This post is for all of you who are interested in storytelling. These unique personal stories dreamed and drawn and erased and re-drawn for animation are amazing. Kentridge’s stories are certainly multimedia pieces. There are many other examples on You Tube. Google William Kentridge. I am very interested in hearing what you think.

History of the Main Complaint (1996)

For a synopsis of the film click here.

Weighing… And Wanting (1997)

Artist’s statement:

“I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending – an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.”

On living a lifetime in Johannesburg: “I have never been able to escape Johannesburg, and in the end, all my work is rooted in this rather desperate provincial city. I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and the films are certainly spawned by, and feed off, the brutalised society left in its wake.”

On his drawings: “The drawings don’t start with ‘a beautiful mark’. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn’t have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion.”

Quotations from William Kentridge by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (1998), Societé des Expositions du Palais de Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles.

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