William Kentridge is the man behind the curtain

Hands play with random, torn bits of black paper. Somehow they come together to form a horse. The hands keep moving the paper—the horse is momentarily lost, but then we find it again, and again and again. As the thick fingers keep moving the bits and pieces around we wait for the horse to appear. “I am not me, the horse is not mine,” the artist tells us. It doesn’t matter. We humans are made to find meaning in what we see. Now almost all the bits of paper are gone, only a few shards remain. We still see a horse. We can’t help ourselves.

The artist pulls larger torn pieces of paper out of the air. He presses them on to the wall, where they seem to meld into one another.. As he moves an eraser back and forth across the now whole paper, his own image, as a drawing, appears beneath his hand. It is clear how the trick is done. The tape is simply running backwards. The artist has first erased, then torn up a self-portrait drawing, and now he’s showing this process to us in reverse. It doesn’t matter that we know this. If anything it seems to add to the wondrous magic he has performed, pulling his own image out of thin air. In this film, “Invisible Mending,” from "Fragments for Georges Melies" he has satisfied our deep desire to see that which is broken made whole.


William Kentridge is a magician who wants us to see the man behind the curtain. He welcomes us in. The very crudeness of his primary materials: thick charcoal and blunt eraser, forces us to see how the trick is done, at the same time that they intensify our pleasure in the illusion. In the catalog to his current traveling retrospective (Five Themes, recently at MOMA in New York City) Kentridge included a DVD with raw source material from his animated films, paired with excerpts from those films. It includes live footage of the actual hotels and cabanas on the beach in Johannesburg, South Africa, which inspired the poetic elegy “Tide Tables.” In the studio, the artist and a little boy in a hat act out the gestures of the old man and his younger self that we see drawn on the beach in the film. In “Tide Table,” the ebb and flow of the waves become the embodiment of the relationship between Europe and Africa, youth and age, life and death, played out upon the sands of time.

Kentridge says,”Out of the process of drawing comes both the content of the work and, implicitly, an analogue for life itself.” He describes the process of making “Tide Tables”(in a video on the MOMA website) as unscripted, that he simply felt his way through images, as they emerged in the process of drawing. He says, “ I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing, the contingent way that images arrive in the work, lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are or how we operate in the world. It is in the strangeness of the activity itself that can be detected judgment, ethics, and morality.” And we, his audience, feel our way along with the artist, as he draws his way across the paper. We implicitly recognize the ways we all, as humans, grope in the dark for shards of meaning in our own lives, finding patterns within our partial and fragmented experience of the world around us.

We feel for the old man in the beach chair, reading the newspaper, remembering his youth on that very same beach. We share his pleasure when he finally gets up to pick up a stone and skip it out over the waves. Kentridge captures the sensation of the waves on sand, and thereby draws us into to his world. Current theories of embodied cognition emphasize that all human knowledge and understanding is rooted in sensory experience (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, Barsalou, 2008). Everything we know and understand, we know through our bodies, which were designed by evolution to enable us to navigate and survive as autonomous beings under an enormous range of conditions. Analogy, comparing current situations with past experiences,is a primary tool that we use to understand how to navigate within the environments in which we find ourselves.

Kentridge says, “The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are or how we operate in the world. It is in the strangeness of the activity itself that can be detected judgment, ethics, and morality.” We understand abstract concepts, such as justice and morality, by making analogies with our own physical experience. We explore the possible intentions and emotions of others, by imagining ourselves in their place, by literally simulating their actions in our own minds . Neuroscience is demonstrating how language itself is born from an embodied response to others (Rizolatti and Arbib, 2002). It is this visceral response Kentridge, like all the best artists, is able to engage through his work.

Imagine now, if you will, a cat swatting at a ball of yarn under the couch. Why does the cat do that? Its obvious that by doing that, the cat is working out one of the central problems of being cat, how to catch a mouse. But that’s not why does it. He does it, because that’s what cats do. He’s excersizing his essential cat-ness. Cognitive scientists are learning that most of the central problems of our lives, we solve through the use of our imaginations. The way we exercise our imagination, is through creative play: dance, music, poetry and drawing. Just like the cat, we don’t set out to solve practical problems in our lives by making art. But just like the cat, playing, making and viewing art, equips to deal with the challenges we face as humans

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) "has recently revealed that visual perception of the external world and mental imagery light up the same parts of the brain. As Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Kosslyn writes, “the brain doesn’t care” whether what we see is “real” or “imagined.” As we watch the man behind the curtain, William Kentridge, both perform and reveal his tricks in front of our eyes, we experience a deep sense of empathy with smudges of charcoal and eraser marks. We don’t care whether we are simply looking at charcoal smudges: we see and feel the waves. In fact, we take pleasure in our knowledge that it is only marks on paper, seeing and feeling our own minds at work.