Untitled Drawing for Mango Groove Music Video (Child in a Landscape and Radio)

Notes

In 1994, William Kentridge directed the music video for Another Country, the title song from popular musical ensemble Mango Groove’s third album. Billboard, a respected industry magazine in the United States, praised the album’s title song as ‘one of the most beautiful songs to emerge from the transition to democracy’.¹ It was also celebrated locally, winning the prestigious Loerie Award in 2014.

The music video was produced in Kentridge’s signature stop-motion style; however, it differs from his career-defining films in that it features a live actor. Mango Groove’s lead singer, Claire Johnston, is the only member of the band who appears in the video, which is set in Kentridge’s abstracted and tumultuous Johannesburg. Johnston moves through Kentridge’s charcoal-drawn narrative that presents banner-carrying crowds who storm down city streets, and towering monuments and animated megaphones that reference the artist’s earlier films Monument (1990) and Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old (1991). While poignant images of a violent past flash across billboards and drive-in screens, there is also a promise of clarity and renewal in the video’s clear, starry skies and cleansing rains.

The drawing of the child in the present lot appears one minute and two seconds into the video. Johnston sorrowfully sings: ‘A mother’s cries / Fear in an old man’s eyes / A child’s blood on the walls’ as the young figure comes into view on an open field. The next frame illustrates the heartbreaking reality of the young lives lost to apartheid’s violence that resounds in the lyrics. The radio is featured at one minute fifty-five seconds, and it recalls how heavily censored the media was during apartheid, as well as the role it took up as the country navigated its complex transition period post-1994. Three decades later, this drawing from Another Country is a valuable document of creative collaboration during a fraught political time and the defiant spirit of hope the song held as South Africa awaited its first democratic elections in 1994.

Music video link: https://youtu.be/TknvvcWciBc?si=XPU3dgpcZb5Ae5yv

^1. Arthur Goldstuck, ‘South African artists reflect
optimism’, in Billboard, 30 April 1994, page 89.