feAture william kentridge
But in fact they predate the realist tradition. The enjoyment of form,
the delight in being aware of the construction of the fiction, is the root,
is the wellspring from which realism becomes one manifestation rather
than the great major hub.
The thing about animation that appeals to me is its potential to
overcome gravity, to similarly represent the absurd or the impossible.
There are certain things that animation can do easily and certain things
that real film can. A change of psychological expression is very easy
with an actor and very difficult if you’re drawing it. On the other hand,
to train a rhinoceros to walk on its hind legs and do a somersault or a
pirouette is really hard if it’s a real rhinoceros. But if it’s a little piece of
paper cutout…
Your work is narratively driven, but there is a tension between
coherence and ambiguity.
Well, the films are not made with a script or a storyboard. I start
somewhere in the middle, and then as the images are drawn, they
suggest others, and then I try things before and others are added, and
eventually a structure is found, and a meaning. But it’s inaccurate when
you say they’re very narrative. They require a lot of generosity from the
viewer to make them coherent.
so they are a refutation of positivism as well?
I think so. It’s certainly a refutation of understanding the world as fact
or process, and understanding not that process happens alongside fact
but that all fact is an abstraction of something that is inherently moving
and changing. There is a sense in which animation deeply connects
to my sense of the world as provisional. Whatever is there is liable
to change. Certainties can disappear. Emotions felt so unbelievably
strongly don’t necessarily endure; they shift and change.
simply passive in it, whatever we do. The world [comes] towards us
rather than asking about the political content of your work, which has and [we project] onto it and, in that membrane, [construct] sense of
been written about at great length, I’d like to know how you feel about the world. I think there’s a kind of utopian politics in all art, rather than
the possibility for art in general to act in the political sphere, rather in the revolutionary song that’s going to lift the spirits and everybody
than just referencing it or taking it as subject matter. do you believe it will sing together. I think that does happen, but it’s not the work that I’m
does have actual agency? able to do.
I believe it has agency, as we construct who we are through things that
we recognise, not things that we naturally discover. So when you see
a film or read a story or see something that corresponds to part of an
works
image of yourself or an image of the world, it consolidates, it amplifies (In order of appearance)
and it moves you. When you say you’re moved by something, it kind
Tide Table, 2003
of reawakens things that are already known, things that are felt. I would single-screen video projection
say that it’s not so much the artworks that have an agency in the world,
Anamorphic Landscape (Johannesburg), 2007
but people have an agency in the world and artworks are a central part charcoal drawing, table, mirrored column,
of how we construct who we are, what we can do in the world, what
118 cm (diameter)
we can’t do in the world. So at the one level, that’s the way in which I All images
would see works working politically: influencing or energising people
© the artist. courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg,
and Haunch of Venison, London
who have seen them.
The second way is a very abstract way: it seems that what art
demonstrates is the possibility of agency, of making something, of
changing something. Whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy or about an
abstract subject or a political subject, [there is that] sense of not simply
following instructions but constructing the world anew, or recognising
it, or meeting the world halfway and understanding that we’re not
77 Artreview
Will Kentridge.indd 77 7/3/08 13:18:13
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