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William Kentridge has just completed an exhibition at the Paris branch of his New York gallery, Marian Goodman, Everyone Their Own Projector. The focus of this exhibition is the artist’s book sharing the same name, published by Captures Edition in Valence, France. Kentridge made roughly one hundred drawings for the book, using collage on text pages torn from books he has cannibalized for years, such as Mrs Beaton’s Book of Household Remedies, and the French Larousse Encyclopedia, favouring ink and brush drawing with crayon on the text pages, rather than his usual charcoal mark.

The underlying metaphor for the book is that we are all projectors, projecting our own experience onto life through the mechanical process of seeing, thus the shift from seeing into the more complicated realm of perception. The artist romps through the history of art on each page of the book, looking at and bringing his own perception to Giotto, Masaccio’s Expulsion from Eden, Manet’s famous bartender and Rembrandt’s beautiful study of his second wife, Hendrickje paddling in a stream. These visual quotations are punctuated by typical Kentridge imagery and obtuse rhetorical questions. His new character, Gogol’s Nose appears, intimately exploring the female body: contemporary female bodies from South Africa alongside studies of Degas’ femmes après le bain. The Nose travels with Kentridge, examining the artist’s selected artistic lineage, and the classic subject of the European artist until the mid twentieth century, that of the female nude.

To accompany the exhibit, Kentridge staged his own projection onto a painted canvas, I am not me, the horse is not Mine, a phrase derived from a Russian peasant denying guilt. Accompanied by the French composer, François Sarhan, the ICTUS ensemble performed Sarhan’s score for the project on an array of hand-made instruments including a strohcello and a strohviol. The music is abstract and jagged, interspersed with vocals barked through a megaphone by the composer. This is appropriate to the theme of Kentridge’s performance, which comes from the testimony that Burkharin presented to the Central Committee of the Communist party in the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1938 as he fought for his life. The imagery is fractured and spiky until an eloquent passage where a rickety, cobbled-together horse appears. Kentridge’s hands enter the frame, as the puppeteer moving around the torn collage that forms the body and joints of the beast as he raises himself up from his haunches and hobbles across the screen. And then the Nose is back, like Humpty Dumpty running up a ladder only to tumble down, run up again, tumble down and hop back up. Kentridge’s black trousers are identifiable protruding from this giant Nose skipping up the steps two at a time and finally balancing at the top.

The artist’s book, Everyone Their Own Projector is printed in a run of 1500, and is also released in a limited, signed edition of 120 copies accompanied by a signed and numbered lithograph by the artist. The artist’s book will be available at the David Krut Publishing booth at the Cape Town Book Fair opening on June 14th 2008.

Keywords: Kentridge, William-Kentridge