William Kentridge

William Kentridge is one of South Africa's most famous artist and with good reason. He studied Politics and African Studies at university, but he had a background in film and theatre, which led to him directing Mozart's Opera 'The Magic Flute' in South Africa, 2007.

This Opera departs from the usual format, and utilising stunning visuals to strengthen the performance. Kentridges smdugy white images are projected onto and behind the performers. His visuals play out ideas and theories that Kentridge has been formulating for years. I find it Impressive how he has used the two strong opposing forces in the Opera, night and day, and all the corresponding notions that accompany these two opposites and through the use of black on white mark making and its subsequent inversion these opposing forces play out through the dynamics of the creation process of the visuals.

Kentridge believes that the brain wants to see patterns in his work, wants to predict what the space will do next. He believes that the most minimal of visual hints are needed for reading sense into a space. He’s interested in utilising our ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that one enters into when engaging with a piece of art and the fact that the brain cannot stop this function when it comes to looking at abstract shapes. If McLuhan says the medium is the message then Kentridge does something interesting by revealing how his processes of movement are created. He renders these processes visible, in allowing us to understand the way in which the medium is utilised we see through the medium. We therefore question its neutral status for creating meaning and in doing this we see how it is selective, subjective memories that are crafted into the grand narratives of history.

He sees his political art as ‘an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings’.

One of my favourite quotes of his is when he’s referring to Plato’s allegory of the cave ‘Plato’s text is an extraordinary prescient description of what it is like to sit in a cinema - of what it means to have images on a screen ahead of you, a projector behind, and light streaming forward’.