As with the earlier section centring on sexuality, towards the end of the show figuration, or rather disfiguration, afforded the curators a means of focusing their engagement with politics. Here the selection was dominated by British and North American artists, with Fernando Bryce (a Peruvian who lives in Berlin) the only exception. Indeed, this Anglophone bias was present throughout the exhibition and, while it might have been more explicitly negotiated, the resulting, more limited claim of the show lent it coherence. The central object of concern here was not any specific political event, position, or mode of activity, but rather the formal and technical disordering of our image of the body as it is ravaged, flattened and convulsed by war, violence, exploitation, and psycho-social malaise. Bryce was at a remove in the soberness of his archival retrieval and transcription of images and documents of loaded historical significance. Two works by Raymond Pettibon provided a bridge to the rest. Pettibon also appropriates the languages other media (here, comic books, amongst other things), bringing jarring, staccato drawings together with provocative, oblique, and blackly humorous text, the voice of which is never clear. Nancy Spero, Leon Golub and Peter Kennard variously distress the surfaces onto which they work, each contributing new means for the expression of rage and indignance at the ideological wars and exploitation attending the development of post-war capitalism. Across the room was the stunning third ‘Documentation’ of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-79). These coloured sheets, scrawled on by her infant son and then written over by the artist, when experienced in the flesh rather than via the black and white reproductions of her well-known book, deliver a more lively and affectively ambiguous charge than her reputation for stern analysis might suggest. Margaret Harrison’s sexualized, hallucinatory drawings of ludicrously excessive ciphers of femininity (Banana Woman, 1971), added a barbed humour while also helping to make the feminist context of Kelly’s work explicit.

 
A more sustained treatment of a particular political, social and psychological formation (apartheid in South Africa) was offered at the end of the exhibition by three of William Kentridge’s celebrated Drawings for Projection. In Felix in Exile (1994), the exiled character Felix Teitelbaum sits naked in a cheap hotel room contemplating a suitcase full of drawings. These sheets, depicting the traumas of apartheid, become animated under Felix’s gaze, flying onto the bare walls around him. Their resulting configuration, together with Felix huddled on a simple chair in the corner of the room, explicitly evokes the famous installation photograph of Kasimir Malevich’s legendary 0:10 – Last Futurist Exhibition, held in Petrograd in December 1915. That exhibition represents a key moment from the historical avant-garde, in which abstract art seemed to have prefigured the utopian drive of revolutionary politics. Unlike the elemental clarity of Malevich’s paintings, however, Kentridge’s scene is marked by a texture of smudges and erasures. These celebrated works, which recall graphic languages associated with social satire and political protest (Goya, Daumier, Grosz, Beckmann), were made by recording the erasure and reworking of charcoal drawings with a film camera. They are palimpsests in which there is a drag or weight placed upon processes of change. Here the dream of pure beginnings is abandoned, or, perhaps better, mourned.
 
For Kentridge, the process of drawing is the engine of change in his films, which nevertheless refer explicitly to their contemporary situation in South Africa. As in the exhibition as a whole, drawing is not claimed as a catalyst for social and political change, at least not in any direct way. That avant-garde aspiration for art is mourned rather than re-enacted here. Indeed, drawing’s conventionally more modest and minor status lends itself instead to furthering more internal, reflexive concerns. This does not mean, however, that it is not a powerful and affecting means to work through our social, political and psychic condition. While drawing is perhaps closer to thinking and reflection than to action, more a part of the vita contemplativa than the vita active, it might still help to show a way forward – like a map or a diagram – by way of imaginative engagement and conceptual extension.
 
Tracing the Century did not provide a history of twentieth-century drawing. Indeed, such a history does not yet exist: there is currently no adequate account of twentieth-century drawing, although such large-scale exhibitions as this (and MoMA’s On Line, for example) are leading the way towards one. But this show did not claim to provide a history as such: chronology was abandoned in favour of clusters and constellations, and references to historical moments and trajectories were at a minimum. In the end, the history of twentieth century art looks less rather than more coherent following this exhibition; the curators have sought to shake up familiar sets of associations and to suggest certain affinities and connections aside from broader, more stable trajectories. The result is a loss in the falling away of some kinds of logic, which would perhaps have located the extraordinary formal innovations on view here more firmly, but a gain in re-staging the kinds of associative liveliness and flexible insight that many artists talk of as characteristic of the drawing process itself.
 
 
Tracing the Century: Drawing as a Catalyst for Change was on view, 16 November 2012 – 20 January 2013. It was accompanied by the solo exhibition, Matt Saunders: Century Rolls.

A series of nine films made from 1989 – 2003 make up the  exhibition’s  second  theme,  Soho  and  Felix.  Soho  Eckstein, a bloated Johannesburg capitalist, and his often  naked  alter‐ego  Felix  Teitlebaum  –  both  of  whom, it should be observed, bear an intended physical  resemblance  to  their  creator  –  preside  over  scenes of mourning and devastation: mineworkers solemnly trek underground, bodies fall apart, animate severed  heads  litter  the  ground,  and  Soho  enjoys  a  baked chicken leg. Beautiful African music – choral sounds  that  undulate  before  they  soar  –  plays  in  the  background, occasionally displaced by more dissonant noises.
 
Artist  in  the  Studio,  the  third  theme,  consists  of  a  three-­part film installation projected on all four walls of a single room. As the title implies, the subject here is Kentridge himself, in his space of work, making and unmaking his art. In one projection, a colony of ants, rendered  white  on  black,  scurry  around  the  artist’s  desk in un-­choreographed movements that reveal mesmerizing  patterns.  In  another,  Kentridge  tears  apart a drawing of himself, before a reverse-­motion effect  puts  it  back  together.  These  exercises  in  self-­portraiture might be read as a retreat from the busy public  spheres  that  provide  the  mise-­en-­scène  for  many Kentridge pieces, but in another interpretation they  are  simply  the  most  explicit  examples  of  a  self-­critical and self-­aware sensibility that lends the artist’s work much of its political efficacy.
 

Theme  four  is  devoted  to  works  created  in  conjunction with Kentridge’s 2005 production of Mozart’s 1791  opera  The  Magic  Flute.  Mozart’s  opera  chronicled the emergence of enlightenment civilization and advent  of  modern  disenchantment.  In  drawings  and  miniaturized performances – representative images impose astrological diagrams and other scientific symbols on empty, exotic landscapes – Kentridge offers his own  critique  of  enlightenment  rationalism  and  the  imperialist violence with which it is bound up.

 
This  spring  Kentridge  directed  another  opera,  Shostakovich’s The Nose (1930), based on Gogol’s 1836  story  of  the  same  name.  Moving  from  the  contradictions of colonial enlightenment, then, Five Themes concludes with the dialectic of revolution and reaction  in  twentieth-­century  Russia.  Again  we  are  surrounded by multiple film projections. On one wall unfolds dialogue from Nicolai Bukharin’s 1937 show trial.  On  another  a  black  woman  dressed  in  Prussian  military fatigues and carrying a large flag paces against a  white  screen,  onto  which  her  profile  is  cast.  Like  Gogol’s story, the critique here is expressed in the idiom  of  the  absurd  –  the  most  appropriate  vocabulary, Kentridge seems to suggest, for confronting  without  reconciling  ourselves  to  the horrors of the long twentieth century.
 
While  aesthetically  and  politically  moving  throughout, Five Themes is not without its shortcomings. The exhibition  is  organized  chronologically,  and  there  is  little engagement – either through curatorial text, or through spatial arrangement – with the ways in which the  artist’s  multiple  thematic,  methodological,  and  historical projects speak to one another. Five Themes, in other words, conforms to rather than deconstructs given  temporal  or  conceptual  frames.  Paradoxically,  though, this central shortcoming brings into starker relief  one  of  Kentridge’s  abiding  strengths:  the  facility with which his work transcends divisions of here and there, then and now, subject and object. Resisting simple  oppositions,  Kentridge  creates  a  constellation  effect- one that reveals much about the imbrication of  different  histories  of  violence,  and  one  that  highlights the role of the solitary witness in remembering  the  past  while  recognizing  the  impossibility of ever making it whole.
 
Perhaps my initial identification with Benjamin’s angel was  misplaced.  Certainly  Kentridge  leads  us  through  the wastelands of our modern history. But his work – like  the  medium  of  drawing  itself,  which  is  at  soul  a  speculative errand into the unknown – gestures as well  toward  the  endless  possibilities  of  what  is  to  come. The perspective here is Janus-faced in the best sense.
 
 
William Kentridge: Five Themes was on view, 24 February–17 May 2010.