Four Instruments

Four Instruments (2003) is another key example of procession in Kentridge’s oeuvre. Here a nutcracker with antlers leads a pinstripe-suited businessman (Kentridge’s shorthand for Soho Eckstein), a sextant with a prosthetic leg and a skirted coffee pot, all going nowhere in particular. The print concentrates Kentridge’s taste for absurd anthropomorphizing and the fusing of commonplace objects, particularly those of the predigital era, whose mechanisms lay exposed to the eye: the desktop rotary phone, the typewriter and the Bialetti Moka espresso pot—so satisfying and consequential to draw. These outmoded things are talismans that recall the clear-sightedness of childhood; he draws the outside of them as if it were their soul, unsentimental and poetic at the same time. – Kate McCrickard, Art in Print. William Kentridge: Drawing Has its Own Memory, from Volume 6, Number 5