William Kentridge Research Articles

A Land of Signs

This essay looks at the way in which the history of South Africa is imprinted in representations of place. It examines images of the land as sites of inscription, exploring the residue of deep colonial history as well as the more immediate past of apartheid on the signs and signifiers that we encounter in the landscape. The works of seven contemporary South African artists are discussed in this context, including the photography of David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim, and Santu Mofokeng, video work and anamorphic drawings by William Kentridge, film by Berni Searle, painting by Vivienne Koorland, and installation by Nicholas Hlobo. The examples therefore cross generations and media in an attempt to understand the ongoing challenge of history for contemporary representations of place in the context of postapartheid South Africa.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE FIVE THEMES BY MARK ROSENTHAL (ED.) AND JOE FEDDERSEN VITAL SIGNS BY BARBARA EARL THOMAS ET AL.

The Art BookVolume 17, Issue 1 p. 20-21 WILLIAM KENTRIDGE FIVE THEMES BY MARK ROSENTHAL (ED.) AND JOE FEDDERSEN VITAL SIGNS BY BARBARA EARL THOMAS ET AL. SUSAN NOYES PLATT, Art writer, SeattleSearch for more papers by this author SUSAN NOYES PLATT, Art writer, SeattleSearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 January 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8357.2010.01076_2.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume17, Issue1February 2010Pages 20-21 RelatedInformation

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe

Reviewed by: Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis Loren Kruger Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, Eds. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4284-7 (cloth) $99.95; ISBN 978-0-8223-4262-5 (paper). $29.95 This volume reproduces Public Culture's special issue on Johannesburg (2004), omitting only Nuttall's interview with artist Rodney Place. It also includes some new essays and evocative images, especially charcoal drawings by William Kentridge and photographs of works by other Johannesburg-based artists like Penny Siopis. The introduction by Nuttall an Mbembe stresses their distinction between studies of the city that rely on paradigms of development, and their intention to focus on "urban form and city life as keys to understanding [Johannesburg's] metropolitan modernity" (11). Overstating their case somewhat by asserting that "few commentators" have focused on urban form, they slight predecessors such as Emerging Johannesburg (2003), edited by one of their contributors, Lindsay Bremner, and omit others like Ordinary Cities (2006), by Jennifer Robinson, both of which balance socio-economic analysis with reflections on urban form, as well as articles by several authors on re-imagining Johannesburg in journals at home (Scrutiny2, African Identities) and abroad (RAL, JSAS). Despite the editors' skepticism about planning and development, the strongest contributors to Johannesburg remain those who combine expert knowledge of city history and current policy with street-level experience and the imagination of its future. In "People as Infrastructure," AbdouMalique Simone builds on his research on African cities from Douala to Khartoum as well as ethnographic investigation of Johannesburg's inner city to analyze migrants' and locals' informal practices of "belonging and becoming," which he and Graeme Götz formulated [End Page 186] in Emerging Johannesburg (123−47). Against Simone's deep analysis, shorter pieces or "voice lines" on cosmopolitanism like Stefan Helgesson's essay on Mozambican poetry on Johannesburg and the email exchange between Tom Odhiambo and Robert Muponde seem unfinished. In contrast, Bremner's reflections on "reformulating township space" draw on her considerable work with urban design, documented in her book Johannesburg: One City, Colliding Worlds (2004), so that her comments here on one project for which she was the architect, rebuilding Freedom Square in Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was launched in 1955, resonate beyond this site to the city's manifold urban forms. Two other "voice lines" from the original publication stand out: Mark Gevisser's comments on Constitution Hill, where his work as "content advisor" (316) helped to shape the museum and other educational installations, are absorbing but might have been pithier had he presented his views directly rather than in interview responses (see also Segal, ed Number Four, to which Gevisser contributed); John Matshikiza's reflections in "Instant City" on his experience as a returning exile not only vividly plot the tension between belonging and alienation, cosmopolitanism and xenophobia, but also, in his notion of the city as "unfinished movie" (222), evoke film and television narratives of Johannesburg whose representations of the city deserve attention. Apart from the absent screens of film and television, several contributors highlight the city's surfaces. Following the editors' lead, David Bunn begins "Art Johannesburg" by asserting the city's "shallowness" (137) but his most illuminating comments, especially on Kentridge's animations, do more than "draw on surfaces" (143). As the single historian in the volume, Jonathan Hyslop digs deeper into the past to analyze significant sites and figures that may no longer show clearly on the surface of the present, from Mohantas Gandhi at the Hamidia Mosque in 1908, to Fanny Klennerman, Jewish socialist founder of Vanguard Bookshop, from the 1930s to 1970s the city's source for cosmopolitan reading, to writer Hermann Charles Bosman on fascist and anti-fascist clashes in Rissik Street in the 1930s. The agents of political confrontation may have changed since Bosman but the site has once again attracted attention; the Rissik Street post office, now shuttered, functioned as location for Hard Copy, a television fictional series on city journalists (2005−07) to which Matshikiza contributed, reminding viewers of the historical traces beneath the surfaces of the built environment. Despite some omissions and editorial glitches (references in the bibliography to articles in...

Terri Cohn. Review of "William Kentridge: Five Themes" by Mark Rosenthal.

Terri Cohn. Review of "William Kentridge: Five Themes" by Mark Rosenthal.

Like Your Art on Canvas or Skin? There's a Museum for You!

Like Your Art on Canvas or Skin? There's a Museum for You!

Review: `William Kentridge: Journey to the Moon/7 Fragments for Georges Méliès/Day for Night'. Hamburger Bahnhof — Museum Für Gegenwart. Berlin, 7 February — 6 May 2007. Curated by Melanie Franke and Joachim Jäger. All films: 2003, black and white, 16mm and 35mm transferred to DVD and `looped', edited by Catherine Meyburgh; acquisitions of Nationalgalerie, Sammlung Marx (Marx Collection)

Review: `William Kentridge: Journey to the Moon/7 Fragments for Georges Méliès/Day for Night'. Hamburger Bahnhof — Museum Für Gegenwart. Berlin, 7 February — 6 May 2007. Curated by Melanie Franke and Joachim Jäger. All films: 2003, black and white, 16mm and 35mm transferred to DVD and `looped', edited by Catherine Meyburgh; acquisitions of Nationalgalerie, Sammlung Marx (Marx Collection)

Representing the South African Landscape: Coetzee, Kentridge, and the Ecocritical Enterprise*

Summary South African artist William Kentridge's Soho Series takes place inside a representation of a Johannesburg mine-landscape. It is a post-industrial and postcolonial landscape of exploitation both of the citizens of the country and of the natural environment. This article considers how the representation of the South African landscape by Kentridge can be seen as part of a continuum of landscape representation in South Africa originating from an initial “wilderness” encounter of a stranger with a new environment. The article traces the movement of landscape representation from those moments when writers and painters, schooled in a particular tradition of representational practices, find themselves forced to create new ways of representing the environment in which they find themselves to a contemporary moment where Kentridge's engagement with landscape representations can be seen as both ecocritical and environmentalist.

William Kentridge and the Black Box of German Colonialism

William Kentridge and the Black Box of German Colonialism

The Spectacle of Post-Apartheid Constitutionalism

In this paper, I reflect on constitutionalism, law and politics in the reconstruction of the South African state. I identify two possible approaches to the constitution: monumental and memorial constitutionalism. A monumental approach is connected to Njabulo Ndebele’s critique on spectacle and a memorial approach to his call for a rediscovery of the ordinary. Two artworks, William Kentridge’s Black Box and Judith Mason’s Blue Dress, as well as a novel by Njabulo Ndebele, are employed to comment on post-apartheid law and politics. I aim to problematise approaches to law as monument and spectacle by calling for the memorial, the ordinary and ‘social reconciliation’. However, I conclude — taking the limits of the law (constitutionalism and human rights) into account — that the latter should also be critically considered.

Violence, Re-Membering, and Healing: A Textual Reading of Drawings for Projection by William Kentridge

This article examines the extent to which insights about the processes and dynamics of psychological health might be located at the intersection between trauma and creativity. To that end, we focus on the animated art series, Drawings for Projection (1989–1999), by the noted South African artist, William Kentridge. Spanning a decade that overlaps the transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid era, Kentridge's art directly addresses themes of violence, reparation, hurt, restoration, and healing. Our intention is not to propose an art therapy but a derivative psychology from the artwork situated in cultural discourse and meaning systems. We provide a hermeneutic reading of Drawings for Projection, and our results suggest that Kentridge's art contains a restorative narrative and function. We identify four narrative aggregations ( Violence as erasure; Re-membering; The breath of the other; and The face of the other) from the data, which we then organise interpretively. This interpretive reading is influenced and informed by the writings of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. As such, we speculate that healing violent traumata involves an ethical reorientation towards the other in re-membrance, care, and action, or else we run the risk of violence returning in reconstituted form. Movement towards an ethical psychology of the other, rather than an egocentric psychology of the self, is suggested.

Layers of permanence: toward a spatial—materialist reading of Ivan Vladislavić's The exploded view

Critics of Vladislavić's early fiction have tended toward dehistoricized textual readings focusing on the author's clear preoccupation with words and word games. Such readings have often ignored or downplayed Vladislavić's equally clear interest in the material processes and socio-physical spaces that shape and enable life in the city. This essay develops a spatial-materialist interpretation of his most recent novel The exploded view, reading word games and puzzles as part of a larger attempt to map the labyrinthine geographies of the post-apartheid city. Vladislavić forges a mode of representation that can register the continual inscription and effacement of social relations onto the physical urban landscape. This narrative strategy, similar to what William Kentridge calls an aesthetic of “imperfect erasure”, operates in tandem with the trope of the “exploded view” to dissect contemporary Johannesburg and lay bare the social and economic processes that create and intersect it.

The Time-Image

he South Africa artist William Kentridge has been working for more than three decades in visual art, animation, theatre, and film. Hie was a founding member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company in Johannesburg and Soweto from 1975-1991 and collaborated with the Handspring Puppet Company on the multimedia productions, also directed by him, including: Woyzeck on the Highveld (1982), Faustus in Africa! (1995), Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), Monteverdi's opera II Ritorno d'Ulisse (1998), and Zeno at 4 am (2001) which have toured several continents. The latter two productions, combining actors, musicians, puppets, and projections were presented at the Visions series of New York's Lincoln Center in recent years. Solo exhibitions of the artist's work have been mounted in his native Johannesburg, several European cities, and in Asia. The first major U.S. retrospective devoted to Kentridge opened, in 2002, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., before traveling to the New Museum of Contemporary Art in N.Y., and Houston and Los Angeles. The Marian Goodman Gallery, in New York, regularly exhibits his drawings and films. Among his well-known animated films, which use charcoal and pastel drawing, are Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris; History of the Main Complaint, Felix in Exile. Kentridge has received the prestigious Carnegie Prize and he is a frequent participant in international art shows and fairs; his films have been shown in numerous festivals and museum retrospectives. Cheryl Kaplan, a New York artist, critic, and producer of Laurie Anderson's new high-definition film for the upcoming World Expo in Japan, conducted the interview over a two-year period, completing it during the New York run of It Ritorno d'Ulisse, in 2004.

History as the main complaint: William Kentridge and the making of post‐apartheid South Africa

This essay considers the relation of history to memory in the process of radical political change. Looking at the work of William Kentridge in the context of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it argues the ways that the language of nation‐building fails to account for the experience of trauma as it resists absorption into the structures of historical time and the ‘talking cure’. In particular, it considers how Kentridge's unique graphic techniques of film animation contest the logic of closure, recovery and renewal that the political and psychic imperatives of ‘new’ nationhood seem to demand. In the radical upheaval to which he submits visuality as much as chronology and teleology, and in the eruption of historical debris through the visual surface, his work disables all sense of resolution.

HISTORY AS THE MAIN COMPLAINT: WILLIAM KENTRIDGE AND THE MAKING OF POST‐APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

This essay considers the relation of history to memory in the process of radical political change. Looking at the work of William Kentridge in the context of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it argues the ways that the language of nation‐building fails to account for the experience of trauma as it resists absorption into the structures of historical time and the ‘talking cure’. In particular, it considers how Kentridge's unique graphic techniques of film animation contest the logic of closure, recovery and renewal that the political and psychic imperatives of ‘new’ nationhood seem to demand. In the radical upheaval to which he submits visuality as much as chronology and teleology, and in the eruption of historical debris through the visual surface, his work disables all sense of resolution.

Postcolonial TrafficWilliam Kentridge and Aboriginal Desert Painters

Discusses globalisation and art; postmodern cultural forms and critical regionalism; postcolonial developments in Western cultural institutions; Western Desert painters and urban Aboriginal artists; relationship between the work of South African artist William Kentridge, whose work was included in an exhibition titled the Divine Comedy at the Art Gallery of Western Australia at the same time that an exhibition of western desert painting was also hung at that institution.

The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994

For much of Africa the 20th century was overshadowed by the experience of colonial rule, with politcal independence arriving for most people only in the last 50 years. Short Century is a broad survey of cultural life in Africa from the independence movements through the post-colonial era to the end of apartheid in 1994. Expansive, wide-ranging and illustrated, this book studies achievements in all areas of the performing and fine arts, photography, literature, theatre, architecture, music and film. Short Century includes the works of over 50 artists from the paintings of Mancona and Sekoto during the '50s, through the drawings and theatre projects of William Kentridge up to the installations and video works of Kay Hassan and Oladele A. Bamgboye. The great writers of the continent - Soyinka, Senghor and Cesaire amongst others - Africa's filmmakers, architects and musicians, all of whom left their mark on the process of decolonization, are studied here in depth. Renowned historians and cultural philosophers discuss the background of developments and analyze the ideological strategies employed by Western colonial powers to preserve their grip on African countries and peoples. A chapter on photojournalism supplemented by a detailed chronology of events and political movements presents the main stages of Africa's political history. A comprehensive anthology in the appendix contains some 30 historical documents, such as essays, speeches and political manifestos, shedding light on the key issues of the period.

William Kentridge at the National Gallery in Cape Town: a retrospective exhibition

William Kentridge at the National Gallery in Cape Town: a retrospective exhibition

Taking Stock: The making of a bourgeois life—The Confessions of Zeno

I must admit that I have over the past several years been drawn increasingly into the realms of confession and autobiography. This is due in large measure to my engagement in the 1990s with questions of Truth and Reconciliation, arising from of the Faultlines projects and the writing of Ubu and the Truth Commission. Most recently, I am undertaking research around the meaning and performance of sincerity, and while initiating this, I returned to Rousseau and St Augustine, began rereading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. It was curious for me to discover in this latter text a passage that was strikingly resonant with The Confessions of Zeno, the theatre piece I have been making over the past two years with William Kentridge, Handspring Puppet Company and Kevin Volans. I had read Franklin's Autobiography some ten years ago, and had no specific recollections of the text. However, what I discovered on my return to this book was that Franklin had been waiting for me.

Law’s Time, Particularity and Slowness

The article compares law’s time and its effects on how we understand and approach law and legal interpretation, to other concepts of time. It explores two trends: one, asking for a disruption of a chronological and a linear conception of time that could contribute to an acceptance of the notion of multiple truths and fluidity of meanings and the other, supporting the notion of slowness, where difference and particularity can be explored and recognised in contrast to law’s speed, universalisation and generalisation. It contemplates how events and interpretations of art can illustrate a way of disrupting chronological time, and by lingering, of showing greater attentiveness. The article investigates and tentatively suggests other ways of or attitudes to legal reading and interpretation, always keeping the limits and the violence of the law in mind. Artist William Kentridge’s observation that ‘[t]he more general it becomes, the less it works’ stands central to the concern with particularity.

Tadeusz Kantor's Happenings: Reality, Mediality, and History

In “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Rosalind Krauss writes about Marcel Broodthaers, James Coleman, and William Kentridge because, as she notes, these artists have decided not to follow the international fashion of installation and intermedia work in which “art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital.”Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 56. Neither have they retreated into the etiolated forms of traditional mediums, such as painting and sculpture. Rather, their recent works have embraced the idea of differential specificity, in which a medium itself is reinvented and rearticulated.