Notes

William Kentridge explains that Stereoscope (1999), an animated film featuring the pivotal character Soho Ekstein, asks “how to maintain a sense of both contradictory and complementary parallel parts of oneself. Since James Joyce, there has always been in modernist writing the notion of a stream of consciousness–floating connections rather than a programmed, clear progression. "What I’m interested in,” he reveals, "is a kind of multi-layered highway of consciousness, where one lane has one thought but driving up behind and overtaking it is a completely different thought."¹

Delve and Stroke resembles a film’s storyboard in which the artist has rapidly sketched ideas for drawings for animation. Water, a central metaphor in Stereoscope suggests life, tears, and floods, is depicted in cobalt blue - a device in the film that features strongly in the present lot. Heads that appear to be asleep or dreaming evoke Kentridge’s monumental African heads. The lower register contains words rich in associative references. Delve suggests digging the ground as well as probing the past. While stroke may imply caresses, it also refers directly to the bizarrely compelling notion of creating electricity by stroking dry, black cats, as advocated by the Russian poet and playwright, Vladimir Mayakovsky—the likely source for the cat in Kentridge’s films.

¹ Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (1999) ‘Interview: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in conversation with William Kentridge’ in Dan Cameron, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and J M Coetzee, William Kentridge, London: Phaidon, page 26.

Provenance

Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 7 March 2011, lot 320.