William Kentridge

(born 1955)

Soho in Bed with Rhinoceros' (Drawing for Mine)

Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired by the current owner at the Goodman Gallery, 'Drawings for Projection' in 1992;
A private collection.

Exhibited
Johannesburg, Goodman Gallery, 'Drawings for Projection', February, 1992.
Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts/Paleis voor Schone Kunsten; Munich, Kunstverein München; Austria, Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, William Kentridge, May, 1998 to January, 1999.

Literature
Dan Cameron, William Kentridge, (London, 1999) p.115 (illustrated)
Mark Rosenthal, William Kentridge, Five Themes, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 79 (illustrated)
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, (Brussels: Societe des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles/Vereniging voor Tentoonstellingen van het Paleis voor Schone Kunsten Brussel, 1998), p. 69 (illustrated)
Lilian Tone, William Kentridge Fortuna, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), p. 151 (illustrated)
Matthew Kentridge, The Soho Chronicles, 10 Films by William Kentridge, (London, New York & Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2015), p. 187 (illustrated)
Margaret K. Koerner, Smoke, Ashes, Fable, William Kentridge In Bruges, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 125 (illustrated)


This drawing, which dates from 1991 is from Mine, the second of Kentridge's animated films. It was used as the final sequence in this film from 5:25 min to 5:32 min., when the Rhinoceros tenderly nuzzles at Soho's out-stretched hand.

The work is the most significant of the 'Drawings for Projection' to come to the market in recent times and has not been seen publicly since its inclusion in the 1998/99 exhibition.

"In these films Kentridge established the story line that would prevail throughout the series: the evolution of the dark-suited industrialist Soho Eckstein, whose complex combination of economic power, personal ruthlessness, and guilt-laden memory characterize one aspect of contemporary South Africa, and his alter ego Felix Teitlebaum, who is portrayed as nude and thoughtful, an artist who wins Soho's wife at least temporarily. In these early films Soho builds his empire and becomes a civic benefactor... ...The early films focus extensively on the struggle of Soho and Felix for Mrs. Eckstein...Soho's appearance derives from a linocut Kentridge had made in his youth of 'my grandfather in his three-piece pin-stripe suit sitting on Muizenberg beach from an old family photograph'...In these early films, Soho is most often seen in his bed surrounded by a clutter of half-eaten food and office machines. The utter jumble of these objects on his bed, and the conjunction of Soho's public and private life, recall the late self-portraits of Philip Guston, in which the artist lies haunted by nightmare and doubt" (Neal Benezra, William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection, exhib. cat. for New York, pgs. 19-20).

Playing a consistent caricature throughout Kentridge's work, references of the rhinoceros can be seen in early drawings from the 1980's, to a symbol of the repressed by the hands of the German colonial force in Black Box created in 2005. Here we see the rhinoceros not as a wild animal, but a domestic pet tamely interacting with Soho who dominates the scene. While this may be a display of Kentridge's affection for the animal, given his favourable use of the subject, the rhinoceros also symbolises the bourgeois exploitation of the South African ecosystem. Following the consequences that the mining industry had on the South African environment, Kentridge critiques conservation motivations whilst simultaneously examining the irony of controlling wild animals through eco-tourism. Eco-tourism, Kentridge analyses, has obscured and consequentially manipulated the nature in South Africa, throwing into question the definition of 'wild' given the nature and game reserve's domesticized state.

"The technique I use is to have a sheet of paper stuck up on the studio wall and, half-way across the room, my camera, usually an old Bolex. A drawing is tarted on the paper, I walk across to the camera, shoot one or two frames, walk back to the paper, change the drawing (marginally), walk back to the camera, walk back to the paper, to the camera, and so on. So that each sequence as opposed to each frame of the film is a single drawing. In all there may be twenty drawings to a film rather than the thousands one expects. It is more like making a drawing than making a film (albeit a gray, battered and rubbed about drawing). Once the film, editing, adding sound, music and so on proceeds like any other.

"...I started filming drawings as a way of recording their histories. Often I found – I find – that a drawing that starts well, or with some interest in its first impulse, becomes too cautious, too overworked, too tame, as the work progresses. (The ways in which a drawing can die on you are depressingly numerous.)
A film of the drawing holds each moment. And of course, often, as a drawing proceeds, interest shifts from what was originally central, to something that initially appeared incidental. Filming enables me to follow this process of vision and revision as it happens. This erasing of charcoal, and imperfect activity, always leaves a gray smudge on the paper. So filming not only records the changes in the drawing but reveals too the history of those changes, as each erasure leaves a snail-trail of what has been."

(Lecture, 1993, published in Cycnos: Image et Langage, Problemes, Approches, Méthodes, Nice, vol. 11 no.1, 1994, pp. 163-168. Republished in C. Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, William Kentridge, Societe des Expositions du Palais de Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles 1998, pgs.61-64)

Bibliography
Matthew Kentridge, The Soho Chronicles, 10 Films by William Kentridge, (London, New York & Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2015)