Notes

The present lot is accompanied by a copy of an artist's certificate of authenticity.

William Kentridge met Gerhard Marx in the early 2000s when Marx was employed by the Handspring Puppet Company to work on their theatrical production of The Chimp Project (2001). Kentridge later invited Marx, a sculpture graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art, to work on the set designs for his 2005 adaptation of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Marx initially worked as a technical assistant. “You get to work in ways that you wouldn’t normally get to do,” says Marx. “You also don’t take the creative risk, you just make. There’s an indemnity and freedom built into it. You can explore quite widely under someone else’s name. There’s value in that.”¹

Marx also contributed his technical know-how to Kentridge’s three-channel video installation Breathe Dissolve Return (2008), which premiered at La Fenice Opera House in Venice. This project directly led to the production of a series of small sculptures from torn sheets of paper and cardboard. The maquettes, which drew on Kentridge’s visual language, were subsequently evolved into painted steel sculptures. Like the large public sculpture Fire Walker (2009), which is jointly credited to both artists, this lot is also a product of shared inputs: Kentridge’s iconography and Marx’s visual problem-solving.

This lot comprises two images: a red circle and a globe astride divider-like legs. The motif of the Greek Titan Atlas holding up the celestial heavens for eternity is central to Western sculpture. In Kentridge’s telling, however, the world in his sculpture has picked itself up by its own bootstraps. The image originated out of various earlier projects, among them an animation of a set of legs, like two pylons marching, which appeared in his operetta Zeno at 4 am (2001). Another important precursor image is a 2007 etching of a globe atop pylon-like legs that Kentridge contributed to the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

The images of the circle and the world only achieve visual coherence from two specific vantage points and cannot be viewed simultaneously. “It has to do with a provisionality of coherence,” explained Kentridge. “It’s a kind of empty sculpture. It should be three dimensional, but it only makes visual sense from one position … It’s very much about the way we put fragments together to make things coherent. We see half of something but imagine what the other half is. We hear half a sentence and imagine what the other part could have been. We nearly understand the foreign language. But the words that we don't understand, we fill in for ourselves as if we are taking this fragmented view of the world on its hind legs, and putting it together into a single, coherent image. So it’s very much about the way we make meaning in the world, not only the meaning of the sculpture, but of all of our daily life.”²

In 2017, a four-by-five metre version of this lot was installed as a public sculpture in Beverly Hills, California.

^1. Gerhard Marx (2022), personal interview, Cape Town, 13 May.
^2. William Kentridge (2021) ‘William Kentridge on his sculptures, Action and World on its Hind Legs’, Norval Foundation, YouTube channel, 31 March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUoaD4KXtJw

Provenance

Lia Rumma, Italy.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Norval Foundation, Cape Town, Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture, 24 August 2019 to 27 July 2020, another example from the edition exhibited.

Literature

Owen Martin (ed) (2020) William Kentridge: Why Should I Hesitate - Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, Cape Town and London: Norval Foundation and Koenig Books, another example from the edition illustrated in colour on page 171 and 174.

William Kentridge (2021)William Kentridge: Visual Index of Sculpture Practice, 1984-2019, William Kentridge: Visual Index of Sculpture Practice, 1984-2019 by Kentridge Studio - Issuu, accessed 3 August 2023.

Stephen Clingman (2022) William Kentridge, London: Royal Academy of Arts, another larger example from the edition illustrated in colour on page 12.