The Head & the Load (the trumpets we used to blow)
Daniel Nelson
There’s a lot to be said about the William Kentridge exhibition at the Royal Academy. But the main point is: it’s brilliant.
It’s big, inventive and shape-shifting. Every room brings pleasure, raises interest, offers ideas.
Much of it is about Johannesburg, the place of his birth, basic education, life and work, but like his ceaselessly morphing black and white ghostly animations his work flows out to the rest of Africa and embraces places and times further afield, such as Mao’s China.
Drawing, static and mobile, often charcoal, is at its heart - an extraordinary contrast with the knock-out colour of the recent In the Black Fantastic exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.
From the show’s opening room the work reflects the brutality and threat of apartheid, with government officials in the form of wild animals. The pictures rapidly grow to ominous sizes. Everything looks sinister.
Then his drawings begin to move. The animations, too, are often disturbing, mesmerising. In one room four animations play simultaneously. You are bombarded with images that are hard to process consciously but conjure up a phantasmagoria of Africa. Two invented figures begin to recur: industrialist Soho Eckstein and artist Felkix Teitelbaum.
The animations reflect many influences on his life, including a student switch from Fine Art to political science and African studies, political activism, conscription in the South African army, spells in Paris and London, years in the world of theatre.
He says he failed in all his other careers, but it’s obvious as you walk through his work and his head that he doesn’t discard his experiences but gathers and takes them with him and transmutes them on paper and screen — and into tapestries; into a version of an 18th century miniature mechanised theatre; into films about the first genocide of the 20th century, by the Germans against the Herero in what is now Namibia, and films of him in conversation with himself; and into idiosyncratic maps [“Drawings for the Head & the Load (the trumpets we used to blow”)]
There’s more: sculpture and an animation of Kentridge walking across the turning pages of a book, and two rooms of flowers and trees.
And opera. For me, the climax — not necessarily the best, but the most exhilarating — of this captivating, thought-provoking body of work is “Notes towards a model opera”. It points to the way Mao’s proletarian revolution echoed apartheid strategies, with both making use of the violent suppression of free thought and enforced relocations.
But it does so in a way that matches the political punch of the message with a wonderful visual humour: a rifle-carrying African women shakes her booty while dancing en pointe, to the accompaniment of absurd tyrannical exhortations and foot–tapping African music.
There’s so much to savour, enjoy and consider in Kentridge’s awful, wonderful world.
* William Kentridge, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1, until 11 December. Info: 7300 8090/ www.royalacademy.org.uk
28 Sept, Kentridge performs his multimedia performance of Ursonate, 6-7pm, £20/£12
1 Oct, Kafka’s Ape, adaptation of a Franz Kafka short story, highlighting the complexities of identity in post-apartheid South Africa, 6-7pm, £20/£12
3 Nov, William Kentridge and Samira Ahmed: In conversation, in person and livestream, 6.30-7.30pm, on site £20/£12, online £8/£5