There is a bottomless black hole in the Royal Academy’s colossal survey of South African artist William Kentridge. It appears on screen, a seething, gaping disc that circles and swirls, occasionally flecked with a dot of light to indicate some endless passage downwards. It is nothing more than an animated drawing, and the simplest thing here, yet it represents two terrors at once: our common fear of falling, and the full horror of sweated labour down a mineshaft.
Kentridge (born 1955) is the most productive and ingenious animator in international art, the polemical bite of his charcoal lines running all the way back to Goya, Daumier and the German expressionists. His technique – neither imitated nor surpassed – is familiar by now yet never ceases to mesmerise. Instead of the successive drawings, one to each frame, that make up most animations, Kentridge has for many decades worked with a single image for each scene that is drawn and redrawn, erased and altered using charcoal and a rubber.
These drawings have proliferated into etchings, linocuts, animations, shadow plays, operas, ballets, tapestries and mechanical puppet shows – all represented at the RA – but they are the origin of everything he makes. It feels ideal, therefore, that the show opens with solo portraits of recurrent characters.
Here are drawings of the white industrialist Soho Eckstein, who lives off the sweat and blood of Johannesburg’s impoverished black citizens, their faces pressing strong and close to the picture plane. Here is his neglected wife, Mrs E, and her sometime lover Felix Teitlebaum, a stocky, balding artist with more than a faint resemblance to his alter ego Kentridge, generally portrayed naked and from behind.
The world Teitlebaum turns to look at is everywhere visible: brutalised miners, queues of starving citizens, police, dogs, howling hyenas, the nameless puppet-masters of the apartheid regime. And he himself is ubiquitous, sometimes as a watchful eye, sometimes as a ghostly outline. You see him traced in an animated reprise of Alfred Jarry’s fat-bellied despot Père Ubu, where he is now translated into Pa Ubu of the secret police unit who tortured their victims. Kentridge’s father was a leading defence lawyer for black South African leaders, representing Nelson Mandela and the family of Steve Biko. The artist has a humble and extremely complex sense of his own role as a political artist.
But mordant as these solo drawings are, they gather true force through movement. Kentridge’s films have an extraordinary surge and drag to them, each figure seeming to move through the heaviest of times, pulling the past along with them – literally, in terms of all the previous drawings, often spectrally apparent. Eckstein lowers his eyes and the whole tone of a scene slowly sinks to depression and guilt. Teitlebaum turns to gaze at the room around him, his anxiety filling the house like dark water.
Images tremble and shift in the fluid density of the charcoal marks. Crowds build, mill, march through a landscape in one powerful continuum. Eckstein buys up half of Johannesburg and the effect is brilliantly expressed as something like a turn of a page on the screen, wiping out every sign of life you saw before.
Cigar smoke turns into speech, fax machines churn out money. Kentridge’s transitions are riveting. In the most recent film here, City Deep (2020), Eckstein looks down into what he believes is an open grave, only to discover a miner digging another bottomless shaft below. And all the certainty of European art vanishes before his eyes in the museum: the paintings simply disintegrate, cascading from their frames like soot from a fireplace.
But what it all means is getting harder to parse, particularly since few of the early masterpieces are included here, such as his epochal History of the Main Complaint, an animation that amounts to a political compass. It is as if the grandeur of the Royal Academy elicited a response based largely on scale. A high central gallery has been turned into a full-scale cinema for giant projections. Another is filled with Kentridge’s Colonial Landscapes, massive drawings that pastiche Victorian images of Africa to no sharp effect. A third is hung with tapestries of his black and white collages worked in mohair from angora goats farmed in the Eastern Cape. Meticulous as they are, these weavings entirely lack his touch.
Kentridge is so prolific that he could have filled the RA many times over; as it is, he has covered every available inch, making charcoal drawings directly on the walls. Yet this selection seems almost too polite in its nod towards Europe. A room of enormous roses and lilacs drawn on sheets of newspaper represent an outsize homage to the late still lifes of Édouard Manet (Kentridge reprises Paul Nadar’s famous photograph of Manet, suave in his wasp-waisted jacket, to emphasise the point). And you will see hints of Dada, surrealism and constructivism everywhere, particularly in the props and stage sets for performances.
Collaboration has always been Kentridge’s modus operandi, and lately the events have grown ever larger. His opera productions have included Shostakovich’s The Nose and Mozart’s The Magic Flute, though alas these experiences remain offstage. Forced into Covid lockdown, there is a sense that Kentridge has been living inside his own head. He certainly shows himself there, a ruminative figure, walking back and forth inside the animated pages of a book.
But it all comes together in the magnificent, multiscreen Notes Towards a Model Opera, which is nothing less than a torrential storm of images across three screens. The title refers to Madame Mao’s model operas, the only officially sanctioned state music permitted during the Cultural Revolution. And what you see is equally stylised in its way: drawings of birds in flight, images of the dead and starving, who might be Chinese or African, actors and dancers performing many parts to the wildest of music: disgraced Chinese politicians, Rhodesian demagogues, African dancers. And through it all, pirouetting en pointe across the pages of a magnified atlas, is a black ballerina dressed in a communist uniform, but waving a flag like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. All the ideals – and disasters – of revolution come together in this pageant, its aesthetic a stupendous extension of Kentridge’s charcoal animations, where the ghosts of the past always haunt the present.
