William Kentridge - The Head & the Load review:
Can one think about History as collage, rather than as narrative? — Kentridge
A masterful approach to a story which is impossible to tell, regrettably displayed in the clammy shadow of a dilating, heaving, grotesque beast, begging for attention, yet denied address.
The piece is one of the 14–18 Now WW1 Centenary Art Commissions marking 100 years since the end of the second world war, and precisely addresses Kentridge’s question. It is tapestry of cry and communicative vocalisation, within which language is just a means to stitch together layers of a visual and audible palimpsest of repetitive woe.
The artists’ KABOOM:
The Dancers’ KABOOM:
Let us try for once not to be right.
If the piece is disjointed and overwhelming it is because it tells a part of history without a story: the overwhelmingly extensive African involvement in the Firsts World War was documented only passively and so risks being forgotten altogether.
Around the turn of the millennia we saw an urgent initiative to document personal accounts of the last surviving veterans from WW1. An initiative which ended on February 4th 2012 when Florence Green, a British woman and the last WW1 veteran, died.
This marked in many ways the end of a World War One narrative, but there is a story left untold, which cannot be told.
That story began with the first shot fired by British forces in WW1 on August 12th 1914. A shot fired by Alhaji Grunshi, an African man, marking the start of a series of events resulting in the death of countless African veterans who are not listed alongside the British, the French, the Polish, and so fourth.
This is the elusive segment of our shared past explored by The Head & the Load. The records which they have to go on are anecdotal, sparse, and problematically subjective in nature. As such the piece is about how the topic has been omitted as much as it assembles images of what occurred.
Because of this the historian’s usual narrative restrictions are allayed and all aspects of the passage of time are made irrelevant and one is faced with all manner of horrific disregard of one human for another, and the vital and destructive empathy experienced in shared sorrow.
Instead of being shown instances and causative progression we are guided into coarse emotional connection.
As the piece progresses this connection is worked into empathy with the fatigued grief of nameless individuals. The painful crux being that their story has never been told, and with an absolute dearth of historical record will seldom be realised.
Our attention is uncomfortably drawn to this lack of narrative. we spend what feels like eternities looking at disembodied and fragmented faces of characters whom the audience is not able to comfortably give identity to. They remain unnamed, silenced.
In other segments languages are collapsed in TH&TL into one stream of unintelligible outcry, obscuring borderlines and reaching towards ultimate emotional communication.
Visually the piece is magnificent. Texture, shadow, reflection, and vastness on stage are deftly used to summon ghosts of unnumbered masses of Africans who fell in the first world war at the hands of German forces. Those Africans fought as French allies, as British allies. As expendable front-line bodies fortifying, or rather shielding French and British troops.
In a different context one could easily read The Head & the Load as a deconstructivist historical montage, focusing on timeless experience rather than narrative progression, and escaping time for a fundamentally relatable experience.
However within its context this deconstructionist element works to distastefully side-step objective analysis: this is not just a piece from Kentridge and the Creative team, it is also a piece from the Tate.
Tate Modern Director Frances Morris says, referring to the Tate’s involvement, that the commission:
has enabled us to partake in the centenary commemorations of the end of the First World War in ways that feel true to our wider mission.
So what are these ‘ways’? What is that wider mission?
Thankfully Morris answers one of these questions for us. Tate Modern’s wider mission is a commitment ‘to telling relevant and complex stories through art.’
Reducing our expectations of The Head & the Load then to that most basic criterion, a story is what we can expect from this piece.
The difficult truth for the Tate here is that this story comes all the way up to the doorstep of a story which the Tate needs to tell with a lot more precision.
Whenever I step into the Tate Modern I am reminded of the narrative of Tate and Lyle’s involvement in the slave trade. Whatever one’s opinion on how nobly that episode was brought to a close, it occurred.
Without a direct address of this involvement, The Head & the Load, nestled comfortably in the prestigious belly of the Tate Modern, risks interpretation as another evasion of Tate’s difficult past, and at worst as an attempt to clean up what turns up in a ‘tate slavery’ google search.
Through this context Kentridge’s collapse of narrative unfortunately feels like avoiding coherent communication, over-saturating the space with imagery and symbolism distracting from the hulking great elephant in the room. And it could have been done differently.
As if to demonstrate the Tate’s shortcomings, this week there was another piece set on the Thames: East Wall, where 150 performers storm the Tower of London and delicately, divisively, and destructively burst through all manner of fourth walls by coming out of the performative space and bringing the queen’s guard into it.
The gentleman sat beside me who fell asleep watching TH&TL would I’m quite sure have been captivated by this experience. East Wall uses popular culture to bring our present experience onto a battleground on which ideas of nationalism, are exposed to the elements, and revealed in their timeless persistance.
By relying on dance rather than collapsed language, clear communication is achieved without definite narrative, and transcending cultural context.
The two are very different pieces, but TH&TL could have overcome it’s contextual difficulty by using modes of clear communication which seemed mastered in the choreography of East Wall which flooded a stage with bodies in war, defiance, and emotion. East Wall proved that dance can be used to communicate distinct issues without linguistic and cultural barriers. Although we have no extensive written record of the Africans who fought and fell in the First World War, we do have a historical silence. That silence, if given a platform, could have been used to paint a clear image of the attitudes of European forces towards African people. Without this The Head & the Load missed a much needed opportunity to address national culpability.
If the Tate are telling difficult, complex stories, there is a large one sat neatly unopened on the floor of the Turbine Hall, overlooked by the balconies and gift-shop.
Dear Frances Morris, a large and lonely elephant has been growing in that great vacuous room in silence since the Tate modern’s establishment. When will it be put out of it’s misery and exhibited?
