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Lot Essay
I'm very much aware of three generationsof forebears in South Africa, and generations before that coming from Eastern Europe. So it is not as if I feel myself Lithuanian in any way, nor do I feel as [if] I have ancestral roots in Africa. Anyone who says they feel quintessentially African is speaking a kind of a myth (William Kentridge in conversation with Dan Cameron, An Interview with William Kentridge, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (exh. cat.), New York, 2001, p. 72; quoted in: Kate McKrickard, William Kentridge, Tate Publishing, London, 2012, p. 7) .
Personal as well as cultural identity and the division of the self are salient themes in the work of the South African artist William Kentridge. The tensions of his dual heritage in the context of the complex recent history of South Africa, find expression in Kentridge's epic animation 9 Drawings for Projection, 1989-2003, in which both the hero and anti-hero, Felix Teitlebaum and Soho Eckstein, are part self-portrait, part amalgam of Kentridge's father and grandfather. This blurring of his own image with alter egos and impersonations is a strategy used repeatedly by Kentridge:
There are things one can say about oneself, which suddenly, if you're saying them about other people, you've got to take all sorts of responsibilities [for]. For example, Soho Eckstein, the character in the film, there was accusation that it was anti-Semitism. Why have you drawn that nasty person as Jewish? So once I say, okay, I'm going to take responsibility for that character as myselfI'll take photos of myself to use those as the reference, as acting the part of Ubu, so it could be ridiculousThings that if I had said, 'I'm doing a drawing of myself', I would never have dared to do. (William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas In Conversation, Lizanicole-films and Pulp Films, 2009, quoted in: Kate McKrickard, William Kentridge, Tate Publishing, London, 2012, p. 77).
The series Ubu Tells the Truth was conceived as a collaborative project with the artists Robert Hodgins and Deborah Bell to mark the centenary in 1996 of the premier of Alfred Jarry's absurd play Ubu Roi. The title also refers to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which, beginning in 1996, invited all those responsible for atrocities under the Apartheid regime to apply for amnesty from future prosecution by giving full public disclosure of their crimes, often before their victims or the victim's families. Jarry's grotesque despot, an enduring emblem of the corruption and brutality of the totalitarian state, finds particular resonance in the light of these revelations of the horrors of state-sponsored apartheid.
Kentridge based the series of etchings on photographs taken of himself, naked, playing the part of Ubu in his studio. In the final, published version, this farcical re-enactment is overlaid with the cartoonish figure of Ubu, printed in white, cavorting around the shallow, stage-like space. Fictitious act and scene numbers are also added to each plate, amplifying the sense of theatricality and of the burlesque. The presence of this grotesque doppelgänger, who abuses, parodies and mimics his human counter-part, but is also somehow identified with him, reveals something of the complexity of the South African experience. As Kentridge explains: 'How does one deal with the weight of evidence presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?...How to absorb the horror stories themselves and the implications of what one knew, half knew, and did not know of the abuses of the apartheid years? (William Kentridge in William Kentridge (exh. cat), Socit des Exposition du Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1998, p. 119; quoted in: William Kentridge (exh. cat), Serpentine Gallery, 21 April - 30 May, 1999).
The present lot is one of only ten sets printed without the additional plate in white. The absence of the cartoonish Ubu changes the tone of the series, which becomes less frenetic and more elegiac, and subtly shifts its reading towards more universal themes of suffering and guilt, of memory and history, of complicity or impotence in the face of injustice. The scrawled legend Ecco Ubu (Act III, scene 4) is now directed at the man, a melancholic association and bleak assessment of the human condition.
Personal as well as cultural identity and the division of the self are salient themes in the work of the South African artist William Kentridge. The tensions of his dual heritage in the context of the complex recent history of South Africa, find expression in Kentridge's epic animation 9 Drawings for Projection, 1989-2003, in which both the hero and anti-hero, Felix Teitlebaum and Soho Eckstein, are part self-portrait, part amalgam of Kentridge's father and grandfather. This blurring of his own image with alter egos and impersonations is a strategy used repeatedly by Kentridge:
There are things one can say about oneself, which suddenly, if you're saying them about other people, you've got to take all sorts of responsibilities [for]. For example, Soho Eckstein, the character in the film, there was accusation that it was anti-Semitism. Why have you drawn that nasty person as Jewish? So once I say, okay, I'm going to take responsibility for that character as myselfI'll take photos of myself to use those as the reference, as acting the part of Ubu, so it could be ridiculousThings that if I had said, 'I'm doing a drawing of myself', I would never have dared to do. (William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas In Conversation, Lizanicole-films and Pulp Films, 2009, quoted in: Kate McKrickard, William Kentridge, Tate Publishing, London, 2012, p. 77).
The series Ubu Tells the Truth was conceived as a collaborative project with the artists Robert Hodgins and Deborah Bell to mark the centenary in 1996 of the premier of Alfred Jarry's absurd play Ubu Roi. The title also refers to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which, beginning in 1996, invited all those responsible for atrocities under the Apartheid regime to apply for amnesty from future prosecution by giving full public disclosure of their crimes, often before their victims or the victim's families. Jarry's grotesque despot, an enduring emblem of the corruption and brutality of the totalitarian state, finds particular resonance in the light of these revelations of the horrors of state-sponsored apartheid.
Kentridge based the series of etchings on photographs taken of himself, naked, playing the part of Ubu in his studio. In the final, published version, this farcical re-enactment is overlaid with the cartoonish figure of Ubu, printed in white, cavorting around the shallow, stage-like space. Fictitious act and scene numbers are also added to each plate, amplifying the sense of theatricality and of the burlesque. The presence of this grotesque doppelgänger, who abuses, parodies and mimics his human counter-part, but is also somehow identified with him, reveals something of the complexity of the South African experience. As Kentridge explains: 'How does one deal with the weight of evidence presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?...How to absorb the horror stories themselves and the implications of what one knew, half knew, and did not know of the abuses of the apartheid years? (William Kentridge in William Kentridge (exh. cat), Socit des Exposition du Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1998, p. 119; quoted in: William Kentridge (exh. cat), Serpentine Gallery, 21 April - 30 May, 1999).
The present lot is one of only ten sets printed without the additional plate in white. The absence of the cartoonish Ubu changes the tone of the series, which becomes less frenetic and more elegiac, and subtly shifts its reading towards more universal themes of suffering and guilt, of memory and history, of complicity or impotence in the face of injustice. The scrawled legend Ecco Ubu (Act III, scene 4) is now directed at the man, a melancholic association and bleak assessment of the human condition.