William Kentridge and Sergio Chejfec

Very interesting essay in berfrois on the artist William Kentridge (you can see some of his work in this book). I bring it up because kentridge figures quite prominently into Sergio Chejfec’s book My Two Worlds, and this essay helps to read some of what Chejfec says about Kentridge.

Here’s what I wrote about Chejfec vis a vis Kentridge in The Critical Flame. For Chejfec, Kentridge helps to embody the gaze, which is one of the primary aspects of My Two Worlds:

Chejfec will gaze, but his gaze will be of the kind that cannot be mass-produced. This idea is made flesh late in the novel when Chejfec admits to his obsession with the artist William Kentridge, who places into his paintings dotted lines that emanate from his subjects’ eyes, representing “the gaze in the process of continuous renewal.” He continues, comparing himself to one of Kentridge’s subjects, saying he feels like

someone versatile set adrift in history and the course of the economy, but at the same time exaggeratedly indolent in the face of what surrounds him, things or individuals, to the point where he succumbs with no sense of shock to the consequences, at times definitive, of his actions.

As with Kentridge’s subjects, Chejfec at once feels himself devouring the capitalistic world through his gaze and yet equally devoured by that world. It is this transit between the outside and the inside of this gaze from which My Two Worlds derives its title, and which Chejfec evokes as he describes his meandering through the park. We begin to wonder, Which world better represents the truth? It is an uncertainty that Chejfec magnifies by continually letting his reminisces die off just before reaching a conclusive statement of their significance.

And here’s Daniel Bosch in befrois:

Thus every event not completely enveloped by darkness (is there any event so thoroughly shadowed?) is in some sense preserved, and in some imaginary sense, remains observable to an eye (or “I”) that could put itself in the right place. (A place, in the case of the light present at the drawing of Beowulf, some 1200 light years from Earth, and still moving!) “Once launched,” says Kentridge, “an image cannot be called back.” From the perspective of the Sun, then, the Earth is painted in the impossibly tiny shadows of every event which has occurred on it—our time is bathed in Borgesian light. With the closure of his first lesson, Kentridge suggested that from some fantastical and ideal viewing distances, perhaps, events in history and in our own lives make a kind of sense as compelling and satisfying as that felt when the kinetic image of a typewriter clicked silently into place.

A typewriter is, however, a beginning place, a tool, hardly the end-point of an artistic process. For Kentridge, art is the richer when it is suggestive rather than dictatorial, when the image and the word are always already “awaiting (their) deformation,” when the object is actively completed by the viewer/listener, rather than delivered as a hermetically sealed—fated—whole. He writes with both light and shadow, and insists on the moment of eclipse as the moment that makes certain kinds of sight possible.

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