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Monday night, South African artist William Kentridge sold out a performance/lecture at Kane Hall. By the time we arrived forty minutes early for the 7:30 event, a line of almost two hundred people were already snaked from the doors to the lecture hall, up the stairs and around the second floor.
William Kentridge's "The Return of Ulysses," at the Moore through Mar. 21. Photo by Johan Jacobs.
The fifty-some-year-old artist takes the stage nicely if casually dressed in slacks and a white Oxford, spectacles tethered to his pocket and carrying a portfolio of loose-leaf paper, against a backdrop on which is projected what appears to be a video of a warehouse wall in which nothing is happening. The only prop onstage is a rolling step-ladder.
The performance begins as though it was a lecture, with Kentridge launching into a discussion of Gogol's short story "The Nose," with reference both to its origins in Sterne's Tristram Shandy and its adaptation into a controversial opera in the 1920s by Shostakovich. Then a second Kentridge appears, walking onstage and dressed exactly the same, in the video. Video Kentridge distracts real Kentridge, who then chases him off, and then tries to return to his lecture, except he's lost his place, his notes are shit (he complains endlessly about incomprehensible details he's included in the ream of papers he has that he can't make heads or tails of). Multiple Kentridges appear, even more distracting. Real Kentridge winds up taking up with what appears to be a completely separate lecture, this time on semiotics, aided by a video showing continuity of formal interpretation in the face of increasing visual abstraction, and so on.
Eventually Kentridge is recounting his travails trying to put together the entire bloody affair while dodging falling piles of semiotic nothingness in the video. Overall, the narrative becomes a meditation on power and censorship in Stalinist Russia, a regime desperate to prove its reality in the face of the gaping nothingness it produces through the construction of false realities and perpetual violence.
Kentridge originally wanted to be an actor, studying at the famed Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris before discovering he wasn't any good at it. As an artist, his fame grew up mostly surrounding his creative animation techniques, particularly 1994's Felix in Exile. His subsequent work with operas and eventually in performance art speak to Kentridge's lust for acting, and I Am Not Me... demonstrates a both wit and a willingness to tackle difficult topics. We're looking forward to getting to see the rest of his work.
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