In A Candid Interview, Leonardo Drew Discusses His Latest Art Installation And Why Art Matters -
William Kentridge speaks of “giving the image the benefit of the doubt.” He describes starting an artwork with an impulse, seeing where that leads and what it might mean, then inviting the audience to be “complicit in making meaning.” The South African artist compares the process to a language you only partially understand, so you hear more attentively and fill in the gaps with what you think is implied. To paraphrase, there may be a mistranslation, but this is a productive mistranslation full of the agency of the mis-translator.
On my train journey from London to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, I have been listening to Kentridge in conversation with the art critic Ben Luke on “A Brush With,” The Art Newspaper podcast. And his words keep coming to me as I walk around “Number 360,” Leonardo Drew’s commission for the YSP Chapel.