Why South African artist William Kentridge doesn’t use colour in his art

Processions have been a recurring theme in your work — including More Sweetly Play the Dance shown in Kochi in 2018-19 — where we see shadows marching to nowhere. Is there a destination? Does it borrow from medieval danse macabre (dance of death)?

Some of my friends would say we need to know where they are marching to, you need to give us a hope of the destination. There are so many people moving around in the hope that where they are going would be slightly better. I suppose there is a hope in the activity of that march rather than a clear destination. There isn’t a certainty, if there was certainty, life would be much easier.

Do you then look for answers in absurdity? Ursonate, your live performance at the Biennale, is based on German artist Kurt Schwitters’ Dadaist sound poem.

There are different kinds of absurd. There is the absurd that is stupid or silly and I am not interested in that. I am interested in the absurd as a place where logic has become dislocated. You might say there is absurdity in the history of South African Apartheid, categorising people by the colour of their skin, which is a crazy logic but followed through with all detailing, that makes it absurd. It is warped logic carried through with great assiduity. To me, it is a category of understanding the world, it’s not tragedy or comedy but understanding situations where there are no good solutions.

Kentridge during the performance of Ursonate in Kochi with Ashwin R on the chenda, Koshery KJ Mani on the harmonium, vocalist Naisha Nazar (Photo courtesy: Swanoop John/Kochi Biennale)

Your parents were prominent lawyers. Your father defended Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu and your mother co-founded South Africa’s Legal Resources Centre. Did you consider being a lawyer or was art your language for activism?

My parents were both great lawyers and there was no point in me trying to be a lawyer because I would never be a lawyer like them. But it was also important for me to find a way of understanding the world that was different from a legal way of understanding. That, for me, became the activity of drawing, animation, something that doesn’t use linear logic but allows collage, understanding by association rather than rational analysis. It’s been a 40-year project. It may be wrong and, in the end I might say this was a test.

In your series Drawing Lessons, you question yourself. Do you do that often?

I think all artists at 4 in the morning, when they wake up, are questioning themselves. I have a project that I start in January and I know some of the broad themes and the language of it but have no idea how it will fit together. So, yes, I am full of doubts. I know when I start working with the musicians and performers, many things will emerge. I am not a novelist or a playwright and don’t write. Even for my films, I never have a script or storyboard, I trust that the images themselves will lead to coherence. I think self-doubt is a condition of being an artist.

You also collect objects and art. Do they enter your work in any way?

I am not a collector. In over 45 years, there are 10-12 things that I have bought. I have a beautiful Dürer’s Rhinoceros and a Rembrandt print. These are not the original, those would be way out of my price range. I also have several Goya prints, from his plate, that are astonishingly inexpensive. So, it’s not a valuable collection but I have works of particular artists. I think artists are scavengers. Like hyenas, they look at the world, works of other artists and pick up details. In a photograph of Shahidul Alam I saw in Kochi, there was a landscape with three women carrying water pots on their heads. The shape of those water pots is different from how it gets carried in South Africa. I took a detail of the silhouette, which might come into the project. I start doing in January. The way the cloth of their garment falls is also different from the South African way cloth is worn, and I might send that to the costume designer. Allowing everything to come into the studio, cutting it and rearranging the fragments and sending it back out is a fundamental activity.

You work in monochrome. The only colour we see in your work is in the maps and charts.

Some artists think in colour, their first impulse is colour and mine is drawing. What if all art students start doing oil painting? When I stepped back, my question with oil painting was ifit looked nice rather than what the image was trying to tell me it needs to become. When charcoal becomes a medium of thinking, with me working with colour became a question of decoration and pleasing, and that’s not a good way for an artist to be. Several references in my work also come from early photography, cinema, printmaking, all naturally back and white mediums. During Renaissance, there was a debate between disegno, the drawing of the Florentine artists, Michelangelo and the others, and Titian and other Venetian artists. Titian would say Michelangelo didn’t have a clue about colour, and Michelangelo would say Titan’s colours are beautiful but why doesn’t he learn to draw.

You continue to stay in Johannesburg, in the same house where you grew up. Is the language of your art also rooted in the place?

What keeps me there is partly the machinery of the studio, foundry, the very rich collaboration with talented musicians, singers, dancers… I was working with figurative animation at a time when that was completely not what was being done in America and Europe. Not being part of the centre and being in the periphery meant South Africa could develop its own language on its own terms without the terror of thinking it fits into the language of art magazines or what was being shown. In the ’90s, when curators started coming to South Africa, I was delighted yet astonished that they were interested in this language that was so different. It has been an interesting time, politically, the change from Apartheid to post-Apartheid to problems in post-Apartheid South Africa. I think there is much more present as raw material to draw on. It’s not like there isn’t politics wherever artists are working, but sometimes it is much more pressing. I don’t see myself as a political artist. I don’t say this is a polemic, I want to make (art) for the world to understand, except the polemic of uncertainty, doubt, is a long-term argument.