An exhibition of William Kentridge's tapestries now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art may be uneven, but that's not totally surprising.
Kentridge, born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955, has always tackled an immense and urgent subject: his country's anguish and inequity in the wake of apartheid. Yet he seems to lack some requisite sense of touch or engagement with the materials of art. Perhaps because he began as an actor, writer and set designer, he doesn't exhibit great feeling for the immediacy of the art object.
As a result, his work is almost always best when presented at a remove, in translation or in motion. His charcoal drawings are never as effective on the wall as they are when mutating in his powerful animated films and videos. In moving images the charcoal becomes a tool that almost literally burrows through South African history and human consciousness. Similarly, his drawings, objects, films and shadow figures can work brilliantly for the illusory magic of set design, as his imaginative staging of Mozart's Magic Flute proved recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
William Kentridge: Tapestries clarifies this discrepancy, and even benefits from it. The collages on which these tapestries are based, along with related prints and bronze sculptures - all looking fairly inert - are in one gallery. In the other, much larger gallery are the 11 tapestries, completed since 2001, looking a lot livelier, even rather gorgeous, if not as completely alive as his films and video.
The tapestries show large, dark silhouettes - the latest incarnation of the shadow figures Kentridge has deployed for years - against the patterns of old maps. That the tapestries improve greatly upon the collages is one of the show's revelations.
The tapestries were made by the Stephens Tapestry Studio in Johannesburg, in close consultation with Kentridge. Marguerite Stephens established the studio in 1963 in Swaziland as a carpet and curtain weaving business. She moved it two years later to Johannesburg to focus on her craft's artistic potential. According to the exhibition catalog, the weavers use the French Gobelin high-warp technique, working from the bottom up on a vertical loom with the cartoon of the weaving behind it.
You don't need to know all this to be impressed by these works, which tap into a long, glorious history and take full advantage of tapestry's capacities for intricacy, color and scale.
Ten are from Kentridge's Porter Series. Measuring as much as 3.6m high or wide, they show one or two figures carrying, or oddly fused with, objects. Of indefinite race, age and often gender, the porters have a Michelangelesque grandeur, even as their black-brown tonality suggests tar or earth. Contributing to their imposing stature are their backgrounds: maps from a world atlas published in 19th-century Europe, when its empires were the most expansive.
In the Puppet Drawings collages on which these tapestries are based, the porters are made from pieces of thick, seemingly torn dark paper hinged together with small, circular pins. As with puppets, their limbs appear moveable.
True to their name, the porters are moving stuff. They are nomads, refugees, asylum seekers or maybe even adventurers. They seem more industrious than driven, but mostly they are on the move, set in motion by forces beyond their control. They are universal, but you could locate them at any point on the maps, and they would become specific, displaced by this or that invasion, liberation, revolution, colonialism or economic crisis.
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