There is a poignant moment in William Kentridge's latest work, a choreographed lecture of 40 minutes in which the artist talks purposefully but with humour about his favourite books. Animatedly chasing after the thread of an idea, Kentridge, looking neither casu al nor formal in his white shirt and dark trousers, almost sighs.
"I am just the artist, I make the drawings," he says.
Kentridge's drawing in three-dimensions In motion, they coalesce into sculptural form
Thing is, we can't be sure if this is unpretentious humility or not. The confusion arises largely out of the fact that we are never quite certain if Kentridge is saying this. Sure, the words come out of his mouth, but his lecture, an exaggerated performance of a public lecture, relies on duplicity and multiplicity.
Premiered at the Sydney Biennale earlier this year, "I am not me, the horse is not mine", as his lecture performance is titled, commences with a retelling of Nikolai Gogol's short story about a St Petersburg official who literally loses his nose. Strange things happen on stage, too.
Sneaking out from the edge of the projected frame of light that surrounds the coolly confident Kentridge, is his double. The real-life artist does a perplexed double-take. The well-heeled Cape Town audience invited to this one-night-only staging at the National Gallery cackles.
And so it continues, Kentridge's likeness popping in and out of the frame to listen in on the story. At one point two likenesses, both wearing white shirts and dark pants, appear projected on the wall behind Kentridge. They sit down, listen to the real-life artist speak of Gogol, Lawrence Sterne and Miguel de Cervantes. We see them get bored, shuffle off, come back, eventually interact.
To borrow from Gogol's absurdist fiction about a respectable gentleman who sets out to find his nose, it is "the most outrageous nonsense". Gloriously outrageous nonsense.
Kentridge's interest in the story of collegiate assessor Kovalyov and his missing nose is appropriate. Written in 1835-1836, Gogol's short story forms the basis of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich's satirical opera of the same name. First performed in 1929 to poor reviews, Kentridge is devising the stage design for a new version of the opera, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera House and due to premiere in New York in 2010.
Projected video fragments "I am not me, the horse is not mine"
In this context, you could say that Kentridge's lecture functions as a fantastically public creative act, one in which we are allowed to sit in and watch the artist chewing on various ideas, to see him spit them out, only to pick up on them again and chew some more."I am very suspicious of good ideas in advance," Kentridge told me in an interview three years ago. He was speaking about his experiences as a theatre practitioner and member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, formed in 1976. "The stage is a very good practical epistemology," he added, talking of how the theatre environment taught him to practically test and refine his ideas.
Despite his assuredness as both a director and actor, Kentridge admits that his latest work presented him with a peculiar difficulty - he had to play himself.
"I thought it would be easy as I quite often do lectures," he says after a casual saunter up and down the Company Gardens in search of a coffee shop in which to sit and chat. "But this, where it has to be a performance of lecture, has been so bloody difficult. It is not easy to act as if one is saying one's own words."
Think Charlie Kaufman, though to his credit Kentridge is far less stultifying than Hollywood's self-obsessed postmodernist. Maybe JM Coetzee's Seor C, from his recent Diary of a Bad Year, is a better template.
Either way, something of the difficulty Kentridge faced comes through on stage as he slips in and out of character. For the most part he is poised and articulate, very much the public persona, but there are moments of doubt, of spontaneous and from-the-heart speech. Maybe.
During one of these latter outbursts, Kentridge mentions being in Venice recently. He recalls an argument that ensued in his mind after a performance: should he go out and live it up, or should he simply go to bed early. The party monster in him won.
Kentridge's Venice aside is not without relevance to his lecture, which teetered on the brink of incoherence, its allusions to Russian art and politics of the 1920s and 1930s opaque.
Kentridge was in Venice to install a projection commissioned for the fire curtain of La Fenice, the city's main opera house. To coincide with the event, an Italian dealer invited Kentridge to show some work at Palazzetto Tito.
As is now usual for the artist, whose activities have spawned a global publishing industry around his name, a small catalogue appeared. Kentridge contributed some words.
"Insofar as there is a central logic behind the whole project, it is the argument of the fragility of coherence, in which the coherence and disintegration of images refers also to other fragilities and breaks."
As South Africans we are familiar with these fragilities; we are living through them now as public officials come undone and logic goes on a holiday.
Kentridge's performance ends with him reading from a transcript of literary theorist Nikolai Bukharin's trial before the Plenum of the Central Committee in 1937. It is hard not to think of Vusi Pikoli.
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