In a group of new editions featuring self-portraits, made in collaboration with Jillian Ross Print, William Kentridge takes the meaning-making modality that he consistently applies to the fragmentary nature of understanding history and applies it to his own image.

 

This movement towards self-examination has its seeds in the Studio Life series of photogravures that were begun during the lockdowns of 2020 – during which Kentridge suddenly found himself isolated in his studio – and has also been built upon in layers through various projects and bodies of work that complicate and expand on Kentridge’s introspection. Additionally, these works have provided Kentridge and Ross with a testing ground for various technical processes, that are being applied at a larger scale in other projects.

 

In the four prints, the image of the artist is made up using elements of collage, featuring pieces of photographs, pieces of drawings, pieces of drawings on pieces of photographs, fragments of text and other images and marks, allowing the portraits to be formed layer by layer. These collaged and hand-worked images are then photographed, flattening them and moving them through a different technology, after which they are transformed through a third modality of photogravure into etchings. The images are further worked into with drypoint directly onto the copper plates, during which process the mark of the artist’s hand is reintroduced in the images. The proofing and printing of the plates is also an analogue activity, bringing the images full circle in terms of making methodology.

 

The form of collage within these self-portraits speaks to a sense of the self that is compound – a compendium of selves, rather than a monolithic self-hood that is singular or complete. The subsequent translation and mediation of the images through various techniques and processes also speaks to the concept of a self that can be understood in various ways, can be edited and worked upon over and over, with each variation offering a different lens through which to see, or nuance through which to understand.

 

The use of photography twice over – first to capture elements to be cut up and collaged, and second to capture the completed collage, thereby smoothing it into a single plane so that it can be transformed further into an etching – is also relevant to this complexity of selves. Susan Sontag, in her reflections on how the proliferation of images of ourselves is changing our relationships to ourselves, has suggested that “the problem with photography is that … it’s too imperious a way of seeing.” In the self-portrait as collage turned photograph turned photogravure, Kentridge makes visible Sontag’s sense of the “dialectical exchange between simplicity and complexity, like the one between self-revelation and self-concealment. The first truth is that every situation is extremely complicated and that anything one thinks about thereby becomes more complicated…The second truth is that one cannot live out all the complexities one perceives, and that to be able to act intelligently, decently, efficiently, and compassionately demands a great deal of simplification.”

 

American author, Mark Helprin, touches on this composite self too, in a way that resonates with Kentridge’s images of his own multiplicity: