Whilst Reaching Down (Slowly) ,2013
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Notes : Whilst reaching down (slowly) emanates from a body of multimedia work by William Kentridge created in 2013/2014, under the general title 2nd Hand Reading. The exhibition was one of the most sustained in his oeuvre to deploy the idea of what might be called the ‘dictionary palimpsest’. Starting life as a series of drawings on found dictionary pages, which then became both a filmic narrative and a flip-book animation, the series draws together Kentridge’s longstanding interest in the interface between text, filmic narrative (including photography) and drawing. His breakthrough series of major work was of course cinematic—the cycle of animated charcoal drawings chronicling the rise and fall of Johannesburg’s modern Randlord Soho Eckstein, and the vicissitudes of his love life with Mrs Eckstein and her lover, Soho’s alter ego Felix Teitelbaum, against the backdrop of a tumultuous and convulsing South African society. 2nd Hand Reading extends the animated drawing method to deconstruct the process of narrative itself. The flip-book drawings, which in book form would be leafed through to create the illusion of time, are here spread out in a grid format, transforming the static drawing into a deceptive narrative. ‘Reading’ the work happens on many levels—the text from dictionary pages seems to contain lexical meaning, each image on a page seemingly put there for a textual reason, but the visual narrative predominates, as the viewer reads the work left to right as if expecting the figures to move—first an avatar of Kentridge himself, then a loping and burdened worker, carrying what may be weapons, or urban detritus. In between are seemingly random text fragments, oddly stentorian and commanding. The overall impression of the work is surprisingly fluid for a text-based work of art. Kentridge masterfully translates the drawing on the dictionary page to a work of time-based art. Its grid format recalls the experiments in ‘chronophotography’ of Eadward Muybridge and Etienne Marey—that is, the attempt to capture and control time in an image-based technology. Only Kentridge, of all contemporary artists, could draw these strands convincingly together.
James Sey
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