The man in the frame wears a white shirt. Black trousers. Not a business man’s shirt. A shirt that holds its shape, has a presence of its own, not stiff, starched, but fluid. A shirt that billows lightly around the torso, that ripples with the movement of the body. Open-necked with wide cuffs, cufflinks. The trousers not the trousers of a suited man. Loose but well fitting. Fine wool, perhaps. The shirt tucked in.
The costume marks William Kentridge’s entry onto the stage as a performer, into the frame of his own work. Kentridge’s drawings, films and performances have often delved into the fraught political landscape of his native South Africa, but in recent years, he has increasingly turned his attention toward unveiling the process of making artworks. After many years of producing animated films based on charcoal drawing, Kentridge began to figure more explicitly in his own work, to produce films and performances that ‘explore what it is to be an artist in the studio’.1Enthused by the possibilities this opens up, he says ‘the studio becomes a canvas or stage and the artist becomes like a brush moving through it’.2
A brush in the hand of an artist is a thing of many moods. You can rub, you can stroke, you can slap or slash or scrub. The tufts of the brush have spring and flow. An artist knows the feel of a brush in the hand, the angle of incidence to the page and the ease through the shoulder and wrist that makes the brush dance. But what is this artist-brush?
For Kentridge, the body becomes a medium in itself. He is not a... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
William Kentridge, Drawing Lesson 47 (An Interview with the Artist), 2010. Film still. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
William Kentridge, Anti Mercator, 2011. Film still. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
