Notes

This drawing is from William Kentridge’s film Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), the first in his celebrated cycle of stop-animation films collectively known as Drawings for Projection. The eight-minute film is composed of 25 charcoal and pastel drawings (of which this is one) that Kentridge progressively altered through erasure and redrawing to evoke the action of his film. The narrative revolves around a property developer named Soho Eckstein, his estranged wife, and a dreamy interloper named Felix Teitlebaum, who in Kentridge’s words gives Mrs Eckstein “a gift of love”.¹ The film culminates in Eckstein and Teitlebaum wrestling over Mrs Eckstein’s affections in the city’s damaged industrial landscapes, notably its slime dams.

Kentridge’s film forms the opening gambit of a longstanding project exploring the pleasures and corruptions – personally, socially, politically as well as ecologically – of white privilege in South Africa. Teitlebaum is not disconnected from Eckstein and is conventionally understood to be an alter ego of his ruthless antagonist in the film. There is a cartoonish grandeur to both Kentridge’s protagonists, who feature in a number of the films in his Drawings for Projection cycle, but also a flagrant self-awareness to his visual criticism. As philosopher Arthur C. Danto notes, “Felix and Soho look much alike, which suggests that together they constitute a self-portrait of the artist, since he resembles both”.²

The film features a number of intertitles, a device from silent films used to narrate the action. This drawing follows a statement reading, “Felix Teitlebaum’s anxiety flooded half the house.” Teitlebaum is routinely associated with the imagery of water and bathing in Kentridge’s film. This wet imagery, notes art historian Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, is presented “in opposition to the dry mining landscape, one of many binary oppositions between Soho and Felix.”³

Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris premièred at the Weekly Mail Film Festival in October 1989. The film has subsequently been shown at numerous venues internationally, enabling a rare density of opinion to form around this key early work of Kentridge. Of interest, Teitlebaum, who floats in his own anxiety, has been variously characterised as “humane and loving”4, “a moony artist who looks like a somewhat leaner Soho with his clothes off,”5 and “artsy, fleshy, sex-obsessed [and] mostly shown in the nude, letting it all hang out in bona fide artist mode, while he frets about the world around him without making any difference to it.”6

1 William Kentridge quoted in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. (1998) William Kentridge, Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts. Page 42.

2 Arthur C. Danto. (2001) ‘Drawing for Projection’, The Nation (USA), 28 June.

3 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, op.cit., page 42.

4 Elizabeth Manchester. (2000) Felix in Exile: Summary,  [Online], Available: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kentridge-felix-in-exile-t07479

5 Arthur C. Danto, op.cit.

6 Blake Gopnik. (2001) ‘An Animated Darkness’, Washington Post (USA), 11 March.

Provenance

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.