Weighing and waiting
by Robyn Sassen
A bemused mix of conviviality and anticipation coloured the mood of the bunch of die-hard Kentridge fans awaiting his arrival at an event organised to celebrate the honorary doctorate being bestowed upon him by Wits University, late last month.
And indeed, the communal and private weighing of other responsibilities in anticipation of Kentridge's talk about this honour and his latest work Tide Tables, paid off.
Scheduled to begin in the early evening, the affair was stretched because Kentridge was delayed on a flight from Zurich. In the wake of limp cheese on toothpicks and a warming melange of poured glasses of wine collecting midges, the repartee was witty and the mood warm, even if the evening was not.
The 'mensch' in every sense of the word, Kentridge brought across his sense of creative thrill and child-like passion in his down-to-earth delivery, which was as professional, dignified, clear and "un-academic" as anyone could wish for.
Kentridge is a phenomenon in South African art who not only brings discursive visual culture that is exciting to experience and which is challenging on conceptual and political levels, but he knows how to address an audience: there is nothing quite as satisfying as being able to listen to a bloke strutting his stuff sans the mask of academic discourse.
For this reason, and so many others, Kentridge's work and the manner in which he goes about it, with hand-made film, opera, theatre, large scale Gesammtkunstwerks, remains unchallenged. He's up there with greats like Picasso and Moore in terms of the international acknowledgment and accolades he's won, and now Wits, too, can be credited for their foresight.
Honouring an artist with a distinction of this nature is quite unusual in South Africa, as the padded speeches of shuffling speakers before tended to stress. Suddenly art in South Africa is being acknowledged as something to be treated with dignity.
As Professor Gerrit Olivier, dean of the arts faculty commented, this gesture on the part of the university opens up new grounds of possibility and promise for arts awareness.
Tide Tables is a magnificent piece of narrative, disarmingly layered and typically difficult to relay with brevity or logic. The first professional linocut that Kentridge ever produced drew from a 1947 photograph of his grandfather Morris Kentridge MP in a pinstriped three-piece suit and shoes, on Muizenburg beach. The quirky, historically evocative image of the quintessential businessman, always dressed in his formal suit, is the conceptual basis for Soho Eksteen, the social emblem and corporate despot who is the main protagonist in many of Kentridge's earlier films.
It is also the starting point of Tide Tables. The jazzy yet poignant music of Franco, a poorly acknowledged West African music composer, the pristine image of Muizenburg hotel and the colourful changing huts on the beach become iconic in a tale told with charcoal on paper that is as nostalgic as it is political, and as sinister as it is witty.
Kentridge began producing hand-made films in 1989, and in a rather delightful but blatant attempt to kill some time, the whole litany of these films was projected. Many speeches were made by dignitaries in the fine arts department. In both of his speeches, Frank Ledimo, head of the galleries, drew attention to the fact that this event also doubled as the launch of the Wits School of the Arts's (WSOA) new art gallery space.
It's big, it's cold, it's bold, it's industrial and raw, and with its naked walls and concrete floor, the possibilities are rich for creative and social diversity in this student platform. It's been a while coming, but it represents yet another part of the growing urban and cultural project that has come to be called the Cultural Arc.
Linking the Constitutional Court in Hillbrow to the Civic Theatre in Braamfontein, to Wits, and further down, to Newtown's cultural precinct, this initiative has been masterminded by the town-planners and city organisers of the Johannesburg Development Agency, but lubricated by our own cultural practitioners. What a great way for the visual art in the city to pat itself on the back in the name of ten years of democracy!
