William Kentridge Research Articles

Decolonizing allegory and anti-imperialist critique in the longue durée of extractivism

A re-thinking of the critical vocation of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature is long overdue. The British Commonwealth of Nations that was first established in 1949 has continued to provide a neo-colonial framework for Britain and its former dominions (particularly Australia and Canada) to extract raw materials, capital, and labour from former British colonies and commodity frontiers within settler colonies. For this reason, the British Commonwealth of Nations may be understood as a zombie-like system of extractivism, in which a moribund imperial power stumbles on by draining the postcolonial world of its lifeblood. Against the obfuscation of this system by the term “Commonwealth literature”, I suggest that one of the critical tasks of anti-imperialist critique in future issues of Literature, Critique, and Empire Today is to examine how a dynamic relationship between allegory and counter-allegory in decolonial world literatures works to foreground and contest the neo-colonial dynamics of extractivism, in order to imagine the conditions of possibility for bringing about the abolition of that system. At the core of the article is a consideration of how allegory and counter-allegory form part of the intricate allegorical machinery of two rather different cultural texts: M. NourbeSe Philip’s experimental poem Zong! (2008) and William Kentridge’s animated film Mine (1991). By giving form and meaning to the history and legacy of anti-systemic movements against racial extractivism, decolonizing allegories such as Zong! and Mine also demand a rethinking of predominant materialist approaches to modern allegory.

"In the Studio" with William Kentridge

Abstract Abstract This interview attempts to explore both the individual and collective creative processes of the prolific and world-renowned multiple media visual and performance artist, William Kentridge. It takes place in Paris where the artist has under 30 minutes to engage in a dialogue before the very first performance of his Chamber opera, Sybil, in a theatre new to the troupe. The conversation takes place backstage in the green room, but the dialogue is engaged in a complicit and playful manner, drawing on common backgrounds and histories to cut corners and spare formalities.The result is a new angle on what “Studioness” has become for the artist, although he had never really considered it that way. Exploring the inward-looking and outward-reaching movements within studio practice, the author seeks to enlarge the notion of studio to include remote and virtual practices in the reflection. The impact of, and response to, the COVID-19 lockdown period is central to the discussion.

Looking at Latin 1911-1965-2019 : Modern Art and an Ancient Language

This article considers the presence of Latin in art from the beginning of the twentieth century until today. It analyses works by Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joseph Kosuth, Giulio Paolini, Rosemarie Trockel, Ian Hamilton Finlay and William Kentridge, and compares their engagement with the Latin language. The article is structured according to the different ways in which these artists unsettle the status of Latin, be it through semantic confusion, material recontextualisation or textual destabilising.

Science for art: multi-years' evaluations of biocidal efficacy in support of artwork conservation.

In recent decades, the relationship between Science and Art has been gradually strengthened through the use of diagnostic, conservation, and valorization technologies. New technologies can also be used to support the creation and durability of bio-artworks. Within such a context, starting from the Spring of 2014, we performed in situ experimentations to eventually increase the durability of the graphical artwork of William Kentridge on the Lungotevere embankments, whose creation was scheduled in the following years. We applied various combinations and concentrations of three different biocides (Algophase, Biotin R, and Preventol R80) and two water repellents (Hydrophase surfaces and Silo 111) on 34 test areas. However, the artist preferred to leave his artwork to a natural fading. Right before the realization of the graphical artwork "Triumph and Laments of Rome" in 2016, just the black biological colonizations mainly composed of cyanobacteria were removed through pressurized water. We monitored the artist's work through analyses of images and colorimetric variations and such drawings showed a duration of 4 years in the natural conditions of recolonization. Here we show how the recolonization of treated and control areas, analyzed with the same methods, showed an increased duration, 3 years longer than under natural conditions in the case of Preventol R80® and Biotin R® plus Silo 111®. The tested solutions showed differential effectiveness and multiple possibilities of use to support the maintenance of the artwork if the artist wanted to preserve his artwork for a longer period.

On Peter Weibel

Abstract He was always the youngest in the group. In 1966, the core participants in what he—with Valie Export—would later dub “Viennese Actionism” applied for government funding to attend the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. The group sent him, just twenty-two years old, to the ministry to argue their case. He remained their go-to spokesperson. On June 7, 1968, at the Kunst und Revolution event in Lecture Hall 1 of the University of Vienna, it was he who introduced the wild proceedings with an “Inflammatory Speech,” his raised right asbestos-gloved hand in flames. Ending quickly in a cry of pain—kerosene on his naked forearm caught fire—his oration, titled (after Lenin's pamphlet) “What Is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement,” gave way to the more scandalous, though perhaps less cunning, actions of his older comrades. Otto Muehl, a “former middle- school teacher,” as one “memory protocol” described him, screamed obscenities while whipping a bandaged man until he bled. Gunter Brus, after undressing onstage, cut himself and (again the protocol) “masturbated for about 20 minutes” before shitting and pissing in the audience's direction. Oswald Wiener, his speech drowned out onstage by grunting, was falsely heard to say that the shitting should move from the lecture hall to St. Stephen's Cathedral, the city's holy of holies. Meanwhile he, the event's “inflammatory” opening speaker, was the only actual student to address the Austrian Socialist Students’ Union (the hapless host of Vienna's infamous “hot quarter-hour”), and he had come well equipped. He brought with him a water bucket to extinguish his burning glove and wore safety goggles to protect his eyes against flames and, as things turned out, against blood, excrement, and urine. When he died this year, just four days short of his seventy-ninth birthday, Peter Weibel seemed perennially youthful. He had led the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe for almost a quarter century, indefinitely postponing his retirement by mounting art exhibitions—sometimes as many as seven in one year—that reshaped the definition of art exhibitions. It was Weibel, earlier and more consistently than anyone, who gave museological form to our posthuman, postmedium, anthropocenic condition. Sprawling, experimental, and provisory, these exhibitions yielded mighty catalogues: about surveillance, futurity, and digital art, about forgotten contemporaries (like Vilém Flusser) and emergent stars (Weibel was early in celebrating William Kentridge and Olafur Eliasson). Of these many shows, the four co-curated with Bruno Latour, who passed away five months before Weibel, were the most significant. Weibel and Latour called them Gedankenausstellungen (“thought exhibitions”). With challenging titles like “Making Things Public,” “Reset Modernity,” and “Critical Zones” and conceptual in what they displayed and how, they blurred the lines between science and art, gallery space and laboratory, aesthetic object and political debate while remaining fun to visit and popularly appealing.

We Write to You About Africa curated by Laura De Becker and Ozi Uduma; Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution curated by Laura De Becker, Bridget Grier, Timnet Gedar, and Ozi Uduma

We Write to You About Africa curated by Laura De Becker and Ozi Uduma; Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution curated by Laura De Becker, Bridget Grier, Timnet Gedar, and Ozi Uduma

Remembering the Herero-Nama Genocide in Namibia

Remembering the Herero-Nama Genocide in Namibia

Reverse Thinking for Forward Learning: The Online Reverse Video Challenge as a Conceptual Alternative to Simulated Work-integrated Learning

The novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-10) which was declared a pandemic in March 2020 has disrupted learning programmes that rely extensively on work-integrated learning (WIL). This article reflects on the use of the 2016 online reverse video challenge as a remote learning alternative to WIL in the technical theatre stream of the Diploma in Performing Arts at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). A reversed intention practice-based assessment (or reverse video assessment) project was designed for the students to approximate the skills required for theatre technicians. This article is a conceptual exploration of the reverse video assessment design that involved exploring trends in reverse footage on online platforms and the professional practice of renowned South African artist and theatre maker, William Kentridge. The needs of contemporary South African students to be “tech-savvy” while faced with limited resources, was aligned with the requirements of the embedded simulated WIL curriculum. The reverse video assessment adopted a design research approach through the lens of play theory to conceptualise the edutainment approach to learning to relieve student anxiety during the pandemic. The assessment focused on three stages of development, namely, abstract thinking, three-dimensional object manipulation, and sequential organisation, which collectively result in a pragmatic creative process. The article will contribute to the remote learning body of knowledge which has come under greater focus during the pandemic. The ongoing pandemic necessitates a remote learning alternative to WIL to ensure continued learning without risking the health of students. The flexible nature of the reverse video assessment allows for the application thereof to different fields and levels of study

Drawing as Devotional Attention

ABSTRACT This article investigates drawing as a form of devotional attention. Engaging with the work of María Lugones and examples from Josef Albers, Corita Kent, Franz Opalka, Georgia O’Keeffe, and William Kentridge, each section revolves around drawing in relation to embodied practices of being together with others. In addition to a personal account of memories and rituals of drawings, this article examines the degree to which drawing hones a pragmatic sense for fallibility, fluidity, and open-ended research, while arguing for drawing as a form of commitment to community that challenges historical associations of creativity with individualistic or uninhibited freedom.

Time After Time

This essay explores South African artist William Kentridge’s multimedia installation The Refusal of Time, first exhibited at documenta (13) in 2012. In the material surrounding this installation, Kentridge and Peter Galison interrogate the history of time’s material invention as a European system of imperial domination, one that gathered the planet itself into a homogeneous regime of sense. The installation explores the manifold workings of this systematised time in a dizzying array of arenas (colonialism, labour, industry, cinema, dance, quantum physics). Time emerges materially via rhythmic inter- and intra-actions mediated by power, but the installation also draws on a history of anticolonial revolt against time and formally de-naturalises time, releasing heterochronic energies and disrupting habituated experiences of time’s homogeneous neutrality. Via readings of Kentridge, Jacques Rancière, Pheng Cheah, and the contemporary politics of time, I approach a mode of heterochronic thought (encompassing theory, art, and politics) that insists upon time as potentialising force.

‘Thick time’: Experiments with feminist urban futures in community podcasts

This paper develops the concept of ‘thick time’ through podcast experiments that foreground feminist voice, speech and aurality. Drawing upon William Kentridge’s notion of ‘thick time’, this paper draws upon gendered experiences of struggles that are accumulated over generations, reinforced through technologies of timekeeping and time-management, leading to a state of permanent crisis. In particular, it focusses on gendered time through thick descriptions marked by fragmentation and simultaneity and heavy with the struggles of the past, present and future. Using experimentation as a method of examining thick time, I document how the temporalities of an intimate domesticity under crisis unfolds in parallel with the public crisis of a pandemic. Experimentation emerges in podcast training workshops with young women living in resettlement colonies in Delhi’s urban peripheries, leading to a series of four podcasts co-produced remotely during the COVID19 lockdown. These podcasts are marked by fragments of speech, poetry, and music by those who are unable to speak to the state or to their families directly. They suggest how entangling the body (as voice, accent and language) with thick descriptions of time is possible through the unwinding, slowing down, rewinding and enriching the experience and significance of time in their lives. The podcasts are marked by repetition, futility, in-betweenness and remarkability, and the paper suggests that podcasts as experiments in value-laden thick descriptions of time can reveal pathways to feminist urban futures.

Accounts and drawings from underground , William Kentridge et Rosalind C. Morris (2015), Seagull Books.

Accounts and drawings from underground , William Kentridge et Rosalind C. Morris (2015), Seagull Books.

Kentridge’s Beckett

The Centre for the Less Good Idea, founded by William Kentridge in Johannesburg, inaugurated its first season with four short plays by Samuel Beckett. Beckett is a productive point of reference for Kentridge, especially in his lecture-performances that reflect on the activity of making art in the studio.

Dialogue between Phidias and William Kentridge in the intertemporal cultural landscape of the Acropolis of Athens: Interactivity and audience performance in ancient and contemporary art

O artigo traz uma reflexão sobre os diálogos que são estabelecidos na paisagem cultural da Acrópole entre o friso do Partenon esculpido por Fídias no séc. V a.C. e a obra de cinema expandido More Sweetly Play the Dance de Willian Kentridge, exibida em 2017 em Atenas. Mostramos como a performance do visitante caminhando em torno do Partenon e no calçadão em torno da Acrópole, onde foi exibida a obra de Kentridge, faz com que a sua interatividade promova entrecruzamentos temporais e espaciais, antre Antiguidade, período medieval, e contemporaneidade.

Smash the Thing: William Kentridge, Classical Antiquity, and hisRefusal of TimeinO Sentimental Machine

AbstractThis article examines a 2018 exhibition of William Kentridge’s work, entitled O Sentimental Machine, at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt. This exhibition placed the South African artist’s work in confrontation with the museum’s collections, which offer an overview of sculpture from antiquity to early modernity. The exhibition draws together themes explored in Kentridge’s sustained engagement with Greek and Roman antiquity: critiques of triumphant narratives of history; questions of memorialization and ruination; and the probing of narratives of enlightenment, which begin with Plato’s allegory of the cave (Rep. 514a–521b). The first half of the article considers Kentridge’s dialogues with Greek and Roman antiquity in his wider works before turning to his Triumphs and Laments (2016), a series of images telling the story of Rome, imprinted on the embankment walls of the Tiber. The second half focuses on O Sentimental Machine, paying particular attention to The Refusal of Time, a piece presented at the exhibition. The article argues that this piece offers a compelling challenge to narratives of ‘civilisation’, at the centre of which lie hegemonic notions of time, underpinned by constructions of the classical tradition. Kentridge thus offers a vision for emancipatory engagements with Greek and Roman antiquity.

Hydrocolonial Johannesburg

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall's invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes' second work of speculative fiction, Zoo City (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes' infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of Zoo City with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay turns to Zoo City to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.

Fragmented Narratives: Exploring Storytelling approaches for Animation in Spatial Context

Animation is considered a prevalent medium in contemporary moving image culture, which increasingly appears across non-conventional surfaces and spaces. And while storytelling in animation films has been extensively theorized, narrative forms that employ physical space as part of storytelling have been less explored. This paper will examine the narrative aspect of animation works which are screened outside the traditional cinematic venues. It will look at how these animation works tell stories differently - using the full potential of the space, as a narrative device, a tool, and a stage where the narratives unfold. This paper will look at the historical perspective and the state of the art in animation installation today, exploring the relationship between the space and narrative in pre-cinematic, cinematic and post-cinematic conditions. It will examine how narrative structures in animation have changed over time, on their way from the black box of the cinema to the white cube of the gallery and even further, where they became part of any space or architecture. Through case studies of works by Tabaimo, Rose Bond, William Kentridge and other relevant artists, the interdependency of the narrative and the space where it appears will be explored, in order to identify new strategies for storytelling in animation. The aim of this paper is to emphasize the storytelling novelty that animation installations offer, which goes beyond the narrative structures that we are used to see on a single flat surface.

The Temporality of Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art: Kant, Kentridge and Cave Art as Elective Contemporaries

AbstractThis article contributes to understanding of Contemporary Art and of the temporality of contemporaneity, along with the philosophy of time more generally. I propose a diachronic contemporaneity over time gaps – elective contemporaneity – through examination of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, the Third Analogy and the concept of ‘following’ among artistic geniuses; diachronic recognition and disjunctive synchronicity discoverable in William Kentridge’s multimedia artworks; as well as non-chronological temporal implications of superimpositions in late Palaeolithic cave art suggesting ‘graphic respect’. Elective contemporaneity shows up complexity in relations to past and present, putting in question definitions of ‘Contemporary Art’ restricted to either chronology or supposedly definitive paradigms.

Artists in Residence

Abstract Mixing criticism and memoir, “Artists in Residence” offers a rumination on improvisation and collaboration in visual art-making and contemporary jazz performance. The author meditates on the 2017 Unite the Right rally and Ryan Kelly's award-winning photographs of the event and considers how artists offer models for resisting anti-Black racism and white supremacy through collaborative practices. The author analyzes the documentary films Looks of a Lot and RFK in the Land of Apartheid and reviews exhibitions by Roy DeCarava and Jason Moran, highlighting the points of intersection between jazz musicianship and visual artistry. Finally, the essay argues that artists like Kara Walker, William Kentridge, and Yusef Komunyakaa create works that express the pleasure and pain of Black Diasporic experience through practices such as blues idiom improvisation and collage. The author presents criticism as a mode of personal writing.

The Necessary Accidental

This essay on William Kentridge’s ideas and practice, in particular regarding his multi-media theatrical works, was prompted by a visit to Zeitz MOCAA to see his retrospective in 2019. Watching a documentary on the making of the ‘The Head and The Load’, I was struck by the production’s frenzied energy, and the exhaustive attempt to break down any predictive or conclusive vision. This has always been Kentridge’s approach – his animated works are exercises in a deconstructive erasure. I have addressed this matter elsewhere, in my essay ‘Faith in a Practical Epistemology: On Collective Creativity in Theatre’ (Predicaments of Culture in South Africa, 2005), but on this occasion, while watching the documentary, it was Nietzsche’s view in Contra Wagner which proved the trigger, namely, that ‘Wagner’s art is sick. The problems he brings to the stage – purely hysteric’s problems – the convulsiveness of his affects, his over-charged sensibility … the instability he disguises as a principle’. While Kentridge does not share Wagner’s reactionary ideology, I argue that there is a connection between the two whose root lies in a decadent sensibility. And the peculiarly late-modern Western crisis that underlies it.