Inside the Black Box
William Kentridge in an Interview
William Kentridge in Stockholm during the
preparation for Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2005
Photo: Petra Hellberg Deutsche Guggenheim, © William Kentridge
The "Magic Flute", the Rhinoceros hunt, the German genocide on the Herero in
Namibia: with "Black Box/Chambre Noire" the South African artist William
Kentridge creates a mechanical, miniaturized world theater in the Deutsche
Guggenheim that is also an elegy to a chapter of forgotten history.
Cheryl Kaplan spoke with the artist.
In the winter of 2005, the South African artist
William Kentridge and I met in Central Park for a walk through
Christo’s installation
The Gates. He was just starting to work on a new commission from
Deutsche Bank for the
Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin called
Black Box/Chambre Noire. William Kentridge is best known for his
animated films as well as theatrical collaborations with the
Handspring Puppet Company, founded in Cape Town by Basil Jones and Adrian
Kohler. Kentridge has exhibited widely, from the 1993
Venice Biennale to the Museum of Modern Art
(Projects 68, 1999), the Hirshhorn
Museum (2001), the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in New York (2001),
Centre Georges Pompidou (2002),
Castello di Rivoli (2004), and The
Metropolitan Museum of Art (2005). He has also been awarded the
prestigious
Carnegie Prize at the
Carnegie International (1999).
William Kentridge in his Johannesburg studio
working on Black Box/Chambre Noir, 2005
Photo: John Hodgkiss Deutsche Guggenheim, © William Kentridge
Kentridge’s characters are frequently worn out by their struggles as they
relentlessly strive towards a cure. In the animated short film Tide
Table, life comes to an almost dead-stop for Soho Eckstein, the
fastidious power broker and frequent protagonist. From Weighing… and
Wanting to Stereoscope, Eckstein has watched kingdoms come and
go. Sometimes he’s nearly drowned in his own tears.
In
Kentridge’s 1996 film History of the Main Complaint, Soho
Eckstein is in a coma, surrounded by doctors who multiply around him. The
disease, part physical and part political, progresses, echoing South
Africa’s plight as the tycoon falls apart. Kentridge’s characters tumble
in and out of their own tragic flaws. The films, mostly done in charcoal,
are relentlessly animated with a Bolex
camera, frame by frame.
William Kentridge, image from Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2005
Photo: John Hodgkiss Deutsche Guggenheim, © William Kentridge
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As part of an ongoing series of conversations, I talked
with William Kentridge moments before his trip to Berlin from his
Johannesburg studio. Straddling film, theater and opera, Black
Box/Chambre Noire takes as its historical start the 1904
massacre of the Hereros
in the former German colony of
Namibia.
Cheryl Kaplan: Your drawings for "Black Box"
reference theater, film, photography, opera, and a vaudeville act.
William Kentridge: The films in general are drawings in four dimensions.
Sometimes a drawing starts as two-dimensional, and then it becomes a
painted backdrop as in Black Box for the Deutsche Guggenheim. There
are projections on flat surfaces moving through time, where a flat
backdrop becomes animated. The logic and way of working has to do with
drawing. I extrapolate outwards into filmmaking or theater. I’m interested
in how cinema and the further development of photography coincide.
Black Box references the black box of the theater, a space for
experimenting, the chambre noir – the space between the lens and the
camera’s eyepiece – and the black box as a recorder of disasters in
airplanes. A black box miniature theater is an optical toy that is a
forerunner of cinema. Instead of having actors on stage, it’s about seeing
a child’s miniature toy theater and its machinery moving. Formally, the
Black Box has something to do with
vaudeville, which, in the 1890s, provided one of the transitions to movies.
William Kentridge, image from Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2005
Photo: John Hodgkiss Deutsche Guggenheim, © William Kentridge
How did you prepare for the Deutsche Guggenheim commission?
The preparatory work happened over two years of working on the opera I’ve done
of Mozart’s
Magic Flute using a 1:10 scale model of the set, working with
projections and models of figures on a miniature scale. The Magic Flute
is about the
Enlightenment and its limits and those not eligible for it, like Papageno
and Monostatos. Mozart’s Magic Flute was first performed in
1791 – and about a hundred years later, the Enlightenment appeared in the
form of the colonization of Africa. At the
Berlin Conference of 1884, Africa was partitioned; that was seen as an
Enlightenment project, bringing lightness to the dark continent. I’m
looking at German colonization in reference to Namibia for the exhibition.
I went there to look at the place where there was a great massacre of the
Herero by the Germans from 1904-1907. Some of that archival material and
footage shot in the mountain where the genocide began is in the final
piece.
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William Kentridge, image from Black
Box/Chambre Noire, 2005
Photo: John Hodgkiss Deutsche Guggenheim, © William Kentridge
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William Kentridge, Untitled, (drawing
for Black Box/Chambre Noire), 2005
Photo: John Hodgkiss Deutsche Guggenheim, © William Kentridge
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