Lost at sea

William Kentridge shows off his usual amazing bag of artistic tricks in "The Great Yes, The Great No." But this time they don’t work.

A scene depicting the two Andre Bretons in William Kentridge’s “The Great Yes, The Great No.” Photo: Monika Rittershaus.

William Kentridge is a unique and protean force in the world of contemporary art. The South African’s sui generis works, which combine painting, film, music, photography, sculpture, drawing, collage, masks, prints, dance, theater and words, take the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, to a mind-blowing new level. Kentridge’s chamber opera Sibyl, which received its US premiere in Berkeley in 2023 as the culmination of a year-long Cal Performances residency, was an open-ended, thought-provoking, and remarkably inventive exploration of epistemological uncertainty, relativism, and the impossibility of knowing the future.

Kentridge’s latest live performance work, The Great Yes, The Great No, which had its Bay Area premiere last weekend at Zellerbach Hall as part of Cal Performances’ “Fractured History” series, seems promising on paper. It is based on a remarkable historical event, a 1941 voyage in which a French cargo ship, the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, carried about 350 escapees from Nazism from Marseilles, France to the Caribbean island of Martinique. The Capitaine Paul-Lemerle was the opposite of a Ship of Fools—more like a Ship of Geniuses. The passengers included two of the most eminent thinkers and artists of the 20^th century: poet and essayist Andre Breton, the leading proponent of Surrealism, and Claude Levi-Strauss, the pioneering anthropologist, ethnologist and father of structuralism, who as a Jew faced increasing persecution under the Nazi-friendly Vichy regime. Also on board were the now-famous Afro-Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam, the Russian Communist writer Victor Serge, and the German-Jewish writer Anna Seghers (real name Anna Reiling), whose 1933 novel A Price on His Head was a prescient exploration of why ordinary Germans embraced Nazism.

It's an extraordinary cast of characters, and Kentridge made it even more potentially interesting by adding a number of other major figures to his fictional manifest, most notably the great Martinique-born poet, author and politician Aime Cesaire, a co-founder of the anti-racist, anti-colonialist literary and theoretical movement Negritude in the 1930s who was championed by Breton and who himself embraced surrealism, his wife and fellow poet Suzanne Cesaire, and the famed revolutionary theorist and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, also from Martinique and a student of Cesaire’s. For good measure, he throws in such disparate characters as Josephine Baker, Joseph Stalin, Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife Josephine, and Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

One can only imagine what an intellectually agile writer like Tom Stoppard, who turned the fact that Tristan Tzara, Lenin and James Joyce all happened to be in Zurich in 1917 into his acclaimed play Travesties, might have done with this king-sized mattress full of strange bedfellows. Stoppard is expert at dramatizing the clash of ideas and finding points of tension between the different characters and their worldviews, and it’s intriguing to speculate about the intellectual fireworks he might have set off.

There are visual and musical fireworks aplenty in The Great Yes, The Great No, but no intellectual ones. In fact, nothing even remotely resembling a narrative, let alone a clash of ideas, emerges from this 90-minute kaleidoscope. And despite all the brilliant and arresting moments that one expects from a Kentridge creation, it just doesn’t work: its whole is less than the sum of its parts. It’s a mess, and worse, not a particularly interesting mess. It somehow manages to be simultaneously simplistic and incoherent.

The obvious rejoinder to this is that criticizing Kentridge for not telling a conventional story is like criticizing avant-garde jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman for not playing like Lester Young: It misses the whole point of Kentridge’s work. He is not interested in creating coherent narratives so much as exploring ambiguity, using unexpected artistic forms to open new ways of seeing the world.

That response is legitimate—to a point. Sibyl was not a coherent narrative either, and it worked. So why did the earlier work succeed while this one fails?

There are several reasons, but perhaps the most important has to do with a fundamental genre distinction, between fine art and theater. The distinction is fluid, of course, and Kentridge has made a career of challenging such artistic categories. But to me, Sibyl felt much more like an art piece than a dramatic one: it would have made sense for it to be performed at a museum. It felt like an art piece not just because visual forms were so central to it—I’ve only seen these two pieces, but that’s presumably true of all Kentridge’s work—but because its themes were so abstract. It’s based on a myth, not on real characters or events, and invites you into a dream-like state consonant with myth. No narrative was imagined, intended or even possible: the work simply washed over you, in a psychedelic multi-media experience. The kind of aesthetic attention it called for was closer to that one brings to looking at a painting than watching a play.

The Great Yes, The Great No is also an art piece, and that’s the problem: It shouldn’t have been. It should have been a play. It’s trying to achieve something that its form is simply unsuited for. Because it is based on an actual historical event and on real people, whose stories and beliefs and works are known, and because it deals with ideas, we expect it to tell a story, pull its disparate elements together into some kind of point—and it needs to tell a story and make a point. Because it doesn’t, it is just an impressionistic pastiche, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Kentridge’s chosen form, kinetic visuals set to music and accompanied by collage-like projections of poetic words, is too fragmented and fractured to allow him to explore the clash of ideas his subject calls for.

Actually, even if Kentridge had channeled his inner Tom Stoppard and turned The Great Yes, The Great No into a conventional play of ideas, it’s far from clear that it would have worked. That’s because there’s not much ideological conflict or intellectual tension in the story, little that would generate a compelling narrative or clash of ideas. There is, to be sure, a very catchy and ironic hook: a famous French surrealist flees Nazism, but escapes to an island colonized by… France! And another catchy fact: the most famous, anti-colonialist writer from that colonized island embraced... surrealism!

For Kentridge, whose work is both surrealist and anti-racist and anti-colonialist, this story must have felt like it was created especially for him. But the fact that he shares the aesthetic and political/ideological views of his main characters is not an unalloyed blessing. Insofar as one can take away a “meaning” from The Great Yes, The Great No, it seems to be mostly a celebratory, mom-and-apple-pie one: surrealism and anti-colonialism are good things. One can agree with this view, but that doesn’t mean a work that proclaims it is going to necessarily be artistically successful.

If there is a potentially interesting clash of ideas here, it involves the relationship between art and politics—in particular the claim, advanced by Breton and by both Cesaires, that surrealism is a revolutionary instrument that will bring about the downfall of colonialism. The Great Yes, The Great No projects part of the following quote, from Suzanne Cesaire’s essay “1943: Surrealism and Us”: "Our surrealism will then deliver it the bread of its depths. Finally those sordid contemporary antinomies of black/white, European/African, civilised/savage will be transcended. The magical power of the mahoulis will be recovered, drawn forth from living sources. Colonial stupidity will be purified in the blue welding flame. Our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our amazing communions will be recovered.”

Uh, no. In fact, the effect of surrealism on colonialism and racism was approximately zero. But if history has been not been kind to Cesaire’s grandiose pronouncement, that doesn’t mean we should simply dismiss it, or the other manifestos of modernism of which hers is actually a rather restrained example. For those overblown credos are at once ridiculous and brilliant—poignant artifacts of a bygone time when artists and thinkers were still naïve enough, and impassioned enough, to take art seriously.

Kentridge is nothing if not a nuanced and sophisticated artist, drawn to exploring the shadow side of ideas and ideologies, and one would love to see him explore this crux, this collision of aesthetics and politics. Perhaps he tries to, here and there, in passing: The cameo appearance of Joseph Stalin, the Communist dictator who rejected avant-garde art and who was ultimately rejected by Aime Cesaire, introduces an ominous note. And he does seem to gently satirize Breton, who is split into two identical personages and at times seems a bit mincing and precious. But that critique, if that’s what it is, is undeveloped.

Indeed, some of Kentridge’s characters seem to have been chosen mostly just because they were involved in some way with the subject of surrealism and politics—a pretty low bar for selection. What are Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo doing here, for example? We don’t really know, other than that Frida could be considered a sui generis surrealist (although she rejected that label) and Rivera was a Communist. Or is their appearance intended to remind us that Stalin had Rivera’s onetime friend (and Frida Kahlo’s lover) Leon Trotsky assassinated? Who knows? Maybe they play a collage-y role not that different from the people depicted on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s: They’re just people Kentridge likes.

The Great Yes, The Great No is at its best when Kentridge uses his formidable powers to create a scene of universal import with a clear relationship to his theme. The most powerful and arresting moment in the piece, for me, is a short black-and-white film that depicts (presumably colonial and white) rational, nameless, mechanical figures using dinner utensils to meticulously cut, carve and move about a black hand on a plate. This horrifying, hallucinatory image, right out of Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, is an actual artistic demonstration of the central theme of surrealism critiquing colonialism. But there are not enough such moments.

There is some leavening humor here, most notably delivered by the ship’s captain, Charon (yes, the mythical ferryman of the dead) whose wry takes on his job offer a Sancho Panza-like contrast to the Don Quixotes who stride the literal and figurative decks. And Kentridge does have a centering device, a kind of Greek chorus, seven South African women who represent all the passengers who made the fateful crossing over the centuries. They deliver gorgeous performances, singing choral composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu’s glorious music beautifully, but what they stand for is too universal and general to shed any light on the particular story at hand. Of course it’s moving to reflect on the endless human pathos of all the different ages during which the voyages between colonized lands and colonizers took place. And the fragments of poetic words that appear on the screen, such as “Why is this age worse than others?” are evocative. But those universal themes aren’t connected enough with the entirety of the work to allow the viewer to experience an aesthetic or emotional catharsis.

Everything that William Kentridge does is worth watching: he has mastered his own original medium. But in this case, the medium is simply not suited to the message.