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.
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, the small pieces of torn paper that Picasso and Braque glued to their cubist paintings – the– are transformed into freestanding, life-sized figures using thin sheets of aluminium tricked up to resemble paper. is revisited as an open-form sculpture.
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.
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.
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