The South African artist talks about his latest project, Alban Berg's epic opera "Lulu"

By J.C.T. | NEW YORK

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings and sculptures—which have fetched up to $1m at auction—and for his films, which often depict the process of creating and altering these pieces. His current project, though, is a new production of “Lulu”, Alban Berg’s epic, 12-tone opera, about sex, power and decadence in Europe between the world wars.

One of the joys of Mr Kentridge’s art is its appearance of handcrafted roughness. His charcoal etchings, his Indian ink drawings on ripped-out encyclopaedia pages, even his theatre work, revel in their analogue simplicity. Mr Kentridge claims to write everything with an ink fountain pen: “All my writing is longhand. You can’t think on a keyboard.”

This is why it feels odd to see the 60-year old artist surrounded by computers and a spread of high-tech gear resembling a control room at NASA as he makes last minute adjustments to his latest opus. “Lulu,” is the second opera that Mr Kentridge has designed and directed at the Metropolitan Opera. But theatricality lies at the heart of all his work, as does a deep sense of rhythm and physicality, which is why these two opera productions (in 2010, alongside a major retrospective at MoMA, he debuted at the Met with “The Nose,” a rarely performed Shostakovich opera after Gogol’s short story) have been rightly hailed as revelations.

Mr Kentridge spoke to The Economist hours before the first night of “Lulu”.

Seeing you in this giant auditorium seems so removed from your non-operatic work, which feels so artisanal and intimate. Do you ever use computers in your artist’s studio?

Oh yes, for the editing part, without a doubt—particularly for the theatrical work. For theatrical work where you have to change scale, composite things together, combine things; it’s only possible with the flexibility of digital mediums. But while the editing is done on a computer, the charcoal animations are still made on old 35mm reel film, frame by frame. It’s a camera from the second world war. It’s the same one I’ve used since I started and it’s fine for what I need.

Your work often harks back to the days of early days of cinema. In your book, “Six Drawing Lessons,” you use the zoetrope, an early motion picture device, as a metaphor for the artist’s studio. That repetitive action cannot be escaped, but that an artist can and must escape the loop. When did you first escape the loop and know that you had stumbled on something original?

I worked for some years as an artist and then I stopped for a few years. When I came back to it and I started working on charcoal drawings, which I hadn’t done before, it was somehow done without the pressure of having to know what it was before the drawing was made. So, that was the moment, I suppose, of allowing myself to not know what I was doing. Or to not know where things would end.

And this breakthrough came only after you had left art school in Johannesburg, worked for a time, and then went to Ecole Jacques Lecoq, a school in Paris that specialises in miming, movement, and physical theatre?

I learned more about drawing at that year at Lecoq than I did from my years at art school. It gave me an understanding of impulse: what is the first movement behind a gesture or a drawing. In theatrical terms it means finding a psychology for movement, rather than starting with a psychological examination of a text, and finding a movement appropriate to it.

What attracted you to “Lulu”?

The entry point for “Lulu” was seeing an exhibition here in New York of German expressionist prints and understanding that black and white visual language was the language of “Lulu.”

But beyond the language, was it the politics or the characters or the music that made you want to spend years of your life with this opera?

I’m drawn to it because of the interest of the nature of obsessive desire, of the instability of these objects of desire, and the frustration that creates. Sometimes the very indifference of the object of desire is a provocation for the obsessive, unending quest for it, and so that being able to translate quite roughly and directly into the roughness of the painting, of the projections—that’s really the interest. So it’s not just the formal technique of the ink drawings. It has to do with how that can embody the intriguing themes buried inside the libretto and the music.

You’ve said you distrust happy endings, and that “the light at the end of the tunnel...turns too quickly into an interrogator’s spotlight.” Is that part of the appeal of “Lulu”?

It’s not an opera of innocence. If you take all the nastiness and cruelty and lack of empathy in the political world of Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s and put it inside a room: this is “Lulu.” It’s the nastiness of the realpolitik of sex.

And it doesn’t help to try to say are we going to give you an analysis of Lulu herself, that she was an abused child, she’s a murderess bitch, a femme fatale. To me it’s the angle of a shoulder that turns something from being innocent to being provocative. It’s the minute stiffening of certain muscles that you read instantly as a challenge or as neutrality or as a defence. Those are things that really construct who the character is, rather than the big analysis for me.

How do you maintain the sense of wonder in your work without feeling like you are championing happy endings or utopian dreams?

You can’t go back to the state of innocence, but you can go back to a sense of excitement about making sense of the world. You can’t ignore the other side of utopian thinking, but if you remove utopian thinking, what is the gap that you’re left with? As Beckett always said so perfectly, how does one fail better? You have to accept that you’re going to fail, but how does one fail better? And even though we know it's all going to end badly, what are the arabesques, what are the dances that we do, that we can’t stop ourselves doing, on the way?