Sunday, December 16, 2007

Rock, Cup, Brain: A Kentridge Experience


Today was the last day for an exhibit of William Kentridge's work at Lewis and Clark College's Hoffman Gallery. A review of the show in Portland Art piqued my interest. I also had heard his name at numerous times, often connected with animation and was impressed with reproductions of his charcoal drawings. The Hoffman show consisted of a number of charcoal drawings that are a part of his film from his animated film of 1997, Weighing and Wanting.

I was not prepared for what the distinct,strange, and disturbing world that lives in Kentridge's animation. Weighing and Wanting's charcoal drawings take on a metamorphisis, shift change, drift, and make connections in strange and unusual ways. Things get reduced and erased. Lines overlap and score objects. Lap dissolves propel the viewer through a gallery of a mind's objects.

I spent nearly about a half hour watching repeat viewings of Weighing and Wanting, almost until it took me into a kind of pre-REM bedtime state. Then I returned to the outer gallery for a closer look at the ten or so images hanging in the outer gallery that appear in the film. The single panel of explication and the gallery essay were helpful. Both pointed out that the bulky bald post-middle age industrial executive-looking Gorbachev-reminiscent fellow in the film is a reoccurring character in Kentridge's work named Soho Eckstein. In this particular time-based Kentridge gallery, he has a MRI brainscan and works through all kinds of reminiscences as he studies the exterior interior of a big rock he collects on his property, listens to his coffee cup like a telephone, puts his head into a lap of a reappearing naked woman who gets overlaid and kind of transformed into large towers associated with the mines.

Images of objects become leitmotifs and they return in little sequences of relationships that create action. For instance, a teeter tottering empty scale later holds both rock and cup that Soho has been interacting with. Or grey line animations brain scans intercut to create montage illusion of Soho and the naked woman come together and face each other. And then there is the cup, that is broken in a sequence of redlines and descriptive violence, which comes back whole at the end of the film.

If the two words in the title of this film were dissolved or overlapped together in the same way as objects in the film, they kind of make the word wait (weigh+want=wait). What might Soho be waiting for? An opportunity to create patterns for meaning? Test results from his MRI? Or for more memories he finds in the center of his rock?

I believe there are probably few things in Kentridge's work that are ever clearly and directly comprehensible, which may be why I was drawn to watch the piece for almost an hour yesterday and why there just doesn't seem to be enough commentatary, critique and interview on this intriguing artist.


posted by well-executed buffet at 5:18 PM
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