The art of magic: William Kentridge speaks about his most recent work

by Shawnee Barton
image courtesy of William Kentridge

My mom remembers sitting in Mrs. Bolinski’s sixth grade class when President Kennedy was shot; my friend can describe watching Michael Jordan play basketball with unbelievable detail. With this same kind of clarity, I remember seeing my first William Kentridge video in 2002 at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. I remember thinking that his magical animated charcoal drawings felt like everything good art should be—lovely, smart, and rich with texture, imagination, and art-historical dialogue. I could watch his signature low-tech videos forever. That’s why I jumped at the chance to hear Kentridge speak and to see his video “Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès” (2003) at the University of Chicago on January 31.

Many of Kentridge’s animations are created from little more than tediously erasing and redrawing in charcoal. The erasures leave behind fascinating ghost images of previous drawings. These ghost images not only add depth and complexity to the new drawings but also remind us that we all were somewhere before where we are now. The lingering images of the past create a physical map of the new subject’s path. Similarly, watching an aged Kentridge draw people and landscapes from his South African childhood, turns the ghosts into a physical representation of one’s walk through life. It’s hard to sit through his videos and not think about youthful memories and about growing-up.

Méliès was a pioneering 19th-century French filmmaker and magician known for playfully using cinematic tricks such as stop-motion animation and overlapping exposures to create smart and lighthearted pictures. The series “Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès” combines the charcoal drawings that we know and love with Méliès-like trickery. The viewer is quickly lost in Kentridge’s world, disoriented by the scenes playing in reverse as often as forward. In one instance, Kentiridge erases a lovely drawing of his boyhood home by simply moving his hand from left to right across the page; then with a swipe back left, the entire drawing returns. He does all this without a drawing utensil or eraser in his hand. Thinking long enough, one can figure out how he does it: he stops the camera, erases or draws, then turns the camera back on, and resumes the hand wiping action. He repeats this over and over before finally playing it correctly to create the image and in reverse to erase it.

He does this sort of thing so often that you begin to loose sense of which way is forward. With only a couple of simple tricks, like the one described above, Kentridge transforms his studio into a magical place where teacups scoot across the sky, ants create drawings, and where he becomes both the artist and the mark.

Somehow it’s clear that it must have been incredibly difficult to make everything look so easy in these black and white videos. Hearing Kentridge speak was like peeking behind the curtain at a magic show. He clued us in when studio assistants were pulling strings off stage; he let us in on details such as how everything had to be performed in slow motion since his camera shot only one frame per second. He also talked about learning “to perform backwards.” He explained that if one records the throwing of a book and then plays it backwards, it looks like a book being thrown in reverse, but “if you pause for a second or two before or after throwing it, everything suddenly changes. Magic happens.” Indeed it does.

Throughout the videos, Kentridge is repeatedly seen as the stereotypical frustrated artist pacing in his studio. During his lecture, Kentridge said that he was thinking about Bruce Nauman’s minimalist performances in which he repeats simple gestures over and over in his studio. Kentridge said that he, “admired the confidence” it takes to do so little and present it as art. Kentridge also said he was similarly exploring “how much is enough,” but in the end concluded that he “is no minimalist.” Thank goodness, because these videos, like most everything Kentridge creates, do something that is hard to do—they manage to exist as incredibly successful art while also being extraordinarily entertaining. I imagine that Méliès would be pleased.

MARCH 2006