KENTRIDGE IN L.A.

A quick note to Cabineteers in the Los Angeles area urging you, if you have not done so already, to make your way over to what may well prove The Show of the Year, there or pretty much anywhere else, which is to say the downtown Broad Museum’s William Kentridge retrospective, masterfully curated by Ed Schad. I’ve been a longtime fan of Kentridge’s and I’d imagined myself relatively well informed about the arc of his career, but even I had had no idea about the Johannesburg artist’s roilingly protean range, the aching depth of his inspiration and the sheer scale of his ambition, by turns antic-sly, heart-melting and gut-wrenching. In fact the show makes a pretty strong case for Kentridge’s being THE Quintessential Artist of our Time. So come to think of it, those of you outside of Los Angeles may want to make a point of heading there, too, if you can, before the show closes on April 9th.

The museum offers a nice little short video of what you will have in store for yourselves here, which I supplement below with a single iPhone sweep of my own, documenting a shelf-long display of rebus sculpture maquettes (I had had no idea what a marvelous sculptor Kentridge was, on top of everything else).

The same two sculptures seen from two separate angles.

For my full iPhone video click here.

The highpoint of the show may be the reinstallation of Kentridge’s room-wide 5-channel video and multimedia fantasmagoria The Refusal of Time from 2012,

which among many other things traces the European imposition of precise clock-time across the African subcontinent as part of the wider colonial project during the very same period that Einstein was conceiving his Theory of Relativity (do plan to tarry for the full thirty minutes!)—a theme which, as it happens, I myself happened to be tackling around the same time (without any knowledge of Kentridge’s efforts, though we were both clearly responding to Peter Galison’s revelatory recent book) in my “Pillow of Air” column at The Believer, in a piece entitled “The African Roots of World War I,” which now reads in retrospect as a supplemental gloss on Kentridge’s piece, and which you can find here.

See you next week!

Wondercabinet

February 9, 2023 : Wondercab Mini (35A)