Artist William Kentridge in front of one of his art works (via davidkrutpublishing.com)

William Kentridge was a failure. By his own account, the South African artist racked up a long list of impressive defeats before succeeding as a draftsman and animator. Before the opening of his current retrospective at the Museum of Modernistic Art Kentridge gave a lecture on "Drawing Lessons" at the New York Studio School.

He began his university career studying to be a painter. But, Kentridge says, "I was a very bad painter." He recalls worrying "Does information technology wait prissy?" each time he would cease a canvas. "In that location are so many other things y'all should be thinking about," Kentridge says. Instead of working in oil pigment, which he had set out to do, he began making charcoal drawings.

Discouraged every bit a painter, he moved to Paris to written report interim. But he wasn't any better at acting than painting, he says. After a year in Paris, he came to terms with his limitations and was still enamored of characters, move and the dramatic chemical element of fourth dimension unfolding. He went dorsum to Southward Africa to be a filmmaker.

But working as an art manager for movies, which he characterized as "borrowing friends' furniture," he came to some other dead finish. "The film industry was so awful that I looked for whatever mode of not existence there."

Later on having failed as a painter, equally an actor, and as a filmmaker, Kentridge came to a conclusion. "I was reduced to being an artist," he says with a wry grinning.

Later on failing at what he intended to do, Kentridge says, "In that location'southward a sense of annihilation and not just disappointment. In the terminate, the work that emerges is who you are."

What evolved over the years he had experimented with these various mediums was Kentridge's item blend of drawing, film and performance. He says acting in detail taught him a lot about drawing, and, over time, performing became a hallmark of his work.

In the 1980s, Kentridge began animative his drawings in an untraditional way. Usually, animation is done by drawing sequential cells on different pieces of paper, yielding a clean and distinct movement on screen. Instead, Kentridge used 1 sail of newspaper per scene and animated his drawings past erasing and redrawing each successive movement on the same sail of paper. Left behind on screen was his erasure of each previous charcoal drawing, a light gray trail of where his figures had been.

"I could non make skillful erasures," he says. He tried every kind of eraser he could, but the balance of his process remained. At first he apologized for the messy look of his animations, just he eventually came to realize his process was integral to the work.

"In the process of making, a meaning will sally," William Kentridge says. The big themes connected with his art — time, modify and the legacy of the by — came organically through trial and fault and a spirit of playful openness. Instead of just executing an idea from beginning to end, he's interested in "finding strategies of working that can enable an answer to come out of the work itself."

During his talk at the Studio Schoolhouse, Kentridge showed a video from rehearsals for his staging of Dmitri Shostakovich'southward opera The Olfactory organ at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Rehearsal for one scene begins with characters walking quickly across a stage. In the next have, Kentridge asks them to march in unison. It looks tighter, stronger and machine-like. It invokes a symbolic army. And so, in the next accept, Kentridge has them do a syncopated shuffle step where the actors swing out their legs and dip in unison. It'southward evocative of fascist armies marching but also jazz music and dancing. It suddenly seems more complex, suggestive and open to interpretation. This became the last staging of the scene.

Kentridge describes the process as "finding things that are in one sense unrelated but using them to construct moments inside them that have a sense and a coherence." The challenge is to understand metaphor not every bit a pregnant ("this ways that") just every bit a "strategy for making meaning." For William Kentridge, the procedure involves trying until y'all fail — and and then trying more.

Quoting Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy, Kentridge gave this advice: "Endeavour Again. Fail again. Fail better."

William Kentridge: Five Themes is at the Museum of Modern Art through May 17.

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Harry Swartz-Turfle is an artist and writer living in New York City. He was an honor-winning law-breaking announcer earlier dedicating his life to the seedier and more dubious prospects of art. He has been published... More by Harry Swartz-Turfle