Untitled (Witwatersrand Landscape) ,1988
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Notes : The 1980s were a significant time in William Kentridge’s career. At the beginning of the decade, he was uncertain whether his future lay in visual art or in the theatre; while by the end he had won both the Standard Bank Young Artist Award and the Cape Town Triennial and, with the film ‘Johannesburg 2nd Greatest City after Paris’ (1989), was about to launch his international career. Thus the dispute over the date of this remarkable drawing – with experts reading the somewhat rubbed last digit in the bottom left hand corner as either a ‘2’ or an ‘8’ – was significant. As it stands, the date certainly looks like ‘1982’. But fortunately the artist himself has settled the matter, pronouncing that the drawing was certainly made in 1988.The later date obviously accommodates Kentridge’s absence at theatre school in Paris in 1981 and much of 1982, and his well-documented neglect of drawing until 1984. It also places both the style and the subject-matter of this drawing close to the several landscapes he made between the prize-winning ‘Embarkation’ (1987) and the desolate peri-urban backgrounds to ‘Johannesburg 2nd Greatest City after Paris’. By around 1988, Kentridge had achieved a lightness and spaciousness in his rendering of landscape; and he had established his vocabulary of mine dumps, high-mast lighting, culverts, tyre tracks, etc., that feature prominently in this drawing and, in one way or another, many other works of this time.Moreover, in November 1988, Kentridge published his essay ‘Landscape in a State of Siege’[i] that provides a theoretical platform for this and similar landscape drawings. The essay opens with the statement “For about a year I have been drawing landscapes” and goes on to expound his condemnation of traditional landscape painting in South Africa and explain his strategies for rendering his geographical environment meaningful. Thus, to escape what he called “the plague of the picturesque”, he would set his odometer at random distances, drive, and draw whatever he found there, generally, as he wrote, “a catalogue of civil engineering details”. For the artist, “the variety of the ephemera of human intervention on the landscape is far greater than anything the land itself has to offer” – and, one may add, more meaningful. Kentridge’s point in reproducing this “catalogue”, or, more often, constructing it from known parts, in the present drawing and all that he made around this time, is to insist on the historical dimension of landscape, a dimension that obviously privileges the economic and political aspects of the South African experience over any supposed beauty in nature. For Kentridge, evidently, the Witwatersrand of his landscape drawings is more truly real, more truly African, than any Tarzan movie or painting by Pierneef.
Michael Godby
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