William KentridgeStroke, 2022
Whilst creating his paragraphs of small glyph sculptures Kentridge realised that he wanted the glyphs to be “... seen as silhouettes, but then in the working of them they shift to being something more than extrusions, they have a much wider life.”
Part of that wider life entailed selecting a few particular small glyphs to experiment what would happen to them when they were significantly larger and potentially in isolation, and key to this was to discover what would happen to Kentridge’s scribble cat were in to grow larger that life, and become what he describes as, “...the opposite of stroking a cat – the idea of when you try to stroke one, and its hair stands on end from static electricity. Mayakovsky has a character in his play ‘A Tragedy’ appeal to us to “stroke back cats, stroke back cats” catch the sparks from their fur and with that electricity and use it to run the trams the next morning. And on this larger scale it’s almost like the cat as cactus, the anti-stroke”.
This medium-sized ‘Stroke’ has two faces, indicative of the feline domestic-but-wild creatures we’ve come to know, but perhaps not entirely trust. There are also the public and private faces of both the Mayakovsky who used to believe in Bolshevism and enthusiastically espouse the party line and the one who was beginning to become wholly disillusioned by Stalinist absurdities, and also, in a broader sense, the ongoing, necessary wrestling between optimism and despondency, realism and idealism that’s at the heart of all of Kentridge's performances and projected shadows.
