charcoal and pastel on paper

Artwork date: 1994-2001
Signature details: signed

(1)

47 x 51 cm

cf. Tone, L., Kentridge, W. and McCrickard,K. (2013). William Kentridge: Fortuna.London: Thames & Hudson, a similar example from this series illustrated on

Notes:

This drawing was made by William Kentridge for his film Felix in Exile between September 1993 and February 1994 in the shapeshifting period just before South Africa’s first general elections. It is the fifth film in his Drawings for Projection series, chronicling the saga of Soho Eckstein (property developer extraordinaire) and Felix Teitelbaum (whose anxiety flooded half the house). The landscape of Felix in Exile is the East Rand, once a centre of industry that fell into dereliction after the closure of numerous mines and factories. ‘It is an area that has nostalgia built into it. Everything in it alludes to the past,’ Kentridge writes. ‘A central characteristic of the East Rand terrain is that it is a landscape constructed rather than found. The structure of what one sees is given… by things that have been made – mine dumps, drainage dams, pipelines, abandoned roadworks’ (Kentridge 2004:101). We view the landscape as if through some kind of technical scope or measuring device – as if we are summing it up, assessing its merits and demerits for a future project outside of pure subjective experience.Our perspective is aligned with Felix’s lover, Nandi, ‘surveyor and reappropriator of the wasteland’ (Coetzee 1999:85). Like Nandi, we receive the bereft and plundered landscape through an instrument of observation – a technological filter. Our inherited romance with nature, trees and sky is starkly interrupted, not only by the wooden stakes driven into the ground around a pit of rubble and liquid circled in red, signalling toxicity or alarm, but by the lines of measurement on the ‘lens’ of the instrument through which we view the scene. Kentridge has reflected that a lot of the drawings used in his films were based on different body imaging techniques, ranging from X-Rays to CAT scans to sonar scans, to magnetic resonance images (Kentridge 2009:65). Seen in this light, this landscape might also be viewed in embodied terms, as a kind of X-Ray of the bruised body of the earth in the closing days of apartheid.

Alexandra Dodd

Sources:

Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, Taylor, Jane, Kentridge, William et al. (2004) William Kentridge. Milan: Skira Editora.

Kentridge, William. (2009) ‘The Body Drawn and Quartered (extract), 1998.’ Mari Ikezawa, Shinji Kohmoto, Ellie Nagata and Tsutomu Nisioka Eds. William Kentridge: What We See & What We Know – Thinking About History While Walking, and Thus the Drawings Began to Move. Kyoto: National Museum of Modern Art.

Coetzee, J.M. (1999) ‘Focus: History of the Main Complaint’. William Kentridge. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Dan Cameron and JM Coetzee and William Kentridge. London: Phaidon. 82­–93.­