William Kentridge: Five Themes

William Kentridge: Five Themes. Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 24-May 17, 2010. Political art that is suggestive of utopia has been viewed with jaded suspicion since the futile attempts of early modernists to use art as an instrument of sociopolitical change. William Kentridge: Five Themes, recently shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, presents a retrospective of Kentridge's work, revealing opportunities for the transformation of collective history and the development of utopianism within the oeuvre of this Jewish South African artist. On view are 130 animated films, drawings, prints, sculptures, and theater models from the late 1980s to today, bringing together works from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. Five themes organize the works, which range from the more overtly political pieces (Ubu Tells the Truth and 9 Drawings for Projection) through the newer, lesser-known projects (films that focus on Kentridge's creative process, Artist in the Studio, and his adaptation of Mozart's Mag/c Flute) and most recently, to his New York Metropolitan Opera production of Shostakovich's The Nose (also the title of the fifth theme). Through the chronology of Kentridge's work, we see faint traces of hope intensify into reflections on utopianism, conveying the importance of a utopian impulse in a global condition marked with continuing discrimination and violence.