Theory as Practice – William Kentridge Second Hand Reading (Lecture/Seminar 17)

In this lecture with Christian we explored the interpretation of text, looking at an artist called William Kentridge and his works called “Second Hand Reading”. Part of this is a film of a flip book which has been created using the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Kentridge drew on every single page creating a narrative by the different imagery he used, such as text, a tree and a man walking. Not only did he change the narrative by overlaying the text with imagery, he also changed the order of the pages making it a bit more unusual.

Following the talk about Kentridge, we looked further into his works with animation and stop motion. Such as his ‘Stone-Age’ animation techniques, where he keeps drawing over the original image draw to create movement. We then had to work in pairs to create our own stop motion film by using newspapers and interpreting this. The article my pair chose showed a armed soldiers standing in ruins, so we came up with the idea to create a narrative showing a building being hit by a bomb. We started out by drawing a building in charcoal on top of the text and imagery on the article and then eventually smudging it out when the bomb hit to create smoke and to create ruins at the end with an animal rising from the ashes.

This was our final outcome for the stop motion film.