A reduced palette.

{Waiting for you in Spain.}


{If you were here you would hear me crying.}

Emerging some three plus hours into a dark wet night having forgotten myself in the brilliant William Kentridge survey exhibition (direct from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) at ACMI, I feel that fantastical mix of awe, inspiration, amazement, and envy. William Kentridge: Five Themes is one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen in the longest time. From Occasional and Residual Hope: Ubu and the Procession films and drawings and shadow theatre techniques through to the model theatres and black and white chalk drawings projected, birds embraced, and rhinos writhing and contorting in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and the works based on Gogol’s The Nose (for The Metropolitan Opera’s Shostakovich opera premiere of The Nose, 2010), I greedily wish only that I’d gone sooner (today is the last day of the exhibition in current guise at ACMI) so that I might go again and sit in the long dark room watching that suite of seven films about the artist in the studio, to reflect on the “invisible work that must be done” (quote plucked from the ACMI exhibition brochure). It is something magical to partake in, all those exhibition punters quietly watching film after film in the many darkened rooms, negotiating a seat, a wall to lean against, or a floor to sit on as before them plays out scenes that give rise to a knot in the throat. A tingle of the skin, a beating of the heart faster, a lump in the throat, a tightening about the chest, a watering of the eyes; the body tells me what I think.  Handspan, rule of thumb, the body is a great measuring device. I’ve no right words for how magnificent, strong, beautiful, melancholic, dark, and brilliant I found this exhibition, but I wish I could go again and I wish you could come with me. It’s been the shove I needed, and my head feels as though a door was found, opened and a new room beyond sighted. If this exhibition didn’t prompt you to pick up charcoal stick or paper play, I’m sure nothing could.
 
+ Temporarily shunning all media shortly so that I can watch a different kind of brilliance tonight on the telly. I’ll bid you adieu, and leave you in the hands of a plucky sparrow.