From an overwhelming slew of art, literature, music, cinema and theater references, there seems to emerge a provisional feel for order in William Kentridge's filmic worlds: worlds created between the artist and spectators' activity in constructing narratives from discrete fragments. How this materializes is not always prone to clear analysis and it is not always clear to the artist at the time of making.
In part, this is because Kentridge often works from tales of the absurd, such as Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Nose," which dissociates itself from its owner and disguises itself as a gentleman to the bewilderment of the author, and Alfred Jarry's play "Ubu Roi" with its "disembraining" machine and the central characters' self-gratifications.
Visitors to Kentridge's first solo exhibition in Japan, "What We See & What We Know: Thinking About History While Walking, and Thus The Drawings Began to Move . . ." presently in Kyoto (then Tokyo and Hiroshima) have the opportunity to see if, like the conclusion to Gogol's tale, when you think it over, there really is something in it.
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