William Kentridge: Timeline 1955 to 2019

WHY SHOULD I HESITATE

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WILLIAM KENTRIDGE TIMELINE: 1955–2019

compiled by Sean O’Toole and Sven Christian

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1955

I think of the child, still stuck inside the frame of this sixty-fouryear-old. I feel his anxiety as he runs around inside me still. The child is saying, “Tell them about this. Tell them about …” [1] ● William Kentridge (WK) is born to Felicia and Sydney Kentridge in Johannesburg ● The Freedom Charter, peoples’ constitution,

and statement of non-racial aspiration, championed by the African National Congress (ANC), are adopted at the Congress of the People in Kliptown, Soweto ● Mixed-race residents of Sophiatown are forcibly removed to new township settlements. The mass removals are enabled by new legislation including the Group Areas Act of 1950 and the Native Resettlement Act of 1954 ● The English-language premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, directed by Peter Hall, is staged in London

1956

In South Africa, people ask: “Are you optimistic or are you pessimistic?” One has to understand that both futures (both judgements of the future) are at this stage unfolding. There is a pessimistic assessment. In a way, everything is going wrong. That is part of what is happening. At the same time, there are extraordinary projects and changes and transformations in people—that is happening too.

It’s not to say that one is true and one is false, or one is a mistake, or that, in retrospect, in the future you will be able to say, “Well, it’s clear, it was just teething pains, it was always going to be a success.” To hold those different things open as both real and true, not as one hiding the other nor as a falsity hiding a truth—that is one of the reasons for understanding contradiction as central to life and art, rather than as an anomaly … [2] ● Nelson Mandela and 155 other Congress of the People leaders are arrested and charged with high treason ● Albert Newall becomes the

first South African to have work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

1957

In Johannesburg, we have dry winters. In summer we have heat, and thunderstorms in the afternoons. Our sublime arrives in the form of huge cumulus nimbus clouds that pile themselves up over the city. With every day, when we have a storm, a new mountain range, a new Alps, is built for us again. In that way the mine dumps can exist, be erased, be rebuilt, so from a clear sky the cathedrals of clouds construct themselves. We see two things in the clouds.

Shapes: a dog’s head, an old man’s face with a protruding chin, the back of a head on a shoulder. This is not our ability to see things.

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It is not an act of generosity to see them. It is about not being able to stop ourselves from seeing the shapes. The man’s head comes to you. Once recognised, you cannot stop yourself from seeing it. This is one element of the clouds. The other is the changing itself, their shifting form, an awareness of the engine in the clouds.

Lying on one’s back, looking at the clouds in the late afternoon, there is a seed of understanding that a child gets, of the nature of provisionality. Something is growing within, changing the outside form, becoming itself. [3] The children’s books we had were books not just of European landscapes, but of English landscapes, in which there was a village, a vicarage, and a barn, and a stream, and woods. And children would play and construct their worlds in this. In South Africa we didn’t have streams, we didn’t have woods, we didn’t have the vicar. We didn’t live in a village. My sense was not that these books were false, that these were lies, but that I had been cheated out of a life, that the landscape which should be there wasn’t. So the first drawings of the landscape are drawings of revenge, of anger. As ugly as the landscape was around Johannesburg, I could draw it.

As soon as I started drawing it, it transformed, because you realise that you don’t have a landscape with mountains and trees and water, you have a man-made landscape, that is to say a landscape that is already a drawing. Straight lines were given by telegraph wires, by electric pylons, by the edge of a ditch. There’s a mountain that is not a mountain but a hill made by excavating the earth and putting it on top of the ground. [4] WE REACH FOR A BOOK

The literal surface The given of the text The sympathetic paper The shore of the page NOT LETTING THE BOOK GO [5]

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● The Immorality Act is revised to prohibit extramarital sex

between white people and people of other races with punishment of up to seven years’ imprisonment ● The South African National Gallery (SANG) acquires its first abstract painting, Composition (1940), by Italian artist Mario Radice

1958

There’s another completely different line of possible origins of these trees that I drew, and this again has to do with etymology.

When I was between the ages of three and six, my father, who was a lawyer in South Africa, was working every day on what was known as the Treason Trial … In the end all were finally released and acquitted. But to my three, or four, or five-year-old head, I always had a different, much more domestic association. At the bottom of our garden there was a group of fir trees and on our veranda we had a mosaic table. We used to talk about the tiles on it. So for me, for all those years, my father went off every day to the ‘Trees and Tile.’ When my wife saw that I was making trees out of different sheets of paper that go together, like tiles, she said to me, “Oh my God, you’re still painting the Treason Trial!” [6] ● The National Party capture an overwhelming portion of the

vote in the first whites-only electorate, winning 103 of 163 seats in the House of Assembly ● After various preliminary hearings, the Treason Trial begins in Pretoria, with ninety-one people accused of high treason; the trial lasts until 1961 ● Morris Kentridge, WK’s grandfather, retires his seat in the House of Assembly aged seventy-seven. He was first elected to parliament in 1920, initially representing Fordsburg and then, from 1924, Troyeville

1959

A small oasis of green, a thin river, reeds and willow trees, a rowing boat, and a box of cherries. What was the pleasure? Certainly the safe domesticity of the boat; the surprise of my mother joining us at seeing who could spit the cherry stones the farthest into the water; my father with his rolled-up trouser cuffs and shirt sleeves, handling the oar so masterfully; the dappled light, the movement of the reeds, the wind in the trees. Even now, fifty-five years later, there is a perfection in the memory, and I pause, caught in a double memory. The wind in the trees was also The Wind in the Willows (1908). Here we were, just messing about in a boat. My father was Badger, and while the rest of us were not Ratty or Mole, we were deep in that English idyll (the place of the picnic was even Henley-on-Klip).

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Where did this English idyll come from? From children’s books— from the illustrations in these books, from the greens of the paintings or reproductions of paintings, of a world drowning in green. The Wind in the Willows stands in for so many others that have, as their premise, a rural Englishness. The [Just] William books by Richmal Crompton, with their English village life, the barn, the brook, the vicarage, the field hedgerows, the outlaws, and William. How could I avoid some connection to William? If my name had been Chaim (my Hebrew name), would I have had a different sensibility? The surname Kentridge is complicit in this. My great-grandfather, a cantor in the synagogue, changed the name from Kantorovich in 1908 to this invented Englishsounding name. [7] ● The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, a key law in

the apartheid state’s separate development strategy, is passed to enable the development of “self-governing Bantu national units” such as Bophuthatswana and Transkei ● The Boycott Movement is founded in London to reject South African goods ● The jazz opera King Kong, written by Todd Matshikiza and featuring Miriam Makeba, opens at Wits University, Johannesburg, and tours to London in 1961; Makeba also appears on US national television and begins a fourweek engagement at a Manhattan jazz club: The Village Vanguard ● The Jazz Epistles, a brief-lived bebop group featuring Dollar Brand, Johnny Gertze, Jonas Gwangwa, Hugh Masekela, Kippie Moeketsi, and Makaya Ntshoko, form and record their only album

1960

In my father’s study was a thin yellow box, which looked like a box of chocolates. The lid is carefully opened. Inside is not the thin wax paper covering the first layer of chocolates, but a sheet of glossy 10x12-inch black and white photographs. A man lies face downward, a dot and a dark stain in the centre of his checkered jacket. The next photograph: the man rolled over. An incomprehensible confusion of shirt, jacket, viscera; the whole chest disintegrated by the exit wound of the bullet. The photos continued. A policeman looking down at a woman, arms splayed, shopping bag still in her hand, her head against the pavement curb.

A larger view. People crouching, running toward us, the cameraman.

The photograph from behind: people lying spread across the veld.

A man sitting dazed, his head in his hands. Another chest—is it a man? Is it a woman?—blown apart. The six-year-old closes the box.

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Puts it back on the shelf. Puts a book on top of it to hide what he has done. It is more than “this should not happen.” THIS SHOULD NOT BE SEEN. [8] ● On 21 March, police kill sixty-nine people in Sharpeville, south

of Johannesburg, during a protest against pass books, part of the system codifying race and regulating free movement ● The ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) are outlawed ● ANC president Albert Luthuli is awarded a Nobel Peace Prize ● British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, addresses South Africa’s white-minority parliament: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. And we must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it” [9] ● White South Africans vote in a referendum for the Union of South Africa (dominion of the British Empire) to become a republic

1961

I was six years old when I was taken to England for the first time.

I remember the rightness of the countryside, of the rivers, of the canals, of the locks. This world shown in the comics, in the children’s books, in the Constable painting [The White Horse (1818– 19)]. But I remember being shocked by the sight of two boys, about my age, who were smoking at the side of a canal. A double question.

Where were their parents that they could smoke? How could there be poor people in this landscape? Poor people were Africans and lived in South Africa. It goes without saying, but let it be said that the great gap between English books and a South African childhood was the absence of black in all that green. Of course not a fault of Constable, Richmal Crompton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, but still enlarging the schism between their imagined world and the world in which I lived.

Did it push Africans in Johannesburg into an invisibility? I don’t think so, but certainly strengthened the gap between different elements in my life. It was an unresolved and unresolvable paradox to be of the world and simultaneously not of the world.

For years this felt like a glitch in the system to be repaired. Now it seems that this and similar paradoxes or riddles without solution are an inescapable part of how we are in the world. Any deep comfortable immersion in a tradition feels spurious. All traditions are active constructions. The more solid the appearance, the more desperate the construction. [10]

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When I was six my father brought me to Italy for the first time.

The memories of that trip are still stuck deep in my consciousness: peach ice-cream at the beach in Levanto, the terror of having my hand bitten off by the Bocca de la Verità, the Carabinieri hats …

At twelve, he gave me a copy of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.

So full was I with the wonders of the Renaissance—its frescos, monuments, and sculptures—that it came as quite a shock to learn (while working on Triumphs and Laments on the banks of the Tiber River), of a large Jewish ghetto that had existed. I had assumed the ghetto was pre-modern, a medieval project, and that by the time of the regrowth of humanism in the Renaissance it was an anachronism. On the one side of the river you had Saint Peter’s, the Vatican, Raphael, Michelangelo. All the glories I had studied in art history and visited on trips to Rome, and on the other side of the river, the ghetto. I had never put the two together. [11] ● After a narrowly successful referendum, South Africa is

constituted as a republic and withdraws from the Commonwealth

● After a four-and-a-half-year trial, Nelson Mandela and twenty-

seven remaining accused are acquitted of treason charges; Mandela goes underground ● Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected leader, is assassinated with the help of Belgian and US agents ● Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to journey into outer space ● East German soldiers close the border with West Berlin and install barbed wire entanglements and fences, which are shortly followed by more permanent elements ● The Cold Castle Jazz Festival is held in the Johannesburg City Hall. The Jazz Epistles and guitar virtuoso Phillip Tabane are awarded prizes ● Christo Coetzee’s mixed-media painting, Butterfly Lightning in a Diamond (1960) is included in the exhibition, The Art of Assemblage at the MoMA, New York

1962

Every Friday night, my sister and I had supper with my grandparents in their flat. Over their dining room table hung a large painting by the South African artist Tinus de Jongh. The painting showed a mountain in the background, a river in the foreground, and leafy trees in between. I was struck by how the flecks of yellow paint could become the rocks seen through the tree branches. How horizontal strokes of paint made the surface of the water, how vertical strokes made the reflection in the water—by the transformation of paint into the world, and the world into paint. With your nose against the canvas, it was all paint and brushstrokes; two steps

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back, and it was illusion. Now this was a landscape: with mountains, shade, colour, water. This was the opposite of what we had.

No mountains; the grass a parched, desaturated yellow in winter; no rivers, at best a culvert. The landscape and the picturesque were synonymous: they needed a view framed by big trees with layers of foliage, a Baroque theatre set of planes of events receding into the distance. [12] ● Nelson Mandela, nicknamed ‘the Black Pimpernel’ by apartheid

authorities for his elusiveness, is arrested near Howick and sentenced to five years in prison for incitement and leaving the country illegally ● The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1761 declares South Africa’s government to be flouting “world public opinion by refusing to abandon its racial policies” and requests member states to break diplomatic relations, close ports, and boycott South African goods ● The Evangelical Lutheran Arts and Crafts Centre opens in Rorke’s Drift, KwaZulu-Natal. In 1968, a two-year fine art course is launched; it closes in 1982 ● Harold Rubin is arrested in Johannesburg and charged with blasphemy for exhibiting works combining Christian themes with anti-apartheid messages; the state’s case fails in court ● Nadine Gordimer’s second novel, A World of Strangers (1958), is banned until 1973. Two later novels are also banned, including The Late Bourgeois World (1966)

1963

When I was eight, I made a list, similar I am sure to that made by many children of that age. It was written in a school exercise book, and it went: THE UNIVERSE THE MILKY WAY THE SOLAR SYSTEM THE EARTH SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE AFRICA SOUTH AFRICA TRANSVAAL JOHANNESBURG HOUGHTON KING EDWARD’S PREPARATORY SCHOOL STANDARD I DESK 12 WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

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A spiralling upward, a huge tornado upward from the exercise book, out to the very edges of the universe. Or else, read down, a huge storm of compression, swirling through everything, landing on my desk, on me. Pinpointing who I was. I was in that city. At that desk. At that time. [13] ● Police raid Lilliesleaf Farm in northern Johannesburg and capture

nineteen members of the ANC’s high command. Ten detainees, along with Mandela, are charged with sabotage; the Rivonia Trial continues into 1964 ● Transkei, in the Eastern Cape, becomes the first autonomous self-governing territory ● Art: South Africa: Today, a non-racial juried exhibition and competition, opens at the African Art Centre, Durban; later exhibitions are held at the Durban Art Gallery

1964

In primary school, during a subject called Social Studies, we would see films made by the Department of Education. Films of rural African life, of an essential Africa with local variations. The child herding cows; Zulu boys stick-fighting (always with a benevolent, godlike commentary). In my memory, there was always a high camera angle, looking down on the object of the film. “See the Xhosa maiden collecting water at the stream. Careful! Do not let it spill. Mother will be angry.” Sunset over straw and reed huts. The stamping of maize with heavy pestles and large wooden bowls.

The matriarch smoking a pipe at the hut’s entrance. It was clear that these were to be resisted. Attempts by the government to make us see Africans as rural, tribalised, unsophisticated, not part of the modern world—whereas, even at that age, I encountered Africans in suits, with smart hats on the streets of the city, reading newspapers, or living in small rooms at the back of our house, dressed up for church on Sundays. But never in skins. Never in beads. Never in a grass hut. Never smoking a pipe. They spoke English. Some were lawyers, like my parents. Africans did not live in dark, smoky huts, lit by a single candle, but were out in the brilliant lights of the city. [14] To live with a tree for fifty years is a sign of privilege and surplus.

To not need the tree for either wood or fire is a luxury. When I was nine years old we planted two white stinkwoods in the garden. All my childhood I waited for the trees to grow, to be strong enough to hold a hammock. They refused. Twenty years later I returned to

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live in the house with my family and the trees were mature. Fifteen years later, the trees were magnificent. And then one of them was struck by lightning and died. The shock, not just the hole in the shade canopy, the gap in the garden, but rather the shaking of the belief that a tree is a gift for future generations or—if not for future generations—then at least for other people … its lifespan should be so much longer. How could the tree die before me? No. If the tree could die, how vulnerable are we or am I? [15] ● Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and six other ANC leaders are sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy, sabotage, and treason ● The

International Olympic Committee withdraws its invitation to South Africa to participate in the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo; the ban lasts until 1992 ● The Cold Castle Jazz Festival is held at Orlando Stadium, Soweto, and attracts 40,000 fans ● The Blue Notes, a jazz sextet featuring Johnny Dyani, Mongezi Feza, Chris McGregor, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Nikele Moyake, and Dudu Pukwana, go into exile

1965

My grandfather gave me Great Landscape Paintings of the World.

Hobbema’s Avenue was on the cover … The images were a lexicon and a lesson in painting, in looking. Lessons of what an artist did.

But there was also a lesson on how the world was constructed.

A mixture of the landscape revealing itself, the folds upon folds of hills disappearing into the distance of Italian Renaissance painting and the construction of this world by the artist … The book suggested there was a consensus of what the world was and how to see it within the tradition. In this case, it was a varied group of pictures and became, if not a tradition, certainly a canon by selection in the book. Each picture was given a particular status by being printed separately on glossy paper and glued onto its corresponding page.

When I opened the book in 2018, its 1965 glue had dried out, and the tipped-in reproductions fluttered out to an extended pile on the floor. These were the images that the word landscape forced through, a world that both had an order and could be ordered by the artist. The horizon, and somewhere on its line, a vanishing point, where everything converged. Two diagonal, not parallel, lines provoke a vanishing point. We cannot resist the destination, codified from Alberti onward. The conventions of reducing deep space onto the flatness of canvas or paper, the pressure of

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the sky above and the activity on the ground below, pushing us to a destination. The vanishing point was a point of compression…

A point of pressure between all that has made you and all that is expected of you. [16] ● Malcolm X is assassinated in New York ● Barney Simon and Ian

Bernhardt establish the Phoenix Players at Dorkay House, Johannesburg, to produce Athol Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye ● Lewis Nkosi publishes Home and Exile, in which he writes of Johannesburg as the city that “seemed to have sprung out of the desert,” a city characterised by “appalling loneliness and desolation … which made it so desperately important and frightfully necessary for its citizens to move fast, to live very intensely, to live harshly and vividly, for this was the sole reason for their being there: to make money, to spend it and make more” [17]

1966

Drawing on books has three pre-histories. Drawing on top of school textbooks, as a resistance to both the boredom and restriction of a Johannesburg state school in the 1960s. The lapidary change of Latin for Today into Eating for Today (the textbook had not changed since my mother’s schooldays—she had made the same typographical interventions). Secondly, a primitive flipbook animation of stick figures in the margins of maths textbooks.

(The first flipbook I made in the years after school was also made in an old school textbook—a book of Catalan grammar—for an exhibition in Barcelona.) In the history textbook filled with linedrawn portraits of the heroes of South African history, there were the predictable additions of moustaches, blackened teeth, new hairstyles, pornographic extensions. This was an activity of the boys in the class (a South African school in the 1960s, only boys, only white boys). I was no different from all the other boys in the class in this activity—I just forgot to stop. [18] ● Dimitri Tsafendas fatally stabs Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in Cape Town ● Delegates at a United Nations semi-

nar on apartheid in Brasilia liken the policies of South Africa’s whites-only government to Nazism ● Clashes between the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) and South African authorities in the protectorate of South West Africa (now Namibia) marks the start of the South African Border War, which lasts until 1990 ● Nadine Gordimer publishes The Late Bourgeois World: “Grow big, have a job, be married, pray to the blond Christ in the white people’s church, give the nanny your old clothes … I said, ‘Graham, what on earth do you think they’ll call it in history?’ and he said, ‘I’ve just

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read a book that refers to ours as the Late Bourgeois World. How does that appeal to you?’” [19] ● Sydney Kumalo and Michael Zondi represent South Africa at the Venice Biennale

1967

The start of theatre? The start of the theatricality? It doesn’t go back quite as far as saying, “I’ll draw with charcoal” as a child, but it goes back almost that far … There was this provincial fear of parents that their children so far from England would speak with a heavy South African accent. So I, like many children, was sent to elocution lessons to practice my vowels. I would be told you must not say, “Bright-eyed rider riding on a bicycle” [WK uses flat, heavy South African vowels] but “Bright-eyed rider riding on a bicycle, bicycle and tricycle turned into an icicle” [WK uses exaggeratedly round colonial vowels]. This speech training was done, it is interesting to note, by either the sister or the niece of Samuel Beckett. And one of the things she would do as part of elocution lessons was to get us to do plays. One of the first pieces of theatre I was involved in was one of these ridiculous pieces based around the pronunciation of one’s vowels—the fetishism of English vowels in the colonies! Which of course also had to do with class. My mother thought it was lower class to have bad vowels—it was like not brushing your teeth. [20] I was twelve when I met Bill Ainslie. He was painting a portrait of my sister and brother. I studied under Bill at high school. I went to children’s art lessons and then to Bill. That was a transition of style, of thinking. It was very rigorous academic teaching, weeks of still-lifes and life drawing. [21] ● Ernest Cole publishes his photobook House of Bondage in the United States; it is immediately banned in South Africa ● Azaria Mbatha

becomes the first black South African artist to be included in the collection of MoMA, New York, with a gift of two linocut prints

1968

What are the origins of this interest in looking at large systems of power—in this case what happened in China during the 1960s and 70s? Part of it was the sense of being thirteen in Johannesburg in 1968, and I remember consciously thinking I was born five years too late and was probably in the wrong place. If only I’d been born five years earlier and it was in New York or Berlin or Paris, I could

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have been part of this extraordinary movement of music, of style, of politics. There was politics in South Africa, but 1968 was the heart of the Vorster era of massive repression. The Rivonia trialists were in prison, your dad [Baruch Hirson] was in prison, it was the most stodgy, stolid, Brezhnev-like era I suspect, when it seemed that nothing could be possible. In a way it wasn’t, until first in 1973 with the start of trade unions, and then in a big way in 1976. It’s not that nothing was happening. Things were brewing; pressure was building in many different parts of the country. But at the time I felt a regret. It was like watching a party in other parts of the world which you hadn’t been invited to. [22] I had a poster up in my childhood, for many years, done by Dumile Feni, which was a poster advertising a jazz concert at Mofolo Hall in Soweto. It had a really nice drawing of jazz musicians. But it was an ammonia dye transfer architect’s poster. So, it faded away and disappeared, but it had a text, which intrigued me for years, and the text was: “With is no charge.“ It drove me crazy, you know. It was not just saying “no charge” or “with no charge,” or “is free,” ... but “with no charge.” And if any of the others had been written, I certainly would not have remembered that phrase for forty years.

So, when I talk about awkwardnesses, or riddles one wants to solve, those things that one desires to set right or make sense of, that’s what compels you. [23] Like many South African Jewish boys, my first suit arrived when I had my bar mitzvah, when I was thirteen. Then when I was fifteen and I had outgrown my suit, I got my second suit, an aubergine wet-look suit. I think I next got a suit twenty years later. When I was working on some of the Drawings for Projection films I thought I had better get a pinstripe suit. I got a suit as close as I could, thinking I’d use it as a theatre costume. I don’t think I ever wore it, not as a costume. I think one either needs to have a very good tailor or a very good figure for a suit, and having neither I don’t wear them that often. [24] ● Lucas Sithole and the Rorke’s Drift Arts and Crafts Centre

represent South Africa at the Venice Biennale. Protests result in South Africa being excluded from further participation, which lasts until 1993 ● Dumile Feni, sometimes referred to as “the

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Goya of the townships,” goes into exile ● Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis ● The start of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia heralds a brief period of political liberalisation and cultural experimentation ● Mass protests and occupations are led by university students in Brazil, France, Japan, Mexico, Poland, United Kingdom, United States, and West Germany. The causes are diverse and include dissatisfaction with government, consumer capitalism, US and USSR imperialism, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons ● Roelof Louw, a Cape Townborn sculptor living in London, appears in Harald Szeemann’s exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information, at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland

1969

The image of Jan Palach burning himself in Prague [on 16 January 1969] after the Russian invasion, in the Prague Spring. Another image of a Buddhist monk burning himself in protest in Saigon. I had remembered this also as 1968 or 1969. Looking it up, I see it was 1963—but I wouldn’t have seen the photograph until 1968 or 1969. This is Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk protesting over the policies of the South Vietnamese government. He sat in the road, four other monks doused him with petrol, and he set himself alight. I put the images together. A shocking statement of belief and commitment: how could you believe in something so much as to do that to yourself? What pulled me so much closer into the photo was a detail, the motorcar behind the monk. It was our motorcar, an Austin Westminster A95 which we used to drive through the night to Plettenberg Bay on holidays. I was taken to school in it. This most respectable British car, an Austin Westminster, driven all the way to Johannesburg and all the way to Saigon. [25] My mother’s story is that I was drawing from when I was three. I suppose I drew as children do. It’s difficult to know when I began to take it seriously. I went to children’s art lessons from the time I was about eight. I seemed to take to drawing more than other media. When I was about fourteen, I started joining my mother in evening life-drawing classes at an art school in Johannesburg.

That was a turning point because as an adolescent you begin to make some important decisions with regards to what art is. You either stop doodling around, drawing airplanes and the sort, or you don’t. I remember wanting very badly to move to the next step. [26]

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● Apollo 11 becomes the first manned mission to land on the moon ● Wole Soyinka is freed from prison after spending twenty-

two months as a political prisoner during the Nigerian Civil War

1970

There is a particular memory held by people who have left the site of their childhood. Partly, this is the freezing of time. The names are held onto as talismans: a rosary of names repeated to stand in for the years spent and left behind. [27] I tried to look at all our old home movies, which my father took on 8 mm. Firstly, nothing’s ever outside the garden. There’s nothing like the Kruger Park or any public space at all. Secondly, no shot lasts for more than half a second. It was very good that my father had a paying job as a lawyer. He would never have made it as a filmmaker. [28] ● The Black Homeland Citizenship Act denaturalises black

South Africans, making them citizens of a designated Bantustan, irrespective of their choices ● Gil Scott-Heron releases the song Whitey on the Moon

1971

What is the difference between reading and looking? Does one read an image in the same way one reads a poem? There is some evidence that these habits are culturally specific and the way a picture is read in the West is informed by the ways in which we read text, but that this is not universal. When one reads a poem, does one also allow one’s eye to jump back to the different lines and phrases within the poem as a secondary reading? [29] I suppose my theoretical interests are rooted in the 1960s and early 1970s and before, in Habermas and Kojève and the Frankfurt School of Marxism, and writers from that era, rather than Althusser and all the people who came after him. Critics and writers, who have been at university much more recently than I have, tend to have a whole different set of vocabulary and reference. But the more I hear about them, the more convinced I am of the importance of the philosophical tradition that I am grounded in. I’m much more propelled to curiosity by, say, metaphysical poets than by trying to wade through contemporary philosophical books. [30]

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● Ahmed Timol, a schoolteacher and anti-apartheid activist, dies in

police detention; it is claimed he committed suicide by jumping from a building. Chris van Wyk’s 1979 poem In Detention commemorates the deaths of various activists while in prison: “He fell from the ninth floor / He hanged himself / He slipped on a piece of soap while washing …”

[31] ● Bill Ainslie, a proponent of abstract expressionism and the workshop model, starts an informal art school in fellow artist Cecily Sash’s Randburg home that is later formalised into the Johannesburg Art Foundation ● Oswald Mtshali publishes his debut poetry collection, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum ● Thamsanqa “Thami” Mnyele joins Mhloti Black Theatre, a collective founded by Molefe Pheto in Alexandra. Mnyele writes: “from time immemorial, black talent in South Africa was white-produced, white-directed, and even whiteowned … Here one is surrounded by the community, alive, blood and flesh” [32] ● The Free People’s Concert, a multi-racial, open-air music festival organised by the South African Folk Music Association, is held on a beach in Durban. Thereafter, the concert is held annually at Wits University and runs throughout the 1980s

1972

I come from a Lithuanian-Jewish-Rabbinic tradition but grew up in an essentially English-style colony—an ex-colony. There was a mixture of English literature as the natural terrain of reading, there was music not from any one particular Western European country, but from all of them. There was Bulgarian music or music that was heir to German musical traditions, there was local music on the radio in South Africa, but there was not a tradition I could call my own. So I would make myself up from different bits of different things. [33] ● Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, premieres at the Space Theatre, Cape Town ● Mofolo Art Centre opens in Soweto ● Phiri, a jazz musical written by Barney Simon with

Oswald Mtshali, Stanley Motjuwadi, and Wally Serote, premieres at Wits University ● James Matthews and Gladys Thomas publish a poetry collection titled Cry Rage!; it is banned in 1973

1973

A degree in the humanities is a ‘blessing’ because it enables a graduate to appreciate that contradictions (and viewing life from the edge) are the only (real) ways to understand life and the country. [34] My interest in Plato is twofold. For his prescient description of our world of cinema—his description of a world of people bound to reality as mediated through a screen feels very contemporary—but more particularly, in defence of shadows, and what they can teach us about enlightenment. [35]

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● Two Bantustans, Venda and Gazankulu, are granted self-governance ● Wopko Jensma publishes his poetry collection, Sing for Our Execution ● Norman Catherine and Walter Battiss begin their Fook Island collaboration ● Joseph Brodsky publishes Selected Poems, a year

after he is forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union

work

1974

○ WK is conscripted for military service in the South African Defence Force

The Conservationist (1974) is the novel of Nadine Gordimer’s that feels closest to me and that I feel most connected to. I’d completely forgotten that the story was about a body found on a farm absorbed and rejected by the land and reburied again, until I reread it after she died in 2014. My connection to the Gordimer novel is particular; they were family friends: Nadine and her husband Reinhold Cassirer and Hugo, their son, who is my age, whom I first met at nursery school.

There was a certain point at which they owned a small farm outside Johannesburg. We would go there for Sunday picnics, and you’d sit on hay bales which they’d put out next to the small river and you’d have your picnic and walk around the lucerne fields and maybe Reinhold would shoot at some pigeons with their shotgun and then you’d go home. And then when I was about seventeen or eighteen there was this novel, The Conservationist, and suddenly there were the picnics that we’d had and sitting on the hay bales and the river and the lucerne fields, all there.

For me the connection to it was a sudden realisation of, “Oh, this is how you take a life, what you’ve actually done, and it gets turned into—in this case—a novel, into art, it’s possible to work in this way. And all she’s doing is describing where we were, in sections of the book.” Then there was the revelation of how it is actually done.

There’s a sequence in which she describes the result of a veld fire, and what she is actually doing, brilliantly, is taking you on a walk with her, seeing the coiled ash of a small fern and half a tree that got burnt, and the way the soil is caked like clay in the heat and cracked, and then along where some burnt mattress caught on a piece of barbed wire.

For me it’s like an education, that paragraph.

It was many years later that I came to think about drawing landscapes, but … two things. Both the revelation about the landscape

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specifically, that she describes so extraordinarily, and also the way of saying, “You take things from your actual life, these are raw materials, and from that you can let them expand. Your responsibility is not to simply describe our picnics and let that become the novel. That’s a starting point; it has to flow and grow and enter imaginative other worlds and other minds.” It was a kind of a Lehrstück: one couldn’t have had a better lesson in what it is to be an artist, and an artist in Johannesburg. [36] Theodor Adorno is also important for me … Few of us were able to read all the works, but Minima Moralia [1951 in German, 1974 in English] was the one accessible Adorno book for me. It was fundamental and the thing I took from it was ‘fragmentation.’ The world as damaged and fragmented, and the realisation that one can work with fragments to see what they add up to. One can either take parts or already existing fragments or one can shatter what is there, what seems coherent, and rearrange them as Adorno does in that book, and see what they add up to. To take quite mundane or prosaic objects or ideas, as he did, and then tease them out or see what other echoes they have. In a way, that book gave me a license to feel I could make a film that doesn’t have a narrative structure, that doesn’t have a script or a storyboard, that can start with different images and see what they become. I was aware that this may well have been a misreading of Adorno. But I was interested in the productivity of that—of a misunderstanding, a productive misunderstanding …

Minima Moralia is still a fundamental book in my head. And the thinking that Adorno prompted with his assertion that there was no more lyric poetry after Auschwitz is ongoing. [37] ● James Matthews launches the first black-owned art gallery in

South Africa, Gallery Afrique, in Fenton Street, Athlone, Cape Town

● Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is deported from the Soviet Union

following the publication of his book, The Gulag Archipelago, in 1973

work

1975

○ Enrols in a Bachelor of Arts degree at Wits University, majoring in

Politics and African Studies

When I first started working in theatre, with Junction Avenue Theatre Company in a collaborative workshop environment, whoever had the most strident sense of self-certainty, that was the direction we followed. I’d be loath to push an idea because I

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was very uncertain about it, but, in retrospect, that uncertain idea would have been better than the much more certain ideas. So when I came back to theatre, having abandoned it and then gone into film, it was with the view that I would need to defend my uncertainty.

There was no longer going to be an equality of input from everyone, I would be the director among the collaborators. I wanted to make, in the workshop and rehearsal and preparation, a big space for uncertainty and indecision. [38] Working over an existing text or image was part of my activity long before I realised it. When I started drawing on top of old books, I had been practicing this already in many forms. All of the theatrical productions I have worked on are re-workings on top of existing texts. When I started making drawings on top of the pages of old books, I had no idea I had been doing this all along. [39] ● Angola and Mozambique achieve independence from Portuguese colonial rule ● Writer and painter, Breyten Breytenbach, receives a

nine-year jail sentence for high treason; he is released in 1982

● American critic Clement Greenberg is invited to be the sole juror

of the last Art: South Africa: Today exhibition. The critic excludes fourteen artists; they hold a ‘salon des refusés.’ WK meets Greenberg at his family home in Houghton

work

1976

○ Appears in two Junction Avenue Theatre Company (JATC)

productions at The Nunnery, Wits University, Johannesburg: Pippa Stein’s The Goat that Sneezed and Ubu Rex (based on Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry), co-produced by Box Theatre and University Players

How does one relate a private experience of a public trauma? For example, when we see images on television now, of people killed or starving, it’s not that they aren’t shocking, but that they fit into a sort of bank of images and are dulled. The hard part is to try to get back to the first sense of shock one had. When I first came across a set of photographs of the Sharpeville Massacre, I was six years old.

It was a complete revelation: the world was constructed in a way that I had no idea of before. A complete shift happens the moment one sees such images. You become aware that the world is not as you thought it was. The hard part is to try to hold onto that sense of outrage because that is the truest response. All the other ways of living with it dilute and normalise. [40]

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The first texts [in my work] would have been on posters. The Fantastical History of a Useless Man, whatever the play we were doing. Tradeunion posters, a few of them—UNITY IS STRENGTH, JOIN THE FATTI’S AND MONI’S STRIKE. [41] ● Television is introduced in South Africa; the commercial-free daily

broadcasts, in English and Afrikaans, are bookended by prayers and the playing of the national anthem ● On the morning of 16 June, school students in Soweto rebel against the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of instruction; nationwide protests ensue. In retaliation, police open fire on the crowd; the death toll is still disputed, ranging from 174 to over 500 ● On the eve of the Soweto Uprising, Thami Mnyele, Fikile Magadlela, and Ben Arnold hold an exhibition in Soweto ● Transkei achieves ‘independence’ but is only recognised as an independent state by South Africa ● Mannie Manim and Barney Simon open the Market Theatre in Newtown, Johannesburg work

○ Commences formal art education under Bill Ainslie at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, which he continues until 1978 ○ Designs,

co-devises, and acts in the JATC production, The Fantastical History of a Useless Man, at The Nunnery, Wits University, Johannesburg, and the Space Theatre, Cape Town

1977

In the mid-1970s, we were struggling to think through what images needed to be made; it was a very Leninist sort of view. What is to be done? What needs to be made? That’s one of the reasons why I stopped making images for several years, because I couldn’t answer that question. I always seemed to be thinking on behalf of someone else, and I realised that in fact I couldn’t begin to know what other people were thinking. [42] Stephen Bantu Biko, a medical doctor and prominent anti-apartheid activist, dies in police custody ● Bophuthatswana gains independence.

Sun City, a white-owned gambling and leisure resort, opens inside the territory; gambling remains illegal in South Africa ● Zulu Bidi, David Koloane, and Hugh Nolutshungu open The Gallery, Johannesburg’s first black-owned art gallery ● United Nations Security Council Resolution 418 imposes a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa ● The non-racial Community Arts Project opens in Cape Town. It plays an important role in the anti-apartheid struggle, particularly in promoting poster-making skills and “culture as resistance” ● Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is banished to Brandfort, Free State ● Staffrider, a literary and arts magazine, launches in Johannesburg: “The aim of this magazine is not to impose ‘standards’ but to provide a regular meeting place for the new writers and their readers, a forum which will help to shape the future of our literature.” [43] The first issue is banned; WK contributes an etching to Vol. 3.1, February 1980, p. 24

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work

1978

○ Co-designs the set, poster, and programme for Wooze Bear, by

Pippa Stein (writer) and Malcolm Purkey (director), performed at The Nunnery, Wits University, Johannesburg

We are all caught in a conflict of confidence of who we are, an absence of an idea of who we are, an understanding of the world outside and trying to understand what place we have in it. [44] beware the good idea FIND THE LESS GOOD DOCTOR track down the inauthentic origin [45] ● The Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA), an interdisciplinary

arts school directed by poet Sipho Sepamla, opens in Newtown, Johannesburg. Art teachers include David Koloane and Durant Sihlali; it closes in 1997 ● P.W. Botha, a hawkish security minister, replaces B.J. Vorster as Prime Minister of South Africa

work

○ Makes Title/Tale with Stephen Sack and Jemima Hunt, 8 mm animation film, 2:00 min ○ Co-develops and performs in JATC

production, Randlords and Rotgut, at The Nunnery, Wits University, Johannesburg, directed by Malcolm Purkey; the play is based on an essay by historian Charles van Onselen exploring the links between liquor and labour exploitation in early Johannesburg ○ Contributes set designs to, and performs in, Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, directed

by Malcolm Purkey, at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg ○ Designs sets for Play it Again, Sam, directed by Barney Simon, at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg

1979

When I was an art student, the idea of a proper artist was somebody who worked with oil paint on canvas. And that’s the way I did my training, at the art school I was at, and that’s what I always assumed I would end up mastering, but I discovered that the softness of oil paint was not good for me, and working with colours was not my strength. When I started working with printmaking, which started off as a five-day summer school course in etching, I found there was a way in which it legitimised working monochromatically, with black on white paper, which is the essence of drawing, and certainly of all printmaking, and so I hung onto printmaking as the bedrock of what I was doing. The first two exhibitions I had as an artist were first, an exhibition of monoprints, and a second exhibition of etchings, and in the years since then, printmaking has always been a very central part of my process, not an ancillary part. [46]

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I think printmaking in general made me aware of just how physical drawing could be. I’ve always enjoyed the physicality of drawing. My more mature drawing came out of my earlier activity in etching. [47] An etching is the record of damage done. It leaves the traces of the damage done to the copper plate. Every abrasure, every line etched into it, every biting bitten into the copper by an acid is there, it is held, and will be released as evidence when the print is made. [48] ● Evidence of a possible undeclared nuclear test is detected near

the Prince Edward Islands off Antarctica; it is speculated that South Africa and Israel are jointly involved ● The State of Art in South Africa, a conference organised by artist Neville Dubow, is held at Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, to debate internal resistance to apartheid. The mostly white attendees call for a boycott of statesponsored exhibitions ● Molefe Pheto and Thami Mnyele, together with other South African artists and activists exiled in Botswana, establish the Medu Art Ensemble ● Police raid New Mandy’s, a gay nightclub in End Street, Johannesburg; the galvanising effect of the incident is likened to Stonewall in 1969, New York

work

○ Debut solo exhibition, William Kentridge, opens at The Market Gallery, Johannesburg ○ Directs Will of a Rebel by Ari Sitas and

Haunchen Koornhof at The Nunnery, Wits University, Johannesburg, and helps devise and acts in Security by Astrid von Kotze, which shows in Johannesburg and Durban; both JATC productions ○ Makes an untitled 8 mm flipbook animation, 2:00 min

1980

As more and more countries distanced themselves from the Nationalist government in South Africa, its library of exclusionist legislation, and its brutal enforcement of these laws, huge landmasses started disappearing. The list of countries one could visit on a South African passport shrank. [49] Here is a photograph taken by David Goldblatt in 1980 in Boksburg, a small town to the east of Johannesburg. A young ballet dancer on the veranda of her house under a pergola. What is it that holds us, that held me, when I first saw it in 1981? Of course the tutu and the point shoes, but also the beatific expression of the girl, an ecstatic dream … the dream of being a prima ballerina assoluta, of Rudolf Nureyev on the other side of the stage, of Swan Lake and Giselle.

How the dreams crash. It is not so much the pergola that crashes down on the dancer; it’s the harsh sunlight of the Highveld winter.

I would describe this photograph as merciless; there is no place to

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protect this dream of Europe. We are at the end of an enormously long string stretching from the ballet centres of Paris and Moscow, swung in an arc that reaches Johannesburg, Adelaide, Shanghai: a longing for this other world. [50] ● Zimbabwe achieves independence following decades of white-

minority rule; Bob Marley performs at celebrations in Harare

● J.M. Coetzee publishes his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians

work

1981

○ Scripts and directs the JATC production Dikhitsheneng (The Kitchens),

presented at The Laager at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg

I went to art school before I trained as an actor. I went to evening classes at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, and I even spent a year full-time there after I finished studying politics and history at university. Then I gave up art, having decided I’d failed as an artist, and only then did I go to theatre school to try my hand at acting. I’d been acting all along as a student, but I thought I would do some training. I discovered after three weeks that I should not be an actor.

But I learned a huge amount about directing and about drawing. I learned more about drawing from the theatre school than I did from the art school. If I teach exercises to drawing students or animation students, they’re almost always the theatre exercises we did at L’École Jacques Lecoq. It has to do with understanding the energy of a gesture, of what it is to use one’s whole body, of expanding the repertoire of degrees of tension with which one can work, whether one is speaking, moving, or drawing. It’s also a way of expanding from the body outward into finding a meaning in the work. [51] When I was at theatre school in Paris … we did a number of exercises using what were termed neutral masks—a leather mask with a bland or non-expression. The effect of this mask was to remove facial expression as part of the performance. This was rather devastating for people like myself, whose poor performances had started from an emotion on the face. Happy, sad, smiling mouth, rolling eyes, furrowed brows—these stocks in trade all became useless. What was left was the expression of the body. It had the effect of removing psychology from the performance. It made very clear the difference between what one thought one was expressing, and what the body showed. [52]

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In 1981 I visited Berlin, the first time I had been in Germany. I crossed into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie. This was a crossing into a strange world of history and fiction. The crossing itself like walking into a film set from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). But the city on the other side felt strange, transported through time. The piles of rubble, the empty blocks, and particularly the bullet-riddled surfaces of every building made the fact of the war, the destruction of the city, immediate. But not necessarily real. It was not clear which was the front of the stage, and which was backstage. The modern technology and buildings of West Berlin, being the backstage machinery, there to present the spectacle of ruin and the history in the East; or if East Berlin was the creaking basis and support of the shiny film set of West Berlin, the top floor of the KaDeWe being the setting for the last act of the opera.

The city was so overloaded. Between the buildings, the stones, the piles of masonry, the weeds growing in empty lots—between all this and my eyes was such a mass of images, stories, histories.

Even looking at the buildings themselves felt like a secondhand looking. It was also the experience of a Johannesburg boy venturing into the forbidden terrain of the other side of the iron curtain (a geography excluded for South Africans because of our apartheid policies; at that time western Europe saw Mandela as a terrorist, and support for Mandela and opposition to the apartheid government came mostly from the USSR and DDR).

And let it be said—there was another displacement, even in 1981 that put me on edge: that of being a Jew in German terrain. [53] ● State operatives murder Griffiths Mxenge, an anti-apartheid activist and Durban-based civil rights lawyer ● A covert police

death squad led by Dirk Coetzee is established at Vlakplaas, a farm twenty kilometres west of Pretoria ● Woza Albert! by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon premieres at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg

work

○ Studies mime at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris ○ Co-directs, Howl at the Moon, with Hugo Cassirer, a forty-

minute video fiction, filmed at WK’s parent’s home, which is now the artist’s home and studio in Houghton, Johannesburg ○ Designs sets for the JATC production, Wooze Bear and the Zoo-Bears, by Pippa Stein and Malcolm Purkey

Solo exhibition

○ Domestic Scenes, The Market Gallery, Johannesburg

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1982

Bastardy, I think, implies a rejection of authority. There was a very strong sense, when I was a student, that if the work I was going to make was to be of any value, it would have to keep true to its medium. If you’re going to make drawings, if the drawings are going to be any good, you must just do drawings. If you’re going to be in a theatre, you must just do theatre. That is why, when I went to theatre school, I tried not to draw anything, and why I tried not to do theatre when I was doing drawings. I tried very hard to adhere to that principle of purity of form, and it took a long time for me to understand that that was temperamentally impossible for me to do so. I was not as Odysseus was, strapped to the mast, when the siren of theatre came back again. I was ready to jump back into theatre, I was ready to move across to film. And at a certain point I understood: “No, I do work that needs different things, and I will work across all those.” And then it was a second jump to understand the strength of the work. Whatever virtue there is in the work lies in its happiness to jump across barriers, to say: “Well, this will start as an etching but it may end up as a piece of theatre, which may then end up as a video.” [54] ○ Marries Anne Stanwix

When I started out I tried to follow the well-meaning and sensible advice of all my friends who told me to do one thing and do it well. “Just do drawing,” they said. “Just do theatre. Only make films because otherwise you get caught between them.” For a long time I tried that, and I failed at all of them. Now I don’t even pretend to know what form an idea will ultimately take or what project it will end up in. I just get on with doing things knowing they will end up somewhere. [55] ● The first two official AIDS deaths in South Africa are recorded ● Medu Art Ensemble organise an arts festival and symposium

titled Culture and Resistance in Gaborone, Botswana; speakers include Nadine Gordimer, musician Abdullah Ibrahim, poet James Matthews, photographer David Goldblatt, and dancerchoreographer Robyn Orlin; a memorandum affirms “the importance of the role of visual arts in the democratic struggle” ● Charles van Onselen publishes two companion volumes exploring the early social and economic history of the Witwatersrand: New Babylon and New Nineveh ● The Cape Town Triennial, a juried exhibition, launches with the support of businessman Anton Rupert

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1983

The mid-nineteenth century invention of photography turned time into stone. The first steps of photography relied on fixed, unmoving elements. Slow chemicals meant slow exposures. The camera had to hold something in its gaze for minutes for it to be imprinted on the silver-coated glass. Rocks, buildings, streets could be congealed. Objects in movement could best be detected as ghosts, disturbances in the solid objects behind them. Only the unmoving shoe-polisher and his client, or a man asleep on a city bench, could force their way onto the glass … The development of moving photography, of the cinema, at the end of the century made an examination of this congealed time possible. That which was past could be made to pass again. A roll of film could be looked at again and again. More than that, the strip of film with a string of successive images could be looked at backwards: time could be held to account. [56] ● Nadine Gordimer publishes the essay ‘Living in the Interregnum’

in The New York Review of Books: “The sun that never set over one or other of the nineteenth-century colonial empires of the world is going down finally in South Africa … the past has begun rapidly to drop out of sight, even for those who would have liked to go on living in it.

Historical coordinates don’t fit life any longer; new ones, where they exist, have couplings not to the rulers, but to the ruled” [57] ● The whites-only parliamentary system is amended to allow for Coloured and Indian representation in the Tricameral Parliament, prompting the foundation of the United Democratic Front, a broad coalition of anti-apartheid organisations, in Cape Town ● Brenda and the Big Dudes, fronted by Brenda Fassie, release their debut single, Weekend Special work

1984

○ Designs the set for a version of Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae, a

JATC production, directed by Malcolm Purkey, performed at Upstairs at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg ○ Writes the children’s play, Emily’s Wheelbarrow Show and the Infamous Mrs Sterntrap, directed by Malcolm Purkey, performed at the Wits Theatre, Johannesburg

The first time I had come across [Rainer Maria Rilke’s] poem [The Panther] was in 1984, which felt for me, and I am sure for many others who read it for the first time, a revelation. I do not literally carry a copy folded in my wallet. But a photostat of the poem, from an article by George Steiner on Rilke, has been in my studio since 1984. Since then I have read many different translations. But this first one I came across still seems to me the best. It was as if those lines were being waited for. They were like advice that we only

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hear or heed when it corresponds to what we already know. The sense that the lines fit a space waiting for them …

Reading it, what had felt like a weakness on my part—this falling asleep on the job, the exhaustion that would come over me in the studio—was passed back into the world: this is how it is …

The drawings on the walls are a record of this dance around the centre … The pacing, and the gap. The meeting on the paper. The membrane between what is us, and what is outside of us; what we can comprehend, and the animal unconscious that sits inside of us. [58] ○ Birth of daughter, Alice Kentridge

Rilke wrote The Panther [1902] when he was working as a secretary for the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He was stuck with the WHAT of writing: knowing he was a poet, and not knowing what the words should describe. Rodin sent him to the zoo, with the instruction not to come back until he had written about something he had seen.

This is one of the great poems of the last century, and it started life as a homework exercise. [59] ● Njabulo S. Ndebele publishes his essay ‘Turkish Tales and Some

Thoughts on SA Fiction’ in Staffrider: “In societies such as South Africa, where social, economic, and political oppression is most stark, such conditions tend to enforce, almost with the power of natural law, overt tendentiousness in the artist’s choice of subject matter, and in the handling of that subject matter. It is such tendentiousness which, because it can most easily be interpreted as ‘taking a position,’ earns a work of art displaying it, the title of ‘commitment’ or ‘engagement’” [60] ● Desmond Tutu receives the Nobel Peace Prize ● Funda Community College is established in Soweto with an art department led by Charles Nkosi work

1985

○ Starts drawing again after a three-year break ○ Writes, directs, and

edits Salestalk, film-fiction, 16 mm film, 30:00 min; it is WK’s only film made with existing people, props, and settings ○ Directs Catastrophe

by Samuel Beckett, Wits Theatre, Johannesburg ○ Performs in A Noose for Scariot Impimpi, a play by a shop-steward’s collective aimed at trade union members, performed in community centres around Durban

Between 1981 and 1985 I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I had a lot of acting parts but it didn’t seem to be coming together. I stopped everything at that point. I closed my studio. It was a critical time of

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assessing what it is I do well, or at least how a few of the different things I do well could find a place. It took a couple of years before I reopened my studio and started working again. When I did, I started drawing. I started working with charcoal. [61] I would like to make a distinction between walking on a beach and the walking that happens in the studio, which of necessity is a circling of a space: going past the vase and past the drawing table and around the sofa, back to the drawing table, crossing back to the wall where the camera is—literally circling and circling. This can sometimes happen for an hour before the first mark is put on a sheet of paper. The nature of this walk has to do with a gathering of energy, of impulses that are hovering at the edge of an idea, until there is a moment of energy and clarity and the first mark is made.

This type of procrastination is a species of waiting; putting off the moment in which a piece of charcoal or ink finally hits the paper and the process begins. It is a necessary and, being optimistic, a productive procrastination. There’s something about the physical activity of the walk, particularly in the studio—about falling and catching yourself, the repetition of the weight changing from the left leg to the right leg and back—that shakes one’s brain and allows ideas to emerge from it that would never come otherwise.

If I’m simply sitting and waiting, my brain goes into a deep neutral and nothing happens. I sit for ten minutes and I say to myself, “You see? Nothing is happening.” I wait another ten minutes: nothing happens.

Something that is present in the studio, but not on the beach, is peripheral vision; a vision that incorporates the traces of other projects that exist on the walls of the studio—sketches, halfbegun projects, old projects or their remnants, phrases, newspaper cuttings: all the usual paraphernalia of the studio. [62] ● The South African government declares a state of emergency in

thirty-six magisterial districts after the ANC encourages citizens to render the country ungovernable ● Matthew Goniwe and three other anti-apartheid activists from Cradock are murdered by the security police ● President P.W. Botha delivers the ‘Rubicon speech’ in Durban: “South Africa’s problems will be solved by South Africans and not by foreigners,” he states, prompting market rout [63]

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● Thami Mnyele is executed in Gaborone during a crossborder raid by South African security forces ● The Prohibition of

Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act are repealed

● Tributaries, a non-racial exhibition of artists from urban and

rural centres, including WK, curated by artist Ricky Burnett, opens in Newtown, Johannesburg; the exhibition stimulates dealer interest in ‘transitional’ artists like sculptor and priest Jackson Hlungwani ● Thupelo, a two-week artist workshop for black artists that emphasises studio experimentation and abstract expressionism, organised by Bill Ainslie and David Koloane, is held outside Johannesburg; it continues annually until 1991

work Solo exhibition

1986

○ Makes Vetkoek / Fête galante, an animated film with actors and

drawings, 16 mm film, 2:41 min

○ William Kentridge, Cassirer Fine Art, Johannesburg

I started calling myself an artist in my thirties when I discovered not just the necessity but the pleasure of drawing the landscape just to the south of Johannesburg, to the south of the leafy suburb I lived in. And also when I discovered the pleasure of a soft chamois leather dipped into charcoal dust and wiped across the white surface of the paper, leaving not just a train of dark charcoal grit on the paper but also of a darkening sky above a light horizon. [64] When I started drawing the landscape outside Johannesburg, it was as a revenge on the landscape. It was an anger primarily at myself for not being able to step away from the landscape, both land and painting I loved. But also an anger against the dry, uninviting bleakness. I decided that however bland or dull that landscape was, I would match it. Of course, as soon as I started drawing it, I was held by all those features that I had so disliked; the pylons, the stunted trees, the lack of trees, rivers, and mountains.

The landscape met the drawing halfway. The blinding contrast of the winter light, all white paper or dark shadow, drained of colour. The dried grass had the blackness of charcoal; the lines of abandoned civil engineering projects were ready for rulers and a steady hand. This was in the mid-1980s, when the land around Johannesburg was becoming a post-industrial wilderness. The gold had been exhausted, mines were closed down, huge elements of cast iron and steel were abandoned in the veld. Roads were eaten

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away from their verges. But still these elements demanded the picturesque, as if the culvert were a river, the storm water drain a stone bridge, the poles of the wire fences another avenue of trees.

I had to find a strategy to avoid this, to find a lack of structure or order in the terrain, to get the great landscape paintings out of my head.

I would choose a random distance—say 12.5 kilometres—drive that distance and then draw the landscape. But even then, I would frame the image in the most familiar way. Most of these drawings were made at the edge of the road, the vanishing point beckoning.

To avoid even this seduction, I would find the image and then turn 180 degrees. I was half-successful. They were drawings I would not have arrived at in any other way, but there were many, in fact most of the drawings, that could not avoid my history of seeing. [65] When I first went to New York with my portfolio in 1986, I thought the big problem would be being a white South African. But the least important problem was that I was a white South African coming from an apartheid South Africa. The biggest problem was that I made drawings and not paintings. And the biggest problem in 1986, as I said, was that you weren’t living in New York. If you want to be seen in New York, you have to come here, pay your dues. Which is a terrible phrase, implying a feudal relationship of a serf who would come and take part, tied to the manor and pay his dues, and then be given a place at the table. [66] ● A nationwide state of emergency is declared, with more than 1,000 people detained on the first day of the decree ● Following a coup

d’état in Lesotho, ANC members in the country are deported to Zambia ● Bombings continue with explosions recorded in Bizana, Durban, Johannesburg, KwaNdebele, Springs, and Soweto

work

Solo exhibition Group exhibition Awards

○ Helps devise and co-designs the JATC production, Sophiatown,

directed by Malcolm Purkey, performed at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg

○ William Kentridge, Cassirer Fine Art, Johannesburg ○ Visions, The Market Gallery, Johannesburg ○ The AA Vita Award, Johannesburg ○ The Market Theatre Award,

Johannesburg

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1987

The pure light of inspiration, for me, is always to be treated with caution. Things that leap out as ‘good ideas’ are often best left as that: mere ideas. It is in the physical act of their coming into being, and in the form they finally achieve, that they have to show their worth, and often things that start in the alleys and sluices of the mind hold their own in the end. [67] I used to think that if you felt the music enough in your body, surely you could just sit at the piano and music would come out of your fingers; and I would sit at the piano and it did not. The same as you think if you just sit at a typewriter and type with enough passion, literature will come out. There’s the hope of the machine, which is both hope and disillusion. [68] Perhaps this is a good place to talk about the division between making and looking, between the ARTIST AS MAKER and the ARTIST AS VIEWER. There is a very real division. [69] ● The siege and intermittent battle for the control of Cuito Cuanavale

in Angola begins, with South Africa and its allies squaring off against Angolan and Cuban forces; combat continues into 1988

work Solo exhibition Group exhibition Award

1988

○ Makes the animated film Exhibition, 16 mm film, transferred to video,

3:00 min

○ In the Heart of the Beast, Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London ○ Three Hogarth Satires with Deborah Bell and Robert Hodgins, (Wits)

University Art Galleries and Cassirer Fine Art, Johannesburg

○ Standard Bank Young Artist Award (Fine Art category), Johannesburg

The boycott was always ambiguous, it was never a total boycott, it was always selective, and why certain things were allowed and certain things weren’t had more to do with who could come into South Africa than what went out, really. The boycott was the whim of the group of people sitting in London, it was never debated, there was never a clear set of terms. But I don’t think their reaction had to do with the specifics of the image. Maybe it did, maybe they would have been happier if it had had a clearer ‘Free Mandela!’ message.

I think most artists who were working outside South Africa came under a lot of pressure to do their ‘Free Mandela!’ images, like Dumile,

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like Sekoto to some extent. Their work was so much stronger in South Africa when they were working in much less direct ways. But I am not sure whether you can generalise. Some people flourish in exile and some people don’t. [70] ○ Birth of daughter, Isabella Kentridge

There is a kind of political language I want to avoid, but there is other political language I want to re-engage. As an artist growing up in South Africa, there was a sense of the renunciation of the political that also seemed so present in European and American art in the 1970s, especially in American colour field painting and in certain kinds of abstraction. But for me, it wasn’t a viable way of working and I looked backwards to find other examples of people who’d worked within modernism, but who were engaged with the world and had their work fed by what was around them, mainly Russian artists, before and after the revolution, but also some American artists around the same time, the Expressionists and onwards, the futurists. That’s an interest I’ve had for some time.

The early works I did on Russia [6 Russian Writers, 1989, screenprints], on Mayakovsky also, from the late eighties were of that order. For years I have been wanting to do a big Russian project about those questions of art and politics. In relation to South African politics, the same questions and concerns raised by the Russian revolution also arise. [71] ● South Africa, Angola, and Cuba conclude an agreement in New York

granting independence to Namibia by South Africa on the proviso that Cuba withdraws from Angola ● A tribute concert celebrating Nelson Mandela’s seventieth birthday, organised by the Anti-Apartheid Movement (formerly the Boycott Movement) is held at Wembley Stadium, London ● The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art (1930-1988), a showcase of pioneer black artists like John Koenakeefe Mohl, Gerard Bhengu, and Gladys Mgudlandlu, curated by Steven Sack, shows at the Johannesburg Art Gallery

work Solo exhibition group exhibition award

○ Co-directs documentary Freedom Square & Back of the Moon with Angus Gibson, 50:00 min, for Channel 4, United Kingdom ○ Another self-titled solo exhibition, William Kentridge, opens at

Cassirer Fine Art, Johannesburg

○ William Kentridge and Simon Stone, a two-person exhibition opens

at Gallery International, Cape Town

○ WK wins the AA Vita Award, Johannesburg, for the second time

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1989

It’s not just by chance that Felix looks like me. The characters arose when I decided I was going to make my first film using charcoal drawings, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989). I thought of what other people I would draw: there was the character of the businessman and I knew how he would look. I knew his pin-striped suit, so he was possible. Then there was a second person. I was asking myself dumb questions like: What style of clothing does someone like that wear? Smart or casual? Is he in shorts? What would be another uniform that is as familiar as a business suit? So in all the films, Felix is always naked and Soho is always in a suit, whether he’s in a coma, or in bed. I had drawn the businessman before for trade union posters and anti-industrialist, anti-capitalist student posters. I had a sense of how to draw him.

I needed Felix to be a second consistent character throughout the film. So who could he be? The easiest thing was to work with a mirror. So it was by chance that he looked like me. But once he started to look like me, I understood that I had to take responsibility for his actions as well. So this became an element, not necessarily of autobiography, but of working within the realm of who Felix was. [72] I play with my self image: it’s like having a commedia della’arte character, he’s there to perform other things, it’s about psychic confrontation. There’s no inner life and if there is inner life it is revealed by the gross motor movements of the figure on the screen.

[73] You can’t escape who you are. Whatever the subject, in the end it is a reflection of yourself, your desires and fears. The ostensible self-portrait is only the most obvious exemplar. The geography of the head, the relation of nose to eyes and ears, the geometries of facial recognition are what we think of when we imagine a portrait. (And I am really not good at this. I always am drawn to watching the pavement portraitists making their quick—and often accurate—likenesses, trying to see how they get the proportions right.) My drawings often correspond to John Singer Sargent’s description of a portrait as “a drawing of a face in which there is something wrong with the mouth.”

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But the self-portrait is there also in the tentativeness of the drawing, or its decisive certainty, its arrogance, its beautiful marks. To paraphrase Graham Greene, “love of mark is love of self.”

Looking more widely, the self-portrait is also there in the subjects the artist chooses over the decades—and the negative selfportrait in the subjects avoided. A self-portrait of coffee pots and rhinoceroses, and the open space of that which is not drawn. [74] ● The East German Communist Party announces that citizens can pass across the Berlin Wall after nearly three decades ● Albie

Sachs delivers a paper titled ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’ at an ANC in-house seminar on culture in Lusaka, Zambia: “We all know where South Africa is, but we do not yet know what it is.

Ours is the privileged generation that will make that discovery” [75] ● Gerard Sekoto: Unsevered Ties, curated by Lesley Spiro, opens at the Johannesburg Art Gallery ● David Goldblatt and critic Joyce Ozynski found Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, a nonracial school of photography ● Esther Mahlangu is included in JeanHubert Martin’s exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in Paris

work

Solo exhibition

1990

○ Makes Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, the first animated

film in the series Drawings for Projection, 16 mm film, transferred to video, 3:11 min

○ Responsible Hedonism, Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London

When David Elliott came to research his exhibition Art from South Africa, he went through a nightmare with the different organisations and people saying, essentially, “What right does someone from outside South Africa have to come and choose what work from South Africa should be seen in Oxford?” I remember, in my case, he looked at my drawings, and he looked at my films, and he said he wanted to show some of the films in the exhibition. My response was to feel insulted. I said: “Those are films, the films are not my art; my art is the drawings, the films are something different.” I am immensely grateful to David, in retrospect, that someone could bring me kicking and screaming to actually understand the work I had been making—and to put it in the exhibition.

When I saw the exhibition in Oxford, it was a strange mix of good and bad work, with millions of tiny works from community art centres. The very imbalance and unevenness of the work on show was in some way representative of the actual fights and battles within the art world in South Africa at that time. [76]

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The day on which [F.W. de Klerk] made his speech in the opening of Parliament, saying he decided to unban the banned organisations, I was driving in my car; I stopped at the side of the road. And I knew then that it was going to be completely different. I realised suddenly that things were absolutely different from how they had been throughout my life. We went home and had a huge party; there was an understanding from that moment on that things had changed. And though there were lots of frustrations over the years it had taken for it to happen, and though today there is no redemption and not everything is fine, that particular day and evening were absolutely a time of ecstasy. [77] ● President F.W. de Klerk unbans thirty-three political organisations,

including the ANC and the South African Communist Party. Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners are released from jail ● Steve Hilton-Barber’s photo essay of Northern Sotho youths preparing for ritual circumcision is exhibited at the Market Theatre and prompts heated debate about cultural appropriation ● Art from South Africa, the first major exhibition of contemporary South African art since Nelson Mandela’s release, curated by David Elliott with the assistance of David Koloane, opens at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; WK shows two works ● Ernest Cole dies in New York

work Solo exhibitions

○ Makes Monument, the second animated film in the series Drawings

for Projection, 16 mm film, transferred to video, 3:11 min

○ William Kentridge: Drawings and Graphics, Cassirer Fine Art and the Gallery on The Market, Johannesburg ○ William Kentridge: Drawings,

Gallery International, Cape Town

1991

It was a very strange moment. I don’t think any of us came out of that well. We weren’t strong enough to defend the right to be more anarchic than we were and we weren’t strong enough to really be political actors. It convinced me certainly that my place was in the studio, not at committee meetings … I do understand the need for solidarity but at a certain point I absolutely resist it also. In the name of solidarity there was an astonishing authoritarian control of what should be done, and in the end a complete contempt for the activity of art. That has its costs now. For the state, art is of no interest and of no significance. It has no need of support because it’s fulfilled its historical mission of solidarity. Once the transformation happened it was done. [78]

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When I was about thirty-five and started drawing, I thought with apprehension that this was going to be the shape of my life: every eighteen months or so I would turn out an exhibition of drawings.

This was terrifying, because I didn’t feel I’d have the energy. In that sense, Robert [Hodgins] was an example because he made one think, here’s someone who is sixty-three and going strong. There are few South African artists who survive the ageing process, in terms of their work still being seen. When I was an adolescent, the artists who were ‘names’ could not reassuringly be regarded as role models for what I might be twenty years on. [79] ● Multi-party, political negotiations commence at the Convention

for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) in Kempton Park, outside Johannesburg ● The Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act repeals the Group Areas Act ● Nadine Gordimer is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ● Dumile Feni dies in New York ● Founded in 1922, the Soviet Union ceases to exist; fifteen separate countries are established, including Russia and Ukraine

work

○ Makes Mine, the third animated film in the series Drawings for Projection, 16 mm film, transferred to video, 5:50 min ○ Makes Sobriety,

Obesity and Growing Old, the fourth animated film in the series Drawings for Projection, 16 mm film, transferred to video, 9:00 min

Group exhibition Awards

○ Little Morals, with Deborah Bell and Robert Hodgins, Taking

Liberties Gallery, Durban

○ Mine wins the Weekly Mail Short Film Competition, Cape Town ○ Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old wins the Rembrandt Gold Medal

at the 1991 Cape Town Triennial

1992

For many years I had made animated films which had been seen by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, and they had made puppet theatre which I had seen. We said, “Let’s see what happens if we put the animation and the puppetry together” … We began by testing some fragments of animation I had made, landscapes around Johannesburg, images of a table laying itself. Against these images on a screen we played with a roughly carved wooden puppet that Adrian had carved based on some of the characters that had appeared in some of my films: a woman covered with newspapers, a homeless man in an oversized greatcoat, a businessman in a suit. We discovered we had a cast of characters and a world for the production but no idea of what play

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we were performing. We hunted through libraries of play scripts looking for roles for our cast, Myakovsky, Merrimé, Soyinka. In the end we were reduced to [Georg Büchner’s 1913 play] Woyzeck as the text that mapped most directly onto what we had done. Our starting point was a disrespect for the text. But as we progressed with the production we discovered that the closer we stuck to the text the stronger the piece was. In the end the play Woyzeck on the Highveld is very faithful to Büchner, but this in spite of us. The inauthentic origins of the project were swamped. [80] ○ Birth of son, Samuel Kentridge

If a puppet is well manipulated, you can’t stop yourself from also believing in the agency of the puppet, at the same time that you know it’s just a piece of wood. This double vision, of knowing something is either a piece of paper with a charcoal mark, or a piece of wood, but at the same time you can’t stop yourself from believing it is a character, Woyzeck—for me that provokes a third stage, which is you as a viewer, standing behind yourself and enjoying the fact of you being fooled, of you being unable to stop yourself giving an agency to the image. [81] ● Political negotiations stall following a massacre of forty-five

people in Boipatong, near Vanderbijlpark, southwest of Johannesburg. Another estimated 136 massacres occur in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging area between 1990–93, and some 14,000 people lose their lives nationally in politically related violence in the same period ● The co.za domain zone is created on 4 June ● Nelson Mandela announces his separation from Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

work

Solo exhibition

○ Conceives and directs Woyzeck on the Highveld, in collaboration

with the Handspring Puppet Company, which premieres at the National Festival of the Arts, Grahamstown (with revivals in 2008 at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, and the Playhouse Theatre, Perth; in 2009 at Festival d’Automne, Paris, followed by a tour to Rome, Chalons, Wroclaw, Girona, Bordeaux, Madrid, Granada, Malaga, Seville, Annecy, Mulhouse, and Strasbourg; and in 2011 in Minneapolis, Chapel Hill, Milan, Combs la Ville, Sartrouville, Lisbon, London, Charleville-Mézières, Bolzano, Budapest, Coventry, Belfast, Cardiff, Aberystwyth, Truro, Exeter, and Oxford) ○ Makes Erasing the Passing (of the Hours), a film collaboration with Deborah Bell and Robert Hodgins, computer animation, transferred to video, 10:00 min

○ Drawings for Projection, WK’s first at Goodman Gallery, Johannes-

burg; a version tours to the Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London

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1993

It is not that every act of violence has had its public relations, its brochures, its paintings and murals of a better life. But rather, and more difficult to apprehend, is that every act of enlightenment, all the missions to save souls, all the best impulses, are so dogged by the weight of what follows them: their shadow, the violence that has accompanied enlightenment. The colonial project in its own description of itself bringing light to the Dark Continent is a gruesome working out of the impulses of Plato’s cave. [82] A heap of forensic photographs, almost impossible to look through.

A man half tumbled out of bed, pyjamas pock-marked with bullet holes, blood on the floor below. A close-up of a man’s head in a pool of blood, one cheek swollen—his jaw shattered. Someone— man? woman?—under newspapers, one hand sticking out. As specific photographs, it was extremely difficult to look at any of them. In the act of drawing from these images, the photos change.

It is not simply that they become a series of greys and tonal gradations and contours; but rather the horror of their origin is put on hold. Drawing is a series of equivalences and negotiations between the paper and the object. What is the shape of the open mouth? What sort of blackness is used for blood, as opposed to the shadow under the shoulder? What is line, what is smudge? At best, when the drawing is really under way and flowing smoothly, the act of drawing feels like a benevolent absence, leaving the arm, the writer, the paper, the photo on their own. The mind appraises things as they emerge, rejects things when they go awry, but does not directly instruct the process.

Believing that there is an intelligence between the eye, arm and paper that will best serve the object. “Is the image beautiful, is the image ugly?”—is not the question the hand is asking. Nor, even, I think, the question, “does the drawing keep the horror to which the original photo attested?” trying to do justice to the source image. The drawing always attests to itself, as the example of transformation. The horror of the circumstances of the original photograph regains its place only as one of the associations the image unleashes. [83]

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● South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani is assassinated in Boksburg ● Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk ● Jackson Hlungwani and Sandra Kriel represent South Africa at the Venice Biennale ● Limits of Liberty, a symposium

on censorship, is held at the Wits Theatre, Johannesburg; it includes screenings of previously banned films and an exhibition of censored news photographs ● Gerard Sekoto dies in Paris

work Solo exhibition group exhibition

1994

○ A retrospective of seven films from 1984 to 1993, shown at the

Edinburgh International Film Festival

○ William Kentridge, Ruth Bloom Gallery, Los Angeles ○ Robert Hodgins, William Kentridge, Deborah Bell, Goodman Gallery,

Johannesburg

I’m interested in the traces of what prompts a reconstruction, not just the trace as such, or the unreconstructed state. What prods an imaginative leap? But in the end, I am making a drawing, for which you see a foundation or a ground, and the interest for me is not just the foundation or the ground, but what it suggests. From all the different possible things that could come out of it, I am interested in the end, in arriving at one, even if it’s an incorrect one. So, it’s not a matter of saying: Here’s a phrase, which is unclear, because there are words missing, that I haven’t heard, and which suggests many things; it’s the leap into that suggestion, which is a leap out of indeterminacy in a way. So indeterminacy is there at the base, but for me, the interest lies in the movement into a drawing, into a sequence of movement. Indeterminacy suggests paralysis if you stay there. [84] Ideas and images come so grudgingly that I need all the aids, stratagems and incantations I can find. Some people have an ability to sit and follow through a coherent line of thought on their own.

They start with a vague impulse and emerge with a concrete plan.

This capacity eludes me. When sitting and contemplating, I either go round in tight circles or slip into neutral and vegetate. Activity is essential for me. It is only when physically engaged on a drawing that ideas start to emerge. There is a combination between drawing and seeing, between making and assessing, that provokes a part of my mind that otherwise is closed off. [85]

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In 1994 I made the animated film Felix in Exile, a nine-minute film in which Felix Teitelbaum in his hotel room has intimations of other lives and deaths around him, which he can approach but never reach. The film was made at the time of the first democratic elections in South Africa and was partly concerned with how long some historical memory of the past would survive in a new society.

As with all the films I make, there was no script or storyboard. [86] ● ANC wins the popular ballot in the first non-racial democratic elections and Nelson Mandela becomes president ● Ernest Mancoba

visits South Africa for the first time since 1938 for his retrospective exhibition, Hand in Hand, at the Johannesburg Art Gallery

work

Group exhibition

1995

○ Makes Felix in Exile, the fifth animated film in the series Drawings

for Projection, 35 mm film, transferred to video, 8:43 min; shown on a monitor in a solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg ○ Makes Memo, an animated film with Deborah Bell and Robert Hodgins, 35 mm film, transferred to video, 3:00 min ○ Trackings: History as Memory, Document & Object. New Works by

Four South African Artists, with Malcolm Payne, Penny Siopis, and Sue Williamson, Art First, London

Uncertainty is an essential category. As soon as one gets certain … the voice gets louder, more authoritarian and authoritative, and to defend themselves they will bring an army and guns to stand next to them to hold. There is desperation in all certainty. I think the category of uncertainty—political uncertainty, philosophical uncertainty, uncertainty of images—is much closer to how the world is. That also relates to provisionality: to the fact that you can see the world as a series of facts or photographs, or you can see it as a process of unfolding, where the same thing in a different context has a very different meaning or very different form. Animation builds that into the very process. [87] There was a huge disconnect between the excitement in the art world, with people taking part in it and all the curators from overseas coming to see the work, and the fact that the exhibition was invisible in the city. All of the resources had gone into making a great exhibition. There was no money left for public relations, and unfortunately there was no money left to wine and dine the city authorities. If they had left R10,000 in the budget to give a big

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dinner to the mayor and the people around him, you would still have a Johannesburg Biennale. And because they weren’t made to feel a part of it, they felt that it was very isolated, separate from the city. It was because of this that they closed the biennale down.

This was a source of extreme frustration for me—that the hard part of the exhibition they had got right, and the easy part of the exhibition they had got wrong; calamitously wrong.

On the one hand, yes, it was the starting point for a huge amount of work opening up for South African artists overseas, but it also represented the closing of immense doors in South Africa. There hasn’t been a biennale since then. We’ve reduced from biennales to art fairs, which is a huge reversal. Everybody was ready for the biennale in Johannesburg to continue being this interesting place, and we shot ourselves in the foot—for which I blame the biennale organisers and a lot of South African artists. You usually think it’s the city that closes things down and that they’re the ones who are against art, but it wasn’t them—we did it ourselves. [88] ● The First Johannesburg Biennale opens in a derelict power station

in Newtown, Johannesburg, under the artistic direction of Lorna Ferguson. Artists from sixty-three countries are represented. Of the biennale, English pop-star, David Bowie writes in Modern Painters, “This is as mind-jarringly moving as any major art-thing I’ve seen, East, West, or Middle, in any year” [89] ● Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, directed by Clementine Deliss, opens at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the South African component of the exhibition, curated by David Koloane, focuses on the “pervasive role played by politics” in daily life and the death of Steve Biko in 1977 work

○ Conceives and directs Faustus in Africa!, a collaboration with the

solo exhibition

○ Eidophusikon, curated by Lorna Ferguson, 4th Istanbul Biennale

Group exhibition

Handspring Puppet Company, which premieres a Kunstfest, Weimar

○ Africus: Johannesburg Biennale, curated by Lorna Ferguson,

Christopher Till, and Bongi Dhlomo in Newtown, Johannesburg; WK shows Memory and Geography (1995), a multimedia project made in collaboration with Doris Bloom, as well as drawings, a film, and two outdoor landscape drawings, Fire Gate (1995) and Heart Drawing (1995)

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1996

[On the Truth and Reconciliation Commission] … we were being given a very clear choice: you can sacrifice justice in return for knowledge, and if you want all knowledge, this comes at the cost of it being powerless. So as you discover terrible things that people are doing, you relinquish the power to hold them accountable, they get given amnesty and that’s the only way in which you are actually going to discover what actually happened. It became a very clear and emblematic separation of truth and justice. [90] In South Africa at the moment there is a battle between the papershredders and the photocopying machines. For each police general who is shredding documents of his past there are officers under him who are photocopying them to keep as insurance against future prosecution. In the production Ubu and the Truth Commission we wanted to show this shredding on stage. But a real machine noisily and slowly going through reams of paper did not seem very remarkable. We considered using a bread-slicer as metaphor but were daunted by the thought of all that sliced bread each evening. I thought of drawing a shredding machine and animating the reams of paper being turned into whorls of spaghetti. Then we thought, “We have three dogs on stage, why not feed the evidence to the dogs?”

But their mouths were too small to swallow videotape or reams of documents. So we asked, “What has a mouth wide enough to swallow a whole dark history?” Hence the crocodile, which became a central character in the play and determined a whole range of the moments and plot directions of the play. [91] The Commission itself is theatre, or at any rate, a kind of proto- or ur-theatre. Its hearings are open to the public, as well as being televised and broadcast on the radio. Many of the hearings are presided over by Archbishop Tutu in full purple magnificence. The hearings move from town to town, setting up in church halls and schools. In each venue the same stage set is created. A table for the witnesses (always at least as high as that of the Commissioners so the witnesses never have to look up to them) and two or three glass booths for the translators. A large banner hangs on the wall behind the commissioners: ‘TRUTH THROUGH RECONCILIATION.’ One by one, witnesses come forward and have half an hour to tell their story, to pause, weep, be supported by professional com-

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forters who sit at the table with them. The stories are harrowing, spellbinding. The audience members sit at the edge of their seats listening to every word. This is exemplary civic theatre: a public hearing of private griefs that are absorbed into the body politic as a part of a deeper understanding of how the society arrived at its present position. The theatre rekindles each day the questions of the moment. How to deal with a guilt for the past, a memory of it?

It awakens every day the conflict between the desire for retribution and a need for some sort of social reconciliation. Even those people (and there are a lot) who will have nothing to do with the Commission and who are in denial of the truths it is revealing are, in their very strident refusal of those truths, joining in the debate. [92] ● The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a legal body created

to investigate human rights abuses between 1960 and 1994, holds public hearings. French-Algerian philosopher, Jacques Derrida describes the process as “a form of political therapy” ● Robben Island, the former political prison near Cape Town, is declared a national monument ● South Africa beats Tunisia 2−0 to win the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament in its first participation after decades of exclusion

work

Group exhibitions

1997

○ Makes History of the Main Complaint, the sixth animated film in

the series Drawings for Projection, 35 mm film, transferred to video and laser disc, 5:50 min

○ Colours: Contemporary Art from South Africa, curated by Alfons Hug

and Sabine Vogel, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; WK presents four films; Nelson Mandela delivers the opening address: “The society we are creating is one in which colours are a beauty of nature and not a determinant of a person’s value” ○ Faultlines: Inquiries into Truth and Reconciliation, curated by Jane Taylor, The Castle, Cape Town

One of the fundamental things that happens in the studio is the process of creating: the physical activity of making marks, erasing and redrawing, in which there is always a gap between the head and the arm; a reliance on the hand’s motor-memory for the manifestation of ideas, as well as a direction from the brain in which these two forms of control are combined with unconscious memory. It’s not to say that the motor memory and the action of the hand in the studio is the same as when one is

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unconscious, but there is definitely a different kind of intelligence or approach to understanding that comes into play in the physical activity of art making. In this way, what happens in the studio—as what happens when one is writing any lecture or doing any work, but which is perhaps particularly emblematic of the studio—is that the world comes into it physically, in the form of images, thoughts, conversations, drawings, text or other elements on the wall, standing in for ideas. The studio becomes a place for the world to be deconstructed, taken apart, and then put back together. [93] When my father became senior counsel, Bram Fischer gave him a suitcase. For a while he kept his papers in it, and then the case kind of disintegrated from overuse. It ended up sitting in a cupboard in the house, at which stage I asked him if I could take it over and use it to store my oil paints. I used the case for about a decade. When we began making the puppets for Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), I remembered this case, took the oil paints out and it became the body of the dog. A much happier life, in fact, than a container for unused oil paints. [94] Internationally, art fairs have taken over the air space and I think that’s terrible. It’s not something to celebrate; it is rather something to fight against and to resist. There is something about [biennales as] one of the few spaces where you have a non-commercial, considered essay by someone about the state of what is being made in world art. I don’t think it’s true that they’ve run their course.

People who have been to many biennales may be jaded by them, but that is them being jaded rather than the form itself being out of touch. [95] In 1996, Robert Hodgins, whom I’d worked with, together with Deborah Bell, on Hogarth in Johannesburg and Little Morals suggested we do a series of prints of Ubu Roi (Robert had done many paintings of Ubu over the years; I had once acted in the role of Captain McNure in a student production of Ubu Roi). The question was how to find an Ubu that was neither the same as Alfred Jarry’s iconic drawing of Ubu with his pointy head and spiral belly, nor one that ignored this original motif. In the end I decided to do images with a combination of Jarry’s schematic Ubu, drawn as a white

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line on a black ground, and a more fleshy figure of Ubu who was both enclosed by these chalk drawings and making them. I took a series of photos of myself in the studio performing the part of Ubu and used these as the basis for the fleshy Ubu figure in front of the white drawing. [96] ● The Second Johannesburg Biennale, titled Trade Routes: History and

Geography, is curated by Okwui Enwezor: “The sense of the world which the Biennale hopes to engage—perhaps even to inaugurate— emerges from the socio-political procedures of a world in conflict” [97] ● Radio station YFM, managed by Dirk Hartford and based in Bertrams, Johannesburg, launches with a singular focus on urban black youth

work

Solo exhibition Group exhibitions

○ Makes Ubu Tells the Truth, the seventh animated film in the series

Drawings for Projection, 35 mm animated film with documentary photographs and 16 mm archival film, transferred to video, 8:00 min ○ Conceives and directs Ubu and the Truth Commission, in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, written by Jane Taylor, which premieres at Kunstfest, Weimar ○ Applied Drawings, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg ○ Trade Routes: History and Geography, curated by Okwui Enwezor,

Johannesburg and Cape Town; WK shows Ubu tells the Truth (1997)

○ documenta X, curated by Catherine David at Museum Fridericianum,

Kassel; WK shows Felix in Exile (1994) and History of the Main Complaint (1996) ○ Ubu: ± 101, with Deborah Bell and Robert Hodgins, curated by Fiona Rankin-Smith, Observatory Museum, National Festival of the Arts, Grahamstown

1998

Many years ago, before I had started doing my animations, before I started doing landscapes, I worked on a film in which I was interviewing David Goldblatt and at a certain point I asked, How did he choose his subject, how did he know what he must take a photograph of? He said it really doesn’t matter what you take a photograph of because in the end the photograph will always reveal your fears and your desires and it will always be about you, the photographer. That lifted the enormous burden of thinking.

What does one have to do? Because whatever you do, it’s you that’s going to come through the work rather than the work only being about your subject. In the same interview, I think, he described the pleasure for him in looking at what he called ‘fuckall’ landscapes, landscapes when there was no real landscape.

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And I said “Oh, OK, ‘fuck-all’ landscape can be an interesting thing, this piece of dead veld, let me see it,” and each time I’d see a piece of veld I would say, “Oh, this looks like a David Goldblatt photograph and that’s fantastic.” So I think I suddenly saw an inversion of something I had written off as being of no interest or value and reconstituted it, in this case through his photographic eye, which meant going back into the landscape and seeing it again. [98] If you’re an artist, more than anyone else, a biography entails a biography of exhibitions, of works done, with a date for every work. A retrospective exhibition is like a root march, if it’s done chronologically. At its heart there is some fundamental insufficiency, which ensures that it is not enough for someone to look at you as the artist and say: “You are who you are and that’s enough.” You say, in response: “No, you need to look at the work.”

[99] ● The Constitutional Court declares the criminalisation of homosexuality unconstitutional ● The Treatment Action Campaign is founded to campaign for access to AIDS treatment ● The right-

wing occupation of the historic Pretoria fort prompts counterinterventions by artists Steven Cohen and Kendell Geers ● David Goldblatt: Photographs from South Africa, curated by Susan Kismaric, is the first solo exhibition by a South African artist to be shown at the MoMA, New York

work

Solo exhibitions

○ Creates animation for, and directs the production of, Il ritorno

di Ulisse, based on the opera by Claudio Monteverdi, with the Handspring Puppet Company, which premieres at the Luna Theatre, Brussels (and tours to Sofiensäle, Vienna; Hebbel Theatre, Berlin; Stads Schouwburg, Amsterdam; Werfthalle, Zurich; Monument Theatre, Grahamstown; State Theatre, Pretoria in 1998–2000; Melbourne Festival in 2004; La Monnaie, Brussels in 2007; La Fenice, Venice, with further shows in Girona, Besancon, Nimes, and Toulouse in 2008; The Moore Theatre, Seattle; Project Artaud Theater, San Francisco; and the Edinburgh Festival in 2009; Theater der Welt, Essen in 2010; and Teatro Massimo, Palermo, and City Recital Hall, Sydney, in 2019)

○ William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection, The Drawing Center, New York ○ Weighing … and Wanting, curated by Hugh M. Davies, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego ○ William Kentridge, Stephen Friedman Gallery and A22 Gallery, London ○ William

Kentridge, curated by Piet Coessens, at Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

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1999

The image of a procession goes back to Goya and his paintings of processions. It goes back more recently to photographs of refugees fleeing Rwanda, coming from North to South Sudan.

All the movement that still exists across the continent of Africa.

Further back to the images of the processions of people from the Balkans. The huge population of movements of people at the end of World War Two. The image of a procession of people pulling or carrying their baggage is both a contemporary and immediate image and one deeply rooted in our psyches.

In many ways we first come across it in Plato’s allegory of the cave ‌ The procession films focus rather on those carriers themselves. The anonymous performers in the Sisyphean task of showing people in the cave the necessity of viewing the light.

The endless procession of people carrying on their heads and shoulders baskets, bundles of clothes, spoils of war. All of history carried by them.

Who are these anonymous carriers? Taken for granted by Plato?

Taken for granted by us as we see them walking through the streets of Johannesburg, through the streets of so many cities of the world? [100] The paper characters in Shadow Procession (1999) formed on the one hand an inventory of people on the move. A man walking while reading, miners carrying a broken city, pensioners carried in a wheelbarrow. An inventory of specific people seen in newspapers and the news, or on the streets of Johannesburg.

But the film was about aptitude rather than the specific nature of a particular journey. A catalogue of people on the move. I was interested in how roughly a figure could be torn and still be understood; how crudely it could be moved and still have coherence as a moving, specific person. [101] The important thing to understand is that in an individual psychological way there are transformations that people have, but that there are also circumstances in society that go through

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extraordinary transformations, not from nowhere, but as if there’s an engine inside that is producing them. The transformation in South Africa from the nationalist, apartheid-era government to the government we have now does not come from nowhere; it’s an unfolding of events and movements. The most important thing to understand is that engine of transformation, rather than the moments of different facts. You can find that the disasters we have in South Africa now with a large section of the government can be traced back to movements that were turning much, much earlier and that will turn into something else, as well. [102] ● Thabo Mbeki becomes president ● In South Africa, the HIV infection rate in adults jumps to 22.4%, up from 0.76% in 1990 ● Liber-

ated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa, the first major show of contemporary South African art in New York, curated by Frank Herreman, shows at the Museum for African Art ● The South African National Gallery is amalgamated with the South African Museum and the South African Cultural History Museum into Iziko Museums of Cape Town and is renamed the Iziko South African National Gallery

work

○ Makes Stereoscope, the eighth animated film in the series Drawings

for Projection, 35 mm animated film, transferred to video, 8:22 min

○ Makes Shadow Procession, an animated film using three-

dimensional objects and paper cut-out figures, transferred to video, 7:15 min ○ Makes Sleeping on Glass, an animated film using threedimensional objects, a live actor and charcoal drawing, transferred to video, 8:11 min ○ Makes Overvloed, an animated film for an oval domed ceiling using paper cut-out figures, shadows, text fragments, charcoal and pastel drawing, water and video footage, 35 mm film, transferred to video, 6:00 min

Award

2000

○ Carnegie Prize at the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh

I like to start my drawings with a tone, and with charcoal I can modulate this by adding bits of charcoal and erasing. I’m not sure it is painterly, but it does allow me to have a kind of palette. It gives the drawing a further dimension beyond a line on a white page. It’s another way of bringing a drawing to life, giving it some visual texture and even a sense of movement. [103] There are no hills. There are no trees big enough for shade. There are no streams or lakes. In the winter glare, colour is leeched away.

It is not sublime, it is not awesome, it has no picturesque features.

But after many years of deafness on my part, I understood it called

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out to be drawn. My deafness had to do with a belief in oil paint as the natural medium for representing terrain, and the conviction that the dappled light and saturated greens of four hundred European landscape painters, was where beauty lay. The call of the Germiston landscape was specific: to paper, charcoal, ruler, eraser—all materials I had been using for some years. The power lines, remnants of civil engineering projects, concrete buttresses, the flat horizon of golden mine dumps, the clarity of the winter glare between areas of light and shadow in the landscape—it seemed that half the drawing was done by the landscape itself.

And with the ground grey and black with the stubble left by veldfire, the burnt wood of charcoal itself moved between the object and the drawing. The pleasure of making the drawings had to do with the pleasure of the discovery of simple translation—power pylons constructed out of a series of ruled lines, charcoal dust rubbed into the paper with a chamois leather to echo the silver sky, short marks of crumbly charcoal to make the black and stubbled field.

The excitement and the reason for doing the work (or any drawing) has to do with the engagement of being caught between the object and the sheet of paper. [104] The image comes into being as much from what I’m taking away as from what I’m putting down. Erasure becomes a kind of pentimento, an element of layering as you get in painting, but it is more ghostly in drawing. Erasure also makes palpable the activity of the work. It gives you a sense of the process both of making and thinking, which is not linear but a series of advances and reversals and lateral moves. [105] ● Thabo Mbeki controversially refuses to acknowledge HIV as the

cause of AIDS at the 13th International Aids Conference in Durban

● Floods in Mozambique cause extensive damage and kill over 700

people

work Solo exhibitions

○ Makes Stair Procession, a long-term installation as part of the Vertical Painting series in P.S. 1, New York ○ William Kentridge: Procession, Annandale Galleries, Sydney ○ William Kentridge, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London ○ William Kentridge: New Work, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York ○ Procession:

Sculpture by William Kentridge, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

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2001

The history of Johannesburg starts 2.4 billion years ago. Three billion years ago, a giant meteor struck the earth 100 kilometres from Johannesburg, in an area now called the Vredefort Dome, a world heritage site, and the largest known meteor impact site in the world. You can tell that this is the site of a meteor impact because of a circle of hills with a diameter of about 100 kilometres, which rise up in what is otherwise a flat landscape. The effect of that meteor impact three billion years ago was to tilt a plane of the earth’s crust, pushing it down where the meteor stuck. There is a layer of the earth which includes a paper-thin layer of gold— which instead of lying on the surface of the earth as it had before the impact, lies now at a 45 degree angle through the earth. At the point where this angled seam of gold touched the surface, the city of Johannesburg was established; and its logic ever since has been to track and follow that seam deep underground. [106] When I first read Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno (1923) some twenty years ago, one of the things that drew me to it was the evocation of Trieste as a rather desperate provincial city at the edge of an empire—away from the centre, the real world. I was intrigued how an Austrian-Italian writing in the 1920s could have such a sense of how it felt to be in Johannesburg in the 1980s. In the years following, this has persisted. And caused me to return to the book. [107] I am always interested in the agency of the individual in the face of the implacable huge social other, whether the state, the party, history or family. For all its problems and limitations I do still hold hope in the humanist ideal. [108] Johannesburg is like an animation of a city. That’s the first thing to be said about a city that erases itself … a city that’s geologically based rather than geographically based also has its consequences.

There is no trade route or river or harbour or port or caravan route that geographically determines where Johannesburg should be; its only reason for existence is what’s hidden, what you can’t see, and that is the gold under the ground. [109]

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● Members of the militant group al-Qaeda hijack four passenger air-

liners in the United States, crashing two into the World Trade Center complex; the attacks kill 2,996 people and usher in the ‘War on Terror’ ● The Apartheid Museum, designed by Mashabane Rose Associates, opens in Johannesburg and prominently features the photographs of Ernest Cole work

○ Moves studio into a dedicated building directly adjacent to his Houghton home ○ Makes Medicine Chest, a video rear-projection on a

medicine chest mirror, 35 mm animated film, transferred to video and DVD, 5:50 min ○ Creates animation for and directs Zeno at 4 a.m., a multimedia shadow oratorio, with the Handspring Puppet Company, Jane Taylor (libretto), and Kevin Volans (score)

Solo exhibitions

○ William Kentridge, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (and

Group exhibitions

○ The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa

2002

tours to New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town) ○ William Kentridge, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris

1945–1994, curated by Okwui Enwezor, with Rory Bester, Lauri Firstenberg, Chika Okeke-Agulu, and Mark Nash, opens at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich. The exhibition examines cultural production in the period of African independence after 1945 to the end of apartheid in 1994

I spent some time looking at the early films of Bruce Nauman, films of him walking backwards and forwards in his studio, of him bouncing a ball, walking in slow motion, walking with contraposto, doing a ‘Beckett’ walk. Perhaps it was the athletic body in jeans and T-shirt that reminded me of the films of Jackson Pollock painting in his studio. It was as if Pollock’s canvas had been taken away and Nauman’s left, with the studio as canvas and himself as brush and mark in one. When I saw the films of George Méliès I was struck by the continuity. Méliès’ films are studio films par excellence. The artist Méliès is in the studio performing in front of his paintings. Although Méliès’ films had many subjects— with a predilection for devils, romantic classics, conjuring tricks performed in front of the camera—the central subject is always Méliès and his painted sets, the artist using the images he has made to try and see himself. [110]

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I’m interested in all of Picasso’s works, most particularly the sculptures and the prints, more than the paintings, although of course those too. But as a process, as an example of what it is to be at work in the studio, and to celebrate that insatiable need to make work, and the lightness of touch with which new ideas are approached, Picasso is certainly for me the model artist, the mentor that stands there showing still a very clear direction in which to work. [111] I think our way of seeing, what one could see, was completely distorted by the politics around it. For example, to talk about African art, traditional sculpture, and then generalise outwards: the white Nationalist ideology of African-ness had to do with black people being seen as rural, only temporarily in the city, not appropriately there at all. So traditional woodcarving, beadwork and other kinds of craft were seen as the appropriate art form for Africans.

Part of the resistance involving the political image of what it meant to be African was to say no, in fact black people could be urban, could live in the city, have the same right to listen to jazz bands, Beethoven, read Shakespeare, make oil paintings like Gerard Sekoto, Ernest Mancoba and other painters, and not be stuck in the apartheid ghetto of making their own traditional work.

This meant that white South African artists who accepted, or at least didn’t challenge that position, and used a lot of essentialist African images of wooden masks in their work, seemed very dubious; their whole project was dubious. One saw pictures by Alexis Preller forever painting emblematic masks which became for me like a decoration of Afrikaner nationalism (even though I am sure he wasn’t thinking of them in those terms at all).

But rejecting the use of traditional art also meant that we didn’t look at what was actually there, the extraordinary craft and carving and other kinds of image-making that did exist in rural areas. We acknowledged that we had Sekoto, but not that we also had Jackson Hlungwani. [112]

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● The remains of Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman sold into slavery

and exhibited in London and Paris in the 1810s, are returned to South Africa. She is buried near her ancestral home in Hankey ● Ernest Mancoba dies in Paris ● Chimurenga, a Pan-African literary and arts journal edited by Ntone Edjabe, launches in Cape Town

work

Solo exhibitions

2003

○ Makes Zeno Writing, a 35 mm animated film using charcoal and

pastel drawing, footage of theatre performance, and documentary material from the First World War, transferred to video, 11:22 min ○ Creates animation for and directs the production of Confessions of Zeno, a multimedia shadow oratorio, with the Handspring Puppet Company, Jane Taylor (libretto), and Kevin Volans (score) ○ William Kentridge, Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan ○ William Kentridge, Annandale Galleries, Sydney ○ William Kentridge: Zeno Writing, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

A story reported from the eastern coast of the country. A child drowned in the sea. So a cow was driven into the waves and made to swim out to sea. [113] The cattle in the film Tide Table (2003) are fat cattle on the beach, the kind you would see on the beaches of the Transkei. In the film the cattle turn into skeletons. On the one hand, it’s the dream of the pharaoh, which is interpretive of the fat cows and the thin cows and what that means for the future of Egypt. But it also has to do with an image of AIDS, which in South Africa, is described as a condition of thinning, being the thin sickness, that people will get thinner and thinner and thinner. [114] THE HOPE IN THE CHARCOAL CLOUD A PROD FOR THE IMAGINATION Moving back towards the light Moving forward to the dark paper A cattle prod to provoke an imaginative leap WHAT CAN WE PULL OUT OF THIS? [115]

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● J.M. Coetzee is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: “Why must

our mothers be ninety-nine and long in the grave before we can come running home with the prize that will make up for all the trouble we have been to them?” he asks in his acceptance speech [116] ● Lara Foot’s Tshepang: The Third Testament, based on the rape of a nine-month-old baby, premieres in Amsterdam

work

○ Makes Tide Table, a 35 mm animated film, transferred to video, 8:50 min ○ Makes 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night

and Journey to the Moon, an installation of eight projections, with durations between 1:20 and 7:10 min ○ Makes Automatic Writing, a 35 mm animated film, transferred to video, 2:40 min ○ Makes Learning the Flute, a 35 mm animated film, transferred to video and projected on blackboard, 8:02 min

2004

Solo exhibitions

○ William Kentridge, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg ○ William

Awards

○ 6th Sharjah Biennial Prize, United Arab Emirates ○ Kaisserring

Kentridge: Journey to the Moon and 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Baltic Art Center, Visby ○ William Kentridge, Mönchehaus Museum für Moderne Kunst, Goslar (award exhibition) Prize, Mönchehaus Museum für Moderne Kunst, Goslar

I started working with charcoal animation partly out of necessity (no backers to be found for a feature film I had written, and there was a choice of spending years jumping through producers’ hoops, or drawing it myself). This meant that I could work on my own, and did not have to know in advance any of the details of the film, as there was no crew that had to be informed. For similar reasons I continue to work in this way, and have avoided the siren calls of high-tech digital animation—which would involve not producers’ hoops being jumped through, but digital technicians being wooed, cajoled, seduced. I have a fear of all their skills and techniques being put at the service of the artist. There is a kind of tyranny in such a situation as well—again I would have to know in advance what the work was to be, in order to explain it.

And of course, the very nature of the techniques would change fundamentally the images being made using them. Charcoal and paper has imperfect erasure as an ineluctable part of it. In a digital medium it would simply be a digital effect, one of any number, all equally gratuitous. In the case of this manner of filming, the obsolescence of the technique provides a safe haven in which to work. [117]

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Tapestry is a digital art. An image is divided precisely into an array of decisions, so many thousand across its width, so many thousand along its length. An X and Y axis of warp and weft, locating every decision precisely. Every line or shape in the initial drawing is mapped against the crossing of the threads. Every gesture in the drawing is tamed into a series of exact moments. Does the line start at this thread or the next? The indecision of the artist, every smudge of line, must be resolved into “here it stops, here it changes.” A new bobbin of a different coloured thread must be used from this point …

A tapestry is the opposite of a charcoal smudge or the blending of oil paint, the opposite of the indeterminacy of a glaze or varnish. History repeats itself: weaving led the way to digital control. The punch cards of early computers (so I am told) were based on punch cards used to control the heddles of eighteenth-century textile looms. [118] ● The Constitutional Court building, designed by Andrew Makin and

Janina Masojada, opens in Johannesburg; it includes an extensive art collection in which WK’s work is included ● Mark Zuckerberg launches the social networking site Facebook ● RoseLee Goldberg, Durban-born art historian and curator trained at Wits University, founds ‘Performa,’ a biennial performance art event in New York

work

Solo exhibitions

2005

○ Nine Drawings for Projection, an outdoor film projection accompanied

by live music by Philip Miller, shows at Spier, Cape Town (and tours to Constitution Hill, Johannesburg; Kliptown, Soweto; and later MoMA, New York)

○ William Kentridge, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea,

Turin (and tours to K20/21, Düsseldorf; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal; Johannesburg Art Gallery; and Miami Art Central) ○ William Kentridge, Art 3 and la CRAC, Valence (and tours to Musée Chateau d’Annecy) ○ William Kentridge, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York ○ William Kentridge, Annandale Galleries, Sydney ○ William Kentridge Prints, Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College (and tours to College of Wooster) ○ William Kentridge, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris ○ William Kentridge, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Mozart wrote The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) in 1791, when an optimism and clear belief in the Enlightenment were possible. Such an optimism is no longer available. Not just the individual monsters of history but the calamitous history of colonialism, the primary political manifestation of the Enlightenment, are both object lessons we cannot ignore. [119]

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Part of the preparation for directing The Magic Flute was to listen to many different recordings of it. One that stood out was a recording of the production conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, in Berlin, in 1938. Of course, it is an old-style reading of the music, for Beecham is looking backward—a huge orchestra, majestic slow pace; he is looking from Brahms backward. Very different from contemporary interpretations, which often come from behind Mozart, from the Baroque. Small orchestras, quicker tempi, older styles of instruments, catgut rather than steel violin strings, horns without valves, forte pianos, and so on. Ostensibly in the name of finding an authentic original sound (as if our ears could be cleansed of all sounds we have heard since 1791: the roar of steam machines; of jets; the rhythm of dot matrix printers; of all the music written and performed since then), to take us back to a pre-industrial innocence. [120] This was Mozart’s Masonic opera: a statement of belief about the world, a world of possible benevolence, wisdom, freedom from superstition (even as it of course invoked the supernatural of the fairy story, for the opera to move forward). The belief in knowledge, derived neither from aristocratic birth nor from God or the church. In the same era, you will remember that Washington and Jefferson were also freemasons, and held to precepts embodying what we now take for granted as the liberal principles of rational thinking and democratic government.

And then of course the central metaphor of the opera is that of darkness and light—characterised in the Queen of the Night and her world of darkness, and in Sarastro the High Priest of light. This is also characterised in the stage directions: “dark caverns giving way to the temple of the sun,” illusion giving way to knowledge.

The photographic and the projection of the photographic become the terrain for exploring the argument. In the studio and on stage, this meant setting the production in the nineteenth century and using the associations of photography to look at the shift between darkness and light. At base, I was trying to show the need for the darkness, for shadow, to be present for anything to be visible. The Queen of the Night is a photographic negative to the photographic

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positive imprint of Sarastro. The Temple of the Sun is a happy ending, but also the completely over-exposed film: the light of the projector when the film has finished and the reel runs out, when nothing more can be said. [121] I was making a series of experimental short films in various forms, loosely as a tribute to George Méliès, the early cinema pioneer. I was using illusionism, with films that were screened reversed in order to invert time, for example. While I was working away there, a small community of ants moved into the studio. I became fascinated by their activity, and realised that with a sugar trail I could manipulate them to move in formation. I became an ant wrangler. And they dashed about, following invisible lines, making waves and paisley motifs, trailing after one another. If I filmed them, I understood that I had a live animation line. What was a real discovery was when I then treated the film as ‘day for night,’ flipping over the values, so that I ended up with a field of white ants on a black ground. Filmed at a certain remove, these became an organic and mobile cluster of constellations, blinking in the night sky. This showed me a whole visual language for working with the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, while thinking about the Enlightenment. [122] ● Thabo Mbeki fires deputy president, Jacob Zuma, on charges of corruption ● Jacob Zuma is charged with raping thirty-one-year-old

family friend, Fezekile “Khwezi” Kuzwayo, but is acquitted after a trial in 2006

work

Solo exhibitions

○ Directs The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), La Monnaie, Brussels (and

tours to Lille; Caen; Tel Aviv; Naples; Geneva; New York; Artscape, Cape Town; Civic Theatre, Johannesburg; Opéra de Rouen Haute Normandie; Rouen; La Scala, Milan; Théatre des Champs-Elysée, Paris; and New National Theater, Tokyo) ○ Makes Preparing the Flute, a miniature theatre with drawings (charcoal, pastel, and coloured pencil on paper) and front and rear projections from 35 mm animated film, transferred to video, 21:06 min ○ Makes Black Box/Chambre Noire, a miniature theatre with drawings (charcoal, pastel, coloured pencil, and collage on paper), mechanical puppets, and back and front projection, including 35 mm animation and documentary footage, transferred to video, 22:00 min

○ William Kentridge, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg ○ William

Kentridge, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo (and tours to Limerick

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City Gallery of Art; and Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin)

○ William Kentridge: Black Box/Chambre Noire, Deutsche Guggen-

heim Museum, Berlin (and tours to Johannesburg Art Gallery, Museum Höxter-Corvey, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg) ○ William Kentridge, Galeria Lia Rumma, Naples ○ William Kentridge: 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Group exhibitions

2006

○ 51st Venice Biennale, titled The Experience of Art, curated by María

de Corral and Rosa Martínez; WK shows 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003) and Journey to the Moon (2003)

In 1904 a revolt was launched against the colonists in what was then German South West Africa. It was a new colony. German missionaries had come to spread the word of a Lutheran God in the 1890s. Cattle traders followed. After a drought in the late 1890s, local inhabitants, the Hereros, sold off vast tracts of land for a pittance. When the drought ended and herds started to revive, the Hereros regretted the sale and attempted to recapture some of the land. The initial revolt was successful. Some farmers were killed.

The garrison of the local town was repulsed when they intervened.

This was a calamity: an initial success in colonial revolts is always a calamity.

The metropolitan centre, in this case Germany, was mortified, and made sure not to under-react. An expeditionary force was sent out under General Von Trotha. He made a proclamation of annihilation: a Vernichtungsbefehl. Over the next three years, starting with the battle at the Waterberg, 80% of the Herero population was killed. Either killed in battle, or driven into the desert to die of hunger and thirst.

This was the first German genocide of the century, afterwards overlooked in the light of larger projects. The skulls of many of those killed were boiled, skinned, and thus, sanitised, sent back to Berlin to the Institute for Physical Anatomy. They were measured, analysed, catalogued—part of a rational, scientific project to make a taxonomy of human heads: the Aryan, the criminal, the Negro, the Jew—a new Great Chain of Being.

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This may seem a long way off, but it is still current. In September 2011, the skulls taken in 1904 were repatriated from the basement of the museum in Berlin, where they had survived the bombardment of the 1940s, back to the representative of the victims’ descendants in Windhoek. Claims for compensation against the German government make their way through the legal system. The ironies continue to reverberate. The main monument in Windhoek to the genocide is the equestrian statue of a German soldier. At the Waterberg, the site of the first battle, there is a well-tended cemetery of German soldiers who died in the first battle (seventeen, I think), and not a word regarding the thousands of Hereros who died in the battle, nor the tens of thousands who died afterwards.

This is not old history. It is where we still are embedded, in questions surrounding drone attacks in Afghanistan or Médecins Sans Frontiẻres (Doctors without Borders) in Somalia. The Herero genocide is part of a continuing set of questions and actions, questions of seeing, understanding, and the use of violence, a set of questions reaching from Plato’s cave to where we are here, and the studio becomes an emblematic space for working with these questions. [123] In the last part of the twentieth century, certainly in the west, there was a sense that enlightened democracy was winning the way and that rational thinking was dispelling superstition and all other forms of the irrational. But in fact, what we have seen in recent years is the extraordinary growth in what can best be described as organised belief in the supernatural. Certainly in the United States of George Bush, the basis of the entire administration was an organised belief in the supernatural. The same holds for many other parts of the world. [124] Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005) had as its narrative subject the Herero genocide of 1904—Germany at the end of the Enlightenment. The theatre used mechanical automata, projections, and a re-working of Mozart’s music. Trying to find through these very material means, answers to particular questions. History has to get onto the floor as a material presence.

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A series of formal questions emerge. How to show a mechanical beating, using the mechanism of a wooden toy. To listen to the music of Sarastro without his deep, reassuring voice, his Master’s voice. To play between Tamino’s taming of a rhinoceros with his flute, and that violence which no flute can enchant. The images both from within the opera and from what surrounds it, mediated by their material equivalents inside the studio.

The studio becomes a compression chamber for the images, ideas, historical links. The miniature theatre, a studio reduced further, a space for the elements to bounce against each other. [125] Art is strong when it is its own inadequate understanding of the circumstances. When art proclaims a certain understanding, a certainty, the chances are not likely to take it somewhere. So, along the way, there is a lot of art which acts as a testimony for its own era, but generally it is not work which has that as an agenda. Maybe some earlier works of mine, if you look at them in retrospect, give some indication of South African life at the time when they were made, but that was not the aim, when they were made. When I tried to do that, as a much younger artist who had a clear political programme in my works, the work failed in all different directions; both in terms of its vague aim of proclaiming a political understanding, and at being interesting as a drawing.

It is only when art avoids the imperatives of what one must or should do, that it has a hope of being eloquent. [126] ● A new HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections Strategic Plan

sees the South African government commit to providing antiretroviral treatment to 80% of those eligible. By December 2007, an estimated 424,009 patients receive ARVs, with the figure growing to 678,550 in 2008 ● South Africa becomes the fifth country in world, and the first in Africa, to legalise same-sex marriage ● Picasso and Africa, curated by Laurence Madeline and Marilyn Martin, at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, juxtaposes eighty-four original Picasso paintings and sculptures alongside twenty-nine African art objects; the exhibition spurs vigorous public debate about Picasso’s theft of African creativity

Solo exhibitions

○ William Kentridge/The Magic Flute: Drawings and Projections, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York ○ William Kentridge, San

Francisco Art Institute (includes 2006 McBean Distinguished

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Lecture) ○ William Kentridge: 7 Fragments for George Méliès, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne ○ William Kentridge: Preparing the Flute, Art for the World, Isola Madre ○ William Kentridge, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris ○ William Kentridge: What Will Come (has already come), curated by Sabine Schulze, Städel Museum, Frankfurt (and tours to Kunsthalle Bremen)

2007

I have done a series of anamorphic drawings, which I started in Italy when I was doing a workshop a few years ago. We visited the Galileo Museum (formerly Institute and Museum of the History of Science), where they had some seventeenth or eighteenth century anamorphic drawings: cylindrical mirrors with drawings distorted on a plane below them, reflected and seen in the mirror. Returning from that day trip, back to the farm where we were staying in Umbria, we found that people had been redoing the air-conditioning, and they had left lying around off-cuts of chromed metal heating duct pipes. These shiny cylindrical mirrors were immediately available.

Within half an hour of getting back it was possible to find out the grammar of what it is to draw an anamorphic drawing. [127] A drawing reflected in a cylindrical mirror is inherently unstable. A straight line drawn on a sheet of paper is turned into a parabola in the reflection. But it is an unreliable one. As your viewing distance to the cylindrical mirror changes, the parabola changes, getting a deeper or shallower curve. In order to draw what appears as a straight line on the mirror, a corresponding curve must be drawn on the sheet of paper. But the line cannot hold its rigidity. Move your head, and the straight line bends. [128] The drawings have a sense of time spent on them, of the erase, redraw, erase, redraw, which is one of the ways of the actual material manifesting the idea. In the process of moving your hand from one side of the table to the other, you have to take on trust its temporal existence, that it used to be there and now it is over here. There is nothing, when you look at it, that says it was there. But with animation, there is a way of erasing and drawing and erasing and drawing, that there is a ghost trace left. In the paper, you see that passage of the movement of the hand, which is of course also the passage of time, given by the material itself rather than an effect added. [129]

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● Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, curated by Simon

Njami, which originally debuted at the Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf in 2004, ends its world tour at the Johannesburg Art Gallery: its only showing on African soil; it includes work by WK ● Jacob Zuma defeats Thabo Mbeki in the leadership vote for the office of president of the ANC; Mbeki remains president of South Africa ● Maponya Mall, a private retail development named after Soweto entrepreneur Richard Maponya, opens in Soweto ● CAPE 07, Cape Town’s first post-apartheid biennale, opens at various venues across the city work

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions Award

2008

○ Makes What Will Come (has already come), a projection installation

with table, drawing paper, and cylindrical steel mirror, and a 35 mm animated film, transferred to video, 8:40 min ○ Shadow Procession is screened at Times Square, New York as part of The 59th Minute: Video Art on the Times Square Astrovision ○ Five large drawings are published in consecutive April editions of Il Sole 24 Ore, an Italian national daily business newspaper ○ William Kentridge: 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès and Black Box/ Chambre Noire, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (and tours to Malmo Konsthall, Stockholm) ○ William Kentridge: 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Journey to the Moon, Day for Night, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin ○ William Kentridge: What Will Come (has already come), Städel Museum, Frankfurt ○ William Kentridge: Doppelt Sehen – Neue Zeichnungen und Projektionen, Kunsthalle Bremen ○ William Kentridge’s Prints, Edinburgh Festival (and tours to Smith College, Northampton) ○ William Kentridge: Fragile Identities, University of Brighton ○ What Will Come, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg ○ William Kentridge: 10 Tapestries, Philadelphia Museum of Art (and tours to Capodimonte Museum, Naples) ○ Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, curated by Simon

Njami, touring exhibition, 2004–07

○ Order of Ikhamanga (Silver), National Orders, Pretoria

There is a photograph in a newspaper in Johannesburg within the last eighteen months that seems emblematic of where we are now. In this photograph you can see someone holding the bottom part of a beach umbrella, someone holding a golf club which looks like a sand wedge and someone holding a curio carved wooden giraffe and people with sticks that are difficult to identify.

This group of people is about to beat someone to death in the xenophobic attacks around Johannesburg … There is something of the domestic or the suburban and the violence in that newspaper photograph that for me is emblematic, not all of where we are, but part of where we are. In some ways, it seems by most indices

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things got worse rather than better. The middle class is better off, black or white, but the poor are as desperate and as destitute as ever, the only difference being there isn’t the possibility of a social transformation that was being held out in 1992. With the ANC taking power, one hoped within a generation that would be a distant image, but it is a very present image. There is a sense both of an optimistic future and a pessimistic future unwinding at the same time. Not to say that one is correct or the other is incorrect, or that you have to choose one or the other, they are both there all the time. [130] The trial of Soviet writer Nikolai Bukharin and the prelude to it, his interrogation by the Central Committee, was an extraordinary example of the absurd, the grotesquely humorous, in action.

Bukharin exemplifies so many of the victims of Stalinism, and stands as a practical example of language and logic taking their belongings and going on their own journey—showing that violence and the grotesquely comic are close bedfellows. This is something that seems very familiar from both the history and current situation in South Africa. [131] The contradiction continues, of a continent being assessed from outside itself for what it is, as if the long view, in which the entire continent can fit onto a single page of a map, in which all its differences can be obliterated in a single thought, continues today. It is unclear what makes the continent. Genetics? History?

Tradition? And whether talking of a continent makes any sense, except as the locus, the provocation, for the discussion of Africanness itself. [132] ● Mbeki resigns as the president of South Africa ● More than sixty

foreign nationals are killed in xenophobic violence across the country; Mozambican national, Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, becomes the symbol of anti-immigrant violence when he is stoned and set alight ● The gold price reaches $1,000 per ounce for the first time ever ● Increased demand for electricity and underinvestment in ageing infrastructure leads to rolling blackouts across South Africa ● The Sunday Times publishes Jonathan “Zapiro” Shapiro’s cartoon, Rape of Justice, prominently featuring Jacob Zuma, who institutes a legal suit against the artist ● The Joburg Art Fair, Africa’s first art fair devoted to contemporary art, opens in Johannesburg with a stand-alone exhibition curated by Simon Njami

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work

○ Makes I am not me, the horse is not mine, an eight-channel video installation, 35 mm film and video, transferred to video, 6:00 min ○ Makes

Breathe Dissolve Return, a three-channel video installation, 6:00 min; premieres at La Fenice opera house in Venice ○ Creates I am not me, the horse is not mine, a solo lecture / performance, directed by Sue Pam-Grant, 45:00 min; premieres at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town (and tours to MoMA, New York; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; Festival Bo:m, Seoul; Theater der Welt, Mulheim; Galeria Lia Rumma, Milan; The Garage, Moscow; and iDANS Festival, Istanbul) Solo exhibitions

○ William Kentridge: Seeing Double, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York ○ William Kentridge, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris ○ William Kentridge, Annandale Galleries, Sydney ○ (REPEAT) from the beginning/Da Capo, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice ○ I am not me, the horse

is not mine, William Kentridge: (REPEAT) From the Beginning, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

2009

The 4 am panic, the dark hour when every project seems both impossible and possible. Lying awake trying to redesign the largest of projects, four times over, between 4:17 am and 4:43 am in the morning. So I wake at 4 am. In the morning, trying to put the pieces together, thinking, should I be filming this panic also, as showing part of the process of how the lecture [for the performance I am not me, the horse is not mine] is made? Do I go out of the bedroom, out across the garden, unlock the studio, disarm the alarm, get a camera, calm the dogs, come back, and film this panic, this inability to make sense of all the fragmentary ideas that are lying around. There must be a limit to the crazy things one will do. Try to sleep. The artist is always at work, even when he sleeps. The artist is at work only when he sleeps. [133] TO UNDO. TO UNSAY. TO UNREMEMBER. TO UNHAPPEN. [134] THE TREE IN THE FOREST THE TABLE THE PENCIL THE BOOK THE SMOKE THE ASHES. [135]

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At a certain point, if you are an image-maker and not a scholar in a library, there has to be a belief that the activity in the studio is a way of understanding that the work is just. Or if not just, then justifiable. You must trust the different marks you are making on a piece of paper will lead you to a drawing of a face. [136] ● Jacob Zuma becomes president of South Africa ● Arts and Culture

Minister Lulama Xingwana refuses to open the exhibition Innovative Women, featuring ten artists, at Constitutional Hill, Johannesburg, claiming Zanele Muholi’s works are “crude misrepresentations of women masquerading as artworks” [137] ● CAPE 09, under the direction of trainee curators, opens at various venues in Cape Town ● Dada South?, curated by Kathryn Smith and Roger van Wyk, opens at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, exploring the legacy of Dada in South African art since 1960

2010

work

○ Makes first Drawing Lesson films, an informal and ongoing series

Solo exhibitions

○ William Kentridge, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle ○ William Kentridge: 5

of films shot in the studio that feature WK as a live actor, alongside drawings and animation

Themes, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and tours to Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; MoMA, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Albertina Museum, Vienna; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Garage, Moscow; and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne) ○ William Kentridge: What We See & What We Know—Thinking about History Whilst Walking, and thus the Drawings Began to Move, Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (and tours to National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art)

When I was twenty, I travelled to Paris from Johannesburg for the first time. I still have the sketchbook I carried with me. It contains drawings of people sitting in cafés, or at the hotel. There are also three drawings I made in the Louvre. Two are of Egyptian granite baboons; one is of a museum guard, resting in his chair. I am not sure why, of all the Egyptian objects, the only ones I drew were these two baboons. Perhaps it was the surprise at seeing such a familiar southern African animal in such an utterly transported place, first from South Africa to Egypt, and then from Egypt to France. I now know that the sculptures were in fact of the Egyptian deified baboon, Baba or Babi, scribe to the gods. The southern African link is both geographical and temporal: baboons are still common here in South Africa, but baboons had disappeared from Egypt long before

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the Pharaohs, and the sculptural baboons relied on some pre-dynastic memory. The baboons were reassuringly familiar. The visit to the Louvre was, of course, overwhelming. [138] To put a nose on stage one needs a nose that a person can hide inside to move about, so a small retroussé snub nose would not work. One needs a nose with a certain heft. For those I used a good Ashkenazi Jewish nose, I suppose a self-portrait, the nose as self-portrait. [139] A cat is a line. A dog is a dot. The principle of a cat is its spine. Draw any line, add some fur, some ears and whiskers, and you have a cat. A dog is its nose. Its movement is being led by its nose. A point leading the way. An arrow, at best a vector, across a page. In working with puppets, you can take a feather boa, put a tennis ball at one end, two sticks to support and manipulate the boa, and you have a cat that can sidle, rub itself against your leg, turn in on itself. For a dog, you need a head, to indicate the direction of the nose, and a tail, to comment on the nose’s findings. [140] We were doing the music for Stereoscope (1999), which Philip Miller was writing. The film has several sequences of a cat turning into a petard (an old round or canonical bomb). We were making this segment of the film in the house of a cello player. There was a dog in the room where we had silent film on the television set, while the musicians rehearsed the music for the quartet. Every time the cat appeared, the dog would prick up its ears and watch the screen intently. Then the cat would turn into a phone or a bomb and the dog would relax. Then the bomb would turn back into a cat and he’d start watching again. [141] ● South Africa successfully hosts the FIFA World Cup ● Protests in

Tunisia following street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation mark the start of the Arab Spring, a series of pro-democracy uprisings across the Middle East ● 1910–2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective, curated by Riason Naidoo, the first black director of the South African National Gallery, opens in Cape Town and surveys South African art in public collections nationally; two early animations by WK are included: Monument (1990) and Mine (1991)

work

○ Establishes a larger second studio at Arts on Main in central Johan-

nesburg, which is used mainly for larger sculptural work and performance workshops ○ Creates Carnets d’Egypte, two cycles of films

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titled Carnets d’Egypte (Salle 26) films, and Carnets d’Egypte (les livres) films; video using drawing, animation, live acting by WK; premieres at the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film ○ Directs The Nose, an opera

by Dmitri Shostakovich, at The Metropolitan Opera, New York (and tours to Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and Opera de Lyon; revival at The Metropolitan Opera, New York in 2013) ○ Creates Telegrams from the Nose with Francois Sarhan (composer), performed by Francois Sarhan and the Ictus Ensemble, Happy New Festival, Kortrijk (and tours to Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Musée du Louvre, Paris; and Centre Pompidou-Metz) ○ Sounds from the Black Box, a concert of music written by Philip Miller for WK’s films, is performed live by Ensemble Pi, Palazzo Reale, Milano (and tours to the World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York) ○ Performs in Playing on Image, a live concert with projected films and performances with Philip Miller and Jill Richards, Arts on Main, Johannesburg Solo exhibitions

○ William Kentridge: Ambivalent Affinities, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign ○ William Kentridge: Carnets d’Egypte,

Musée du Louvre, Paris ○ William Kentridge: Breathe, Dissolve, Return, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris

2011

Time is distance, but it is also geography. The nineteenth century coordination of clocks was undertaken to synchronise the clocks with stations in Europe. The cities of Europe would no longer construct their individual noons from when the sun was at its zenith. Basel and Paris would no longer have noon seven minutes apart, but would sacrifice their own noon for the sake of commerce and coordinated agreement.

The perfection of chronometers had long been the aim of geographers, to fix more precisely the positions of islands and continents in relation to Europe. With the spread of cables under sea and over land, that filled the development of electric telegraphy, time was taken from the master clocks of London and Paris and sent to the colonies.

The lines on maps were miniature renderings of the real lines of cables that snake their way around continents, or drew great arcs across the floors of the oceans. Sending and receiving stations followed the cable and marked the end of lines tethering the centre to the satellite colony. The clock and the colonial observatory completed the mapping of the world. These strings of cables, these birds’ nests of copper, turned the world into a giant switchboard, for commerce and control. Local suns were sent further and further from local zeniths. [142]

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The Refusal of Time (2012) … is an impossibility, but a necessary desire. We know we can’t stop time but we have to believe we could.

Part of The Refusal of Time is a resisting of the imposition of a global system, in this case the time zones of how we organise our life in time. If you think of the way in which time draws a map around the world, that led to the thought behind all the different ways of structuring images of the world, and in particular projection—in the sixteenth century I think it was—ways of drawing lines to describe a sphere as a flat surface so as to map the world. Anti-Mercator (2011), a preliminary work to The Refusal of Time that contains a lot of the ideas which were developed in the later project, is a resistance to systems of wanting to control time, the world, our lives. [143] I have worked with the dancer Dada Masilo for The Refusal of Time, in which a duet was performed between her dancing and my texts and thoughts about the nature of our attitude towards time. The pleasure of the work, of the interaction and of what that duet became, made me hunt for another project to work on with Dada. In another corner of the studio was this absence, a desire to continue the exploration of working not just with a dancer, but with Dada’s specific movements. [144] ● The Dalai Lama is refused entry into South Africa to attend the

eightieth birthday celebration of Desmond Tutu; China later thanks South Africa in 2014, when it again bars him from entry ● Civil unrest in Damascus and Aleppo leads to ongoing armed conflict in Syria ● The first ever South African Pavilion, curated by Thembinkosi Goniwe, is inaugurated at the Venice Biennale; the pavilion is, however, dogged by allegations of corruption ● Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, curated by Tamar Garb, shows at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London work

○ Makes Anti-Mercator, 35 mm film and video using drawing, animation, live actors, transferred to video, 9:45 min ○ Makes Other Faces, 35 mm animated film, transferred to video, 9:36 min ○ Creates Refuse

the Hour, in collaboration with Philip Miller (composer), Dada Masilo (choreography and dance), and Catherine Meyburgh (video construction and editing), theatre piece using projections, a dancer, actors, machines, live musicians and singers, 80:00 min; premieres at The Market Theatre, Johannesburg (performances at Quartier d’Ete festival, Paris; ImpulsTanz, Vienna; SchauspielHaus, Hamburg; Design Indaba, Cape Town; BAM, New York; Perth International Arts Festival; and Foreign Affairs: International Performing Arts Festival, Berlin)

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Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Awards

○ William Kentridge, Seagull Editions, Calcutta ○ William Kentridge, Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan ○ La Negation du Temps – Prologue, Le Laboratoire, Paris ○ William Kentridge: Other Faces, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York ○ I am not me, the horse is not mine, Cité du Livre, Aix-en-Provence ○ Chostakovitch, Atelier Cézanne, Aix-en-Provence ○ William Kentridge: Other Faces, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg ○ Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, works on paper curated

by Judith B. Hecker, MoMA, New York; WK shows Casspirs Full of Love (1989) and Walking Man (2000) ○ Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York ○ MASSART President’s Award for Creative Achievement, Boston ○ Southern Graphics Council International Award for Lifetime Achievement in Printing, Saint Louis ○ International Art Critics

Association Award (for the performance of I am not me, the horse is not mine, in conjunction with ‘Performa’), New York ○ Doctor of Literature Honoris Causa, London University

2012

It is not neutral to show images of dead bodies. [145] I was interested in Marikana, the photographs of it, wanting to know what the landscape actually feels like there. What are the traces that are still there, what are the registers of it? It was a day’s journey there and a lot of looking, some photographic references taken to aid my memory. When I went to Carletonville, I drew landscapes in a similar way to that in which I would drive a random distance. I wasn’t hunting for a particular mine or a particular scene, but I was interested to know what the Marikana landscape felt like. It’s not quite Johannesburg, it’s more than a hundred kilometres away. The geological formation of platinum-bearing rock is not the same as that where the gold mines are found, I think. But it is still the same Highveld landscape. The shocking thing was how small the landscape looked, how close to the town the hill was. How much larger the rock looked in the newspaper photographs than the actual hillock. How tiny the small koppie was across which people were chased by the police and executed between the rocks. And how sordid it felt. [146] There was a newspaper report about the people who were shot, followed and executed, with these yellow marks indicating each spot. The next day the marks had all been defaced and turned into graffiti, to hide the forensic evidence that was there. So there was

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an alteration, an animation of the actual landscape, that involved hiding its history. This is the way in which the world comes into the studio and suggests itself, meeting the process of drawing halfway.

[147] Once launched, an image, an event, a discus, cannot be called back.

It has the pressure of perfect memory. [148] ● On 16 August, police kill thirty-four striking miners at Marikana, a

platinum mining area north of Johannesburg, wounding 112 others.

It is the single most lethal use of force by security forces against civilians since the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 ● Brett Murray exhibits The Spear (2012), a painting depicting President Jacob Zuma in a Leninist pose with his penis exposed, at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; it provokes outrage and the public marches on the gallery; two members of the public deface the work ● The Soweto Theatre in Jabulani opens and features a one-night-only musical by musician Zakes Bantwini billed as “a tribute to Sophiatown” ● Wits Art Museum opens in Johannesburg; its collections include works amassed by prominent collectors Jack Ginsberg, Vittorio Meneghelli, and John Schlesinger

work

Awards

○ Delivers Six Drawing Lessons, a series of six lectures, for the

Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry, Harvard University, Cambridge (presented again in 2013 at the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, University of the Witwatersrand; in 2014 at SchauspielHaus, Hamburg; and in 2016 at Foreign Affairs: International Performing Arts Festival, Berlin) ○ Creates The Refusal of Time, in collaboration with Philip Miller (composer) and Catherine Meyburgh (video construction and editing), a five-channel video installation with four megaphones and breathing machine (elephant), 35 mm film and video with animation, live action, stills, transferred to video, 28:00 min ○ Member of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia ○ Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge ○ Member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres, et des Beaux-arts de Belgique, Brussels ○ Commandeur dans l’ordre des Arts

et des Lettres au titre de la promotiondes personnalités étrangères, France ○ Laureate of the Dan David Prize (for the Present Time Dimension in the Field of Plastic Arts), Tel Aviv University

Solo exhibitions

○ William Kentridge: No se unirá usted al baile, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga ○ William Kentridge: Universal Archive (parts 7–23), Annandale Galleries, Sydney ○ MCA DNA: William Kentridge, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago ○ William

Kentridge: Fortuna, Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro (and tours to Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre; Pinacoteca do Estado de

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São Paulo; and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City) ○ William Kentridge: I am not me, the horse is not mine, Tate Modern, London ○ William Kentridge: Vertical Thinking, MAXXI – Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Milan ○ William Kentridge as Printmaker, The Blue Coat, Liverpool (and tours to MAC, Birmingham; QUAD, Derby; and University of Northumbria Gallery, Newcastle) ○ William Kentridge: No, It Is, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town Group exhibitions

○ dOCUMENTA (13), curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Kassel; WK shows The Refusal of Time (2012) ○ Rise and Fall of Apartheid:

Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, curated by Okwui Enwezor with Rory Bester, International Centre of Photography, New York (and tours to Haus der Kunst, Munich; Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea Milano, Milan; and Museum Africa, Johannesburg); WK shows Mine (1991), Felix in Exile (1994), and Weighing … and Wanting (1998)

2013

In the corner of the studio is a press for printing etchings. The press has a double metaphor. On the one hand, intimate and domestic.

There is the bed of the printing press, covered by blankets (thick felt) to protect the sheet (the sheet of paper under the blanket).

Under the blanket, on top of the sheet, we make sense of the open bite, the foul bite, the spit bite, the drypoint, the hard ground. An entire erotics of etching, a process that has an essential physical sensuousness: the gentle wiping of the hand, the soft ground, the open bite … But the etching press is also a primitive machine for logic. A plate is prepared: a proposition. Through acid, engraving burins, drypoint scratches, the pittings with the dot of an aquatint, the smooth surface of the plate is disturbed. It is inked, excess ink is cleaned off the surface, it goes through the bed of the press: the sheet of paper, the blanket. This layered collection—the blanket, the sheet of paper, the copper—passes under the rollers of the press, the paper pressed into the plate. On the other side of the roller, the blanket and the sheet of paper are peeled back; and we have—a proof. The proof is a record of all the damage done to the plate. [149] Linocut is a marginal medium in America and Europe, but remains a major means of expression for many South Africans—both because it is inexpensive and because by now there is a strong tradition of lino work. [150]

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The images in lino, as opposed to woodcut or wood engraving, are broad and simple. There is an affinity with the decorative fabric designed in some African countries, white fabric with black ribbon stitched onto it. Images are constructed not from an illusionistic web of fine lines, as in engraving or etching, where the line becomes invisible as flesh, cloth, cloud, tree, but from large blocks of black and white. Thick lines, broad decisions. There is an immediate resonance with carving—the lino block as shallow-relief carving.

The line of linocut is halfway between looseness and freedom of drawing and the resistance of a material to be carved and cut. [151] I’m really not a sculptor. I’ve made a lot of sculpture, but it’s made as a drawing. Sometimes extruding something into space, sometimes working with the flatness of it, sometimes with the illusion of coherence of an image and allowing it to find itself. But I am not carving and not ‘finding something inside’ the material. I am not using a chisel the way I would use an eraser, where you can cut something off and repair it. The tact of a sculptor is always to be approaching the figure, and to stop when he reaches it. [152] There is the difference between etching and engraving and linocut and silkscreen and digital printing, and I think there are interesting political questions concerning these different printmaking techniques. Linocut, for example, relates back to German expressionism, and the German woodcut comes from the experience of artists looking at the African wood masks at the same time as Picasso. But in South Africa linocut technique was reintroduced in places like Rorke’s Drift by European missionaries who know German expressionism, reintroduced to linocut makers; they in turn connect back to the masks that had been there previously.

For me it is where such connections are at their most distorted and mistranslated, several times over, that the authentic journey lies. [153] ● Nelson Mandela dies in Johannesburg; crowds jeer at president Jacob Zuma at the funeral ● Report finds that 67% of South African land is owned by mainly white farmers ● The state declares it illegal

to publish photographs of Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla residence

work

○ Holds a public conversation with his father, Sir Sydney Kentridge,

in the context of the exhibition Rise and Fall of Apartheid, Haus der

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Kunst, Munich ○ Creates Second-hand Reading, with Neo Muyanga (composer), HD video, 7:01 min ○ Delivers Thinking on one’s feet: A walking tour of the studio (lecture) and Pictures and Texts (symposium) as part of the Humanitas 2013 Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art, Universities of Oxford and Cambridge ○ Delivers a public lecture, Listening to the Image, at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago Solo exhibitions

○ William Kentridge: Poems I Used to Know, Volte Gallery, Mumbai ○ William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ○ William Kentridge: Second-hand Reading, Marian Good-

man Gallery, New York

Awards

2014

○ Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, Yale University, New Haven ○ Distin-

guished Visiting Humanist, University of Rochester, New York

I am completely interested in Picasso’s stage work … I spent a lot of time looking at the different models he did for the ballet Parade (1917), and I was struck by the way in which they look really beautiful as sculptures, and I suspect were rather flat and unremarkable as objects on stage. Having done a lot of work looking at the difference between puppets that are beautiful objects, and then having to find puppets that actually work on stage telling a story, I am often very struck by the difference between the two. The things that look like beautiful objects can often die a death on stage, and things which are rather unremarkable as sculptures can be very eloquent in movement. [154] In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, people turn into trees, birds, objects, figures—always a response to some kind of emergency. When Pelops wanted to get back at her husband, she fed him her own children. When he discovered what had happened he is enraged, and takes his great curved sword and chases her through the halls of the palace. She, in her panic to escape, becomes a bird and flies out into the forest. He, in his rage, turns into a wood hoopoe, his curved sword becoming a curved beak. There is this classic metamorphosis, but it is also a response to an impossible situation. [155] Some years ago my daughter Isabella applied for a scholarship. On the scholarship application form she had to list “father’s occupation.” There was no category on the form for artist. The nearest

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thing, which she chose to put down, was “semi-skilled manual labourer”—because, as she said, “It is not as if you really have any skills, you are not a watch-maker, you are not a jeweller, you can’t fix anything in the house.” Having a family gives one a good perspective on oneself. My wife, who is a real doctor, not semiskilled in the arts of healing, says, “Don’t for one moment think you can bring that hood and funny hat with you into the house and call yourself doctor.” [156] ● Electricity blackouts return to South Africa ● Athlete Oscar Pistori-

us is found guilty of culpable homicide in the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp; the credibility of his legal defence, writes Mandisi Majavu, relies on “white angst about crime in post-apartheid South Africa” [157]

work

Solo exhibitions

2015

○ Creates and directs, Paper Music, with Philip Miller (composer),

featuring Ann Masina and Joanna Dudley (vocalists) and Vincenzo Pasquariello (piano), 60:00 min; premieres at Bargello Museum, Florence (and tours to Carnegie Hall, New York; Foreign Affairs: International Performing Arts Festival, Berlin; Cité de la Musique at The Philharmonie de Paris; and Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris) ○ Directs Winterreise, based on Franz Schubert’s 1828 composition, with performances by Matthias Goerne (voice) and Markus Hinterhäuser (piano); premieres at Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (and tours to Teatro dei Rinnovati, Siena; Singapore International Festival of Arts; Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg; Lincoln Center, New York; and Foreign Affairs: International Performing Arts Festival, Berlin) ○ Delivers the lecture, A Dream of Love Reciprocated: History & the Image as part of the Mosse Lecture series, Humboldt University, Berlin ○ William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (and tours to Parasophia, Kyoto; Perth International Arts Festival; Johannesburg Art Gallery; EMMA, Helsinki; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus) ○ William Kentridge: Drawings: East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg ○ William Kentridge: Tapestries, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg

A bowl of peonies; an image of an ink drawing of a small bird, a sparrow. The drawing of the peonies is on the wall of the studio; the birds still hover as an idea. A sense of a vague image, an image that feels specific but isn’t yet fixed—an image, a smudge of ink on paper becoming a bird.

Let it be said I am bad at focusing on a single thought. But somehow have to rescue this failure. I will latch onto any stray image

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and thought that lets me off the hook, or prolongs the moment when I have to start pushing a thought.

Mangoes, swallows, sparrows, the peonies;

an enamel jug the expulsion of Pope Clementine in 1440;

a drawing of the movement of a horse portraits of the composer Alban Berg, his wife, his mistress;

three Highveld landscapes pages of a Chinese dictionary;

photos of a political rally in Dar es Salaam pages from a newspaper from the Paris Commune of 1871.

These are all images up on the walls of the studio …

Circling the studio there is a persistent peripheral vision of the images on the walls of the studio. You can stop walking and study them, but they can also float at the edges of vision as you pass.

Reminders of that which you are not focused on. [158] China certainly hovers over us like a huge zeppelin. The scale of it, the scale of its hunger for resources, the scale of everything.

China in Africa today, a sense of a series of questions rather than any answers. Are we here the tethered goat waiting for the tiger?

Easy pickings? [159] ○ Felicia Kentridge, WK’s mother, dies

At the time of the [Chinese] Cultural Revolution, painters whose works was described as being too formal or not revolutionary in subject were castigated as ‘Black Painters’. Their careers and those of their supporters amongst the nomenclatura were ended. Of course, in many cases the clashes were between people in power, and the artists were merely acceptable casualties in their battles.

But there were real arguments. It comes back to the studio. What should an artist paint? Revolutionary narrative in a familiar form?

The Peking Opera? The ballet en pointe? Or a new way of making art in which the ostensible subject matter was never the real subject of the art? [160]

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I was invited by the Metropolitan Opera to direct a production of Alban Berg’s opera, Lulu. I turned down the invitation. I didn’t have a solution for working on an opera that was four hours long.

The charcoal animation technique I used was fine for projects which were fragmentary, which were short. It could take a month to animate a minute and here was four hours in the theatre needing to be imagined, to be put into images.

I had already directed one theatre production, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, in which a woman is stabbed to death. I couldn’t imagine doing another project in which again the central woman is the subject of the violence of her lover. I couldn’t make sense of the music of Lulu, which does not have any clearly recognisable melodies. No audience member comes out of the performance humming a tune. I had no possible way of entry into the opera.

I mentioned my rejection of the offer to two women friends who were musicians. I was castigated by both of them.

“It’s the great opera of the twentieth century.”

“But it’s so misogynist.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Lulu is the most interesting character in opera. How could you turn it down?”

“Oh,” I said, “of course yes, yes you are right. I misunderstood.”

I had to recalibrate. There were obviously things in the opera that I had been both blind and deaf to. [161] ● A bronze sculpture of the colonial politician and mining oligarch

Cecil John Rhodes is removed from the University of Cape Town following weeks of protest by students—under the banner of #RhodesMustFall—around the lack of transformation on campus; the event inaugurates national student activism for free, decolonised tertiary education ● Jacob Zuma briefly appoints ANC backbencher Des van Rooyen as finance minister; financial markets react negatively, costing the economy $34 billion ● Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini calls for foreigners in South Africa to “pack their belongings and go,” promoting a wave of xenophobic violence in Durban; seven foreigners are killed, and Nigeria recalls its ambassador ● French economist Thomas Piketty, speaking in Soweto, describes “the inequality regime” that existed under apartheid as “much more oppressive and violent than the Ancien Régime in France” [162]

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work

Solo exhibitions

○ Creates More Sweetly Play the Dance with Janus Fouché (video con-

struction), an eight-channel video installation with four megaphones, sound, HD video, 15:00 min ○ Creates Notes Towards a Model Opera, with Dada Masilo (choreographer and dancer) and Philip Miller (composer), a three-channel HD video projection, 11:22 min ○ Directs Lulu, the opera by Alban Berg, which premieres at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam (and tours to The Metropolitan Opera, New York; the English National Opera, London; and Teatro Dell’Opera, Rome) ○ Delivers lecture Peripheral Thinking at the Design Indaba 2015, Cape Town (and tours to MUAC, Mexico City; Europalia Festival, Brussels; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; and Yale University, New Haven) ○ Delivers lecture O Sentimental Machine, as the 2015–16 Belknap Visitor in the Humanities, Princeton University ○ William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town ○ William Kentridge: If We Ever Get to Heaven, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Amsterdam ○ William Kentridge: The Nose,

HausKonstruktiv, Zurich ○ William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing (and tours to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul) ○ William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance, Marian Goodman Gallery, London ○ William Kentridge: LULU, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York Group exhibitions

2016

○ Double Vision: Albrecht Dürer / William Kentridge, a two-artist exhi-

bition, held in collaboration between the Freie Universität Berlin and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Kupferstichkabinett ○ 56th Venice Biennale, titled All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor ○ 14th Istanbul Biennial, titled SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev; WK shows Tide Table (2003) and O Sentimental Machine (2015)

There is a project already underway in the studio—another frieze, this time for the darkened marble walls of the banks of the Tiber River, from Ponte Sisto towards Castel Saint Angelo, a 500 m straight section of the river with walls ten metres high.

This frieze will be a series of drawings made using the bacteria and pollution that have darkened the marble stones. Stencils of figures will be cut out—ten metre high stencils—and the wall around and between each stencil washed with high pressure hoses, leaving a trace of dark figures against the white of the newly cleaned marble. A frieze viewed by walking along its length.

The subject of this frieze is Triumphs and Laments. Pinned on the studio walls are preparatory charcoal drawings of heroes and victims from Roman history. Dead Romulus (from a fifteenth century engraving), the head of Saint Theresa in ecstasy, Marcello

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Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain, the dead filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (from a newspaper photograph), the widows of Lampedusa, a sculpture of Cicero.

The question of image and theme shatter into the practicalities of the making, moving between the concrete offer of the project, the walls, the themes the walls suggest, and logistical steps to work on the walls. [163] My connection with Italy has to do with the stories my father told me as a young child. He was in the South African Air Force as an intelligence officer, and was with the Allied Forces as they came up from Sicily during the second part of the Second World War. I think that from that moment he had a love for Italy, so of all the places in Europe, Italy is the most infectious for me. My father learned to speak Italian during that period. The first opera he saw was either at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples or the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. I think Italy was where my father seemed most at ease in the world. When I went to visit Italy with him for the first time when I was six, I’d already heard all these stories about the country, and I could see the pleasure in his face as he showed us around. I’m sure there is an echo back to my father in Triumphs and Laments. [164] When I asked Philip Miller to compose the music for Triumphs and Laments, I had just heard for the first time the celebrated Charles Ives piece Three Places in New England (1903–14), which experiments with musical quotation, after Ives heard two different marching bands playing at the same time. This gave me the idea to have two marching bands—one representing triumphs and one representing laments—which would pass through each other during a procession on the Tiber River. [165] The brass band of course comes out of Western music, but it is inflected by a lot of African elements. It essentially starts as church music, so it has brought the scales and tonality from a European tradition. But there is something very visceral and immediate, without knowing exactly what is being done musically, that I

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respond to so strongly in that brass band. I think it has to do with the sense of public, with the sense of a large group activity— different from the formality of a symphony orchestra. [166] ● The South African Public Protector’s State of Capture report details high-levels of corruption in the Zuma-led government ● Protesting

students at the University of Cape Town torch twenty-four artworks, most of them paintings, and separately vandalise a photo exhibition commemorating the anniversary of the #RhodesMustFall movement ● Parliamentary hearings uncover executive political interference at the state broadcaster (SABC), as well as a gross misuse of public funds ● Protestors picket Our Lady, a group exhibition at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, featuring a photograph by murder-accused Zwelethu Mthethwa, who is later found guilty of murdering a sex worker in 2013 work

solo exhibitions

○ Creates Triumphs and Laments, a monumental frieze along the

banks of the Tiber River, inaugurated with performance events directed by composer Philip Miller, in collaboration with local street musicians ○ Creates A Guided Tour of the Exhibition: for Soprano with Handbag, with Joanna Dudley, multimedia lecture, c. 40:00 min; performed at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, as part of Foreign Affairs: International Performing Arts Festival

○ William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York ○ William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg ○ William Kentridge: Triumphs, Laments and Other Processions, Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan ○ William

Kentridge: Triumphs and Laments, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO) Via Nizza ○ William Kentridge, NO IT IS!, curated by Wulf Herzogenrath, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin ○ William Kentridge: Thick Time, curated by Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery, London (and tours to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Museum der Moderne and Rupertinum, Salzburg; and the Whitworth Museum, Manchester)

2017

I discovered years ago, when I was a student working in theatre, that I would always defer to certainty, to people who felt certain.

I thought, “Well, they know what they like, they must be right, because they are so certain and I am so uncertain.” It took me a long time to realise that in fact, in many cases, in retrospect I’d preferred my uncertain impulses to the certainty which was presented. So it was important to find collaborators who could work within this floating space of allowing what we are not certain of either to prove itself or to disappear, or to suggest other things which we would follow. [167]

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I SHOUT THINK THINK THINK! THE FACT THE FACT THE FACT KABOOM! KABOOM! KABOOM! (This is a fair idea of progress) [168] The Centre for the Less Good Idea houses the question of how we collectively take responsibility for constructing the world. Who takes responsibility, and for which functions? Who does that work? Is that a collective responsibility? [169] ● Private security ejects members of the opposition party, the Eco-

nomic Freedom Fighters, from the National Assembly during the State of the Nation Address opening Parliament ● Fred Khumalo publishes the historical novel Dancing the Death Drill, about the SS Mendi, which sank off the Isle of Wight in 1917, during which more than 600, mostly black, South African soldiers drowned ● Koleka Putuma publishes her debut poetry collection, Collective Amnesia: “I have inherited a lineage of hand-me-downs. / It has made me a mechanic and magician. / It has made my bank account a bucket with a hole. / Black tax is the water” [170] ● Two private art museums open in Cape Town: the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, housed in a reimagined grain silo redesigned by the British architect, Thomas Heatherwick, and the Norval Foundation

work

○ Launches the Centre for the Less Good Idea, Arts on Main, Johannesburg ○ Directs Wozzeck, the opera by Alban Berg, which premieres

at the Salzburg Festival (and tours to the Sydney Opera House; The Metropolitan Opera, New York; and the Canadian Opera Company, Toronto) ○ Makes Lexicon, a series of forty-four small bronzes

Solo exhibitions

○ That Which We Do Not Remember, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg ○ William Kentridge. Enough and more than enough, curated by Manuel Borja-Villel and Soledad Liaño, Reina Sofia, Madrid ○ William Kentridge. Smoke, Ashes, Fable, curated by Margaret K. Koerner, Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges ○ William Kentridge: Universal Archive, Trout Gallery at the University of Dickinson, Carlisle (and tours to the Walsh Gallery, Fairfield University Museum, Connecticut; and The Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania) ○ Procession of Reparationists, a site-specific installation of fifteen steel silhouettes on thirteen concrete and metal plinths, supervised by Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, east courtyard of OGR, Turin ○ Journey to the Moon, Hilliard University Art Museum, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette ○ O Sentimental Machine, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris

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2018

All projects—even those which end on a stage—are developed in my studio in Johannesburg. A good space with simple technologies: camera, video projectors, costumes left from previous work. A space for working with actors and performers; and a smaller studio space for working on the stage model of the project … In the protected and heated space of the studio, wonderful things develop. For Wozzeck, there were dancers with chairs, there was a choreography of shell shock, there was shadow puppetry, some elements used and some not used in the final production … There was so much left at the edge of the production, that as we started on the next production, many of the items called to be looked at again, to be brought back onto stage. This was the heart of the start of The Head & the Load. To start from the team: the designers, the performers, the musicians.

From this, the project developed. [171] The first shots in anger in World War One were fired in Togo on 3 August 1914. The war in Africa finished ten days after the armistice of 1918, when news of the end of the war in Europe was confirmed …

While The Head & the Load started as a project looking at Africa in World War One, it developed into a project about the paradoxes of colonialism. This was not its starting point, but it is what the work itself, the material we were dealing with, pushed us towards.

By the paradox I mean the contradictory relationships towards Europe—the desire of Africans to be part of Europe, to share in the wealth and the richness of Europe, and wanting to resist Europe and its depredations.

There was a desire on the part of many Africans to be part of the war. Blaise Diagne, the first black deputy in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris, demanded “the right to serve in the French army as all French citizens do. We offer a harvest of devotion.” Sol Plaatje, who had been to England to protest against the 1913 Land Act—which reserved most of the land in South Africa exclusively for the ownership and use of white South Africans—returned to South Africa and argued strongly for Africans to be allowed to fight in the war.

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Both Diagne and Plaatje hoped that after the war civil rights would come: equal rights as citizens, or at least an amelioration of the intolerable conditions under which Africans lived in the colonies.

A hope that after colonial powers saw the sacrifices that Africans had made in the war, they would have to change their attitudes, behaviour and laws. It was a vain hope. [172] Usungi thathele konke enginako

You have already taken all I have.

Kodwa ngoba ungu mgodi kawugcwali Nakhu usubyile usuzo landa indodana yami

Now you are taking my son.

Mhla semuka sasinje ngama qabunga esihlahla somkhiwane ehlobo

When we left we were as numerous as the leaves on a tree.

Aba sala enkundleni banjenga maqapunga phansi komuthi entwasa hlobo

The dead lay like leaves under a tree.

Mhla sibuya sasinjenge sihlahla shishywe yizulu lama ndebele

When we returned the tree was bare.

Bathathwa ngenkani ye selesele bengafuni

They were recruited by force.

Wonke umuzi kwakufanele unikele ngomdondoshiya wensizwa eyodwa

Every household had to produce one young man.

Amabhinca waskhihla esika Nandi

The mothers were crying.

Okwentambo kwa tshutshwa ezindlebeni baboshwa njengezinkabi emasimini

Ropes were put through their earlobes and tied together. [173] The flickering projections we see in the news of people fleeing floods, civil war, refugees, migrations, refugees returning, displacements—still, two and a half thousand years later, so largely on foot, individual human power still the central means of locomotion, handcarts, wheelbarrows, shopping carts the only aids. The head and the load are still the troubles of the neck. [174]

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● Cyril Ramaphosa becomes president of South Africa following Jacob Zuma’s resignation after nine years in power ● Parliamentarians

debate amending the Constitution to provide for land expropriation without compensation ● Omari Monono (aged three) falls into a pit-latrine toilet outside his aunt’s house and dies. At the same time, the family of Michael Komape (aged five), who died in similar circumstances after falling into a similar toilet at his school in 2014, lose their case against the state for general and constitutional damages. It is estimated that more than 4,500 schools still have these latrines

work

Solo exhibitions

○ Creates The Head & the Load, with Philip Miller (composer),

Thuthuka Sibisi (co-composer and musical director), and Gregory Maqoma (choreography), an installation with a live performance featuring dancers and the chamber orchestra, The Knights, 85:00 min; premieres at the Tate Modern, London (and tours to the Ruhrtriennale, Bochum; and Park Avenue Armory and Holland Festival, Amsterdam) ○ Makes Paragraph II, a series of twenty-three small bronzes ○ Makes KABOOM!, a three-channel video installation with projections onto model stage, 18:00 min

○ More Sweetly Play the Dance, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin ○ O Sentimental Machine, curated by Vinzenz Brinkmann and Kristin Schrader, Liebieghaus Skulpturesammlung, Frankfurt ○ Triumphs

& Laments, curated by Pamela Allara and Joseph D. Ketner II, Emerson Urban Arts, Media Art Gallery, Boston ○ That Which We Do Not Remember, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (and tours to Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide)

2019

Is it possible to tell a story without telling it through the story of one individual—the girl, the soldier, the hero, standing in for the whole war? To make not a tragedy, which is always constructed around one person, perhaps not even a comedy. But to work from understanding history as fragmented (or the past as fragmented) and understanding history as a construction of fragments that make a provisional understanding of the past. Here we have a choice, whether to hide the joints between the different fragments, or to show the white scars of the joints of the reconstructed vase, to show the completed vessel made up of so many shards. [175] There’s a deep reassurance in the weight of a book in one’s hands, the comfort of the book remembering for us. There are some people fortunate enough to remember all the plots, all the characters of all the books they have ever read, but for those of us who are not on this

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memory spectrum whatsoever, there is a reassurance in the books that sit on your shelf silently holding their breath and keeping that knowledge and those memories for you. [176] VIVA DOUBT VIVA Neither acquiescence Nor CERTITUDE [177] ● A commission of inquiry led by Justice Raymond Zondo

investigates allegations of state capture, corruption, and fraud in the public sector, including the organs of state ● Cyclone Idai causes widespread flooding and devastation in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi ● Electricity blackouts return to South Africa ● Threats of book burnings and disruptions mark the launch of Pieter-Louis Myburgh’s book, Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule’s Web of Capture ● Middle-distance runner Caster Semenya loses her appeal against a new athletics ruling requiring hyperandrogenous athletes to medicate their testosterone levels

work

Makes a series of twelve mid-size, and three large-scale Lexicon bronzes ○ Makes The Mouth is Dreaming (in progress), animated film, HD Video ○ Makes Waiting for the Sibyl, a chamber opera with Kyle Shepherd and Nhlanhla Mahlangu (composers), approx. 40:00 min; premieres at Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Rome

Solo exhibitions

○ William Kentridge: Let Us Try For Once, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York ○ William Kentridge: A Poem That Is Not Our Own, curated

by Josef Helfenstein, Kunstmuseum Basel (and tours to LaM Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut) ○ William Kentridge: Ten Drawings for Projection, EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam ○ Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture, Norval Foundation, Cape Town ○ Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town

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ENDNOTES

[1]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 98.

[2]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 13.

[3]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 97–98.

[4]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 15.

[5]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 156.

[6]

Kentridge, W. 2013. Thinking on one’s feet: A walking tour of the studio, Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art: University of Oxford. Madrid: Ivory Press

[7]

Kentridge, W. Forthcoming. Constable: Finding the Dapple. New York: Frick Museum.

[8]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 83–84.

[9]

Macmillan, H. 1960. ‘Wind of Change.’ Speech addressed to the South African parliament. Cape Town, 3 February. Recording available online. BBC archive.

[10]

Kentridge, W. Forthcoming. Constable: Finding the Dapple. New York: Frick Museum.

[11]

Kentridge, W. 2018. ‘Quello che non Ricordo.’ Lecture given on the occasion of receiving the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize, Rome, 9 November. Transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[12]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 81.

[13]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 71–72.

[14]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 58.

[15]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 76.

171

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[16]

Kentridge, W. Forthcoming. Constable: Finding the Dapple. New York: Frick Museum.

[17]

Nkosi, L. 1965. Home and Exile. London: Longman Group Ltd, p. 16.

[18]

Kentridge, W. 2018. ‘By Which Is Meant.’ O Sentimental Machine edited by V. Brinkmann & K. Schrader. Bielefeld & Berlin: Kerber Verlag, pp. 35, 37.

[19]

Gordimer, N. 1966. The Late Bourgeois World. London: Bloomsbury, p.

100.

[20]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, pp. 27–28.

[21]

Kentridge, W. 2005. Interview with Sean O’Toole in Houghton, Johannesburg, 05 July. Transcript in the possession of the interviewer.

[22]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 197.

[23]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 172.

[24]

Kentridge, W. 2005. Interview with Sean O’Toole in Houghton, Johannesburg, 05 July. Transcript in the possession of the interviewer.

[25]

Kentridge, W. 2015. ‘Peripheral Thinking.’ Notes Towards a Model Opera edited by Karen Marta. Beijing, London: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Koenig Books, pp. 134–135.

[26]

Kentridge, W. 2009. ‘Double Lines.’ William Kentridge: Five Themes edited by Mark Rosenthal & Michael Auping. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, p. 251.

[27]

Kentridge, W. 2007. ‘Painting Maps.’ Vivienne Koorland: Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes) edited by Tamar Garb. London: The Freud Museum, p. 226.

[28]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Conversation with Penny Siopis. Unpublished transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[29]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 82.

[30]

Kentridge, W. 2016. Interview for In Terms of Performance. Transcript available online.

172

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[31]

Van Wyk, C. 1979. It is Time to go Home. Johannesburg: AD Donker, p. 45.

[32]

Mnyele, T. 2006. ‘Autobiographical Notes.’ Messages and Meaning: The MTN Art Collection edited by Philippa Hobbs. Johannesburg: MTN Foundation, p. 118.

[33]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 84.

[34]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Hope as a Political Category. Keynote address delivered at the University of Cape Town, 18 December. Unpublished transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[35]

Kentridge, W. 2004. ‘In Praise of Shadows.’ William Kentridge edited

by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev & Jane Taylor. Milan: Skira, p. 157.

[36]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, pp. 204–205.

[37]

Kentridge, W. 2016. ‘William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland.’

William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letters and Lines edited by Tamar Garb. Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery, p. 126.

[38]

Kentridge, W. 2016. Interview for In Terms of Performance. Transcript available online.

[39]

Kentridge, W. 2018. ‘By Which Is Meant.’ O Sentimental Machine edited by V. Brinkmann and K. Schrader. Bielefeld & Berlin: Kerber Verlag, p. 34.

[40]

hooks, b. 1998. ‘Breaking Down the Wall: Interview with William Kentridge,’ Interview Magazine, September, p. 167.

[41]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 208.

[42]

Kentridge, W. 2016. ‘William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland.’

William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letters and Lines edited by Tamar Garb. Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery, p. 120.

[43]

‘About Staffrider.’ 1978. Staffrider 1(1): 2.

[44]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Hope as a Political Category. Keynote address delivered at the University of Cape Town, 18 December. Unpublished transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

173

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[45]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 88.

[46]

Kentridge, W. 2015. Interview with Cécile Godefroy and Vérane Tasseau for Cahiers d’Art Special Issue, 2015 Picasso: In the Studio.

London: Thames & Hudson. English transcript in the possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[47]

Kentridge, W. 2009. ‘Double Lines.’ William Kentridge: Five Themes edited by Mark Rosenthal & Michael Auping. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, p. 231.

[48]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 98.

[49]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 56–57.

[50]

Kentridge, W. 2015. ‘Peripheral Thinking.’ Notes Towards a Model Opera edited by Karen Marta. Beijing, London: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Koenig Books, p. 113.

[51]

Kentridge, W. 2016. Interview for In Terms of Performance. Transcript available online.

[52]

Kentridge, W. 2004. ‘In Praise of Shadows.’ William Kentridge edited

by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev & Jane Taylor. Milan: Skira, p. 157.

[53]

Kentridge, W. 2014. A Dream of Love Reciprocated: History & the Image. Lecture given at Humboldt University, Berlin, as part of Mosse Lecture series, 3 February. Unpublished transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[54]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull, p. 86.

[55]

Wroe, N. 2016. ‘Out of South Africa: how politics animated the art of William Kentridge.’ The Guardian, 10 September. Available online.

[56]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 105.

[57]

Gordimer, N. 1983. ‘Living in the Interregnum,’ New York Review of Books, 20 January, p. 21.

[58]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 151–152; 154–155; 156.

[59]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 155.

174

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[60]

Ndebele, N.S. 1984. ‘Turkish Tales and Some Thoughts on SA Fiction.’ Staffrider 6(1):44.

[61]

Kentridge, W. 2009. ‘Double Lines.’ William Kentridge: Five Themes edited by Mark Rosenthal & Michael Auping. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, p. 245.

62]

Kentridge, W. 2013. Thinking on one’s feet: A walking tour of the studio, Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art: University of Oxford. Madrid: Ivory Press, pp. 7, 10.

[63]

Botha, P.W. 1985. Address at the opening of the National Party Congress, Durban, 15 August. Transcript available online. Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.

[64]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 102.

[65]

Kentridge, W. Forthcoming. Constable: Finding the Dapple. New York: Frick Museum.

[66]

Kentridge, W. 2013. ‘On the Aesthetic and Political Language of Art: A Conversation between Kendell Geers and William Kentridge moderated by Okwui Enwezor.’ Kendell Geers 1988–2012 edited by Clive Kellner. Munich: Prestel, p. 103.

[67]

Kentridge, W. 1993. ‘Fortuna: Neither Programme nor Chance in the Making of Images.’ Lecture transcript published in ChristovBakargiev, C. 1998. William Kentridge. Brussels: Palais des BeauxArts, p. 67.

[68]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 158.

[69]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 20.

[70]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 74.

[71]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull, p. 139.

[72]

Enwezor, O. 1998/99. ‘Truth and Responsibility: A Conversation with William Kentridge,’ Parkett 54:168.

175

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[73]

Kentridge, W. 2016. ‘William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland.’

William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letters and Lines edited by Tamar Garb. Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery, p. 133.

[74]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 56.

[75]

Sachs, A. 1990. Protecting Human Rights in a New South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, p. 175.

[76]

Kentridge, W. 2013. ‘On the Aesthetic and Political Language of Art: A Conversation between Kendell Geers and William Kentridge moderated by Okwui Enwezor.’ Kendell Geers 1988–2012 edited by Clive Kellner. Munich: Prestel, p. 103.

[77]

hooks, b. 1998. ‘Breaking Down the Wall: Interview with William Kentridge,’ Interview Magazine, September, p. 182.

[78]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Conversation with Penny Siopis. Unpublished transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[79]

Kentridge, W. 2002. ‘Conversations, Collaborations.’ Robert Hodgins edited by Brenda Atkinson. Cape Town: Tafelberg, p. 52.

[80]

Kentridge, W. 1998. ‘Ce soir, on joue,’ Puck 11. Unpublished English version, ‘Tonight We Perform,’ in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[81]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Interview with a student, name unrecorded.

Unpublished transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[82]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 48.

[83]

Kentridge, W. 2006. ‘Two Thoughts on Drawing Beauty.’ Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics edited by Sarah Nuttall.

Durham: Duke University Press, p. 97.

[84]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 71.

[85]

Kentridge, W. 1993. ‘Fortuna: Neither Programme nor Chance in the Making of Images.’ Lecture transcript published in ChristovBakargiev, C. 1998. William Kentridge. Brussels: Palais des BeauxArts, p. 68.

[86]

Kentridge, W. 2006. ‘Felix in Exile.’ William Kentridge Prints edited by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, p. 50.

176

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[87]

Lund, C. 2014. ‘William Kentridge Interview: How We Make Sense of the World.’ Deutsche Staatstheater, Hamburg, Louisiana Channel: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Interview recording available online.

[88]

Kentridge, W. 2012. ‘William Kentridge: Reflections.’ Trade Routes Revisited edited by Joost Bosland. Cape Town: Stevenson, p. 98.

[89]

Bowie, D. 1995. ‘The Cleanest Work of All.’ Modern Painters.

Summer: 44.

[90]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 89.

[91]

Kentridge, W. 1998. ‘Ce soir, on joue,’ Puck 11. Unpublished English version, ‘Tonight We Perform,’ in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[92]

Taylor, J. 1998. ‘Director’s Note: William Kentridge.’ Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, pp. 8–9.

[93]

Kentridge, W. 2013. Thinking on one’s feet: A walking tour of the studio, Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art: University of Oxford. Madrid: Ivory Press, p. 11.

[94]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Interview with Eliza Garnsey. Unpublished audio recording in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[95]

Kentridge, W. 2012. ‘William Kentridge: Reflections.’ Trade Routes Revisited edited by Joost Bosland. Cape Town: Stevenson, p. 98.

[96]

Kentridge, W. 2006. ‘Ubu Tells the Truth.’ William Kentridge Prints edited by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, p. 60.

[97]

Enwezor, O. 1997. ‘Travel Notes: Living, Working and Travelling in a Restless World.’ Trade Routes: History and Geography edited

by Matthew DeBord. Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, p. 9.

[98]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 51.

[99]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 76.

[100]

Kentridge, W. 2015. ‘From Here to There.’ William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance edited by Marente Bloemheuvel & Jaap Guldemond. Amsterdam: EYE Filmmuseum, pp. 25–26.

177

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[101]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 6–11.

[102]

McCoy, A. 2016. ‘William Kentridge: In Conversation.’ Brooklyn Rail, 3 May. Available online.

[103]

Kentridge, W. 2009. ‘Double Lines.’ William Kentridge: Five Themes edited by Mark Rosenthal & Michael Auping. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, p. 235.

[104]

Kentridge, W. 2006. ‘Two Thoughts on Drawing Beauty.’ Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics edited by Sarah Nuttall.

Durham: Duke University Press, p. 101.

[105]

Kentridge, W. 2009. ‘Double Lines.’ William Kentridge: Five Themes edited by Mark Rosenthal & Michael Auping. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, p. 239.

[106]

Kentridge, W. 2010. ‘Meeting the World Halfway: A Johannesburg Biography.’ Kyoto Prize Commemorative Lecture: Arts & Philosophy, Kyoto, Japan. Unpublished lecture transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[107]

Kentridge, W. 2004. William Kentridge edited by Carolyn ChristovBakargiev & Jane Taylor. Milan: Skira, p. 172.

[108]

Kentridge, W. 2011. Interview for Citizen K magazine, Moscow, 18 August. Unpublished transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[109]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 36

[110]

Kentridge, W. 2003. ‘Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon.’ BAC-Kentridge: Journey to the Moon and Fragments for Georges Méliès. Visby: Baltic Art Centre, p. 13.

[111]

Kentridge, W. 2015. Interview with Cécile Godefroy and Vérane Tasseau for Cahiers d’Art Special Issue, 2015 Picasso: In the Studio.

London: Thames & Hudson. Unpublished transcript in the possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[112]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, pp. 59–61.

[113]

Kentridge, W. 2004. William Kentridge edited by Carolyn Christov-

Bakargiev & Jane Taylor. Milan: Skira, p. 201

[114]

Kentridge, W. Forthcoming. Constable: Finding the Dapple. New York: Frick Museum.

178

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[115]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 72.

[116]

Coetzee, J.M. 2003. Speech at the Nobel Banquet, Swedish Academy, Stockholm, 10 December. Transcript available online. The Nobel Foundation.

[117]

Kentridge, W. 2002. ‘Some thoughts on obsolescence.’ October 100, Spring: 16.

[118]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 124.

[119]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 48.

[120]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 42.

[121]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 44–45.

[122]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 21.

[123]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 38–39.

[124]

Kentridge, W. 2006. Speech delivered at the opening of Figuring Faith: Images of belief in Africa at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, 20 April. Unpublished transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[125]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 50–51.

[126]

Kentridge, W. 2010. Interview with Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily newspaper, 30 December 2010. Unpublished English transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[127]

Kentridge, W. & Breidbach, A. 2005. Thinking Aloud. Köln: König.

German edition; quote taken from the unpublished interview transcript in English, in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[128]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 46.

[129]

Koerner, M.K. 2012. ‘Death, Time, Soup: A Conversation with William Kentridge and Peter Galison.’ New York Review of Books, 30 June. Transcript available online.

179

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[130]

Kentridge, W. 2010. Interview with Reinier Leist, Houghton, Johannesburg. Unpublished transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[131]

Kentridge, W. 2011. Interview with Rümeysa Kiger for Today’s Zaman, an English-language daily newspaper based in Turkey.

Unpublished English transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[132]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 56.

[133]

Kentridge, W. 2008. I am not Me, The Horse is not Mine.

Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, p. 67.

[134]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 25.

[135]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 60.

[136]

Kentridge, W. 2016. Triumphs and Laments. Cologne: Koenig Books, p. 55.

[137]

Xingwana, L. 2010. Statement by Minister of Arts and Culture Ms Lulu Xingwana on media reports around the Innovative Women exhibition, 4 March. Available online. Department of Arts and Culture.

[138]

Kentridge, W. 2010. Notes on Carnets d’Egypte in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[139]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 106.

[140]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 143.

[141]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 21.

[142]

Kentridge, W. 2012. ‘The Refusal of Time.’ The Refusal of Time edited

by Caroline Naphegyi & Xavier Barral. Paris: Éditions Xavier Barral, pp. ii–xviii.

[143]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, pp. 164, 166.

[144]

Kentridge, W. 2015. ‘If We Ever Get to Heaven: Occasional notes on More Sweetly Play the Dance.’ William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance edited by Marente Bloemheuvel & Jaap Guldemond.

Amsterdam: EYE Filmmuseum, p. 19.

180

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[145]

Kentridge, W. 2017. Smoke, Ashes, Fable. Brussels: Mercatorfonds, p. 4 (Originally a conversation between William Kentridge & Margaret K. Koerner, Cambridge [Mass] May 2013).

[146]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 199.

[147]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 181.

[148]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, p. 24.

[149]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 118–119.

[150]

Kentridge, W. 2006. ‘Muizenberg.’ William Kentridge Prints edited by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, p. 22.

[151]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, pp. 61–62.

[152]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 54.

[153]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, pp. 66–67.

[154]

Kentridge, W. 2015. Interview with Cécile Godefroy & Vérane Tasseau for Cahiers d’Art Special Issue, 2015 Picasso: In the Studio.

London: Thames & Hudson. Unpublished English transcript in the possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[155]

McCoy, A. 2016. ‘William Kentridge: In Conversation.’ Brooklyn Rail, 3 May. Available online.

[156]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Hope as a Political Category. Keynote address delivered at the University of Cape Town, 18 December. Unpublished transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[157]

Majavu, M. 2014. ‘They don’t teach it in law school: White privilege and Oscar Pistorius.’ The South African Civil Society Information Service, 11 November. Available online.

[158]

Kentridge, W. 2015. ‘Peripheral Thinking.’ Notes Towards a Model Opera edited by Karen Marta. Beijing & London: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art & Koenig Books, pp. 84, 87.

[159]

Kentridge, W. 2015. ‘Peripheral Thinking.’ Notes Towards a Model Opera edited by Karen Marta. Beijing & London: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art & Koenig Books, p. 100.

181

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[160]

Kentridge, W. 2015. ‘Peripheral Thinking.’ Notes Towards a Model Opera edited by Karen Marta. Beijing & London: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art & Koenig Books, pp. 138, 141.

[161]

Kentridge, W. 2017. ‘What does Lulu wear?’ William Kentridge: basta y sobra edited by Maria Gough & Lynne Cooke. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. In Spanish; English transcript in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[162]

Piketty, T. 2015. 2015 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, University of Johannesburg, Soweto Campus, 3 October. Lecture transcript available online. Nelson Mandela Centre for Memory.

[163]

Kentridge, W. 2015. ‘From Here to There.’ William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance edited by Marente Bloemheuvel & Jaap Guldemond. Amsterdam: EYE Filmmuseum, p. 15.

[164]

Kentridge, W. 2016. Triumphs and Laments. Cologne: Koenig Books, p. 66.

[165]

Ibid.

[166]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 229.

[167]

Kentridge, W. & Hirson, D. 2017. Footnotes for the Panther.

Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, p. 171.

[168]

Kentridge, W. 2018. ‘I Shout.’ William Kentridge: A Poem That Is Not Our Own edited by Josef Helfenstein and Sébastien Delot.

Gegenwart: Kunstmuseum Basel, p. 175.

[169]

Kentridge, W. & Taylor, J. 2018. That Which We Do Not Remember.

Sydney: Naomi Milgrom Foundation, p. 27.

182

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[170]

Putuma, K. 2017. Collective Amnesia. Cape Town: uHlanga, p. 87.

[171]

Kentridge, W. 2018. ‘I Shout.’ William Kentridge: A Poem That Is Not Our Own edited by Josef Helfenstein and Sébastien Delot.

Gegenwart: Kunstmuseum Basel, pp. 183–184.

[172]

Kentridge, W. 2018. ‘I Shout.’ William Kentridge: A Poem That Is Not Our Own edited by Josef Helfenstein and Sébastien Delot.

Gegenwart: Kunstmuseum Basel, pp. 176–177.

[173]

Miller, P. & Sibisi, T. 2018. The Head & the Load. Unpublished transcript of the libretto in possession of the WK Studio Archive.

[174]

Kentridge, W. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, p. 28.

[175]

Kentridge, W. 2018. ‘I Shout.’ William Kentridge: A Poem That Is Not Our Own edited by Josef Helfenstein and Sébastien Delot. Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, pp. 175–176.

[176]

See p. 56

[177]

Kentridge, W. & Morris, R.C. 2017. That Which is Not Drawn.

Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 140.

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