“I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing—the contingent way that images arrive in the work—lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world.”
A multidisciplinary artist well known for his charcoal drawings often tied to socio-political conditions in post-apartheid South Africa, William Kentridge aims to record history. In 1994, South African pop group Mango Groove commissioned a short film from Kentridge with the aim, as an activist group, to demonstrate the changes that had occurred in South Africa following the democratic election of Nelson Mandela. The film was used as a music video for the group’s song, Another Country, and was comprised of a montage of Kentridge’s drawings depicting scenes of protest, strikes, and poverty. The present work, Untitled Night Drawing, was created as the final frame of the film and has been in the personal collects ion of Mango Groove’s lead artist since its creation. Initially creating films as a means of documenting his drawings, the artist has said that the “charcoal drawings come first and the technique of erasure and redrawing was a way of arriving at a static drawing. Then I started filming the process. So the films arrived rather than being decided upon.” Shedding light on a country’s desire for peaceful change in the midst of political shifts, Untitled Night Drawing is a notable example of Kentridge’s oeuvre and provides an exceptional glimpse into his animation techniques that are ultimately rooted in drawing alone.
“I'm not interested in the computer doing the animation, in filling in between and using techniques of drawing on a screen—there's something about the feel of paper and charcoal that is essential, and that a mousepad and a pressure pen or stylus doesn't begin to approximate. The analogue basis at the heart of it all is essential.”
A native Johannesburg artist, Kentridge has been lauded with awards such as the Kyoto Prize, 2010; the Oskar Kokoschka Award, 2008; and the Sharjah Biennial 6 Prize, 2003, among others. His work is held in the permanent collects ions of esteemed museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Kunstmuseum Basel.
Official music video for Mango Groove, Another Country including Kentridge’s charcoal drawings.
