The Centre for the Less Good Idea is an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts based in Maboneng, Johannesburg

BREATHE & WEIGH ALL TEARS.

The first highway works are by the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, William Kentridge, 'Breathe,' and 'Weigh All Tears'.

Much of the Centre’s collaborative and methodological approaches have been drawn directly out of Kentridge’s practice. In William’s words, “Often, you start with a good idea. It seems crystal clear at first, but when you take it off the proverbial drawing board, cracks and fissures emerge, and they cannot be ignored. It is the process of following the secondary ideas, those ‘less good ideas’ coined to address the first idea’s cracks, that the Centre nurtures, arguing that in the act of playing with an idea, you can recognise those things you didn’t know in advance but knew somewhere inside of you.”

The Centre’s visual identity is based on William's ‘Blue Rubrics’, a series he began after receiving a gift of pure lapis lazuli gouache from Afghanistan. In order to find a use for the vivid blue pigment he addressed it in terms of its specific colour and material, eventually mixing it into ink to overlay silkscreen prints. In William’s words, “They are called Blue Rubrics, but a rubric really should be red – a rubric was the printed or illuminated red text in a liturgical manuscript, in which the black ink would have been the text of the liturgy and the red would have been instructions on how to pray. So they are footnotes to a thought, the edges of the thought. In my case they are unsolved riddles, phrases which hover at the edge of making sense, these are fragments of sentences which sit in a drawer of phrases used in other work over the years, they get taken out and sorted through on occasions."