WHAT WE SEE AND WHAT WE KNOW: THINKING ABOUT HISTORY WHILE WALKING, AND THUS THE DRAWINGS BEGAN TO MOVE...
On its surface, the recent large-scale William Kentridge exhibition that debuted in September 2009 at Kyoto’s National Museum of Modern Art (MoMAK) was a relatively straightforward survey of a mid-career, internationally recognised artist. Organised by MoMAK chief curator Shinji Kohmoto, the exhibition toured to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, introducing all of Kentridge’s major animation works to date, as well as original drawings, prints and stereographic installations, to local audiences.
This model has been familiar in Japan since at least the Picasso retrospective organised by the Yomiuri Shimbun in 1951 in the aftermath of World War II, and is one that fits easily into flowcharts that see intellectual capital circulating from a central source to the waiting margins. However, the fact that works were drawn exclusively from South African and Japanese collections, and the curatorial rhetoric behind the exhibition, entitled ‘What We See & What We Know: Thinking About History While Walking, and Thus the Drawings Began to Move…’, broke sharply with the typical internationalist party line. Indeed, the exhibition celebrated the potential for more point-to-point exchange even as the past decade’s intensified globalisation of contemporary art has spurred a flattening of artistic and critical values.
Kentridge, of course, is known for his evocative portrayal of life in South Africa from the end of Apartheid to the current era of ANC government, the AIDS epidemic and increasing xenophobia towards immigrants from neighbouring countries. Yet as an educated, white South African, he also occupies an ambivalent position in relation to narratives based on a victim/witness-perpetrator/oppressor dynamic. In his essay to the exhibition catalogue, Kohmoto addresses this point by provocatively writing that... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Invisible Mending. Still from the film installation 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, 2003. Collection of the artist.
A Lifetime of Enthusiasm. Still from the film installation I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008. Collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. All © the artist.
