Kentridge explores elements fostering collective narcissism

The most remarkable work in William Kentridge’s exhibition is a burlesque yet sinister and disturbing satire on the arbitrary violence of Stalin’s regime.

Part of ‘William Kentridge: that which we do not remember' exhibition

William Kentridge’s work is deeply political in its innermost inspiration but not in the sense that it is animated by facile ideologies and easy formulas. On the contrary, the most remarkable work in this exhibition is a burlesque yet sinister and disturbing satire on the arbitrary violence of Joseph Stalin’s regime.

Much less does Kentridge indulge in identity politics. Today contemporary art exhibitions are full of work that is supposedly exploring — code for navel-gazing — the artist’s identity as the member of some minority, or preferably of two or more minorities at once.

This is a phenomenon that has arisen in the post-political environment of prosperous developed economies, starting not surprisingly in the US. The odd thing is that, for all their wealth, these are not societies that have abolished the gap between rich and poor — in many cases it has grown worse in recent decades — but ones in which the poor are apathetic and the elites and the intelligentsia have abandoned failed utopian visions of equality.

It is above all the university-educated classes who have resorted to identity politics, partly because of a tribal urge for self-definition and differentiation in the bland conformity of contemporary society, and partly because of the need for self-justification through the denial that they are in fact privileged beneficiaries of an unequal system.

So identity politics shifts attention away from the real inequalities between rich and poor and focuses on illusory or exaggerated differ­ences between sexes, ethnic groups and so on. The implication, or even the overt claim, is that the disadvantage suffered by these subgroups is a manifestation of capitalism, but that is a fallacy: capitalism is interested in people only as workers and consumers, and has no interest whatsoever in discriminating against women or homosexuals, for example, in either capacity.

This problem ultimately goes to the roots of human psychology and to the unfortunate fact human beings can establish a sense of their own identity only through difference; tribes identify themselves in opposition to other tribes, nations and religions assert themselves against other nations and religions.

That opposition cannot happen without an element of hostility, and it is often based on the implicit principle that the other is bad and therefore I am good.

That opposition cannot happen without an element of hostility, and is often based on the implicit principle that the other is bad, and therefore I am good. This is the reactive logic that Nietzsche characterised as the core of the slave mentality. The master asserts his own goodness unconditionally; the slave, on the other hand, asserts the wickedness of his master and derives his own goodness as a corollary of the negation of the other. He is good because he is the victim of wickedness.

So here we see the reasoning of all the fractional groups who oppose their own lot to the privilege of that allegedly most privileged of all categories, the heterosexual white male. Unfortunately, the truth is more complicated, or perhaps simpler: real privilege is wealth. There are plenty of poor white males – they are Donald Trump’s constituency – and on the other hand plenty of rich women, rich homosexuals, rich black people, and so on. Identity politics is a hypocritical device to allow these groups to evade the guilt of privilege by reconstructing themselves as victims.

This is why we have to be grateful to the so-called Incels and the other male-identity movements of the last few years, because when even heterosexual white males want to jump on the bandwagon and be victims too, they inadvertently provide a ludicrous reductio ad absurdum of the whole system. Critics of the masculinist movement regularly refer to a culture of ‘‘toxic masculinity’’, but it is the mentality of victimhood, resentment and self-pity in all its forms that is truly toxic.

Men and women, in the course of knowing themselves – as the Delphic oracle enjoined two and half millennia ago – need to take stock of their various particularities, from sex to culture, from family history to personal circumstances, interests and abilities. But in the end, as most schools of philosophy have suggested, wisdom consists in transcending the self, in opening ourselves to a world beyond self-interest, and in reaching for a level of consciousness that is unbounded by egoism.

Kentridge’s work deals with some of the elements that have made possible or even fostered these whirlpools of collective narcissism in our time, especially the disorientation of the individual in a society without common values of the sort that shared religious belief traditionally has provided in most cultures. His most famous works are short stop-motion animations, drawn in charcoal and produced in a way that is minimal yet endlessly inventive: his characteristic device of erasure and redrawing evokes a world in constant and seemingly random change and metamorphosis, yet where things always bear the imprint of their former state and where the shadow of memory is inescapable.

The principal characters of these films, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitelbaum, are everyman figures who remind us of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, the modern incarnation of Odysseus in Ulysses (1918-20). It is particularly interesting that Kentridge, whose family background is Jewish but whose name is British, should have adopted such emphatically Jewish names for these cinematic alter egos; similar to Joyce, he seems to allude to the figure of the Jew as an outsider, even a wanderer.

Eckstein and Teitelbaum experience this shifting world, in which subjective and objective alternate or merge, as though they were in a dream or bemused spectators of unintelligible phenomena. And in several graphic pieces in the present exhibition they, or the artist in his own person, evoke alienation in an absurd world, or the playing out of rituals recalling those of obsessive-compulsives, charades of purpose in the absence of real meaning, like a man climbing up on to a chair, then down again on the other side.

Two other striking drawings, drawn on the pages of a reference work, constitute a self-portrait diptych, naked but for a hat, walking against a faint background of mountain ranges in one case and ankle-deep in water at the seaside in the other. There is no doubt a reference to J. Alfred Prufrock, who declares in Eliot’s poem (1915) that he will “walk upon the beach”, and it is certainly no coincidence that Eckstein’s head is close to the printed portrait of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch Jewish philosopher for whom freedom ultimately consists in acting in accordance with necessity.

Nearby is a fascinating variety of work inspired by natural history, optics and music, particularly opera, but equally informed by an intimate knowledge of the history of art. Thus in one piece, anamorphic images rotating in a circle on a tabletop assume normal proportions when reflected in a mirrored cylinder at the centre of the circle, recalling similar experiments in the mannerist and baroque periods.

Another animation is based on designs for a production of Mozart’s Magic Flute. Once again, stop-motion charcoal animation allows one image to appear, as if by magic, only to be erased or transformed before our eyes into something completely different. It is Kentridge’s tremendous facility at drawing, at evoking everything from figures to birds, architecture or even geometric designs, that makes it possible for him to create a dizzying alternation of vivid images and intellectual puzzles.

All of these resources are brought together in the most important work in the exhibition, the video installation that was the highlight of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney and that has been don­ated to the gallery by the Belgiorno-Nettis family.

This piece epitomises the complex weaving of literary, musical and historical elements that enter into Kentridge’s oeuvre, for it is a kind of spin-off of his work on Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, which Kentridge designed and also directed for the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2010.

The opera is based on a proto-surreal short story by Nikolai Gogol, published in St Petersburg in 1836, in which a mid-ranking government official wakes up one day to discover that his nose has left to start a career of its own, even achieving a higher rank than its owner, before eventually returning to its proper place. Almost a century later, Shoshtakovich composed his opera in 1930, but it was not well received in a period when Stalin’s regime was growing steadily more repressive.

Kentridge’s eight-channel video installation, in turn, evokes the cultural world of the Russian avant-garde that ended in the repression and state terror that began in 1936 — a year in which Shoshtakovich himself suffered damaging criticism and denunciations — and ended with the execution of most, if not all, of the remaining veterans of the revolution who might have been rivals to Stalin’s dictatorship.

The title of this work, I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine, is apparently a Russian peasant saying, effectively denying responsibility, which is appropriate for a work that evokes the impersonality of mass movements and the failure of personal moral duty when it comes to saving one’s own skin. The horse becomes one of the symbols used in the various individual films in the installation, as is the rogue nose, both suggesting the irrational and absurd human characteristics let loose in the chaos of revolution.

The whole installation is alive with an irresistible, visceral but dangerously unpredictable energy, underscored by the driving and compulsive rhythms of the music. The various screens are filled with animation, archival footage and other material, but most strikingly a kind of shadow puppetry made from paper cut-outs. The whole thing has the quality of an obsessive, intoxicated danse macabre, at once highly artificial and deeply threatening.

One particularly remarkable figure is what looks like a Russian soldier in greatcoat and peaked cap, performing a Cossack dance, but filmed in silhouette and from a distorting angle which turns him into a kind of shadow puppet. And all this artificiality and theatrical exuberance is set against one chilling screen at the end of the space, which has no animation, no visual excitement.

It is part of the transcript of the Communist Party Central Committee hearing in February 1936, in which Nikolai Bukharin, one of the principal figures in the revolutionary government, is being questioned and accused of treason. Stalin had set his mind on destroying Bukharin, so no one dared stand up for him. The following year, in 1937, he was arrested and in 1938, after a particularly grotesque show trial, he was shot. What is particularly striking on seeing the work again is noticing that as Bukharin tries to defend himself, he is met by derision or outrage from the other members of the committee. Today, this rather disturbingly reminds us of the lynch mobs of social media; Kentridge’s work did not have such associations at its first showing a decade ago, around the time the smartphone was introduced, which shows how quickly a new technology can produce a new abuse of political life.