This is an enjoyable, important show built round the work of the South African artist animator William Kentridge. It is well worth seeing. You may need two or three hours (and sandwiches) to take in Kentridge’s short films, Buster Keaton’s long silent movies and the entire series of Goya’s Caprichos though these last are barely visible in the low conservatorial light. Although it cost more than $200,000.00 the show if It comes without a catalogue or much in the way of visible scholarly apparatus. There are notes and hints in helpful newspaper format also free from the information desk so don't miss it. There is an unexpectedly good introduction to Kentridge showing on the TV monitors in the foyer.

But there no hint of an explanation for the show – Does Kentridge read Dante? There is little overt evidence of it in his work, even the psychic metaphors of Dante’s hell, frozen lake, fire and so on are a long way from the gallows, guns, gas and mobs of Apartheid South Africa that feature so prominently in his hand drawn movies. The exhibition title, The Divine Comedy, seems chosen irresponsibly, almost at random, as a brand name, in the usual style of boredom incorporated, because, Well --! Uhm !! Aah !!! - People think they know what it means and it sure will help them haul their asses into our gallery. Yes, work by the three artists does resonate and Smith's dramatic dark light presentation helps the odd small epiphany. But I would argue that the overall effect of this exhibition is to deny most of its visitors an experience of the very qualities of intimate but public outrage, the rediscovery of one’s sentiment for disgust, justice and decency, as a member of a community.

All three artists work towards this. They take it for granted, as a human trait. It is this pursuit which makes Goya and Keaton, at least, such problematic figures for late modern. Good as he is, by comparison Kentridge is a minor artist with a narrow range. Perhaps curator Trevor Smith should have checked out the significance of Divina Comedia a little more closely.

The transformation of the art audience from an informed community to a collection of consumer cliche junkies has been AGWA’s chief curatorial strategy for a few years now. Nor is this just a sales and survival ploy. I have pointed out elsewhere that post modern theory and advertising copy are often indistinguishable. In both you find rabid anti-humanism, cynicism as a life ordering principle, professional paranoia and the shrivelled relics of a distant, over controlled, conspiratorial universe, the tyranny of distance measured in light years. Most importantly so called post modernity has no use for history or scholarship or anything else that privileges subtle humane difference.

The theatrical ‘post modern’ curatorial approach of The Divine Comedy, must have difficulties with such resolutely humanist artists. The crunching of complexity and difference, the denial of information and scholarship and the suggestion that all an audience can do is join up the dots round some vague notion of the comedic is highly respectable. It sprang from the lazy premise that modernity and its humanistic values had somehow emptied out, that communal dialogue with art is impossible. Consequently we can only live on the knife edge of the present. Yet the artists in The Divine Comedy can only be understood through their acting out of the humanistic premise as the key to the symbolic order through which we all achieve existence.

Not that they celebrate it in the manner of, say, the public side of Beethoven. On the contrary they are interested in its moments of failure, cock-ups large and small, the precise nano-second when the mirror cracks from side to side and brute cunning, black desire and despair press on every lonely nerve. You can see it happening, in Keaton’s death mask of a face, as he fails, yet again, to stay erect. At these moments, life is revealed in the raw, at its most human and its most social.

This is obvious, if you consider humanism, not as a set of banal enlightenment propositions, a front for baseless rationality, but as a vital excrescence of the symbolic order into the social; a squirming shape that we glimpse under the security blanket of the everyday. To put it far too crudely, the symbolic order is the pattern of power, memories, desires, difference and equivalence that, rational or not, helps us rev up our psyche every morning and get out of bed. We all share in it. Everyone suffer when it becomes overtly oppressive or corrupt. Kentridge's movies focusses on that suffering as it is mediated through out the Apartheid society. He talks of white South African guilt – some feel guilty once day some once year, some never feel guilty on principle some are destroyed by guilt but it touches everyone's life all the time. I can remember the occasional announcements of succesful 8.00 am hangings on the BBC in the early sixties. They did wonders for my breakfast. Lord knows what the daily savagery of apartheid did to peoples lives.

It is clear that artists who concentrate on human miseries, large and small, are working with the gap that they open in the safety of the quotidian. Through this gap the symbolic order appears as a bankrupt emptiness, an absurdly present absence.. There is nothing under the blanket. Life flees elsewhere, as Lacan said. It survives, and, like Keaton walking from a wrecked building or a train crash, picks itself up and starts all over again. It renews the Sisyphean effort towards permanent balance, the completion of the symbolic order we call death.

There is a term for the extended presence of this insight, Melancholia. Long revered by poets and philosophers, it might be defined as a long lasting fixation before the bad news about humanity and the symbolic order. Melancholia and the reiterations of neurosis are both fostered by it, but slow reflective melancholia is the mode of revelation which links Kentridge, Keaton, and Goya. It funds their comedy, by contrast, most modern and nearly all late modern art is neurotic in orientation, a vital difference easily missed in this exhibition.

At the entrance to the show, on my first visit Kentridge's, Parade a large silhouette movie showed of crowd fleeing through a rough circle brightly lit, like the view through a rifle sight of the terrified crowds at Sharpeville. Onm second visit the beginning of a parade, slow funereal. This is also an image of life fleeing an oppressive symbolic order, losing all dimension and colour, literally, flattened by fear. One's increasingly inadequate attempts to recognise these figures in the round some how parallel their panic and loss .

A more apt title for this show might be Melancholia-The Tracks of My Tears.

It unites the originary renaissance concept – Sir Richard Burton's, Anatomy of Melancholy, with Smokey Robinson and Van Morrison, and references the pathos of drawing and gesture as vanishing traces of the fugitive human across the symbolic order. Tears dry, lines are erased, the smiling clown face remains.

In Kentridge's earlier drawn animations. all of which are on show, he makes much of the act of erasing or part erasing the charcoal drawing of the exploding cat, the dirty street scene, tramlines a couple making love, the sinister Jo'burg skyscraper or whatever, on film, leaving a dusty residue over which he draws the next event or view. Each disappearance and reiteration reads as yet another go at getting the corrupted symbolic order right, for good. When vibrant signifying life flees an intolerable symbolic order, dusty melancholy reigns. Kentridge produces a paean of infinite melancholy that dominates his narrative and imagery.

Apartheid was an attempt to handcuff life, the vibrant signifier, forever to the regime's empty symbolic order, hence its willingness to kill without restraint. Kentridge's animated drawing amplifies and extends an apparatus of ramified power in charcoal, telephones, power lines wheels, wires, dynamos, trains, tanks and guns, whose sole purpose is to fix the symbolic order for good. In Stereoscope these lines of symbolic melancholia are blue. Kentridge knows this is happening, just listen to his sadder than sad sound tracks even the jazz in Johannesburg second city to Paris is melancholy. I once heard Harry Oppenheimer, the boss of De Beers, try to justify himself, like a man who has murdered millions in his sleep.

In his new movie Ubu Tells The Truth, Kentridge abandons this filmed drawing process. Instead he simply prints everything cleanly, but in reverse, so that black is quite literally white, with all that implies. He also crosscuts his hand drawn account of the South African reign of UBU, the Parisian Macbeth of Modernity and Master of the Phynances with ultrasharp prints of black and white newsreel film of Sharpeville and other moments of extreme cruelty. This hybrid works to graft the intimate structured revelation of the symbolic order of Apartheid made possible by his drawing onto its outer manifestations in memory and history - a psycho-social collage. But it also exposes him for the first time to the temptations of editing and its bundle of cheap tricks. He succumbs too often.

Nonetheless Kentridge invents some compelling, passionate imagery. He borrows the century old "traditional" costume of Pere Ubu, the schoolmaster's big belly and pointy head, from his inventor Alfred Jarry. Ubu, the original nowhere man, has moved from one 'nowhere' of the symbolic order - Poland, to another, South Africa. He remains dedicated to unbridled murder and gross theft. Now he can transform himself into a camera or machine gun, or both at once, a vicious merciless mechanism.

In one section Ubu becomes a camera on a tripod poking at the face of his victim, then a gun that shoots him to the ground. He dynamites the body repeatedly until it breaks first into limbs and torso then into a constellation of tiny fragments of flesh spread across the bible black sky. All this is done with an amazing animal presence in the drawing, a vicious embodied logic. It also recapitulates the stages of degradation that coloured South Africans endured passively under Apartheid. If this were a Tom and Jerry cartoon, the body would reassemble and thrash Ubu. All we are given is this static, melancholy constellation, life relegated to useless myth – the only triumph possible for Apartheid. I cannot recognise this as comedy.

In another scene a "fall" from a high rise window Kentridge invokes judicial oppression as the centre of the symbolic order. A blind cord becomes a noose, a bath of water a torture instrument. During the long fall the gallows trap repeatedly bangs open on the sound track. Visitors, prompted by the context of this exhibition to look for comedy, may see no more in these scenes than a gratuitous good guy/bad guy political slapstick and miss the terror inscribed in the every day. They will see no more than moralising grotesques in Goya and clowning in Keaton.

These artists, above all others, demand a sense of community, of common humanity from their viewers, yet everything about this show and the ethos of AGWA works against them. Consider Keaton's movies as a clean continual art exhibit with no eager audience, no noise, no laughter. no stalls, no ice cream, no popcorn, something's missing. They were intended for a community to enjoy as a community, not for solitary individuals to drift past in a daze. Goya's prints were published by the Spanish Royal Press as a gesture to the public. Kentridge works with the desperate consequences of a split, failed community and therefore, inevitably, with a divided, incoherent audience.

To mediate art like this to the community requires information and scholarship, a bit more contextual information on Goya for instance. But, since the departure of Robert Bell, there are no scholars at AGWA. One gets the impression that the gallery has forgotten what a community can be. Even the its library has been closed to the public. It was inevitable that the contradictions of its 'show biz' attitude would also be enshrined in its exhibitions.