William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, and filmmaker, as well as the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea. Self-interrogation is central to the work of Kentridge. This Long Minute reminds us of his ‘Drawing Lessons’, a collection of his thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio.

In an interview with The Arts Newspaper in June 2019, Kentridge says: “For anyone who has ever written or drawn anything, ever recorded themselves speaking or singing, there’s an enormous difference to one’s sense of self in the moment of making and when you take a step back to become the viewer…What seemed like such good writing the night before, when you re-read it the next morning, you say: ‘I couldn’t have written anything so stupid, some other idiot did it.’ And you curse yourself. That shifting between yourself as the maker and yourself as the viewer is something that is very obvious in the studio, but it is often less painfully obvious in the rest of your life. So that’s one of the ways in which the things that are natural in the studio often serve to make things that are invisible in daily life very present. And I suppose with the Drawing Lessons and a lot of my work, that is the aim.”

Concept & Performance | William Kentridge
Video Editor & Compositor | Žana Marović
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace