Notes

The two rubrics 'Thick Time’ and ‘Practical Epistemology’ do not only represent basic processes in Kentridge’s art-making, they are also at the core of his own, and all good qualitative research. Notably, the rubrics are printed on the pages of old texts — showing how the artist’s thinking and his work are always rooted in an historical past.  In Lesson 3 of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures series, William Kentridge deals with his own origins and with the geological, political and socio-cultural sedimentation of Johannesburg, where he has lived his life. Every creative activity that he performs and completes contains the materialisation of time: his movement between studio and the environment that he captures in his art; his movement to and from the sheet of paper on his studio wall; his movement between camera and paper when shooting frame by frame of his animated films. In the process of art-making "the studio becomes a machine for the alteration of time. Time becomes distance, it becomes matter, it expands and contracts, it becomes visible”.¹

Thick Time became Kentridge’s signature theme for several exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, September 2016 to January 2017; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, February to June 2017; Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Salzburg, July to November 2017; and the Whitworth, Manchester, September 2018 to March 2019.

1. William Kentridge (2014) Six Drawing Lessons, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, page 90.