Notes

This process drawing derives from Kentridge’s ten-minute animated film Other Faces (2011), the tenth film in the artist’s celebrated Drawings for Projection (1989-present) series. The film currently appears in Kentridge’s large-scale survey at London’s Royal Academy. Filmed using a 35mm movie camera, Other Faces features an impressionistic montage of charcoal drawings, many progressively altered through erasure and overdrawing. The film is bookended by drawings of Johannesburg’s changing inner-city landscape, notably around Selby, and depicts the slow excavation of a mine dump with a drive-in cinema atop. This recurring motif references the well-known demolition, in 2009, of Johannesburg’s Top Star drive-in cinema, which for decades was located on the Ferreira dump. The film’s roaming exploration of Johannesburg is dramatically anchored in a head-on collision between aging industrialist Soho Eckstein, the most durable character in Kentridge’s film series, and another, unnamed driver. This leads to a tense standoff between the two drivers, both men in pinstripe suits, one black and the other white. The accident occurs at the fictional meeting point of two actual Johannesburg roads, Eckstein Street in Observatory and Error Street in New Doornfontein. Error, a central concept in Kentridge’s idea that the studio as a safe space to fail, is here – nudge-nudge wink-wink – linked to geographies familiar to the artist. Kentridge lived in central Johannesburg for many years and still regularly commutes to his second studio on Main Street. Not all the drawings are related to the demolition and collision. Other Faces includes documentary portraits of anonymous city inhabitants, as well as fine descriptions of architectural landmarks, notably Jeppe Street business facades and the Edwin Lutyens-designed Anglo-Boer War Memorial in Eckstein Park, Saxonwold. This particular drawing was used in a series of rapidly edited tracking shots near the end of the film, when the digressive narrative returns to the shouting men in suits. Prefaced by a moving portrait of the artist’s mother, Felicia Kentridge, who was rendered paralysed in later life by a degenerative disease, the montage of drawings include the surreal injunction, ‘JUST GET OUT OF TOWN!’ Language is a malleable thing in the artist’s hand. In this drawing, which includes the silhouette of Yeoville Water Tower at top left, that instruction is recomposed to suggest, MUST GET OUT NOW.