William Kentridge Research Articles

Why Jazz? South Africa 2019

I consider the current state of jazz in South Africa in response to the formation of the nation-state in the 1990s. I argue that while there is a recurring sense of the precarity of jazz in South Africa as measured by the short lives of jazz venues, there is nevertheless a vibrant jazz culture in which musicians are using their own studios to experiment with new ways of being South African through the freedom of association of people and styles forming a music that sounds both local and comfortable in its sense of place in the global community. This essay uses the words of several South African musicians and concludes by situating the artistic process of South African artist William Kentridge in parallel to jazz improvisation.

William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments: The Challenges and Pleasures of Collaboration

ABSTRACTThis essay traces the artistic collaborations between William Kentridge and two Johannesburg-based printmaking studios: Artist Proof Studio (APS) and the David Krut Print Workshop (DKW). It is intentionally descriptive, in order to document the process of collaboration between the artist and master printers in the making of a series of composite prints based on Kentridge’s 2016 Tiber River frieze, Triumphs and Laments. Although video documentation exists of the rehearsals of Kentridge’s performance works, little attention has been paid to the nature of his collaborations in the making of his prints. Whereas artists will often make a plate and then leave the printing entirely up to the master printers, in this instance, the technical and aesthetic complexity of each of the ten prints in the Triumphs and Laments series required intensive interaction between artist and printer. Although the two studios have different missions—APS trains and educates printmakers and DKW prints the work of the gallery’s artists—both are committed to the creative processes involved in artistic collaboration. The premise that printmaking is a collaborative medium is thus confirmed. Finally, all of the prints’ subjects are taken from different sections of the frieze, but the content of each echoes Kentridge’s assertion that “it’s not just to say history is problematic and complicated, but that inside one person’s triumph is someone else’s disaster” (in Triumphs and Laments: William Kentridge. Edited by Carlos Basualdo. Cologne: Walter Koenig, 2018, 51).

The “Big Man” as Fictional Archetype in the Work of Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge

ABSTRACTThe “Big Man” phenomenon is often associated with the African dictator. However, with the rise of modern “strongman” leaders such as Trump, Putin, and Xi, it is not surprising that the notion of the Big Man has come to represent a global condition, one that not only characterises African dictatorship but that also has a precedent in Western tradition. A potent visual and conceptual fictional archetype for the Big Man can be found in Alfred Jarry's Père Ubu, the central character for his play Ubu Roi (1896). While the tyrannical Père Ubu is an evocation of the European psyche of the late 19th century, he is equally compelling today as an archetype and symbol of the contemporary tyrant. This article seeks to investigate this claim by engaging with works by Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge inspired by Père Ubu. The Jarry-inspired Ubu theme is well known throughout Hodgins's and Kentridge's work. However, this article asserts the relevance of their work featuring this theme, given the evocation of an archetypal tyrant figure that has global significance and is pertinent to notions of tyranny in Africa (including South Africa).

The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich by Elizabeth R. Baer

Reviewed by: The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich by Elizabeth R. Baer Kristin Semmens The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich. By Elizabeth R. Baer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. Pp. xiii + 179. Paper $32.99. ISBN 978-0814343852. A book has clearly done much to provoke thought when a reader wishes it were double or triple in length so that its author might further explore a number of relevant themes. Elizabeth R. Baer's The Genocidal Gaze: From Southwest Africa to the Third Reich is one such book. It raises many tantalizing, important questions, but leaves many more unaddressed and unasked. The book is part of a growing academic literature linking German colonialism in Southwest Africa, and more specifically, the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples, to the Nazi Holocaust. Baer connects the two atrocities through the shared "genocidal gaze" of the German perpetrators, defined as a set of "racist attitudes" to racial others that were "passed from generation to generation," giving "license to exterminate" from 1904 to 1908 and again between 1939 and 1945 (3). To examine this gaze, Baer investigates literary and artistic works rather than archival sources. The texts she has chosen were created during the German colonial occupation of Southwest Africa in the early twentieth century or decades after the Holocaust; all either embody the genocidal gaze or challenge and critique it. Chapter 1 focuses on the incredibly rich archive of Hendrik Witbooi, a Nama revolutionary. Witbooi resisted the dehumanizing gaze of the German colonial authorities in his personal papers and correspondence with them just as he defied them militarily. [End Page 381] Baer's decision to "recover" a voice of the "gazed-upon" is commendable (13, 17). In a book spanning "German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich," one might expect to listen to the voices of Jews who likewise resisted the genocidal gaze at the time of their persecution, but Witbooi's words stand alone for the victims. Chapter 2 turns to Gustav Frenssen's novel Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest (1908), which Baer suggests was a crucial "instrument for transmitting" the German colonizers' racist attitude to Africans (61). This fictionalized biography of a soldier celebrates the efforts and heroism of the German troops in their brutal exploitation and suppression of the indigenous peoples. Frenssen actually mentions the Herero and Nama themselves "very little," Baer admits, but the Nazis found much to admire in it nonetheless (52). They reprinted the novel several times between 1933 and 1944. Here, then, is solid evidence of a link between imperial and Nazi attitudes toward others, be they Africans or Jews. Again, one might expect a parallel treatment of a text that narrates or fictionalizes Germans' experiences in the East during the Holocaust, which likewise would have transmitted the genocidal gaze from the periphery to the metropole. Baer's commentary on soldiers' letters and photographs from the eastern front or the correspondence of women sent to "Germanize" the occupied lands would have been most welcome. The book leaps across the years 1918–1945 entirely and next examines post-Holocaust texts and art. Chapter 3 focuses on two novels by Uwe Timm. Morenga (1978) centers on Gottschalk, a German military veterinarian, who witnesses the Herero uprising. Timm foreshadows the later Nazi genocide by referencing "a key Nazi henchman," death camps, and eugenics at various points (90). Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Timm's fictionalized memoir of his brother's time on the eastern front as a member of the Waffen SS, is a scathing indictment, Baer argues, of the genocidal gaze. Yet how is Timm, writing not as a victim resisting that gaze but as a German, decades after the Holocaust, suddenly able to critique it? The transmission from generation to generation has obviously been halted or interrupted. How? Where did the genocidal gaze "go" after 1945? Was it so utterly discredited by unconditional surrender, Allied occupation, and forced denazification that it disappeared after decades of presence? One wishes Baer had addressed this subject. Chapter 4 examines "Black Box," a complex and fascinating 2005 art installation by William Kentridge that "interrogates German guilt" by way of...

Urban secrets? Affinities and anthropologies of South African cities

This paper reflects on the discussions of a collective of academics in and around Johannesburg, Africa’s iconic city built on the extractive capital of gold mining. Captured aptly in William Kentridge’s art film Johannesburg: Second Greatest City after Paris (1989), the city is brought into an imaginary relationship with a romanticised Parisian experience. This comparison is taken up through an endeavour to read, re-read, imagine and re-imagine Johannesburg in relation to visions of the French capital contained in the writings in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project with its “convolutes” of the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century. The authors locate these discussions within debates addressed to urban anthropology in South Africa now, delving into the theories, methods and insights presented in a scholarly meeting and associated city tour held in 2017, and through the papers submitted for this special issue. This essay considers how an authorial collaboration comprising an anthropologist, historian and an architect might contribute differently to debates current in the spatial disciplines and anthropology, and how such a multi-disciplinary reading of a seminal text about a European city might resonate with our location in Southern Africa.

21 July 1773: Disputation, Poetry, Slavery

Previous articleNext article No Access21 July 1773: Disputation, Poetry, SlaveryPeter GalisonPeter Galison Search for more articles by this author Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard. His 1983 PhD is in theoretical high-energy physics and in the history of science. In 1997, he received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; he won a 1998 Pfizer Award for his book Image and Logic (1997); in 1999, the Max Planck/Humboldt Stiftung Prize; in 2018, the Pais Prize from the American Physical Society. His other books include How Experiments End (1987); Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003); and Objectivity (with Lorraine Daston, 2007). He and Robb Moss directed Containment (1915), a film about guarding radioactive materials for ten thousand years, and Secrecy (2008). Galison has also partnered with artist William Kentridge on The Refusal of Time (2012). His current research is on technology, science, and the self and, separately, black holes.PDFPDF PLUSFull TextSupplemental Material Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 45, Number 2Winter 2019Davidson and His Interlocutors Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700967 Views: 459Total views on this site © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Art as a catalyst to activate public space: the experience of ‘Triumphs and Laments’ in Rome

Many cities have rediscovered and reinvented their river fronts as public spaces in recent years. From New York to Seoul, urban waterways which were forgotten, marginalized, or outright abandoned are now filled with life. In each case the transformation was spurred by a combination of grass roots, bottom-up initiative and savvy government recognition of the projects’ potentials. Once the city leaders embraced the projects - and not a moment sooner - public and private funding materialized and bureaucratic barriers disappeared. In Rome, whether due to the complexity of the chain of responsibility for the river front, or simply an ingrained aversion to progressive planning - saying no or saying nothing is much easier than taking responsibility for positive change - initiatives to renew the urban riverfront have been small and disconnected. Diverse interests ranging from green space to water transit, from river front commerce to ecological restoration, have all vied for a role in the river’s regeneration. But one particular discipline, that of art, has succeeded more than others in attracting international attention and changing the way people in Rome and throughout the (art) world see the Tiber. Artist William Kentridge, with his project ‘Triumphs and Laments’, using the simple technique of selective cleaning of the Tiber embankment walls, revealed to the world a procession of figures which populate the riverfront with a life that it hasn’t seen in centuries.

We The People: Portraits of Resistance and America Reconstructed

We The People: Portraits of Resistance and America ReconstructedDonna BassinDonna Bassin84 Haller Dr., Cedar Grove, NJ 07009. E-mail: [email protected]Donna Bassin, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and published author, filmmaker, and fine art photographer. She is an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and in private practice in New York City. She has directed and produced two award-winning documentaries, Leave No Soldier and The Mourning After.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:December 2018https://doi.org/10.1521/prev.2018.105.6.709PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations AboutREFERENCESBassin D. (2017). The art(s) of witness: Through the camera and the psychoanalytic situation. In Hagman G. (Ed.), Art, creativity and psychoanalysis: Perspectives from analyst-artists (pp. 165–181). New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis. Google ScholarBenjamin J. (2018). Beyond doer and done to: Recognition theory, intersubjectivity and the third. New York: Routledge. Google ScholarBion W. (1988). Notes on memory and desire. In Spillius E. B. (Ed.), Melanie Klein today: Developments in theory and practice, Vol. 2, Mainly practice (pp. 17–21). Florence, KY: Taylor & Frances/Routledge. (Original work published 1967) Google ScholarButler J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? New York: Verso. Google ScholarCole T. (2018, August 23). There's less to portraits than meets the eye, and more. New York Times Mag. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/magazine/theres-less-to-portraits-than-meets-the-eye-and-more.html Google Scholarhooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. New York: Harper Perennial. Google ScholarMaltz-Leca L. (2013). Process/procession: William Kentridge and the process of change. Art Bull., 95:139–165. Google ScholarMirlesse S. (2012, March 22). Light, looking: Uta Barth. BOMB. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/light-looking-uta-barth/ Google ScholarMitchell S. A. (2000). Relationality: From attachment to intersubjectivity. New York: Analytic Press. Google ScholarMorrison T. (2015, March 23). No place for self-pity, no room for fear. Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/no-place-self-pity-no-room-fear/ Google ScholarPizer B. (2008). Passion, responsibility, and “wild geese”: Creating a context for the absence of conscious intentions. Psychoanal. Dialog., 15:57–84. Crossref, Google ScholarSegal H. (1997). Silence is the real crime. In Psychoanalysis, literature, and war: Papers, 1972–1995 (pp. 143–156). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1987) Google ScholarSolnit R. (2014). The faraway nearby, New York: Penguin Books. Google ScholarWhite M. (1960). Aperture, 8(4). Google ScholarWhite M. (1963). Equivalence: The perennial trend. PSA J., 29:17–21. Google Scholar Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 105Issue 6Dec 2018 Information© 2018 N.P.A.P.PDF download

Film, History and Memory eds. Jennie M. Carlsten, Fearghal McGarry (review)

Reviewed by: Film, History and Memory eds. Jennie M. Carlsten, Fearghal McGarry Frans Weiser and Paul Cohen Film, History and Memory Carlsten, Jennie M., Fearghal McGarry, eds. New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2015, Print Editors Jennie Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry explain in their introduction to Film, History and Memory that the project emerged out of collaboration between historian McGarry and a documentary team using his research to make a film about an Irish republican activist. In addition to cooperating on the film, the two groups also launched an interactive website and organized an academic conference with Carlsten that included film scholars, setting the stage for the interdisciplinary nature of the current volume of essays. Building on the ground made by similar multidisciplinary projects, such as the Blackwell Companion to the Historical Film (2013), edited by historian Robert Rosenstone and film studies scholar Constantin Parvulescu, Carlsten and McGarry purposefully avoid rehearsing the familiar debates about academic distrust of the legitimacy of historical cinema and instead take as a given that that films about the past can "embody historical thinking" (2). To that end, they present several principles designed to guide future research on the subject, from recognizing that both filmmaking and viewing are collaborative processes—and suggesting broader recognition of what constitutes historical sources and stories—to advocating greater attention for emotional responses, film reception and context(s) of production. One of the collection's most notable features is signaled by its title, for it augments theory in this burgeoning field by focusing on the role of memory as a form of social identity within evaluations of history. Additionally, the volume features a striking geographical diversity. Given the origin of the project, it is not surprising to see various chapters dedicated to questions of British and Irish cinema, yet several are also transnational in scope, and in two cases, scholars move away from Europe to examine the transmission of memory in Latin America and South Africa. The volume's eleven chapters are not divided into sections, though the text is effectively bookended by two theoretical interventions, with the chapters in between exploring case studies through a variety of different methodologies. In Chapter One, for example, Gianluca Fantoni provides a particularly informative and concise overview of the "symbiotic if problematic relationship between historians and film" (26), chronologically tracing the question of historical representation from the beginning of cinema through its halting, uncertain acceptance into historiographical scholarship over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Coauthored by three scholars, Chapter Two begins the series of case studies by expanding traditional definitions of "heritage film," once associated with British period pieces of the 1980s, to instead examine its current practice as a hybrid genre that has been used to markedly different ends in the Basque Country, Denmark, and Germany. As the authors convincingly argue, the continued prominence of heritage films reveals as much about national memory as it does about transnational coproduction, and such films' "economic impact cannot be measured by box-office figures alone, but also by how they foster heritage tourism, locally and regionally" (45). Chapters Three and Four respectively explore Spanish and Portuguese responses to national trauma, the former reconsidering the [End Page 59] frequent artistic preoccupation with the Spanish Civil War by examining how films that creatively use intergenerational perspectives to illustrate multiple perspectives can mediate the contradictory ways an event has been remembered at different historical moments. The latter essay by Alison Ribeiro de Menezes explores the "affective turn" in cultural studies by highlighting the strategies that two recent Portuguese documentarians use in appropriating historical footage from earlier documentaries in the dictatorship as a means of testing the limits of representation in the documentary genre. Chapter Five once again returns to transnational comparison, as Mercedes Camino analyzes the distinct ways that filmmakers from Italy, France, Yugoslavia, and Belarus have both shaped and complicated images of resistance and collaboration relating to World War Two. In Chapter Six, Andrew Hennlich examines how a 1997 film by South African animator William Kentridge draws upon French symbolist theater and Soviet director Dziga Vertov's silent documentary Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Kentridge's purpose, however, is to interrogate the thorny...

Crystal am nelson. Review of "William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose" by Jane Taylor.

crystal am nelson. Review of "William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose" by Jane Taylor.

Shifting Views: People and Politics in Contemporary African Art

June 01 2018 Shifting Views: People and Politics in Contemporary African Art Shifting Views: People and Politics in Contemporary African Art curated by ShannenHill with KevinTervala Baltimore Museum of ArtDecember 18, 2016–December 10, 2017 Author and Article Information Online Issn: 1937-2108 Print Issn: 0001-9933 © 2018 by the Regents of the University of California.2018The Regents of the University of California African Arts (2018) 51 (2): 83–85. https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00406 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Shifting Views: People and Politics in Contemporary African Art. African Arts 2018; 51 (2): 83–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00406 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsAfrican Arts Search Advanced Search Shifting Views: People & Politics in Contemporary African Art is the third in a series of thematic exhibitions of African art installed in the Baltimore Museum of Art's (BMA) new Focus Gallery. The gallery debuted with Diverging Streams: Eastern Nigerian Art (April 26, 2015–April 17, 2016) followed by Design for Mobile Living: Art from Eastern Africa (June 1–November 27, 2016). Located adjacent to the recently (April 2015) reopened renovated and expanded galleries for African art, its 680 square feet fosters an intimate space for engagement through close looking, finding connections, critical thinking, and quiet reflection (Fig. 1). Shifting Views, curated by Shannon Hill, Associate Curator for African Arts, with Kevin Tervala, former Curatorial Fellow in the Arts of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Pacific Islands, features twenty-four works on paper by seven artists from the museum's growing collection of contemporary art: David Goldblatt, Gavin Jantjes, William Kentridge,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Wendy Ann Parker. Review of "William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letters and Lines" by Fiona Bradley and Tamar Garb and "William Kentridge" by Rosalind E. Krauss.

Wendy Ann Parker. Review of "William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letters and Lines" by Fiona Bradley and Tamar Garb and "William Kentridge" by Rosalind E. Krauss.

Authorship and auteurism in Another Country

In 1873 Benjamin Disraeli could bemoan, "[a]n author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children." Today, however, authorship is a consumable that demands endless promoting in order to be profitable. The ironic predicament of the author within contemporary (technocratic) culture is his frequent invisibility. Another Country is an apposite vehicle for raising the quandary of contemporary authorship since it is first, a music video and thus a promotional tool itself and second, an authorial collaboration between musical artists Mango Groove and "fine artist" William Kentridge.

Under Erasure: William Kentridge, Derrida, and Post-Apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACTThis article aims to read the work of South African artist William Kentridge through the prism of Jacques Derrida’s notion of trace. Kentridge utilizes a unique style of filmic animation: charcoal pictures drawn on a single piece of paper, where the animation is achieved by erasing and re-drawing parts of the picture, and then filming the image again. I will argue that this technique, as well as Kentridge’s focus on deferral, memory, and identity, share an affinity with the philosophical, aesthetic, ethical, and political aspects of Derrida’s trace. Drawing attention to the trace—a paradox of presence, where motion is achieved precisely by the deferred nonpresence in each drawing—Kentridge acknowledges, in a similar way to Derrida, the impossibility of ontological thought and knowing. In post-apartheid South Africa, this is not only an aesthetic statement but a political one as well. By maintaining the traces, Kentridge concedes that knowing should be deferred, acknowledging that what we know about the other is limited, if not impossible, and that the apartheid regime’s attempt to master the other was violent and erroneous.

The Many Hands of Thick Time: William Kentridge at the Whitechapel Gallery

The Many Hands of Thick Time: William Kentridge at the Whitechapel Gallery

Archive of Darkness: William Kentridge'sBlack Box/Chambre Noire

Situating itself in histories of cinema and installation art, William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005) raises questions about screens, exhibition space, site-specificity and spectatorship. Through his timely intervention in a debate on Germany’s colonial past, Kentridge’s postcolonial art has contributed to the recognition and remembrance of a forgotten, colonial genocide. This article argues that, by transposing his signature technique of drawings for projection onto a new set of media, Kentridge explores how and what we can know through cinematic projection in the white cube. In particular, his metaphor of the illuminated shadow enables him to animate archival fragments as shadows and silhouettes. By creating a multi-directional archive, Black Box enables an affective engagement with the spectres of colonialism and provides a forum for the calibration of moral questions around reparation, reconciliation and forgiveness.

Writing ‘Time’:The (Late) Oeuvres of Jacques Derrida and William Kentridge

In order to respond to the provocative interrogation of time in contemporary thought, this article investigates the ways in which the late oeuvres of Jacques Derrida and William Kentridge engage with the question of ‘time’: by way of deconstruction in Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign (2011. Chicago: Chicago University Press), and through ‘imperfect erasure’ in the case of Kentridge's installation-performance The Refusal of Time / Refuse the Hour (2012). Derrida, the Algerian-French thinker, and Kentridge, the South-African artist-performer – two pre-eminent intellectuals of our time – coincidentally come to question time, to interrogate specific notions of time. They share a critical focus on the ‘instruments’ that ‘make’ time in the Western world: the ‘page’ of the text; the ‘stage’ of the performance; and the ‘wheel’, upon which the movements of time are deconstructed and imperfectly erased. In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida's reading of the adventures of Robinson Crusoe on the deserted island, interweaved with an analysis of a Martin Heidegger seminar on ‘solitude, finitude and the world’, deals with time in relation to the ‘retreating’ mechanism of the wheel. Kentridge, meanwhile, organizes the installation The Refusal of Time and the chamber-opera Refuse the Hour around the ‘returns’ of wheel of Fortuna. For both the thinker and the artist, the movements of the wheel set the rhythm of the encounter with the Other: in Derrida, it is the absolute other of death, in its relation to what is to come, l’à-venir; in Kentridge, it is the splitting of the ‘I’ into a series of others who act out the propelling force of their future(s). This article maps the re-treats and the re-turns of the wheel of time along the paths that Derrida and Kentridge follow on the page of the book and on the threshold between the studio and the world; it provides a reading of the singularity and the universality of their approaches to the (im)possible end of the journey in / through / of time.

Poetics of Peril

From the rich register of ideas in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literatures across Continents, a few stand out as particularly poignant for the present exploration of literature's work. ‘Poetics of Peril’ is particularly concerned with the relationship between the dynamism embedded in the understanding of ‘presence’ as ‘absence in process’ ( Ghosh and Miller 2016 : 122), the idea of the text as ‘noise’, and the intricate relationship of both of these kinds of ‘presencing’ to metaphor as ‘initiating a kind of change (phora), a translocation of meaning, a momentum for the across’ (87). A selection of texts comes to mind where the triad of what lies between the ‘to be’/the ‘not yet’, ‘noise’, and translocation orchestrates the narrative. It can be read for and brought into dialogue across the periods and locations from where the works speak, from William Kentridge's video installation ‘More Sweetly Play the Dance’ (2015) to Tabish Khair's The Bus Stopped ( 2004 ) and Herman Melville's ‘Benito Cereno’ (1855), to Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic (2011). While very different in provenance, focus, and even genre, the four share certain narrative patterns whose presencing resides in sudden aesthetic ruptures and shifts which ultimately, and most seriously, bespeak epistemological unravelings and dis-placements, a poetics of peril and aesthetic of absence.

Reflexões sobre o ateliê como lugar/espaço em processos de criação em Artes Visuais

ResumoEste artigo[1] tem por objetivo refletir sobre o ateliê como lugar/espaço em processos de criação em Artes Visuais, bem como sua relevância na construção intelectual, crítica e reflexiva do artista. Busca-se, assim, possibilidade de compreensão do que seria esse ateliê nas Artes Visuais, sua conceitualização, finalidade e espaço/tempo para a construção de um ser/estar artista em meio ao processo criativo. Nessa perspectiva, propõe-se transitar por ateliês de artistas, em especial, o ateliê de William Kentridge, onde se aponta para a presença dos objetos inseridos neste contexto, investigando a cadeira como possível impulsionadora nos processos cognitivos de criação. Como desdobramento para este estudo, pretende-se também investigar os conceitos de espaço e lugar, assim como a dialética entre a poética e a estética nos processos de criação, ancorando-se nos estudos de René Passeron (1997) e Luigi Pareyson (2001), que neste momento somente serão adotados para elucidar o início da pesquisa. Enviado em: 28 de abril de 2017.Aprovado em: 05 de maio de 2017.

William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose by Jane Taylor

Reviewed by: William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose by Jane Taylor Hazel Rickard William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose. By Jane Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017; pp. 224. Jane Taylor’s William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose explores William Kentridge’s 2010 production of The Nose for the New York Metropolitan Opera. Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1928 opera is based on Nikolai Gogol’s satire (1836) of the same name in which the nose of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev abandons him and succeeds him in rank. Taylor argues that the theme at the heart of The Nose is the internal contradiction of the divided self, and that this can be seen as an allegory for William Kentridge’s mode of art-making. The dialectical relationship between parts of the self drives Taylor’s project in content and form, and the style of writing itself performs the main thrust of the argument. By deliberately employing her writing to mirror Kentridge’s mode of working, Taylor creates not only an insightful critical study of Kentridge’s creative process, but a sophisticated piece of performative writing as well. In her first chapter titled “Nasal Passages,” Taylor discusses the prehistories of the production, including the life of Shostakovich and Kentridge’s position as a political artist in South Africa. She explores the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize art under a totalitarian regime: most significantly, that double-speak is necessary to survive and that consistent identity is almost an impossibility. Taylor goes on to explore how Kentridge’s oeuvre investigates this problem, as well as how he strategically employs internal division in his process. In the second chapter, “Nose Bleeds,” she describes the range of media, images, and ideas that emerged while making The Nose. In the third chapter, “A Special Theory of Relativity,” Taylor explores issues of artistic lineage and familial relation as it informs Kentridge’s art. “Object Lessons,” her fourth chapter, centers the type of dialogue that happens between “Kentridge the artist” and “Kentridge the filmmaker,” which she argues are two separate though dialectically related entities (121). In his studio the critical impulse is held at bay while the hand plays, and in the secondary phase of filmmaking he employs a mode of repair rather than invention. During this later time of reflection when drawings are revised, compiled, and animated to create a film, certain themes emerge in new ways, but they are always grounded in the material work of the other Kentridge. The theme of splitting and possible reconciliation appears throughout Taylor’s book, and in her fifth chapter, “Collegiate Assessments,” she frames this predicament as the problem of modernity: that there is anxiety over internal personal coherence in environments wherein censorship makes it almost impossible to reconcile disparate parts of the self; one must hide and show certain things strategically. Taylor poses the question: “Can allegory and history be viewed through a single frame?” (147). In other words, can the absurd contradictions of life be seen through the same artistic lens as the very real and specific terrors of political regimes? Kentridge and Taylor attempt to do so. Kentridge proceeds by bringing negative images in his work (distance, separation, shadow, or the black space of a censored page) into light (erasing an image until the screen is bare, for example). He sometimes reverses the cinematic image to make a broken image whole again. Taylor shows that, on the one hand, there is hope and humor in his artistic gestures, but on the other that there is a deep seriousness, a sense of division and loss. Taylor chose the form of dialogue to stage an encounter with Kentridge as other authors have done before, most notably Angela Breidbach in William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud (2006) and Rosalind Morris in That Which Is Not Drawn: Conversations (2014). Like them, Taylor develops insightful commentary on Kentridge’s work, but she also engages critically with the form of dialogue itself. She takes as her model Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets (1748), which is an absurd and magical conversation with female genitalia. Gender politics aside, Taylor finds the gem [End Page 597] at the heart of the work that is relevant for the...