William Kentridge, 9 Drawings for Projection

William Kentridge’s animations rise like ghosts from the screen- the ghost Africa, the ghost Art, the ghost Abandon. He employs charcoal as though it were collected from the cheeks of miners and spread against paper to tell it’s own story. Every image is haunted by traces of the images that came before. Memories hang like shadows unloosed from form. The past remains always present.

Oppression is written in the geography. It seeps up from the soil- endless lines of starving men. One isolated from the hoards lays beaten and bleeding, swallowed by his own shirt, his skull, shoulders, hips and knees become boulders. Posts rise from blood puddles and support yet another blank billboard. An artist floats naked (always naked) in his room flooded by anxiety. A land eating, tycoon sits in his pin striped business suit (always in his pin striped business suit) eating breakfast in bed. He pushes down his French Press. Filter becomes tunnel digger and we return to the mines.

posted by: Marty Schnapf