William Kentridge

by Rosalind E. Krauss (Editor)

Overview

Critical texts and interviews that explore the drawings, animations, and theatrical work of the South African artist William Kentridge.

Since the 1970s, the South African artist William Kentridge has charted the turbulent terrain of his homeland in both personal and political terms. With erudition, absurdist humor, and an underlying hope in humankind, Kentridge's artwork has examined apartheid, humanitarian atrocities, aging, and the ambiguities of growing up white and Jewish in South Africa. This October Files volume brings together critical essays and interviews that explore Kentridge's work and shed light on the unique working processes behind his drawings, prints, stop-animation films, and theater works.

The texts include an interview by the artist Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of the first major retrospective of Kentridge's work; an essay by Andreas Huyssen on the role of shadow-play in Kentridge's film series 9 Drawing for Projection; and investigations of Kentridge's work for opera and theater by Maria Gough, Joseph Leo Koerner, and Margaret Koster Koerner. An analysis by influential art historian Rosalind Krauss, the editor of this volume, argues that Kentridge's films are the result of a particularly reflexive drawing practice in which the marks on the page—particularly the smudges, smears, and erasures that characterize his stop-animations—define the act of drawing as a temporal medium. Krauss's understanding of Kentridge's work as embodying a fundamental tension between formal and sociological poles has been crucial to subsequent analyses of the artist's work, including the new essay by the anthropologist Rosalind Morris, who has collaborated with Kentridge on several projects.

Essays and Interviews
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Maria Gough, Andreas Huyssen, William Kentridge, Joseph Leo Koerner, Margaret Koster Koerner, Rosalind Krauss, Rosalind Morris

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262340021
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	09/01/2017
Series:	October Files , #21
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Rosalind E. Krauss is University Professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where, from 1995 to 2006, she held the Meyer Schapiro Chair in Modern Art and Theory. She is a founding editor of October and the author of Passages in Modern Sculpture, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths, The Optical Unconscious, Bachelors, Perpetual Inventory, Under Blue Cup (all published by the MIT Press), and other books.

Rosalind E. Krauss is University Professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where, from 1995 to 2006, she held the Meyer Schapiro Chair in Modern Art and Theory. She is a founding editor of October and the author of Passages in Modern Sculpture, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths, The Optical Unconscious, Bachelors, Perpetual Inventory, Under Blue Cup (all published by the MIT Press), and other books.

Rosalind E. Krauss is University Professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where, from 1995 to 2006, she held the Meyer Schapiro Chair in Modern Art and Theory. She is a founding editor of October and the author of Passages in Modern Sculpture, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths, The Optical Unconscious, Bachelors, Perpetual Inventory, Under Blue Cup (all published by the MIT Press), and other books.

Table of Contents

Series Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

Authors' Notes xiii

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in Conversation with William Kentridge (1999) Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev William Kentridge 1

"Fortuna": Neither Program nor Chance in the Making of Images (1993) William Kentridge 25

"The Rock": William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection (2000) Rosalind Krauss 33

In Praise of Shadows: The Neutral Mask (2001) William Kentridge 69

The Shadow Play as Medium of Memory in William Kentridge (2013) Andreas Huyssen 77

The Other Side of the Press (2012) Rosalind Krauss 99

Landscape in a Site of Siege (1988) William Kentridge 107

Drawing the Line at a Tree-Search: The New Landscapes of William Kentridge (2015) Rosalind Morris 113

Kentridge's Nose (2010) Maria Gough 147

"Whichever Page You Open": William Kentridge in New York (2014) Joseph Leo Koerner Margaret Koster Koerner 177

Index of Names 185