Ambivalent African

William Kentridge’s charcoal drawings don’t stay still on the walls, they erupt in active dramas on video monitors, unfolding in the herky-jerky movement of an early animated cartoon. In “History of the Main Complaint,” a well-fed, pinstriped titan of industry lies on a hospital bed breathing through a respirator as his memories pass before him, like visions along a highway, in moments of despair and pleasure. Or in “Felix in Exile,” a melancholic artist, depicted in the nude, peers at a canvas as he tries to envision the landscape outside his room.

The man in the pinstriped suit is rapacious industrialist Soho Eckstein; the nude artist, his alter ego, is Felix Teitlebaum, a dreamy optimist. They have spent a little more than a decade struggling with their consciences and with each other for the affection of Eckstein’s wife. In half a dozen brief, animated films by Johannesburg artist William Kentridge, these roughly drawn characters symbolically represent the will to power and the concomitant feelings of guilt and remorse experienced in white South Africa in the 1990s.

“The films have the ambivalence of different values going through them at the same time. In praise of doubt, as a long-term project,” explains Kentridge. “Certainly, white South Africa is in a state of ambivalence, but I don’t think it is restricted to here. I think living in a state of contradiction is the norm rather than the exception.”

Ambivalence is a dominant theme of the retrospective “William Kentridge” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art beginning next Sunday. Organized by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and New York’s New Museum, the show includes more than 60 charcoal stills, two sculptural installations and a selection of his films, which are the works that launched Kentridge’s international career.

The New Museum’s senior curator, Dan Cameron, has said that Kentridge’s characters are white South Africans but the work is “universally human.” He told an interviewer in 2001, “They are defined almost by the way they try to ignore the extraordinary circumstances of their life and act as if any crisis can be surpassed, which I think is a tendency in many cultures, including our own.”

Kentridge, 47, was reached by phone at his Johannesburg home, where he lives with his wife and three children. It is midwinter there and he was sitting with a cup of tea and piece of cake watching the sun drop below the horizon, as the temperature fell to freezing.

Since his films made a splash at Documenta X, the 1997 iteration of Germany’s quintennial contemporary art festival, Kentridge has been considered one of South Africa’s premier artists. In the New York Times, art critic Grace Glueck wrote of the retrospective: “In searing images, he addresses not only the land itself and its racial problems but also the general human condition ... of bourgeois lives played out in the country’s deeply dysfunctional setting.”

It all began with drawing. In 1987, a friend left a movie camera in Kentridge’s studio so that Kentridge could film the process of making his drawings, including all the erasures and changes. “I’d wanted to track the process of drawing as it came into being,” he explains. “Often, there would be some point halfway through when it could be freer instead of polished and tight. I wanted to track when the drawing started to disintegrate.”

But the artist got more than he anticipated. “Halfway through the first film, I’d drawn a character in a suit and a character naked. Then I put a woman between them as a formal device to connect the parts I’d made.”

Before he knew it, he had created Eckstein and Teitlebaum and the drama that links them. But this is more like art-making than moviemaking: The images come first; the story line follows.

“The strategies are the strategies of drawing. I start in the middle and let the process be the process of making clear what I want to draw,” he says. “Put a smudge on paper and gradually the image will appear. Normally, you would start with a storyboard or script. For me, the script comes at the end and the storyboard never comes.”

In fact, Kentridge’s approach was so intuitive that he had completed “Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris” (1989)--the first of the series of works he calls “drawings for projection”--before realizing that Eckstein’s appearance was modeled after that of his grandfather. And then there’s the resemblance between the artist and Teitlebaum.

Still, Kentridge says, while they tap into his history and family, the films “had to feel not as autobiography, but as a touchstone. I have to be able to take responsibility for the characters in the film.”

“I think the films address the issue of how one makes sense of the life one lives,” he adds, “what are the building blocks of how one constructs who one is.”

Kentridge’s building blocks include a distinguished family history. His maternal grandmother immigrated with thousands of other Lithuanian Jews to South Africa in the early 1900s. His father, Sir Sydney Kentridge, who now lives in Great Britain and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1999, was an attorney in the anti-apartheid movement. He represented Nelson Mandela at his treason trial in 1956 and the family of Steve Biko at the 1977 inquest into the activist’s death. The artist’s mother, Felicia, is a lawyer who founded South African’s first nonprofit Legal Resources Center.

Kentridge’s privileged background was balanced by a sense of obligation, even guilt. “I think there is not a white person in South Africa who doesn’t have something to apologize for,” he says. “It may not have been an individual desire, but there is no doubt that one kind of life was led at the expense of other people’s lives.”

Kentridge’s upbringing led him to study politics and African studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. But, he says, he never planned on following in his parents’ professional footsteps.

“There was a sense that my father had been too good a lawyer for that to be an option,” he says. “I thought I would be an engineer or architect.”

He had been drawing since childhood, and after graduating in 1976, he decided to study art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation with Bill Ainsley, an influential artist in South Africa. Simultaneously, he was interested in theater and helped form the Junction Avenue Theater Company, a nonracial “theater of resistance” troupe.

In 1981, he went to Paris to study mime. Returning to Johannesburg during the period of economic sanctions against South Africa, he worked in theater and as an art director in films, all the while making drawings. “It took many years to decide that indecision is what I am best at,” he says of his meandering career.

He was, he says, “waiting to see what I would be when I grew up. In the mid-’80s, a friend said, ‘Now you are too old to be employable. The only possible hope is to make a go of it as an artist.’ ”

Making a go of it meant that Kentridge exhibited his briskly figurative charcoal drawings and prints for four years before the borrowed movie camera pushed him in a new direction. After some early film experiments, in 1989 he completed “Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris,” which marked the debut of Eckstein and Teitlebaum (they wrestle one another in a barren South African landscape). That was followed by “Monument,” in 1990, which shows the industrialist erecting a monument to his good works and “Mine,” in 1991, which connects Eckstein to the diamond trade. Teitlebaum becomes intimately involved with Mrs. Eckstein in the next work in the series, 1993’s “Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old.”

Meanwhile, the apartheid system was slowly being dismantled, and in 1993, the U.N. lifted sanctions. The artist could travel abroad and critics and scholars began to visit. It was Catherine David, former curator of the Pompidou Centre, who selected Kentridge’s films for Documenta X. That was his first major showing of the films outside of South Africa, and the reaction cemented his growing reputation in Johannesburg. Two years later, he was awarded the Carnegie Medal from the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The current retrospective, which opened in Washington in February 2001 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is the first major exhibition of his work to travel internationally.

As in the world of ambivalence chronicled by Kentridge, however, not all the attention garnered by the films has been positive. He has been charged with anti-Semitism.

Kentridge, who is Jewish, has been criticized for the fact that the rapacious Eckstein and the reclusive Teitlebaum were cast as Jews. Kentridge defends the choice. “It would have been easier if I’d drawn them as two Afrikaners,” he admits. “But these are characters who were familiar and despicable, two different aspects of Jews in South Africa. Jews were more representative in the liberation struggle than any other community. But it is also true that they have been the worst industrialists. It is two sides of who we are. The only people who accuse me of anti-Semitism are people who don’t like the mirror held up to them.”

These days, Kentridge alternates between work on drawings and films and a return to his work in the theater. In the early 1990s, after he had established the core of the Eckstein and Teitlebaum series, he joined Johannesburg’s Handspring Puppet Company, which mixes actors, musicians, puppets and animation. For his first collaboration with them, he reconceived Georg Buchner’s Expressionist soldier’s story, “Woyzeck,” and moved it from Germany to South Africa in “Woyzeck in the Highveld.” The production toured internationally. Since then, he has directed Handspring’s “Faustus in Africa” and a production that puts Alfred Jarry’s tyrannical character Ubu in contemporary South Africa: “Ubu and the Truth Commission.” An animated film was made based on the Ubu production as well.

Theater, Kentridge says, “is a comfortable sine wave between the external and internal worlds. After 18 months with 20 people in the theater, it is fantastic to have a year alone in the studio. After that year, it is better to work with people again.” (The LACMA retrospective includes video clips of his theater productions.)

And he continues to draw his two main protagonists, although Eckstein alone appears in his films of 1998 and 1999. The theme of ambivalence crops up whether he is drawing in charcoal or directing a play. “There are no resolutions in my work,” Kentridge says thoughtfully. “These are reflections on different elements of their lives, on loss, on responsibility, on guilt or violence, reflections rather than descriptions of South African society.”

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“William Kentridge,” LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Next Sunday through Oct. 6. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, noon-8 p.m.; Fridays, noon-9 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; closed Wednesdays. Adults, $7; students, 18 and older with ID and senior citizens 62 and older, $5; children, $1; 5 and younger, free. The second Tuesday of every month is free. (323) 857-6000

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Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is an occasional contributor to Calendar.