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tavily_search,0.0,3.023197889328003,What year was the first time that William Kentridge appeared in the Time 100?,5.0,,,,
page_scrape,3.1057918071746826,4.635124444961548,,,https://forward.com/culture/187082/south-african-jewish-artist-william-kentridge-bend/,3152.0,"# South African Jewish Artist William Kentridge Bends Time
**Time Transfixed:** William Kentridge?s installation ?The Refusal of Time? was first displayed at the 2012 Documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.Image by Metropolitan Museum of Art
Titled“The Refusal of Time,”Kentridge’s exhibit is a joint acquisition of the Met and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that was first exhibited in 2012 at Documenta, a 100-day exhibition of art in Kassel, Germany, In cooperation with the South African composer Philip Miller and Peter Galison, a science historian at Harvard University, as well as more than 20 singers, actors and dancers,Kentridgeworked for two years to realize this multimedia art and sound installation.
Kentridge is of Jewish-Lithuanian descent and grew up in South Africa, where he still lives today. His father was a famous lawyer who defended many anti-apartheid activists.
Kentridge studied drama and worked as an actor and director in Johannesburg before focusing on drawing and creating animations.
His current project is intended to question the notion of time. Large video projections cover three of the four walls, and the surrounding sounds immerse the viewer in the work, making it easy for one to lose track of how much time he or she has spent at the exhibit. In the middle of the room, a so-called “breathing machine” — a device not unlike an organ that creates a rhythmic, comforting background noise by means of a pumping bellows.
These are two of Kentridge’s frequent themes, appearing also in his 2000 series Atlas Procession, in which etchings depict a seemingly endless march taking place before an industrial backdrop.
The performance in “The Refusal of Time” lasts about half an hour, but it can and should be watched multiple times, and from varying perspectives. The pace of the videos changes, adding to the feeling that time is nonlinear. At some point, all the screens display metronomes that move at different speeds — so the directions of one’s gaze determine the pace.
In the darkened room, it is difficult to gauge visitors’ reactions. Hardly anyone stays to watch the entire performance. When a person stands up to leave, he or she becomes part of the installation by casting a shadow onto the projection. Thought-provoking imagery follows invigorating rhythm and is, in turn, followed by silence. The more time one spends with the installation, the more one can not only take in the astounding variety of Kentridge’s work and explore the recurring themes, but also experience the whole cycle of feelings, all of which are evoked by the changing pace and content displayed here.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the _Forward_ has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
**This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.**
### At 87, one of the great Jewish film directors thinks there’s still time to start over
### South African Jewish Artist William Kentridge Bends Time
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page_scrape,3.1072776317596436,5.775135278701782,,,https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/18/lines-of-resistance,35813.0,"Kentridge performing a monologue inspired by Gogol.Photograph by Steve Pyke
A few minutes before going onstage to deliver his theatrical monologue “I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine,” in New York on November 9th, the South African artist William Kentridge admitted that he was feeling “rather stressed.” He didn’t show it. Kentridge, who is fifty-four, is a solidly built man of medium height, with deep-set blue eyes and the distinctive profile of a Roman proconsul. Dressed as usual in dark trousers and a white open-necked shirt, he seemed thoughtful but confident.
Nearly four hundred people had come to see him, in a cavernous ground-floor space on West Twenty-sixth Street. (The event was sponsored by Performa 09, a three-week series of performance pieces by artists in different venues around the city.) The overflow turnout was an indication of how influential Kentridge’s work has become since 1997, when his drawings, prints, and strangely compelling animated films started to register outside his native city of Johannesburg. A major Kentridge exhibition opens on February 24th at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized originally by the independent curator Mark Rosenthal, the show is appearing at eight other museums here and abroad. On March 5th, a Kentridge-directed-and-designed production of “The Nose,” the rarely performed opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, will have its première at the Metropolitan Opera. It is hard to remember when a visual artist has cut such a wide swath in the city’s cultural life, or spanned so many disciplines with such aplomb. “I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine” (the title is from Russian folklore, and refers to a Russian peasant’s denial of guilt) is a by-product of his two-year focus on the Shostakovich opera, which is based on a story by Nikolai Gogol. Although Kentridge often shows up in his drawings and films, this is the first piece in which he has appeared, live, as a solo performer. Promptly at ten past eight, with no introduction, he stepped up on the low platform that served as a stage, surveyed the rapidly quieting audience, and began, in a resonant and cultivated voice, to talk about Gogol’s “The Nose.”
His summary of the plot was concise and dramatic. Kovalyov, a minor bureaucrat in tsarist Russia, wakes up one morning and realizes that his nose has vanished. During his frantic efforts to find it, he spies his nose on the street, strutting about in the uniform of a government official whose rank is higher than his own. He confronts it timidly, and the nose rebuffs him with contempt. At length, after more humiliating encounters, Kovalyov and his nose are abruptly and inexplicably reunited. The Kafka-like tale, satirizing self-image and the terrors of hierarchy, set Kentridge off on a wide-ranging, forty-minute exploration of the absurdist impulse in literature, art, and history, and in his own life. From time to time, he was joined on the stage by projected video images of himself: first one and then two white-shirted figures who came and went mutely, sat down, stood up, moved furniture, and eventually imitated Kentridge’s habit, during his talk, of tossing his lecture notes into the air. Kentridge’s precisely timed attempts to intimidate or ignore his split selves, and to catch and retrieve the projected images of notes, drew somewhat uneasy laughs, but the audience stayed with him. Near the end, he put on gold-rimmed pince-nez (which he keeps in his shirt pocket, tethered by a black shoelace) and read excerpts from Nikolai Bukharin’s testimony, in 1937, before a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow. The doomed Bukharin’s appeals to reason and human decency, and the ironic laughter with which they were received, pushed the absurdist theme into political areas that Kentridge, who grew up with the ambiguities of being white and Jewish in South Africa, has dealt with throughout his work. No artist is less didactic than Kentridge, however, and he offered no explicit connections. He ended his performance in pensive silence, looking away from us as the stage lights went down.
Like many people, I can remember the first time I saw a Kentridge film. It was in 1999, in a Projects show at the Museum of Modern Art, and the film was called “Stereoscope.” An eight-minute sequence of hand-drawn animations, it included a heavyset businessman in a dark chalk-striped suit, sitting at a desk piled with papers; a dozen or more people manning a huge switchboard, from which swiftly moving cobalt-blue lines proliferated and intersected; individual men and women being pushed aside and obscured by pages of meaningless numbers; a dense crowd of people surging through city streets; men kicking or beating helpless victims. The businessman reappeared toward the end, holding his head in apparent anguish; the word “ _GIVE_ ,” in large capitals, filled the screen and changed to “ _FORGIVE_ ”; the businessman stood, looking down, as blue water poured from the pockets of his clothes, filling the room. The images were crudely but powerfully drawn, in charcoal and blue pastel, and filmed in an old-fashioned stop-motion technique. I had never heard of Kentridge, didn’t know he was South African, didn’t understand that his images were rooted in the terrible history of apartheid and its aftermath, but the film made me forget where I was.
“Stereoscope” is the eighth of Kentridge’s “Nine Drawings for Projection,” the series that launched international interest in his work. During several conversations I had with him last fall, when he was in New York, he told me that the first film in the series, titled “Johannesburg, Second Greatest City After Paris,” came about more or less by accident, in the late eighties. He was thirty-four years old at the time, married to a doctor, with two young children, and he considered himself a failure at everything he had tried to do—painting, acting, commercial filmmaking. It was a particularly grim time in South Africa. To stem the mounting internal opposition to apartheid, a state-of-emergency law had been passed in 1985, and arrests and police brutality were on the rise. International sanctions and boycotts had isolated the country from Europe and most of the world. Kentridge decided at this point to go back to the one thing he had always been able to do well, which was drawing. The artists he admired most, then and now, tended to be great draftsmen—Goya, Max Beckmann, Picasso—and his new, large-scale charcoal drawings and engravings, many of them quick studies of people he had seen on the street, had that kind of unrefined intensity. A Johannesburg art gallery exhibited them in 1985 and 1986, and although quite a few were sold, Kentridge still felt discouraged. “I had a terrifying moment of thinking, An exhibition every eighteen months, another forty years of work—is that all it’s going to be?” he told me. “I needed to find something else.” Using a borrowed 16-mm. Bolex movie camera, he began making a film in his studio, with the Warholian idea that anyone or anything that came in would be included. One of his charcoal drawings was on the wall; he filmed its successive changes and erasures. When his close friend Angus Gibson, a filmmaker and film editor, saw the raw footage, Kentridge told me, “he said the only interesting part was the drawing, and why didn’t I make a film out of drawings? Angus nursed that first film into being.”
Kentridge didn’t know where he was going with it. “I had two men,” he said. “One was Soho Eckstein, a character I’d used in posters for trade unions. That was easy, the businessman in the pin-striped suit—it was made for drawing. I had no idea what the other man would wear, so I decided to make him without clothes. And I put a woman between them, who became Mrs. Eckstein.” The naked man is Felix Teitlebaum, a sensitive poet and dreamer, the lover of Eckstein’s voluptuous wife. Felix and Mrs. Eckstein appear in three of the nine films, and Soho appears in all of them. “Much later, I realized there were elements of me in both men,” Kentridge said. “I look back now and think, How lucky not to know what you’re doing.”
Banner design for production of “The Nose.”Courtesy William Kentridge / Marian Goodman Gallery, NY
There were no storyboards; nothing was worked out in advance. “It doesn’t start with a social message,” he explained. “It starts with images that interest me, or provoke me.” He found he could make a crowd move across a landscape by placing a tiny dot in one corner and gradually adding more. He called his method “stone-age animation.” For a sequence that would take hundreds of computer-drawn cels in a Pixar film, Kentridge used a single charcoal drawing, altered and rephotographed again and again. The shadowy leftover traces of smudged or erased lines made each film a palimpsest, a history of its own making. I still can’t figure out why these stubbornly low-tech films are so moving. In “Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old,” the fourth in the series, Eckstein, whose wife has left him, stands facing away from us into a blasted postindustrial landscape, under a sign reading “Her Absence Filled the World.” Kentridge’s friend Yvette Christiansë, a South African poet and novelist who teaches at Fordham, told me that when she shows a Kentridge film to her freshman class “they don’t breathe until it stops, and then they don’t know how to talk about it. This happens every time.” I know artists who dismiss his work as retro and maybe a bit kitsch. The _Times_ art critic Roberta Smith has described his drawings as generic and impersonal. The European curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, one of his main supporters, once wrote that Kentridge, by denying coherence, clarity, and style, has created “an art of ‘resistance’ to modernism _and_ post-modernism.” I agree with her. For me, the “Nine Drawings for Projection” have a rough magic that’s unlike anything else in contemporary art.
When Kentridge was five, he discovered in his father’s desk a folder of eight-by-ten photographs of black people who had been shot by the police in the Sharpeville massacre. “It was certainly a shock to be expecting to find chocolates and see these photographs,” he recalls. “But it was even more of a shock to see the difference between an entry wound, just a dark little hole in the back of someone’s jacket, and the next photo of the person rolled over, with an exit wound that was the whole chest exploded. I never mentioned to my father that I had seen them, not until years later. That the adult world could be this violent—it didn’t fit any conceivable notion. It was one of those moments when one’s understanding of the world turns a sharp corner.” Sydney Kentridge, his father, was a leading trial lawyer in the anti-apartheid movement, and his wife, Felicia, co-founded the most important public-interest law firm in South Africa. They were brilliant, magnetic people, extravagantly admired by their many friends, and by the liberal intelligentsia whom they welcomed to their house. A family member recalls the novelist Nadine Gordimer’s saying that when Felicia walked into a room it took your breath away. When William was growing up, he often considered becoming a lawyer. “I think I’d have been able to do that, and do it well,” he told me. “But it always seemed that my father’s was an impossible act to follow.” His three siblings apparently felt the same way. William’s older sister, who lives in Toronto, is a marriage officer. His younger brother is a management consultant, and his younger sister is an artist; they both live in England. Sydney and Felicia Kentridge left South Africa, moving to London in 1981. “My father couldn’t bear to appear before the terrible South African judges anymore, and it seemed impossible that things would change,” William told me. “I am the only one who’s still here.”
The family lived in a large, comfortable house, on a hillside about two miles from the city’s center, with three acres of rambling English-style gardens. Their black servants lived in separate quarters on the property. Kentridge was a bright, articulate child, with a lively sense of humor. His father recalls an incident when he was five, and his mother, who was taking him out, told him to wash his hands and put on his shoes: “ ‘One or the other,’ William said. ‘Not both.’ ” He went to the all-white boys’ school that his father had attended. Most of his classmates came from families that supported the conservative United Party, and they saw nothing unusual about their social situation. Because of his parents, though, Kentridge was aware early on that he lived in an abnormal society, where terrible things were done every day.
He did well in school, and he acted in all his class plays. He also did a lot of drawing. He remembers, at one of his first art lessons as a child, being given a piece of charcoal, which seemed “more serious than a pencil.” Kentridge had art lessons every Saturday morning until he was fourteen, when he started going to life-drawing classes with an artist named Bill Ainslie, whom his parents had got to know when they asked him to paint a portrait of their younger son and daughter.
At the local University of the Witwatersrand, which he entered in 1973, after a year of compulsory military service, Kentridge majored in politics and African studies. He also directed and acted in theatrical productions, many of which were politically based; student opposition to the apartheid government was rife at the university, and Kentridge did some marching and protesting. At least half his time, though, was spent off campus at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, a non-racial, non-credit art school that Bill Ainslie had started in 1972. Kentridge was trying to be a painter then, and not making much headway. His problem was with color. “I found it really difficult to choose one color as opposed to another,” he said. There was no such indecision in his relationship with Anne Stanwix, an Australian whose family had moved to South Africa when she was sixteen. She had come to his high school once, with the debating team of her all-girls’ school. Kentridge had been in the audience that night, and afterward he invited her to have tea with him. They met again in freshman year at the university, where she was studying medicine, and they have been together ever since.
For several years after college, Kentridge seemed headed for a career in the theatre. He and some fellow-students had started the Junction Avenue Theatre Company in 1975, while they were still in school; they performed in Johannesburg, doing Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” and other experimental workshop productions, one of which, “The Fantastical History of a Useless Man,” was about “what it felt like to be white and useless in South Africa.” Kentridge said, “We finished it in 1976, just as the Soweto riots exploded, and we had this big discussion: Do we keep going or do we stop?” The group eventually joined forces with a black theatre company called Workshop ’71 and continued performing. Kentridge acted, directed, designed sets, and made posters. (He also designed posters for the black trade unions, which had gained the right to strike in 1979.) He kept taking art classes at Ainslie’s foundation, and made drawings and prints on his own. Eventually, though, his problems in handling oil paint convinced him that he could never make it as an artist, so he decided to go to Paris and become a serious actor.
He and Anne finished out the year in Paris. She was doing her residency at the American Hospital, and he was learning more about art, he said, than he had ever learned in art school. Kentridge described a rigorous exercise in which Lecoq students had to act out six degrees of tension in breathing and speaking—he demonstrated them for me—from a kind of lassitude that made movement of any kind virtually impossible, to the sixth degree, in which the simple act of picking up a fork involves a “rictus of tension that corresponds to Japanese Noh theatre.” The exercise, he said, helped to instill a physical awareness of energy withheld and spent, and it could also be applied to drawing: “You go from a looseness of mark-making to an efficient one to a gestural one.”
He and Anne decided it would be fun to get married in Paris, but, lacking the required documents, they married in London instead. In 1982, they returned to Johannesburg—“that rather desperate provincial city,” as Kentridge once called it. The city and its complex history fascinate him: the mineral wealth (gold and diamonds) that made it an industrial giant and left on its outskirts a wasteland of abandoned mines and industries, which appear again and again in his films; the fact that its two most famous residents in the last century were Gandhi and Nelson Mandela; the discovery, in limestone caves thirty miles from the city, of hominid fossils that push back the date of human origins by a million years or more. “There is something extraordinarily ugly/beautiful about Johannesburg that informs his work,” his friend Angus Gibson said last fall. “I can’t imagine him living anywhere else.” The Kentridges took a house in a low-rent district near the center of town, where, a little later, drug dealers operated openly. “People were constantly coming in to get their wounds mended by Anne,” Gibson recalls.
Kentridge worked in the commercial-film industry. He did props and designed sets for television, and went on to make a few documentaries and one short feature. “I had a friend who used to ask me, jokingly, when I was going to get a real job,” he recalls. “One day, he said, ‘You are now unemployable. You’re nearing thirty, you’ve never had a job, and no one will hire you, so do what you’re doing and stop complaining.’ Our first child, Alice, was born soon afterward, in 1984, and suddenly there was a big change of focus. I started drawing again. That’s the point where I began to write ‘artist’ on application forms, rather than ‘technician.’ Sink or swim, I was reduced to being an artist.”
The cultural boycott of South Africa, he says, made it easier to find his way. It meant he could work quietly on his own, without trying to keep abreast of current developments elsewhere. His knowledge of contemporary art was limited. “I had never heard of Bruce Nauman,” he said. “I was aware of Joseph Beuys—Beuys and his honey pump, which was supposed to be political art. But politics is not spreading honey around the main building at the Documenta art exhibition. It’s putting electrodes on people’s testicles, locking them up, putting them in fear of their lives. There was some anger separating me from the naïveté of Jasper Johns, who could celebrate his national flag so un-ironically. In South Africa you could not begin to paint the flag.” The minimalists and conceptualists made him marvel at the huge gap between his experience and theirs. “Part of this was a mixture of ignorance and provincial disdain for the center,” he said. “At any rate, there was no expectation of my work appearing in _Flash Art_ or _Art in America_ , so the terror those magazines exercised over a lot of young artists wasn’t there. And by the time the cultural boycott ended, in 1990, I was making the animated films. When they were shown in exhibitions outside South Africa, and curators responded to them on their own terms, I was astonished.”
Two of Kentridge’s films, “Felix in Exile” and “History of the Main Complaint,” drew widespread comment at the 1997 Documenta X exhibition, in Kassel, Germany. His timing could not have been better. Globalism was in flower, and one of its manifestations was a surge of interest in new forms of art from countries outside Europe and the United States. “He just came soaring through that,” according to Connie Butler, the chief curator of drawings at _MOMA_ , who saw his work the next year at the Drawing Center in New York. “His drawings had an intensely local feeling,” she said, “but I remember being struck by the combination of their intimacy and their performative quality—something I had never seen before.” Klaus Biesenbach, one of three _MOMA_ curators who will install the Kentridge show at the museum next month, told me that Kentridge’s time-and-process-based art, “which bridges opera, theatre, movies, sculpture, and drawing,” could not have been shown on this scale at a major museum ten years ago. “It’s a huge shift in paradigms,” he said.
Apartheid ended in 1994, when the African National Congress Party won the first democratic election, and Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa. For Kentridge, though, the key event had occurred four years earlier: “I was driving on a highway, listening to the boring opening of Parliament in 1990, when the announcement came that all the political parties banned since the nineteen-sixties would be unbanned. I pulled off to the side of the road, because I understood that everything was going to be different. We didn’t know what would happen, whether it would turn into civil war, but we realized that the unchangeable blocked situation had just been rolled over. That was the night we opened the champagne.”
The transfer of power from the outgoing government to Mandela’s party was fraught with tensions and uncertainties. “It seemed wonderful that we had a country transforming itself without the streets running in blood, and that we had a political compromise, but the price of the compromise was deeply felt,” Kentridge said. “The main decision was to put the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in place, with the understanding that terrible criminals would be let off scot-free as long as they told the truth about what they had done. There’s a cost to pay for that kind of amnesty. The choice was made between truth and justice, and it meant not taking responsibility for your actions.”
This dilemma was reflected, though never overtly, in Kentridge’s work. In 1992, he had begun to collaborate with the Handspring Puppet Company, a professional troupe that performed mainly in Cape Town and Johannesburg. He made animated film projections, which were used onstage with large, hand-carved wooden puppets, each of them manipulated by two live actors. “Faustus in Africa!,” their 1995 adaptation of the Faust story, resonated with undertones of the bitter choices being made in post-apartheid South Africa. Testimony from the Truth and Reconciliation hearings informed “History of the Main Complaint” and figured prominently in “Ubu Tells the Truth,” an animated film whose central image is the monstrous tyrant of Jarry’s play. Kentridge never tried to illustrate apartheid or its aftermath directly, but much of his work in the nineteen-nineties stemmed from his own struggle to come to terms with a compromised society. As he once explained, “I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures, and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.”
Kentridge’s parents returned from London several times a year for visits of varying length. They came back less often as the years passed, and in 1997 William and Anne and their three children—Isabel was born in 1988, Samuel in 1992—moved into his parents’ big house in Johannesburg. “We’d thought the only way we could manage it financially was to break up the property and sell off sections,” Anne recalls, “but that was the year William showed at Documenta, and the year Marian Goodman asked him to join her gallery in New York. He was also approached by a dealer in London, and suddenly we could afford the rates and taxes and all the gardening costs. His parents had planted two cypress trees—one on either side of the front door—which had grown so high, in forty years, that they blocked the view. When we told William’s parents that we were going to cut them down, it felt a bit like matricide and patricide—those two looming figures too large for us to cope with.” Anne worked long hours at the main public hospital, where she was a rheumatologist. She also took a keen interest in William’s work, commenting on it with candor, and even appearing nude in one of his films. Kentridge turned the sitting room into his studio, where the children were always welcome—he would get them to make shadow puppets or paint posters. He took them to school and brought them home, and he did much of the cooking. (His birthday cakes were very inventive: Alice remembers getting a giraffe one year and a pirate chest full of gold coins another.) Eventually, he built a larger studio, in the garden.
Work poured out of him—films, sculptures, puppet-theatre productions, charcoal drawings, and also prints, which have always been an important part of his oeuvre. One of Kentridge’s projects with the Handspring Puppet Company had been an adaptation of Monteverdi’s opera “The Return of Ulysses,” which he designed and directed. Widely performed, it caught the attention of Bernard Foccroulle, then the director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, in Brussels, who asked Kentridge if he would be interested in staging—designing and directing—a full-dress opera. Kentridge loves opera, a passion he shares with his father, and the prospect of working on a big stage excited him. Finding the right opera took two years. He spent a year and a half working on “Tannhäuser,” but Wagner’s long, static scenes were inhospitable to the kind of staging, with animated-film projections, that Kentridge had in mind. “Finally, in 2004, I went to the director and said, ‘Sorry, I can’t do this.’ He said, ‘Well, we’re also thinking about “The Magic Flute,” ’ and I said yes, immediately.”
He had seen the opera only once or twice. He adored the music and the libretto’s childlike, fairy-tale qualities, but, as he said, “I realized I knew very little about it. I knew that Act I has great scenes, with wild beasts and bird-catching, and in Act II there’s an impossible series of scenes with priests, where you don’t really know what’s going on, and then you have a great duet at the end. One of the main jobs was to make the story flow—not to let the second act be a confusion. It had to work like a fairy story.” For Kentridge, the most pressing problem was how to adapt his own process-oriented method of working to a situation that involved dozens of other people and a lot of meticulous planning. One reason he had failed as a filmmaker, he told me, was that it was hard for him to give other people instructions—to do so would imply that he knew what he was doing in advance. The solution he found this time was to spend many months alone in his studio, working out the film elements, and then to have a series of workshops with a four-person team of experienced collaborators, whom he chose and brought to Johannesburg: a set designer, a costume designer, a video editor, and an assistant director to work on the staging. Many drawings and a number of independent works came of this process, including a model theatre, built in his studio, with three-dimensional sets and backdrops. “It was a lot harder when I had to confront the singers on day one of the rehearsals,” he said. “I was completely terror-struck—and acted as if I knew what I was doing!”
Kentridge had come to view the opera as a reflection of the Enlightenment, whose contradictions and ramifications were personified in the character of the high priest Sarastro. “Mozart’s opera opened in 1791, two years after the French Revolution,” he said. “By 1792 or 1793, you had the first real Sarastros in the Committee of Public Safety and in Robespierre, people who said that in the interests of pure rationalism and what’s best for everyone we’ll chop the heads off thousands of people. Sarastro decides to kidnap Pamina, and put her under the control of his thug, because he knows what’s good for her. That’s in the libretto, but the music that Mozart gives him is very calming and reassuring.” Kentridge was not about to politicize Mozart. His thinking led, however, to a separate but related work called “Black Box,” another miniature theatre, with a twenty-two-minute scenario of filmed projections and puppet figures on mechanical tracks. The subject is colonialism in Africa, which, as Kentridge points out, was justified by the European powers as bringing enlightenment to the Dark Continent, and the piece makes reference to the near-annihilation by German colonial troops, in 1904, of the Herero tribe in German Southwest Africa—now Namibia. The soundtrack is a collage of Namibian songs and “Magic Flute” arias, somewhat altered—one of Sarastro’s arias, instead of being sung, is played by a military brass band. The most delightful moment in Kentridge’s “Magic Flute” comes in the first act, when an animated rhinoceros, hearing the flute, dances on its hind legs and turns somersaults; “Black Box” includes archival film footage from a 1912 rhinoceros hunt in Cameroon, which ends with the rhino thrashing in agony, and two white hunters cutting off its horn.
“The Magic Flute” was warmly received when it came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in 2007, after highly successful runs in Brussels, Lille, and Naples. The _Times_ ’ Anne Midgette called it “an exuberant dialogue between drawing and music.” Writing in the _Wall Street Journal_ , Matthew Gurewitsch said that it “has Kentridge’s fingerprints all over it, yet never betrays Mozart’s generosity and sweet temper.” The production disclosed a new dimension in Kentridge’s art, a playful, lighthearted expansiveness that had not been evident in his earlier work, and an ability to operate on a large—the largest possible—theatrical scale. A number of viewers, this one among them, had reservations. I loved the animations, which filled the stage with mathematical diagrams and fast-moving projections, in white light, of abstract and natural forms—Kentridge had filmed himself, as Papageno the bird-catcher, holding and releasing wonderfully lifelike doves—but there were times when I felt that the visual effects were a distraction from the music. This may well have had to do with the _BAM_ performance, which was handicapped by a lack of rehearsal time and the absence of great singers. “Some people hated it because there was too much to watch,” Kentridge said, when I mentioned my reaction. “But opera is an impure medium, combining many different elements. It’s also a completely contemporary form, in that what’s possible today, in combining image and music, was not possible thirty years ago. The whole popular-music industry is based on music videos. The operatic tradition of combining large-scale visual spectacle with live music is the pattern of popular music-making now.”
Kentridge discovered “The Nose” when he bought a book of Gogol’s short stories in an airport bookstore. Although he reads a lot of fiction, he says that there are gaps in his knowledge of the classics, and Gogol was one of them. He was struck by the tale’s affinities with the absurdist strain in art and literature, which, in the last century, had moved from the periphery into the mainstream. (A note in the introduction to the Gogol volume led him to Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” written the century before Gogol, which tells of a man whose nose was squashed flat at birth.) Kentridge learned of the Shostakovich opera soon afterward. Completed in 1930, when the composer was twenty-two, the production was shut down after a few performances, a victim of Stalin’s brutal crushing of the post-Revolutionary avant-garde. “It’s about a world gone awry, about dislocated logic and a driven irrationality where language stops making sense,” Kentridge told me. “That’s very much part of the nineteen-thirties in Russia, the period of the show trials. The absurd is the only form adequate to describe that breakdown of logic and rationality.”
Early in 2005, Peter Gelb, who would soon take over as the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, approached Kentridge about staging an opera for the Met. Gelb has defined his primary goal as helping the Met “reclaim its place in the forefront of American theatre and world theatre,” and he has hired some of the most innovative theatre and film directors to re-stage operas in the repertory or to direct new productions. The opera Gelb had in mind for Kentridge was Verdi’s early and rarely performed “Attila.” Kentridge thought about it overnight, and then, as Gelb recalls, “he came back and said he was not remotely interested in ‘Attila,’ but how about ‘The Nose’?” Gelb did some quick research. “I was aware of the opera, but I didn’t know it,” he said. “I also had to find out if Valery Gergiev, who is the leading Shostakovich conductor, would be willing to take it on. He was, and I told William we would do it. It was very quick. I was convinced.”
Gelb, Kentridge, and his four-person team went to St. Petersburg, where Gergiev arranged a special performance of “The Nose” for them, as part of the White Nights Festival. From there, Kentridge went straight to Johannesburg, where he set to work. It took him several months to work out the visual language of the piece; its main element is a huge collage, in the Constructivist style, of newspaper pages and agitprop slogans in Russian, German, and French, against which images would be projected. Although the actual nose appears and sings in only two scenes of the opera, Kentridge produced countless drawings of it, some of which will appear as projected images—the nose on horseback, the nose dancing (its legs are sometimes Kentridge’s and sometimes Anna Pavlova’s, in archival footage). “The shape of the nose is my nose,” Kentridge told me, beaming, “an Ashkenazi Jewish nose.” He clearly had enormous fun conceiving the visual elements. The Met agreed to pay for two extended workshops, one in Johannesburg and one in New York. (It is also sharing the cost of a European production of the opera, which will take place in 2011, in Aix-en-Provence.) Gelb has signed Paulo Szot, the Brazilian baritone who won a Tony Award in 2008 for his performance in “South Pacific,” to sing the leading role of Kovalyov. There will be six performances at the Met, starting March 5th. Asked whether “The Nose” might return to the Met next season, Gelb was cagey. “I don’t know,” he said. “It may have to wait for the next nasal festival.”
When Kentridge left New York in November, he was headed for Naples, where a show of large-scale tapestries, made from his drawings by a small weaving studio in Johannesburg, was opening at the Capodimonte Museum. After that, he looked forward to two months at home. Alice, his older daughter, now fully recovered from a yearlong ordeal with cancer, was getting married in January, at the house, and the whole family would be there. When things finally quiet down, late this spring, Kentridge has promised himself a sabbatical, a year or so of reading, thinking, eating well, and drinking “better wine than I deserve.” He also plans to make another animated film from charcoal drawings, “going back to basics, which is to say, drawing Johannesburg.” I asked him whether he had ever seriously considered living somewhere else. “Never to the extent of making plans,” he replied. “Just vague longings. Each time I go to Paris, I say, ‘What a gorgeous city—why don’t we live here?’ ”
In the end, Kentridge stays because South Africa’s compromised society reflects and nourishes his work. “My work is about the provisionality of the moment,” he told me. “I’ve become very suspicious of certainty. First comes understanding the value of doubt. For me, that’s how we go through the world.” ♦
More:Animated MoviesApartheidArtArtistsFranceJohannesburgMetropolitan OperaMoviesNikolai GogolParisPerformance ArtPeter GelbSouth AfricaWilliam Kentridge
",2.0
page_scrape,3.108105421066284,3.6347391605377197,,,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kentridge,16665.0,"William Kentridge
William Kentridge at an exhibition opening atACMIinMelbourne, Australia in 2012
**William Kentridge**(born 28 April 1955) is aSouth Africanartist best known for his prints, drawings, andanimated films. He is especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s, constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second's to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. Thesepalimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.[1]
Kentridge has created artwork as part of design of theatrical productions, both plays and operas. He has served as art director and overall director of numerous productions, collaborating with other artists, puppeteers and others in creating productions that combine drawings and multi-media combinations.
Kentridge was born inJohannesburgin 1955 toSydney KentridgeandFelicia Geffen, a Jewish family. Both were advocates (barristers) who represented people marginalized by theapartheidsystem.[2]He was educated at King Edward VII School in Houghton, Johannesburg. He showed great artistic promise from an early age, and began taking classes withcharcoalat age eight.[3]In 2016, he became perhaps the first artist to have a catalogue raisonné devoted exclusively to his juvenilia.[4]
Kentridge believed that being ethnically Jewish gave him a unique position as a third-party observer in South Africa. His parents werelawyers, well-known for their defence of victims ofapartheid. The basics of South Africa's socio-political condition and history must be known to grasp his work fully, much the same as in the cases of such artists asFrancisco GoyaandKäthe Kollwitz.[6]
Kentridge has practicedexpressionistart, whereform often alludes to contentand _vice versa_. The feeling that is manipulated by the use of palette,compositionandmedia, among others, often plays an equally vital role in the overall meaning as the subject andnarrativeof a given work. One must use one's gut reactions as well as one's interpretive skills to find meaning in Kentridge's work, much of which reveals very little content. Due to the sparse, rough and expressive qualities of Kentridge's handwriting, the viewer sees a sombre picture upon first glance, an impression that is perpetuated as the image illustrates a vulnerable and uncomfortable situation.[7]
Aspects ofsocial injusticethat have transpired over the years in South Africa have often become fodder for Kentridge's pieces._Casspirs Full of Love_ , viewable at theMetropolitan Museum of Art, appears to be nothing more than heads in boxes to the average American viewer, but South Africans know that acasspiris a vehicle used to put down riots, a kind of a crowd-controltank.
The title,_Casspirs Full of Love_ , written along the side of the print, is suggestive of the narrative and is oxymoronic. A casspir full of love is much like a bomb that bursts with happiness – it is an intangible improbability. The purpose of a machine such as this is to instil ""peace"" by force, but Kentridge noted that it was used as a tool to keep lower-class natives from taking colonial power and money.[8]
Print from portfolio 'Ubu Tells the Truth' by William Kentridge,Honolulu Museum of Art
By the mid-1970s, Kentridge was making prints and drawings. In 1979, he created 20 to 30monotypes, which soon became known as the ""Pit"" series. In 1980, he executed about 50 small-format etchings which he called the ""Domestic Scenes"". These two extraordinary groups of prints served to establish Kentridge's artistic identity, an identity he has continued to develop in various media. Despite his ongoing exploration of non-traditional media, the foundation of his art has always been drawing and printmaking.
Between 1989 and 2003, Kentridge made a series of nine short films, which he eventually gathered under the title _9 Drawings for Projection._[11]In 1989, he began the first of those animated movies,_Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris_. The series runs through _Monument_(1990),_Mine_(1991),_Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old_(1991),_Felix in Exile_(1994),_History of the Main Complaint_(1996),_Weighing and Wanting_(1997), and _Stereoscope_(1999), up to _Tide Table_(2003) and _Other Faces_(2011).[12]
For the series, he used a technique that would become a feature of his work – successive charcoal drawings, always on the same sheet of paper, contrary to the traditional animation technique in which each movement is drawn on a separate sheet. In this way, Kentridge's videos and films came to keep the traces of the previous drawings. His animations deal with political andsocialthemes from a personal and, at times, autobiographical point of view, since the author includes hisself-portraitin many of his works.
The political content and unique techniques of Kentridge's work have propelled him into the realm of South Africa's top artists. Working with what is in essence a very restrictive media, using only charcoal and a touch of blue or red pastel, he has created animations of astounding depth. A theme running through all of his work is his peculiar way of representing his birthplace. While he does not portray it as the militant or oppressive place that it was for black people, he does not emphasise the picturesque state of living that white people enjoyed duringapartheideither; he presents instead a city in which the duality of man is exposed. In a series of nine short films, he introduces two characters – Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum. These characters depict an emotional and political struggle that ultimately reflects the lives of many South Africans in the pre-democracyera.
In an introductory note to _Felix In Exile_ , Kentridge writes,
Not only in _Felix In Exile_ but in all his animated works, the concepts oftimeandchangecomprise a majortheme. He conveys it through his erasure technique, which contrasts with conventionalcel-shaded animation, whose seamlessness de-emphasizes the fact that it is actually a succession of hand-drawn images. This he implements by drawing akey frame, erasing certain areas of it, re-drawing them and thus creating the next frame. He is able in this way to create as many frames as he wants based on the original key frame simply by erasing small sections. Traces of what has been erased are still visible to the viewer; as the films unfold, a sense of fadingmemoryor the passing of time and the traces it leaves behind are portrayed. Kentridge's technique grapples with what is not said, what remains suppressed or forgotten but can easily be felt.
In the nine films that follow Soho Eckstein's life, an increasing vehemence is placed on the health of the individual and contemporary South Africansociety. Conflicts betweenanarchicandbourgeoisindividualistic beliefs, again a reference to the duality of man, indicate the idea ofsocial revolutionbypoeticallydisfiguring surroundingbuildingsandlandscapes. Kentridge states that, although his work does not focus on apartheid in a direct and overt manner, but on the contemporary state of Johannesburg, his drawings and films are certainly influenced by the brutalised society that resulted from the regime.
As for more direct political issues, Kentridge says his art presentsambiguity,contradiction, uncompleted movements and uncertain endings,[13]all of which seem like insignificant subtleties but can be attributed to most of the calamity presented in his work. In amixed-mediatriptychentitled _The Boating Party_(1985), based onRenoir's painting of asimilar name, the havoc caused by a seemingly-uninterestedaristocracyis perhaps his most severe comment on the state of South Africa during apartheid. The languid diners sit at ease while the surrounding area is ravaged, torn and burned, a contrast that is reflected in his style and choice of colours.
In 1988, Kentridge co-founded Free Film-makers Co-Operative in Johannesburg. In 1999, he was appointed a film-maker by Stereoscope.
In 2001, Creative Time aired his film _Shadow Procession_ on the NBC Astrovision Panasonic screen inTimes Square.[15]
Kentridge has been commissioned to create stage design and act as a theatre director in opera. His political perspective is expressed in his opera directions, which involves different layers: stage direction, animation movies, and influences of the puppet world. He has staged _Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria_(Monteverdi), (Mozart) and (Shostakovich). Following the last work, he collaborated with the French composerFrançois Sarhanon a short show called _Telegrams from the Nose,_ for which he made the stage and set design for the performance.[16]
In November 2015 his ""provocative and visually stunning new staging""[17]of Berg's , premiered at theMetropolitan Operain New York, a co-production with theEnglish National Operaand theDutch National Opera.[18]On 8 August 2017, William Kentridge's (Alban Berg) premiered at theSalzburg Festivaland received enthusiastic reactions.[19]
In 2023, Kentridge received theLaurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Operafor the production of 'Sybil' at theBarbican Theatre, London.[20]
Kentridge's protean artistic investigation continues in his series of tapestries begun in 2001. The tapestries stem from a series of drawings in which he conjured shadowy figures from ripped construction paper; he made a collage of these with the web-like background of nineteenth-century atlas maps. To adapt these figures as tapestry, Kentridge worked in close collaboration with the Johannesburg-based Stephens Tapestry Studio, mapping cartoons from enlarged photographs of the drawings and hand-picking dyes to colour the locally spun mohair (goat hair).[15]
In 2016, the anniversary ofRome's legendary founding in 753BC, Kentridge unveiled _Triumphs and Laments_ , a monumental mural along the right bank of the riverTiber. The 550m-long frieze depicting a procession of more than 80 figures from Roman mythology to the present is Kentridge’s largest public work to date. To celebrate its launch, he and his long-time collaborator, the composerPhilip Miller, devised a series of performances featuring live shadow play and more than 40 musicians.[23]
Kentridge is married to Anne Stanwix, arheumatologist, and they have three children. A third-generation South African ofLithuanian-Jewishheritage,[24]he is the son of the South African lawyerSydney Kentridgeand the lawyer and activistFelicia Kentridge.
Kentridge's films were shown at the 2004Cannes Film Festival.[25]
* 2008 _William Kentridge Seeing Double_ ,Marian GoodmanGallery, New York[27]
* 2015Haus Konstruktiv,Zürich: William Kentridge – The Nose (4 June to 6 September)
* 2016Whitechapel Gallery– Thick Time (21 September 2016 to 15 January 2017)
* 2017Museum der Moderne Salzburg, – Thick Time (29 July – 5 November 2017)
* 2024Taipei Fine Arts Museum _William Kentridge_
Kentridge's works are included in the following permanent collections:Honolulu Museum of Art, theKalamazoo Institute of Arts, theMuseum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, theMuseum of Modern Art(New York), and theTate Modern(London). An edition of the five-channel video installation _The Refusal of Time_(2012), which debuted atdocumenta 13, was jointly acquired by theMetropolitan Museum of Artin New York and theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art.[39]In 2015, Kentridge gave the definitive collection of his archive and art – films, videos and digital works – to theGeorge Eastman Museum, one of the world's largest and oldest photography and film collections.[40]
* 2024 William Kentridge was awarded the prestigious International Folkwang Prize in recognition of his transformative impact on the arts and culture.[44]
Kentridge's Five Themes exhibit was included in the 2009 _Time_ 100, an annual list of the one hundred top people and events in the world.[45]That same year, the exhibition was awarded First Place in the 2009 AICA (International Association of Art Critics Awards) Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally category.
In 2012, Kentridge was in residence atHarvard Universityinvited to deliver the distinguished Charles Eliot Norton lectures in early 2012.[22]That same year, he was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society.[46]
Kentridge's artworks are among the most sought-after and expensive works in South Africa: ""a major charcoal drawing by world-renowned South African artist William Kentridge could set you back some £250,000"".[47]Kentridge is represented byGoodman Gallery, Lia Rumma Gallery andHauser & Wirth(since 2024).[48]From 1999 to 2024, he worked withMarian Goodman Gallery.[49]
The South African record for Kentridge is R6.6 million ($320,000), set at Aspire Art Auctions in Johannesburg in 2018.[50]One of his bronze pieces reached $1.5 million atSotheby'sNew York in 2013.[51][52]
* ""William Kentridge | Who's Who SA"". Whoswhosa.co.za. Retrieved1 March2014.
* Amadour (7 December 2022).""15 Minutes With Visionary Artist William Kentridge""._Los Angeles Magazine_.
* ""William Kentridge – May 6 – June 18, 2011 – Marian Goodman Gallery"". Mariangoodman.com. Archived fromthe originalon 15 August 2018. Retrieved1 March2014.
* Kentridge 2007.
* James Jorden,_William Kentridge Commits Murder Most Excellent at the Met_ ,_New York Observer_ , 11 November 2015.
* ^Jump up to:""William Kentridge – September 17 – October 26, 2013 – Marian Goodman Gallery"". Mariangoodman.com. Archived fromthe originalon 29 September 2017. Retrieved1 March2014.
* Gattinara, Federico Castelli; McGivern, Hannah (22 April 2016).""William Kentridge unveils 550-metre frieze along Rome's River Tiber"".. Retrieved1 May2016.
* ""William Kentridge News""._The New York Times_. Archived fromthe originalon 30 May 2015. Retrieved8 August2018.
* ""William Kentridge Seeing Double"",_MutualArt_.
* McCulloch, Samantha; Williams-Wynn, Christopher (2015). ""Conflicts between context and content in William Kentridge: Five Themes : a case study of the Melbourne exhibition""._Museum Management and Curatorship_.**30**(4):283–295.doi:10.1080/09647775.2015.1060866.S2CID142528621.
* ""Willam Kentridge — Fortuna"".
* ""Modern art stuns in Bruges: Smoke, Ashes, Fable by William Kentridge""._Expatica.com_. 26 October 2017. Retrieved5 October2022.
* """"That Which We Do Not Remember"" Exhibition by William Kentridge""._M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum Of Art_. 2 January 2022. Retrieved5 October2022.
* Searle, Adrian (20 September 2022).""William Kentridge review – the sound and the fury""._The Guardian_. Retrieved29 September2022.
* Charlotte Burns (10 October 2014),""The sun never sets on William Kentridge"", .
* Barone, Joshua (8 October 2015).""William Kentridge Gives Major Collection to George Eastman Museum""._ArtsBeat_. Retrieved3 January2023.
* Reed, Lou (30 April 2009).""William Kentridge – The 2009 TIME 100"". TIME. Archived fromthe originalon 3 May 2009. Retrieved1 March2014.
* Sarah Douglas (7 March 2024),William Kentridge Joins Hauser & Wirth, Departing Longtime Dealer Marian Goodman.
* Sarah Douglas (7 March 2024),William Kentridge Joins Hauser & Wirth, Departing Longtime Dealer Marian Goodman.
* Sarah Douglas (7 March 2024),William Kentridge Joins Hauser & Wirth, Departing Longtime Dealer Marian Goodman.
* Cole, William. ""On Some Early Prints by William Kentridge"", vol. XXVI no. 3 (2009), 268–273.
* Cole, William. ""Privileged Access, Judiciously Shared. Matthew Kentridge, The Soho Chronicles: 10 Films by William Kentridge.""Art Journalvol. 74, no. 4 (winter 2015).
* Cole, William._The Juvenilia of William Kentridge: An Unauthorized Catalogue Raisonné_. Sitges: Cole & Contreras, 2016.
* Coumans, Sandra. ""Geschichte und Identität. Black Box / Chambre noire von William Kentridge"", Regiospectra Verlag Berlin, 2012.
* Edmunds, Paul. ""William Kentridge's SANG Retrospective"", Artthrob:_Contemporary Art in South Africa_ 65 (2003).
* Kentridge Studio – Official site for William Kentridge
* William Kentridge at Goodman Gallery
* William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
* Artworksby William Kentridge
* Interview with William Kentridge, by Lilian Tone
* William Kentridge believes South Africa let Nelson Mandela downArchived21 October 2017 at theWayback Machine, Interview with William Kentridge, by Flavia Foradini, The Art Newspaper, online edition, 13 Dec 2013
* How We Make Sense of the World. An interview with William KentridgeVideo byLouisiana Channel
* culturebase: William Kentridge
* 2017:William Kentridge
* 2020:Ennio MorriconeandJohn Williams
William Kentridge
",3.0
page_scrape,3.109637498855591,4.4798424243927,,,https://time.com/archive/6644402/10-questions-with-william-kentridge/,655.0,"**Your dad retired last year at 90. Do you foresee such longevity for your career?** I can’t imagine it, but I can’t imagine doing anything else. Somebody did say, “If you didn’t have to work, what would you do?” And I said, “I could spend so much time in my studio.”
## More Must-Reads from TIME
* Meet the2025 Women of the Year
© 2024 TIME USA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of ourTerms of Service,Privacy Policy(Your Privacy Rights) andDo Not Sell or Share My Personal Information.TIME may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.
",5.0
page_scrape,5.979727029800415,7.102899789810181,,,https://time.com/7213490/why-are-young-people-getting-cancer/?utm_source=roundup&utm_campaign=20230202,10905.0,"**From Left:** Imtiaz Hussain, 31, was diagnosed with colon cancer at 26. Carrie Regan, 41, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at 40. Kelly Spill, 33, was diagnosed with colorectal cancer at 28. Giancarlo Oviedo-Mori, 32, was diagnosed with lung cancer at 18.Frankie Alduino for TIME
He found his answer after sifting through national health data: colorectal cancer, he discovered, was indeed beingdiagnosed more oftenthan in previous years among New Zealanders under 50. Furtherresearchby Frizelle analyzing populations in Sweden and Scotland showed the same thing. A bigger picture was emerging. Here were three different countries, with different populations and health challenges—but united by a spike in colorectal cancers among young adults.
Photograph by Frankie Alduino for TIME
In the years since, it’s become clear that the problem isn’t limited to those three countries, nor to colorectal cancer. Researchers have found that young people around the world are getting many different kinds of cancer at alarmingly high rates. And as the diagnoses of celebrities and public figures likeKate Middleton,Chadwick Boseman, Dwyane Wade, andOlivia Munnbring mass attention to the issue, scientists are racing to answer a question on the minds of many outside the medical profession: Why is cancer, historically a disease of old age, increasingly striking people in the primes of their lives?
Globally, diagnoses and deaths related to early-onset cancers—those affecting patients younger than 50—rose by 79% and 28%, respectively, from 1990 to 2019, according to a recentstudypublished in the medical journal _BMJ Oncology._In the U.S., breast cancer is the most common type of early-onset disease, but recent surges in cancers affecting digestive organs—including the colon, rectum, pancreas, and stomach—are particularly dramatic within this age group. In fact, today’s young adults are about twice as likely to be diagnosed with colon cancer—and four times as likely to be diagnosed with rectal cancer—as those born around 1950,researchsuggests.
The rise in early-onset diagnoses partly comes down to advances in our ability to detect and diagnose different kinds of cancers. “With much more sophisticated tools now, inevitably we’re doing more tests on younger people [and] we’re using more accurate imaging,” which leads to more cancers detected, Powles says. Some screening protocols have also been modified in recent years to include younger adults; since 2018, for example, the American Cancer Society has recommendedcolonoscopiesstarting at age 45, down from 50.
There are plenty of known risk factors for cancer, from the genes someone is born with to the unhealthy lifestyle habits they pick up, such as smoking,drinking lots of alcohol, or spending time in the sun. Such habits can speed up the natural degradation of cells, which over time acquire genetic mutations as they lose their ability to repair damage. As that damage accumulates with age, cells may become cancerous, growing and -multiplying too fast for the body’s immune system to keep them in check and potentially choking out vital organs. The immune system also loses some of its strength with age, making it easier for cancer cells to colonize the body.
**Kelly Spill** , 33, was initially brushed aside by doctors who thought her cancer symptoms were related to pregnancy and birth. “If you don’t find your answers, keep pushing for them,” Spill says.Frankie Alduino for TIME
There’s no shortage of theories about what those may be. Many scientists point to modern diets, which tend to be heavy on potentially carcinogenic products—includingultra-processed foods, red meat, and alcohol—and may also contribute to weight gain, another cancer risk factor. The foods we eat can also affect the gut microbiome, the colony of microbes that lives in the digestive system and appears linked to overall health. Alterations to the gut microbiome via diet, or perhaps exposure to drugs like antibiotics, have also been implicated.
Dr. Andrea Cercek, co-director of the Center for Young Onset Colorectal and Gastrointestinal Cancers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, agrees that some early-onset cancer cases defy easy explanation. She’s treated patients in their 20s and even teens with tumors that, biologically, “look just like a regular 80-year-old’s tumor.” These cases stump her. “Even if they drank as a teenager, it just doesn’t make sense,” she says. A few years of drinking alcohol, following an unhealthy diet, or having obesity should not be enough to produce the kind of tumor typically seen in a senior citizen, Cercek says. And yet, there they are.
**Giancarlo Oviedo-Mori** , 32, credits his Christian faith with helping him live with lung cancer for more than a decade. “When I was first diagnosed, I was searching on Google for anybody who was a survivor, and I couldn’t find no one,” he says. “There is hope. There are people who are living long and having a great quality of life.”Frankie Alduino for TIME
To Cercek, these advanced tumors suggest that people have been exposed to damaging substances for a long time, perhaps even longer than they were aware of. Research and awareness about early-onset cancer is accumulating now, but the source of the problem may not be new, Cercek says. It can take years for even the mosttoxic exposures to result in health problems—which means that the source of a problem in the public eye now may have emerged decades ago, silently sickening people until the trend became too pronounced to ignore.
Giancarlo Oviedo-Mori, 32, is one of many patients whose cancer defies obvious explanation. When he was in high school, Oviedo-Mori developed a persistent cough that didn’t respond to medication. Eventually, at just 18 years old, he was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.
Oviedo-Mori and his doctors were stunned. He’d had asthma as a child growing up in Peru, but he had no family history of cancer and had never been a drinker or smoker; he was barely even old enough to buy cigarettes and still years shy of his 21st birthday. Oviedo-Mori’s family spent a day observing the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack whentoxic particles were still in the air, but it had been a brief visit and no one else in the family had developed health problems. That was the only exposure he could think of. The diagnosis didn’t make sense. “It was so weird,” he says.
Dr. Shuji Ogino, a pathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, is studying early-onset cancer using a unique approach that combines epidemiology (the study of population-level health trends) and molecular pathology (the granular analysis of a patient’s tumor). He believes this unlikely pairing will help uncover triggers for early-onset disease.Sophie Park for TIME
Ogino and his team are making their way through about 4,000 colorectal tumor samples that came from people who developed the disease at various points in their lives. Each sliver of tissue holds innumerable clues about the person it belonged to, from what they ate and drank to the bacteria that lived in their body before cancer took root. To unearth these clues, the researchers stain the tissues, so that under the lens of a powerful microscope, they can see the different types of cells in the tumor in brilliant color. Using these cell-level insights, they can distinguish between the tumors of young vs. older patients and—with the help of AI—search reams of scientific literature for environmental exposures, lifestyle habits, or health conditions linked to particular cellular traits. Repeating this painstaking detective work enough times helps reveal patterns among young cancer patients, giving Ogino and his team clues as to what may have caused their diseases.
Proving his theory won’t be simple, Barreto acknowledges. It would require collecting data on huge numbers of people, starting before they were even born, then sifting through that data to pinpoint relevant prenatal and early-life triggers. To speed up the process, Barreto has contacted more than 20 research groups around the world that are tracking groups of people beginning at or before birth, in hopes of using their data to jump-start his research. “If we start [from scratch] now, it will take us 40 years to find answers,” Barreto says. That’s too long to wait, with patients already getting sick at an alarming rate.
**Carrie Regan** , 41, went to the ER in 2023 because of stomach pain, which led to an ovarian cancer diagnosis. Regan is now in good health and is monitored for recurrence. She wants other women to be vigilant about their health, since ovarian cancer symptoms, like bloating and cramps, are easy to miss. “The day I went to the ER, there was a long wait and I started to feel better. I almost left,” she says. The fact that she didn’t saved her life.Frankie Alduino for TIME **Imtiaz Hussain** , 31, says cancer is seen as “kind of untreatable” in his native Pakistan. He no longer thinks so, after joining a clinical trial run by Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Dr. Andrea Cercek. After just a few months of treatment with an experimental immunotherapy drug, Hussain felt better. Today, he is cancer-free and a father of three. “I was a part of history,” he says.Frankie Alduino for TIME
The upshot of all this: it could take years, if not decades, to sort out what’s causing early diagnoses, and perhaps even more time to figure out how to stop them. What seems so obvious to us now—the conclusion that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, for example—tooksome 40 years for scientists to solidify. Even once they did, change didn’t happen overnight. Smoking rates have fallen steadily since public-health warnings escalated in the 1960s, but they didn’t plummet all at once. Still, change is possible. Today, smoking is at historic lows, and lung cancer diagnoses have declined with them.
If the challenge sounds daunting, for researchers like Ogino, from Brigham and Women’s, the complexities are part of the process. He is reminded every day that good science takes as long as it takes. Many of the tumor samples he relies on in his research came from participants enrolled in a study that launched in 1976. The researchers who started it couldn’t have known that, 50 years later, their work would be critical in the quest to reverse the rise of early-onset cancer, Ogino says.
“That’s the kind of legacy you can make in science,” he says. “That’s a great, rewarding way to contribute”—even if it takes a lot of time to get there.
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",5.0
page_scrape,6.080690860748291,10.397520065307617,,,https://time.com/7261675/disability-inclusion-dei-cuts-essay/?utm_source=roundup&utm_campaign=20230202,1199.0,"We are problem-solvers, innovators, and leaders—because we’ve had to be. We navigate inaccessible systems daily, adapting in ways that others never have to think about. According to a2018 Accenture study, companies that excel in disability inclusion see 28% higher revenue, 30% higher profit margins, and two times the net income compared to peers. A2020 studyfrom the U.S. Department of Labor also noted that employees with disabilities tend to have higher retention rates, reducing costly turnover and improving workplace stability. The business case for disability inclusion couldn’t be clearer.
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page_scrape,6.763472557067871,7.564331293106079,,,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kentridge#bodyContent,16665.0,"William Kentridge
William Kentridge at an exhibition opening atACMIinMelbourne, Australia in 2012
**William Kentridge**(born 28 April 1955) is aSouth Africanartist best known for his prints, drawings, andanimated films. He is especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s, constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second's to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. Thesepalimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.[1]
Kentridge has created artwork as part of design of theatrical productions, both plays and operas. He has served as art director and overall director of numerous productions, collaborating with other artists, puppeteers and others in creating productions that combine drawings and multi-media combinations.
Kentridge was born inJohannesburgin 1955 toSydney KentridgeandFelicia Geffen, a Jewish family. Both were advocates (barristers) who represented people marginalized by theapartheidsystem.[2]He was educated at King Edward VII School in Houghton, Johannesburg. He showed great artistic promise from an early age, and began taking classes withcharcoalat age eight.[3]In 2016, he became perhaps the first artist to have a catalogue raisonné devoted exclusively to his juvenilia.[4]
Kentridge believed that being ethnically Jewish gave him a unique position as a third-party observer in South Africa. His parents werelawyers, well-known for their defence of victims ofapartheid. The basics of South Africa's socio-political condition and history must be known to grasp his work fully, much the same as in the cases of such artists asFrancisco GoyaandKäthe Kollwitz.[6]
Kentridge has practicedexpressionistart, whereform often alludes to contentand _vice versa_. The feeling that is manipulated by the use of palette,compositionandmedia, among others, often plays an equally vital role in the overall meaning as the subject andnarrativeof a given work. One must use one's gut reactions as well as one's interpretive skills to find meaning in Kentridge's work, much of which reveals very little content. Due to the sparse, rough and expressive qualities of Kentridge's handwriting, the viewer sees a sombre picture upon first glance, an impression that is perpetuated as the image illustrates a vulnerable and uncomfortable situation.[7]
Aspects ofsocial injusticethat have transpired over the years in South Africa have often become fodder for Kentridge's pieces._Casspirs Full of Love_ , viewable at theMetropolitan Museum of Art, appears to be nothing more than heads in boxes to the average American viewer, but South Africans know that acasspiris a vehicle used to put down riots, a kind of a crowd-controltank.
The title,_Casspirs Full of Love_ , written along the side of the print, is suggestive of the narrative and is oxymoronic. A casspir full of love is much like a bomb that bursts with happiness – it is an intangible improbability. The purpose of a machine such as this is to instil ""peace"" by force, but Kentridge noted that it was used as a tool to keep lower-class natives from taking colonial power and money.[8]
Print from portfolio 'Ubu Tells the Truth' by William Kentridge,Honolulu Museum of Art
By the mid-1970s, Kentridge was making prints and drawings. In 1979, he created 20 to 30monotypes, which soon became known as the ""Pit"" series. In 1980, he executed about 50 small-format etchings which he called the ""Domestic Scenes"". These two extraordinary groups of prints served to establish Kentridge's artistic identity, an identity he has continued to develop in various media. Despite his ongoing exploration of non-traditional media, the foundation of his art has always been drawing and printmaking.
Between 1989 and 2003, Kentridge made a series of nine short films, which he eventually gathered under the title _9 Drawings for Projection._[11]In 1989, he began the first of those animated movies,_Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris_. The series runs through _Monument_(1990),_Mine_(1991),_Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old_(1991),_Felix in Exile_(1994),_History of the Main Complaint_(1996),_Weighing and Wanting_(1997), and _Stereoscope_(1999), up to _Tide Table_(2003) and _Other Faces_(2011).[12]
For the series, he used a technique that would become a feature of his work – successive charcoal drawings, always on the same sheet of paper, contrary to the traditional animation technique in which each movement is drawn on a separate sheet. In this way, Kentridge's videos and films came to keep the traces of the previous drawings. His animations deal with political andsocialthemes from a personal and, at times, autobiographical point of view, since the author includes hisself-portraitin many of his works.
The political content and unique techniques of Kentridge's work have propelled him into the realm of South Africa's top artists. Working with what is in essence a very restrictive media, using only charcoal and a touch of blue or red pastel, he has created animations of astounding depth. A theme running through all of his work is his peculiar way of representing his birthplace. While he does not portray it as the militant or oppressive place that it was for black people, he does not emphasise the picturesque state of living that white people enjoyed duringapartheideither; he presents instead a city in which the duality of man is exposed. In a series of nine short films, he introduces two characters – Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum. These characters depict an emotional and political struggle that ultimately reflects the lives of many South Africans in the pre-democracyera.
In an introductory note to _Felix In Exile_ , Kentridge writes,
Not only in _Felix In Exile_ but in all his animated works, the concepts oftimeandchangecomprise a majortheme. He conveys it through his erasure technique, which contrasts with conventionalcel-shaded animation, whose seamlessness de-emphasizes the fact that it is actually a succession of hand-drawn images. This he implements by drawing akey frame, erasing certain areas of it, re-drawing them and thus creating the next frame. He is able in this way to create as many frames as he wants based on the original key frame simply by erasing small sections. Traces of what has been erased are still visible to the viewer; as the films unfold, a sense of fadingmemoryor the passing of time and the traces it leaves behind are portrayed. Kentridge's technique grapples with what is not said, what remains suppressed or forgotten but can easily be felt.
In the nine films that follow Soho Eckstein's life, an increasing vehemence is placed on the health of the individual and contemporary South Africansociety. Conflicts betweenanarchicandbourgeoisindividualistic beliefs, again a reference to the duality of man, indicate the idea ofsocial revolutionbypoeticallydisfiguring surroundingbuildingsandlandscapes. Kentridge states that, although his work does not focus on apartheid in a direct and overt manner, but on the contemporary state of Johannesburg, his drawings and films are certainly influenced by the brutalised society that resulted from the regime.
As for more direct political issues, Kentridge says his art presentsambiguity,contradiction, uncompleted movements and uncertain endings,[13]all of which seem like insignificant subtleties but can be attributed to most of the calamity presented in his work. In amixed-mediatriptychentitled _The Boating Party_(1985), based onRenoir's painting of asimilar name, the havoc caused by a seemingly-uninterestedaristocracyis perhaps his most severe comment on the state of South Africa during apartheid. The languid diners sit at ease while the surrounding area is ravaged, torn and burned, a contrast that is reflected in his style and choice of colours.
In 1988, Kentridge co-founded Free Film-makers Co-Operative in Johannesburg. In 1999, he was appointed a film-maker by Stereoscope.
In 2001, Creative Time aired his film _Shadow Procession_ on the NBC Astrovision Panasonic screen inTimes Square.[15]
Kentridge has been commissioned to create stage design and act as a theatre director in opera. His political perspective is expressed in his opera directions, which involves different layers: stage direction, animation movies, and influences of the puppet world. He has staged _Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria_(Monteverdi), (Mozart) and (Shostakovich). Following the last work, he collaborated with the French composerFrançois Sarhanon a short show called _Telegrams from the Nose,_ for which he made the stage and set design for the performance.[16]
In November 2015 his ""provocative and visually stunning new staging""[17]of Berg's , premiered at theMetropolitan Operain New York, a co-production with theEnglish National Operaand theDutch National Opera.[18]On 8 August 2017, William Kentridge's (Alban Berg) premiered at theSalzburg Festivaland received enthusiastic reactions.[19]
In 2023, Kentridge received theLaurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Operafor the production of 'Sybil' at theBarbican Theatre, London.[20]
Kentridge's protean artistic investigation continues in his series of tapestries begun in 2001. The tapestries stem from a series of drawings in which he conjured shadowy figures from ripped construction paper; he made a collage of these with the web-like background of nineteenth-century atlas maps. To adapt these figures as tapestry, Kentridge worked in close collaboration with the Johannesburg-based Stephens Tapestry Studio, mapping cartoons from enlarged photographs of the drawings and hand-picking dyes to colour the locally spun mohair (goat hair).[15]
In 2016, the anniversary ofRome's legendary founding in 753BC, Kentridge unveiled _Triumphs and Laments_ , a monumental mural along the right bank of the riverTiber. The 550m-long frieze depicting a procession of more than 80 figures from Roman mythology to the present is Kentridge’s largest public work to date. To celebrate its launch, he and his long-time collaborator, the composerPhilip Miller, devised a series of performances featuring live shadow play and more than 40 musicians.[23]
Kentridge is married to Anne Stanwix, arheumatologist, and they have three children. A third-generation South African ofLithuanian-Jewishheritage,[24]he is the son of the South African lawyerSydney Kentridgeand the lawyer and activistFelicia Kentridge.
Kentridge's films were shown at the 2004Cannes Film Festival.[25]
* 2008 _William Kentridge Seeing Double_ ,Marian GoodmanGallery, New York[27]
* 2015Haus Konstruktiv,Zürich: William Kentridge – The Nose (4 June to 6 September)
* 2016Whitechapel Gallery– Thick Time (21 September 2016 to 15 January 2017)
* 2017Museum der Moderne Salzburg, – Thick Time (29 July – 5 November 2017)
* 2024Taipei Fine Arts Museum _William Kentridge_
Kentridge's works are included in the following permanent collections:Honolulu Museum of Art, theKalamazoo Institute of Arts, theMuseum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, theMuseum of Modern Art(New York), and theTate Modern(London). An edition of the five-channel video installation _The Refusal of Time_(2012), which debuted atdocumenta 13, was jointly acquired by theMetropolitan Museum of Artin New York and theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art.[39]In 2015, Kentridge gave the definitive collection of his archive and art – films, videos and digital works – to theGeorge Eastman Museum, one of the world's largest and oldest photography and film collections.[40]
* 2024 William Kentridge was awarded the prestigious International Folkwang Prize in recognition of his transformative impact on the arts and culture.[44]
Kentridge's Five Themes exhibit was included in the 2009 _Time_ 100, an annual list of the one hundred top people and events in the world.[45]That same year, the exhibition was awarded First Place in the 2009 AICA (International Association of Art Critics Awards) Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally category.
In 2012, Kentridge was in residence atHarvard Universityinvited to deliver the distinguished Charles Eliot Norton lectures in early 2012.[22]That same year, he was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society.[46]
Kentridge's artworks are among the most sought-after and expensive works in South Africa: ""a major charcoal drawing by world-renowned South African artist William Kentridge could set you back some £250,000"".[47]Kentridge is represented byGoodman Gallery, Lia Rumma Gallery andHauser & Wirth(since 2024).[48]From 1999 to 2024, he worked withMarian Goodman Gallery.[49]
The South African record for Kentridge is R6.6 million ($320,000), set at Aspire Art Auctions in Johannesburg in 2018.[50]One of his bronze pieces reached $1.5 million atSotheby'sNew York in 2013.[51][52]
* ""William Kentridge | Who's Who SA"". Whoswhosa.co.za. Retrieved1 March2014.
* Amadour (7 December 2022).""15 Minutes With Visionary Artist William Kentridge""._Los Angeles Magazine_.
* ""William Kentridge – May 6 – June 18, 2011 – Marian Goodman Gallery"". Mariangoodman.com. Archived fromthe originalon 15 August 2018. Retrieved1 March2014.
* Kentridge 2007.
* James Jorden,_William Kentridge Commits Murder Most Excellent at the Met_ ,_New York Observer_ , 11 November 2015.
* ^Jump up to:""William Kentridge – September 17 – October 26, 2013 – Marian Goodman Gallery"". Mariangoodman.com. Archived fromthe originalon 29 September 2017. Retrieved1 March2014.
* Gattinara, Federico Castelli; McGivern, Hannah (22 April 2016).""William Kentridge unveils 550-metre frieze along Rome's River Tiber"".. Retrieved1 May2016.
* ""William Kentridge News""._The New York Times_. Archived fromthe originalon 30 May 2015. Retrieved8 August2018.
* ""William Kentridge Seeing Double"",_MutualArt_.
* McCulloch, Samantha; Williams-Wynn, Christopher (2015). ""Conflicts between context and content in William Kentridge: Five Themes : a case study of the Melbourne exhibition""._Museum Management and Curatorship_.**30**(4):283–295.doi:10.1080/09647775.2015.1060866.S2CID142528621.
* ""Willam Kentridge — Fortuna"".
* ""Modern art stuns in Bruges: Smoke, Ashes, Fable by William Kentridge""._Expatica.com_. 26 October 2017. Retrieved5 October2022.
* """"That Which We Do Not Remember"" Exhibition by William Kentridge""._M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum Of Art_. 2 January 2022. Retrieved5 October2022.
* Searle, Adrian (20 September 2022).""William Kentridge review – the sound and the fury""._The Guardian_. Retrieved29 September2022.
* Charlotte Burns (10 October 2014),""The sun never sets on William Kentridge"", .
* Barone, Joshua (8 October 2015).""William Kentridge Gives Major Collection to George Eastman Museum""._ArtsBeat_. Retrieved3 January2023.
* Reed, Lou (30 April 2009).""William Kentridge – The 2009 TIME 100"". TIME. Archived fromthe originalon 3 May 2009. Retrieved1 March2014.
* Sarah Douglas (7 March 2024),William Kentridge Joins Hauser & Wirth, Departing Longtime Dealer Marian Goodman.
* Sarah Douglas (7 March 2024),William Kentridge Joins Hauser & Wirth, Departing Longtime Dealer Marian Goodman.
* Sarah Douglas (7 March 2024),William Kentridge Joins Hauser & Wirth, Departing Longtime Dealer Marian Goodman.
* Cole, William. ""On Some Early Prints by William Kentridge"", vol. XXVI no. 3 (2009), 268–273.
* Cole, William. ""Privileged Access, Judiciously Shared. Matthew Kentridge, The Soho Chronicles: 10 Films by William Kentridge.""Art Journalvol. 74, no. 4 (winter 2015).
* Cole, William._The Juvenilia of William Kentridge: An Unauthorized Catalogue Raisonné_. Sitges: Cole & Contreras, 2016.
* Coumans, Sandra. ""Geschichte und Identität. Black Box / Chambre noire von William Kentridge"", Regiospectra Verlag Berlin, 2012.
* Edmunds, Paul. ""William Kentridge's SANG Retrospective"", Artthrob:_Contemporary Art in South Africa_ 65 (2003).
* Kentridge Studio – Official site for William Kentridge
* William Kentridge at Goodman Gallery
* William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
* Artworksby William Kentridge
* Interview with William Kentridge, by Lilian Tone
* William Kentridge believes South Africa let Nelson Mandela downArchived21 October 2017 at theWayback Machine, Interview with William Kentridge, by Flavia Foradini, The Art Newspaper, online edition, 13 Dec 2013
* How We Make Sense of the World. An interview with William KentridgeVideo byLouisiana Channel
* culturebase: William Kentridge
* 2017:William Kentridge
* 2020:Ennio MorriconeandJohn Williams
William Kentridge
",3.0
page_scrape,7.307944059371948,8.564993143081665,,,https://forward.com/about-us/republish-forward-content/,1470.0,"* **Republished stories must credit the _Forward_.**This includes in the byline (e.g., “Jodi Rudoren, the _Forward_ ”) and an italicized line, preferably at the top of the story, that reads: “This story was originally published in the Forward (with a link to the forward.com version of the article).Click hereto get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.” For republication in print, the italicized line should say, “This story originally appeared in the Forward (forward.com). To get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox, go to forward.com/newsletter-signup.”
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",1.0
page_scrape,7.4086103439331055,9.657578706741333,,,https://forward.com/culture/187082/south-african-jewish-artist-william-kentridge-bend/#main,3152.0,"# South African Jewish Artist William Kentridge Bends Time
**Time Transfixed:** William Kentridge?s installation ?The Refusal of Time? was first displayed at the 2012 Documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.Image by Metropolitan Museum of Art
Titled“The Refusal of Time,”Kentridge’s exhibit is a joint acquisition of the Met and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that was first exhibited in 2012 at Documenta, a 100-day exhibition of art in Kassel, Germany, In cooperation with the South African composer Philip Miller and Peter Galison, a science historian at Harvard University, as well as more than 20 singers, actors and dancers,Kentridgeworked for two years to realize this multimedia art and sound installation.
Kentridge is of Jewish-Lithuanian descent and grew up in South Africa, where he still lives today. His father was a famous lawyer who defended many anti-apartheid activists.
Kentridge studied drama and worked as an actor and director in Johannesburg before focusing on drawing and creating animations.
His current project is intended to question the notion of time. Large video projections cover three of the four walls, and the surrounding sounds immerse the viewer in the work, making it easy for one to lose track of how much time he or she has spent at the exhibit. In the middle of the room, a so-called “breathing machine” — a device not unlike an organ that creates a rhythmic, comforting background noise by means of a pumping bellows.
These are two of Kentridge’s frequent themes, appearing also in his 2000 series Atlas Procession, in which etchings depict a seemingly endless march taking place before an industrial backdrop.
The performance in “The Refusal of Time” lasts about half an hour, but it can and should be watched multiple times, and from varying perspectives. The pace of the videos changes, adding to the feeling that time is nonlinear. At some point, all the screens display metronomes that move at different speeds — so the directions of one’s gaze determine the pace.
In the darkened room, it is difficult to gauge visitors’ reactions. Hardly anyone stays to watch the entire performance. When a person stands up to leave, he or she becomes part of the installation by casting a shadow onto the projection. Thought-provoking imagery follows invigorating rhythm and is, in turn, followed by silence. The more time one spends with the installation, the more one can not only take in the astounding variety of Kentridge’s work and explore the recurring themes, but also experience the whole cycle of feelings, all of which are evoked by the changing pace and content displayed here.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the _Forward_ has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
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### At 87, one of the great Jewish film directors thinks there’s still time to start over
### South African Jewish Artist William Kentridge Bends Time
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page_scrape,9.331156730651855,14.641350507736206,,,https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/18/lines-of-resistance#main-content,35813.0,"Kentridge performing a monologue inspired by Gogol.Photograph by Steve Pyke
A few minutes before going onstage to deliver his theatrical monologue “I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine,” in New York on November 9th, the South African artist William Kentridge admitted that he was feeling “rather stressed.” He didn’t show it. Kentridge, who is fifty-four, is a solidly built man of medium height, with deep-set blue eyes and the distinctive profile of a Roman proconsul. Dressed as usual in dark trousers and a white open-necked shirt, he seemed thoughtful but confident.
Nearly four hundred people had come to see him, in a cavernous ground-floor space on West Twenty-sixth Street. (The event was sponsored by Performa 09, a three-week series of performance pieces by artists in different venues around the city.) The overflow turnout was an indication of how influential Kentridge’s work has become since 1997, when his drawings, prints, and strangely compelling animated films started to register outside his native city of Johannesburg. A major Kentridge exhibition opens on February 24th at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized originally by the independent curator Mark Rosenthal, the show is appearing at eight other museums here and abroad. On March 5th, a Kentridge-directed-and-designed production of “The Nose,” the rarely performed opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, will have its première at the Metropolitan Opera. It is hard to remember when a visual artist has cut such a wide swath in the city’s cultural life, or spanned so many disciplines with such aplomb. “I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine” (the title is from Russian folklore, and refers to a Russian peasant’s denial of guilt) is a by-product of his two-year focus on the Shostakovich opera, which is based on a story by Nikolai Gogol. Although Kentridge often shows up in his drawings and films, this is the first piece in which he has appeared, live, as a solo performer. Promptly at ten past eight, with no introduction, he stepped up on the low platform that served as a stage, surveyed the rapidly quieting audience, and began, in a resonant and cultivated voice, to talk about Gogol’s “The Nose.”
His summary of the plot was concise and dramatic. Kovalyov, a minor bureaucrat in tsarist Russia, wakes up one morning and realizes that his nose has vanished. During his frantic efforts to find it, he spies his nose on the street, strutting about in the uniform of a government official whose rank is higher than his own. He confronts it timidly, and the nose rebuffs him with contempt. At length, after more humiliating encounters, Kovalyov and his nose are abruptly and inexplicably reunited. The Kafka-like tale, satirizing self-image and the terrors of hierarchy, set Kentridge off on a wide-ranging, forty-minute exploration of the absurdist impulse in literature, art, and history, and in his own life. From time to time, he was joined on the stage by projected video images of himself: first one and then two white-shirted figures who came and went mutely, sat down, stood up, moved furniture, and eventually imitated Kentridge’s habit, during his talk, of tossing his lecture notes into the air. Kentridge’s precisely timed attempts to intimidate or ignore his split selves, and to catch and retrieve the projected images of notes, drew somewhat uneasy laughs, but the audience stayed with him. Near the end, he put on gold-rimmed pince-nez (which he keeps in his shirt pocket, tethered by a black shoelace) and read excerpts from Nikolai Bukharin’s testimony, in 1937, before a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow. The doomed Bukharin’s appeals to reason and human decency, and the ironic laughter with which they were received, pushed the absurdist theme into political areas that Kentridge, who grew up with the ambiguities of being white and Jewish in South Africa, has dealt with throughout his work. No artist is less didactic than Kentridge, however, and he offered no explicit connections. He ended his performance in pensive silence, looking away from us as the stage lights went down.
Like many people, I can remember the first time I saw a Kentridge film. It was in 1999, in a Projects show at the Museum of Modern Art, and the film was called “Stereoscope.” An eight-minute sequence of hand-drawn animations, it included a heavyset businessman in a dark chalk-striped suit, sitting at a desk piled with papers; a dozen or more people manning a huge switchboard, from which swiftly moving cobalt-blue lines proliferated and intersected; individual men and women being pushed aside and obscured by pages of meaningless numbers; a dense crowd of people surging through city streets; men kicking or beating helpless victims. The businessman reappeared toward the end, holding his head in apparent anguish; the word “ _GIVE_ ,” in large capitals, filled the screen and changed to “ _FORGIVE_ ”; the businessman stood, looking down, as blue water poured from the pockets of his clothes, filling the room. The images were crudely but powerfully drawn, in charcoal and blue pastel, and filmed in an old-fashioned stop-motion technique. I had never heard of Kentridge, didn’t know he was South African, didn’t understand that his images were rooted in the terrible history of apartheid and its aftermath, but the film made me forget where I was.
“Stereoscope” is the eighth of Kentridge’s “Nine Drawings for Projection,” the series that launched international interest in his work. During several conversations I had with him last fall, when he was in New York, he told me that the first film in the series, titled “Johannesburg, Second Greatest City After Paris,” came about more or less by accident, in the late eighties. He was thirty-four years old at the time, married to a doctor, with two young children, and he considered himself a failure at everything he had tried to do—painting, acting, commercial filmmaking. It was a particularly grim time in South Africa. To stem the mounting internal opposition to apartheid, a state-of-emergency law had been passed in 1985, and arrests and police brutality were on the rise. International sanctions and boycotts had isolated the country from Europe and most of the world. Kentridge decided at this point to go back to the one thing he had always been able to do well, which was drawing. The artists he admired most, then and now, tended to be great draftsmen—Goya, Max Beckmann, Picasso—and his new, large-scale charcoal drawings and engravings, many of them quick studies of people he had seen on the street, had that kind of unrefined intensity. A Johannesburg art gallery exhibited them in 1985 and 1986, and although quite a few were sold, Kentridge still felt discouraged. “I had a terrifying moment of thinking, An exhibition every eighteen months, another forty years of work—is that all it’s going to be?” he told me. “I needed to find something else.” Using a borrowed 16-mm. Bolex movie camera, he began making a film in his studio, with the Warholian idea that anyone or anything that came in would be included. One of his charcoal drawings was on the wall; he filmed its successive changes and erasures. When his close friend Angus Gibson, a filmmaker and film editor, saw the raw footage, Kentridge told me, “he said the only interesting part was the drawing, and why didn’t I make a film out of drawings? Angus nursed that first film into being.”
Kentridge didn’t know where he was going with it. “I had two men,” he said. “One was Soho Eckstein, a character I’d used in posters for trade unions. That was easy, the businessman in the pin-striped suit—it was made for drawing. I had no idea what the other man would wear, so I decided to make him without clothes. And I put a woman between them, who became Mrs. Eckstein.” The naked man is Felix Teitlebaum, a sensitive poet and dreamer, the lover of Eckstein’s voluptuous wife. Felix and Mrs. Eckstein appear in three of the nine films, and Soho appears in all of them. “Much later, I realized there were elements of me in both men,” Kentridge said. “I look back now and think, How lucky not to know what you’re doing.”
Banner design for production of “The Nose.”Courtesy William Kentridge / Marian Goodman Gallery, NY
There were no storyboards; nothing was worked out in advance. “It doesn’t start with a social message,” he explained. “It starts with images that interest me, or provoke me.” He found he could make a crowd move across a landscape by placing a tiny dot in one corner and gradually adding more. He called his method “stone-age animation.” For a sequence that would take hundreds of computer-drawn cels in a Pixar film, Kentridge used a single charcoal drawing, altered and rephotographed again and again. The shadowy leftover traces of smudged or erased lines made each film a palimpsest, a history of its own making. I still can’t figure out why these stubbornly low-tech films are so moving. In “Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old,” the fourth in the series, Eckstein, whose wife has left him, stands facing away from us into a blasted postindustrial landscape, under a sign reading “Her Absence Filled the World.” Kentridge’s friend Yvette Christiansë, a South African poet and novelist who teaches at Fordham, told me that when she shows a Kentridge film to her freshman class “they don’t breathe until it stops, and then they don’t know how to talk about it. This happens every time.” I know artists who dismiss his work as retro and maybe a bit kitsch. The _Times_ art critic Roberta Smith has described his drawings as generic and impersonal. The European curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, one of his main supporters, once wrote that Kentridge, by denying coherence, clarity, and style, has created “an art of ‘resistance’ to modernism _and_ post-modernism.” I agree with her. For me, the “Nine Drawings for Projection” have a rough magic that’s unlike anything else in contemporary art.
When Kentridge was five, he discovered in his father’s desk a folder of eight-by-ten photographs of black people who had been shot by the police in the Sharpeville massacre. “It was certainly a shock to be expecting to find chocolates and see these photographs,” he recalls. “But it was even more of a shock to see the difference between an entry wound, just a dark little hole in the back of someone’s jacket, and the next photo of the person rolled over, with an exit wound that was the whole chest exploded. I never mentioned to my father that I had seen them, not until years later. That the adult world could be this violent—it didn’t fit any conceivable notion. It was one of those moments when one’s understanding of the world turns a sharp corner.” Sydney Kentridge, his father, was a leading trial lawyer in the anti-apartheid movement, and his wife, Felicia, co-founded the most important public-interest law firm in South Africa. They were brilliant, magnetic people, extravagantly admired by their many friends, and by the liberal intelligentsia whom they welcomed to their house. A family member recalls the novelist Nadine Gordimer’s saying that when Felicia walked into a room it took your breath away. When William was growing up, he often considered becoming a lawyer. “I think I’d have been able to do that, and do it well,” he told me. “But it always seemed that my father’s was an impossible act to follow.” His three siblings apparently felt the same way. William’s older sister, who lives in Toronto, is a marriage officer. His younger brother is a management consultant, and his younger sister is an artist; they both live in England. Sydney and Felicia Kentridge left South Africa, moving to London in 1981. “My father couldn’t bear to appear before the terrible South African judges anymore, and it seemed impossible that things would change,” William told me. “I am the only one who’s still here.”
The family lived in a large, comfortable house, on a hillside about two miles from the city’s center, with three acres of rambling English-style gardens. Their black servants lived in separate quarters on the property. Kentridge was a bright, articulate child, with a lively sense of humor. His father recalls an incident when he was five, and his mother, who was taking him out, told him to wash his hands and put on his shoes: “ ‘One or the other,’ William said. ‘Not both.’ ” He went to the all-white boys’ school that his father had attended. Most of his classmates came from families that supported the conservative United Party, and they saw nothing unusual about their social situation. Because of his parents, though, Kentridge was aware early on that he lived in an abnormal society, where terrible things were done every day.
He did well in school, and he acted in all his class plays. He also did a lot of drawing. He remembers, at one of his first art lessons as a child, being given a piece of charcoal, which seemed “more serious than a pencil.” Kentridge had art lessons every Saturday morning until he was fourteen, when he started going to life-drawing classes with an artist named Bill Ainslie, whom his parents had got to know when they asked him to paint a portrait of their younger son and daughter.
At the local University of the Witwatersrand, which he entered in 1973, after a year of compulsory military service, Kentridge majored in politics and African studies. He also directed and acted in theatrical productions, many of which were politically based; student opposition to the apartheid government was rife at the university, and Kentridge did some marching and protesting. At least half his time, though, was spent off campus at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, a non-racial, non-credit art school that Bill Ainslie had started in 1972. Kentridge was trying to be a painter then, and not making much headway. His problem was with color. “I found it really difficult to choose one color as opposed to another,” he said. There was no such indecision in his relationship with Anne Stanwix, an Australian whose family had moved to South Africa when she was sixteen. She had come to his high school once, with the debating team of her all-girls’ school. Kentridge had been in the audience that night, and afterward he invited her to have tea with him. They met again in freshman year at the university, where she was studying medicine, and they have been together ever since.
For several years after college, Kentridge seemed headed for a career in the theatre. He and some fellow-students had started the Junction Avenue Theatre Company in 1975, while they were still in school; they performed in Johannesburg, doing Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” and other experimental workshop productions, one of which, “The Fantastical History of a Useless Man,” was about “what it felt like to be white and useless in South Africa.” Kentridge said, “We finished it in 1976, just as the Soweto riots exploded, and we had this big discussion: Do we keep going or do we stop?” The group eventually joined forces with a black theatre company called Workshop ’71 and continued performing. Kentridge acted, directed, designed sets, and made posters. (He also designed posters for the black trade unions, which had gained the right to strike in 1979.) He kept taking art classes at Ainslie’s foundation, and made drawings and prints on his own. Eventually, though, his problems in handling oil paint convinced him that he could never make it as an artist, so he decided to go to Paris and become a serious actor.
He and Anne finished out the year in Paris. She was doing her residency at the American Hospital, and he was learning more about art, he said, than he had ever learned in art school. Kentridge described a rigorous exercise in which Lecoq students had to act out six degrees of tension in breathing and speaking—he demonstrated them for me—from a kind of lassitude that made movement of any kind virtually impossible, to the sixth degree, in which the simple act of picking up a fork involves a “rictus of tension that corresponds to Japanese Noh theatre.” The exercise, he said, helped to instill a physical awareness of energy withheld and spent, and it could also be applied to drawing: “You go from a looseness of mark-making to an efficient one to a gestural one.”
He and Anne decided it would be fun to get married in Paris, but, lacking the required documents, they married in London instead. In 1982, they returned to Johannesburg—“that rather desperate provincial city,” as Kentridge once called it. The city and its complex history fascinate him: the mineral wealth (gold and diamonds) that made it an industrial giant and left on its outskirts a wasteland of abandoned mines and industries, which appear again and again in his films; the fact that its two most famous residents in the last century were Gandhi and Nelson Mandela; the discovery, in limestone caves thirty miles from the city, of hominid fossils that push back the date of human origins by a million years or more. “There is something extraordinarily ugly/beautiful about Johannesburg that informs his work,” his friend Angus Gibson said last fall. “I can’t imagine him living anywhere else.” The Kentridges took a house in a low-rent district near the center of town, where, a little later, drug dealers operated openly. “People were constantly coming in to get their wounds mended by Anne,” Gibson recalls.
Kentridge worked in the commercial-film industry. He did props and designed sets for television, and went on to make a few documentaries and one short feature. “I had a friend who used to ask me, jokingly, when I was going to get a real job,” he recalls. “One day, he said, ‘You are now unemployable. You’re nearing thirty, you’ve never had a job, and no one will hire you, so do what you’re doing and stop complaining.’ Our first child, Alice, was born soon afterward, in 1984, and suddenly there was a big change of focus. I started drawing again. That’s the point where I began to write ‘artist’ on application forms, rather than ‘technician.’ Sink or swim, I was reduced to being an artist.”
The cultural boycott of South Africa, he says, made it easier to find his way. It meant he could work quietly on his own, without trying to keep abreast of current developments elsewhere. His knowledge of contemporary art was limited. “I had never heard of Bruce Nauman,” he said. “I was aware of Joseph Beuys—Beuys and his honey pump, which was supposed to be political art. But politics is not spreading honey around the main building at the Documenta art exhibition. It’s putting electrodes on people’s testicles, locking them up, putting them in fear of their lives. There was some anger separating me from the naïveté of Jasper Johns, who could celebrate his national flag so un-ironically. In South Africa you could not begin to paint the flag.” The minimalists and conceptualists made him marvel at the huge gap between his experience and theirs. “Part of this was a mixture of ignorance and provincial disdain for the center,” he said. “At any rate, there was no expectation of my work appearing in _Flash Art_ or _Art in America_ , so the terror those magazines exercised over a lot of young artists wasn’t there. And by the time the cultural boycott ended, in 1990, I was making the animated films. When they were shown in exhibitions outside South Africa, and curators responded to them on their own terms, I was astonished.”
Two of Kentridge’s films, “Felix in Exile” and “History of the Main Complaint,” drew widespread comment at the 1997 Documenta X exhibition, in Kassel, Germany. His timing could not have been better. Globalism was in flower, and one of its manifestations was a surge of interest in new forms of art from countries outside Europe and the United States. “He just came soaring through that,” according to Connie Butler, the chief curator of drawings at _MOMA_ , who saw his work the next year at the Drawing Center in New York. “His drawings had an intensely local feeling,” she said, “but I remember being struck by the combination of their intimacy and their performative quality—something I had never seen before.” Klaus Biesenbach, one of three _MOMA_ curators who will install the Kentridge show at the museum next month, told me that Kentridge’s time-and-process-based art, “which bridges opera, theatre, movies, sculpture, and drawing,” could not have been shown on this scale at a major museum ten years ago. “It’s a huge shift in paradigms,” he said.
Apartheid ended in 1994, when the African National Congress Party won the first democratic election, and Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa. For Kentridge, though, the key event had occurred four years earlier: “I was driving on a highway, listening to the boring opening of Parliament in 1990, when the announcement came that all the political parties banned since the nineteen-sixties would be unbanned. I pulled off to the side of the road, because I understood that everything was going to be different. We didn’t know what would happen, whether it would turn into civil war, but we realized that the unchangeable blocked situation had just been rolled over. That was the night we opened the champagne.”
The transfer of power from the outgoing government to Mandela’s party was fraught with tensions and uncertainties. “It seemed wonderful that we had a country transforming itself without the streets running in blood, and that we had a political compromise, but the price of the compromise was deeply felt,” Kentridge said. “The main decision was to put the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in place, with the understanding that terrible criminals would be let off scot-free as long as they told the truth about what they had done. There’s a cost to pay for that kind of amnesty. The choice was made between truth and justice, and it meant not taking responsibility for your actions.”
This dilemma was reflected, though never overtly, in Kentridge’s work. In 1992, he had begun to collaborate with the Handspring Puppet Company, a professional troupe that performed mainly in Cape Town and Johannesburg. He made animated film projections, which were used onstage with large, hand-carved wooden puppets, each of them manipulated by two live actors. “Faustus in Africa!,” their 1995 adaptation of the Faust story, resonated with undertones of the bitter choices being made in post-apartheid South Africa. Testimony from the Truth and Reconciliation hearings informed “History of the Main Complaint” and figured prominently in “Ubu Tells the Truth,” an animated film whose central image is the monstrous tyrant of Jarry’s play. Kentridge never tried to illustrate apartheid or its aftermath directly, but much of his work in the nineteen-nineties stemmed from his own struggle to come to terms with a compromised society. As he once explained, “I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures, and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.”
Kentridge’s parents returned from London several times a year for visits of varying length. They came back less often as the years passed, and in 1997 William and Anne and their three children—Isabel was born in 1988, Samuel in 1992—moved into his parents’ big house in Johannesburg. “We’d thought the only way we could manage it financially was to break up the property and sell off sections,” Anne recalls, “but that was the year William showed at Documenta, and the year Marian Goodman asked him to join her gallery in New York. He was also approached by a dealer in London, and suddenly we could afford the rates and taxes and all the gardening costs. His parents had planted two cypress trees—one on either side of the front door—which had grown so high, in forty years, that they blocked the view. When we told William’s parents that we were going to cut them down, it felt a bit like matricide and patricide—those two looming figures too large for us to cope with.” Anne worked long hours at the main public hospital, where she was a rheumatologist. She also took a keen interest in William’s work, commenting on it with candor, and even appearing nude in one of his films. Kentridge turned the sitting room into his studio, where the children were always welcome—he would get them to make shadow puppets or paint posters. He took them to school and brought them home, and he did much of the cooking. (His birthday cakes were very inventive: Alice remembers getting a giraffe one year and a pirate chest full of gold coins another.) Eventually, he built a larger studio, in the garden.
Work poured out of him—films, sculptures, puppet-theatre productions, charcoal drawings, and also prints, which have always been an important part of his oeuvre. One of Kentridge’s projects with the Handspring Puppet Company had been an adaptation of Monteverdi’s opera “The Return of Ulysses,” which he designed and directed. Widely performed, it caught the attention of Bernard Foccroulle, then the director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, in Brussels, who asked Kentridge if he would be interested in staging—designing and directing—a full-dress opera. Kentridge loves opera, a passion he shares with his father, and the prospect of working on a big stage excited him. Finding the right opera took two years. He spent a year and a half working on “Tannhäuser,” but Wagner’s long, static scenes were inhospitable to the kind of staging, with animated-film projections, that Kentridge had in mind. “Finally, in 2004, I went to the director and said, ‘Sorry, I can’t do this.’ He said, ‘Well, we’re also thinking about “The Magic Flute,” ’ and I said yes, immediately.”
He had seen the opera only once or twice. He adored the music and the libretto’s childlike, fairy-tale qualities, but, as he said, “I realized I knew very little about it. I knew that Act I has great scenes, with wild beasts and bird-catching, and in Act II there’s an impossible series of scenes with priests, where you don’t really know what’s going on, and then you have a great duet at the end. One of the main jobs was to make the story flow—not to let the second act be a confusion. It had to work like a fairy story.” For Kentridge, the most pressing problem was how to adapt his own process-oriented method of working to a situation that involved dozens of other people and a lot of meticulous planning. One reason he had failed as a filmmaker, he told me, was that it was hard for him to give other people instructions—to do so would imply that he knew what he was doing in advance. The solution he found this time was to spend many months alone in his studio, working out the film elements, and then to have a series of workshops with a four-person team of experienced collaborators, whom he chose and brought to Johannesburg: a set designer, a costume designer, a video editor, and an assistant director to work on the staging. Many drawings and a number of independent works came of this process, including a model theatre, built in his studio, with three-dimensional sets and backdrops. “It was a lot harder when I had to confront the singers on day one of the rehearsals,” he said. “I was completely terror-struck—and acted as if I knew what I was doing!”
Kentridge had come to view the opera as a reflection of the Enlightenment, whose contradictions and ramifications were personified in the character of the high priest Sarastro. “Mozart’s opera opened in 1791, two years after the French Revolution,” he said. “By 1792 or 1793, you had the first real Sarastros in the Committee of Public Safety and in Robespierre, people who said that in the interests of pure rationalism and what’s best for everyone we’ll chop the heads off thousands of people. Sarastro decides to kidnap Pamina, and put her under the control of his thug, because he knows what’s good for her. That’s in the libretto, but the music that Mozart gives him is very calming and reassuring.” Kentridge was not about to politicize Mozart. His thinking led, however, to a separate but related work called “Black Box,” another miniature theatre, with a twenty-two-minute scenario of filmed projections and puppet figures on mechanical tracks. The subject is colonialism in Africa, which, as Kentridge points out, was justified by the European powers as bringing enlightenment to the Dark Continent, and the piece makes reference to the near-annihilation by German colonial troops, in 1904, of the Herero tribe in German Southwest Africa—now Namibia. The soundtrack is a collage of Namibian songs and “Magic Flute” arias, somewhat altered—one of Sarastro’s arias, instead of being sung, is played by a military brass band. The most delightful moment in Kentridge’s “Magic Flute” comes in the first act, when an animated rhinoceros, hearing the flute, dances on its hind legs and turns somersaults; “Black Box” includes archival film footage from a 1912 rhinoceros hunt in Cameroon, which ends with the rhino thrashing in agony, and two white hunters cutting off its horn.
“The Magic Flute” was warmly received when it came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in 2007, after highly successful runs in Brussels, Lille, and Naples. The _Times_ ’ Anne Midgette called it “an exuberant dialogue between drawing and music.” Writing in the _Wall Street Journal_ , Matthew Gurewitsch said that it “has Kentridge’s fingerprints all over it, yet never betrays Mozart’s generosity and sweet temper.” The production disclosed a new dimension in Kentridge’s art, a playful, lighthearted expansiveness that had not been evident in his earlier work, and an ability to operate on a large—the largest possible—theatrical scale. A number of viewers, this one among them, had reservations. I loved the animations, which filled the stage with mathematical diagrams and fast-moving projections, in white light, of abstract and natural forms—Kentridge had filmed himself, as Papageno the bird-catcher, holding and releasing wonderfully lifelike doves—but there were times when I felt that the visual effects were a distraction from the music. This may well have had to do with the _BAM_ performance, which was handicapped by a lack of rehearsal time and the absence of great singers. “Some people hated it because there was too much to watch,” Kentridge said, when I mentioned my reaction. “But opera is an impure medium, combining many different elements. It’s also a completely contemporary form, in that what’s possible today, in combining image and music, was not possible thirty years ago. The whole popular-music industry is based on music videos. The operatic tradition of combining large-scale visual spectacle with live music is the pattern of popular music-making now.”
Kentridge discovered “The Nose” when he bought a book of Gogol’s short stories in an airport bookstore. Although he reads a lot of fiction, he says that there are gaps in his knowledge of the classics, and Gogol was one of them. He was struck by the tale’s affinities with the absurdist strain in art and literature, which, in the last century, had moved from the periphery into the mainstream. (A note in the introduction to the Gogol volume led him to Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” written the century before Gogol, which tells of a man whose nose was squashed flat at birth.) Kentridge learned of the Shostakovich opera soon afterward. Completed in 1930, when the composer was twenty-two, the production was shut down after a few performances, a victim of Stalin’s brutal crushing of the post-Revolutionary avant-garde. “It’s about a world gone awry, about dislocated logic and a driven irrationality where language stops making sense,” Kentridge told me. “That’s very much part of the nineteen-thirties in Russia, the period of the show trials. The absurd is the only form adequate to describe that breakdown of logic and rationality.”
Early in 2005, Peter Gelb, who would soon take over as the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, approached Kentridge about staging an opera for the Met. Gelb has defined his primary goal as helping the Met “reclaim its place in the forefront of American theatre and world theatre,” and he has hired some of the most innovative theatre and film directors to re-stage operas in the repertory or to direct new productions. The opera Gelb had in mind for Kentridge was Verdi’s early and rarely performed “Attila.” Kentridge thought about it overnight, and then, as Gelb recalls, “he came back and said he was not remotely interested in ‘Attila,’ but how about ‘The Nose’?” Gelb did some quick research. “I was aware of the opera, but I didn’t know it,” he said. “I also had to find out if Valery Gergiev, who is the leading Shostakovich conductor, would be willing to take it on. He was, and I told William we would do it. It was very quick. I was convinced.”
Gelb, Kentridge, and his four-person team went to St. Petersburg, where Gergiev arranged a special performance of “The Nose” for them, as part of the White Nights Festival. From there, Kentridge went straight to Johannesburg, where he set to work. It took him several months to work out the visual language of the piece; its main element is a huge collage, in the Constructivist style, of newspaper pages and agitprop slogans in Russian, German, and French, against which images would be projected. Although the actual nose appears and sings in only two scenes of the opera, Kentridge produced countless drawings of it, some of which will appear as projected images—the nose on horseback, the nose dancing (its legs are sometimes Kentridge’s and sometimes Anna Pavlova’s, in archival footage). “The shape of the nose is my nose,” Kentridge told me, beaming, “an Ashkenazi Jewish nose.” He clearly had enormous fun conceiving the visual elements. The Met agreed to pay for two extended workshops, one in Johannesburg and one in New York. (It is also sharing the cost of a European production of the opera, which will take place in 2011, in Aix-en-Provence.) Gelb has signed Paulo Szot, the Brazilian baritone who won a Tony Award in 2008 for his performance in “South Pacific,” to sing the leading role of Kovalyov. There will be six performances at the Met, starting March 5th. Asked whether “The Nose” might return to the Met next season, Gelb was cagey. “I don’t know,” he said. “It may have to wait for the next nasal festival.”
When Kentridge left New York in November, he was headed for Naples, where a show of large-scale tapestries, made from his drawings by a small weaving studio in Johannesburg, was opening at the Capodimonte Museum. After that, he looked forward to two months at home. Alice, his older daughter, now fully recovered from a yearlong ordeal with cancer, was getting married in January, at the house, and the whole family would be there. When things finally quiet down, late this spring, Kentridge has promised himself a sabbatical, a year or so of reading, thinking, eating well, and drinking “better wine than I deserve.” He also plans to make another animated film from charcoal drawings, “going back to basics, which is to say, drawing Johannesburg.” I asked him whether he had ever seriously considered living somewhere else. “Never to the extent of making plans,” he replied. “Just vague longings. Each time I go to Paris, I say, ‘What a gorgeous city—why don’t we live here?’ ”
In the end, Kentridge stays because South Africa’s compromised society reflects and nourishes his work. “My work is about the provisionality of the moment,” he told me. “I’ve become very suspicious of certainty. First comes understanding the value of doubt. For me, that’s how we go through the world.” ♦
More:Animated MoviesApartheidArtArtistsFranceJohannesburgMetropolitan OperaMoviesNikolai GogolParisPerformance ArtPeter GelbSouth AfricaWilliam Kentridge
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