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william kentridge
South Africa’s leading artist tells us how artworks play a central role in
the construction of our identities and our relationships with the world.
And what an anamorphic film is.
interview SALLY o’REILLY
william kentridge’s practice spans nearly four decades and an ArtReview:
abundance of media and disciplines. But whether working with drawing, with your stereoscopic work and anamorphic films, you seem to be
print, film, puppetry or theatre, his sensibility is that of the humanist, thinking about the mechanisms of seeing.
giving prominence to gesture and the evidence of processes. In his
animated films, which feature allegorically charged characters, he rifles William Kentridge
through the dark corners of identity, memory and fantasy, with particular It has to do with an ongoing interest in the larger act of understanding,
relation to the history of South Africa, where he lives and works. and seeing as construction rather than reception. Not just the world
Although Kentridge often makes direct reference to apartheid and the as we receive it in our eyes: we do, but where is the point that we
subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission, his commentary is meet it? With stereoscopy you’re very much aware of that activity of
more oblique, less hectoring than we might anticipate. His concerns lie transformation. [Illusory] depth is one example, or a kind of metaphor,
with the universal state and enduring themes of humanity: power at an for the other ways in which we construct sense.
individual and local level as well as the grand narratives of geopolitics.
Kentridge’s use of optical devices and guileless drawing has i’ve never heard of an anamorphic film before. did you invent it?
developed into a complex analytical tool. The political and formal
integration of the 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès series (2003) was a I don’t know. There are sixteenth-century Crucifixions in anamorphosis,
deft yet lyrical centrepiece for his representation of South Africa at the and there are eighteenth-century pornographic drawings using the
Venice Biennale in 2005. Kentridge is currently working on a version same principle, so it’s not a new technique, but I haven’t seen it used
of Shostakovich’s 1928 opera of Gogol’s 1836 short story The Nose – a in this way. Another thing about it is, because the screen is a cylinder,
synthesis of expressiveness, design and satire directed at the follies of you can walk around the whole screen. or instead of walking around,
bureaucracy, vanity and codified behaviour. you can actually make the image revolve, which means the whole thing
artreview 74
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