charcoal and pastel on paper

Artwork date: 1987
Signature details: signed and dated
Exhibited: 1820 Settlers National Monument, Standard Bank Arts Festival, Grahamstown (toured to Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg; University Art Galleries, University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg; University Art Gallery, UNISA, Pretoria; Durban Art Gallery, Durban), Standard Bank Young Artist Award 1987 – William Kentridge, July 1987.
Literature: Miles, E. & Crump, A. (1987). Standard Bank Young Artist Award 1987 – William Kentridge. Catalogue. Grahamstown: Broederstroom Press, colour illustration, unpaginated.

(1)

149 x 101.5 cm

Acquired from the artist following the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 1987 exhibition.

Notes:

Kentridge’s subject here is ostensibly ballet – more specifically the grand jeté, an explosive show-stopping movement in which the dancer leaps forwards and upwards into the air in a ‘split jump’, creating a fleeting, stop-frame illusion of floating, suspension, momentary weightlessness. But the ‘grand’ in the title registers also as a witty double entendre that riffs on the voluptuousness of the dancer who defies not only gravity but the slightness and ephemerality of balletic convention. The scale of the drawing lends credence to the ‘grand’ spectacle and sense of impossible contradiction – grandeur and abjection, weight and weightlessness, earthy embodiment and celestial lightness – at the heart of this work.Grande Jeté formed part of Kentridge’s 1987 Standard Bank Young Artist Award exhibition of drawings and etchings. South Africa was two years into the State of Emergency declared by then President PW Botha in an attempt to quell increasing popular resistance and violent township protests against institutionalised racial segregation, and Kentridge’s exhibition was shot through with themes and motifs that questioned ‘the absurd “condition” in which we live’, as Alan Crump put it in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. Crump also noted that Kentridge was, at the time, ‘considerably younger than any of the past award winners’, and this drawing is something of an ur work – holding within it many of the themes and fascinations that the artist has gone on to explore across his rigorously inter-disciplinary oeuvre (embodiment, incremental movement/processions/stop-frame animation, theatricality, art as a mode of social dis/engagement, the limits of bourgeois modernity…). Kentridge had already established himself as one of the few artists in the country who ‘produced work in theatre, stage design, and film with equal ease and virtuosity’, and the subject of this work testifies to his passion for simultaneously embodying, directing and deconstructing the mechanics, illusion and form of the theatrical/cinematic experience.Far from the effete and grandiose ballet theatres of Paris, this theatre is more like an immense colosseum – a raucous stadium of popular gladiatorial combat, worldly affairs, enforced limits and torments. Advertising banners cover the tiers, vying for the spectators’ attention, and the arena below is strewn with barriers, barbed wire and other random apparatus; the razor wire an instantly recognisable reference to the ghettos of Eastern Europe and the militarised townships of 1980s South Africa. But the dancer has used her body, her art, her imagination, to transcend the tawdry spectacle about her, and in so doing, to dramatically transform it. She has reached a seemingly impossible height, defying gravity and science, and we view her from this height. Our vantage point, as viewers, is from above. It is as if she has miraculously succeeded in taking us with her. In a moment of ecstatic release, she breaks free from the grasp of gravity, and succeeds in liberating not just herself, but us too – her audience outside the frame.

Alexandra Dodd

Sources:

Crump, A. (1987). William Kentridge. Standard Bank Young Artist Award 1987. Catalogue. Johannesburg: Standard Bank, unpaginated.