20/5/19 Interview

A Quiet Studio Day With William Kentridge: An Interview

Interview for Holland Festival and Mister Motley with artist William Kentridge. Part of the ‘Landloos’-series made by Mister Motley.

…What is the best advice you have ever received?
Kentridge: “I think the only advice I never received is what one kind of already knows and the advice serves to reaffirm or to confirm an impulse. […] But I think the most helpful piece of advice I got was from the great South African photographer, David Goldblatt, who died in the last six months. When I was a young artist and I asked him how he knew what to photograph, he said: ‘In the end it doesn’t matter what you photograph, what you’ll always be photographing are your fears and your desires and whatever the subject; in the end the work will be about you. If it’s pretentious, that tells you about yourself, if it’s too modest it tells you who you are also.’ So, in the end the work becomes a sort of self-portrait of the longue durée.”…