"The anamorphic film, What Will Come (has already come) (2007), which is about the Italian-Ethiopian war of the 1930s, works on the principle that what is distorted in the projection gets corrected in the viewer’s seeing of it in a mirror. So the distortion is the correction and the original is the distorted.” - William Kentridge
Figure 9, William Kentridge, What Will Come (has already come), 2007, steel table, cylindrical steel mirror, 35mm animated film transferred to video, 8:40 min, 41 1/4 x 48 x 48″ (Courtesy Norton Museum of Art.
I decided to focus my research on one of the exhibition by William Kentridge called What Will Come (has already come) I was lucky to see this January in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
The main work of the exhibition, the filmic anamorphosis What Will Come (Figure 9), draws on the idea of the picture puzzle that originated in the sixteenth century. Kentridge translates this play with perception that operates with distorted images that can only be deciphered from a certain angle to his film.
The technique of cylinder mirror anamorphosis he employs is a special form of anamorphosis that is based on the addition of a further level of perception. It is not enough to change one’s point of view but a special seeing machine is essential to decode the picture: a cylindrical mirror with a certain radius that reflects the distorted image, “straightening” it “optically.” Producing such complicated distorted pictures requires a profound knowledge of mathematical rules and optical foundations. Relying on a special graphic grid, the preparatory sketch is transferred to the anamorphotic mode segment by segment, and the curvature of the mirror that is to correct the distortion has to be precisely calculated.
William Kentridge avoids these down-to-earth exercises by looking into a mirror while drawing, positioning his hands and arms on the desk as usual instead of basing his work on mathematical calculations. What he draws he sees in the mirror and not on the sheet in front of him. An unusual drawing process already precedes the unusual perception that the viewer is confronted with later.
As in the past, present anamorphosis also initiate a discourse on the subject of seeing because they not only entertain the viewer with their optical attractions but also encourage reflections on the relativity of visual perception. In this sophisticated play of projection, reflection, and transformation involving different forms and sceneries, Kentridge relates to subjects such as colonialism, fascism, and tyranny. Without offering a definite plot, he intersperses his film with narrative and visual fragments. A gas mask points at the Abyssinian War of 1935/6, for example, in which the Italian fascists, with Hitler’s support, annexed Ethiopia by force and 275,000 Ethiopians lost their lives.
The soundtrack, an Italian marching song of the fascists under Mussolini, speaks of a little black face, “Facetta Nera,” a beautiful small Abyssinia to be kissed by the sun of Rome. A composition by Dmitri Shostakovich based on a Jewish song that Kentridge also uses echoes the exodus of Ethiopian Jews to Israel after the great famine of 1984/5.
If only by allusion, the artist touches on the subject of not ending losses of place through elements of his soundtrack and the visual motifs of his work. Though the background is quite different, Kentridge also comes from an African Jewish family. What Will Come shows the artist in a Janus-faced structure (Figure 10) inextricably linked at his spine with an African male’s head.
Kentridge is interested in machines that make you aware of the process of seeing and aware of what you do when you construct the world by looking. This is interesting in it but more as a broad-based metaphor for how we understand the world.
When we look through a stereoscopic viewer (Figure 11) we are self aware that you have two completely flat images, and it is our brain that is constructing the illusion of 3 dimensional depths. And that is very clear when you are looking at a stereographic viewer. What is not very obvious is that what our eyes are doing in real life everyday: our retina in receiving two flat images and our brain is combining them into this illusion of depth, and it does it so well that we believe in it. We don’t see in depth, we are constructing in depth.
“The activity of seeing, or the work that we do in seeing... is a philosophical point about epistemology... it is about not understanding ourselves as merely passive receivers, or objects of manipulation, but people who are actively involved in constructing our world the whole time..."
According to Kentridge one of the aspects of doing the film or the drawings was learning the grammar of the transformations that happen when you go from a flat surface to the curved mirror. So, for example, to draw a straight line is relatively complicated because every straight line is in fact a curve, whereas every straight line that you draw becomes a parabola. So when we see the anamorphic drawing and its correction in the mirror (Figure 12), what we are very aware of is how our brain is constructing what appears to be a perfect circle, when we know in fact it’s not a perfect circle. It’s a completely disgusting kidney shape. We believe we are simply seeing depth rather than constructing depth out of two flat images. So, again, it’s both about the phenomenon and the wow factor—but more about the agency we have, whether we like it or not, to make sense of the world.
William Kentridge asks: “How does one find a way of not necessarily illustrating the society that one lives in, but allowing what happens there to be part of the work?”
Shooting without a script when making his animations, Kentridge’s experimental method demonstrates thinking with one’s hands and proposes an understanding of the world as process rather than as fact.
Featured in ART21, PBS, Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 5 (2009), Compassion.
William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He attended the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1973–76), Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–78), and studied mime and theater at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris (1981–82). Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects that are most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. In a now-signature technique, Kentridge photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge uses stereoscopic viewers and creates optical illusions with anamorphic projection, to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions (“William Kentridge.” PBS. http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/william-kentridge).
“William Kentridge Fragile Identities, University of Brighton Gallery and The Regency Town House, Brighton.” Independent, 2007. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/william-kentridge--fragile-identities-university-of-brighton-gallery-and-the-regency-town-house-brighton-763465.html.
William Kentridge avoids these down-to-earth exercises by looking into a mirror while drawing, positioning his hands and arms on the desk as usual instead of basing his work on mathematical calculations. What he draws he sees in the mirror and not on the sheet in front of him. An unusual drawing process already precedes the unusual perception that the viewer is confronted with later.
