Work That Seems to Hold That Thought

The turbulent, strangely affecting animated films made by South African artist William Kentridge are driven by special effects. By that, I don’t mean 3-D worlds conjured from the digital ether of computer pixels. In fact I mean just the opposite.

Today, what goes by the name “special effects” in movies is anything but special. High-tech razzle-dazzle is instead routine, a conventional process of filmmaking fully anticipated by the audience. Occasionally it’s effective; mostly it’s inert. Either way, the ubiquity of machine-made special effects in corporate cinema is a backdrop against which Kentridge’s short, cottage-industry films stand out.

Using black charcoal and white paper almost exclusively, Kentridge, 47, creates animation that seems to have the evanescent power of unfolding human thought. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a survey of 11 films made between 1989 and 1999 is accompanied by some 50 examples of those drawings, as well as two dozen etchings and screen-prints, rear-screen projections and a video that shows excerpts of his work as a theatrical stage designer.

This is Kentridge’s second solo show in a Southern California museum. (At the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998, “WEIGHING ... and WANTING” focused on the animated film of that name.) It was organized jointly by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and New York’s New Museum.

Kentridge’s films are short--one is just over three minutes long, none is more than nine minutes--as one might expect of a studio artist who makes every frame by hand. At LACMA they’re shown continuously in five black-box screening rooms built inside the gallery. The films do not convey linear narratives. Episodic and anarchic, they’re more Dada than descriptive. Alfred Jarry’s classic “King Ubu” (1896), a grotesque parody of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” is among Kentridge’s sources. (Like Jarry, Kentridge has employed puppets in theatrical productions.) So is William Hogarth, whose 18th century lampoons of British corruption find a kind of colonial counterpart here.

Several films focus on Soho Eckstein, a voracious businessman in a pinstripe suit, who is contrasted with the character of Felix Teitelbaum. A pudgy nude, Felix is a dreamy figure whose eccentricity casts him as an artist or social outsider. The brutality of South African apartheid and other political situations create an inescapable context for their escapades, but the shifting tide of the human psyche in a world of social inequity and strife is Kentridge’s recurrent focus.

Kentridge evokes this psychic turmoil through an often powerful technique of graphic animation. The soft, black marks of charcoal on paper, rubbed in to make shades of gray and rubbed out to create erasures, establish a constantly shifting atmosphere of fluid movement. As Eckstein listens through a paper cup to hear the inner whispers of a stone, or bodies evaporate into the earth, nothing is stable in these dark, visually intense worlds. “All that is solid melts into air,” to borrow an eloquent phrase from Karl Marx--and as it does the disorder lurking just beneath the quivering surface of modern life rushes to the fore.

In the exhibition, samples of Kentridge’s drawings accompany the films in which they appear. (A few of the drawings are independent of the films.) Of all artistic mediums, drawing is the one that is most directly connected to the elaboration of artistic thought. It’s the place where nascent ideas take material form, with the hand as intermediary between mind and object. Kentridge’s expressive handling of charcoal emphasizes the procedure.

When the process embodied in his drawing technique is recorded as film, the result is startling. It’s almost as if a stream-of-consciousness is being projected on the wall. The effect is magical and mesmerizing. The relative brevity of the films also allows for repeat viewing that further enhances the satisfaction, as qualities of obsessive repetition enter the picture.

Interestingly, the drawings assembled for the exhibition as representative examples are not, on their own, unusually compelling. They’re useful for getting a handle on the visual sources that Kentridge uses to such powerful effect in his films, ranging from Hogarth and Goya to such modern German Expressionists as Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann.

In isolation, however, his drawings can seem like competent illustration, as in one that shows Eckstein standing alone before a curved horizon and beneath the legend, “Her absence filled the world.” Undistinguished on its own, it’s a bit like a souvenir of the 1991 film for which it was made, “Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old.”

Still, Kentridge is at the leading edge of a growing wave of artists who appear to be reacting against the numbing acreage of lifeless video projection and sleek, large-scale photography. Defined more than anything by deadened, gee-whiz technology, such work was once useful in creating a pose of ironic detachment. But that’s about the last thing we need in art right now.

The objects in Paul Sietsema’s modest 1998 film, “Untitled (A Beautiful Place),” for example, are as clearly handmade as the home movie itself. A recent gallery show by Jennifer Bornstein featured short film clips of obviously phony special effects--a meteor shower, a polar sunset--whose charm was nonetheless palpable.

And spring’s Whitney Biennial provided a telling if peculiar sight: The galleries were larded with vacuous digital trivia while the concurrent film and video program emphasized visceral work. (See for yourself in September, when the program travels to the Santa Monica Museum of Art.)

Even transferred to DVD, as Kentridge’s is for exhibition, 16-mm film retains its visceral look. That bodily attribute is further emphasized by mark-making and erasure executed in a continuous flow. By themselves, Kentridge’s drawings might not be anything special. As animation they bristle as thought incarnate.

“William Kentridge,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through Oct. 6. Closed Wednesday.