"Trauma in the Box":
Press Reactions to
William Kentridge’s Installation Black Box/Chambre Noire at the Deutsche
Guggenheim
At the Deutsche
Guggenheim, "Black Box/Chambre Noire", the installation created by the
South African artist William Kentridge, has been meeting with
controversial response. It’s no wonder, because Kentridge has directed his
attention to a repressed chapter of colonial rule during the era of
Wilhelm II: the German massacre on the Herero tribe in German Southwest
Africa, today Namibia, during which the tribe was almost completely
exterminated in 1904. "Black Box/Chambre Noire" combines the possibilities
of drawing, animation, photography, film, opera, and theater to
investigate the difficulties in the representation of a historical trauma.
Yet how does the artist convey his complex political message?
"But the
Herero people must leave this land. If they refuse, I will force them with
the Groot Rohr [canon]. Any Herero found within the German borders armed
or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will accept no more
women or children, but will send them back to their people or have them
shot." These are the words General Lieutenant
Lothar von Trotha, acting under the orders of Emperor
Wilhelm II, used in 1904 to initiate the genocide on the Herero tribe;
Markus Woeller cites them at the beginning of his critical exhibition
review in the taz. One hundred years after the Herero uprising,
which was brutally suppressed, German Foreign Aid Advisor
Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul might have asked for forgiveness, but black
Africa’s past does not play much of a role in the German collective
memory, as Woeller contends. The fact that
Kentridge’s installation will not do much to change this is due, in
his opinion, to an overload of quotes and techniques in Kentridge’s
miniature theater, the
Black Box: "Unfortunately, Kentridge does not […] succeed at turning the
darkroom into a place of illumination. In Black Box/Chambre Noire,
form and content collide in a clumsy way. In what starts out as an
investigation into the Herero massacre, theatrical performance and
decontextualized opera arias are blown up into an-all-too respectable
desire to make art. A mechanical sculpture ballet and fragments of
documentary material, nostalgic colonial decor and computer-generated
projection technique reduce the images endlessly." In using drawing to
imitate original documents, pages of historical books, old-style
handwriting, and Dadaist collages, Kentridge creates a "complacent retro
style." In his opinion, "the project Black Box/Chambre Noire
gets too tied up in aesthetic frills. Yet it was supposed to recover the
black box of human catastrophe and evaluate it."
This demand
for a didactic analysis of historical events contrasts with the admiration
felt by other critics for Kentridge’s complex aesthetic strategies. While
Michael Althen interviews Kentridge on the boundaries between art and
cinema for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Elke Buhr from the
Frankfurter Rundschau calls his installation "a box full of trap doors":
"in William Kentridge’s work, everything is always in flux: each image is
a process, a sequence of thoughts, a superimposition of many ideas and
contexts. And the Black Box, his latest work created on commission
for the
Deutsche Guggenheim, is a wonderful little machine that gives room to
each of these planes in his work." According to Buhr, the story his
mechanical figures and film projections tell are neither linear nor clear;
probably, they are more the history of Europe than of Africa: "The
rhinoceros is dancing with a small, seemingly alive machine that looks
like a cross between a megaphone and a desk lamp, carrying a large sign
with the Freudian term Trauerarbeit (work of mourning) around with
it. In the end, it will make a reckless leap above it all – the
consolation is in the movement, in the simple miracle of the image
transforming out of its own self."
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Yet it’s precisely these basic gestures that do not suffice
for Nicola Kuhn from the Tagesspiegel . Kentridge’s installation is
a "poetic review," and particularly in relation to his investigation of
South Africa’s history of apartheid, the commissioned work in Deutsche
Bank’s "own home gallery" is somewhat "piquant." The result is an "attempt
at a highly complex coming to terms with the past, yet it was expressed
artistically in such a roundabout manner that no one could have seriously
taken exception to it." One would have to know much more about the violent
suppression of the Herero uprising from 1904 or be familiar with
Kentridge’s stage design for
Mozart’s Magic
Flute and the political references to the exhibition site Berlin,
where the colonial division of Africa was agreed upon in 1884 as part of
the West
Africa Conference. In this sense, Kuhn contends that Kentridge’s
images are never truly moving. Only the documentary footage of a
rhinoceros hunt at the beginning of the century succeeded in unsettling
her: "In what was otherwise a nostalgic series of images, this real
brutality was frightening. The Black Box would have to show sharper
images to work."
If one believes Marin Majica’s exhibition
review "The Trauma in the Box," then Nicola Kuhn is right, because
Kentridge’s work at the Deutsche Guggenheim is chiefly one thing for the
critic of the Berliner Zeitung: "bizarrely beautiful… a puppet
theater with animated film images of charcoal drawings projected onto the
rear wall – a light box with mechanical figures buzzing through it as
though pulled by the hands of ghosts." Kentridge’s "machine" postulates a
cause for the "Herero catastrophe" – "the purely technical reasoning of
the industrial and colonial age," whose inhumanity the author sees as an
"Anti-Enlightenment" that ultimately culminated in the Nazi era. For Vasco
Boenisch, who reviewed Black Box for the art magazine Monopol
, Kentridge creates a "playing room in which the threads of meaning carry
straight through human civilization, from the enlightenment motif in
Plato’s
cave allegory right up to the perversion of the same during the
Christianization of Africa."
According to Gabriele Walde,
however, this would have worked better with the help of additional
information. While she notes in the Berliner Morgenpost that the
scenarios Kentridge has created are moving and powerful, she also
criticizes that a "few facts" would have "done the installation good." To
her mind, this does not necessarily imply a demand for more unequivocal
images: "Whoever invites the brilliant draftsman with his inexhaustible
urge for experimentation knows from the onset that everything is possible,
that nothing is established once and for all. A surreal world of images in
constant flux. In Kentridge’s work, the images dance; the wild charcoal
lines seem unbridled. But one also knows that Kentridge is never
interested in the lightness of being, even if his poetic and deceptively
vague animated films, drawings, and puppet games might seem so at first
sight – for him, it’s a matter of addressing the past in manner that is in
truth hard as a rock."
For Barbara Wiegand, as well,
Kentridge’s work has "almost nothing of an animated film," as she notes in
her commentary for Deutschlandradio: "Kentridge repeatedly refers
in his installation directly to this German history in Africa – endless
lists of the dead are projected onto the walls of the stage, the bones of
the victims are measured – just as it really occurred at the time, in the
name of research." In this sense, Kentridge’s approach to the past leaves
behind "evidence that cannot be extinguished": "He shows this by
intentionally leaving traces of erasures in the drawings used for the
animations. Thus, what happened yesterday is still present today on this
stage in the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum. And the mourning work proclaimed
at the beginning of the piece retains a hold on the viewer long after one
has left this fascinating theater."
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