William KentridgeFugitive Words, 2024
This single-channel charcoal-animated video piece unfolds entirely within the pages of a bound notebook, wherein shapes, symbols, extracted phrases, and historic and familial figures spill across the double-page spreads of paper and beyond onto and across Kentridge’s studio desk, until the notebook becomes inseparable from the real, tangible world.
This nuanced but often raw vulnerability of Kentridge’s drawings and works in this rather personal artwork, allows for an elliptical, non-narrative engagement with the filmed notebook as an aide memoire that treats his notebook as a site where ‘fugitive’ words and images find proximities between its covers to the sound of Beethoven's Piano Trio No. 7 in B-Flat Major, Op. 97 Archduke: III Andante cantabile.
In an extract from a letter to his father Sydney, William asks: “What will remain when you are gone?” and later the words, “Enter not into the fields of the fatherless”. A cursive heading on a further page pleads, “Remove Not The Old Landscape”, whereas elsewhere, in Latin, the phrase Ave Atque Vale – hail and farewell – appear in conclusion. Included among the figures that populate the film’s pages are the artist’s late mother, Felicia – who passed away a decade ago but is pictured here as a young woman. There is also William's own likeness, who gazes back at his ageing father, face-to-face across the notebook’s binding.
The collation of images and phrases assumes an elegiac and gentle lamentation, and celebration of lives well lived, in a layered but simple eulogistic reflection on the past, whilst anticipating more mourning. Beyond himself and his parents, Kentridge has added a supporting cast of the poet Mayakovsky and his muse, the author Lilya Brik, the muralist Diego Rivera, and Surrealist André Breton who all cite recent projects from his studio, whilst the barmaid from one of his favourite paintings, 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère' stares back at us - and Manet in the penultimate year of his foreshortened life.
