Word and image explore our catastrophic present

Ordinarily, encountering the work of a famous contemporary artist, my contrarian and antiestablishment tendencies come out. I look for reasons to dislike what I see, to distrust the art market consensus around the artist in question. But when it comes to William Kentridge, I find it difficult to be cynical.

This is partly because the Kentridge aesthetic has become so iconic that its familiarity brings a kind of comfort.

There is pleasure in recognising a Kentridgean coffee pot, cat, nose, megaphone, bird, typewriter or horse. The headgear of a mineshaft, a lone tree, a Cossack dancer, a female nude — all these subjects have a specific incarnation in the minds of Kentridge fans around the world.

Self-portraits, too: slightly self-mocking, gesturing towards the artist’s awareness of himself as a trope. And always a gratifying dose of the “meta”, of art about art, by turns serious and playful.

Kentridge gives viewers the compliment of sharing with us the art-making process, leaving clues within individual works (a monochrome “colour” palette in the corner of a large-scale painting), inviting us to trace connections across his oeuvre, or insisting on the value of collaborating with other artists across disciplines.

The real gift here is his intellectual curiosity, his readiness to be humbled in the studio and the rehearsal room, to deal in fragments, to dwell in uncertainty.

One is almost tempted to say that Kentridge’s genius lies as much in identifying the apt phrase as it does in producing the evocative image. It is this verbal flair that takes us into the rich conceptual and historical terrain he is exploring.

What Have They Done With All The Air? Kentridge’s new exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, includes a handful of works that employ his customary technique of collaging arresting snippets of text over drawings — in this case, verdant “jungle” scenes (actually inspired by the garden at the artist’s Houghton home).

One of these snatches supplies the title of the exhibition, while others echo its anxious and claustrophobic tone: The world is leaking; Why is this age worse than others?; Now the hour of justice has collapsed; We shall call for the sun & it will not rise; To whom shall I tell my sorrow?

These seem to give voice to a catastrophic present, characterised by warfare and persecution but ultimately defined by the prospect of environmental collapse. Unsurprisingly, however, Kentridge has dredged them up from the literary past. Some are from antiquity — more specifically, from the stylus of ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. Others call to mind a more recent past: the tides of 20th-century fascism, and those who bravely swam against them.

“What have they done with all the air?”

is a line from Marxist novelist and poet Victor Serge, a critical chronicler of Soviet life (a nod to Kentridge’s sustained fascination with the Russian Revolution and its aftermath). In 1940, fleeing both Stalinism and Nazism, Serge escaped from Vichy in France across the Atlantic to the small Caribbean island of Martinique. He was one of thousands of refugees and dissidents, including anti-Nazi Germans, Spanish republicans and European Jews, who sailed from Marseille on the Martinique route.

This midcentury moment brought together the representatives of two distinct historical currents. In Martinique, European intellectuals and artists such as André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Anna Seghers would meet writers and political activists of a different inclination — people like Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, founders of the Negritude movement that profoundly influenced the struggle against French colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean. Frantz Fanon, Césaire’s pupil, also hailed from Martinique.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the historical quirk of the Marseille-Martinique line caught Kentridge’s imagination. Indeed, the confluence inspired a theatrical piece in development, The Great YES, The Great NO, and it is out of this process that the current exhibition emerged. Audiences at Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg enjoyed a work-in-progress performance in September.

The title of this new work is

VERBAL FLAIR TAKES US INTO THE RICH CONCEPTUAL AND HISTORICAL TERRAIN HE IS EXPLORING

also a literary allusion: the choice between “yes” and “no”, as portrayed by Greek poet CP Cavafy. Yes, in this context, is

the easy option — it means going with the popular (populist?) flow. No, by contrast, is the act of heroic resistance.