lot of things in childhood that you mirror as an adult. For Stevens, who grew up in the‘50s, childhood is inextricably linked to the birth of television. “The cartoon characters, the personalities (like Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney) and the commercial icons – they were so high-impact they left a residue on the brain; and the companies merchandized those icons to the point where they became superstars.”   Stevens’ knowledge of early television programming  is encylopedic, and the suburban Sacramento house, which he shares with his wife, the painter Suzanne Adan, reflects that obsession. There are enough toys, lunch pails, Disney characters and period objects to fill a Happy Days museum.
 
When the relative calm of the post-WWII years dissolved into war, riots, and assassinations in the ’60s, Stevens took a dimmer view. He posits Charlie Manson and Donald Duck as examples of the gulf between the decades. “They’re both famous for different reasons, except one of them doesn’t exist and never will. But Donald Duck seems real to many people, and this is why these characters are fascinating. They both exist as part of the make up of American culture, and it’s a culture that is just as capable of giving as it is taking away. 
 
“The ‘60s,” he continues, “showed us who we were as a culture, and we battled ourselves for the first time since the civil war. The anger in my work has always been from that experience, and I always use the images from one generation [the ‘50s] to express the anger I feel in the others.”
Michael Stevens in his Sacramento Studio
 
When building a piece, Stevens does little prior planning. “I’ve been working so long I just trust my own instincts. And I don’t let not knowing prevent me from carving, say, just a head.” Or, starting with just a title. Or, scouring his storage shed for a backdrop that he can use to link disparate ideas.  “Eventually a solution will arise because it always has. It comes in like wind through a window," and it most always reflects his thoughts — about history, TV, current headlines or some personal experience where they all intersect. 
 
“If I’m anything,” Stevens says,  “I’m a satirist. I draw on universal situations, like being out on a limb and using a comedic saw to cut yourself down,” as in “Three Wishes,” where “you have three choices for the place where you will fall. The imagery that I use talks about the human condition, that theatrical predicament that we’re all in.”
 
–David M. Roth
 
Michael Stevens’ “One Act Plays” is on view through June 20 at Braunstein/Quay Gallery, SF.
 
Learn more about Michael Stevens: http://www.michaelstevensartist.com/bio.html
 
 

 

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Artist Profile: Alan Chin

Artist Profile: Alan Chin

Posted on 23 May 2009
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Alan Chin
If Alan Chin looks a bit weary, there’s a good reason. In the past 48 hours he’s slept for about three hours, which, as it turns out, is pretty typical for the 22-year-old artist, who when I met him at Sacramento’s Art Foundry Gallery, had just finished a 6-month sprint: making the 50 plus objects that he and a crew of eight friends had finishing installing several nights before, at 3 a.m.
 
Chin’s output, which includes several distinct styles of abstract painting and sculpture (in clay, wood and steel), feels like the work of at least three artists – and, quite possibly, evidence of a bionic level of energy chained to a restless spirit.  At 16 he was the youngest artist ever to be commissioned for the “Hearts of San Francisco” a benefit project for the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation. That was in 2003. Since then he’s shown in France, Italy and the Netherlands and in the Bay Area.   He’ll complete his BFA degree at California College of the Arts (CCA) next year.
 
Journey to Supernova (Orange)
His strongest canvases have a haunted, spectral quality that recalls Helen Frankenthaler’s "pour" paintings; while his large-scale ceramic sculptures, reminiscent of Miro’s, feel totemic and iconic, like relics of a lost civilization. Chin speaks effusively about these influences, while praising the CCA instructors who have mentored him, particularly Raymond Saunders (for whom he works as an assistant) and the ceramic sculptor John Toki. But his biggest influences seem to have come from outside the classroom.
 
The son of two highly successful graphic designers, Chin grew up surrounded by affluence, fine art and plenty of art-making materials, and he credits his parents, who once gave Thiebaud prints to friends as gifts, with helping him develop a keen self-critical sense, particularly in regard to aesthetic choices. “They would tell me, ‘This is a sophisticated color. This is a subtle color. This is a hot color. This is too vibrant to use.’”
 
Installation View
From his grandmother he learned about ancient rituals practiced by monks in northern China which figure prominently in his ceramic sculpture, much as the visual tropes of Louise Bourgeois do in his steel works. 
 
When he was five years old, he watched his home burn to the ground in the Oakland hills fire of 1991, and during the past five years, 24 of his friends and relatives died. “It was a sense of death and loss when I was a child,” an inkling of “wow, this can happen,” he recalls. No surprise, then, that mortality looms large in his art. Chin’s two Bourgeois homages feature spider-shaped, steel armatures under which ceramic figures cower. “I’m trying to convey the emptiness you feel when you know your body’s there, but you feel worthless and empty and totally ripped out and wonder: ‘How am I alive? How am I still functioning?’”
 
Gate of Birth: Cityscape
Chin tries to find out by examining the very essence of life in his paintings.  He made them from photographs of window glass taken with a fluorescent microscope which illuminated the cell structure of water that had crystallized on the surface. He manipulated the pictures on his computer and rendered the results more or less realistically, yielding loose, biomorphic images that look like mash-ups of oil stains and Rorschach blots.  In a similar fashion, his large ceramic sculptures refer directly to trees that burnt on his family’s property. They’re glazed with the same metal alloy of car wheels that melted in the blaze. Chin can also be topical. His “Surveillance” series of ceramic sculptures, which have orifices or eyes, came out of his experience in London, where every street is watched by omnipresent CCTV cameras.  He found Britain’s so-called “surveillance society” unnerving.
 
Chin’s already started a new cycle of work that will see him through graduation. After that, he plans to travel in Asia and Europe.  Sleep?  “Sleep," he says quoting the old African saying, "is the cousin of death.”
 
–David M. Roth
 
 
 
Alan Chin: “A Cycle,” runs through June 6 at the Art Foundry Gallery, Sacramento.
Learn more about Alan Chin: http://www.alanchinart.com/
 

 

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Gale Hart @ Solomon Dubnick

Gale Hart @ Solomon Dubnick

Posted on 15 May 2009
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Self Defense

Gale Hart is a Sacramento-based artist/activist with a long and storied history of agitating on behalf of animal and human rights. She’s done this in a multitude of media and in various high-profile events, most notably the series of anti-circus shows in which she — and several hundred cohorts — employed highly sophisticated aesthetic strategies (within a wide range of mostly figurative painting styles) to expose the cruelties imposed on animals for human entertainment.

Brand Zero

In this show of 20 new works (paintings and sculptures) at Solomon Dubnick through May 30, Hart expands her repertoire of seduce-and-clobber tactics. In the 10 acrylic-on-panel paintings that are the show’s focal point, Hart depicts events in which humans abuse animals and each other – but not always in ways that are overtly shocking. To feel their full effect you have to really look, and Hart makes sure you do. The strongest of these works depict unequal power relationships: A redneck threatens a gay man. A soldier points a rifle at a child. A stockyard worker prods the skeleton of a steer. The bejeweled head of a taxidermied deer stares back at us from a living room wall and so on. The figures are painted as silhouettes. 

Dead Before They’re Dead

By themselves, they would not be all that unsettling were it not for the fact that Hart fills the interior space of each silhouette with lines, scrapings, textures, forms and washes that together, reference a variety of art-historical and graphic design styles without quoting any of them directly. You could argue that this Rauschenberg-like surface confusion obscures her intent, but I’d argue the opposite: that it’s the plastic activity within the figures that activates paintings like “Blinded for Your Good Looks”, “Self Defense”, “Brand Zero”, “Hunting Allowed”, and “Dead Before They’re Dead”. They do what good activist art is supposed to do, which is to use aesthetics to make a point.

Hart also, in this exhibit, extends her longstanding practice of furniture making; although in Hart’s case the label “furniture” may be a bit misleading since many of the objects seem to be as sculptural as they are functional.

EM 2 Ball Table

Their support structures reference high modernists like sculptor David Smith. Their painted geometric shapes come straight out of Mondrian; and their deployment of industrial symbols, like the encircled capital letters seen on big rigs that haul toxic materials feels like a knowing wink at Deborah Oropallo.

You can sit on the sturdiest of them, and on the slenderest ones you can rest a can of beer; but chances are that neither you nor your drink will sit very comfortably.  

Which is, of course, the impact Hart has been striving for all along. 
 
            –David M. Roth

 Learn more about Gale Hart.

 

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Janice Nakashima @ Axis

Janice Nakashima @ Axis

Posted on 15 May 2009
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 You may not have noticed, but we are in the middle of a map-making epidemic. It began in the early ‘90s when artists started using maps to talk about identity and race.  But instead of drying up, as most trends do, this one’s actually picked up speed.  Now, it seems, artists everywhere are painting maps, slicing up maps or feeding raw data into computers to produce winking, blinking maps of everything from trans-national travel patterns to such seemingly mundane activities as the movement of books in and out of libraries. Several days ago I saw a collection of laminated maps conjoined by zippers, which I thought was pretty funny until I realized that under this scheme, anyplace on Earth could be seamlessly grafted onto any other place, like pieces of a modular toy. 

 
Presently
In “Wander, Wander”,  at Axis Gallery through May 31, Janice Nakashima offers a primordial take on mapping in which watercolors incorporate pieces of topographical maps. These she renders in layered washes that fuse the atmospherics of Asian landscape painting with forms that bring to mind Native American petroglyphs. While in one drawing she incorporates a literal representation of a map – as a series of concentric lines surrounding numbers that denote the elevation of an actual place – her best use of these forms comes when she employs them abstractly, in shapes that suggest birds, animals and rivers, either viewed directly, as if on a wall, or from the sky. 
Door
 
“Presently,” the strongest of the nine pieces on view at Axis, looks like a sun-faded charcoal drawing of an African textile – possibly a mud cloth overlaid with glyphs. It has the gauzy allure of a looted archeological treasure. Equally evocative is “Door,” a picture made from an aerial perspective containing map-derived images that recall land patterns of the sort typically attributed to aliens. The only weakness is that several drawings in the series are under-worked, and in these, Nakashima substitutes text for ideas that might be better expressed visually.
Red Windows 1
 By contrast, text does most of the heavy lifting in “Messages Out of Occupation,” a conceptually fraught project whose activist agenda echoes a 2007 exhibit Nakashima mounted in this same space. Here, 16 Palestinian artists living in the occupied West Bank were given a simple assignment: say something about yourself. They do so in 39 drawings on 5” x 7” cards, each of which is mounted on a wire cage and accompanied by a short message. The drawings, for the most part, seem child-like; but the messages behind them, which are scrawled on the wall and sometimes awkwardly translated, are unequivocally adult-like. They express fear, rage, hope, faith, frustration and most of all, a longing for peace.
 
Unlike Nakashima’s watercolors, which are all about wide-open spaces, the Palestinians’ voices are about confinement, and the cage through which we view their remarks is an apt metaphor for their condition – and for the freedoms that exist outside of it.
 
–David M. Roth
 
Janis Nakashima: "New Paintings" and "Messages Out of Occupation runs through May 31 at Axis Gallery
 

 

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Lewis deSoto @ SJICA

Lewis deSoto @ SJICA

Posted on 15 May 2009
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La Cena Pasada
 La Cena Pasada
Would Jesus drive a ’64 Chevelle wagon? Would Judas pilot a ‘60 Ford Starliner? Those were a few of the choices conceptualist Lewis deSoto grappled with in assembling a contemporary take on Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, one of 15 pieces that figure prominently in a 36-year survey that
 
includes photography, sound installations, sculpture and prints . At a distance, one might reasonably wonder what the connecting thread is between these works. After all, deSoto is perhaps best known for transforming a ‘65 Chrysler New Yorker into a vehicle of historic re-imagination in which the truth about his namesake, the Spanish conquistador Hernando deSoto, is revealed. Here, in a tightly focused, elegantly mounted retrospective, Before After, the artist demonstrates that regardless of media, his work revolves around three themes: desire, mortality and transcendence. The result is a portrait of a hydrocarbon-powered, millennia-straddling Zen Catholic whose quest for meaning roams from the earthly to the ethereal. 
 
The Restoration
The show opens with an olfactory blast from a room strewn with cocoa hulls, End of Desire (2008).  It functions like a Zen joke: You can salivate or resist the overpowering odor of chocolate, but either way you’re trapped in a cycle of competing desires that do not, in the Zen scheme of things, lead to enlightenment. Pakhgan-gyi (2003), a collage of tiny pornographic images inserted in and around outlines of the Buddha’s footprints, makes the same point by appealing simultaneously to voyeurism and whatever its opposite is. Fittingly, the exit image of a nearby grid of 24 black-and-white photographs, Basho (1977), was of a hearse. This montage, dominated by memory-laden images, leads viewers into a gallery filled with op-ish, computer-generated prints and sculptural representations of the artist’s deceased father.
 
The latter homage, which plumbs the mysteries of corporeal existence, takes several forms: an aluminum torso outfitted with a motorcycle gas valve, which was (presumably) opened to fill the cavity with holy water; a wooden armature covered with fabric in the shape of the deceased’s body; and a suit of armor arrayed on the floor that emitted ticking sounds that the artist compares to those of a cooling engine. By likening the life force to things vehicular, the artist demonstrates how we anthropomorphize machines and how automobiles become objects of quasi-religious devotion that are woven into the fabric of our existence.
Recumbent (Entropy)
La Cena Pasada (2002) goes even further by replacing the above-referenced dramatis personae of Da Vinci’s 15th century Last Supper with 13 scale models of ‘60s-era muscle cars. These appear in a glass vitrine. In a similar spirit, the artist updates Vermeer with The Restoration (2005), a back-lit transparency in which a baby-blue ‘64 Pontiac Grand Prix appears on the parquet floor of a suburban kitchen, attended to by a mechanic who looks a bit like Jesus and a maid who could have walked off one of the Dutch master’s canvases. ICA Director Cathy Kimball writes in a superb exhibition brochure that deSoto was strongly influenced by Vermeer’s sense of color and light and by his practice of inserting symbolic objects. Yet it’s the car at center stage that dominates. What it and similar references point to is the syncretistic mix of car culture and religion that pervades much of deSoto’s output. And it’s this reflexive, irony-free combination of the two that gives the work its power.
 
Elsewhere, The Site Projects (1981-83) document deSoto’s forays into environmental photography. These were inspired by Robert Smithson’s earthworks. But instead of bulldozing dirt, deSoto photographed moving light sources at night with long exposures. Of four examples on view, Tideline resonates most strongly. A crepuscular image made under extraordinary natural lighting conditions, it combines the time-lapse effects of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) with same feelings of infinity generated by Richard Misrach’s pictures which came two decades later. The idea, that humankind is just a spec in the universe, is a consistent theme throughout.
 
Zenith
The exhibition concludes with two powerful installations. Zenith (2000), a wall-mounted hi-fi cabinet, feels as if it’s being levitated by the drone of an audio loop from the minimalist composer Terry Riley, but is really an unrecognizable snippet from the Jackie Gleason Orchestra. Lament (2009), situated in a narrow, nearly dark corridor, reverberates with the recorded voice of opera singer Erin Neff, who improvised a haunting melody to words from Herman Hesse’s 1943 novel The Glass Bead Game, about a life that starts promisingly and ends tragically. It’s a remarkable piece of acoustical alchemy that turns a small space into something cathedral-like. Penetrated by a dim ray of blue light, the space serves as a metaphor what lies ahead for all of us.
 
Like so much else in this show that is transporting, Lament whisks us out of ourselves with a dissonant, bittersweet message: that while life does have an endpoint, there is also light at the end of the tunnel.
 
–DAVID M. ROTH
 
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Lewis deSoto’s Before After closed March 28 at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art.
Learn more about Lewis deSoto.
 
 

 

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William Kentridge @ SFMOMA

William Kentridge @ SFMOMA

Posted on 04 May 2009
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If anyone doubts the importance of William Kentridge, “Five Themes,” a sprawling exhibition at SFMOMA through May 31, establishes him as one of the most profound artists working today.  During his 30-year career, the South African artist has created and directed operas, designed sets, cast bronze sculpture, animated shadow puppets and worked as an actor; and he channels that experience into films that grab at the subconscious and don’t let go. This is one the strongest shows the museum has ever mounted.  

Untitled Artist and Model Drawing
Drawing is the core of Kentridge’s art. He does it prolifically and obsessively, but not always with commanding distinction – at least not in the works that he erases and re-works for his films. Most of the 48 (mostly charcoal) drawings on view here have the feel of the quickly rendered studies, which in fact they are. His best drawings, the one viewers are likely to really savor, are his self-portraits. They appear in various guises, the strongest of which invert artist-model relationships in a powerful Expressionist style. 
 
Kentridge’s real power, though, derives from the way he combines drawing and stagecraft in stop-animation films that deal with the unfinished business of the 20th century: namely, humanity’s unchecked record of racist violence and cruelty. If Freud and Marx loom large, Kentridge tells us it’s because we don’t understand our own psyches, nor have we figured out a way to equitably divide the world’s riches so that war stops being the planet’s most reliable growth industry. 
Ubu and the Procession
 
Yes, there’s some grim and unsettling stuff in this show – like the human rights abuses depicted in films like “Ubu and the Procession,” one of several Kentridge takes on Apartheid based on Alfred Jarry’s 1888 satiric play “Ubu Roi” about a deranged despot. But such images are tempered by so much playfulness and graphic inventiveness that we rarely experience anything horrific for a sustained period. Kentridge turns hand-drawn images into surrealist-inspired films that unfold like dreams, accompanied by Philip Miller’s extraordinary original music.
 
Central to everything Kentridge does is the idea of moral relativity — that good and evil stand at opposite ends of a slippery continuum. That notion, when applied to artistic decision-making, means no work of art is ever finished. To demonstrate, Kentridge runs nine projections simultaneously on the walls of a large installation called “The Artist in the Studio”. In it, drawings animate, mutate and self destruct; a spilled cup of coffee morphs into an abstract painting; an animate cloth wipes ink off paper like a magnet attracting iron fillings; and the artist (on film) engages in feats of telekinesis. This light-hearted and hilarious opening act positions Kentridge, somewhat hyperbolically, as a wizard. But it’s no exaggeration: Each of the four “themes” that follows is epic in scope and massively inventive in technique and presentation. 
 
Scenes from Ubu Tells the Truth
“Shadow Procession” begins with a parade of puppets whose silhouetted infirmities and burdens recall every migration of nomads and refugees in human history. It sets the tone for the companion film, “Ubu Tells the Truth,” whose protagonist, Ubu, (looking pretty much like Jarry’s original woodcut) becomes a hideous composite of Mussolini, Adi Amin and Mr. Potato Head. He gesticulates psychotically and shape-shifts into forms that stand in for the repressive tools of Apartheid: a surveillance camera, a machine gun, a helicopter and a rotating (Dali-like) eyeball. These forms are intercut with news footage of police quelling demonstrations and stop-animation drawings of brutality– all set to a global soundtrack (Hawaiian, Cajun, delta blues, township jive, Afro-beat) that injects an incessant rhythm and a necessary tragicomic counterpoint to the visuals. In the final sequence, when the camera backs away from a skyscraper to reveal scenes of abuse in each of the building’s windows, state-sponsored terror isn’t an abstract idea; it’s a palpable fact.
 
While Kentridge is painfully aware of the havoc wreaked by ideologies that have run amok, he’s also attracted to the utopian visions that accompanied them, specifically those of the Russian avant-garde before Stalin crushed it. In “Learning From the Absurd: The Nose,” a series of films loosely based around Nikolai Gogol’s story about a St. Petersburg official who loses his nose to a higher-ranking apparatchik, he fills the walls with

A Lifetime of Enthusiam — from The Nose

propagandistic graphics that gleefully dance before our eyes, asserting the optimism of the movement. Red-tinged, collaged and geometrically sharp-edged, they feel fresh and revolutionary even now. In contrast, documentary footage of Russian workers marching in a parade and a projection of dialog from the interrogation of Nikolai Bukharin by the Communist Party’s Central Committee cast a pall: the parade because we know how so many workers’ lives ended; the “trial” because it demonstrates how the Soviet system extinguished the souls of even its most loyal lieutenants. As for the nose itself, the most telling sequence has Kentridge climbing (and repeatedly falling down) a staircase wearing an outsized nose over his head like a giant mask. It’s a Sisyphean metaphor for the thwarted aspirations of any number of failed states.

The Nose
 
If this sounds unrelentingly bleak, it’s not. At least not the way Kentridge presents it. With eight projections running simultaneously, you can walk around the room and assemble the fragments however you like. Or, you can stand in one spot and watch any film from beginning to end. Kentridge may throw down a gauntlet of sorts with weighty, historic material, but he never manipulates conclusions; the very lack of structure in these films compels viewers to build their own narratives. 
 
The two most innovative examples of this are the two “theatre boxes” he created as studies for his staging of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”. The storyline, which is only hinted at, seems almost beside the point; it’s the melding of animated drawing and computer-assisted “choreography” that makes these presentations compelling. Modeled on the layering of bellows in an old view camera, each
Country Dances
box consists of painted “columns” onto which film is projected from both front and rear. This creates a receding perspective and the illusion of multiple scrims hanging at varying depths. Add in mechanical shadow puppets that enter and exit from the sides of the “stage” (as they do in “Black Box”) and you have, well, a lot of moving parts through which the racial politics of South Africa (and the rest of the continent) play out. But these are not polemics. Kentridge mixes in so much abstract imagery that the presentations quickly migrate into a poetic, dream-like realm from which it’s hard to awaken. 
 
"Theater Boxes" — The Magic Flute
 
Somewhat ironically, it’s Kentridge’s earliest, least technologically complex series of animated drawings, “Thick Time: Soho and Felix,” that proves to be the most dream-like — and the most emotionally charged. These nine films, which run serially, concern two characters: Soho Eckstein, a greedy industrialist with a troubled conscience, a crumbling empire and a wayward wife, and Felix Teitlebaum, a homeless aesthete who longs for and eventually becomes Mrs. Eckstein’s lover. Against a backdrop of environmental degradation and popular unrest, Soho’s health and wealth vanish and — contrary to expectation — we feel his pain. We feel it because of Kentridge’s technique. He presents an image, modifies it, wipes it away, and then replaces it with something else to suggest in a pure and very literal form, the fluid nature of thought, memory, feeling and life itself – all in granular, textured forms that dissolve, one-into-another, like melting snowflakes.
 
Scenes from Thick Time: Soho and Felix
Many people left “Thick Time” and the other installations with moist eyes, and not because they fell for cheap sentimentality, but because the films replicate and stimulate the workings of the unconscious mind, allowing us to associate images and events according to our needs. That they make such pointed statements through what is essentially a loose, improvisational process is a testament to the artist’s consummate skill and vision. 
 
The overall effect is like drinking straight from a bottle. You may leave a little wobbly, but you’re better off for having done so. 
– DAVID M. ROTH
 
Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, “The Nose,” directed by William Kentridge, opens March 5, 2010 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
 
Watch William Kentridge videos on youtube.

 

 

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