Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  A private collection
  
  EXHIBITED:
  Street, Somerset, Atkinson Gallery, Cross Currents: Contemporary Art Practice in South Africa, 5 June - 30 September 2000
  
  LITERATURE:
  J. Picton and J. Law (eds.), Cross Currents: Contemporary Art Practice in South Africa, (Somerset, 2000), illustrated p.80
  
  Casspirs Full of Love is the title for a group of works – including a drawing, an encaustic, a screenprinted banner and a drypoint – which Kentridge developed between 1988 and 1989. The various incarnations all feature disembodied heads either dispersed in a landscape or packed into cabinets, resonating with scenes from the 1989 film for projection, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris.
  
  Casspirs Full of Love is renowned as one of the artist's most overtly political projects. Best known are the drypoint etchings, printed in two phases (1989 and 2000), which appear in significant international collections such as those of the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, Johannesburg Art Gallery and Tate London. The current lot however, is unique, and a rare example of the use of encaustic in Kentridge's oeuvre.
  
  As recorded by Judith Hecker in the catalogue William Kentridge, Trace: Prints from the Museum of Modern Art: "The heads were inspired by artworks Kentridge encountered in Florence: frescos by Giotto, the figures of which he later drew and cut up, resulting in a pile of decapitated heads; and a mound of bronze heads sculpted by Tony Cragg". The title comes from a personal dedication overheard by Kentridge on the popular radio programme "Forces Favourite", sent from a mother to her son in the South African security forces: "This message comes to you from your mom with Casspirs full of love".
  
  Under the state of emergency declared in South Africa from the mid 1980s, armoured military vehicles called Casspirs were deployed to the townships, ostensibly permitting police to open fire at unarmed civilians in order to "keep the peace". Casspirs Full of Love captures the tension between the violence employed by the Casspirs and the message of love sent to the security forces; contradictions inherent in the apartheid state but somehow upheld in daily life. As Dan Cameron observes: "It is startling to see Kentridge employ [a Casspir] as a container for human affection, much less the victims of state violence..." This tension is echoed on an aesthetic level through the highly charged, textural surface of the encaustic, contrasted with the loping cursive of the inscription.
  
  BIBLIOGRAPHY:
  D. Cameron, 'A Procession of the Dispossessed', in D. Cameron, C. Cristov-Bakergiev and J.M. Coetzee, William Kentridge, (London and New York, 2003), p. 50
  J. B. Hecker, William Kentridge, Trace: Prints from The Museum of Modern Art, (New York, 2010), p. 58-59

Auction Notices

• PROVENANCE: Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London, Responsible Hedonism, 1989 A private collection Bears gallery label (verso)

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Category: Fine Art / South African Art

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