Kentridge Show

Friday was my third trip to the William Kentridge show at the MOMA and I finally was able to see all of it. The show is the same one that was at the SFMOMA last year, it is called "William Kentridge: Five Themes". The five themes are: Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession, Thick Time: Soho and Felix, Parcours D'atelier: Artist in the Studio, Sarastro and the Master's Voice: The Magic Flute, and Learning From the Absurd: The Nose.

Each theme is based around a series of videos looped in succession in one room or a few rooms or many videos played constantly in multiple projections in the same room. In the areas outside the video rooms there are "final" stills from some of the videos and other creations.

My first visit about three weeks ago I walked through all of the parts of the exhibit except "The Magic Flute" becuase it wasn't working that day. Last week I went to the exhibit for a second time and saw "Ubu and the Procession" and "Soho and Felix".

One of the highlights from these two parts of the exhibit was "Shadow Procession", a 7 minute video from 1999 which, "represents Kentridge's early experimentation with stop-motion animation". The figures in the video are made from "torn black paper". I really like the boots and the machines that seem to have no purpose.

Because of the size of the exhibit it was often very funny to watch people who didn't really know what to expect from it (including me on my first visit). It is pretty hard to make much sense at all from the exhibit without spending at least a few hours there (my three separate four hour Friday afternoon blocks were barely enough time to see everything). People's idea of how to behave in a museum also made watching them funny. The videos for "Ubu and the Procession" and "Soho and Felix were shown in large (15'x15'x15'?) black rooms (one for the two videos in "Ubu" and three for the nine videos in "Soho" with the projection shown on the entire wall opposite the entrance to the rooms. Most of the time there were many more people crowded around the large doorways to the video rooms than there were inside. In some of the rooms there was a single bench (these rooms were usually had the most people in them) but in some people either had to stand against the wall or sit on the floor. The crowd when I was there might have been unusual, with more people who did not really know what to expect because the three days that I went were Friday afternoons when the museum is free. It seemed like people stayed longer in the video rooms with the benches, happy to have somewhere to sit down.

"Soho and Felix" is a series of "9 Drawings for Projection" done from 1999 to 2003 which feature two characters Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum. These videos feature one of the techniques that Kentridge is most famous for which is charcoal drawings that are changed in each frame of the video. The technique is very interesting because each change in the drawing leaves behind a ghost image of itself like writing on a blackboard. Often these ghost images can add a lot to the image especially in depictions of motion. Two of my favorites of these videos are "History of the Main Complaint" and "Stereoscope". I especially like the driving scenes in "Main Complaint" (see 3:30 in the video).

The videos for both "Artist in the Studio" and "The Nose" were all playing in one room each simultaneously. In "Artist" each video was of a different length. On two walls facing each other "Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès", seven videos featuring Kentridge played in their own loops, on each wall of the room. On each end of the room a larger projection played "Journey to the Moon" and "Day for Night". The "Seven Fragments" incorporate backwards video, disrupting the cause and effect that normally exists in a linear narrative. The fact that the videos played in an endless looped added to this. I also like this one but I can't embed it. "The Nose", featuring Kentridge's most recent work complements Kentridge's staging of Dmitri Shostakovich's 1930 opera The Nose based on a 1836 story by Gogol. The videos in this part of the exhibit are an installation called "I am not me, the horse is not mine" which consists of 8 videos of the same length which play in a continuous loop. This video is taken from a slightly different set up of the exhibit but is in some ways a good example of what it feels like to be inside a room with 8 videos playing at once.

It's interesting watching what people do when they wander into a room with 8 videos playing at once. It seemed like the people crowded outside the video rooms for "Ubu" and "Soho" were trying on their best "Museum" outfits, doing their best to not get in anyone's way, to not block any views, but in "Artist" and "The Nose" the people who enter the room become part of the exhibit (more on this later this week when I write about the Tim Burton and Marina Abramović shows), many people are so mesmerized by so many different movements and lights that they hardly notice that they are standing directly between another projection and another person. It's a strange experience staying in these rooms for enough time to watch each of the videos in it's entirety, to see the crowd ebb and flow to see who stays for a long time, sits down and picks out a few videos to watch. The only problem with staying for this long in the rooms is that the same music loops the whole time, only one of the videos in "Artist" has music and the videos in "The Nose" are all the same length and are set to the same music.

My favorite part of the exhibit was "The Magic Flute" based on and featuring the Mozart opera. There were three videos in this part which played once an hour. The videos are projected onto "two animated miniature theaters" and a blackboard and feature moving robotic parts. "The Magic Flute" was out of order on my first visit, on my second visit I saw the end of the third of the videos and on my third visit I was able to see the whole thing. "The Magic Flute" contains the two longest videos in the exhibit. This video is of the blackboard section.

This room provides probably the most entertaining people watching. The two animated miniature theaters are at each end of a row of 5 benches, the blackboard is on a third side, opposite the two entrances to the room. Because many people enter the room as the previous showing is ending and see people sitting facing the last movie that played they all sit down facing the same direction as the people getting up had been sitting. HOWEVER! The first movie starts on the blackboard to the right (which only requires minimal shifting for most people) and then the next movie is on the mini theater behind them! For some reason this was really funny to me but probably isn't in my description of it. Anyway, the animations for "The Magic Flute" are really amazing, I liked the second part the best but I find it difficult to describe any of the parts of it that I liked.

Fun times at the MOMA! Soon I will write about the Tim Burton and Marina Abramović shows which were surprisingly complementary.