An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore and Tide Table by William Kentridge
Two films built on the edges of disintegration:
This evening I saw Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Unmistakably, it is a “must see” flick. Its “truth” emerges from Gore’s direct encounter with the irrefutable visual evidence - glaciers disappearing, deserts forming, hurricanes - combined with a watertight presentation of scientific analysis of the data. Interwoven are Gore’s own personal encounters with early teachers on the subject, as well as his own life enhancing - as well as endangering - experiences from growing up in the natural world of his childhood family farm. There is also the overhang of his Presidential election loss, combined with an awareness of the collusion of the Bush Presidency with oil interests and this Administration’s refusal to acknowledge and take action on the real threat of global warming.
Aesthetically, presented as an actual slide lecture, the format is that of probably the most expensive Power Point presentation one will ever get to see: on site video footage of planetary demise, data graphs, etc., etc. presented with watertight cogency, and clarity - counter pointed with the heartfelt sincerity of a man once thrown off the horse of ambition to become President, and now, very much back on his feet. He creates a convincing, totally uncynical impression of a sophisticated Everyman who is working constantly to both light up the future and use his leadership to divert the globe from emminent demise. Indeed, I believe it is one of those ‘change the picture of the map’ films. No matter how dire the vision, the film is a life affirming, populist call to action on all fronts. (In fact, I already have several friends that are now riding bikes, turning down the temp on their water heaters, and all the good etcs!)
Curiously, before seeing the film, I had been to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where I had twice watched Tide Table, a brilliant five or so minute video by the South African artist, William Kentridge. Similar to the Gore film, Tide Table is also engaged by the sea, and also very much involved in a landscape (a country) that is closely bordering on the edge of disintegration. However, from the point of view of art, aesthetically Kentridge is doing it from a much different perspective. Gore’s film - no matter how much one is persuaded by it as a documentary - is quite weak from the point of view of an “artwork” An Inconvenient Truth - in terms of ‘felt’ visual content appeals to a nineteenth century pastoral and/or ’sublime’ - as witnessed in video clips of remote mountains and glaciers, or sites of devastation from hurricanes and flooding. In terms of pastoral, the film begins on a green shaded river and periodically revisits the Gore family ranch - where the trees and fields are transmuted through the fuzzy lens of impressionist art. The tree shapes and field are warm, practically dripping with illuminated colors. These images are suddenly a bit of unreal 19th century nostalgia. I am not sure if that’s what Gore envisions, when and if global warming is eliminated - a kind of return to Thomas Jefferson’s view of the farm, Virgilian landscapes et al. That part of the film - set in the context of Gore buzzing around in planes, limousines, and state of the techno art auditoriums - came off as a bit lame and retro-innocent. In fact - though we are offered means to cut down global warming, there is no real vision as to how the world will look when petroleum no longer informs its core operating system. (At this point he is not required to that either!)
The William Kentridge work, on the other hand, makes no bones about the absence of innocence. For Tide Table he makes many, many charcoal drawings of a simple seaside resort - with all its various buildings and different kinds of individuals at in various modes of work and play - a social panoply of contemporary South Africa: The industrialist in a suit sitting in his folding chair reading the paper and overlooking the sea. Children playing in the ocean. What appears to be a black African baptism in the waters just out from the beach. The four bungalows in which people are staying, dressing, sleeping through the night. The interior of a large, overflowing bunkhouse whose impoverished appearing black inhabitants appear to be possibly dying of AIDS. The handsome double storied and towered resort building for the wealthy. The three uniformed sentinels on the upper floor stiffly looking out across the beach, measuring the potential threat in everyone’s moves. Then several panels of horned cattle that mysteriously appear - as if some unconscious, unaccountable force of nature brings them into view.
Kentridge has taken these individual charcoal drawings and woven them into a video animation. These drawings, I should say, operate in an area between ‘realistic and “cartoonish” - they are not deep character studies, yet their presences are loaded with a sense of an artist who has closely studied the social landscape of the beach: the low waves move along the beach, shovels dig into sand, the newspaper in the industrialist’s hand cover his face; at night, his folding chair takes on a life of its own within one of the bungalows - dancing back and forth across the floor -, the cattle appear and disappear at unpredictable moments, a woman leads a baptism out in the waves, where kids also flip and flop in the waters: there is a visitation by a healthy relative to someone dying in the bunk house. The suited industrialist gets his chair closer and closer to the beach, protects his head with the newspaper, and his face, by the end, his face becomes part dog. Kentridge clearly knows his Hogarth and other satiric eighteenth century court cartoonists - and yet, the work is not at all ‘cartoonish.’
What Kentridge has done in a five-minute video, I find quite astonishing. The level of compassion - even pleasure - in the drawings of the various characters is palpable - even when the work makes satiric, ironic gestures (with maybe the exception of the sentinels). Yet, at the same time, while there is comedy and play within the animation, there is a profound, mediated sense of disturbance, as well as lament, here. One suspects that Kentridge is right on the register: the geist, and the role of the country’s various contrary forces that are edging back and forth against and with each other. Tide Table - as a title - is a metaphoric way of saying the piece is taking measure of country’s social depths. Though entertained on some level. I suspect most visitors don’t leave the Museum viewing room feeling real comfortable.
So back to Gore, and the comparison. Both men are confronting oceans full of disturbance, pending and otherwise. An Inconveient Truth, I strongly like for its informed and persuasive power, but not for any great aesthetic sense, such as what I find gratifying in Tide Table. Kentridge’s work (medium) scrapes down to the diverse layers of his content.One senses that the very charcoal strokes he makes for the drawings are a way of digging and scraping deeper and deeper into his subject matter until he arrives at a certain sense of truth. I suspect it’s the sensuality of that process that makes me trust the work - the video as an artifact becomes an imaginative kind of a social and human fact. It’s that sense of materiality, combined with his intelligence and comic intention - in the sense of his engagement with larger, probaly impossible social space - that I find totally engaging.
The Gore, on the other other, as I suggest, has an aesthetic that is closer to Power Point - the content is shaped by a powerful arsenal of graphic and other imageing tools. But, as such a lecture ought, the event is factually disturbing and persuasive, in fact provides a persuasive model for actions that will alter the conditions that beset the globe. Ironically, the Kentridge does not seem to have any of those intentions. Yet I would rather look at Tide Table several times over and be more touched to the heart. I think the difference rests on the question of aesthetics. By not appealing to either the sublime or the pastorale, Kentridge goes in a much more felt way into the core experience of exploring and contending with social and human disintegration. Unlike the Gore film, there is no offering of solutions - Tide Table celebrates as much as it fears. I find that realistic combination and vision of human endeavor provides the most sense of hope, as well as makes a great, compelling piece of art
Our twenty-first century moment: disintegration or??