Kentridge_Tide_Table

=William Kentridge's "Tide Table" (2003)=


 * [|Clip of live performance of Tide Table]

A critical discussion by Mark Auslander (Anthropology & Cultural Production, Brandeis University)

William Kentridge’s complex animated work, “__Tide Table__” (2003), the ninth installment of his charcoal-based Drawings for Projection, moves across boundaries of affliction and healing, love and loss, dreams and prophetic vision, separation and reintegration [1]. [i] Set on the beach at Muizenberg southeast of Cape Town the piece returns us to Soho Eckstein, the white industrialist, real estate magnate and mine-owner featured in so many of Kentridge’s still and moving images. [2] [ii] As an apparently retired Soho, on the verge of dozing, sits reading a newspaper on a beach chair; a child whose race is ambiguous, perhaps Soho as a boy, cavorts on the rocks and tosses pebbles into the surf, watched over by a black nanny. White-robed members of the Zionist church perform a rite of worship and healing in the churning waters. From the immaculate Muizenberg Hotel high above, uniformed black generals survey the scene through binoculars. A cow arises out of the sea, in time multiplying into seven beasts that recall Pharaoh’s dreams in Genesis 41, interpreted by Joseph as foretelling seven rich years followed by seven lean years. Within a row of changing shelters, a shower head sprays out water that congeal into the cow, a moment later morphing into a grappling hook that hoists and dismembers the beast as if in a slaughterhouse. In another room (another chamber of Soho’s memory? ) the beach chair cavorts excitedly to the music, only to transmute into an empty bed, prefiguring the room’s next transformation into an AIDS hospital ward, rendered as a site of painful, awe-inspiring beauty. The bare feet of patients fade into those of beachgoers, as the playing boy fades away into the waves. Enigmatic words and tidal charts in the newspaper hint at tragedies and ruptures beyond conventional language and understanding. Pounding waves wash away the disintegrating body of a cow. The hospital bed contains a gaunt, dying patient and then transforms into an empty bed, the absent presence signaled only by a shadow on the pillow, that in turn fades back into the pounding surf, as the afflicted men transforms into a shrouded corpse, held tenderly in the arms of his companion. The sleeping Soho for a moment seems to be comforted by the black nanny who touches his hand; he then awakes to follow in the steps of his remembered boyhood self, playfully casting a stone into the very waves from which the cow first magically appeared. An underwater rock, washed over by a wave, transmutes itself back into the playing child and the beach is restored to its empty, austere beauty.

In Kentridge’s earlier work, Soho Eckstein has simultaneously epitomized white alienation from, and desperately voracious longing for, the lands and peoples of Africa. In __Mine__ (1991) his desktop coffee plunger penetrates deep under the surface of the continent, disgorging everything from a bronze Ife head to a miniature pet rhinoceros, which he possessively plays with upon his ever-expanding desk, his own private nature reserve from which all persons of color have been expelled. In subsequent work, the vast, immovable conundrum of Apartheid was repeatedly imaged as a gargantuan rock that resisted all efforts to dislodge it. (Krauss 2000; Maltz 2004) Yet __Tide Table__ presents new kind of surfaces that prefigure not so much violent alienation as libratory possibilities of new knowledge of self and other. The beach, newspaper and ocean all function in a manner akin to a diviner’s bowl, mat, or mirror, improbably allowing the white dreamer a way in, back into his childhood and into renewed intimate connections with persons and communities of color. The great rock of Apartheid now at last seems splintered into seaside boulders on which to scamper, even as the inaccessible stone edifice of the hotel, now inhabited by shadowy figures of the emergent postcolonial elite, towers over the scene. Cattle, the supreme repositories of cultural value and embodiment of ancestral agency in so many rural Southern African societies, seem to evoke simultaneously the vital resilience of africanity (furthered signal by a soundtrack that draws on Zaire’s Franco) as well as the profound peril now faced by so many African communities.

As always, Kentridge is highly attuned to historical ironies. Muizenberg beach exemplifies the multicolor tapestry of the rainbow nation, yet so many of its people are betrayed, or at least under-served, by those who have inherited the mantle of their liberators. Soho, who made his fortune out of the vast crimes of Apartheid, is granted a healing, prophetic vision of common humanity through the very disease, AIDS, that was so vastly multiplied in southern Africa through the operations and legacies of Apartheid itself. Whatever grace that is extended to Soho is but a pebble cast into the ocean measured against the enormity of the continent’s awesome predicament.

NOTES

[i[1] Critical work on the __Drawings for Projection__ include Benezara 2001, Cameron 2001, Christov-Bakargiev 1998, and Krauss 2000. [ii] [2] Kentridge has long been interested in the Muizenberg beach, the subject of his 1970s linocuts inspired by a photograph of his father sitting on the beach. (Benezra 2001:29) Yet it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the beach is a few minutes from the home of Zachie Achmat, South Africa’s most renowned AIDS activist, who has been visited by Nelson Mandela as an act of implicit reproach against Thabo Mbeki’s response to the disease.