These two art exhibitions take contrary approaches to depicting history
Contemporary art is a gigantic billboard for political platitudes, but if there is one artist who consistently transcends the overwhelming shallowness, it’s William Kentridge. As a South African who lived through the fall of apartheid, this may have given Kentridge a more complex understanding of history and politics than so many of his mono-dimensional peers. Or it may be simply a matter of personality. With the possible exception of Anselm Kiefer, there’s not another living artist who approaches a subject with such intense intellectual commitment.
The central work in Kentridge’s show at Annandale Galleries, Day Will Break More than Once (for which I’ve written a brief catalogue essay), is a film called Waiting for the Sibyl, in which the pages of a book are turned, revealing a succession of puzzling statements: “Old Gods have retired… I have brought news. I have forgotten the message… The third martini… Beware of insects with moustaches… You will never see that city…”
Confusion and uncertainty: The works of William Kentridge on display at Annandale Galleries.Credit: Document Photography
The film relates to a piece of music-theatre performed at the Sydney Opera House late last year, based on the Cumaean prophet Sibyl, who would sit in a cave, reading the future and writing her discoveries on oak leaves. When the wind scattered the leaves, it became impossible to align prophecy with petitioner, rendering the predictions useless.
Apollo had granted the Sibyl’s request for eternal life, but because she had forgotten to ask for eternal youth, her body gradually withered away until she was nothing but a voice. Her story illustrates the futility of overreaching our mortal state, of trying to outstay our welcome on the planet or foresee what destiny holds in store.
For Kentridge, the confusion and uncertainty are more stimulating than a mere declaration of one’s political beliefs. He takes episodes from history, and art history, and rearranges them in a speculative manner. In Paper Procession I-VI, the small pieces of torn paper that Picasso and Braque glued to their cubist paintings – the papiers colles – are transformed into freestanding, life-sized figures using thin sheets of aluminium tricked up to resemble paper.
Picasso’s famous She-Goat (1950) is revisited as an open-form sculpture. The original bronze was cast from items such as a cane basket, broken ceramic jugs and palm fronds, held together with plaster. One cast sold at auction for US$179.4 million in 2017.
Drawing for Sibyl (Whichever Page You Open), 2023.Credit: Courtesy of Annandale Galleries
Kentridge has replaced that solid body with a set of metal arabesques, as if an abstract expressionist had taken over at the halfway mark. It removes the goat from its fixed place in history and propels it into another era – a feat of time-travelling that occurs in many of Kentridge’s meditations on the art of the past.
In a series of photogravure prints called Studio Life made during the pandemic, Kentridge portrays himself working on projects that range across genres and media, with multiple historical references. In Studio Life: Showman, Stalin’s face is superimposed on a figure taken from the abstracted forms of Russian revolutionary set design. For artists such as Malevich and Rodchenko, Stalin was the kiss of death for the movements they championed, namely suprematism and constructivism. In Kentridge’s print, we see an imaginary version of history, in which Stalin stands onstage surrounded by avant-garde imagery.
One wonders how we would view Stalin and these movements today had the dictator embraced the new art rather than stamping it out. We are so accustomed to seeing so-called progressive art as a badge of freedom, the enemy of all things dark and oppressive, it’s almost inconceivable that Stalinism and suprematism could co-exist. But it only takes a moment’s reflection to realise that modernism had many points of contact with authoritarian politics, from Ezra Pound’s praise of Mussolini to Wyndham Lewis’ admiration for Hitler. The futurist generalissimo, Filippo Marinetti, was a dedicated fascist. German expressionist Emil Nolde was a member of the Nazi party, although it didn’t prevent him being tagged as a “degenerate artist”.
In Kentridge’s work, history is treated as a board game in which truth and fiction are mingled. He has a good deal in common with a novelist such as Benjamin Labatut, whose astonishing book When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), which reads like an intimate history of modern physics, constantly asks us to consider what is true and what is false.
The impact of such work is that we come to value truth, in all its messy permutations, as something that doesn’t reveal itself in a blinding flash. On almost every occasion, there are details that need to be unpacked and analysed. Kentridge’s art historical hypotheticals show us how things might have turned out had the dice fallen in a different way. We see that chance has been more influential than the most rigorous intellectual systems. It takes but one unexpected event, such as the attacks on October 7, to throw the world into chaos. The ramifications, however, will be with us for generations to come.
William Strutt’s Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851 (1864), installation view, 24th Biennale of Sydney: Ten Thousand Suns, Museum of Contemporary Art.Credit: Hamish McIntosh
This brings me back to the 24th Sydney Biennale, which runs until June 10 at venues across the city. No one could accuse curators Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero of not having a sense of history. The exhibition contains a range of historical inclusions, from William Strutt’s famous bushfire painting Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851 (1864) to Bonita Ely’s ecological works of the 1970s and William Yang’s documentation of the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre from the same period.
The Biennale, however, takes a contrary approach to history to that found in Kentridge’s show. The artworks of the past are presented with a sense of certainty that tends to close down avenues of interpretation, with problematic results. The organisers’ first faux pas was to describe the Anzac landing as “an anti-jihad preventive campaign” that had helped form national identity, by implication as a rejection of Islam. This statement, on the Biennale website, was quickly removed, being wrong on almost every count. Not only was there no “jihad” on the Turkish side, but one of the lasting legacies of the Gallipoli tragedy is a sense of fellowship between Australians and Turks that transcends the bounds of language, politics and religion.
As for the surprise appearance of Strutt’s Black Thursday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, we learn that the historic fire was “an unintentional testament to the detrimental consequences of failing to respect Indigenous land technologies and agriculture”. This, to put it mildly, is to draw a long bow. There were only 77,000 people in Victoria in 1851, although that number would increase by seven times over the following decade because of the gold rushes. To blame the fires on the failure of this small population to respect Indigenous land management practices, without a word about the freakish weather conditions, is ridiculous.
Weaver Hawkins’ painting Atomic Power (1947), at the Art Gallery of NSW, is used to convey a purely negative message about “the weaponisation of science”. By contrast, one of the crucial aspects of the movie Oppenheimer is that it explores the reasons the renowned scientist helped to create the A-bomb, largely in response to the danger of the Nazis getting there first.
In brief, the Biennale’s displays and catalogue entries are characterised by a simplistic attitude towards history, whereby events are to be celebrated or condemned in accordance with whether they advance a social justice agenda. But one may endorse the Indigenous, LGBTQ and environmental positions raised by the Biennale, while recognising that the manner of presenting these themes is purely ideological. Where Kentridge asks questions, the Biennale provides ready-made answers.
It could be argued that it’s precisely this willingness to hold to fixed positions that is causing the deep divisions undermining Western democracy. The vicious play of intransigence and reaction between right and left is a recipe for chaos. What’s gone missing is dialogue, along with the willingness to envisage a broad range of reasons and motivations for any historical event.
Art can be a way of asking vital questions, stimulating thought and creating connections, not just a way of cheering for the right team. With almost 90 artists, or groups of artists, there’s a huge variety of work on offer at this year’s Biennale. Take it all in, but don’t feel obliged to follow the script.
William Kentridge: Day Will Break More Than Once is at Annandale Galleries until May 25. The 24th Biennale of Sydney: Ten Thousand Suns is at White Bay Power Station, Art Gallery of NSW, Chau Chak Wing Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, UNSW Galleries, Artspace and Sydney Opera House until June 10.
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