William Kentridge - Interpreting Text

Using the Shorter English Dictionary, 1936 edition, volume 1, Kentridge created an animation drawing on the pages and using the existing text as an effective background. Kentridge is a South African artist who uses his countries history of apartheid as a topic for his work. The book he uses, the use of text as ‘ground’ and image and the meaning behind the text all play important roles into making the result as meaningful as it is.

The use of the book Kentridge picked could have been chosen for a couple of reasons, firstly for the quality of the paper and the ink and the way they interact together, the way they can be worked upon. Secondly, the book could have been chosen for its particular subject, in this case a dictionary which tries to bring meaning to everything and bring it all together to be one, quite the opposite to the apartheid of South Africa, keeping people separate.

The use of the large blocks of dictionary text as ‘ground’ means the text itself becomes a kind of drawing and part of the image it displays. The pages aren’t in sequence if you look closely at the animation, this means he has put some thought into which pages he uses for which image, for example leaving out the pages at the start of a new letter chapter with the larger capital to mark the new chapter. The animation wouldn’t have been created with one drawing per page, but taking a photo of a drawing and then editing it slightly and rubbing parts out before taking the next photo.

               The meaning behind some of the drawings in his animation, although not drawn specifically about the apartheid, but they are spawned from memories of the apartheid in his youth, potentially a way of coming to terms with the brutal things he would have seen as a child. This has parallels with the idea of using a dictionary as the base book as a dictionary tries to bring together all knowledge and meaning of words and hold it in one singular place.