William Kentridge: Pain & Sympathy | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #100: With his video "History of the Main Complaint" (1996) serving as a backdrop, William Kentridge discusses how artists draw upon tragedy as subject matter for their work and how drawing itself can be a compassionate act.

Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth centurys most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.

Learn more about William Kentridge at: http://www.art21.org/artists/william-kentridge

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Paulo Padilha. Artwork Courtesy: William Kentridge.

[Intro Music]

Pain & Sympathy

[Choral music and sound of oxygen mask]

[Choral Music]

History of the Main Complaint

[choral music]

In the activity of making work

there's a sense that if you spend a day

or two days drawing

an object or an image

there is a sympathy toward that object,

embodied in the human labor of making the drawing

[choral music]

and for me there is something in the dedication

to the image whether it's Jericho painting guillotined heads

it's a shocking image

but there is something about the hours

of physically studying those heads and painting them

that becomes a compassionate act for me

even though on the one hand you can say

that is very cold bloodedly and ghoulishly looking at

disaster or using other peoples’ pain

as raw material for the work.

[choral music]

[sound of baseball bat hitting]

[choral music]

[Choral music and sounds of punches]

[cardiac monitor beep]

[choral music, cardiac monitor beep and sound of punches]

I mean naturally every artist does this

use other peoples pain as well as their own as raw material

so there is a kind of, if not a vampirishness

certainly an appropriation of other people’s distress

in the activity of being a writer or an artist.

But there is also something in the activity of both

contemplating, depicting, and spending the time with it

which I hope, as an artist, redeems the activity

from one of simply exploitation and abuse.

[choral music]

[sound of a car crashing]

[sound of telephone ringing]

[cardiac monitor beep]

[exit music]