Notes

This drawing was made for the animated film Stereoscope, the eighth in William Kentridge's decade-long series featuring Soho Eckstein, the archetypal white, Johannesburg businessman of the post-Apartheid era. In these films, Kentridge developed a small cast of characters: Soho Eckstein, a Johannesburg real estate developer; Mrs Eckstein, his unsatisfied wife; and Felix Teitlebaum, a poetic dreamer who longs for Mrs Eckstein, some of these characters, presumably, alter egos of the artist. In reworking William Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness, William Kentridge created a narrative specific to South Africa based on the lives of two characters.

In Hogarth’s original the idle apprentice ends up being hanged, while the industrious man becomes Lord Mayor of London. In Kentridge’s retelling, the idle man makes a fortune abroad while the industrious man ends up destitute. The evolution of the industrialist Eckstein becomes a metaphor for contemporary South Africa conferred through his “complex combination of economic power, personal ruthlessness, and guilt-laden memory”.¹ The film Stereoscope addresses the question of “how to maintain a sense of both contradictory and complementary parallel parts of oneself” and regards the “cost of trying to bring these disparate parts together”.²

The role of drawings in Kentridge's oeuvre has developed over time. Initially created in service to his films, they gradually took on a more independent life, and in 1992 the artist began showing them separately. In this drawing, Eckstein is on the telephone with a blue cord leading down to a pile of wire and telecommunications hardware below. In the films of this time, the blue pastel often represents conscience and memory, as though Eckstein is trying to make sense of the mess below, or the history that he has created.

¹ Sittenfeld, Michael. (ed.) (2001) William Kentridge, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art. Page 19.
² Kentridge interviewed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in Cameron, Dan; Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn and Coetzee J.M. (1999) William Kentridge. London and New York: Phaidon Press Limited. Page 23-30.