DVD Review: “William Kentridge: Anything is Possible”
William Kentridge: Anything is Possible The South African artist William Kentridge (he’s based in Johannesburg) has impressed many of us as a major figure in the art world at least since he was given a grand exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the summer and early fall of 2002. Of course, calling him an “artist” doesn’t quite do him justice, for Kentridge is not only an animator, an illustrator, and a sculptor, but he works fluently in film, theater, tapestry and opera. Apologies, then, if I’ve left out one or two other mediums. This new documentary, a product of Art21 and PBS, focuses by and large on the opera “The Nose,” which was composed by Dmitri Shostakovich and is based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol. It has a surrealist twist (a bureaucrat’s noggin bids him adieu and heads off to climb up the social ladder) which clearly appealed to Kentridge, just as other artists in other fields – from Peter Greenaway and Franco Zeffirelli to David Hockney and Werner Herzog – have been unable to resist becoming involved with opera. In the present instance, “The Nose” received several performances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. When the Kentridge exhibition…
Read this story on easyreadernews.com