Long Walk to Freedom

William Kentridge’s prints, on view at the Zimmerli, take on the political.

By: Jillian Kalonick
   South African artist William Kentridge frequently works in theater and film, so his printmaking often involves participation. For a series of etchings called "Ubu Tells the Truth," the starting point for a theater production, he wanted the feeling of theater directly in the prints.
   After printing the heel of his hand across the piece to create a fleshy texture, "I wheeled a bicycle across the paper, hit it with a charcoal-impregnanted silk rope, invited children and cats to walk over it, spattered it freely with pigment," Mr. Kentridge writes.
   The drawings and theater production were followed by a film, based on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, that incorporated testimony given during the hearings of the South African government’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The subtle political element of the pieces is typical of Mr. Kentridge’s work. The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick is exhibiting a third of the prints the artist made throughout his life through July 16.
   "His prints are usually allegorical — a personal take on the political," says Jeffrey Wechsler, senior curator at the Zimmerli. "He uses broad themes to make comments on human comedy, tragedy, folly… It’s in the whole tradition of Hogarth and Goya in terms of commentary about society, and the political and social scene."
   Like William Hogarth and Francisco Goya’s art, Mr. Kentridge’s work is inspired by conditions in his country, mostly his reaction to apartheid. The exhibition, which originated at Grinnell College in Iowa and will travel to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Smith College Museum of Art, includes 120 works from 1976-2004. Mr. Wechsler has organized the exhibition mostly chronologically, noting that the artist’s prints became larger and larger as the years went on.
   The exhibition was a natural fit for Rutgers, says Mr. Wechsler — the school is home to the Rutgers Archive for Printmaking, and the Zimmerli is home to a large collection of French art focused on innovative printmaking, poster and journalistic art. Mr. Kentridge even created several prints at Rutgers studios.
   The Johannesburg native was born in 1955 and grew up in a family of prominent attorneys who were active against apartheid. "Law was the obvious field for me to have gone into, and is what I would have been best at… Being an artist was a very unnatural and hard thing for me to do," he writes in the exhibition catalog.
   In the 1970s he began to work in film and theater as a writer, director, actor and set designer, and is well-known for his animation. Printmaking echoed animation work, involving drawing, erasing and redrawing, and was a natural fit for the political messages he sought to express, says Mr. Wechsler.
   "Printmaking is a mass media, like newspapers," he says. "A lot of printmakers were first in newspapers and magazines. Since you have multiple copies, it was more democratic — it’s art of the people, since you can make more and they can be sold cheaply."
   The first in a series of posters, "Art in a State of Siege" was meant to be hung all over Johannesburg in 1986, as part of a backlash against the city’s centenary celebration. At that time there was a state of emergency throughout South Africa and widespread oppression — "they felt it was no cause for celebration," explains Mr. Wechsler. The poster includes the text "100 Years of Easy Living" and a figure of a heavy man in a suit smoking a cigar, whose face appears to be crumbling.
   The man in a suit — often a pinstriped suit — is often used in Mr. Kentridge’s work, as a symbol of business and power, Mr. Wechsler says. Ubu is frequently depicted, as are megaphones, telephones and cameras.
   In his politically or socially themed art, "he won’t show pure discrimination against blacks," says Mr. Wechsler. "He’ll show figures that represent authority, money or power."
   The exhibition at the Zimmerli includes etchings, lithographs, monotypes, photogravures and more, along with works created on record albums or against a canvas of reference books and atlases, demonstrating an impressive range for an artist. Accompanying wall text is written by Mr. Kentridge, allowing a unique perspective into his creative process.
   There were often no boundaries between his work on stage and on canvas, such as when he lived in a communal house in London in the ’70s and ’80s. He created posters for theaters and, since there was no proper place to hang them, "We would go to sleep under the sweet smell of evaporating lacquer thinners," Mr. Kentridge writes.
   Most of the prints in the exhibition have little or no color, forcing the viewer to study the figures and lines of the piece.
   "Kentridge enjoys the pure physical process of the technique," Mr. Wechsler says. "He enjoys the process of black and white and the tone you can get — that’s a really close tie to tradition."
William Kentridge Prints are on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton St., New Brunswick, through July 16. Hours: Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sat.-Sun. noon-5 p.m. Closed Tues. in July. Admission costs $3, members/students/faculty and staff/under 18 free. Free admission first Sun. For information, call (732) 932-7237. On the Web: www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu