Making Sense, Making Meaning at the Kentridge Arts Festival

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Photo by Adine-Sagalyn

William Kentridge

William Kentridge in Rome, 2020

William Kentridge might be the most important visual artist in the contemporary world, and if you dispute that claim, it’s harder to argue that he isn’t one of the most diverse, truly a multimedia artist in the fullest sense. Kentridge sculpts and produces linocuts, lithographs, screen prints, silk screens and etchings. He designs productions for opera and theater performances. He makes brilliant use of simple, even archaic technology, including films that reinvent and revisit the origins of animation as handmade drawings that move. But Kentridge’s drawings don’t only move, they move with significance. He isn’t Damian Hirst fashioning overpriced artifacts for the rich and clueless. His work reflects the tragedy and hope of a world damaged by bad ideologies.

Milwaukee is where the South African artist will begin his U.S. tour. The Kentridge Arts Festival encompasses the ongoing “See for Yourself” exhibition at the Warehouse Art Museum; performances of short plays at the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre; and Present Music’s “Kentridge and Miller: Flat on your back on the dry wintry grass—a cine concert” featuring Kentridge’s collaborator, South African composer Philip Miller, and Kentridge's animation. Kentridge will be in town for a three-day whirlwind centered around the performances at the Chamber Theatre’s Broadway Studio Theater in November.

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Photo courtesy the Warehouse Art Museum

William Kentridge and Philip Miller

William Kentridge and Philip Miller

The Kentridge Art Festival is the vision of Milwaukee’s Jan Serr and John Shannon, art collectors, patrons of the arts and founders of the Warehouse Art Museum. Shannon’s enthusiasm is unaffected and contagious. He’s apt to stroll around the Warehouse Museum during open hours, introducing himself to gallerygoers, asking where they’re from and offering an exegesis of the nearest print on the wall.

“Jan and I first saw Kentridge’s work at the Robert Brown Gallery in Washington D.C., a series of small etchings that really intrigued us. We’d never seen work like this before,” Shannon recalls. “Then we happened upon his work at the San Francisco Modern—one of his animated films. We stood there mesmerized by the skill and also the humanity clearly evident in the storytelling. Kentridge has an expression: ‘Making art, making meaning.’”

Born in 1955, Kentridge grew up in a Jewish South African family, classed as “white” yet inescapably an outsider under the Calvinist regime of Apartheid. His parents were civil rights barristers, arguing cases in court for Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and other prominent Black activists in the struggle to overturn their nation’s racist system. As Shannon puts it, “Art for art’s sake is not part of his life. He makes things that make sense.”

Sometimes Bitter Satire

Sources for Kentridge’s creativity include the performance-oriented Dada and Theater of the Absurd, movements resulting from the absurd systems that gave rise to world wars in the last century. Early on, Kentridge became involved in agitprop, anti-Apartheid theater. In 2016 he cofounded the Johannesburg-based Centre for the Less Good Idea to continue his vision in performance. The plays staged as part of the Kentridge Arts Festival will be the Centre’s debut in the U.S. Milwaukee Chamber Theatre is providing the venue and technical support for their production of Mayakovsky by Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky and two plays derived from short stories, Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist and Joseph Conrad’s ironic An Outpost of Progress, a precursor to his better-known indictment of colonialism, Heart of Darkness. Public performances will take place Nov. 8-9 at the Broadway Studio Theater, with Kentridge giving a talk at the Milwaukee Art Museum in between the matinee and evening shows on Nov. 8.

The art on view at the Warehouse’s “See for Yourself” reveals the breadth of Kentridge’s art history interests. Living behind the international embargo against South Africa, in an age without the Internet, Kentridge may have developed in isolation from trivial pursuits of post-Pop Western art. German Expressionism is apparent in some of his figurative scenes, and the bitterly satirical spirit of George Grosz bristles through the large-scale silk screen Art in a State of Siege (1988). A comment on the centennial of Johannesburg, it’s the portrait of a bloated, cigar-smoking businessman, swollen from the wealth extracted from the labor of exploitation. His “Little Morals” series, inspired by Theodor Adorno’s remarks on the power of art to express human tragedy, channels Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings. Especially powerful is Kentridge’s etching on paper, Refugees (You Will Find No Other Seas) (2017). Mounted on what appears to be a canvas sail, the large image depicts one of the dangerously overcrowded small boats bringing desperate refugees across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe.

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Photo courtesy the Warehouse Art Museum

John Shannon

John Shannon with William Kentridge's Refugees (You Will Find No Other Seas), 2017

The political implications of Kentridge’s work are broad and consistent, according to Shannon. “He doesn’t like authoritarianism on the right or the left. He doesn’t like authoritarianism anywhere in any way.”

The Kentridge Arts Festival “is significant for Milwaukee,” Shannon says. The artist “is flying from London, where the Royal Academy opened a huge exhibit of his work. He is starting his American tour in Milwaukee because of our exhibit here and because we’re bringing over the theater company [Centre for the Less Good Idea] he loves working with. When he leaves, he flies to Los Angeles for a huge exhibition at the Broad, and then on to Miami for an art presentation.”

Other highlights of the Kentridge Arts Festival include panels on Apartheid at the Warehouse and America’s Black Holocaust Museum on Oct. 29 and Nov. 11 and a poetry reading and discussion with the artist’s writer-sister Eliza Kentridge on Nov. 15 at the Warehouse.

For more information, visit thewarehousemke.org.

For tickets for the Centre for the Less Good Idea/Milwaukee Chamber Theatre performances, visit skylightmusictheatre.org/box-office/buy-tickets.

For more information on Present Music’s concert, visit presentmusic.org.