One of the most sustained and emblematic creations in the history of South African contemporary art is William Kentridge’s fictional, pinstripe-suited character Soho Eckstein, described by the artist as a “property developer extraordinaire.” Eckstein is the archetypical rapacious white businessman, who first appeared in one of Kentridge’s earliest animated films, Johannesburg, Second Greatest City After Paris (1989), attempting to solve the annoyingly visible problem of the city’s poor by literally throwing food at them.
Tide Table (2003) is the eighth in the series. For the first time, Kentridge takes Soho out of his milieu of the brash business-centered city of Johannesburg and puts him down in Cape Town on holiday. Removed from his desk and his telephone, Soho is an onlooker rather than the center of the action. Says Kentridge of Tide Table, “It began with a family photograph of my grandfather in a pinstripe suit sitting on Muizenberg beach . . . kind of Soho in his deck chair. The starting point was to see who came along the beach and what happened.”
As in all of Kentridge’s videos and theatrical productions, Kentridge holds up a mirror to current events within his native South Africa, seen against a dazzling palimpsest of images and references drawn from the international and local press, the Bible, literature, film, and his own life experience.
In Tide Table the beach becomes the stage for an allegory of the ravages of AIDS, which has devastated the country. In the animation Kentridge presents such disparate images as a small boy building sandcastles, a baptism by immersion in the waves by a group from an African religious movement, and cows wandering in and out of the surf, playing out the biblical dream of Pharaoh in which seven thin cows eat seven fat cows and become reduced to skeletons. One of the beach huts morphs into a hospital with dying AIDS patients, and in the sad climax to the film the painfully thin dying body of a black man slips from the arms of his caregiver and slides into the sea.
Kentridge’s characters do not utter dialogue, but their body language tells us all we need to know. In an age where technological advances allow for seamlessly sophisticated video animations, the very hand-drawn quality of Kentridge’s scenes, with their smudgy erasures, allow us intimate insight into the artist’s creative process. Through the entire action of Tide Table, Soho plays a passive role, continuing to read his newspaper in his deck chair, seemingly oblivious to the human drama playing out on the beach near him. As in all of Kentridge’s films in which Eckstein plays a leading role, the character is a symbol of a self-satisfied blinkered existence, of willful white blindness to black pain.
Drawing for the film Tide Table 2003
Charcoal on paper
120 x 160 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: Hannelie Coetzee
© William Kentridge
Drawing for the film Tide Table 2003
Charcoal on paper
80 x 20 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: Hannelie Coetzee
© William Kentridge
Drawing for the film Tide Table 2003
Charcoal on paper
55 x 160 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: Hannelie Coetzee
© William Kentridge