William in Exile: Thoughts on Failed Utopias

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Andrew Solomon

William in Exile: Thoughts on Failed Utopias I Moral certainty ends in brutality; doubt is the precondition of humanism. William Kentridge inhabits this conundrum; he has a strong ethical viewpoint, but he shies away from persuasion. The inherent danger of confidence about anything is his work’s only surety. He is secure in his methods and bullish in his beliefs, but he is the patron saint of ambiguity. His qualm-riven art consistently reverts to a critique of dogmatism. The narrative within his time-based projects follows the structure of dreams: associative rather than declarative, and reliant on multiple layers of meaning that may remain obscure to the viewer, as they do to the artist. Images—now oddly fast, now oddly slow—transform from one thing into another, with meanings that can be teased out only partially, opaquely, and after the fact. Kentridge’s drawings, films, sculpture, theatrical productions, lectures, and ephemera limn the compelling but necessarily fruitless impulse to know. Lucidity is not the fruit of experience, but the delusion of innocence; all we can aspire to grasp is the rough shape of our ignorance. Yet contingency here manifests in playfulness more often than in despair. That phenomena are indecipherable does not mean that they are disastrous. Injustice is presumed to be an ineluctable characteristic of the world, and one must confront it even if trouncing it remains impossible. Kentridge never lapses into the existentialist proposition that everything is pointless; he merely elaborates on the idea that we seldom know or can 25


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