See William Kentridge “for Yourself” at Warehouse Art Museum

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For years, I’ve introduced art history courses by broaching the idea of a “canon” of art. In the last few years what seemed like a fairly solid concept has begun to melt—once orthodox examples like “The Great Gatsby,” “Casablanca” and “Elvis”—pick your icon or text—have started to lack former relevance, and certainly any resonance with a new generation. Whether it’s my students, cultural geography, history, technology, or me personally is four-dimensional math better left to mushrooms and campfires, but it’s still worth noting as it relates to our relationship to artists who are in the process of traversing generations, and probably, paradigms.

Most would still hold the artist William Kentridge to be firmly ensconced in anyone’s ever-mutating list of canonical contemporary practitioners. I, we, studied his work 30 years ago. A few days ago, I viewed a comprehensive array of his projects at Milwaukee’s Warehouse Art Museum entitled “See for Yourself” (on view through Dec. 16) It’s a wildly diverse show, with prints, drawings, videos, performances (as video artifacts,) objects and ephemera. Many will recognize the charcoal drawings with their fluttering erasures and palimpsesty productive histories.

The show, assembled largely from the collection of John Shannon and Jan Serr, and curated by Melanie Herzog, provides a generous look into the deep and winding imagination of an omnivorous artist who came alive during a time when one sought prolonged relationships built from points of view over years rather than seasons. It reminded me starkly that social media is wide, not deep. Individual ingots like Kentridge have been rolled under the pressure of the internet into a shiny foil that has broadened the cultural milieu while leaving it far thinner.

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So, seeing what is basically an old-fashioned core sample of a dogged individual life-journey jiggled a nerve in me. Yes, museums continue to do retrospectives by generational artists. I was recently floored by Jasper Johns’ two-part tour-de-force at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art, but it didn’t trigger me in the moment. And it takes a trigger sometimes. For me Kentridge’s sprawling breadth left me realizing just how much well-packaged, mediocre, one-off images I’m subjected to on social media. This seems like a sea change. The best example of Kentridge’s enduring wisdom is a stop-motion video “Second-Hand Reading,” featuring scenes unfolding on top of the pages of an Oxford English Dictionary.  With its scumbled and erased drawings of text, visual noise, landscapes, abstractions, and constantly disrupted moments of tingling metaphorical symbolism the work is an apt encapsulation the spirit of the exhibition.

Messages such as “Fixing the Moment” and “Showing and Hiding” pop up, flicker, and vanish before one can truly absorb them visually. The video is a hypnotically poetic comment on human folly, right on top its proudest cultural achievement: a book objectifying all its concepts in an array of abstract symbols. It’s a microphone-drop of a work. And there’s a hundred more pieces in the show with similar if less comprehensive ambitions. Describing it all particularly would be a little like telling someone about the Alps by offering the elevations of five of its highest peaks. See it for yourself, indeed.

Kentridge is a polymath if there ever was one, part linguistic philosopher, draftsman, filmmaker, musician, social activist, and performer. This grandness and intellectual weight is abundantly present in the show. Present in the same way it is in Stanley Kubrick, Andy Warhol or Paul Simon, and is absent for most part in the contemporary musicians on your “contemporary hits” Spotify playlist. You’ll leave “See for Yourself” with a deep understanding of this fact. It’ll leave you with an aching nostalgia for deep dives and prolonged engagement. With long hiccupping conversations filled with piercing eye contact. You’ll recall listening to both sides of a record without checking your phone. Hopefully you’ll wonder where your endurance has gone. And where has it gone? Put that question in your pantry with your cupcakes.