Footnotes

Provenance
A private US collection.

The present work appears at approximately 2 minutes and 55 seconds into the music video titled 'Another Country' by the band Mango Groove. The video opens on a charcoal drawing animation by William Kentridge of a barren landscape dotted with microphones for public addresses. Wind howls in the air, but stops when Claire Johnston, the band's lead, begins to sing. A vessel of water emerges and the scene changes to an animated charcoal drawing of a city with protestors filling the streets. On one building, images emerge of people who have been injured and killed. Later in the video, the protestors surround the towers of loudspeakers and structures, some of which are now covered and bound. It is at this point when the present image appears. Johnston stands as a giant in a sea of protestors, destroying one of the towers. The wrapping of one of the towers reveals a bowl, and the protestors leave the streets. The bowl fills to overflowing with water flooding the streets of the city and washing away the loudspeakers. The scaffolding of another loudspeaker collapses, and the speaker becomes a bucket from which water flows. Johnston gestures again, and a giant bowl of water appears in the sky over a field of protestors, replacing them with a thriving landscape, the bowl again overflowing with water.

The song was released in 1993 by One World Entertainment, near the end of the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa and several months before South Africa's landmark 1994 general election, the first democratic election in the country's history. The title song, "Another Country", expressed an optimism about the country's future. There are differing attributions to the songs origins. The notes for the bands 2006 compilation album, 'Moments Away', suggests that it was in response to the Boipatong massacre while the magazine, Femina suggested it was in response to the assassination of Chris Hani, the leader of the anti-apartheid movement.

The choice of William Kentridge as the animator of the video for "Another Country" was an inspired and informed decision with the artists at the height of his animation powers. This work was made in the same year as his celebrated fifth film Felix in Exile (1994). Kentridge has commented that this film was:

'made at the time just before the first general election in South Africa, and questioned the way in which the people who had died on the journey to this new dispensation would be remembered'.

The work recalls a scene from 'Monument' (1990), a film by William Kentridge which thematically explores notions of exploitation, passivity, responsibility, and power. The year that this work was created in was also a period of transition from the Apartheid. Kentridge calls into question how the Apartheid will be remembered, commemorated, and even appropriated. Comparatively, the present work possesses the relevant tropes such as censorship, social justice, and power yet also displays compositional similarities in the crowds surrounding a shrouded monument. Moreover, both 1990 and 1994 were both significant dates in the evolution out of Apartheid. It could be said that Kentridge was drawing direct visual relevance between each work, both 'Monument' and the present work from 'Another country', to create a full circle moment in this instance.

Kentridge's process of re-working and altering a singular drawing numerous times to display animated movement in the film has resulted in this conclusive drawing. "The technique I use is to have a sheet of paper stuck up on the studio wall and, half-way across the room, my camera, usually an old Bolex. A drawing is started on the paper, I walk across to the camera, shoot one or two frames, walk back to the paper, change the drawing (marginally), walk back to the camera, walk back to the paper, to the camera, and so on. So that each sequence as opposed to each frame of the film is a single drawing. In all there may be twenty drawings to a film rather than the thousands one expects. It is more like making a drawing than making a film (albeit a gray, battered and rubbed about drawing)." (Lecture, 1993, published in Cycnos: Image et Langage, Problemes, Approches, Méthodes, Nice, vol. 11 no.1, (1994), pp. 163-168. Republished in C. Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, William Kentridge, Societe des Expositions du Palais de Beaux-Arts, (Bruxelles 1998), pp. 61-64)

We are grateful to the William Kentridge Studio for their assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.