William KentridgeWhisper to the Silent Earth I, 2024
This set of four unique sequential trees was created by Kentridge, in charcoal, then Indian Ink, then collage, on mine logbook paper dated from the end of the first World War. The titular phrase 'Whisper to the Silent Earth’, is a line from the Austrian poet and novelist, Rainer Maria Rilke, whom, as evinced in his ‘Caged Panther / Footnotes for the Panther’ and other projects, is one of Kentridge's favourite writers – whilst all the other quotes are from the libretto to William’s most recent touring performance, namely, 'The Great Yes, The Great No’.
Formally, there is a deliberate change of mark-making and material usage as the sequence moves from a premeditated tree into one in which thought, ideas and the material its created from has completely taken over anything preconceived, so the journey from the first to the fourth is indicative of William’s practice, ethos and vocational values: the first drawing is a very detailed charcoal tree, the second, with the libretto and Rilke distracting the viewer with words becoming the tree, the third, with ink taking over from charcoal and leading to the fourth with the tree and its associations taking over almost entirely from the artist's control.
As Kentridge puts it, "The tree is never itself. Our biography is part of the understanding:…A memory of hanging by my legs from the smooth bark of the branch of a walnut tree...The branches of the tree like the bronchi of a lung…The sunlight on a leaf…Shrapnel in the wood.
We could say that the tree is the centre, and all the other associations circle it, land on it, bend it or break the branches. That which seems extraneous cannot be kept out of the centre…The paper, the ink, the good and the bad brush meet the tree in the act of making it in the studio. A good brush gives a controlled line, and the uncontrolled bristle of the bad brush that has lost its point, demands the randomness of foliage. From the bad brush and its possibilities, a forest of trees can grow..”
The phrase 'Shrapnel in the wood’ being particularly pertinent to these four drawings, because the last year of the First World War and the beginnings of Dada which grew out of the disillusionment of man’s barbarity to man. A carpenter working with Kentridge on his ‘The Head and the Load’ World War One performance, told him that many of the trees near what had been The Western Front have not been felled because of all the shrapnel within them, as nobody would risk damaging their tools on them – so they continue to survive precisely because of their wounds.
