William KentridgeTry to Understand this Simple Speech, 2023
The phrases in Kentridge’s Indian ink, coloured pencil, and collage on handmade paper, unique drawing ‘Try to Understand This Simple Speech’ are from his libretto for ‘The Great Yes, The Great No’, a multimedia theatre project premised on a 1941 voyage of artists, philosophers and leaders of the Negritude Movement escaping Nazi-occupied Marseilles for Martinique. Rather than offering didactically discernable answers, these textual fragments operate as Dadaist interruptions that invite distraction as much as reflection and challenge the viewer to construct their own meanings through personal and circumnavigatory association.
The key sculptural, collaged figure placed on Kentridge’s studio desk, in a dinner jacket with cafétierre head, is somehow both one of the Vichy French bourgeoisie complicit in the occupation, and Kentridge himself, with reference to his Venice Biennale project and episodic streamed series, ‘Self-portrait as a Coffee Pot’. As the latter, it appears to be dancing with, and perhaps conducting two torn-paper smaller figures, who will go on to become the epic forms of his monumental ‘Paper Procession’ sculptures in Kentridge’s Yorkshire Sculpture Park solo exhibition.
The fact that this work’s subject is the very studio it’s painted in - those ink pots the same ink pots that he dipped into to create it, and so on - is key to these other concurrent performative and sculptural projects: the world has been brought into the studio, (which is treated as a ‘safe space for stupidity’), and then sent out again as something anew, or as Kentridge himself puts it, ‘the walk around the studio as the preamble to, the unconscious part of, the drawings… which come from an impulse, from an image that’s in my head, from something as little as a phrase.”
