Bella and Jonathan’s Critique of William Kentridge’s “O Sentimental Machine” at Marian Goodman Paris

 

Bella’s Critique

 

Entering off the street into the Gallerie Marian Goodman is like entering into another word. You are suddenly whisked off of the bustling rue into a beautiful courtyard oasis. Inside the Gallerie, on the ground floor, the space is light and airy. The first room to your left has a few evenly spaced and well-lit William Kentridge artworks based on some of Manet’s work. These pieces are largely charcoal and ink, with the odd outline of red colored pencil. Kentridge, however, adds a level of dynamism as each piece is composed of several distinct pieces of paper, giving the work an almost sculptural quality. One piece in this first room combines two of Manet’s works, contrasting Manet’s earlier political work, and his later floral work.

As you continue through the Gallerie, you will also see several portraits. Although seemingly distinct from the previous ode and reinterpretation of Manet, the first two portraits are that of Manet and his wife, followed by Freud, Pavlov, and Anna Akhmatova. The portraits are all doubled, with one portrait being perhaps more rough and raw than the other’s more gentle and put together quality. All of the portraits also have words cut and pasted onto them, the significance of which seems to be lost amongst the rapid strokes and energy of the portraits themselves. There is also a set of portraits of Leon Trotsky, next to a triplet of portraits of Leon Trotsky after he was assassinated, with bold, sharp, horizontal lines across his face. All of the portraits after those of Manet and his wife feature people who in some way or another dealt with the idea of malleability and programmability of one’s conscious, as referenced in the title of the exhibition O Sentimental Machine.

Downstairs, the clean, modern feel of the Gallerie completely disappears. There is an enclosed space, with a plethora of sounds and images in what appears to be a Turkish hotel room. There are beautiful carpets on the floor and Turkish writing on doors that never open. The whole space is incredibly immersive; it is as if you have been transported back in time, perhaps to the hotel room of Trotsky himself while he was in exile in Turkey. Kentridge displays footage of Trotsky delivering a speech that he was supposed to give in Paris, but could not get the travel papers to go there. This footage didn’t make it to Paris either. Trotsky’s speech, however, is pushed to the side, at times visually submerged in water, and/or drowned out by the score of Kentridge’s piece. All this seems as if to reference Trotsky being drowned out in real life, as he was placed in exile and later assassinated. Directly in front, on the biggest screen, and towards which all of the furniture in the room is facing, is a film. This film is filled with references to the Soviet Union, with real footage of soldiers and people in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 30s, as well as images and sequences that are similar to Soviet film’s of the era, and a reference to the mirror scene in the Marx brother’s film Duck Soup. The film also features Kentridge as Trotsky, and his secretary, who throughout the course of the film seem to slowly go mad, and eventually both she and Trotsky become more machine than man.

The film plays with the title of the exhibit, where man is seen as a ‘sentimental machine,’ a programmable, engineer-able entity that can perhaps be perfected, an idea that Trotsky himself believed. There is a sequence in which the secretary performs various balletic movements, however, the movements appear forced and unnatural. They lack the kind of grace and spirit that a great prima ballerina would naturally possess. This, along with other sequences scattered throughout the film, seems to suggest that Kentridge believes or at least would like to portray in his art that there exists an ineffable quality to humanity that cannot be replicated in a machine.

 

Jonathan’s Critique

 

In the basement of the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris—situated on the cold, concrete floor and nestled between its four white walls—there is a room. Cut-off from both the gallery space it inhabits, and even the larger room it sits within (other than sharing that same concrete floor), this room is the space of William Kentridge’s O Sentimental Machine—a small, barren hotel suite, with five doors, one desk, three chairs, and two large couches facing a single large projection screen (strange layout for a hotel suite but fitting for what looks like a quasi-cinema). O Sentimental Machine is the combination of this space and five channels of video and audio, a nine minute and one-second loop created by Kentridge that, for its short time, fills the space with movement and context. The multi-layered film mixes historical footage with a fictional story, superimposing the audio and video of a lost speech by Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky with an almost parodic film about his dramatic recording of it, a lovestruck and unproductive secretary, and their transformation into the machines that do the talking for them.

Kentridge’s exhibit is funny. Funny both in the “ha-ha” sense and in the sense of the word that would probably be closely synonymous with “curious.” His film, in which he actually plays the character of Trotsky with drawn-on facial hair and a dramatic flair, repurposes comedic tropes of cinema for a cute effect that confuses somewhat the real historical work of the exhibit. Trotsky’s speech, featured throughout the film, was intended to be sent to Paris for presentation, but it never reached its destination and was lost. The exhibit brings the speech to Paris for the first time but distorts it with critique and comedy through Kentridge’s own artistic interpretation. The almost prophetic arrival of the speech in Paris is neat, but with Kentridge’s commentary, and the largely humorous tone, the actual historical miracle of the event is downplayed. It kind of brings into question the politics of ownership when it comes to words, art, and messages—Trotsky’s own words are being shaped and critiqued before they could have even created their own effect or be understood without any accompaniment.

What is most curious about Kentridge’s critique of the speech, and the meat of the actual exhibit, is the change in tone that happens within the film, from humorous to almost scary. This tonal shift is probably most clearly outlined by focusing on the character of Trotsky’s secretary in the film. Wearing Soviet-styled clothing, she becomes increasingly disheveled as the film progresses—her legs falling out from under her as she feverishly types, her confused confrontation with a twin in a mirror that seems to be real but may just be a reflection. The film, from its beginning, seems to be joking with Trotsky’s speech as it plays in the background. Trotsky’s idea that human beings are “programmable,” seems to find its fault with the easily glitched secretary. The tone of the film completely shifts, however, as the secretary seems to lose her mind—dancing in front of a projector in a pointed bra, collecting her tears into a glass jar, and all of this before her head is transformed into a coned speaker. The film ends with the secretary’s head, asleep it seems, projected onto a screen for the cone to watch. This progression seems to hint at a kind of role reversal, from a power structure that places those “sentimental” humans in control up until their exhaustion, when machines will take over. From my perspective, at least, Kentridge seems to brush away Trotsky’s idea that humans are programmable and instead posits that their inability to be programmed in a world that expects as much (Trotsky’s world) would be their downfall.

The layout of the room-within-a-room might just emphasize this possible message. The walls of the exhibit are lined on the outside with projectors that shine into the five doors, enclosing any viewer and inhabitant in what becomes a largely mechanical and projected experience that feels authentic. Shadows pass by a couple of the doors, and Trotsky’s image towers over others and fills with water. The projectors are even encased in wood to fit the old-time vibe within the room, extending not only that feeling but also Kentridge’s critique beyond the three walls he’s constructed and out into the gallery and possibly into Paris itself.

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