William Kentridge

The Universal Archive linocuts began as a series of small Indian ink drawings, created in a state of what Kentridge refers to as “productive procrastination” during the time that he was preparing his Norton series of lectures, presented at Harvard University in 2012. The drawings were made on pages of old dictionaries, using both old and new paintbrushes. The former refers to the pristine new brush, which gives perfectly intentional lines. The latter has damaged, splayed bristles which gives a less certain mark. It is the worn, mistreated brush that artists tend to discard but Kentridge embraces for its individual qualities. Hence, the images are made up of both solid and very fine lines, with an unconstrained virtuosity of mark-making. The ink drawings were initially attached to linoleum plates and painstakingly carved by the DKW printmakers and the artist’s studio assistants. Master Printer Jillian Ross speaks of the exacting process as “a giant puzzle constantly solving”. As the project expanded, the images were photo-transferred to linoleum plates in order to preserve the original drawings. The images have been printed onto pages from various books, including dated copies of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The use of dictionary pages for this project is both unusual – considering the paper’s non-archival qualities – and significant – in terms of the manifold associations that spring up within each work as a result of the spontaneous overlap of image and text. The philosophical implications of this choice have been expounded superbly by Kentridge, in a publication produced in collaboration with Jane Taylor:

“A dictionary is not the same size as a head, although it is quite close, and the thousands of pages in the dictionary do not even begin to match the uncountable number of thoughts, associations, flashes of ideas that zoom around inside the head. But nonetheless there is something of the weight and pages enclosed within the covers of a dictionary that has an association with the memories, the thoughts, the knowledge of different kinds, that we have inside our heads. And the drawings on the different pages of the book do not try to give a map of the way they think, but rather put a marker for the processes, unpredictability and marvels of association that we produce in our heads all the time.”

As a result of the meticulous mechanical translation of a gestural mark, the linocuts redefine the characteristics traditionally achieved by the medium. The identical replication of the artist’s free brush mark in the medium of linocut makes for unexpected nuance in mark, in contrast with the heavier mark usually associated with this printing method. Furthermore, the paper of the nonarchival old book pages resists the ink, which creates an appealing glossy glow on the surface of the paper.

Many of the images are recurring themes in Kentridge’s art and stage productions: cats, trees, coffee pots, nude figures. While some images are obvious, others dissolve into abstracted forms suggestive of Japanese Sumi-e painting. Image mis/identification is core to Kentridge’s practice and is richly explored in this series. The parallel and displaced relationships that emerge between the image and the text on the pages relate to Kentridge’s inherent mistrust of certainty in creative processes. This becomes part of a project of unraveling master texts, here questioning ideas of knowledge production and the construction of meaning. Aside from the numerous individual images created, there are prints assembled from pieces: cats torn from four sheets, a large tree created from 15 sheets. Groups of prints featuring combinations of individual images – twelve coffee pots, six birds and nine trees – show the artist’s progressive deconstruction of figurative images into abstract collections of lines, which nonetheless remain suggestive of the original form. The process by which the viewer projects meaning is sincerely rattled. This movement from figuration to abstraction and back, along with the works’ close relationship to Kentridge’s stage productions, suggests that this body of work holds an intriguing place in Kentridge’s oeuvre on the edge of animation and printmaking.

Ross, who has worked with Kentridge since the early 2000s, stresses that an in-depth understanding of the series requires knowledge of the multiplicity inherent in many of Kentridge’s projects, in which the same imagery recurs in varying forms. “Because he often works on a number of projects at once, his ideas for one project tend to fuel another. Images that you see in Universal Archive overlap considerably across many mediums.” Ross adds that she sees the title as “a reference to his personal ‘universal archive’ – the themes and images that he repeatedly draws on to animate his work.”

Text by Jacqueline Flint, 2020

In January 2016 Jillian Ross, Master Printer of Johannesburg’s David Krut Workshop (DKW), was invited to spend an afternoon in Kentridge’s Houghton studio. At the time, preparations for the frieze project were in motion, the walls and surfaces of the studio covered with proposed layouts, scale tests, preliminary drawings and plans. Ross and Kentridge began exploring the idea of using these drawings as the basis for a print collaboration.

A number of different avenues were investigated, and Ross left mulling over a few ideas. For Ross, an important considerations was the ability to build on the skills acquired in previous projects so as to go beyond what had been achieved before.

Considering that the images stencilled onto the Tiber wall are ultimately fugitive, in time all that will remain of the project are the outcomes of collaborations that happened alongside and as a result of it. The Tiber River procession was an extraordinarily ambitious pursuit and the print collaboration needed to do justice to the scale and intent, albeit in a different arena. Woodcut was finally settled upon as the medium – a challenge in itself, having not worked together in the medium before. And so they embarked on a journey that led to the creation of a series of six almost-life-size, multi-sheet, multi-timber woodcut prints, which unfolded over the course of three years.

The Triumphs & Laments Woodcut Series has been shown extensively, as a whole and in parts, over the course of the years in which it was made.

2019 saw two large-scale retrospective exhibitions of Kentridge’s work – in Cape Town, at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) and at the Kunstmuseum Basel – which presented the artist with an opportunity to review a selection of his work spanning the last 40 years. The Triumphs & Laments Woodcut Series was included in both these exhibitions as a pinnacle project for Kentridge in terms of his dedication to print media. The series, and its relationship to the Triumphs & Laments frieze project in Rome, is also an excellent acknowledgement of Kentridge’s dedication to impermanence and contingency in terms of making sense – of politics, of social commentary, of history.

Text by Jacqueline Flint, 2020

Each print comes unassembled with the following contents included:

• a black linen portfolio box that houses
  • an instructions manual
  • a booklet on the making of each artwork
• the number of prints found in the finished work
• the number of aluminum pins found in the finished work
• two acetate sheets with registration notes (life size)

William Kentridge (b.1955) is a multidisciplinary South African artist – a printmaker, a director of the theatre and opera, a draftsman and an animation filmmaker. One might call him a maverick of the arts for the unparalleled ways in which he combines old and new artistic mediums, such as film and charcoal. While he does not define himself as a “political artist”, Kentridge is widely regarded as the go-to contemporary South African artist whose work cannot be detached from his country’s recent history and fraught present.

His reading of ‘Politics and African History’ while studying at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg inspired him t0 reject the traditionalist position from which art was taught at the time in South Africa. In his own words, he was told that “to be an artist was to paint with oil on canvas”. He took evening classes in etching, through which he started to grow as a visual artist who largely deals in black and white.

While many artists dabble in printmaking on the side of their practice, Kentridge is a modern pioneer in the medium – drawings and theatre projects regularly emerge from his prints. For Kentridge, printmaking is in itself a multi-disciplinary practice. He says that “there is also a way of thinking of an etching as an extraordinary, ridiculously complicated form of animation, different states of the plate when you know that you will rework them”.