As characters they range from the symbolic to the real and back again. Rushing across Germany, the Pylon Lady has legs that suggest a draftsman's compass. The figure marching across Central America is piled with ladders and tools that might belong to a gardener or carpenter. Asia Minor is being traversed by a man who has sprouted tree limbs.
The 11th tapestry, Office Love, is the largest - around 3.6m by 4.6m - and easily the most beautiful. Its protagonists include a heavyset businessman with a typewriter for a head, who purposefully approaches three more or less feminine pieces of office furniture, the largest of which is a scribe's table that seems to hold a pair of scissors. Something is in the air. Maybe it is sexual tension; maybe it is simply progress. The writing machine is invading the scriptorium. Interestingly, typewriters started to become standardized in the 1890s, as modern Johannesburg was first being built.
Translating the collages into tapestries is a process of amplification, expansion and refinement. They are redrawn and further detailed in thread. Lines of red, yellow and blue, muted in the collages, become brighter. New lines are added, too, giving the works a greater sense of flux, as if Kentridge were rethinking them. The maps become more legible, the edges of the torn paper more assertive. In awakening and giving life to Kentridge's images, the weaving process could almost be said to animate the collages, to give them a visual energy bordering on motion.
In his catalog essay, Carlos Basualdo, the Philadelphia Museum's curator of contemporary art and the organizer of this exhibition, uses the term "generic creativity." To my mind, generic is a pejorative that implies something is routine, general and impersonal. It is exactly the term I would use to describe what's wrong with many of Kentridge's art objects. I would also suggest that as Kentridge's work moves further away from the specific travails of South Africa, as it does here, it becomes more generic.
But Basualdo translates generic differently, more positively, and arrives at a fresh and helpful point of view. He uses the phrase to describe how weaving transforms Kentridge's ideas by reinterpreting them through a human activity that is not attached to an individual creator, but is instead a "generic creativity" that can be expressed by anyone, in this case, trained in and attentive to the craft.
That's a big idea. It makes sense, given Kentridge's roots in the collaborative art of theater. And it underscores why the work from his own hand gains immeasurably when filtered through a second process, whether provided by a weaver or a video camera. In keeping with the themes of his best efforts, his art is subjected to a form of liberation.
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