William Kentridge Case study 3 P.C.

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William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art. Early life and career

Kentridge was born in Johannesburg,[ and educated at King Edward VII School in Houghton, Johannesburg. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and then a diploma in Fine Arts from the Johannesburg Art Foundation. In the early 1980s, he studied mime and theatre at the L'cole Internationale de Thtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He originally hoped to become an actor, but he reflected later: "I was fortunate to discover at a theatre school that I was so bad an actor, I was reduced to an artist, and I made my peace with it.".Between 1975 and 1991, he was acting and directing in Johannesburg's Junction Avenue Theatre Company. In the 1980s, he worked on television films and series as art director. His father, Sydney Kentridge, is a prominent lawyer who took on civil rights cases against apartheid. Work

William Kentridge's work is heavily context-dependent given he hails from South Africa, where until only recently second-class native citizens still existed under apartheid. Kentridge himself is of European descent, and as such has a unique position as a third-party observer. His parents were lawyers, famous for their defence of victims of the apartheid, giving Kentridge the ability to remove himself somewhat from the atrocities committed. The basics of South Africa's socio-political condition and history must be known to grasp his work fully, much the same as in the cases of such artists as Francisco Goya and Kthe Kollwitz.

Kentridge is of expressionist lineage: form often alludes to content and vice versa. The feeling that is manipulated by the use of palette, composition and media, among others, often plays an equally vital role in the overall meaning as the subject and narrative of a given work. One must use one's gut reactions as well as one's interpretive skills to find meaning in Kentridge's work, much of which reveals very little actual content. Due to the sparse, rough and expressive qualities of Kentridge's handwriting, however, the viewer sees a sombre picture upon first glance, an impression that is perpetuated as the image illustrates a vulnerable and uncomfortable situation.

Aspects of social injustice that have transpired over the years in South Africa have often acted as fodder for Kentridge's pieces. "Casspirs Full of Love", viewable at the Met Museum, appears to be nothing more than heads in boxes to the average American viewer, but South Africans know that a casspir is a vehicle used to put down riots, a kind of a crowd-control tank. The box, then, is the casspir and the heads are those of people who have been killed in riots and demonstrations, people who have been "put down".

The title itself, "Casspirs Full of Love", written along the side of the print, is suggestive of the narrative and is oxymoronic. A casspir full of love is much like a bomb that bursts with happiness - it is an intangible improbability. The purpose of a machine such as this is to instil "peace" by force, but Kentridge

here is pointing to the fact that it was used as a tool to keep lower-class natives from taking colonial power and money.

Prints and drawings

By the mid-1970s Kentridge was making prints and drawings. In 1979, he created 20 to 30 monotypes, which soon became known as the "Pit" series. In 1980, he executed about 50 small-format etchings which he called the "Domestic Scenes". These two extraordinary groups of prints served to establish Kentridge's artistic identity, an identity he has continued to develop in various media. Despite his ongoing exploration of non-traditional media, the foundation of his art has always been drawing and printmaking.

In 1987, he began a group of charcoal and pastel drawings based, very tenuously, on Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera. These extremely important works, the best of which reflect a blasted, dystopic urban landscape, demonstrate the artist's growing consciousness of the flexibility of space and movement.

"My drawings don't start with a 'beautiful mark'," writes Kentridge, thinking about the activity of printmaking as being about getting the hand to lead the brain, rather than letting the brain lead the hand. "It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion."

Animated films

Between 1989 and 2003 Kentridge made a series of nine short films that he eventually gathered under the title 9 Drawings for Projection.In 1989, he began the first of those animated movies, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris. The series runs through Monument (1990), Mine (1991), Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (1991), Felix in Exile (1994), History of the Main Complaint (1996), Weighing and Wanting (1998), and Stereoscope (1999), up to Tide Table (2003). For the series, he used a technique that would become a feature of his work - successive charcoal drawings, always on the same sheet of paper, contrary to the traditional animation technique in which each movement is drawn on a separate sheet. In this way, Kentridge's videos and films came to keep the traces of the previous drawings. His animations deal with political and social themes from a personal and, at times, autobiographical point of view, since the author includes his self-portrait in many of his works.

The political content and unique techniques of Kentridge's work have propelled him into the realm of South Africa's top artists. Working with what is in essence a very restrictive media, using only charcoal and a touch of blue or red pastel, he has created animations of astounding depth. A theme running through all of his work is his peculiar way of representing his birthplace. While he does not portray it as the militant or oppressive place that it was for black people, he does not emphasize the picturesque state of living that white people enjoyed during apartheid either; he presents instead a city in which the duality of man is exposed. In a series of nine short films, he introduces two characters - Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum. These characters depict an emotional and political struggle that ultimately reflects the lives of many South Africans in the pre-democracy era.

In an introductory note to Felix In Exile, Kentridge writes, "In the same way that there is a human act of dismembering the past there is a natural process in the terrain through erosion, growth, dilapidation that also seeks to blot out events. In South Africa this process has other dimensions. The very term 'new

South Africa' has within it the idea of a painting over the old, the natural process of dismembering, the naturalization of things new."

Not only in Felix In Exile but in all of his animated works do the concepts of time and change comprise a major theme. He conveys it through his erasure technique, which contrasts with conventional cel-shaded animation, whose seamlessness de-emphasizes the fact that it is actually a succession of handdrawn images. This he implements by drawing a key frame, erasing certain areas of it, re-drawing them and thus creating the next frame. He is able in this way to create as many frames as he wants based on the original key frame simply by erasing small sections. Traces of what has been erased are still visible to the viewer; as the films unfold, a sense of fading memory or the passing of time and the traces it leaves behind are portrayed. Kentridge's technique grapples with what is not said, what remains suppressed or forgotten but can easily be felt.

In the nine films that follow Soho Eckstein's life, an increasing vehemency is placed on the evanescing health of the individual and contemporary South African society. Conflicts between anarchic and bourgeois individualistic beliefs, again a reference to the duality of man, indicate the idea of social revolution by poetically disfiguring surrounding buildings and landscapes. Kentridge states that, although his work does not focus on apartheid in a direct and overt manner, but rather on the contemporary state of Johannesburg, his drawings and films are certainly spawned by, and feed off of, the brutalised society that it left in its wake. As for more direct political issues, Kentridge says his art presents ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted movements and uncertain endings, all of which seem like insignificant subtleties but can be attributed to most of the calamity presented in his work. In a mixed-media triptych entitled "The Boating Party" (1985), based on Renoir's painting of a similar name, the havoc caused by a seemingly-uninterested aristocracy is perhaps his most severe comment on the state of South Africa during apartheid. The languid diners sit at ease while the surrounding area is ravaged,

torn and burned, an interesting contrast that is reflected in his style and choice of colours.

In 1985, Kentridge co-founded Free Film-makers Co-Operative in Johannesburg. In 1999, he was appointed a film-maker by Stereoscope. "Purely in the context of my own work," he wrote in a published playscript of his celebrated Ubu and the Truth Commission, "I would repeat my trust in the contingent, the inauthentic, the whim, the practical, as strategies for finding meaning. I would repeat my mistrust in the worth of Good Ideas. And state a belief that somewhere between relying on pure chance on the one hand, and the execution of a programme on the other, lies the most uncertain but the most fertile ground for the work we do. I think I have shown that it is not the clear light or reason or even aesthetic sensibility which determines how one works, but a constellation of factors only some of which we can change at will." In 2001, Creative Time aired his film Shadow Procession on the NBC Astrovision Panasonic screen in Times Square.

Opera
His political perspective is also present in his opera directions, which involves different layers: stage direction, animation movies, influences of the puppet world. He staged Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (Monteverdi), Die Zauberflte (Mozart) and The Nose (Shostakovich). He also collaborated with the French composer Franois Sarhan on a short show called Telegrams from the Nose, for which he made the stage and set design for the performance.

Tapestries
Kentridge's protean artistic investigation continues in his series of tapestries begun in 2001. The tapestries stem from a series of drawings in which he conjured shadowy figures from ripped construction paper and collaged them

onto the web-like background of nineteenth-century atlas maps. To reincarnate these figures into tapestry, Kentridge worked in close collaboration with the Johannesburg-based Stephens Tapestry Studio, mapping out cartoons from enlarged photographs of the drawings and hand-picking dyes to color the locally spun mohair (goat hair).

Sculpture
In 2009, Kentridge, in partnership with Gerhard Marx, created a 10m-tall sculpture for his home city of Johannesburg entitled Fire Walker. In parallel of the Five Themes exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (2010), the artist is featured at the Louvre. The Louvre show, Carnets d'Egypte, includes drawings of the artist, presented next to works from the museum collections, and videos shown in Louis XIVths bed. An article about Kentridge by Calvin Tomkins appears in the 18 Jan 2010 issue of The New Yorker.

Family
William Kentridge is married to Anne Stanwix, an immunologist, and they have three children. A third-generation South African of Lithuanian-Jewish heritage, he is the son of the prominent South African lawyer Sydney Kentridge.

Films
1989 Johannesburg: 2nd Greatest City After Paris 1990 Monument 1991 Mine 1991 Sobriety, Obesity & growing old

1994 Felix in Exile 1996 History of the Main Complaint 1996-97 Ubu Tells the Truth 1998 Weighing and Wanting 1999 Stereoscope 2001 Medicine Chest 2003 Automatic Writing 2003 Tide Table

Kentridge's films were shown at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

Exhibitions
1997 Documenta X, Kassel 1998 So Paulo Biennial 1998 The Drawing Center, New York 1999 Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art 1999 Venice Biennial 2000 Bienal de la Habana, Havana 2003 Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg 2004 Metropolitan Museum, New York 2005 Muse d'art Contemporain, Montreal 2006 Johannesburg Art Gallery 2006 Salzburg Museum der Moderne

2006 Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 2007 Smith College Art Museum 2007 Museum of Modern Art, New York 2007 University of Brighton Gallery 2007 Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brasil 2008 Williams College Museum of Art 2008 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia 2009 Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art 2009 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2009 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 2009 Henry Art Gallery, Seattle 2009 The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto 2009 The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach 2010 Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010 The Jewish Museum (New York), New York 2010 Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima 2010 Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center 2010 Jeu de Paume, Paris 2010 Louvre, Paris 2010 Albertina, Vienna 2011 Israel Museum, Jerusalem 2011 MOMA, New York City

2011 MACO, Oaxaca 2011 Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow 2011 Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest 2012 Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne

Awards
1982 Red Ribbon Award for Short Fiction 1986 Market Theatre Award for New Vision exhibition 1986 AA vita Award at Cassirer fine Art 1987 Standard Bank Young Artist Award 1992 Woyzeck on the Highveld awards for production, set design & direction 1994 Loerie Award memo 2003 Goslar Kaiserring 2004 Carnegie Medal 2004 Honorary Doctor of Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand 2006 Jesse L Rosenberger Medal from the University of Chicago 2010 Kyoto Prize

Kentridge's Five Themes exhibit was included in the 2009 Time 100, an annual list of the one hundred top people and events in the world.. That same year, the exhibition was awarded First Place in the 2009 AICA (International Association of Art Critics Awards) Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally category.