William Kentridge
This drawing of Nandi lying dead beneath newspapers predates Kentridge’s film Felix in Exile (1994) in which she again appears. A pas de deux between two characters – Felix, alone in a room, and Nandi, who first appears to him in the mirror above his basin – the animated work reflects on the price of hard-won freedom. Made in the year that marked South Africa’s transition to democracy, it offers an allegory of failing faith, with Nandi a personification of hope short-lived. In both the film and this drawing, she is left dead in an empty landscape. The scene is evocative of a photograph taken by the journalist Peter Magubane during the Soweto Uprisings in June 1976, which shows a young man lying face down on the ground, his body similarly covered with newspaper. On a broadsheet, a headline reads: ‘This I believe’ by a South African. Beneath it, an advert promises The end of nervous tension. Fragments of brick and stone weigh down the newspaper to hold it in place. To many, it was not an unfamiliar sight. In his testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Magubane recounted:
In the days after the first day, Soweto was again different from any of the townships for the police were now not playing but killing. You woke up in the morning, and down the streets, you would find ten bodies lying covered in newspapers.
b.1955, Johannesburg
Performing the character of the artist working on the stage (in the world) of the studio, William Kentridge centres art-making as primary action, preoccupation, and plot. Appearing across mediums as his own best actor, he draws an autobiography in walks across pages of notebooks, megaphones shouting poetry as propaganda, making a song and dance in his studio as chief conjuror in a creative play. Looking at his work, a ceaseless output and extraordinary contribution to the South African cultural landscape, one finds a repetition of people, places and histories: the city of Johannesburg, a white stinkwood tree in the garden of his childhood home (one of two planted when he was nine years old), his father (Sir Sydney Kentridge) and mother (Felicia Kentridge), both of whom contributed greatly to the dissolution of apartheid as lawyers and activists. The Kentridge home, where the artist still lives today, was populated in his childhood by his parents’ artist friends and political collaborators, a milieu that proved formative in his ongoing engagement with world histories of expansionism and oppression throughout the 20th century. Parallel to – or rather, entangled with – these reflections is an enquiry into art historical movements, particularly those that press language to unexpected ends, such as Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism.
Moving dextrously from the particular and personal to the global political terrain, Kentridge returns to metabolise these findings in the working home of the artist’s studio, where the practitioner is staged as a public figure making visible his modes of investigation. Celebrated as a leading artist of the 21st century, Kentridge is the artistic director of operas and orchestras, from Sydney to London to Paris to New York to Cape Town, known for his collaborative way of working that prioritises thinking together with fellow practitioners skilled in their disciplines (for example, as composers, as dancers). Most often, he is someone who draws, in charcoal, in pencil and pencil crayon, in ink, the gestures and mark-making assured. In a collection of books for which A4 acted as custodian during the exhibition History on One Leg, one finds 200 publications devoted to Kentridge’s practice. In the end, he has said, the work that emerges is who you are.