Notes

An interest in optics and the construct of seeing informs Kentridge’s experiments with stereoscopic vision, of which Table with Sparrow forms a part. In order to achieve the illusion of stereoscopic vision, a drawing or construction is photographed twice, with the focal points about 7,5 centimetres apart – roughly the distance between the pupils of a person’s eyes. The use of the stereopticon—an optical viewer that creates the illusion of three-dimensionality when viewing two nearly identical images side by side – transforms these two images into a three-dimensional experience in the viewer’s perception, as they are translated into the complex neural patterns of the brain.

Table with Sparrow translates the set of small photographic images inserted into a stereopticon, as seen in Kentridge’s earlier Double Vision (2007), into two largescale drawings forming a diptych, and it  was subsequently made into an editioned work by the artist.

A sense of contention and play is brought into the artist’s practice through the questioning of perception that Table with Sparrow proposes. It also harks back to early experiments in binocular perception that found their way into the repertoire of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The drawing Table with Sparrow (2019) was included for Norval Foundation’s Why Should I Hesitate?, Sculpture, the first retrospective exhibition of William Kentridge’s sculptural practice.

Exhibited

Norval Foundation, Cape Town, William Kentridge: Why Should I Hesitate, Sculpture, 24 August 2019 to 27 July 2020.

Literature

Karel Nel and Owen Martin (2019) William Kentridge: Why Should I Hesitate, Sculpture, Cape Town: Norval Foundation, illustrated on pages 196 and 197.