William Kentridge Prints
(David Krut Publishing)
William Kentridge is best known, in South Africa and internationally, for his drawings and the short films using those drawings as their base. In parallel with those media, however, he has a long and distinguished career as a printmaker, often tangentially related to his other projects such as his theatre work. It is these prints that this attractive and comprehensive book documents.
I remember taking part in the first fully legal protest march through central Johannesburg in 1989, and seeing in the distance, bobbing above the heads of the crowd, a big poster depicting boxed heads and the mysterious legend ”Casspirs full of love”. It turned out to be borne by Kentridge, and was one of his works — then in the form of a silkscreen, I think. Here it is reproduced as a drypoint etching.
William Kentridge Prints demonstrates the full range of his printmaking, going back to his earliest prints, which were lino cuts, and showing the various ways in which he has experimented with the medium. His Thinking on Water series, for instance, used copper wire to create watermarks in handmade paper, and his Living Language set responded to the challenge of printing from old vinyl records — an experiment that then introduced the circular form to other areas of Kentridge’s work. He has even made use of a plague of ants to create prints, which is surely an unprecedented conceptual innovation.
The background to the works, and any pertinent details, are concisely explained by the artist himself in short commentaries alongside the images — a gold mine for artists and those interested in technique and its way of transforming content. An overview of Kentridge’s printmaking practice is provided by Princeton academic and poet Susan Stewart in her essay Resistance and Ground. She teases out both Kentridge’s ”moral thinking”, the layers of reference to forebears such as Hogarth, and the manner in which ”the history of printmaking has offered Kentridge a number of devices for complicating point of view”. In this ”art of reversals”, as Stewart says, Kentridge has found another application for his unique talent.