Visual Arts: Almost black and white

William Kentridge's cartoons of apartheid South Africa have gravity. They're melancholy. They're captivating. But is he doing anything more with the medium than merely cataloguing the horrors?

In a church, in a village, in Norfolk, there's a mural. It depicts the evils of our century, and, as far as I remember, it goes like this. In the centre of the scene, a demo or riot is taking place, and being violently broken up by police. This is shown as happening immediately next door to a concentration camp. In the foreground, a hippy drug addict squats, injecting himself. To one side stand some starving Africans. Meanwhile, in the distance, an atomic mushroom cloud rises.

It's easy to think of things that are wrong with this well-meant picture. It wasn't wise of the artist to place all the incidents in a single, continuous scene. And the impact of these terrors is checked by the way that the picture is obviously working through a list. But the plainest problem is the sense that the artist neither knew, nor could conceive, of the extremities with which he or she was dealing. These things had only been heard of, read about, or seen on television. They are depicted, yes - but without being remotely imagined. The disproportion is embarrassing.

This is meant to be a review of the William Kentridge show at the Serpentine Gallery, and it will be. Kentridge also depicts extremities. But I want to open the subject out a bit more.

Embarrassment. Think about how the cartoonists are covering the Yugoslav war. They can hardly avoid the topic, and sometimes they can't avoid depicting the war's victims: the massacred, the bombed, the refugees. These pictures are embarrassing. It's not just that cartoonists are comic artists, and so run the risk of making atrocity look blackly funny. It's more that to draw a human figure is to claim some intimacy with that person's experience; and in the circumstances, that claim seems preposterous. What does it feel like to sit down and put your hand to representing, however "sympathetically", dismembered or carbonised bodies - as if you knew something about them, and as if your drawing had anything to add? Mustn't it feel embarrassingly naive or grotesque? And the more "sympathetic", the worse?

There can be get-outs. Michael Heath, in a cartoon about the convoy bombing, was a neat one. When it came to picturing the victims, he collaged in, or copied, tormented figures from Picasso's Guernica.

That may seem an arty cop-out. Or it may make you think about Guernica itself, and how far it really is a picture of bomb-victims - by suddenly jolting that notable icon of human suffering against contemporary actuality. But I take it that the prime motive for Heath's quotation was a creditable tact: anything to avoid the presumption of doing the victims "first-hand".

The playwright Edward Bond once wrote a poem about how he'd written a play which had the stage-direction "has plague" - and how the make-up people came to him with medical books, offering a menu of possible plagues, asking which he wanted. I'm not sure if the poem accuses make-up people of being too interested in gruesome physical details; or accuses the playwright himself of having a too symbolic imagination; of not thinking what his general words might mean in particular, bodily reality. But artists are their own make-up people and they can be tempted in either direction: to generalise and symbolise horrors away, or to get too stuck in.

Last month, Jake and Dinos Chapman showed a series of etchings at the White Cube gallery. I saw them, unfortunately, too late to make a review worthwhile, but they seem relevant here. They were a re-vamp of Goya's Disasters of War. They were about (among other things) the representation of atrocity and its taboos. It was important that they were hand-drawn.

The etchings were an inventive catalogue of terrible and revolting things, but some of them also included images of Auschwitz and its chimney. And that, at once, seemed wrong, going too far. Or rather, you were conscious of a strong taboo in force. The taboo says that the death camps can be documented with photos, and can be drawn if the artist was a victim/eye- witness. But otherwise you must be very careful about imaginative depictions - because that makes too free with facts that are sacred, the unique crime gets reduced to a nightmare vision, the act of drawing becomes a gratuitous recapitulation of real evils, may even be fun to do: all sorts of reasons. But, of course, the thing is already imagination-ised - a sight, a famous skyline, a horror story, a place we dream about.

Other prints in this Chapman Brothers series had imitations, in a scratchy pseudo-childish hand, of schoolboy torture-machine drawings. You know the sort - an endless round of hangings, tearings, choppings, mincings, shootings and electrifications. True enough: one of the basic uses of drawing is the imagining, the proxy-enactment, of atrocities. And these are set against quotations from the old Goya etchings - images which, we're usually assured, are great protests against "man's inhumanity to man".

William Kentridge is a South African artist, white, mid-forties, and I hadn't heard of him. He does figurative charcoal drawings which bear the influence of Goya and of Max Beckmann, too. As such, it sounds an unlikely sort of art to find at the Serpentine Gallery nowadays. But these drawings are the basis of a very interesting form of animation.

Normal, animated drawing uses thousands of different images, one per frame of film, which succeed each other, flipbook style. Kentridge uses, in effect, a single image, which is continually altered. That is, he shoots a frame or two of film, partially erases and re-draws the image into a new position, shoots a frame or two more etc. So, unlike a normal cartoon film, the active figures don't have an independent mobile life. The moving parts in Kentridge's films still feel attached to the rest of the drawing which hasn't moved. You see the not-quite-erased drawing of the last frame. Still and moving image are always in tension. The action has a heavy flow and drag to it, shifting and stirring in the dense medium of its charcoal marks. Technique-wise, the work is grave, melancholy, and captivating to watch. I don't think that I've ever seen animation that has felt so physically substantial.

And some of the imagery and transitions in these short films are very deftly rendered - especially the gathering, marching and milling of crowds. I wish I could feel so well about their subjects and stories. These are psycho-political melodramas about apartheid South Africa, with symbolical characters - a fat-suited plutocrat, a sad, naked, poetical alter-ego, a woman who stands for pity and redemption - for which the kind word is "expressionist". There are ticker-tape machines spewing out people and wasted landscapes, failing skyscrapers and statues of the oppressed which come alive.

And there's much representation of violence. Demonstrators are shot and lie dying on the ground, the drawn blood-flow from their wounds focused on, slowed down for pathos. Other bodies are subjected to inventive - and graphically inventive - tortures in police stations. And with any animated treatment, even Kentridge's, the depiction of such things will be more of an enactment of them than it would be in a still image. I kept thinking that Kentridge must, somehow, be using the resources of his distinctive animation-technique to do something with this business, to register or resist the problems of straightforward depiction. But I couldn't see that he was, and it made me think of that church mural, and all the other art and atrocity stuff.

Meanwhile, back at the Yugoslav war: a few nights ago, on a TV-discussion programme, someone said that the refugees in Macedonia were living in "Breughel conditions".

Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2; till 30 May; every day; free