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Kate Sands on the art of witness.

Article Excerpt
William Kentridge Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2 September-28 November 2004

There is a sort of wilful amnesia, a refusal to accept accountability, that comes from the naturalisation of outrageous systems in the world. But I'm more interested in the question of historical memory--of what happens when people forget so quickly. William Kentridge

In William Kentridge's animated film, Tide Table (2003-2004) a man in a pinstriped suit sits on a deckchair on the beach, reading the newspaper. Now and then he looks up and, at one point, goes to sleep. Before him in the water someone is baptised, watched by a small group of people. Elsewhere, a choir sings and cows wander in search of food. A bathing shed morphs into an AIDS hospital. Watching the scene from a hotel balcony are several military men with binoculars: Generals.

People and animals live and die while the man remains detached, reading the paper, and the Generals maintain their surveillance. As in this recent film, the hand-drawn vision of South Africa that we see throughout Kentridge's art is both complex in its reach and particular in its evocation of details and moments from everyday life. In a recent forum at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney, Kentridge talked about what it would take to get this figure out of the deckchair and how, in the end, he had not been able to achieve this. From this perspective, the reader of the newspaper becomes a trope for the role of many white people in South Africa, the position of the privileged--observing but not directly engaged in the historic upheavals of South African society over the last twenty years.

There is a question haunting this wonderful solo exhibition, one which also underlies the accompanying commentary about and by the artist. It is this: what does it mean to be a white South African artist, and what kind of art can possibly be produced in the context of such a painful history? The question is there in comments concerning whether Kentridge's art is overtly political or not, whether his work is radical, and in his remarks about why he chose to...

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