South Africa's Picasso: William Kentridge | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 41

brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor yes when I was three years old and those asked what I wanted to be when I grew up I said I wanted to be an elephant and when I was fifteen I said I wanted to be a conductor of operas and then somebody said I bet you understand to be a conductor you have to be able to read music as it hug oh really okay better recalibrate in fact both of those were equally impossible dreams South African artist William Kentridge is best known for his animated charcoal drawings but he also works in sculpture printmaking tapestry and stage design he directs operas and creates multi-screen video installations that tour the globe William Kentridge to me is one of the most celebrated South African and African artists of the 21st century his Alba Castle when you look at his CV it's just it's just unbelievable we marvel really at his draftsmanship he is one of the great masters he stands up there for me with artists of the calibre of Dura or Rembrandt he is really genuinely one of the only people I've ever come across who really does know something about everything and who knows everything about rather a large number of somethings he is a genius and the gentleman recently he's combined his love of figurative art with dance music and mime and he's created an extraordinary 500 meter freeze set within the heart of the ancient city of Rome this was from the arch of Titus William Kentridge is frequently in the top rankings for international artists but despite his global reputation he's always remained anchored to his roots they've been many opportunities to go and live elsewhere but he's always resistant that on the grounds that his work is driven by what he has seen and the evolution South Africa has been through Johannesburg very much is a muse for William in some way something like a medieval peasant in the sense that I've never shifted more than 6 kilometers from where I was born William grew up in the 1950s and 60s his parents were lawyers in a South Africa firmly in the grip of a part 8 rule where non-whites were segregated and repressed my father was a very prominent lawyer with a prominent cases he represented the family of Steve Biko in the inquest into his death to the Sharpeville Massacre as a lawyer in the treason trial of nelson mandela and other ANC members I suppose there was a sense of indignation and rage at the dinner table that was very formative the society I grew up in the school I went to was only for white boys the public swimming pools would have been just for white people to swim in the beaches were segregated the post office was segregated there was one entrance for white people in one entrance were non-european and I suppose early on it both seemed crazy but the world in which we lived in now there were some white South Africans who found it too crazy and left and there were others like my parents who found it crazy and fought against it but were there it was a damaged logic I've known Williams since he was nine years old he used to come to the gallery with his parents he was a very clever child and he came from a very clever family but he wanted to be something that his father couldn't do and that made him be an artist I suppose I did what all children do as I drew all children draw and I simply forgot to stop he didn't find fame from drawing straightaway but tried other forms of Arts unsuccessfully including oil painting it took many years to discover his true calling I failed as an artist I said to myself so I tried to become an actor I'd been working with the theatre company for many years at university and thought well then if I wasn't going to be an artist maybe I could be an actor and went to theater school for a year in Paris where I discovered I should not be an actor then tried to become a filmmaker and when that fell discovered whether I liked it or not I was making drawing so I was reduced to being an artist in the end and I was rescued by seeing the work of several black South African artists particularly one artist Amelie Fanny whose work was essentially figurative large-scale charcoal drawings as charcoal became his medium of choice Williams career took off in the 1980s making figurative work with South African politics as the backdrop in 1990 William donated a work to a charity auction and was caspere's full of love and to me this is one of the most pertinent things I had ever seen there was ironic that you were living in a country like South Africa with 40 years of apartheid and yet it wasn't being reflected in many people's work the caspere in the title refers to the armored riot control vehicles used by the South African army at a particularly turbulent time when censorship was rife we would get newspapers with the entire page as black because they would censor the entire page and the newspapers refused to not print it so they just printed black you know but artists like William found a way I made a far equal way to deal with the subject and survive let's say we are filled with a million different images impulses thoughts memories and understandings which always have to meet the world halfway and you see this very clearly in a drawing where there's a body that's lying in a pool of water onto that you project images that you yourself have of people that are lying down whether it is to the first world war two floods or to the war in Syria and it's understanding that if we can meet a drawing halfway it's about how we meet the world halfway and can also affect it and change it a constant image in Williams work is the mining landscape around Johannesburg a city built on gold mines a landscape that symbolizes a torn and divided nation a landscape essentially was green leafy with water in it with mountains usually in the background if it was a South African landscape and the landscape around Johannesburg was none of those things so when I started drawing it was trying to understand could one make an anti picturesque landscape that was the opposite of these expectations what a landscape would be and then I found the extreme pleasure of actually drawing those landscapes the fact that they were half way drawings themselves which was full of graphic lines of straight edges of abandoned civil engineering that made the landscape what it was and they became both a pleasure in the activity and following that a pleasure in the landscape so there is no landscape so blasted and bleak around Johannesburg that doesn't give me great pleasure to look at Johannesburg's a very ugly city it doesn't have any defining natural feature wasn't built along a river or the mountain you just went drove down and extracted gold it's industrial but it has a strange rester city and if you look at Williams landscape drawings from that time he evokes that strange damaged yet San our rural landscape I love this the changing features of the johannesburg landscape became a defining characteristic of the art itself as he worked and reworked his drawings William developed a new technique to create what he's best known for today his charcoal animated films yes yes William Kentridge is an artist living and working in Johannesburg South Africa despite international acclaim he's chosen to stay in his home city Johannesburg is a very terrible city in many many ways its violence its ugliness its brutishness but it's also a gorgeous city in terms of the trees the gardens closeness of friendships that exist in at the grange of people that one can work with I have two Studios one in the more industrial part of town where the larger work the sculpture the theatre rehearsals larger filmmaking happens and one in a suburban studio studio is in the garden there's a 30 meter commute to work in the morning open it wider and I'll tell you when you're too wide meaning that it's very easy to go back to work at night or to work early in the morning or at any moment which I'm sure it's not good it's important to waste more time than I do with friends at Central activity 2 must be always making and that's hard to stop myself this it again then time ok the charcoal animated films are obsessive I mean each one has to be drawn erased redrawn erased to give the illusion of movement so it does become a very slow down art making in slow motion and the slowness of it also gives it a chance for the film to find its own narrative its own set of interests because they're never made with scripts or storyboards and this is saying that that first initial thinking process be the heart of it but I would have that hand coming and making the drawings like that when I first made a film and the curator said he wanted to show the film in an exhibition method well that's rubbish because their films you can't put a film on the wall of a gallery you put a drawing why don't you want to show my drawings I was insulted that he wanted to show the film eventually said well we'll show the drawings as well but ready I want to show the films and I said well it's his exhibition it's his funeral everybody's just going to laughter rise of Rhee and so I was taken kind of kicking and screaming to understand what it was in fact I was doing drawings for projection is the collective title for the series of films which gave William his big break well the two characters Felix teitelbaum and so her acting they're not autobiographical but they certainly come out of fragments of thoughts and impulses and they also act as a kind of long-term description of the politics in South Africa over those 30 years of the early films the one that really stopped me dead in my tracks is the dark and dense mind drawn in quite a brutal istic way in haste and an anger the character is at his most devilish but you begin already to understand the vulnerabilities that there is something about this thuggish exterior that masks other insecurities about the life and the world he finds himself in he takes a coffee plunger and plungers are down into the glass and it just carries on going and it becomes a pipe digging a shaft it has the power of things that are both at once cruel and tragic and yet also storing these did not look like anybody else's drawings they didn't look like anybody else's films my favorite films monument Sony three minutes but it's just it's just incredible in monument's the main character industrialist soho Eckstein builds a monuments which people think will be of himself to everyone's surprise when it's unveiled its actually a monument of a male worker with the tools of his labor on his back it's a black man it's a slave figure and when the film ends he opens his eye and he blinks various intrumental was very gripping and for me that's the most poignant film because it's the most if you like the best monument that I have against part head I always cry when I watch it as his animation series continued William would collaborate with the composer who's become a key player in his work he asked me to consider writing some music for Felix in exile and I sat down on the piano and I put the video into the video machine if you're watching it in silence there's a strange feeling you're aware of each rubbing out each incremental shift in the drawing it taught to me in a way that gave me huge amounts of inspiration for how to work with him the moment you put sound or music to that animation time becomes more suspended Felix in exile is certainly my favorite film like many of Williams forms it has an incredible soundtrack it's a very lyrical form but also tremendously sad in many ways like many critical South African intellectuals at the time Felix is seen as an enemy of the state and has gone into exile he views the country under a part eight through the eyes of an African woman surveying the land and sites of great trauma what I remember most about Felix in exile is how the arrange of one frame to another contributed to the understanding of the next scene within the world there was always a remnants of the previous experience it's extremely interesting in terms of the context of the South African history our divided history and how the array of histories has negatively and positively changed how we see ourselves as South Africans there been a lot of credit ii and violence in our country leading up to democracy so scenes of bodies being covered up by the earth spoke to the fact that apartheid had left a lot of casualties and that the landscape almost on the surface Hitler's by the time a part eight officially ended in 1994 and sanctions against South Africa lifted williams work would finally reach the international audiences it deserved is so shifted a bit more across there to make tiny bit smaller I guess can you see it's a drowned body William Kent she's animation work has led him on to more complex projects including opera direction and creating his own stage designs and digital projections yeah for scale I think that William in the part I do that work there was an immediacy to the work you can feel a strong responsibility not only to respond to what's happening but to resist it to fight it to critique it to take it on ways now I see an artist who said I want to dialogue with literature and science poetry and become much more of a universal man 1823 and 36 refusal of time started as a conversation between myself and Peter Galison a historian of science and a physicist and I was interested in the prehistory of relativity what had happened in science in the 19th century that made Einstein's revelations and understandings possible then he the refusal of time was commissioned for one of the most important exhibitions in the art world Documenta in kassel germany collaborating with musicians dancers and actors William created an installation made up of a five screen projection with five megaphones and a centrally placed mechanical object representing the engine of time for composer to think about time was very very interesting rhythm speed silence ideas of sounds in space we discovered at the end that yes it's about time but really it's about trying to escape our fate that we know we cannot escape the six-foot hole we are all destined to go to the ability to take something so enormous as the theory of relativity and yet make it an enjoyable experience for everybody you can find something there to identify with I was blown away by this thumping pulsating immersion in light and sound in a world of dance and scientific experiment we just felt we have to bring this to London the Whitechapel Gallery is just the first stop on a grand European tour for the refusal of time and other key works but his biggest work to date is on a literally epic scale found in the ancient city of Rome I was in Rome about 15 years ago and was taken by an American artist Kristen Jones back of her scooter to the edge of the Tiber and said look at the straight expense of wool the size of the silicone Maximus and she kept on saying wouldn't this be a great place to do a projection to do a drawing on I was drawing these she-wolves I had 300 she-wolves on my computer after seeing this magical animation that he did I had this fantasy that he had to do the animation that William drew the she-wolf and it awoke in the city of Rome you to walk on all of us to this magical site and to the fact that there is no reason why we can't inspire ourselves from Rome's history and build a major Contemporary Art open-air gallery that's already built for this frieze stretching 500 meters across the marble wall of the river Tiber William has used a series of images taken from historical Rome in addition to newer imagery of migrants arriving in Italy today I'm making a drawing simply by AirAsia which is something I've done with charcoal but never thought of doing with pollution and bacterial growth on the wall they raise different sections of the dirt and have a whole series of other possible histories so the fact that it's an ephemeral project after four years it will fade away two or three years it will start fading away in four years there'll be a ghost of it maybe that will be when it's at its most interesting and it's almost there but not present the gradually disappearing images in triumphs and immense wasn't only conceived as a freeze a spectacular show was also in the making to be performed to the people of Rome notion of being an exile started to really talk to me as a composer and I ended up choosing a 17th century piece of music by Italian Jewish composer Salamone Rossi it was a psalm which deals with the rivers of babylon that idea became almost the real theme had glued everything together we worked with two bands 500 metres apart one of triumphs one of lemons and the two bands coming together with different stops and contests between them but showing this historical clash it I'm a little bit astonished that the project actually happened there were so many things we saw in the three days we had to rehearse of how you could work with large-scale shadows that in a way I'm now really keen to do more work that uses that scale and that those techniques but which is waiting to be developed further another project definitely one of the highlights in my working relationship with RIA he has grown into somebody who tackles the most alarmingly massive projects it looks daunting to anybody else and take it all in stride he's one of the very rare artists that is able to bridge the gap between visual art performance theater film all in one work and for me he's extremely inspiring I asked him once what are the upsides of Fame and he quoted Emily Dickinson poem Fame has a sting but it also has a wing he certainly used the updraft in such a productive way with friends he recently was saying if you didn't have to work what would you do many people that I've they didn't have to do their job they retire here that live in this place and doing that lasted well if I didn't have to work I could spend so much time in the studio and yeah I can't imagine not 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Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 122,621

Rating: 4.9006386 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, William Kentridge, South Africa, art, dance, music, mime, Rome

Id: yaTnWGGhkzY

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2016