South African

He is white & Jewish – becomes the model for his character Felix

Shows 2 views – our brain interprets these as one.

This means that reality has different points of view

His parents were politically active during Apartheid times so he was raised to be aware of inequalities in power and possessions

William Kentridge – animator of drawings

A ‘stereoscope’

‘Stereoscope’ is one of his animated drawings

issue of New Media … is drawing really ‘Art’?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kentridge

http://www.youtube.com/embed/c6Y5hiIGrUY No Longer available due to a copyright claim by the Marian Goodman Gallery! (Watch on our server)There is re-mix using it with strange music.Point about New Media as a valued and valid art work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeUu-pTNaK8Meditation on Stereoscope by Philip Hartigan

http://www.cmoa.org/international/html/art/kentridge.htm

He uses blue to represent lines of communication – both pleasant and unpleasant. e.g. water connecting people

Also the line of a bullet moving to kill

Kentridge:

“But I think there are other people who do say that the films are about space between the political world and the personal, and the extent to which politics does or does not find its way into the private realm.”

Colour symbolism i.e. its meaning

Music? Minor key = plaintive; haunting; mourning; unresolved;Discordant combinations of notes.Music is normally not part of art.

Felix is the natural man – naked – has nothing, not even clothes

Felix

Soho

Soho is the suited capitalist – rich – has everything

A political duality!

All drawings from Stereoscope (Artthrob)

Also a personal duality!

“I understood Soho and Felix much more as two different sides of one character rather than two different

characters.”homepage.mac.com/.../tonekentridge.html

Materials & Technique

Kentridge draws in charcoal, erases it,then adds more charcoal

He photographs this activity as it progresses

This says that history can never be erased – the past is always visible and recorded

Issues of ‘New Media’

This is a new way of working with drawings- not like traditional animation technique where 1 drawing = 1 frame

He also works intuitively - no fixed story plan – this is very different to traditional film-making

Kentridge says of Stereoscope:

“I wanted a sense of transience, of a city bustling, telegraph wires and power stations.

Early on I knew that it would involve lines of communication, telephone switchboards. The idea of the stereoscope, of the double room, came quite a lot later.”homepage.mac.com/.../tonekentridge.html

Lilian Tone says of Stereoscope:

“Somehow the stereoscope here works as a surrogate for the camera. It is like the X-ray, the M.R.I., the cat scan, other instruments that have appeared in your films, which represent different ways of seeing, different ways to represent and understand the world.”homepage.mac.com/.../tonekentridge.html

EXTRA

Lilian Tone: When you first told me about your ideas for Stereoscope, you were not sure if you would be using your usual characters, or any characters, but later somehow Soho made his way into the film. How have the characters of Felix Teitlebaum and Soho Eckstein evolved over the past ten years?

Kentridge: Initially I would always conceive Soho as an other, as an alien, very much based on images of greedy industrialists from Russian and early Futurist propaganda drawings, of George Grosz and German Expressionism. But after a few films I understood that in many ways he looked like my paternal grandfather, and in fact years ago I had made some drawings of my grandfather in his suit on the beach that looked just like Soho. This made me understand that maybe he was not as far from me as I had anticipated.

homepage.mac.com/.../tonekentridge.html

EXTRA