Notes

In 1999, during the initial wave of his global reception, William Kentridge made his first video installation to incorporate domestic furniture. Titled Sleeping on Glass, the work featured video-transfer reproductions of his charcoal drawings projected onto a mirror atop an antique chest of drawers. In 2001, Kentridge made a second work in this style, Medicine Chest, from which this drawing is derived. The installation comprises a found medicine chest with its mirrored back replaced with a screen showing a 5-minute 50-second animation of various charcoal and coloured pencil drawings. Featured in Kentridge’s first American career survey in 2001, the drawings included depictions of personal-care objects and other household objects stacked in three rows, as in a cabinet, some of these arrangements quoting still lifes by Chardin, Morandi and Philip Guston, as well as various self-portraits, written instructions (“Nil per mouth”), newspaper fly-bills (“Shopping mall’s bloody Monday”) and landscape drawings. Some of the landscape drawings are rendered in the three-tiered format of the still lifes. The present lot is an example.

The unpeopled post-industrial landscapes in this drawing evoke the southeastern periphery of Johannesburg. “It is an area I have known vaguely since childhood, but in detail since I worked as an art director on a film there, in which the yellow sands of the mine tailings had to stand in for the Namibian desert.”¹ Kentridge’s interest in landscape is highly analytical. “The landscape hides its history. The general nature of terrain and landscape as image is to appear as fact … I am really interested in the terrain’s hiding of its own history and the correspondence this has not only with painting, but with the way memory works. The difficulty we have in holding onto passions, impressions, ways of seeing things, the way that things which seem to be indelibly imprinted on our memories still fade and become elusive, is mirrored in the way in which the terrain itself cannot hold onto the events played out upon it.”²

Many of Kentridge’s most acclaimed drawings held in collections were used as drawings in his films. In this sense, their meaning, while obviously determined by what they portray, is also relational and linked to their usage within a film installation. “As the movie unfolds, the image [of the medicine chest] is transformed into a window, a birdcage, a kitchen cupboard, a still life, a curiosity box, and a number of other variations of container,” elaborated curator Dan Cameron. “On-going physical metamorphosis is at the thematic heart of Kentridge’s work and takes precedence in this piece over the idea of character and narrative, in a way that suggests a strong metaphysical undercurrent. The act of projecting a film within a domestic object also underscores the motif of human intimacy, which sharply differentiates Kentridge’s art from that of other artists dealing with questions of cultural change and transformation.”³ The tension between human intimacy and terrain as social fact is central to an appreciation of this important drawing.

^1. William Kentridge (1999) William Kentridge, London: Phaidon, page 126.
^2. Ibid., page 126.
^3. Dan Cameron (2001) curatorial statement for exhibition William Kentridge, New Museum, New York, 3 June to 16 September 2001: https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/374.

This lot has been selected by Curatorial Voice: Azu Nwagbogu.

Provenance

João Ferreira, 2002.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

New Museum, New York, William Kentridge, Solo Exhibition, 3 June – 16 September 2001.

Literature

William Kentridge (1999) William Kentridge, London, Phaidon, a similar example illustrated on page 126.