William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015. Installation view at EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam, 2015. © William Kentridge. Courtesy of EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam.
William Kentridge’s current exhibition “More Sweetly Play the Dance” at the Milwaukee Art Museum (through Aug. 19) is a little different than what we’re used to seeing from him. But really, only a little. Those familiar with his penetrating charcoal-on-paper stop-motion animations will find continuity between what they’ve seen elsewhere and this more monumental mashup of live-action video and hand-rendered animation.
For those who aren’t familiar with Kentridge’s work, he’s one of a very short list of artists who is guaranteed to be found in one of the final pages of your art survey text from college, in one of the chapters about “New Media” or “Politics and Identity” that hopelessly attempts to inventory the chaotic recent history of art. Kentridge fits into those categories only slightly more comfortably than those categories fit into a tidy narrative of western art history. His work mixes new and old media, contemporary politics with history and tradition, making what he does difficult to classify…in the best possible way.
“More Sweetly Play the Dance” is a child of Kentridge’s South Africa circa 2015: a country with a long history of racial division and inequality, at a time when those local struggles were swelling into a global movement. The work depicts a procession of mostly silhouetted or backlit figures entering from left and slowly making their way across eight video screens before exiting at screen right, the most basic of filmic devices. Each of the large videos is a separate channel, and the continuity between each one is slightly off in a beneficial touch of imperfection. A motley cast acts out a modern-day danse macabre, only it features exiled hospital patients, a brass band, shrouded refugees and a gun-toting South African dancer, rather than medieval penitents fearing the plague. The ongoing parade activates the foreground while Kentridge’s signature flickering charcoal smudges and erasures animate the background. And the whole raucous visual melee is soundtracked by a jarring yet jaunty zydeco-ish score by Johannes Serekeho, making for a singularly immersive and captivating experience.
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The figure/ground compositional dynamics and racial subtext of the work will draw comparisons with one of Kentridge’s contemporaries, Kara Walker, who uses silhouettes based on racial stereotypes to much more direct and disturbing effect. While Kentridge is of course political, his politics are suggestive and impressionistic. He shows more than he tells, and he shows with nuance and breadth. This is certainly the case here. Anyone who sees the piece will associate the imagery of limping individuals carrying possessions on their heads with any number of refugee groups displaced around the world. The dozens of ambiguous horizontal objects dragged from ropes suggest bodies in bags. The demagogic politicians gesticulating at their podia remind us of certain real maniacs in power.
Despite the obvious darkness of “More Sweetly Play the Dance,” it stays buoyant. The music and dancing offset the desperation and hysteria of the characters. This was, incidentally, the original symbolic function of the danse macabre: to somehow reckon with the inevitability of our doom and come to terms with it through art. Kentridge is doing the same with his own art and contemporary condition. He identifies that condition, reckons with it, then dances in its face hysterically. The band plays on, so to speak, defiantly, desperately and dutifully even as the ship takes on water.
Will the ship sink? I think we’re all wondering that. So what value is there in questioning it then? In other words, what is art worth that tells us what’s already on our minds? The answer is: “very little.” But there’s a profound value in art that can show us what is in our minds in ways we couldn’t have imagined. To help us flesh out and animate the confusion and chaos that invisibly paralyzes us, so that the traumas and tragedies can be sublimated into ecstatic visions, Dionysian orgies, and macabre dances. Take that, dark forces of the world!
