William Kentridge
Thick Time
006
Introduction Iwona Blazwick Sabine Breitwieser Poul Erik Tøjner Maria Balshaw
008
29
7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, 2003 Nine Fragments for Nine Films Iwona Blazwick
036 49
Tapestries, 2009-2012 A Collaboration with Stephens Tapestry Studio Joseph Leo Koerner
056 81
The Refusal of Time, 2012 Poincaré’s Present Michael Juul Holm
088
Second-hand Reading, 2013 William Kentridge
108 129
More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015 The Rights of Strangers Homi K. Bhabha
136 157
Lulu, 2015 Le Théâtre est son double Denise Wendel-Poray
168 189
Notes Towards a Model Opera, 2015 Peripheral Thinking A Lecture by William Kentridge
200 225
O Sentimental Machine, 2015 Performing the Archive of History in Shorthand Sabine Breitwieser
234 236 246 253 255
List of Works Chronology Bibliography Acknowledgements Image Credits
Untitled (Bicycle Wheel II) 2 12 Steel, timber, brass, aluminium, bicycle parts and found objects 26 × 15 × 12 cm
Contents 5
Thick Time
The boundary-shifting plurality of William Kentridge’s oeuvre has found its most powerful manifestation in the multi-media installations that he has evolved since the early 2000s. His experiments with drawing, film, tapestry, stage design, mime, music and dance are brought together in the multi-faceted environments featured in this book. Structurally Kentridge’s dancing shadowlands pivot on figure/ground (or actor/stage) relations. His silent, monochromatic figures are both emblematic and expressionist. They have stepped out of mythology, art history, opera, literature, autobiography and politics. They take part in rituals common to all societies. Characters process in a courtly masque or carnival parade. They mass and surge in revolt or tramp in the wretched march of the soldier, the captive or the refugee. Dancers and musicians give expression to rites of passage. Gesture is narrative. The figure may also be an anthropomorphised object or even a declaration. Through the expressionist renderings of his iconic figures and through his own presence, Kentridge infuses his cutout characters and slogans with profound emotional and psychic resonance. Kentridge’s ‘ground’ or stage set may be the landscape – as pastoral idyll, as map and as scar tissue; his panoramas roil and mutate as metaphor for history and memory. His ground might also be the studio where traces of process become a palimpsest. Printed matter is another arena, the pages of dictionaries and encyclopaedias offering a backdrop of categorisation and definition, an archive of rationalism. Time – stopped, reversed, fragmented and looped – ‘thick time’, adds the phenomenological dimension that immerses and displaces us. Just as Kentridge roams through history drawn by the great ideological and aesthetic experiments of the twentieth century or the seismic histories of colonial and post-apartheid South Africa, we also catch glimpses of images and sounds that are at once ephemeral and epic. The physical staging of moving images projected on repeated loops, ensures that there is no
Still from The Refusal of Time 2012
6 Introduction
Iwona Blazwick Director, Whitechapel Gallery Sabine Breitwieser Director, Museum der Moderne Salzburg Poul Erik Tøjner Director, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Maria Balshaw Director, The Whitworth The University of Manchester
end point, that there is a ‘refusal of time’. Trauma is forgotten but must return; violence and mourning, nature and culture, truth and illusion endlessly revolve. The paint that has been splattered across a sheet of paper leaps back onto the brush and the utopian possibilities of the tabula rasa are restored. Disaster strikes, hope springs. Eight installations dating from 2003 until 2016 form the chapters of this book, each accompanied by a commentary contributed by curators, critics and the artist himself. These installations have also embarked on an odyssey travelling from London to the shores of Denmark and the cities of Salzburg and Manchester. Along the way Kentridge has found other platforms for his live work: in London, a performance as part of the Cabaret Kultura at the Whitechapel Gallery, a ‘drawing concert’ titled Paper Music at the Print Room and his production of Lulu by the English National Opera. His interpretation of the opera Wozzeck is premiered as part of the 2017 Salzburg Festival, alongside an exhibition of posters, costumes and opera and theatre set drawings featuring productions from the early 1970s until the present, including, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, The Magic Flute, The Nose, and Lulu – exhibited, Wunderkammer style, at the Rupertinum. In each location Kentridge’s installations and performances offer a world within a world yet one that resonates with the specifics of each time and place. We salute the artist for sharing his vision with European audiences, absorbing and implicating each one of us in his fragments of personal and world histories. 7
7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
7 Fragments for Georges Méliès 2003 (installation of seven films, shown with Day for Night and Journey to the Moon) 16 mm and 35 mm film transferred to video, colour, silent Video editor
Catherine Meyburgh
Invisible Mending, 1:30 minutes Balancing Act, 1:20 minutes Tabula Rasa I, 2:50 minutes Tabula Rasa II, 2:10 minutes Moveable Assets, 2:40 minutes Autodidact, 5:10 minutes Feats of Prestidigitation, 1:50 minutes Day for Night, 6:32 minutes 16 mm film transferred to video, colour, silent Video editor
Catherine Meyburgh
Journey to the Moon, 7:10 minutes 16 mm and 35 mm film transferred to video, black and white, sound Video editor Music Piano
Catherine Meyburgh Philip Miller Jill Richards
Right: Still from Journey to the Moon, 2003 Overleaf: Installation view of William Kentridge: Fragments for Georges Méliès, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006
8
Day for Night Journey to the Moon
Invisible Mending
12
7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
13
Balancing Act
14 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
15
Tabula Rasa I
16 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
Tabula Rasa II
17
Moveable Assets
1
7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
19
Autodidact
Feats of Prestidigitation
22
7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
Day for Night
23
Journey to the Moon
24 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
Overleaf: Installation view of William Kentridge: Fragments for Georges Méliès, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006
25
Iwona Blazwick
Nine Fragments for Nine Films ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM Blots, splashes, smudges and lines – spiralling, undulating, bleeding – are as much a part of William Kentridge’s oeuvre as the figuration for which he is renowned. Like Hans Namuth’s 1951 film of Jackson Pollock dripping paint onto glass, 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès is a record of action painting. Tabula Rasa I starts with blank paper lying flat. The artist’s hand enters the frame with a stick of charcoal to make one dot, then two, connecting them to create a line. For a moment they are co-ordinates, forms of mapping. Suddenly, the second dot and the line are erased, leaving the first dot alone. It is joined by a blob. Next, an arabesque line snakes out to connect the two. More lines appear, followed by a sequence of numbers, 1 to 5. Kentridge’s dynamic kinetic black and white forms recall Mark Rothko’s conceptualisation of abstract shapes: They are unique elements in a unique situation. They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion. They move with internal freedom, and without need to conform with or to violate what is probable in the familiar world. They have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognises the principle and passion of organisms.1 Kentridge’s mathematical glyphs represent quantities. Yet they do not progress along the lines of an equation, but are scattered across space, connected by a swarm of undulating lines.
With a brush of the artist’s hand, they are replaced by letters of the alphabet. Suspended in white space, numbers and letters are decoupled from meaning while still signifying as an autonomous system or ‘organism’. In Tabula Rasa II, the action commences with a black rectangle invading blank paper. The artist pulls a cloth across the surface, each expressive gesture removing some pigment. He reverses the painterly process to reveal the lyrical swirls and splashes from which the monochrome is comprised. As the film plays in reverse, we discover the source of Kentridge’s painterly abstraction – a pot of coffee, into which the black liquid obediently rushes back. It leaves behind a cosmic halo of tiny dark splashes around a white epicentre, like a supernova in reverse. A thousand tiny dots leap into a dish of paint being whisked by the artist, the humble origin of this big bang. He overlays the sheet of paper with another black monochrome created from charcoal. Here his brush is a feather duster that sweeps across the sooty surface, obliging each particle of carbon dust to be absorbed in its fluff y embrace. Black is returned to white, all becomes tidy and clean – good housekeeping, a tabula rasa. The fluidity of ink, the smudginess of charcoal, the explosive force of a splatter, the controlling contours of a line: 7 Fragments is in part a joyous portrayal of the physical properties, protean energy and expressive potential of mediums and their power – unleashed by the artist/alchemist – to become symbol, gesture or image. Filling the screen, a splash can take on cosmic proportions – Kentridge links the micro and the macro, demonstrating universal principles of matter. The gestures also foreground the relation of medium with the body, expression with the psyche. 29
THE CAS
Fig 1 Still from Journey to the Moon, 2003
Fig 2 Still from Day for Night, 2,,3
30
7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
Kentridge is the chief protagonist of 7 Fragments and its companion films, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, accompanied by a lively cast. Among them is one other human – his wife Anne Stanwix, who makes fleeting appearances in the flesh and as a drawing. She adopts a traditional studio role of the Nude and Muse. In Journey to the Moon she appears in silhouette, seated or following the artist – but never in dialogue with him. She walks naked behind the clothed Kentridge as if echoing the myth of Orpheus leading his lost wife Eurydice out of the underworld; to free her, he must not look at her [FIG. 1]. There are also the ants, who make their debut in Day for Night [FIG. 2]. Having invaded Kentridge’s studio, their tendency to congregate and to form lines saved them from insecticide: the artist decided to capitalise on their animated mark-making and give them starring roles. Following lines of sugar water they swarm and scatter across the picture surface; reversed white out of black, their tiny spiky bodies look like stars at night. Things in Kentridge’s studio – inks, brushes, pencils and charcoals – have agency. Like the objects and animals in fairy tales, they are imbued with magical properties. An athletic ladder is the protagonist in Balancing Act and a levitating chair in Journey to the Moon. A drawn hat makes several guest appearances, a nod perhaps to that worn by the father of performance art, Joseph Beuys. An animated compass dances menacingly across the screen in Tabula Rasa I. Collaged figures that we recognise from Kentridge’s shadow figure processions, such as a person rowing a boat, also fl it across the picture surface. Books and sheets of paper take flight, swooping like birds into the artist’s hands. But it is coffee and its accoutrements that take ‘best supporting role’. Coffee provides the opportunity to caffeinate, procrastinate and meditate. Here it is both prop and performer. In Tabula Rasa I the coffee cup and saucer dash across the surface of Kentridge’s papers, scooping up and dispensing liquid. In Journey to the Moon, the coffee cup acts as both microscope and telescope. We join the artist in peering through the bottom of the cup at pages of text; it reveals a bustling world of drawings skipping across the page. Three cups together become a telescope that reveals the cosmos. The saucer becomes the moon rising across the night sky, while the coffee pot, transformed into a space rocket, crashes on its surface. The coffee pot, cup and saucer have their antecedents in the still lifes of artists such as Braque and Picasso, who pictured the detritus of a café table or of the studio itself to shift the nature morte from its role of vanitas to verité. Yet Kentridge also imbues coffee and its instruments with hallucinogenic, even alchemic, properties that become analogous with the imagination. By animating tools, bugs, physical materials and processes, Kentridge also offers a meditation on the fast time of material culture and technology, and the slow time of nature, evolution and entropy.
Fig 3 Still from Invisible Mending, 2,,3
HE DOUBLE Kentridge once remarked that it was in the making of 7 Fragments that he realised there are two of him. There is William Kentridge the artist, hesitant, fallible yet irrepressible, while the other William Kentridge is a witness. He had reflected this duality in earlier works, where he developed the alter egos Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum. By contrast, 7 Fragments features the artist and his consciousness as subject. Kentridge the observer films Kentridge the artist as he paces around the studio waiting for inspiration and looks over his shoulder as he attempts to create art [FIG. 3]. Tirelessly editing, rewinding, making improvements, it is Kentridge the judge who forces so many of Kentridge the artist’s drawings to be scribbled over, rubbed out or even ripped up. Invisible Mending shows Kentridge catching pieces of paper flying up from the floor and reattaching them to form a drawn self-portrait that had been scrawled across and torn into pieces. Having been magically restored, the drawing then miraculously comes to life, in an eternal cycle of representation and reality. Could we understand this doubling by thinking about Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’, the moment when an infant first conceives of itself as an autonomous image through its reflection or representation? At a time when the infant is uncoordinated and vulnerable the image appears unified, an ideal self. ‘This imago is established as an Ideal-I toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout his or her life.’ 2 Kentridge as artist is a projected subjectivity, ‘the ego in anticipation’ at once a source of failure and aspiration. As in literature, the double may also represent a Manichean divide between the civil and the savage, the rational and the irrational, consciousness and the id. The double may also leave its twin in the confines of the studio, to undertake a voyage of the imagination. 1
LYING
ILM
Conversely, Kentridge’s cast members also have an exhilarating propensity for flight. The word ‘flight’ may translate as escape, or as a dream – as in a ‘flight of fancy’ – or light-mindedness as in ‘flighty’. In Tabula Rasa I and II liquids free themselves from the surface of a sheet of paper and surge through the air to return to their source. Texts and books fly to the artist in Autodidact, offering up their stores of knowledge. In Journey to the Moon, an entire group of drawings defy gravity and levitate up onto the studio wall, while a chair dances on Kentridge’s fingertips. Kentridge makes an imaginary extra-terrestrial flight in his ‘journey to the moon’. From Vladimir Tatlin’s 1929 Letatlin flying machine, to Gustav Klucis’ 1910s collages of flying acrobats, defying gravity was a key trope for early modernists. A defining military feature of twentieth and twenty-first century mass destruction, flight also defined Cold War propaganda with superpowers competing for space itself with the race for a moon landing. Kentridge’s Journey to the Moon, with its delightfully low-tech space rocket, decolonises it, making the moon once again the locus of dream and fantasy [ IGS. 5 & 6].
Fig 4 Still from Balancing Act, 2003
FALLING Kentridge’s objects and images have an unpredictable relationship with gravity. In Balancing Act, the artist carries a ladder and leans it up against the studio wall, where some drawings of ‘still lifes’ – flower studies, a chair and a hat – are pinned up. They will not be still for long. Kentridge climbs the ladder and ascends out of the image. The drawing of the hat takes the first leap into the void, flying into the air and then wafting to the ground. The other drawings soon join in. The ladder metamorphoses into a drawing, makes a spectacular somersault and collapses into pieces on the floor. The artist follows suit, tumbling head over heels from the top of the image, like Icarus dropping to the sea [FIG. 4]. The word ‘fall’ can, after all, be extended to the word ‘fallible’. In Moveable Assets trees rush out from backstage towards the viewer, running from the horizon of a landscape and toppling to the bottom of the image like skittles. There is comedy, even catharsis in the collapse, but also frustration, anxiety and loss. The trees in Kentridge’s landscape can’t stay rooted. In traditional African or nomadic cultures, a good life was understood to be one where humans left no trace. Western civilisation is characterised by territorialism and accumulation. Trees will be felled, replaced on the South African veldt with oil derricks, mine shafts, shanty towns and cities. And in our drive for territory, communities will be displaced. The fall might therefore also be understood in the biblical sense of Adam and Eve’s fall from Eden. 32 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
7 Fragments, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon are a tour de force of cinematic technique – animation, time-lapse and stop-motion photography, substitution splices, multiple exposures, dissolves, motion reversals and the eponymous ‘day for night’ (night scenes made by underexposing film or processing stock to make the negative positive). A tribute to the French pioneer of these methodologies, Georges Méliès (1861–1938), the sequence includes Kentridge’s remake of his 1902 film Le Voyage dans la lune (Journey to the Moon). A piano score by composer Philip Miller, in the musical style once played live to dramatise silent movies, accompanies it. All the ‘fragments’ were filmed using a 16 mm film camera and a 35 mm animation camera. Reversals in time and tone were made with a domestic digital video camera, which the artist has observed, ‘functioned as a kind of sketch-book’.4 Cinema in Africa has a distinct political history. In the immediate postcolonial era, many newly independent countries looked to the Soviet Union as a model for society. During the Cold War, the USSR seized the opportunity to push forward its ideological frontiers by funding African students to make film. The Russian avant-garde had grasped the political power of the camera as early as the 1910s, and cinema had become a primary tool of propaganda. Russian filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, an influence for Kentridge, had also pioneered a revolutionary visual language. His Kino-Pravda focused on everyday life and technological progress. Man with a Movie Camera of 1929 used montage and dynamic geometric angles to celebrate a new machine age and became the paradigm for an aesthetic of progress. Cuba and Yugoslavia were among the communist countries that established film schools on the African continent and radical independent filmmakers such as Jean Rouch ran workshops. African filmmakers also travelled to Russia to study cinematic technique.5 Until the fall of communism in 1991 and the withdrawal of Soviet support from African nations, film was practised as a revolutionary medium. Kentridge acknowledges this history with his animated cameras that metamorphose into megaphones and mounted guns.
In my head while making the film, there was inescapably Jules Verne’s book [From the Earth to the Moon] … , 2001: A Space Odyssey … the Wallace & Gromit film, A Grand Day Out, and of course Méliès … If the seven earlier fragments are about wandering around the studio waiting for something to happen, Journey to the Moon was an attempt to escape. 3 Throughout these films, drawn and painted lines also fly across monochromes. Suggesting unknown territories of potential image-making they take us on an intoxicating journey through creativity itself.
Figs 5 & , Stills from Journey to the Moon, 2003
GESTURE Méliès was also known as an ‘illusionist’ and Kentridge’s seventh film is titled Feats of Prestidigitation. This archaic term means a ‘sleight of hand, manual dexterity in the execution of tricks, a conjuring trick or deception’., The moving image, indeed the very making of a drawing, where a line can become a face or an apple, is spellbinding. And like a conjuror Kentridge draws our gaze with his hands. These silent films, where mime must replace speech, are animated by gesture. In Tabula Rasa I the artist uses his hands to rehearse potential images. In Moveable Assets he gesticulates sternly at the landscape drawing that keeps running away. In Autodidact he paces with his hands in his pockets. Aimless pacing is analogous with thinking. Kentridge pulls out texts from his pockets that unfurl like a magician’s doves; he catches flying papers and balances piles of open books, which he studies intently – his dexterity becomes an emblem of absorbing knowledge [ IG. 7]. Drawing a line, tearing paper or erasing a mark with one motion of his hand, he dramatises the act of creation and destruction. In Journey to the Moon he caresses a drawing of Anne. While he sits staring into space, she appears behind him and places her hand on his shoulder in a moving gesture of affection. The artist Jeff Wall who, like Kentridge, stresses figuration as a radical form, has written about the expressive gesture as emblem: ‘Gesture’ means a pose or action which projects its meaning as a conventionalised sign. This definition is usually applied to the fully realised, dramatic gestures identified with the art of earlier periods, particularly the Baroque, the great age of painted drama … gesture as the bodily, pictorial form of historical consciousness.7 Kentridge is interested in the photography and graphics of revolution both in Russian Constructivism and Maoist China, where the raised arm and pointing hand became a symbol of stru(le, of machine-age man and of the direction of progress towards a utopian future. At the same time, his early training with Jacques Lecoq’s ‘physical theatre’ and his collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company in Johannesburg all combine in his performance, where gesture evokes emotion while also functioning as expression and symbol.
4
7 Fragments for Georges Méliès
U OP(A The possibility of reversing film or tape is so seductive because of its immediately revealing what the world is like if time is reversed, what it would be like if we could remember the future. Film reversed shows a utopian perfection of one’s skills. Throw a pot of paint and when you catch it in reverse, not a single drop is spilt. Tear a sheet of paper in half and it restores itself without the smallest crease. There is an extreme politeness of objects; pull a book out of a shelf and when you replace it, the books at each side at the last instance shift just the right amount to make space. From chaos there is return to order. The page of text returns letter by letter, word by word into the pen, leaving the load of ink pregnant with infinite possibilities.A Fig 7 Still from Autodidact, 2003
THE STUDIO I spent some time looking at the early films of Bruce Nauman, films of him walking backwards and forwards in his studio, of him bouncing a ball, walking in slow motion, walking with contraposto ... Perhaps it was the athletic body in jeans and T-shirt that reminded me of the films of Jackson Pollock painting in his studio. It was as if Pollock’s canvas had been taken away and Nauman’s left, with the studio as canvas and himself as brush and mark in one … When I came to work on the fragments for Méliès, the given, the parameter, was the artist in the studio.8 The studio is stage, laboratory, sanctuary, prison, archive, factory and film set. 7 Fragments shows it in all these guises. Kentridge’s notion of Nauman as the brush and mark against the blank walls of the studio posits it as the tabula rasa. Yet in these films it is a palimpsest. The camera angle is fixed either in front of a wall bearing the inked edges of previous works, or above a cluttered surface. The studio is a capsule of time and space. Time is marked by the flotsam and jetsam of previous works and processes, and is reversed and travelled through film. Space is delineated by the dimensions of wall, surface and lens – space as vertical and horizontal plane, as limit and portal. The studio is biography and memory. However, it is also a utopian space of new beginnings [ IG. 8].
Included in the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, 7 Fragments, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon were projected life-size, each film screened simultaneously side-by-side and on a loop. The cycle from disorder to perfection produced by reversing film became continuous, and so order collapsed back into anarchy. The possibility of both is central to Kentridge’s work. It pays tribute to the utopian futures promised by twentieth century fantasies of space travel and life on the moon, of Communist revolutions, of the search for Truth and Reconciliation, of the blank sheet of paper and the promise of a line. These miraculous films also show the essential paradox of utopia, of humanity itself, prey as it is to fallibility, absurdity and the contingencies of external forces. Yet through expression there is resistance and hope. The freedom to mark and erase intimates the freedom required to transform social and cultural structures.
1 Mark Rothko, ‘The Romantics were Prompted …’, Possibilities, I, New York, 1947, p. 84. Cited in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900 – 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993) p. 5:3. 2 Defi nition, Lacan and the Mirror Stage, www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan (accessed March, 2,1:). 3 First published in William Kentridge, BAC Baltic Art Center, Visby, Sweden, 2,,3 n.p. Reproduced in William Kentridge, exh. cat. (Turin: Skira, 2,,4) p. 1A3. 4 Ibid, p. 1A,. 5 Things Fall Apart: Red Africa, an exhibition and season of fi lms and talks at Calvert 22 Foundation, London, 4 Feb – 3 April 2,1: featured historical archives, photographs and fi lms documenting this cultural phenomenon. A book is in progress at the time of writing. : The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1AA1) 7 Jeff Wall, ‘A Diff erent Climate’, exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: Stadtisches Kunsthalle, 1A84) in Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon Press, 1AA:) p. 7:. 8 William Kentridge, 2,,4, p. 1A2.
Fig 8 Still from Balancing Act, 2,,3
A Ibid
5
Tapestries
Tapestries 2009-2012 All tapestries shown: Tapestry weave with embroidery Warp: polyester Weft and embroidery: mohair, acrylic and polyester Woven by the Stephens Tapestry Studio Diepsloot, Johannesburg
Right: Pianta della cittĂ di Napoli (detail) 2009 00 Ă— 94 cm
36
The Nose (with Strawberries) 2012 40 Ă— 2 0 cm Overleaf: (detail)
8
Tapestries
9
Pianta della cittĂ di Napoli 2009 00 Ă— 94 cm
42 Tapestries
Streets of the City 2009 440 × 44 cm
45
City of Moscow 2009 421 × 408 cm Overleaf: Winterreise 201 220 × 180 cm
46
Tapestries
Joseph Leo Koerner
Tapestries – A Collaboration with Stephens Tapestry Studio It is a special property of tapestries to seem everywhere at home. Among the earliest human artefacts, weavings connect us to our nomadic past. The Bible states that Adam and Eve wove leaves together to cover their nakedness. Imagining Adam’s house in paradise, architectural theorists speculated that human dwelling started with textiles hung between upright supports. Tapestries are a portable home. Hanging them out makes any place domestic. Fittingly, in his works in this medium, William Kentridge makes mobility the fundamental theme. Dark figures command his tapestries. Riders on horseback, marching compasses, forward-travelling noses, porters carrying great loads: all struggle to move from here to there. Monstrous and comical, these forms enact the human condition in accordance with physics’ basic law that work equals force times distance. These figures also travel forwards and backwards through the artist’s oeuvre, from his most recent, monumental Triumphs and Laments (2016) in Rome and his multi-channel video installation More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), through his 2014 collaboration on performances by Matthias Goerne and Markus Hinterhäuser of Schubert’s Winterreise and the 2010 production of Shostakovich’s The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera, back to Shadow Procession of 1999. 48 Tapestries
Schubert’s song cycle begins where Kentridge’s weavings do: in motion from the start. With the piano sounding the wanderer-singer’s footsteps as he walks in winter away from his fickle love, and with the singer locked in a shifting duet with nature, these Viennese Lieder proved an illuminating matrix for Kentridge’s art, heightening its melancholy and embellishing with personal storylines its landscape of single trees, uncanny crows, windmills and weathervanes. With each new project generally, Kentridge launches new messages and forms, steadily expanding his reach while remaining aesthetically and ethically consistent. Long before his tapestries, the artist cast the figure of the porter as the antihero of his 1991 animated film Monument. Designing for tapestries places special demands on an artist. Forms have to be simple enough to look good enlarged and from far away. They must also be interesting and animated enough to sustain attentive, close-up viewing even on that big scale, and to justify the labour expanded in weaving them. It’s not by accident that two of Europe’s great virtuosos of monumental painting, Raphael and Rubens, designed the greatest tapestry cycles of the tradition. Through his expansive installations, civic sculpture and opera set designs, and now, in Rome, through his 500-metre long frieze on the travertine embankment, Kentridge 49
Fig. 1 Augustine’s Empire, 2008. Mohair tapestry, 410 × 442 cm. Woven by the Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg
50
Tapestries
has mastered huge formats. And in his animated films, through drawing, erasing and redrawing, and elsewhere in his oeuvre, through collage and the use of printed and handwritten pages as supports, he achieves a density similar to weaving. In the tapestries, figures appear like moving shadows projected on lighter grounds. Those grounds reference travel, too. Consisting of old maps, they read like the world through which the shadow figures trudge. Kentridge distinguishes figure and ground sharply, as dark to light, and elevation to plan. The black silhouettes are deliberately haphazard [FIG. 1]. The artist made them by tearing crude forms from black construction paper – they are cousins to the puppets he used in Shadow Procession. As Kentridge explained in his Norton Lectures at Harvard in 2012, these constructions were experiments in moving illusions up Plato’s ladder of being, which climbs from the realm of mere shadows and images via the world of things (itself illusory) to a zone of truth, called the Realm of Ideas. As a maker of images, Kentridge confessed to having a vested interest in the base of Plato’s famous hierarchy, and through his shadow-casting paper puppets he aimed ‘to show the place illusion has in the making of knowledge itself ’ 1. To recognise the figures as porters, horses, noses, compasses, etc., takes a projective imagination that – as the artist puts it – meets the image halfway. By contrast, the maps consist of exact contours that took their makers centuries of meticulous effort to achieve. The shapes of coastlines, rivers and mountains arose from an immense cumulative labour: travellers bringing little bits of information home, mapmakers collecting and collating the bits, travellers setting forth now with maps to gather more information. The geographies on and through which Kentridge’s shadow processions move seem like indisputable facts, as something found in the world rather than made in the studio – pictorial ground figured as terra firma. But it’s the contrast between the natural and the human order that Kentridge’s tapestries complicate. When woven, figure and ground become a continuum, thematically, through the artist’s imagination, and materially, through knotting that entwines threads into a whole. In a work in the Porter Series (2001 to the present), a fabulous Tree-Man (one of Kentridge’s signature motifs) marches left to right against an old French school map of Asia Minor [ IG. 2]. The figure’s leafy branches meld with the map’s rivers and valleys, suggesting the eons of human movement over the earth’s surface (here, perhaps, the migrations of peoples out of Africa through this terrain) that brought the map about. In another tapestry, a figure drags a huge compass, evoking not only the labour that brought about the cartographic ground but also, via the burden that this compass evidently is, the calamitous effect the mapmaker’s knowledge and power can have on the mapped [ IG. 3, OVERLEA ]. Tapestries related to Kentridge’s production of The Nose and to his monumental 2012 sculpture Il Cavaliere de Toledo project motifs of military triumph on old
Fig. 2 Porter Series: Asie Mineure (Tree Man), 2006. Mohair tapestry, 248 × 343 cm. Woven by the Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg
51
Fig 3 Installation view, William Kentridge: Tapestries — A Collaboration with Stephens Tapestry Studio, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, 2015
52 Tapestries
maps and news clippings. The paraded spoils of war now include – as the collaged ground of the mock-heroic figures – the unedited, traumatic residue of history: old images, texts, and maps. What is most remarkable about these tapestries, though, is how the thematic meshing of figure and ground is materially achieved. The conceptual epiphany that what seems ‘found’ (the world through which the figures trudge) is humanly ‘made’, is transcended by the visual epiphany of the tapestries themselves. Anyone who spends time before these weavings cannot but be awestruck by the uncanny patterns that the weavers at the Marguerite Stephens Studio have created [ IGS. 4, 5, 6 & 7]. This workshop in the Diepsloot suburb of Johannesburg is the Gobelins of South Africa, not only because it produces tapestries in the French high-warp technique – with several weavers working simultaneously on different parts of the tapestry, all weaving from the bottom up on a long vertical loom, with the cartoon behind it – but also because of the prestige of Stephens’ collaborators, who include (beyond Kentridge) Gillian Ayres, Gerald Sekoto, Eduardo Villa and Tito Zongo. These are genuine collaborations, for the transferral of a drawing, painting or collage into the textile medium – threads coming down and weaving together with threads running across – requires interpretation at multiple levels. First, there are the translations of complex prototypes (in Kentridge, maps with inscriptions, legends and cartouches; pins and patches of the paper shadow puppets; further pins that, in the original model, hold bits of paper in place, and so forth) into a workable cartoon. Then there are the weaver’s trompe-l’oeil additions— for example, the semblance that Stephens and her team create of shadows cast in the original working model by paper loosely pinned to the underlying ground. Not quite of Kentridge’s art, these effects are nonetheless in tune with that art in its wilful display of process. Yet these tapestries also outdo their model through the magic of weaving. Look at any section of these works, pick out any figured surface and attend to the weaving of which it was made, and wondrous new patterns come to light. Stephens’ production begins with mohair shorn, carded, spun and dyed in Swaziland, and her control over materials is everywhere evident in the variegated textures and tonal intensities of the finished works. What was, in the artist’s model, the mark of crimson Prisma colour pencil becomes, woven, a mesmerising coil of red more saturated, palpable and enigmatic than anything a pencil could make. Woven, the blacker black of the sticky tape that Kentridge pastes on the black construction paper becomes an absorbing figure in and of itself. Freud lined his consulting room with tapestries and rugs. Whereas the little museum of antiquities installed in that room aimed to return patients to the archaic substratum of the human species, the ‘Persian’ rugs that cocooned the famous couch encouraged a more abstract thought process. For in Vienna in 1900 it was believed that the ornamental art of weaving, with its arabesques, rhythms and repetitions, and with its dizzying
Fig 4 Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg, 2006
Fig 5 Tapestry detail, Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg, 2006
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Fig 6 Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg, 2014
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alternation of figure and ground, was a visual analogue to the ‘free association’ that Freud demanded of his patients for their talking cure. Add to the power of tapestry’s patterns the mysteries of the weaver’s craft (the rapid twists, returns and knots remain technically opaque even when observed up close in the workshop) and the result is a depth of imagery over and above – and under and in-between – the enigmatic pictures and stories that Kentridge’s designs encompass. These are ancient metaphors. Thought is a thread. The storyteller spins yarns. And poets do something more: they weave. The great poem can be likened to a weaving or tapestry because it doesn’t simply set forth plot and characters but also conjures an entire world, a cosmos encompassing events, peoples and places and embracing us too as, listening, we are psychically woven into that tapestry. Later, the scribes began to write down – fi rst in scrolls, then in codices – these poetical weavings. And when they achieved on the written page a thing of similar consistency and complexity as the poem, they called what they made a text. The word comes from the Latin textus (‘thing woven’) from textere (‘to weave, braid, fabricate, build’), and before that from Proto-Indo-European teks (‘to weave, to make, to make wicker or wattle’). So originally the text was a weaving, and only subsequently, by analogy and metaphor, did it become writing or scripture. Kentridge’s tapestries return texts to this primordial condition. The artist’s texts – the stories this poet-artist tells in imagery, in performance and in the enigmatic narratives of his 10 Drawings for Projection (1989–2011) – are all about the imponderables of history, memory and the human condition. In the tapestries, through the weaver’s craft, these become texts in that original sense of weavings. Examined closely, these collaborative creations do what great tapestries do, plus reciting the poems that Kentridge, over the course of his career, has composed through his images. Recently, the artist gave a new twist to his story. In his five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012), the familiar procession of silhouetted figures was given a fi nal, cosmic destination: a black hole. Scientists are divided as to whether, beyond its so-called ‘event horizon’, the information of that which is sucked into the black hole somehow remains preserved or whether instead it is permanently lost: a death subsuming all mortality. Near the end of The Refusal of Time performance, Kentridge’s voice is heard through loudspeakers saying: ‘As an object approaches the black hole, it lengthens, becomes redder; information is stripped and twisted into “strings”.’ According to a version of String Theory, to which the artist alludes, information neither disappears into, nor is somehow preserved within, the black hole 2. Instead, it is somehow deposited on the surface of the hole in the form of multi-dimensional ‘strings’. The structure of this quasi-knotted surface remains unfathomable, but the tapestries made after Kentridge’s designs have a density akin to this contemporary myth.
1 William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014,) p. 29 2 Margaret K. Koerner, ‘Death, Time, Soup: A Conversation with William Kentridge and Peter Galison’, http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2/12//6/&// kentridge-galison-refusal-of-time/ (Accessed 1 May 2/16) First published: Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘William Kentridge: Tapestries – A Collaboration with Stephens Tapestry Studio, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa’, African Arts, 49:1 (Spring, 2/16), pp. 85–88, © 2/16 by the Regents of the University of California
Fig 7 Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg, 2/14
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The Refusal of Time 2012 Five-channel video projection, colour, sound, 4 megaphones, breathing machine 30 minutes Made in collaboration with Philip Miller, Catherine Meyburgh, Dada Masilo and Peter Galison Commissioned by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev for dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, )ermany, 2012 Music and Soundscape Video (horeography Dramaturge Breathing machine
Philip Miller (atherine Meyburgh Dada Masilo Peter )alison Jonas Lundquist Sabine Theunissen
Video installation Sound design Movement direction (ostume design Design Lighting design Megaphones
Yoav Dagan )avan Eckhart Luc de Wit )reta )oiris Sabine Theunissen Urs Schönebaum (hristoff Wolmarans Louis Olivier (hris-Waldo de Wet
Singing and vocals
Ann Masina Bham Ntabeni Joanna Dudley Thato Motlhaolwa Mandie de Villiers-Schutte Siyavuya Makuzeni
Flugel horn, Trumpet Trombone, Euphonium Tuba Violin Percussion
Adam Howard Dan Selsick Thobeka Thukane Waldo Alexander Tlale Makhene Robert Ndima and the Ntuba Brothers (hoir
Dancer Actors
Dada Masilo William Kentridge Thato Motlhaolwa Abdul Razaq Awofeso Luc de Wit Louis Olivier Shareen Mathebula
Right: Still from The Refusal of Time, 2012 Overleaf: Installation view, The Refusal of Time, Ullens (entre for (ontemporary Art, Beijing, 201
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Previous pages: Workshop stills, Refuse the Hour, Johannesburg, 2011
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Stills from The Refusal of Time, 2012 (and following pages)
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Overleaf: Installation view, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2013
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Michael Juul Holm
Poincaré’s Present Eleven minutes into William Kentridge’s seething, swinging, pumping, ultimately poetic video installation The Refusal of Time, we are presented with a kind of key: ‘Here I am’, a narrator’s voice says, having for a couple of minutes already tried to assert itself over a chorus of singing sirens, shrill overtones of string instruments and low, tuba-like sounds of compressor horns. Here I am! It is the artist himself saying it, but we are it. We are here, now. The present ‘now’ in which we perpetually produce ourselves as meaning and context, as singular subjects; the moment in which various elements of the past and more or less randomly at hand impulses meet: it is this – existential, if you will – condition that is in play. It is also what, for a while, in the ongoing time of the work, is suspended.
Here I am. It is likely that we have forgotten it, this far into the 30-minutes dramatic cycle of the installation – if, that is, we do at all have the ability to forget ourselves. Already here, little more than a third of the way into the cycle, we have been subjected to an extended, dense, sensory bombardment of rhythm, melodic sequences, voices, film clips of Buster Keaton-like slapstick and Samuel Beckett references, animated sequences in Kentridge’s familiar style, giant metronomes letting the beat go off the rails and a motorised bellows, an artificial lung, a big mechanical heart or whatever it is, the solid, kinetic wooden construction dividing and giving weight to the room and seeming to drive the work’s pulse. The key statement is connected to a somewhat longer story. True grist for an artist’s mill, this story is told haphazardly, in unequal competition with other sounds from the installation’s four large 81
megaphones (resembling Marconi’s ‘gigantophones’ from 1926). The story goes like this, again in the voice of the artist himself: In the mid-nineteenth century, scientists measured the speed of light using spinning disks, mirrors, prisms, beams of light. They show that an image is not received by the observer the instant it is made, but that it takes time to travel from its site of generation to its site of reception. It was established that light and images travel not infinitely fast but at an invariant, measurable speed, approximately 186,000 miles per second. In 1846, Felix Eberty, a German scientist, expanded on this discovery and postulated all of space as a universal archive of images from the past. Everything that had happened on Earth could be found in space. Near a star two thousand light years away, he put it, one could see Jesus Christ on his cross. In the vicinity of a star five hundred light years away, one could see Luther pinning his edicts on the church door in Wittenberg. Every action, heroic or shameful, every secret deed, was there to be found; we are all constantly broadcasting ourselves, not just here on stage but throughout the universe. With each breath we pump out our images and transmit ourselves, and traces of ourselves, sending out our images. 82 The Refusal of Time
And so, in a brief lull from the ethereal sounds and the celestial song: Here I am. Here I am. Here I am. Both the large universal image machine – information machine, time machine – and the frail, much less than universal I are in play, and it is in the interaction between the two that we blissfully surrender to the work. Along the way, we are led past splinters of facts and half-buried or opaque references to the history of science, in particular the history of the white man’s tentative mastery of space and time through more or less science-based, yet all the more pompous, established definitions of fixed standards – the European standard metre in Paris, the corresponding standard kilogram weight in the same city – and on to the story of the white man’s even more hopeless attempt to legitimise his hegemony over the rest of the world. All of it is embedded in rhythm, music, shifts between relative darkness and strong light, storm and calm, what sounds like ‘ethnic’ song and Kentridge’s own hyper-articulate lecture, of which we only hear fragments, albeit significant ones. Just enough to put us on the scent, just enough to understand what it is about, but not quite enough to fathom how. The years around the publication of Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) special theory of relativity in 1905 are at the core of the work, the historical event that some parts of the work lead
Figs 1 & 2 Stills from The Refusal of Time, 2012
into and others jump off from. Preceding the year 1905 lies an extended development throughout the nineteenth century, including the physicists Hendrik A. Lorentz (1853–1928) and Henri Poincaré (1854–1912). Around the turn of the century and building on the scientist James Clerk Maxwell’s summarising equations from 1876, they arrived at results anticipating parts of Einstein’s theory, though without formulating its consequences with similar clarity. That the speed of light is a constant means that time is not; time can no longer be a universal entity in a metaphysical sense (though in an astrophysical sense it can: as space-time, subject to laws of gravity, curvature, etc.). Simultaneity is not absolute. This is a slap in the face to all scientific absolutism and a tombstone for the concept of fixed standards. In a series of astonishing black and white stills and sketch-like scenes from imagined ‘laboratories’ [FIG. 1 & 2] on the installation’s five projection surfaces, we witness the attempt to scientifically test and completely map the known as well as the distant and unknown world. One of these ‘laboratories’ is the Bureau des Longitudes, the Parisian institution that since the days of the Enlightenment and the Revolution in the late eighteenth century had been tasked with rationalising and standardising shipping, time, mapmaking, astronomy, etc. The Bureau des Longitudes was an important tool of modernity and clear thinking, but 83
also of French colonial power – the further you extend your power, the more important it is to be able to coordinate precisely. The president of this institution was from 1899 Henri Poincaré, the same man who, as a professor at the Sorbonne, laid a major part of the foundation for the special theory of relativity and whose other accomplishments included the initiative to introduce international time zones as we know them today. In turn, a whirl of ideas about meaning and time is set in motion, and we are happily swept away by an interesting flood of half-spoken riddles, hints, intimations or sudden shifts into new contexts; yet there is no time to dwell on them. The artist does not hide the fact that much is left unsaid, that specifics are hit or miss: do we have any knowledge of the Bambatha Uprising of 1906, the Herero Rebellion of 1904, or the Hut Tax War of 1898? Do we associate anything in particular with the concept of Torschlusspanik [FIG. (], the terror of the closing door? Do we have time to get the allusion to Greek mythology (the legend of Perseus, who accidentally killed his grandfather, Acrisius) in the headline He that Fled his Fate [FIG. )]? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter. We can sense where it’s going. The rejection of time as a disciplining instrument is also a rejection, or temporary suspension, of the demand for meaning – Kentridge likes to talk about a ‘resistance to meaning’ or methods for ‘escaping the tyranny of meaning’. Not that he is advocating obscurantism or general ignorance. On the contrary. But for a few moments – for this moment, extended by all art’s available means – he opts to leave things in the balance, letting them find their own, however ephemeral, meaning. Which brings us back to what I called the production of one’s self as a singular individual: Here I am. Just as we infinitely project ourselves – if we are to believe Felix Eberty (1812–1884), this infinity should be taken quite literally – we are also (not quite so) infinite projection surfaces for meaning, and we are plain receivers. In this individual reception, a half-sung tune can go a long way, or entirely miss the mark. In a work that stirs up
Fig 3 Drawing for The Refusal of Time (He that Fled his Fate), 2011 Charcoal, coloured pencil and poster paint on two sheets of brown pattern making paper 198 × 267 cm Private collection
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Fig 4 Still from The Refusal of Time, 2012
and blends together elements of the recent history of mastery and hegemony, colonial history, the history of science, Africa as an external narrative, even a story of Paris’ underground system of pneumatic tubes pumping in air every minute to move the hands of the city’s clocks with perfect synchrony – in such a work, it is not so strange that the artist allows himself some doubt, that he has to pace around the arena multiple times, circling the perimeter of his studio with the clock running; you have to put in the work. What hat should you wear? Kentridge shares with the author Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) a preoccupation with Poincaré, this man of apparent contradictions. Can one stand on both sides of the absolute? Can one be a steadfast person of science in the service of the (all too) rational while also representing the middle ground, the area where reason yields to more erratic, tentative, exploratory insight? Is there something to be gained in the great cyclotron of image and sound, some precise collisions or random but meaningful correlations to be found in the accelerator of meaning? Poincaré liked to work on four or five different projects at the same time, like a bee flying from flower to flower. He did not linger long on one problem, convinced that the subconscious mind would keep at it, and he often found fertile cross-pollinations between his different assignments. ‘It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover’, he reputedly said. Kentridge’s own method is not far removed: he works with what is available and likes to activate the studio inventory in new ways. This little animated film against that music? These megaphones (previously used in a theatre production), these notes, this lecture? This dancer? The ideal and progenitor is theatre, with its partly communal processes. In this particular case, we are as close as it gets to a mini-opera, though the 85
work must still be called an installation: we are the only living participants. Here I am. In the 2016 production at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk (the work, which belongs to the museum, has been staged differently in all its iterations), that is clearer than ever before. Here, there is not just the stage onto which we, the participants, walk and where we remain for the duration, but also a balcony offering a quite exceptional opportunity to view the totality of the work and its construction as a traditional stage. Accordingly, we can be participant or viewer. We can enter the work, or we can choose to go to the theatre and look at everyone else, the participating viewers. The work, it should be added, also exists in a live version, a performance with singers, dancers and Kentridge himself on stage, entitled Refuse the Hour (2012). Many of the oddly cropped and abrupt elements of the installation are distilled from somewhat more expanded sequences in the stage version, though there is otherwise no unequivocal heredity to speak of. Apart from being one of the founders of so-called ego psychology, the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris (1900–1957) was originally an art historian and early on worked as a curator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. He provides a fruitful theory for understanding the dynamics that are in play in a work like this. The aesthetic experience, he says, emerges in the alternation between momentary absorption and withdrawal to the controlling ego. This state is in itself pleasurable, because it takes us to the limits of our possibilities (in this case also beyond those limits, which are dictated by the elements of content in the work). The psychodynamics of art enjoyment are determined both by the work’s capacity to absorb us, to engender a state of self-forgetfulness, and by an aesthetic mechanism that enables, even urges us, to change mode, gaze, voice: to draw the ego back to brief reflection. The work opens up an alternating current-like charge: it is not the fall into absorption, nor the experience of control, but precisely the play between the two that produces the pleasure, the presence, the meaning, if we allow for a moment this term to surface. The physics and body of the work constitute a wild, musical rollercoaster ride, an opera of which we are part. Some of the embedded riddles are blocks to the intellect, moments of wonder that make us pause before we again let ourselves be swept away. Joining Kentridge’s by now classic shadow procession, we leave the work a little smarter about the true nature of knowledge, intuition, hegemony, rhythm and random, happy encounters in time and space. The Refusal of Time drew big crowds when it was first shown at the 2012 Documenta in Kassel. It is a key work in the South African artist’s oeuvre and in contemporary art in general. Aided by all of Kentridge’s genres and devices, we are thrown head first into an expeditious process of learning and unlearning, into the universe’s infinite (but relative) space-time and deep into ourselves, where the world comes into being. Here I am.
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Fig 5 Drawing for The Refusal of Time (In Praise of Bad Clocks), 2011 Charcoal, coloured pencil and poster paint on two sheets of brown pattern making paper 258 × 1() cm Private collection
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Second-hand Reading
Second-hand Reading 2013 Flipbook film from drawings on single pages of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary HD video, colour, sound 7:01 minutes Music and voice Neo Muyanga Editor Snežana Marović
Right and overleaf: Drawings for Second-hand Reading 2013 Ink, watercolour, computer print, charcoal, pastel and red pencil on pages from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Each page 27.2 × 19 cm
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More Sweetly Play the Dance 20 5 Eight-channel video installation with four megaphones, HD video, colour, sound 5 minutes Commissioned by EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam and Lichtsicht – Projection Biennale, Bad Rothenfelde, 20 5 Video editing and construction Music composition Music
Percussion Vocals Sound mix Costume design Choreography and Dance Performers
Janus FouchĂŠ Johannes Serekeho African Immanuel Essemblies Brass Band (under Bishop R.E. Sefatsa) Bham Ntabeni Moses Moeta Tlale Makhene Gavan Eckhart Greta Goiris Dada Masilo
Dada Masilo Tlale Makhene Bham Ntabeni Thato Motlhaolwa Mncedisi Shabangu Luc de Wit Joanna Dudley Sue Pam-Grant Lara Adine Lipschitz Lawrence Maduna Samson Falowo Sipho Zungu Sipho Seroto Agnes Khunou Maria Ndlela Maphokoane Serobanyane Okechukwu Adinnu Thuthuka Sibisi Matthews Phala Stella Olivier Motsamai Thabane Members of African Immanuel Essemblies Brass Band Members of First St John Brass Band
Right: Still from More Sweetly Play the Dance, 20 5 Overleaf: Installation view, More Sweetly Play the Dance, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 20 6
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Previous pages: Workshop stills, More Sweetly Play the Dance, Johannesburg, 20 4
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Stills from More Sweetly Play the Dance, 20 5 (and following pages)
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Overleaf: Installation view, More Sweetly Play the Dance, EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, 20 5
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Homi K. Bhabha
The Rights of Strangers AN IMAGE ENTERS, FLIES THROUGH More Sweetly Play the Dance opens with a presentiment of the procession – the Dance of Death – not its presence. At first sight, the non-landscape around Johannesburg – grasses, tracks, culverts, pipes and power-lines – appears flat and uneventful amidst a threnody of wailing and drumming. Johannesburg suffers from a ‘lack of geography,’ 1 but it has all the forebodings of allegory, the mise-en-scene of myth. The air is expectant and unstill; charcoal dust flies in the face of the wind; the smudged light of dusk sets the day on edge. Something is on the verge of happening. Turning to the first screen on my left, I wait for the flaring entry of the procession to carry me on its linear passage across the installation, from left to right, from start to finish. As I am about to step into the procession, I face a refusal of time and place. This is not the moment, nor the direction. From the very edge of the last screen on the far right something is about to happen. A garbed, ghostly apparition startles the frame with the acrobatic speed of a tumbleweed; a whirling dancer sweeps across the screens from right to left, brushing against the grain of looking. And disappears [SEE OPPOSITE].
This spirit of presentiment haunts the making of MSPD. The work unravels just as it is about to begin, unsettling the viewer’s expectations and the artist’s intentions. It is the unscripted spirit of imminence that haunts the practice of medium and material – charcoal, camera, rubber eraser, screen, music, movement – and creates forces of circumstance that Kentridge names Fortuna: The contingent fact of using charcoal, the contingent fact of the imperfection of erasure, the shakiness of the camera all produce a film which has a very specific nature, and for which I have to take responsibility … None of them came about through a plan, a programme, a storyboard, neither obviously did they come about through sheer chance. ‘Fortuna’ is the general term I use for this range of agencies, something other than cold statistical chance, and something too outside the range of rational control.2 Contingency, in and of itself, is neither interesting nor confounding. The force of contingency becomes vital and visible only when it is constrained by the exigencies of agency. Fortuna, forever waiting in the wings, is both muse 129
‘What does fascinate me is to know where the image came from,’ Kentridge wonders as he awaits Fortuna’s entry: … the re-ordering, the slight shift, the word that is illegible … [W]e make some new crack, … and this is the guest we have been waiting for.3 Where, for Kentridge, is more a process of ‘evocation’4 than a quest for the origins of an idea or image. Where is more a matter of whereabouts: the erratic archive that inhabits the studio; the ambulant epistemology of waiting and watching and walking away again; making lists, tearing paper, erasing drawings and re-drawing; mimicking and morphing his own mirror-image; animating the coffee pot and re-configuring Dürer’s Rhinoceros; and, all the time, going back and forth from wall and paper to the camera and then to film the whole process again and again and again … Unspooling our habits of reading and viewing, the ghostly dancer at the very start of MSPD lays down a trace of temporality – a platform of presentiment – that reaches back beyond the beginning of the procession. Once linear progress is interrupted and its dramatic direction reversed, a measure of time emerges to haunt the history of materials. It is here that the ‘whereabouts’ of the work must be sought when ‘Time gets transformed into the charcoal dust’: A grey smudge of charcoal dust lodged in the paper fibres remains as the ghost of the image before its alteration … Time gets transformed into the charcoal dust, the damaged fibres of the paper, the flecks of plastic eraser, clinging to the surface of the drawing. The hill is neither there, still, as in the photograph… nor is it entirely absent, as it is in our memories … It hovers in the smudges on the paper and in the roll of the film in the camera, awaiting processing and projecting. 5 You have to look for the ghost of the image as it hovers in the grey smudge, and in the Fortuna of the mix of fibres, dust, plastic flecks, raw-stock, you find a measure of time, as yet unprocessed and unprojected, that gives you a presentiment of the ghost image. The dark room and the studio are always haunted by a hermeneutic of hide and seek.
TIME IN THE STUDIO When the ghost dancer comes towards me, all of a sudden, spinning in circles anti-clockwise, I know that he is a harbinger of the final hour. Yet his ferocious desire to dance against the current of the procession is a mode of resistance to death’s determined march. The Dance of Death is a refusal of time achieved by drawing out the fated moment in rituals of resistance – dancing furiously to defeat the drumbeat of death, narrating cycles of stories to delay the end. Time’s resistance draws the idea of death into the realm of human affect and rhythm. Kentridge is attentive to time as it comes to be invested in material and medium, and this raises the issue of scale in ways that are practical and poetic at once. Just as time finds its energy in resisting fate, the procession finds its agency in resisting the force of found objects. The archive is turned on the lathe of a new image or emotion to give the Dance of Death another spin. The ‘whereabouts’ of the eight-screen format used for the projection of MSPD looks back to other works, and in each ‘smudge’ there is an element of presentiment. Fortuna. The calcified, bleached texture of the blackthorn brushwood wall (10 × 412 metres) installed in Bad Rothenfelde [FIG. 1] in 2015 evokes the need for an elongated format for the project. And the scale and texture of the wall, its physical presence, suggests a technique of temporality that significantly informs the deep structure of MSPD. As the viewer moves along the wall to catch up, or level with, the narrative of the moving image, time also courses through the background surface on which the image is projected. The whitened brushwood wall catches and releases light in quick impulses that set the screen a-quiver. Kentridge’s habit of repeatedly drawing and erasing the background while continually filming the smudged traces produces an unsettled effect of light as the flickering of fate itself. I think this movement of time in the background as well as the obvious one of the movement of people in the front is an important component of MSPD. The next vital part was to place them in the world. Placing them between a large sky and a landscape foreground through which they move … There is the linear progression from left to right across the 8 screens, and people entering the screens as others leave. But the performers are also continuously present.6
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Fig 1 Installation view, Lichtsicht — Projection Biennale, Bad Rothenfelde, 2015
Caught in the fibrillation between figure and ground, viewers contemplate their own unsteady place in death’s passing procession. Placing the procession ‘in the world’ is another instance in which a problem of scale becomes part of the process of time. Kentridge overlays the projection’s linear progress with iterative loops and lapses of the Dance of Death. Figures follow each other serially, one by one, but the chalky, fitful light also encourages you to see side-by-side, in a syncopated solidarity of depth. Is the spirit of memory working against linear time, in defiance of death, keeping alive, in equal measure, what is past and what is yet to come? As the motley processional passes before the levelling eye of death, there is a growing sense of a shared community of fate in the face of vastly unequal and uneven worldly conditions. 131
Fig 2 Still from More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015
THE HIGHWAY OF CONSCIOUSNESS Refugees, manual workers, political demonstrators, garbage collectors in ill-fitting tarps, religious celebrants, clerks chained to their desks [FIG. 2], Ebola victims dancing with IV drips hanging off their skeletal frames, a ballerina en pointe and, as always, the tumbling ghost dancer disturbing the order of things. These figures of fate bear their singular suffering but they also carry the shared burden of what Kentridge has called ‘the procession of the dispossessed.’ The very leanness of the illusion pushes us to complete the recognition – and this prompts an awareness of the activity, recognising in this activity our agency in seeing, and our agency in apprehending the world.7 Kentridge allows us no easy passage between the agency of seeing and the agency of social action. Their complex relation to each other is forged in the habitus of the studio: place of perambulation and presentiment; space of trials and transitions; cave of the magic of missteps; nest of the fl ight of Fortuna. Art-making cannot be equivalent to world-making (Plato’s lesson) 132 More Sweetly Play the Dance
Fig 3 Still from More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015
because agency (Kentridge’s lesson) is always an anxious condition of equivocation and ambivalence. The agency of art-making starts with small, uncertain steps turning here and there in search of the image: The walk back … is a re-imagining of how the drawing could look. The turn to shoot the next frame … the fresh glance at the drawing on the turn …8 But soon this two-way traffic of thinking on the back foot and acting on the turn finds itself caught in the graphic onrush of what the artist has termed ‘the highway of consciousness’. As Kentridge runs interference against linear progression, his demand for a ‘frontal assault of all the images together’ contains the key to grasping the vital relation between the agency of seeing and the agency of apprehending the world. Different fragments of materiality, diverse forms of media, sometimes together, sometimes partial, sometimes coming in front of, or appearing from behind, all these moves and motivations ‘seen alongside each other,’ are a presentiment of the ‘time’ that holds in place, side-by-side, the disparate fates and singular histories of the procession of the dispossessed. Agency is the prime mover
of the art of illusion – ‘to move the field of images’ – but the ready reference to animation should not obscure Kentridge’s commitment to the affective power of the image to move, to motivate an agency of assembly amongst the dispossessed. ‘But to note,’ writes Kentridge, ‘what sticks in the throat, what must be resisted, is the passivity of the image of people waiting to be rescued …’ 9 Kentridge resists the passivity of the image – the people waiting to be rescued – but he does not propose a project of emancipation or liberation. His art is ambivalent and enigmatic, his muse is Fortuna, and his craft is contingent – charcoal’s blurring erasure’s imperfections, the camera’s shakiness. There is agency ‘outside’ the image in the iconography of the political history of the procession in the 1990s, in the new South Africa, that art historian Leora Maltz-Leca describes so well: This ongoing walk, an acting-out on foot of the political process – as much communal pilgrimage from bondage as a performance of civil liberties – became concretised from metaphor to reality in the mass processions of 1989 … the visual impact and timely political resonance of the metaphoric string: the step, the walk, the last mile.10
And then there is another form of agency that is found somewhere between art-making and world-making. It is an agency that stages the lateral leanness of the procession but interferes with its linear progression: an agency visible in the seriality of silhouettes but struggling to establish the side-by-sideness of various orders of suffering and dispossession ‘set alongside each other in a full frontal attack’; an agency that is as much heard as it is seen at the very core of MSPD. Kentridge suggests something similar when he measures the length of the procession in terms of the temporal break of drumbeats – ‘these long friezes in which Death recurs like a beating drum between each figure.’ 11 And the music follows suit. The brass band provides the forward thrust of processional marches and percussive melodies [FIG. 3]. The intricate architecture of sound is repeatedly interrupted by bursts of jazz, overlaid with a cappella male voices, waylaid by messianic chants and disturbed by off-key rhythms. Forward drive/Reverse thrust/And in between: traces of discordant measures of time. Kentridge’s processions are acts of hospitality, ongoing gatherings of people and things on the move. Movement is the material and the medium of MSPD; Goya is its inspiration and Lulu’s Dance of Death its provocation. Of equal importance is 133
the fact that human scale – the nature and stature of personhood – is measured in terms of ‘foot power.’ Kentridge, the ceaselessly ambulant artist, is as intrigued by the foot ‘stepping into the void’ 12 as is Giacometti, that other great silhouette artist. Kentridge writes: The procession is a form … that records the fact that here in the twenty-first century human foot power is still the primary means of locomotion and we are still locked in the manual labour of individual bodies as a way of making the world… The image of people carrying their baggage is both a contemporary and immediate image and one deeply rooted in our psyches.13 Foot power is as much an ethical measure as it is an aesthetic drive. The footstep is a sign of the singular fate of each oppressed group whilst serving as a symbol of the collective condition of dispossession and diaspora. Are these diverse communities assembled together under the flag of a political ideology or a social movement? It might be sentimental, and ultimately unsustainable, to bind these figures together into a political body of marginalised members of the ‘underclass’ holding aloft a dying hope for some utopian moment of collective rights and representations. The conflicted conjunctions that haunt the dark phases of the procession do not allow for a notion of a progressive march to freedom. The moments of invisibility between screens repeatedly interfere with the legibility of an idea of linear progress – or precipitous decline – suspending the procession in a recurring danse macabre.
INTERFERENCE / INTER-REFERENCE ‘Progress,’ Walter Benjamin observed, ‘has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences – where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn.’ 14 The recurring interferences that punctuate the progress of MSPD are not merely disruptions of linear time and the myth of progress. Interference does more than disrupt the telos of history or impede art’s unfolding symmetry. The aim of interference is as temporal as it is archival. The time-lapses between the screens, into which the procession disappears only to reappear on the other side, is part of the memory of the sequential structure of the artwork which poses the persistent Kentridgian question: Where does the image come from? Interference, as archival retrieval, is the dynamic of forgetting-as-remembering that gives the imminent presence of the work – ‘the new that makes itself felt for the first time’ – a memory of its material history inscribed in the transitions and transformations that bear witness to the incubatory power of the studio. Interference is an instance of inter-reference: The two walls, blackthorn and marble (photos, ground plans), the Play-station controller, and its animation between acceptance and rejection, the comic grotesque of the Disney film, the dance from Lulu, an anticipation of Dada’s dancing.15 Read from the perspective of its interferences, the viewer becomes aware of the montage-like assembly of Kentridge’s studio praxis: ‘seen together at one glance, cut in half, seen alongside each other, in front of ’. Such interferences (and inter-references) of proportion, design and perspective recall French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s marvellous description of the scale of montage as ‘a little machinery of the heterogeneous’: [I]t involves organising a clash, presenting the strangeness of the familiar, in order to reveal a different order of measurement that is only uncovered by the violence of a conflict.16 What would be a different mode of measurement – aesthetic or ethical – uncovered by the visibility of dark interferences? Is there another order of life revealed in the measures of the dance of death? The primal interference in MSPD is surely staged by the ghostly apparition with whom I began, the dancer who crosses our path contrariwise and dances against the grain of the progress of the procession. The ghostly dancer never simply appears or disappears; there is a sense in which s/he is always there, a spirit of presentiment, coming from the opposite direction but converging with every member of the procession as s/he crosses their path.
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In this act of convergence, enabled by the curvature of the screens, there is a faint echo of Immanuel Kant’s concept of the ‘right to hospitality’ grounded in the ethical condition of human life on the spherical surface of the globe. Kant’s plea for perpetual peace grows unbearably loud by the day as we witness the unholy procession of ‘migrant deaths across deserts and seas,’ to quote a phrase from a recent New York Times headline that is as close as daily journalism will ever get to Kant’s profound principle and prophetic language: Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. [Strangers have the right to hospitality] by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth. Uninhabitable parts of the earth – the sea and the deserts – divide this community of all men, but the ship and the camel (the desert ship) enable them to approach each other across these unruled regions and to establish communication by using the common right to the face of the earth, which belongs to human beings generally … In this way distant parts of the world can come into peaceable relations with each other, and these are finally publicly established by law. Thus the human race can gradually be brought closer and closer to a constitution establishing world citizenship.17
1 William Kentridge, ‘Vertical Thinking: A Johannesburg Biography,’ Six Drawing Lessons (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 97. 2 William Kentridge, ‘Fortuna: neither programme nor chance in the making of images,’ Cycnos, vol. 11, no. 1, 17 June 2008. http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html Kentridge, ‘Practical Epistemology: Life in the Studio,’ Six Drawing Lessons (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 117. 4 Joseph Leo Koerner and Margaret Koster Koerner, ‘Whichever Page you Open,’ Artforum, vol. 52 no. 5, January 2014, p. 92: ‘Patching the tree together the artist shifted, layered, tore … an artist does better to evoke than to copy.’ 5 Kentridge, ‘Vertical Thinking,’ p. 95. 6 Personal correspondence with the artist. 7 Kentridge, ‘In Praise of Shadows,’ in Six Drawing Lessons (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 29. 8 Kentridge, ‘Vertical Thinking,’ pp. 95–96. 9 William Kentridge, ‘In Praise of Shadows,’ p. 28. 10 Leora Maltz-Leca, ‘Process/Procession: William Kentridge and the Process of Change,’ Art Bulletin, vol. 95 no. 1, March 201 , pp. 15 –4. 11 William Kentridge, et al., William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance (Amsterdam: EYE Filmmuseum, 2015), p. 22. 12 Kentridge, ‘Practical Epistemology,’ p. 115. 1 Kentridge, et al., More Sweetly Play the Dance, p. 25. 14 Walter Benjamin, ‘Convolution: On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,’ The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 474. 15 Kentridge, et al., More Sweetly Play the Dance, p. 22. 16 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2009), p. 57. 17 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Essay, trans. M. Campbell Smith, (London: George Allen & Unwin, rd edition, 1917), pp. 1 7–1 8.
An extended version of this essay appears in Artforum, October, 2016.
35
Lulu
Right Into Her Arms 2016 Model theatre with projected images, drawings and props HD video, software and circuitry, electronic components, wood, steel, cardboard, found paper and found objects 300 × 244 × 25 cm minutes Video editing and construction Software design Model theatre design Mechanical design Scenography
Janus Fouché Janus Fouché Christoff Wolmarans Chris-Waldo de Wet Sabine Theunissen
Music: Kurt Schwitters, Ursonate, performed by William Kentridge Das gibt’s nur einmal, performed by Zarah Leander Anton Webern, Stück für Klavier, im Tempo eines Menuetts, performed by Hayk Melikyan James Kok, Und die ganze Welt spricht von Nanette, performed by James Kok Tanz Orchestra Arnold Schönberg, Mahnung (Brettl-Lieder), performed by Burcu Kurt (soprano) and Karlheinz Donauer (piano)
Right: Drawing for Lulu 20 4 Indian ink, charcoal and Tipp-Ex on Shorter Oxford English Dictionary pages 76.2 × (3.3 cm Overleaf: Performance of Lulu at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, 20 (
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Drawings for Lulu 20 4 Indian ink and charcoal on Shorter Oxford English Dictionary pages, variable dimensions
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Drawings for Lulu 20 4 Indian ink, charcoal, red pencil and Tipp-Ex on Shorter Oxford English Dictionary pages, variable dimensions
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Drawings for Lulu 20 4 Indian ink, charcoal, red pencil and Tipp-Ex on Shorter Oxford English Dictionary pages, variable dimensions
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Model theatre for Right Into Her Arms, Johannesburg, 20 6
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ight Into Her Arms 20 6 Artist’s studio
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Model theatre for Lulu, Johannesburg, 20 3 Overleaf: Performance of Lulu, Dutch National Opera and Ballet, Amsterdam, 20 5
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Denise Wendel-Poray
Le Théâtre est son double Few visual artists have had as strong an involvement and impact in theatre and opera as William Kentridge. His fourth full operatic production, Alban Berg’s 1925 masterpiece Wozzeck, commissioned for the 2017 Salzburger Festspiele, marks a new era of the festival under the direction of Markus Hinterhäuser. In addition to the exhibition Thick Time at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, a group of the artist’s theatre-related works at the Rupertinum building allows a glimpse into the creative process behind Wozzeck and previous productions. First, an introductory room comprised of posters and backdrops, ‘artefacts’ from the 1970s and 1980s, evinces Kentridge’s early involvement in radical political theatre under apartheid in South Africa. Then, drawings, films, props and kinetic models related to operas produced between 1998 and 2017 follow chronologically: Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, The Magic Flute, The Nose, Lulu. Finally, in the form of a workshop atelier, the rough tools and materials used in the making of Wozzeck are visible.
THE FAN AS ICAL HIS ORY OF A USELESS MAN NUNNERY THEATRE, JOHANNESBURG, 1976 Looking back on his work, it becomes clear that Kentridge’s experimentation in theatre coincides with his awakening as an artist. As early as 1976 he became involved with the Junction Avenue Theatre Company (JATC), an experimental workshop started by a group of students and graduates from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Here he designed,
co-authored, acted in and directed original works. The first of these, The Fantastical History of a Useless Man, which opened on 20 September 1976 at the Nunnery Theatre in Johannesburg, was workshopped and co-written by the core members. Conceived in the months that led up to the Soweto massacre on 16 June and performed shortly afterwards amidst weekly protests brutally suppressed by government forces, as well as rising international criticism of apartheid, the play was an attempt to define the group members’ individual positions as privileged, white South Africans. Through a series of disjointed sketches framed by Brechtian style cabaret songs, the play boldly challenges the official paradigms of African history as they were taught in white schools. Several sequences ‘unmask’ legendary figures and historical events such as the Great Trek, Queen Victoria and the Boer Wars. Some dialogues deliver a searing indictment of white escapism from the subject of violence and oppression under apartheid. Young white activists are also satirised. One sketch stages a fashion show featuring ‘revolution’ jeans and t-shirts and the presenter asks: ‘Why look attractive when you can be revolting?’ Finally, in a climactic auto-critique the Useless Man declares: ‘White is not a colour. It is an attitude. And myself? I am a coward and a useless man – the most I can do is be the least obstruction.’ The posters produced for The Fantastical History of a Useless Man [SEE P. 233] and those of later plays shown at the Rupertinum for the first time, adumbrate what would become Kentridge’s distinctive style as a draughtsman, as well as his penchant for absurdist satire and a piercingly critical view of official order. 57
.ACQUES LECOQ: LE CORPS POÉ IQUE After four years of intense involvement with the JATC and the Market Theatre, Kentridge began to consider training to become a professional actor. This led to a year in Paris at the École Internationale de Théâtre, studying under the famous teacher of mime and acting, Jacques Lecoq. In the late 1970s and early 1980s students included members of the Théâtre de Complicité, the Swiss mime ensemble Mummenschanz, theatre directors Luc Bondy and Ariane Mnouchkine, as well as architects, visual artists, psychoanalysts and writers. The methods taught there were based on improvisation, the use of masks, and movement techniques, which Lecoq developed in his manifesto Le corps poétique. Lecoq’s approach was the opposite of Stanislavski and psychological realism techniques, which were the predominant method taught in Europe and America. This was ‘physical theatre’ based on the body and tactile memory. Kentridge still uses these techniques today as a director: Lecoq techniques provide a way of arriving at meaning through exercises using very concrete metaphors that have nothing to do with psychological motivation in acting. For example, the actor is asked to imagine a physical object like a piece of clay and what clay feels like, its physical qualities – how you can cut into it, or push into it, how it doesn’t bounce back, but stays – searching the dynamics of clay. From there, there is a transfer of these sensations into the actor’s dramatic work. With these tools you can build a whole character and as you continue to work on a role, these sensations remain, and you can refer back to them and reconnect with the character immediately.1 The Lecoq experience also brought about a disappointing but vital realisation: That year, 1981–1982 in Paris, was the most productive year of teaching I’ve ever received. I think I was fortunate to discover at a theatre school that I was such a bad actor. I was reduced to being an artist, and I made my peace with it.2
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Fig 1 Poster from Sophiatown, Market Theatre, Johannesburg, 1987
SOPHIA OWN MARKET THEATRE, .OHANNESBURG, 1987 On his return to South Africa, Kentridge continued to work in the theatre, becoming increasingly involved in directing and designing. In 1987, once again with the JATC, he collaborated on the writing and producing of Sophiatown, as well as creating a number of large drawings that served as backdrops. [FIG. 1]. The play is set in the 1950s in the legendary ‘freehold’ township of Sophiatown, where non-whites were permitted to own property. A relative tolerance for illegal alcohol and multi-racial gatherings led to the formation of a cultural hub where some of South Africa’s most famous writers, musicians, artists and politicians gathered. However, over time, it was increasingly viewed as a threat to the principles and stability of the apartheid system and in February 1955, the government ordered the total destruction of the town and obligatory relocation of the population.
The play dramatises the events as seen from the crowded household of Marmarita, a ‘Shebeen Queen’ or seller and brewer of alcohol. As the play opens, a new tenant, Ruth Golden, arrives on the scene. She has responded to a newspaper advertisement placed by the intellectual of the group, Jakes, looking for a Jewish girl to live with them as part of an experiment in racial tolerance and reconciliation. A string of episodes follow where there is an apparent growth of understanding between the diverse occupants. It becomes clear that it is exactly this natural process that apartheid is trying to annihilate as government forces are heard outside, bulldozing Sophiatown into the ground. During the workshop period for Sophiatown, the group met three times a week for six months in an attempt to confront the questions of apartheid, not only through documents and research in film archives but through personal experiences. Director Malcolm Purkey remembers how in one workshop on ‘rites of passage’, Kentridge recounted his preparations for his Bar Mitzvah, and his efforts to chant in his breaking voice the Torah, written without vowels in a language he didn’t understand, in a flat in the suburban town of Hillbrow, at seven o’clock in the evening while his teacher, already in pyjamas, refused to get out of bed.: A descendant of Lithuanian Jews who had fled the Russian pogroms, Kentridge seems to be questioning his own identity. In the final script of Sophiatown one character asks: ‘What’s Jewish? I don’t know what the hell I am. I’m Jewish on Mondays, I’m white on Tuesdays, I’m South African on Wednesdays, I’m a democrat on Thursdays, and I’m confused on all the other days.’ 4 The anecdote about Kentridge’s struggle to learn his portion (parsha) of the Torah, written in biblical Hebrew, anticipates the themes of fragility of meaning and difficulty of communication that he would later explore in many works, such as I am not me, the horse is not mine, originally a lecture/performance made for the Sydney Biennale in June 2008. Here, projections of short phrases – excerpts from the show-trial of Nicolai Bukharin, a close lieutenant of Lenin’s who was executed in 1938 under the Stalinist purge – are spoken in an Aesopian language that borders on the absurd.5 During his internment, Bukharin wrote thirty-four letters tearfully stating his case to Stalin, who turned a deaf ear. With the Sydney Biennale piece, Kentridge, who had renounced being an actor, is back on stage. Thus begins a new genre, the lecture/performance, that will lead to theatre works Refuse the Hour (2012) and Paper Music (2014), featuring Kentridge and ‘son double’ Kentridge.
Fig 2 Still from T&I, 1990
&I, 1990 His first piece on an operatic theme was a twelve-minute film, T&I, based on Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1859) [FIG. 2]. Like Thomas Mann’s early novella Tristan (1903), which presages the importance of music as a counterpoint to narrative and image in later works such as The Magic Mountain (1924) and Doctor Faustus (1947), T&I plays freely with operatic leitmotifs, image and narrative, and anticipates Kentridge’s work in opera today. Both Mann and Kentridge create adaptations of the famous story of love, betrayal and death where Tristan is not a knight but an artist. Wagner’s work ends with the Liebestod, Isolde’s final aria after the death of Tristan. Liebestod, literally ‘love death’, or erotic death, refers to the consummation of love through death. In contrast to Mann’s darkly psychoanalytical rendering, Kentridge brings irony into the tragic ending. Tristan and Isolde commit suicide by hugging a large electrified fish, which becomes incandescent and spouts live sparks to the accompaniment of Wagner’s Liebestod: ‘Do you not see? How he shines ever brighter. Star-haloed rising higher.’ In the end, all the actors are filmed coming out for bows on the balcony of a dilapidated Victorian building while the jubilant finale of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice: ‘Trionfi amore / e il mondo intero / serva all’impero / della beltà’ celebrating the triumph of love is heard. There are parallels between T&I and Kentridge’s 1989 animated film Johannesburg, Second Greatest City after Paris. Both describe love triangles. Felix Teitelbaum, like Tristan, is a fragile dreamer seen standing nude, gazing out from a balcony onto urban sprawl, whereas the capitalist Soho Eckstein, like King Mark, is in the habit of sleeping fully dressed in a dark pinstriped suit. The eye behind the camera capturing John Cassavetes-style close-ups in T&I, and the eye filming the ink drawings of Johannesburg, Second Greatest City after Paris are one and the same, gazing with equal penetration into the politics of desire, deceit and passion. It is this analogous mixture of irony and tragedy, film and live performers that resurfaces explosively when the artist takes on the bloodlust story of Lulu with directorial brio in 2015. 159
Fig 3 Performance of Woyzeck on the Highveld, Market Theatre, Johannesburg, 200.. Woyzeck Puppets by Adrian Kohler, animation by William Kentridge
Fig 4 Performance of Ubu and the Truth Commission, The Print Room, London, 2015. Mongi Mthombeni with crocodile puppet.
Fig 5 Performance of Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, La Fenice, Venice, 200.. Ulisse puppet by Basil Jones, animation by William Kentridge
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PUPPETRY AND IL RITORNO D’ULISSE LUNA THEATRE, BRUSSELS, 1998
HE MAGIC FLU E THÉÂTRE DE LA MONNAIE, BRUSSELS, 2005
In 1992, Kentridge started to collaborate with the Handspring Puppet Company – a group of puppeteers whose work with three-quarter life-size wooden puppets has now made them world famous. The group’s experimental and collaborative work methods were similar to those that Kentridge had practised at the JATC, but the particular genre of puppetry was an unfamiliar discipline that opened up new roads of expression to him. The company produced classics such as Woyzeck on the Highveld (after Georg Büchner) [FIG. 3] in 1992 and Faustus in Africa! (after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) in 1995. Ubu and the Truth Commission conceived and designed by Kentridge in 1997 intertwines the adventures of playwright Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi with events in South Africa in the difficult post-apartheid period and the public hearings of the 1996 Truth and Reconciliation Commission [FIG. 4]. These highly mediatised investigations of violence and abuse under apartheid fixated thousands of viewers at the time. The spectacle and the horror that we witness in the testimonies of the puppet/victims is strangely moving and sparks a strong cathartic impulse. Here, as in French poet Antonin Artaud’s Théâtre de la cruauté, the stage becomes the forum where ‘the agitation and anxiety of our era’ are played out.6 In each of these productions the projections function as a basso-continuo to what is happening on stage: images such as a gunshot wound, a crow, dissolving, filling up, emptying out, breaking up, reassembling. Kentridge has a long-standing fascination with encyclopedias, where juxtapositions of botanical drawings, works of art, maps and anatomical dissections all enter into the dance of images. In the manner of Aby Warburg’s combinatory experiments in the Mnemosyne Atlas, his flowing animations spark flashes of intuition, rather than linear understanding, in the viewer. 7 It was in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company that the artist staged his first opera, Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria (The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland, 1641), at the Luna Theatre in Brussels in 1998. In this nutshell, 90-minute version of Monteverdi’s three-hour epic the ‘Patria’ becomes South Africa. The stage set is a seventeenth century anatomical amphitheatre where dissections were carried out in front of a paying audience sitting in surrounding stalls. More than just narrating the return of Ulisse to Ithaca, the film projected behind the puppeteers, singers and puppets becomes the grey matter of the piece, not a moving backdrop, but the central nervous system of all that is happening corporally on stage. Depicted in turn are reams of desolate industrial wasteland, a modern hospital ward, ultrasound screens, a blood system pumping, and a digestive system that explodes into torrents, rivers and open seas [FIG. 5]. With the help of the puppeteers, each singer manipulates a beautifully carved wooden puppet that corresponds to his or her character. They breathe, sing and direct all their energy towards the puppet as opposed to facing the audience, who observe the scene like witnesses to a surgical operation.
Kentridge’s foray into the international opera scene began in 2003 with Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791) [BIG. 6]. One of the most frequently performed operas worldwide, the famous ‘Singspiel’ tells the tale of Prince Tamino as he endeavours to save the daughter of the Queen of the Night, Pamina, who has been kidnapped by the high-priest Sarastro. In the company of the bird-catcher Papageno, he is led by the Three Child-Spirits to the temple of Sarastro, where he is obliged to undergo a series of Masonic initiation rites before he is finally united with Pamina in marriage. For Kentridge a wealth of imagery emerged from Masonic elements woven into the opera (the librettist Emanuel Schikaneder and Mozart were Masons and lodge brothers), which he incorporated into the projections in the form of measuring instruments, Masonic symbols, figures and annotations. These swirl into motion over a static décor composed of hand-painted backdrops in trompe l’oeil like those of traditional Baroque theatre. There is a tribute to the 1816 stage set of The Magic Flute by neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the starry dome behind the Queen of the Night and numerous references to his preparatory sketches in the projections.
The opera is clearly influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, and the benevolent high-priest Sarastro can be seen as an example of Enlightened Absolutism. Kentridge gives a glimpse into the ‘marred side of Idealism’ A by projecting a filmed document from circa 1930 behind Sarastro as he sings, ‘Within these sacred halls, revenge has no place’. The film shows men in safari hats mocking the agony of a dying rhinoceros that they have just shot, posing next to it and taking photos. The idea occurred to Kentridge when listening to the famous Thomas Beecham recording of The Magic Flute, which took place in Berlin in 1938, when just outside, Jews were being taken off to concentration camps. In staging The Magic Flute, Kentridge found that Lecoq methods were particularly useful to the singers. The disadvantage of this highly popular work is that singers have performed or seen the roles so many times that they often have engrained ideas about staging. Lecoq techniques can help them wipe the slate clean and then ‘find’ the role through improvisation. The results he obtained with the different casts of young singers (Pamina was played by his future Lulu, Marlis Petersen) were astonishing in their freshness and precision. The production was so successful that it toured worldwide until 2013.
Fig 6 Performance of The Magic Flute, La Monnaie, Brussels, 2005
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Fig 7 Performance of The Nose, Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2010
HE &OSE METROPOLITAN OPERA, NEW YORK, 2010 Choosing the rarely performed Shostakovich opera The Nose, completed in 1928, as his second full operatic production was less a guarantee of success than The Magic Flute, especially at the Metropolitan Opera, known for its conservative audiences [BIGS. 7 & A]. This monumental Soviet Era masterpiece is scored for a vast orchestra producing unprecedented instrumental effects, colours and dynamics, such as a rousing four-minute intermezzo scored exclusively for unpitched percussion instruments. The cast involves eighty different solo roles and a large number of smaller roles of extreme difficulty. The director can find himself at moments with over 100 performers on the stage. 162 Lulu
Fig A Performance of The Nose, Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2010
Shostakovich based his libretto mainly on Nikolai Gogol’s satirical short story The Nose of 1836, which recounts the misadventures of a Russian bureaucrat who wakes one morning to find that his nose is missing. He later discovers that it has developed a life of its own, and has even surpassed him in social rank. Kentridge explains that his attraction to the work was: the way it takes the absurd seriously. This has a strong appeal for me, because if you take the absurd seriously and don’t consider it to be just rubbish or nonsense, you come to discover that the way the world is structured is not based on logic and Cartesian rationality, but, rather, on ruptures to that clarity and clear logic, which seems to me to be much closer to how the world actually operates. 9
His choice was also influenced by a long-standing interest in the Russian avant-garde, which is already palpable in the work Comrade Mauser (1980), for example, where Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky are referenced. He explains how when he began working on The Nose: there was a wealth of material from thirty-five years ago sitting around in the studio or on my bookshelf or on my table. Then, during the two years of making the opera, there began a lot of sifting and drawing, editing and seeing which images were relevant. The Nose was a project that everything could be mapped onto … For me to choose an opera, it can’t just be a distant
relationship to the material and text. With The Magic Flute and The Nose I was completely involved with the dramatic material. I need to be in sympathy with the thematic material and intrigued by it to take it on as a project.10
The show was met with a delirious response, completely unprecedented at the Met for a twentieth century work. When asked about the extraordinary success of this and other theatre productions, Kentridge points to his high-calibre core team: stage designer Sabine Theunissen, director Luc de Wit, costume designer Greta Goiris, composer Philip Miller and lighting designer Urs Schönebaum. When they come together for weeks of intensive work in the Johannesburg studio, the collective workshop methods and brainstorming hark back to those of the JATC. 163
LULU DUTCH NATIONAL OPERA AND BALLET, AMSTERDAM, .UNE 2015 METROPOLITAN OPERA, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 2015
Fig 9 Workshop still from Lulu, Johannesburg, 2015
64 Lulu
Alban Berg’s unfinished opera Lulu (1929–35) is a seminal twelvetone composition that was premièred incomplete in Zurich in June 1937, two years after the composer’s death. Berg adapted the libretto from two plays by the German writer Frank Wedekind that recount the rise and fall of a celebrated femme fatale, Lulu. With these plays Wedekind laid the foreground for Expressionist theatre and also anticipated the didactic cabaret and epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht. Berg’s first opera Wozzeck (1925) is infused with the subjectivity, introspection and angst of Expressionist theatre, whereas Lulu is characteristic of the Neue Sachlichkeit in its objectivity and distancing from emotional content. When Kentridge began to study Lulu he explored the connection between his own printmaking and that of artists associated with both of these movements: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann. His way of initially penetrating the work was by making ‘masses of drawings and lino-cuts’.11 The result became a three-dimensional decor that was constantly intertwined with the two-dimensional in the form of films and drawings on paper. In addition, Lulu has a paper dress, her portrait is a collage of drawings, and the projections sometimes give the impression of a vast palimpsest of sketches [FIG. 9]. The dramatic structure of the opera Lulu is a mirror image: the protagonist’s social ascension in the first half is reflected by her demise in the second. Berg’s keystone is the central Verwandlung (Film music), which is a musical palindrome, formed by ascending and descending arpeggios. In Kentridge’s darkly sensitive rendering of the story, Lulu is the prisoner of her own image, literally immersed in swirling pages and portraits. In her words, she has never pretended to be ‘anything but what men see in me’. Her mime-artist double (Joanna Dudley) sits at a silent, glossy, grand piano on the edge of the stage. She pretends to play it, poses on it, glides upon it, and sometimes lives inside it. Lulu knows she is there, as an irritant always miming the truth [FIG. 10]. Like in the theatre of Jacques Lecoq that Kentridge revisits here, the mime is the ‘corps poétique’ or soul of the real Lulu. The ecstatic audience response on opening night at the Metropolitan Opera, as one critic wrote, had never been equalled for a twentieth century work except by the one that followed The Nose five years earlier. One review read: ‘Kentridge commits murder most excellently at the Met … the lurid plot played out as pure poetry.’ 12
Fig 10 Performance of Lulu, Dutch National Opera and Ballet, Amsterdam, 2015
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WOZZECK SALZBURG B&STIVAL, 2017 Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck is a series of fragmented scenes with no definitive text, left unfinished at the time of the writer’s death in 1837. It relates the story of a soldier who, persecuted by his superiors and used as a guinea pig for a series of medical experiments that cause hallucinations and the general deterioration of his health, finally decides to murder his girlfriend Marie, who has betrayed him. For Berg it had the mysterious attraction of the incomplete, which he shaped into a naturalistic operatic work Wozzeck (1925), giving voice to the stammering soldier, victim of social and economic forces and to the young genius Büchner, who died at the age of twenty-four, leaving only three completed works and an eight-page revolutionary pamphlet. Though the trajectory of their lives is different, the heroines of Berg’s two operas, Marie and Lulu, were both born into poverty and die in poverty. Unlike Lulu, Marie will never experience comfort, riches and celebrity, but their tragic fates are identical: prostitution and violent death by stabbing. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze relates Berg’s uncompromising, graphic depiction of their murders to the paintings of Francis Bacon: Berg knew how to write the music of the scream, the scream of Marie, and the very different scream of Lulu; but each time, it was by putting the force of the scream in relation to the forces of silence, those of the earth in the horizontal scream of Marie and those of the heavens in the vertical scream of Lulu. Bacon paints the scream, does paintings that scream. 1: Just as uncompromising, Kentridge’s drawings make the scream visible, unheard voices visible, the protest coming from the open mouths on the 1987 Sophiatown posters visible. Deleuze’s analysis refutes Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s famous argument in Laocoön against the depiction of the un-beautiful (das Unschöne) in art.14 Lulu and Wozzeck are the antithesis of ‘beautiful’ opera. In undertaking these works, and in particular Wozzeck, Kentridge returns to a form of theatre, like that of the JATC, that promotes an ‘unmasking’ of beautified history and the dramatisation of injustice. In his 1992 rendering of Büchner’s bleak tale, the soldier Woyzeck becomes a migrant worker in South Africa during the 1950s, a wooden puppet making his way through a desolate urban landscape of animated drawings [BIG. 11]. His cry ‘Wir arme Leut’ (We poor people) becomes the leitmotif of universal suffering and struggle. Berg’s musical treatment of the story adds yet another layer of interpretation. The singing voice (Berg employs styles ranging from Sprechgesang – spoken singing – to bel canto – expressive singing) interlaces Büchner’s narrative and accentuates the inflections of the text, sometimes deforming it to liberate, ‘the magnetic power of the word’.15 The musical composition 166 Lulu
1 William Kentridge, interview with the author, Alternatives Théâtrales, June 2012, pp. 11:–14. 2 Ibid. : Martin Orkin, ed., At the Junction: Four Plays by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001) p. 21:. 4 Ibid., p. 167
Fig 11 Performance of Woyzeck on the Highveld, Market Theatre, Johannesburg, 200A
introduces different notions of time into the narrative. The capsular unity of each act is ‘linear time’, expressed in a suite of five scenes. Then there are ‘Erinnerungsmotive’ or memory-motives that recall ‘past time’; the first act echoes the prelude. There is ‘simultaneity’ in the floating tonal moments where nothing moves. Berg even indicates several ‘black moments’ of ‘suspended time’ where the curtain should fall. Kentridge’s animation contains all of these possible expressions of time, but it is only occasionally synchronised to the music.16 In his 2014 production of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey) cycle of twenty-four songs, Kentridge takes ‘the Winterreise that was somewhere in me all these years’ and uses mostly pre-existing films to create a parallel composition to the solitary journey of Schubert’s wanderer.17 In the films, images of migration, winter, death, rebirth, deserted landscapes of shell-shocked trees, recipients of memory and shrapnel, conflicts, trenches, explosions follow in procession and form a temporal unity with the music that remains enigmatic and inscrutable. The same is true for the animation in his operatic productions, where there are moments of synchronisation between the film and the action on stage that have huge dramatic impact, but the films are never illustrative of the action. Each of the hundreds of ink drawings that make up a film becomes an explosive kernel when projected onto the stage and proscenium. The drawings for Lulu that are now individual exhibition pieces demonstrate this. With The Nose and to an even greater extent with Lulu, Kentridge and his team have achieved a veritable Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner’s ideal of a musical, poetic and visual work that would unify all art forms via the theatre. But the mysterious power that drives his productions seems to lie beyond the huge operatic machine that he directs. Perhaps it is not only self-irony that, after such unmitigated success, prompts his remark: ‘Primarily I think of myself as someone making drawings.’ 1A
5 Aesopian language is one that conveys two meanings: one on the surface understandable to the general public and a hidden one that is understandable only to a specific group or clandestine movement. It refers to the Greek storyteller Aesop and the language used in his animal fables. The term ‘Aesopian language’ has evolved over time to refer to an allegorical language used by Russian and later Soviet non-conformist publicists or writers to conceal antiregime sentiments. This is one of the accusations against Bukharin. The German-American philosopher, Herbert Marcuse later used the term to stigmatise Martin Heidegger’s abstruse, oracular style. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (196G) was an inspirational book for 1960s New Left and student revolts worldwide. Certainly known to the members of Junction Avenue Theatre Company, their 1976 play The Fantastical History of a Useless Man discussed above, echoes Marcuse’s indictment of conformism and consumer society. 6 Antonin Artaud, ‘Théâtre de la cruauté’, 19::, Oeuvres, (Paris: Quarto Editions Gallimard, 2EEG) p. HHH, author’s translation. 7 German art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, left unfi nished at the time of his death in 1929, was an extensive picture atlas consisting of forty wooden panels covered with black cloth, on which Warburg had pinned nearly 1,EEE pictures, reproductions of famous artworks from books, as well as images from magazines, maps and contemporary sources. See Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Image Survivante (Paris: Aux Editions de Minuit, 2EE2) A William Kentridge, interview with the author, Alternatives Théâtrales, June 2E12, pp. 11:–1G. 9 Ibid. 1E Ibid. 11 Ibid.
12 James Jorden, ‘William Kentridge commits murder most excellent at the Met’, The Observer, 11 November 2E1H, http://observer.com/2E1H/11/williamkentridge-commits-murder-mostexcellent-at-the-met/. 1: Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 19AG), pp. 6E, 61, author’s translation. 1G Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön, Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 19AG) pp. A–9. Originally published in 1766, Lessing’s Laocoön was one of the fi rst systematised treatments of aesthetics during the Enlightenment. His fundamental tenet was that the highest goal and the only thing worthy of expression in the visual arts was beauty. The depiction of the scream, because it disfigures the face, therefore constituted a fault. Lessing takes the example of the ancient sculpture depicting the Laocoön who, though enduring extreme pain, appears to sigh rather than scream. 1H Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Fano, Wozzeck ou le nouvel Opéra (Paris: Editions Plon, 19H:). Jouve and Fano discuss the Bergsonian theory of ‘Duration’ and how it applies to Berg’s ‘composed’ time in Wozzeck. 16 Only suggested here is a larger discussion on how the perception of time in Kentridge’s fi lms is multiple and variable within the duration of a fi lm. The discussion of the scientific measuring of time versus the intuitive perception of time is often explored by Kentridge, in particular in The Refusal of Time, created for dOCUMENTA (1:) in 2E12, and its performance off-shoot Refuse the Hour. 17 For more on Kentridge’s production based on Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (1A2A), which involves twenty-four projections, one for each Lied in the cycle, and premiered at the Wiener Festwochen on A July 2E1G. See William Kentridge, interview with the author, Wiener Kurier, July 2E1G. Performed by German baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Markus Hinterhäuser, who commissioned the work, the production has been highly acclaimed and has continued to tour worldwide. http://kurier.at/kultur/buehne/ interview-with-william-kentridge-thewinterreise-that-was-somewhere-in-meall-these-years/69.:EG.696. 1A William Kentridge, interview with the author, Wiener Kurier, Vienna, August 2E1:.
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Notes Towards a Model Opera
Notes Towards a Model Opera 2015 Three-channel video projection HD video, colour, sound :22 minutes Choreography and Dancer Music composition and arrangement Additional Music composition Video editing and construction Director of Photography Sound mix Costume design Vocals
Percussion Trombone Trumpet and Spoons Tuba Guitar Stroh Violin Performers
Dada Masilo Philip Miller Johannes Serekeho with music performed by First St John Brass Band Snežana Marović Janus Fouché Duško Marović Gavan Eckhart Greta Goiris Bham Ntabeni Moses Moeta Joanna Dudley Ann Masina Tlale Makhene Thato Motlhaolwa Tlale Makhene Dan Selsick Adam Howard George Fombe Charles Knighten-Pullen Waldo Alexander Dada Masilo Tlale Makhene Bham Ntabeni Thato Motlhaolwa Thabani Edwin Ntuli Members of African Immanuel Essemblies Brass Band Members of First St John Brass Band
Right: Still from Notes Towards a Model Opera, 20 5 Overleaf: Installation view, Notes Towards a Model Opera, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 20 6
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Workshop stills (and previous page) Notes Towards a Model Opera, Johannesburg, 20 4
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Stills (and following pages) from Notes Towards a Model Opera, 20 5
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Overleaf: Installation view, Notes Towards a Model Opera, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 20 6
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Stills (and previous pages) from Notes Towards a Model Opera, 20 5
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Overleaf: Installation view, Notes Towards a Model Opera, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 20 6
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A Lecture by William Kentridge
Peripheral Thinking PERIPHERAL THINKING What happens at the edges? Today I am meant to be talking about the importance of the margins – but I can’t stop thinking about mangoes. (Let it be said that it is their season as I write this. The kitchen is filled with the overripe sweet smell.) The correct way to eat a mango, I was told in my childhood, was in the bath. A facecloth to wipe your face, and fingernails cut not too short, to ease the fibres from between your teeth.
BEST FRUIT WORST FRUIT In our family we make lists. Best film, worst film, best author, worst author, best fruit worst fruit. Mango my daughter’s best fruit, mango my father’s worst. (I am aware this is of no interest at all, but I am trying to follow the thoughts wherever they go. Clearly here resisting the attempt to construct an argument.) To offer an explanation of the themes of the lecture. These notes were written in my studio in Johannesburg, in anticipation of this lecture and of the exhibition in which this project will be shown. I was trying to keep track of life in the studio. There are other ideas hovering in the wings, apart from the mango. 89
M NET T THE B RRIC DES EUR SI N TREE SP RROW A bowl of peonies; an image of an ink drawing of a small bird, a sparrow. The drawing of the peonies is on the wall of the studio, the birds still hover as an idea. A sense of a vague image, an image that feels specific but isn’t yet fixed – an image, a smudge of ink on paper becoming a bird. Let it be said I am bad at focusing on a single thought. But somehow have to rescue this failure. I will latch onto any stray image and thought that lets me off the hook, or prolongs the moment when I have to start pushing a thought. Mangoes, swallows, sparrows, the peonies; an enamel jug
A POROUS FOCUS And parallel to this peripheral vision there is a peripheral thinking. Ideas pushed aside by thoughts, connected to, but not central to them. The visual intrusions (vital in every studio) are both a prompt to, and a way of describing, the thinking they provoke. I try to fix on one thought, one argument, and am filled with other images. The list could go on. We would each have different sets of association. Every encounter with the world is a mixture of that which the world brings to us and what we project on to it. The tree is never just itself. Our biography is part of the understanding.
THE USES OF A TREE A tree. I fix on it for five minutes to try to record the thoughts that arise. I am interested in the porousness of the focus. The tree in the garden. A white stinkwood, not indigenous The roughness of the bark, a memory of the rough bark of a mulberry tree. In the corner of the garden of my first childhood home A memory of hanging by my legs from the smooth bark of the branch of a walnut tree. The branches of the tree like the bronchia of a lung.
the expulsion of Pope Celestine V in 1440; a drawing of the movement of a horse
The sunlight on a leaf.
portraits of the composer Alban Berg, his wife, his mistress; three Highveld landscapes
The suicide of Virginia Woolf. (Virginia Woolf wrote that the brightest thing in nature was sunlight on a leaf)
pages of a Chinese dictionary; photos of a political rally in Dar es Salaam
The tree as gibbet. The uses of a tree: pencil, table, plain planks of a coffin.
pages from a newspaper from the Paris Commune of 1871.
West Park Cemetery. (The Johannesburg cemetery)
These are all images up on the walls of the studio. One extract from the newspaper reads: OBITUARY We announce the death in Paris, of Monsieur Baroilhet, a baritone in the National Opera. Monsieur Baroilhet possessed a very curious collection of paintings, ancient and modern, well-appreciated by connoisseurs. Monsieur Baroilhet died playing dominoes. The same newspaper reports, from The Grahamstown Journal in 1871, that a diamond of 119 carats of the clearest colour has been found in South Africa. We could easily spend the next while just with these entries in the newspaper. Circling the studio there is a persistent peripheral vision of the images on the walls of the studio. You can stop walking and study them, but they can also float at the edges of vision as you pass. Reminders of that which you are not focused on.
4 Private Thoughts. (Private) The Trees in the Treason Trial. Shrapnel in the wood. A Swedish carpenter and ship-builder complained of using German timber, as it was so full of fragments from WWII ordinance. Seventy years on, a natural history. The beech forest in Buchenwald. The pollarded trees of WW I. Botanic xenophobia. The tree just stands, a prisoner in the garden. 53 years. The tree, the white stinkwood planted when my parents moved into this house in 1964. The tree just stands but the future is decided for it. Ethnic botanical cleansing. A barrel bomb in Aleppo. An internal tree, growing one’s own death.
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GOOD BRUSH BAD BRUSH To be schematic, we could say that the tree is the centre, and all these other associations circle it, land on it, bend or break the branches. That which seems extraneous cannot be kept out of the centre. In the studio this is even more obvious. Not just the ideas released by the tree, but how it is seen, how it is represented, how it is made. The paper, the ink, the good and bad brush meet the tree in the act of making it in the studio. A good brush gives a controlled line and the uncontrolled bristle of the bad brush that has lost its point, demands the randomness of foliage. From the bad brush and its possibilities, a forest of trees can grow. There is a Zen mindfulness that will try to exclude extraneous thoughts but I would suggest that to do that is to remove the tree itself.
THE PERIPHERY DESCRIBING A CIRCLE Put a pin in a sheet of paper, pull on a string against the pin. The line that defines the outside edge of the blank circle is the periphery. Made as a pressure, a force against the centre. In Paris the Périphérique, the motorway that circles the 20 arrondissements of the historic centre inside, also delineates the banlieue outside. Here in South Africa the periphery is even more obvious. The city centre surrounded by townships, informal settlements. The truth of the centre is only comprehensible in relation to that outside of it. More than that, the meaning of the centre is made by the periphery, however much financiers may wish to believe they are the makers of wealth and those beyond the glass towers are extraneous. Any re3ection will show the dependence of a centre on its periphery. Our gold mining history has always been subsidised by the rural areas. The formal economy always depends on the informal economy. In the studio it is not only elements at the edge of images that structure it, but what is outside the frame: there is often a migration of images and ideas from one project to another. The art is to not defend the centre, to be open to that which is apparently extraneous. The tree is never its own tree. The painting of peonies leads to ideas beyond that of 3owers. We have to acknowledge that the act of seeing (and thinking) is always a negotiation between what comes towards us and what we project onto it. Our understanding of history – imperfect, idiosyncratic, is always shaped by our biography. Not even our whole biography, sometimes incidents or memories from it. Knowing how unstable it really is, we all try to prop up the common ground we have, and wish for it to be reliable and stable. The periphery and its migration into the centre is what I am interested in, in this investigation. 92 Notes Towards a Model Opera
THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION I want to look at these questions in relation to a project I am currently working on in the studio, a series of projections and drawings being made for an exhibition in Beijing. China certainly hovers over us like a huge zeppelin. The scale of it, the scale of its hunger for resources, the scale of everything. China in Africa today, a sense of a series of questions rather than any answers. Are we here the tethered goat waiting for the tiger? Easy pickings? The project began with an invitation to show a selection of my work in a museum in Beijing. Curiosity, 3attery are part of the equation. What is it in my work that would interest people there? I wanted both to find a link to it and to make a work that would refer to this question. Drawing, film, performance, posters, sculptures – all was possible, everything was open. The project began as many do with a distracted reading and looking. I read the books of Lu Xun, a modernist whose sensibility placed him with Japanese writer Akutagawa and European writers in the tradition of the absurd modern like Gogol and Kafka. Books of revolutionary posters. Here the language pulled me in, the exhortations, the instructions, the clamour of incredible and unstoppable enthusiasm. Here is one starting point. And then some videos of the model operas performed during the period of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 (from when I was eleven to when I was twenty-one).
PERFORMANCE OF SLOGANS
ROLETARIANS OF THE WORLD UNITE WORK HARD FOR THE ELECTRIFICATION OF AGRICULTURE CRUSH THE 4 OLDS NEVER STO FIGHTING CAST OUT FEAR BUILD A GREAT WALL OF STEEL
GUARD THE MOTHER (LAND) STRUGGLE FOR A GOOD HEART
BURN THE ENSLAVING (ONTRA(T SHAR EN YOUR HILOSO HY (ONTRIBUTE MORE TY EWRITERS STRUGGLE AGAINST THE (ROOKED VALLEYS AND RIVERS EAT BITTERNESS STUDY HARD BY (OAL OIL LAM STUDY (AREFULLY RADIATE VIGOUR SMASH ALL OX DEVILS GLOW WITH HEALTH LESS BRO(ADE ON THE JA(KET MORE FUEL IN WINTER
MAKE THE GREAT MOTHER (LAND) ROUD WARMLY SU
ORT THE MOTHER’S ARM
THE GREATER THE HARDSHI WORK HARD FOR THE O EN HEART THE GREATER THE HARDSHI EX EDITE THE BUDDING OF THE ROSE DON’T DE END ON THE HEAVENS RIVATISE THE HEREAFTER RESIST THE ATTEM T TO (ONSTRU(T AN ARGUMENT RESIST THE ATTEM T TO (ONSTRU(T AN ARGUMENT
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(T (S R(GHT TO REBEL The model operas were theatre pieces exemplary in revolutionary content, the form of the Peking operas re-worked with revolutionary stories: through passionate song, speech or dance, a peasant, a young soldier, a young communist, roused their fellows to fight the Kuomintang or the Japanese. There is singing, ballet or martial arts with its precise percussion. Many red 3ags are waved, the enemy is defeated, and then there is a singing of the Internationale. Seeing these films of the opera started the project. To remind ourselves of the Cultural Revolution itself. We remember it was huge upheaval in China from 1966 to 1976 in which the youth of China, following the slogan IT IS -IGHT TO -EBEL, turned against authority figures who were seen to have abandoned the revolutionary path and become enmeshed in the world of bourgeois aspiration and comfort. The students were encouraged in their rebellion by Mao himself.
A F(GHT (/ THE K(TCHE/ But the project can also be described as an upheaval in China, provoked by a power struDle in the top ranks of the party, in which first students and scholars and then workers in the army were used both to bolster political careers and to contest opposing viewpoints as to the direction that the socialist revolution should take. Already there is a gap in the centre. Which is the correct description of the Cultural Revolution? This is not only a question of interpretation by commentators and historians. At its centre, it is constructed through interpretation by its actors. It is not as if outside there is interpretation, and inside raw truth. Events are always constructed by the meeting of the interpretation or understanding of the protagonists, and the world around them: a provisional truth. These political battles are the centre of the upheaval, but it was movements at the edges, images caught in the peripheral vision of the turmoil that held me. There was the paraphernalia, the ephemera of the action. The huge hand-drawn, large character broadsheets pasted onto walls at night, in which members of the party or other authority figures were accused of corruption. But it was the model operas that held me. A notebook was begun with the inscription NOTES TO6A-DS A MODEL OPE-A. The work on the project itself began with a morning’s improvisation with Dada Masilo, a South African dancer with whom I had worked before. We watched some of the films of the model operas. In the first hour on the dance 3oor, there were strangenesses, unexpected connections and collisions in the dance, and the dance in relation to the music from the model operas, of music from the 1950s, African colonial dance bands. It was already clear the project could not be abandoned – even though it was unclear (as it is still unclear now) what the final piece would be. To walk around the edges of the project: a few of the peripheral thoughts. 94 Notes Towards a Model Opera
PER(PHERAL THOUGHT ( EN PO(NTE / O/ PO(/T Here is a photograph taken by David Goldblatt in 1980 in Boksburg, a small town to the east of Johannesburg. A young ballet dancer on the veranda of her house under a pergola. What is it that holds us, that held me, when I first saw it in 1981? Of course the tutu and the point shoes, but also the beatific expression of the girl, an ecstatic dream – ‘even as I dance I dream of dancing’ – the dream of being a prima ballerina assoluta, of Rudolph Nureyev on the other side of the stage, of Swan Lake and Giselle. How the dreams crash. It is not so much the pergola that crashes down on the dancer; it’s the harsh sunlight of the Highveld winter. I would describe this photograph as merciless; there is no place to protect this dream of Europe. We are at the end of an enormously long string stretching from the ballet centres of Paris and Moscow, swung in an arc that reaches Johannesburg, Adelaide, Shanghai: a longing for this other world. While this does not go back to the bathtub and mango, it does go back to our house, to my sister’s ballet lessons, to her hopes, the practice barre in the playroom. So when I see the Chinese dance en pointe, all this is there: the fighting of the Japanese en pointe, learning to throw a hand grenade en pointe, charging through the enemy machine guns, waving the red banners en pointe. It is absurd, but there is also a strange beauty in the dancing: the perfect unity of the ensemble work; and a sadness of impossible hopes in Boksburg, in our house, and a sense of gap. There is surprise at the connections, a French art form perfected in Russia, winning out in the cultural battles of the Soviet Union, the Bolshoi Ballet rather than the modernism of Akarova or even Diaghilev. A conservative victory, and here in the Chinese Model Operas, used to proclaim the revolutionary new. An unbridgeable gap between what was being made on stage and what was happening outside the theatres and cinemas. The specifics of dancing en pointe can’t be avoided: the violence done to the feet, their binding into these point shoes. Here I remember the tears, blood, cotton wool and methylated spirits of my sister’s attempt to wear the Cinderella ballet shoes. I think it goes one step further. The great model revolutionary ballet is called The Red Detachment of Women, with a cast almost entirely of women, and a pleasure reported by many from China at the time at the rare opportunity of looking at all those naked thighs with a clear revolutionary conscience. The libido is seldom referred to in revolutionary or other political theory, but the edges show it is there. Desire is never far from the studio, the theatre, the politburo. Mao’s priapism, his lovers, are not part of the o5cial discourse, but it is there. The connection between the biographical and the grand statement. (Further peripheral thoughts: political leaders and their entitled libidos, not just Mao of course, but Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro. I am sure I have left one president out – of course – Kennedy.)
David Goldblatt, Girl in her new tutu on the stoep, Boksburg, 22 June 1980. Gelatin silver print
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All of these float at the edge of the big question: the great proletarian Cultural Revolution; the biographical – Mao’s, mine; the periphery longing for the center; the line of connection, Johannesburg to Shanghai; and the balance between the edges, ironic or not, and the great swell of pride that also came over audiences watching the defeat of the Japanese or the Kuomintang by the communist cadres and their red flags. To hold the hope and disillusion together.
and political, between hope and the teargas and bullets of the authorities. (NOTE TO SELF: copper, cast iron, aluminum, wooden spoon, rubber spatula, soup ladle. Side-to-side with the image of my eighteen month-old grandson sitting on the floor beating an upturned saucepan with a wooden spoon.) We are off the wall and into the centre of the studio: an insistence in the face of the big idea: We are here, and will be heard.
PERIPHER L ,HOUGH, NO. 7 DE ,H OF SP RROWS
PERIPHER L ,HOUGH, NO. 8 ,HE GOLDEN M NGOES
This is peripheral thought number 7. Peripheral thoughts no. 5 and 6 are absent. This peripheral thought precedes the main event. In 1952, as part of The Great Leap Forward, China’s project of modernisation, Mao declared war on The Four Bads: flies, mosquitos, rats and sparrows – specifically the Eurasian Tree Sparrow, that ate seeds planted for the harvest. Killing the sparrows would boost food production. Tens of millions of sparrows were killed. But the sparrows had fed not only on seeds, but also on immature locusts, and there was a plague of locusts. Crops were devastated. Through this and other equally ill-advised decisions, between twenty and thirty million Chinese died of starvation. The technique that Mao chose for the extermination of the sparrows was mass mobilisation of the peasants. They were instructed to rise before dawn and bang on their pots and pans to frighten the birds out of the trees, and then keep beating their pots and pans whenever the birds tried to land – so that in the end the birds would fall out of the sky with exhaustion. The efficacy of this method of species extermination is disputed, but the death of the sparrows, the flourishing of the locusts, and the famine, is not. The disasters of The Great Leap Forward lowered Mao’s standing and power in China, and the great proletarian Cultural Revolution can be described as Mao’s attempt – successful – to regain supreme position in the country. But what holds me here in this story of the Eurasian Tree Sparrow are the pots and pans, a line that jumps forward to the Arab Spring of recent years and back to China. Particularly to the protests of Gezi Park and Taksim Square in Istanbul where beating of pots and pans became a symbol of ungovernability and revolt, a bringing of the domestic to the larger political. To return into the studio, everything has to happen twice, to have two resonances: a provocation in the studio and an echo in the world outside. Here an invitation to work with pots and pans, percussion, rhythms of protest, a raw material waiting to be used; and an outside sense in the link of the domestic to the political, of private biography meeting large histories. The copper or aluminum base of the pots becomes the membrane between the hopes, desires, fears, of those whose pots they are, and the world beyond them. A membrane between the personal
In August of 1968 Mao was given a gift of six mangoes from the president of Pakistan (this event is so peripheral that many histories of the Cultural Revolution ignore it altogether). Mao did not eat the mangoes; he gave them to the ‘WorkerPeasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams’ who were deployed to bring the students under control. This was a small gesture with huge implications. This was at the height of the student uprisings in Chinese schools and universities. The Red Guards, the students, were Mao’s storm troopers, embodiments of the dictum that IT IS -IGHT TO -EBEL. But Mao gave the mangoes not to the students, but to the workers. It marked the end of student power and the handing over of control of the Cultural Revolution to the workers, which meant in effect to the army. This political shift was celebrated as an act of altruistic generosity. The mangoes were preserved in formaldehyde; copies were made out of wax and kept in glass domes, like the relic of a saint. They were distributed around the country. They appeared on posters, tray cloths, and enamel mugs. They were represented on huge floats in processions. The wax copies were kept in shrines in factories or schools. A feature film was made, The Song of the Mango. We have the absurd, the apotheosis of a common fruit, the transformation of an immaterial quality – the generosity of the great helmsman and his wisdom – into a material object. A political shift with huge consequences. Tens of thousands of students’ studies and lives were disrupted, often irrevocably, as they were sent for years to a form of penal servitude in distant corners of the country. The students had served their purpose, resurrecting the unquestioned political supremacy of Mao. Now not only could they be dispensed with, but they could be crushed. Mao could be both the force behind the students and the force stopping them, agitator and policeman together. We spin out in two directions: sideways to the politics of fruit and vegetables; and staying around the edges of the periphery to the year 1968, to echoes of students in revolt elsewhere in the world. We should entertain both trajectories at the same time.
96 Notes Towards a Model Opera
1968
B.ACK PA(/T(/G
1968. The student revolts in Paris of May ’68. The student revolts in Paris and elsewhere were not the same as the student-led Cultural Revolutionary actions, but there were points of connection. Both tried to harness the energy of revolt among students and scholars, rather than relying on the organisation of the party. How could one find a revolutionary activity in Europe that escaped the moribund straightjacket of the old Stalinist communist parties? In China, how could Mao use this energy to re-assert a continuing revolutionary role for the party (and let us not forget this – for himself). The opposition to the Vietnam War, which reached us even in South Africa. Why do I remember this? Not just from an abstract or inherent interest in history. In 1968 I was thirteen years old. I was in Johannesburg. I had such a strong feeling of being born five years too late, and in the wrong country. If only I had been eighteen and in Paris or Berlin, I could have been part of these student protests. Students at the local university then and later did hold protests on the road at the edge of the university grounds. But it felt like the ballet dancer in Boksburg, a statement of longing to be in a different centre. I thought at the time, in five years time when I am eighteen, the Vietnam War will be over; students will be back at their studies; I will have missed it all. I was right. But then of course in the mid-nineteen seventies things in South Africa did change dramatically. I know I should be talking about the politics of the mango at the same time. We will get to it and then you have retrospectively to place them one on top of the other. Further edges here. From mangoes to 1968 to Paris to Johannesburg, and the thirteen year-old looking at newspaper photographs. The image of Jan Palach burning himself in Prague after the Russian invasion, in the Prague Spring. Another image of a Buddhist monk burning himself in protest in Saigon. I had remembered this also as 1968 or 1969. Looking it up, I see it was 1963 – but I wouldn’t have seen the photograph until 1968 or 1969. This is Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk protesting over the policies of the South Vietnamese government. He sat in the road, four other monks doused him with petrol, and he set himself alight. I put the images together. A shocking statement of belief and commitment: how could you believe in something so much as to do that to yourself? What pulled me so much closer into the photo was a detail, the motorcar behind the monk. It was our motorcar, an Austin Westminster A95 which we used to drive through the night to Plettenberg Bay on holidays. I was taken to school in it. This most respectable British car, an Austin Westminster, driven all the way to Johannesburg and all the way to Saigon. To return from the sideways look at 1968 to the Chinese politics of vegetables and their representation.
In China, there is a long history of politics in vegetables and 3owers and their representation. As early as the 13th century, a painting of a stem lettuce (upright and tall) stood for an educated man. Bitter bamboo shoots represented good government (a good government will accept di5cult and bitter advice). Chinese court painters who had displeased the emperor and been sent into exile expressed their protest in their painting. That which was white was painted black – black blossoms on a branch. They were known as the Black Painters. Other paintings of fruit and vegetables made subtle political commentaries. If the weeds in the painting were too close to the bok choy, the emperor was paying insu5cient attention to his territories and subjects. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, painters whose work was described as being too formal or not revolutionary in subject matter were castigated as ‘Black Painters’. Their careers and those of their supporters amongst the nomenclatura were ended. Of course in many cases the clashes were between people in power, and the artists were merely acceptable casualties in their battles. But there were real arguments. It comes back to the studio. What should an artist paint? Revolutionary narrative in a familiar form? The Peking Opera? The ballet en pointe? Or a new way of making art in which the ostensible subject matter was never the real subject of the art?
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M NE, IN ,HE G RDEN For some years now I have been drawing 3owers, partly for the pleasure of the activity, transforming the petal into ink and paper; and partly as a resistance to the pressure to work on big themes, and often in reference to the great French painter Edouard Manet, most sublime painter of peonies and lilacs; but also painter of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, a painting that places him in the company of Goya and his 3rd of May, and later of course of Picasso and his Guernica. This is a link from the studio, a private link, as it were. How Manet painted the bunch of asparagus, how he showed the sheen on the foil of a bottle of champagne, are the concern and envy of someone in a studio. But the echoes are wider. Further peripheral thought. Manet painted The Execution of Emperor Maximilian in 1868 or ‘69. The emperor, abandoned by his Austrian family, was captured by Mexican revolutionaries and shot in 1867. His last act before his overthrow was to order from Trieste, his previous home, one thousand nightingales to fill the gardens of the palace with song by night.
P RIS 1871 So there is a double link to the painter, to fruit and flowers and vegetables in China and in Paris, but of course the great link is to the Paris Commune of 1871. This was a spontaneous peoples’ uprising, and was an inspiration during the Cultural Revolution and particularly during the student protests. On the same streets in 1968, the students pried some of the cobbles from the streets used in the 1871 Paris Commune. The red flag of the Model Opera makes a semaphore to the red flags of the Place de la République a hundred years before. Now citizens, we remind you that more than ever we must rally around our red flag to preserve the Republic. Long Live the Commune. Long Live the Republic. – statement in the newspaper of The Paris Commune, the 16th of May, 1871. This flag is shattered into fragments. Four hundred thousand students in Tiananmen Square, each waving their own red book on the thoughts of Chairman Mao. Their own red flag. And the Internationale of course, the anthem of the socialist movement around the world, all spreading out from Paris. There are echoes of clear differences. Paris in 1871 is not totalising. There is space in the official Commune newspaper for other events: news of the death of the baritone while playing dominoes, the diamond found in the Cape. Even under the siege, artists are invited to apply for the Rome Prize. Three days later they are invited to appear at the Théâtre Châtelet for military training to defend the city. The Louvre museum sends out a communiqué vehemently denying that it is planning to sell its collection of antiquities in London. We are spinning in time: 1871, 1968, 1963, 2015; and in space: Shanghai, Paris, Czechoslovakia, Johannesburg. Nightingales and sparrows buffeted across the world. 98 Notes Towards a Model Opera
P SQUIN DE G INS, MYSELF The central tenet of the great proletarian Cultural Revolution was the transformation of the consciousness of the people. Partly this was to be achieved by exemplary model: the perfect model peasant, the model worker, the model soldier – these as shown in the Model Operas. But part was done through criticism and destruction of the old. The world was divided into the good, the comparatively good, and the bad. The bad to be rooted out. Self-criticism struggle sessions. There are grotesque images of people who are accused of either rightist views, or of having the wrong class position. An image of them wearing long, pointed dunce caps and sandwich boards proclaiming their faults. These echo several of Goya’s etchings from the early nineteenth century. The image of victims of the Inquisition, chained in dunce’s caps, wearing sandwich-boards on which their crimes are written: an orthodoxy and authority with no place for uncertainty or criticism. This dance of the dunces is the backstage dance of the Model Operas. We bring it into the studio. The fool’s cap and the sandwich board become some of the props for the project. A megaphone inverted to become a dunce cap becomes its own mute. The Paris Commune was crushed. After weeks of the barricade, there followed the semaine sanglante, the week of blood: the repression and execution of the communards. Maximilian could have been replaced by hundreds of others in Manet’s paintings. Karl Marx, whose writings had been the inspiration for many in the Commune, wrote at the time of the ‘necessary failure of their revolution’ (the proletariat was insufficiently aware of itself and its class position to make a revolution). We are gathering around us pots and pans, Manet’s 3owers, the bok choy of Chinese vegetables, childhood memories, ballet shoes and the sparrows. In China, even during the Cultural Revolution, some of its leaders wrote of the ‘probable defeat’ of it, and of ‘the probable imminent failure’. So the idea of failure, probable, impending or necessary – take one’s choice – sits on the walls of the studio, an element in the mix; but also inevitably the question of hope behind the failure. Where does that leave us? China, Paris, old French colonialism, new colonialism. We set all in motion. An incoherent hullabaloo. What are the operas that could be made? Do we call up Patrice Lumumba? Or Nyerere’s ujamaa theory of African Socialism? The hullabaloo is in the centre. Cohesion temporary. Defeat certain, but temporary. Success certain, but temporary. Hope and failure: two sparrows 3ying through the din of the pots and pans of the edicts and the theories and private histories.
This lecture was fi rst presented by William Kentridge at Design Indaba 2015, Cape Town, 2015
Edouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1867. Lithograph, 54.8 × 72 cm (paper), 33.3 × 43.2 cm (print). Print: Lemercier, Paris. Museum der Moderne Salzburg
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O Sentimental Machine
O Sentimental Machine 2015 Five-channel video installation with four megaphones, HD video, sound 9:55 minutes Commissioned by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev for SALTWATER: Theory of Thought Forms 14th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, 015 Musical composition and arrangement Video editing and construction Costume design Director of Photography Sound mix
Philip Miller
Voice Theremin Bouzouki Piano
Joanna Dudley Janus Fouché Jannous Aukema Philip Miller
Actor
Sue Pam-Grant
Mazi. 19 0s Composer Singer
Necip Celal Andel Seyyan Hanim
Snežana Marović Janus Fouché Greta Goiris Duško Marović Gavan Eckhart
Right: Still from O Sentimental Machine, 015
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Installation view, O Sentimental Machine, SALTWATER: Theory of Thought Forms, 14th Istanbul Biennial, Hotel Splendid Palace, BĂźyĂźkada Island, Istanbul, 015
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Overleaf: Workshop stills from O Sentimental Machine, Johannesburg, 015
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Overleaf: stills from screen three (main screen)
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Sabine Breitwieser
Performing the Archive of History in Shorthand
At the 14 th Istanbul Biennial in 2015, entitled SALTWATER: Theory of Thought Forms, William Kentridge surprised audiences with a new cinematographic installation at one of the exhibition venues, the holiday island of Büyükada, one of the Princes’ Islands. Unlike the animated films for which he is famous, this installation made no direct use of drawings. O Sentimental Machine (2015) was conceived as a commission by the biennale and, in the time available, Kentridge was unable to make a film based on his ‘drawings for projections’, the method he developed in the late 1980s. However, given his earlier projects, like his stage sets for The Nose (2010), an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich based on Nikolai Gogol’s story of the same name, and Notes Towards a Model Opera (2015), a video installation about the cultural revolution in China, and in connection with his own Lithuanian-Jewish origins, he was attracted to the theme that had been proposed to him – Léon Trotsky, who had lived in a villa on Büyükada Island in the Sea of Marmara while in
exile in Istanbul from 1929 to 1933. Today, that building is a ruin situated in a romantically overgrown garden [FIG. 1 OVERLEAF]. In his contribution, Kentridge intentionally chose an artistic form in which his working method is made transparent in relation to the concrete subject matter. However, the place at his disposal for his artistic reflection was not the Trotsky villa, but the Hotel Splendid Palace, which dates from 1908, its silver domes welcoming those arriving on the island from Istanbul. There, Kentridge chose a theatre-like space, the landing on the first floor, that he first transferred to his studio in the form of an architectural model, from which he then developed his new work. The studio, for Kentridge, is a place that provides scope for free associations, experiments and utopias. Here, he engages with issues and topics by staging them, as it were, frequently in the form of a drawing process. For his animated films, he captures this process in its individual stages: he takes a photo of a drawing and then partly or completely erases it, then reworks and photographs 225
Fig 1 Ruin of Trotsky’s villa on Büyükada Island today
226 O Sentimental Machine
it again, and so on, before compiling the resulting images into a film. He also experiments with kinetic objects, developing them in his studio together with his team and later using them in his films and operas, or improvises short scenes that include himself and others as actors, and which find their way into his various works. Yet the studio is more than just a place of free thought and art production. Kentridge uses it as a kind of archive, having repeated recourse to its reservoir of ideas and the traces of earlier artistic involvements, which he then re-processes. Generally, his handmade drawings, printed graphics and the improvised scenes in his films are rebelliously directed against the ‘fate of the arts under the pressure of advanced technologies’ 1 and even against the ‘homogeneity of “contemporary” languages of representation as well as the non-representational visual art developed during the Modern Age’.2 His methods may entail a considerable amount of time, but they provide great artistic freedom, and the work has a lightness that belies the process of their making. Reviewing Kentridge’s original artistic practice, it is clear that despite his concentration on the technically reproducible medium of film, this recent work is not devoid of the timeconsuming method of drawing he often employs. Instead, it represents a revitalisation and, to a certain degree, a clarification of his method of using drawing as a medium generating a process. In it, he employs film like a sketch that freely produces associations and movement, similar to the flow of his drawings. According to Kentridge, O Sentimental Machine is a form of ‘shorthand for drawing’3 in which the slow process of drawing and erasure is replaced by the modern medium of film. Just as the hand moves the pencil over and back across the sheet of paper, then extinguishes the drawing by erasing it, thereby creating space for further images, in this film Kentridge generates ever new ideas in the form of found footage from film archives and specially shot scenes, as well as film material from earlier projects. These combine to produce a multi-part and multi-layered scenic ensemble that can be regarded as a kind of performance of an archive and thus a re-enactment of history. In its original form in Istanbul, O Sentimental Machine was staged as a site-specific five-channel video installation on the spacious landing of the first floor of the Hotel Splendid Palace and included back projections onto the glass windows of the four doors to the adjacent hotel rooms [FIG. 2].4 The work could be viewed comfortably from two chairs at a small table on the landing and from the staircase. The arrangement of the five films in that stage-like space was such that the frontal main projection and the four smaller back-projections created the impression of a multi-part scenario. All five films had soundtracks that blended to produce a sound collage on the landing. For the specific exhibition for which this text was written, Kentridge, together with the architect Sabine Theunissen, has produced an architectural mise-en-scène in which the group of films will henceforth be shown and will itself point to the original place, the history of the work and the resulting installation.
Fig 2 Installation view, O Sentimental Machine, SALT WATER: Theory of Thought Forms, 14th Istanbul Biennial, 2015
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The individual videos are a mixture of montages from film archives and scenes shot at the artist’s studio. The installation’s main frontal projection (in Istanbul it faced the sea) begins with a scene in which a woman presents historical film footage of Istanbul, the Bosphorus with ships [ IG. 3], Princes’ Islands with the lovely villas on the Sea of Marmara projected on a screen. Soon the accompanying music is interrupted by a text spoken in French in one of the other projections, but which on the main screen accompanies film documentation of a speech by Trotsky. Different video scenes recorded in Kentridge’s studio are faded into this sequence, giving a theatrical and surreal aspect to Trotsky’s speech. On an apparently endless roll of paper a woman is typing a text that is being dictated to her by a mechanical megaphone. On a poster behind her back we read bizarre alternating inscriptions like ‘Power to the serviettes’ or ‘The wind to rescue speech’ [ IG. 4]. Later, her shadow appears wielding a huge pair of scissors. Kentridge himself, disguised as Trotsky, makes a speech accompanied by sweeping gestures. The same woman in different clothing poses in front of a large mirror, throwing typescripts into the air. In other scenes she does gymnastic exercises in front of what look like technical wall drawings, collecting her tears in a strange vessel [ IG. 5], which she holds under her eyes. The mechanical megaphone leads a life of its own, much like a human figure, and some of the other protagonists also mutate into machine-like creatures as their heads and legs are replaced by megaphones and wooden tripods. The brief storylines strung together here escalate when the machine-like creatures start to shoot all around them with guns. The full-screen sized numbers that appear next suggest an emphasis on money. Towards the end of the video, the self-made slapstick scenes are increasingly overwhelmed by footage originating from the Soviet Union: triumphant military parades at the end of the civil war, dancing bears [ IG. 6], 228 O Sentimental Machine
pre-revolutionary scenes of people swimming, among them Tsar Nicholas II [FIG. 7], interspersed by a speech given by Lenin. Because of the flickering effect typical of old film stock and the quality of the sound, all the video projections have a historic feel. This aspect of the installation in the old hotel building is underscored by the soundtrack, in which a Turkish love song Mazi (Past) from the 1920s, the Trotsky speech and The Internationale alternate or are acoustically superimposed (the composition and arrangement are by composer Philip Miller, a long-term collaborator with Kentridge). Opposite this film collage of found and specially-filmed scenes and to the left and right of the central projection are the four other videos, back-projected onto the windows of the hotel-room doors. In these, Kentridge takes up the theme of water, a defining image of the locality, and uses it in the same way as his method of erasing and overworking drawings so as to transfigure a scene. Some of the protagonists from the central projection appear again in two of these videos: Trotsky, making the same speech, and the mechanical megaphone, which also enunciates Trotsky’s speech but, towards the end, increasingly sings passages from the song Mazi (Past). In a staccato voice it appeals for democracy and against centralism, making statements like ‘This machine is the textbook we need, a source of knowledge and affection’, or ‘The question of socialism can only be answered if we find out how the spiritual and physical components of man can be construed, regulated and improved.’ When declaiming Trotsky’s speech about the nature of ‘the new man’ in the Soviet Union, the megaphone increasingly comes into conflict with its (human) feelings. It starts to sing verses from Mazi about love and grief in the voice of the female Turkish singer Seyyan Hanim, and on hearing ‘since then her heart is a ruin’, one cannot but think of the ruin of the Trotsky villa and the failure of the social utopias of that time. The scenes with Trotsky and the talking
Figs 3, 4, 5 & 6 Stills from screen three (main screen)
Fig 7 Still from screen two
megaphone have been inserted into a scenario featuring water rising and falling: the up and down movement gives the whole scene the sense of a litany – the never-ending story of failed utopias [FIG. 10 OVERLEAF]. On another of the windows, archive films from Russia are shown, including shots of people at stations taken from moving trains. We recognise Stalin being welcomed by masses of people, and in later scenes Trotsky also appears, delivering a speech out of a train window. This is followed by excerpts from a home movie by Trotsky with his wife on Princes’ Islands. Kentridge as Trotsky uses the large paper scissors to open his letters. Finally, images of the revolutionary’s murder in Mexico City in 1940 are faded in. All of these scenes are transfigured by means of underwater effects. The fourth fi lm was shot completely under water and features floating requisites from a past era: a typewriter and advertising material from Turkey. This referencing of history, of failed utopias, and Kentridge’s commitment to the use of analogue media and a subjective method and language, cannot just be regarded as a rejection of the technical media of modern or contemporary society. Indeed, in O Sentimental Machine Kentridge investigates the utopias concealed and possibly not yet fully exploited in the combination of man and machine. He tests a model in which the subject does not just simply take over (or lose) control and gain creative scope, but seeks performative dialogue through interaction. His point of departure for this is the theremin, an instrument with which he has been experimenting in his studio for some time. Its Russian inventor Leon Theremin (1896–1993) developed this first electronic musical instrument in 1920.5 It is played without being touched directly, the sound being produced and controlled by the changing position of both hands and the human body’s electrical field via two antenna-shaped electrodes and the electromagnetic field generated. There is 229
Figs 8 & 9 Stills from screen three (main screen)
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something strange about a performance with the theremin, as if a magician were at work. In one of the film scenes made for the installation in Istanbul, Kentridge himself plays a theremin using theatrical gestures – again in a guise reminiscent of Trotsky [FIG. 9]. The sound is broadcast through a megaphone attached to a sewing machine that causes the former to make ecstatic movements [FIG. 8]. The gestures required for the performance with the theremin are similar to Kentridge’s own gestures when drawing. Technical drawings on blackboards in the background of the performance underscore the significance of the experiment being presented here and something yet to be realised, or in other words, to be performed. For Kentridge, the drawing – particularly when technically transformed into a print – has always had an emphasis on its experimental potential in conjunction with political connotations, especially in connection with South Africa. In the 1970s he made silkscreen posters for the Black Trade Unions, for student protests and for experimental theatre performances in which he himself also acted. Printing techniques were simple means of capturing history, especially during the opposition to apartheid. Kentridge has never regarded the print as a mere technical reproduction; his prints are ‘much more than a manifestation of his astonishing drawing’.6 Kentridge usually sets out to test the limits of the technical reproduction process, and even when the technical scope was limited, he found ways to achieve the maximum variations possible through improvisation. In the early 1980s, his beginnings as an actor in experimental theatre, and perhaps also his unusual performative handling of printing techniques, motivated him to study acting at the École Internationale de Théâtre in Paris under Jacques Lecoq. Similar to Lecoq, whose work retrieves through movement the memories stored in our body, Kentridge also uses different forms of archives in his most recent work. He avails himself of various sources – from real documents of historical events to the private or unconscious corporeal archive – which he ‘presents’ as a kind of prop for his theatre. Film and all its possibilities, from historical footage to specially-filmed and manipulated scenes, are to be found as history lived anew, both on the stage at the Hotel Splendid Palace and now in the exhibition gallery. As for the Trotsky speech documented in the film, it is actually the recording of a presentation that never took place live because of a missing travel visa for France and so was only broadcast. In this particular speech, which Kentridge presents as a fi lm document and re-enacts himself, complete with exaggerated gestures, Trotsky emphasises that ‘[t]he education of the revolutionary demands an internalised democracy … and that the disciplined revolutionary has nothing to do with blind obedience.’ 7 Unlike Stalin’s centralism, against which Trotsky’s speech rails, his expectations of the ‘new man’ meant that the latter ‘has to constantly reinvent himself and even make his own errors’.8 In his text The Author as Producer of 1934,9
Walter Benjamin recalls Plato’s model of the state, in which poets are regarded as dangerous and superfluous. Benjamin calls on artists to influence the conditions of production ‘operatively’. That particular text is based on a speech intended for the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris that Benjamin – like Trotsky – never gave, but instead wrote as a historical document. In O Sentimental Machine Kentridge revisited what was already part of history but hadn’t yet been performed. Thus this work constitutes a report on his artistic work, a kind of ‘making of’, as he himself says.10 In it he attests to the studio as a utopian place, and to both his unconscious and real archives, which are waiting to be retrieved and re-enacted.
Fig 10 Still from screen one
1 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (eds.), Art since 1900, (London: Thames & Hudson, 200-) p. 65,. 2 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, exh. cat., (Brussels: Palais de Beaux Arts, 1::8) p. 11. , Transcription of video recording of ‘Belknap visitor lecture in the humanities in Princeton’, 1- October, 2015, Kentridge Archive, Johannesburg. During the installation and the preview of the biennale, Kentridge even stayed in one of the hotel rooms off the landing. 5 Robert Moog later developed the Moog synthesiser based on his experiences with copies of the Theremin instruments. 6 Judith B. Hecker, William Kentridge. Trace, exh. cat., (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010) p.10. This catalogue also contains an excellent chronology. 7 Transcript of the speech by Léon Trotsky taken from the subtitles of the Kentridge video 8 Ibid. : Walter Benjamin, ‘Der Autor als Produzent’ (The Author as Producer’), address to the Institute of the Study of Fascism, Paris, 27 April 1:,-, in Walter Benjamin, Aufsätze, Essays, Vortrage. Gesammelte Schriften Band II-2, ‘Der Autor als Produzent (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1::1) pp. 68,–701. See Understanding Brecht (London: Verso), new edition 200, 10 ‘Belknap visitor lecture’, op. cit.
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List of Works Chronology Bibliography
List of Works Works are listed in chronological order, and works created in the same year in alphabetical order. Dimensions are given as height by width by depth in both centimeters and inches. Works marked with an asterisk (*) are additions to the exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Works included in a section dedicated to the artist’s works on theater presented in Salzburg are listed at the end. When not otherwise specified, the exhibited works are courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery (New York, Paris, London), Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town) and Lia Rumma Gallery (Milan, Naples). 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, 2003 Nine-channel video installation with sound 7 films, 16 mm and 35 mm, based on live-action film, video and animated drawing, transferred to video (colour, silent) Fragments for Georges Méliès: Invisible Mending, 1:30 min. Balancing Act, 1:20 min. Tabula Rasa I, 2:50 min. Tabula Rasa II, 2:10 min. Moveable Assets, 2:40 min. Autodidact, 5:10 min. Feats of Prestidigitation, 1:50 min. Video editor: Catherine Meyburgh Day for Night, 6:32 min. Film, 16 mm and 35 mm, based on live-action film, video and animated drawing, transferred to video (colour, silent) Video editor: Catherine Meyburgh Journey to the Moon, 7:10 min. Film, 16 mm and 35 mm, based on live-action film, video and animated drawing, transferred to video (black and white, sound) Video editor: Catherine Meyburgh Music: Philip Miller Piano: Jill Richards Pianta della città di Napoli, 2009 Tapestry weave with embroidery Warp: polyester. Weft and embroidery: mohair, acrylic and polyester 300 × 394 cm (136 ⁵∕₈ × 178 ³∕₄ in.) Woven by the Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg, South Africa
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Streets of the City, 2009 Tapestry weave with embroidery Warp: polyester. Weft and embroidery: mohair, acrylic and polyester 440 × 443 cm (173 ¹∕₄ × 174 3∕₈ in.) Woven by the Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg, South Africa The Nose (with Strawberries), 2012 Tapestry weave with embroidery Warp: polyester. Weft and embroidery: mohair, acrylic and polyester 340 × 230 cm (133 ⁷∕₈ × 90 ¹∕₂ in.) Woven by the Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg, South Africa The Refusal of Time, 2012 Five-channel video projection Video (colour, sound) 30 min. (loop) Megaphones, breathing machine Produced by Marian Goodman Gallery (New York and Paris), Lia Rumma Gallery (Naples and Milan), Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg and Cape Town) Commissioned by Carolyn ChristovBakargiev for dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Acquired with funding from The New Carlsberg Foundation Untitled (Bicycle Wheel II), 2012 Steel, timber, brass, aluminium, bicycle parts and found objects 260 × 150 × 120 cm (102 3∕₈ × 59 × 47 ¹∕₄ in.) Second-hand Reading, 2013 Flipbook film from drawings on single pages of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary HD video (colour, sound) 7:01 min. (loop) *More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015 Eight-channel video installation HD video (colour, sound) 15 min. (loop) 4 megaphones Commissioned by EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam and Lichtsicht – Projection Biennale, Bad Rothenfelde, 2015 *Notes Towards a Model Opera, 2015 Three-channel video projection HD video (colour, sound) 11:22 min. (loop) O Sentimental Machine, 2015 Five-channel video installation HD video (black and white, sound) 9:55 min. 4 megaphones Commissioned by Carolyn ChristovBakargiev for SALTWATER: Theory of Thought Forms, 14th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, 2015; Exhibition venue: Hotel Splendid Palace, Büyükada Island, Istanbul, Turkey
Right Into Her Arms, 2016 Miniature model theatre with projected images, drawings and props Wood, steel, cardboard, found paper and found objects HD video, software and circuitry 11 min. 300 × 244 × 125 cm (11; ¹∕₈ × 96 × 49 ¹∕₄ in.) Heartbeat Sewing Machine, 2016 Wood, metal, rubber, found objects, electronic components, software and mechanically engineered parts 60 × 30 × 70 cm (23 ⁵∕₈ x 11 ¾ × 27 ¹∕₂ in.)
List of additional films included in Salzburg: 10 Drawings for Projection, 19;9-2011 10 films, 16 mm or 35 mm, animated, transferred to video (colour and black and white, sound) Direction, drawing, and photography: William Kentridge Editing if not mentioned otherwise: Angus Gibson Production if not mentioned otherwise: Free Filmmakers Co-operative, Johannesburg, South Africa Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, 19;9 Sound design: Warwick Sony Music: Duke Ellington; South Kaserne Choir Monument, 1990 3:11 min. Sound design: Catherine Meyburgh Music: Edward Jordan Mine, 1991 5:50 min. Music: Antonin Dvorák, Cello Concerto in H Minor, op. 104 Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old, 1991 ;:22 min. Music: Antonin Dvorák, String Quartet in F, op. 96; South Kaserne Choir; M’appari from Friedrich von Flotow, Martha (sung by Enrico Caruso) Felix in Exile, 1994 ;:43 min. Sound design: Wilbert Schübel Music: Philip Miller, String Trio for Felix in Exile (performed by Peta-Ann Holdcroft, Marjan Vonk-Stirling, and Jan Pustejovsky); Motsumi Makhene, Go Tlapsha Didiba (sung by Sibongile Khumalo) History of the Main Complaint, 1996 5:50 min. Sound design: Wilbert Schübel Music: Claudio Monteverdi, Ardo
WEIGHING … and WANTING, 199; 6:20 min. Editing: Angus Gibson and Catherine Meyburgh Sound design: Wilbert Schübel Music: Philip Miller (performed by Peta-Ann Holdcroft, Marjan Vonk-Stirling, and Ivo Ivanov) Stereoscope, 1999 ;:22 min. Editing: Catherine Meyburgh Sound design: Wilbert Schübel Music: Philip Miller (performed by Peta-Ann Holdcroft, Marjan Vonk-Stirling, Ishmael Kambule, and Minas Berberyan) Tide Table, 2003 ;:50 min. Editing: Catherine Meyburgh Sound design: Wilbert Schübel Music: Franco et le T.P. O.K. Jazz, “Likambo Ya Ngana”; singers from the Market Theatre Laboratory Other Faces, 2011 9:36 min. Editing: Catherine Meyburgh Sound design: Wilbert Schübel and Gavan Eckhart Music: Philip Miller (performed by Ann Masina and Bham Ntabeni)
Preliminary list of works included in the extended exhibition on theatre and opera in Salzburg: Installations and stagings UBU REX, 1975 In cooperation with the Junction Avenue Theatre Company (JATC), A Box, and University Players, Johannesburg, South Africa Silkscreen print 79.; × 4;.5 cm (31 3∕₈ × 19 ¹∕₈ in.) The Goat that Sneezed, 1975 In cooperation with the JATC, Johannesburg, South Africa Silkscreen print on brown paper 77 × 52 cm (30 ¹∕₄ × 20 ¹∕₂ in.) The Fantastical History of a Useless Man, 1976 In cooperation with the JATC, Johannesburg, SouthAfrica 2 silkscreen prints on brown paper 55 × ;0.5 cm (21 ⁵∕₈ × 31 ³∕₄ in.) / ;0.5 × 53.5 cm (3/ ¾ × 2/ in.) Wooze Bear, /977 Silkscreen print ;0.3 × 52.5 cm (3/ ⁵∕₈ × 20 ¹¹∕₁₅ in.) Wooze Bear and the Zoo Bears, 2; March /977 In cooperation with the JATC, Johannesburg, South Africa Offset lithography 60 × 42 cm (23 ⁵∕₈ × /6 ¹∕₂ in.)
Are the workers in your factory unfairly dismissed?, /97; Silkscreen print on brown paper 65.5 × 55.5 cm (25 ³∕₄ × 2/ ⁷∕₈ in.) Randlords & Rotgut, /97; In cooperation with the JATC, Johannesburg, South Africa Silkscreen print on brown paper ;0.9 × 53 cm (3/ ⁷∕₈ × 20 ⁷∕₈ in.) Travesties, /97; In cooperation with Malcolm Purkey and The Market Theatre, Johannesburg, South Africa Silkscreen print 65.5 × 46 cm (25 ³∕₄ × /; ¹∕₈ in.) Will of a Rebel, /979 In cooperation with the JATC, Johannesburg, South Africa Silkscreen print on brown paper 60 × 45.5 cm (23 ⁵∕₈ × /7 ⁷∕₈ in.) Security, /979 In cooperation with the JATC, Johannesburg, South Africa Silkscreen print on brown paper 57 × 35 cm (22 ¹∕₂ × /3 ³∕₄ in.) Dikhitsheneng (The Kitchen), /9;0 Production: JATC, Johannesburg, South Africa Silkscreen print on brown paper 62 × 44 cm (24 ³∕₈ × /7 ³∕₈ in.) Dikhitsheneng & Security, /9;0 Silkscreen print on brown paper 52 × 36 cm (20 ¹∕₂ × /4 ¹∕₈ in.) Ilanga le zo Phumela Abasebenzi (The Sun Will Rise for the Workers), /97; In cooperation with the JATC, Johannesburg, South Africa Silkscreen print on brown paper 62.7 × 4/.; cm (24 ³∕₄ × /6 ¹∕₂ in.) Emily’s Wheelbarrow Show and the Infamous Mr. Sterntrap, /9;3 Silkscreen print on brown paper 6/.3 × 3; cm (24 ¹∕₈ × /5 in.) Sophiatown, /9;7 Silkscreen print 25 × 20 cm / 74 × 42 cm (9 ⁷∕₈ × 7 ⁷∕₈ in. / 29 ¹∕₈ × /6 ¹∕₂ in.) Tooth and Nail, /9;; In cooperation with the JATC, Johannesburg, South Africa Silkscreen print 62 × 44 cm (24 ³∕₈ × /7 ³∕₈ in.) Woyzeck on the Highveld, /992 In cooperation with the Handspring Puppet Company, Cape Town, South Africa Digital print ;4 × 60 cm (33 ¹∕₈ × 23 ⁵∕₈ in.)
SOPHIATOWN (1987) Director: Malcolm Purkey Music: JATC Set design: William Kentridge, Sarah Roberts
Learning the Flute, 2003 Letterpress on encyclopedia pages, mounted on //0 sheets of paper 26 × 36.5 cm (/0 ¹∕₄ × /4 ³∕₈ in. each), overall: 2;/.3 × 356.6 cm (//0 ³∕₄ × /40 ³∕₈ in.)
Sophiatown, /9;7 Theatre set drawings (selection) Gouache on brown paper Various dimensions
Preparing the Flute, 2005 Model theatre 2 films, 35 mm, animated, transferred to video (colour, sound) 2/:06 min. (loop) Video projection onto wooden structure, /77 × /66 × 70 cm (63 ³∕₄ × 65 ³∕₈ × 27 ¹∕₂ in.) MAXXI. Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome
T&I, /990 Film, /6mm, transferred to video (black and white, sound) ca. /5 min. Woyzeck on the Highveld, /992 Drawings (selection) Puppets IL RITORNO D’ULISSE (1641) Music: Claudio Monteverdi Libretto: Giacomo Badoaro Director: William Kentridge Film and sets: William Kentridge Musical director: Philippe Pierlot Set, puppet and costume design: Adrian Kohler Production: Standard Bank National Arts Festival, the State Theatre, Mannie Manim Productions, the Flemish government, Wiener Festwochen (Vienna) and Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels) Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, /99; Drawings, drawing fragments (selection) Charcoal and pastel on paper variable dimensions Puppets Wood, variable dimensions Handspring Puppet Company, Cape Town, South Africa
The Magic Flute ‘Bird Catching’, 2006 Suite of /0 etchings Acquatint and drypoint on Hahnemühle Warm White paper 34 × 39 cm (/3 ³∕₈ × /5 ³∕₈ in. each) Printed by Artist Proof Studio, Johannesburg, South Africa Costumes Fabric, painted, variable dimensions THE NOSE (1930) Music: Dmitri Shostakovich Libretto: Georgi Ionin, Alexander Preis, Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin, and Dmitri Shostakovich based on the satirical short text Hoc (The Nose) by Nikolai Gogol, /;36 Director: William Kentridge with Luc De Wit Video: William Kentridge Projection designer: Catherine Meyburgh Set design: Sabine Theunissen and William Kentridge Costume designer: Greta Goiris Lighting designer: Urs Schönebaum Production: The Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY, US, 5 March 20/0
Working model Video of animation (black and white, silent) DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE (1)91) (The Magic Flute) Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Libretto: Emanuel Schikaneder Director: William Kentridge with Luc De Wit Video: William Kentridge Projection designer: Catherine Meyburgh Set design: Sabine Theunissen and William Kentridge Costume designer: Greta Goiris Lighting designer: Jennifer Tipton Production: Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, 2005
The Nose, 2009/20/5 Drawings (selection) variable dimensions Untitled (Senseless Requests; I am Not Me; You are Lying; Portable Monuments; The Shadow of a Shadow) 5 photogravures 42-44 × 4;-6/ cm (/6 ⁹∕₁₆ - /7 ⁵∕₁₆ × /; ⁷∕₈ - 24 in.) Greta Goiris and William Kentridge Ensemble, 2009-/5 Digital archival print on cotton paper, marine plywood hardboard, coloured crayons, steel, wood glue /50 × 356 × /5 cm (59 ¹∕₁₆ × /40 ³∕₁₆ × 5 ¹⁵∕₁₆ in.)
Backdrops made for "Telegrams from The Nose", concert with projections by William Kentridge and music by François Sarhan, performed by François Sarhan and Ictus Ensemble Acrylic on canvas 320 × 4;0 cm (/26 × /;9 in.) Working models The Metropolitan Opera, New York Props for The Nose Video of the performance at The Metropolitan Opera, New York, 20/3 HD video (colour, sound). /22 min. The Metropolitan Opera, New York LULU (193)) Music: Alban Berg Libretto: Alban Berg based on Pandora’s Box by Frank Wedekind, /902 Director: William Kentridge with Luc De Wit Film projections: William Kentridge Projection designer: "atherine Meyburgh Set designer: Sabine Theunissen "ostume designer: Greta Goiris Lighting designer: Urs Schönebaum Production: "o-production of the Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY, US, Dutch National Opera & Ballet, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the English National Opera, London, UK Lulu, 20/2-20/& Drawings (selection) Indian ink and various media on found paper variable dimensions "ostumes Papier-mâché and other materials WOZZECK (19 5) Music: Alban Berg Libretto: based on the play Woyzeck, by Georg Büchner, /;&6/&7 Director: William Kentridge with Luc De Wit Film projections: William Kentridge Projection designer: "atherine Meyburgh Set designer: Sabine Theunissen "ostume designer: Greta Goiris Lighting designer: Urs Schönebaum Production: Salzburg Festival 20/7, Salzburg, Austria Wozzeck, 20/7 Ephemera, drawings, models, working material, props
Greta Goiris and William Kentridge Costume (coat) for The Nose, 2009 Cotton fabric, acrylic paint /20 × ;0 cm (47 ¼ × 3/ ½ in.)
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Chronology
1979 William Kentridge, Market Gallery, Johannesburg (solo) 1981 Domestic Scenes, Market Gallery, Johannesburg (solo) National Graphic Show, Association of Art, Bellville, "ape Town (group)
William Kentridge Born /955, Johannesburg, South Africa Lives and works in Johannesburg
1985 William Kentridge, "assirer Fine Art, Johannesburg (solo) Cape Town Triennial ’85, South African National Gallery, "ape Town (group)
Education 1973–6 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 1976–8 Johannesburg Art Foundation 1981–2 École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris
Eleven Figurative Artists, Market Gallery, Johannesburg (group) Tributaries, Market Theatre, Johannesburg; toured Germany (group) 1986 Claes Eklundh, William Kentridge, Thomas Lawson, Simon/Neuman Galleries, New York (group) But This Is the Reality, Market Gallery, Johannesburg (group) William Kentridge, "assirer Fine Art, Johannesburg (solo) Salestalk, Durban Film Festival, Durban; "ape Town Film Festival, "ape Town (film screening) /9;7 Three Hogarth Satires, University Art Galleries, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg; toured as Hogarth in Johannesburg to "assirer Fine Art, Johannesburg (group) In the Heart of the Beast, Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London (solo) Standard Bank Young Artist Award Exhibition, Grahamstown; toured to Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg; University Art Galleries, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; University Art Gallery UNISA, Pretoria; Durban Art Gallery, Durban (solo)
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1990 William Kentridge: Drawings and Graphics, "assirer Fine Art and Market Gallery, Johannesburg (solo) Art from South Africa, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; toured the UK (group) 1991 Five Gouache Collage Heads, Newtown Galleries, Johannesburg (solo) Little Morals, Taking Liberties Gallery, Durban (group) 1992 Drawings for Projection, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; toured to Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London (solo) 1993 Easing of the Passing Hours: Robert Hodgins, William Kentridge, Deborah Bell, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (group) William Kentridge, Ruth Bloom Gallery, Los Angeles (solo) Incroci Del Sud: Affi nities – Contemporary South African Art, 45th Venice Biennale, Venice (group) Edinburgh International Film Festival, Edinburgh (film screening) Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old, /99/, Annecy International Festival of Animated Film, Annecy, France; toured to Best of Annecy Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; "entre Georges Pompidou, Paris (film screening) 1994 Trackings: History as Memory, Document and Object: New Work by Four South African Artists, Art First, London (group) Displacements, Block Gallery, North Western University, "hicago (group) David Krut Editions, Spacex Gallery, University of Exeter, Exeter (group)
1988 William Kentridge, "assirer Fine Art, Johannesburg (solo)
Felix in Exile, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (solo)
1989 Responsible Hedonism, Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London (solo)
1995 Africus, /st Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg (group)
African Encounters, Dome Gallery, New York; toured to Washington D" (group)
Memory and Geography (with Doris Bloom), Stefania Miscetti Gallery, Rome (group)
Panoramas of Passage: Changing Landscapes of South Africa, Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts, Albany Museum, Grahamstown; toured to US and South Africa (group) Mayibuye I Afrika: 8 South African Artists, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London (group) On the Road: Works by 1. Southern African Artists, Delfina Studio Trust, London (group) Eidophusikon, 4th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (group) Annecy International Film Festival, Annecy (film screening) 1996 Eidophusikon, Annandale Galleries, Sydney (solo) Colours: Art from South Africa, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (group) Simunye: We Are One. Ten South African Artists, Adelson Galleries, New York (group) Faultlines: Inquiries into Truth and Reconciliation, The "astle, "ape Town (group) Jurassic Technologies Revenant, /0th Sydney Biennial, Sydney (group) Ici et Ailleurs, film section within Inklusion-Exklusion: Versuch einer neuen Kartografie der Kunst im Zeitalter von Poskolonialismus und Globaler Migration, Graz (group) Don’t Mess with Mr. Inbetween: 15 Artistas da Africa do Sul, "ulturgest, Lisbon (group) Campo 6: The Spiral Village, Galleria "ivica d’Arte Moderna e "ontemporanea, Turin, toured to Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (group) Festival des Dessins Animés, Brussels (film screening) 1997 William Kentridge: Applied Drawings, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (solo) Città/Nattura: Mostra Internazionale di Arte Contemporanea, Villa Mazzante, Rome (group) The Individual and Memory, 6th Havana Biennial, Havana (group) Documenta X, Museum Fredericianum, Kassel (group)
UBU ±1.1, with Deborah Bell and Robert Hodgins, Observatory Museum, Grahamstown; toured to Johannesburg (group) Truce: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (group) Trade Routes: History and Geography, 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg (group) Les Arts de la Résistance, Festival Fin de Siécle, Johannesburg, Galerie Michel Luneau, Nantes (group) Delta, AR" Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris (group) 1998 William Kentridge, The Drawing "enter, New York (solo) Vertical Time, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York (group) William Kentridge, The Museum of "ontemporary Art, San Diego (solo) William Kentridge, Stephen Friedman Gallery and A22 Gallery, London (solo) William Kentridge, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; toured to Kunstverein, Munich; Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz; Museu d’Art "ontemporani de Barcelona, MA"BA, Barcelona; Serpentine Gallery, London; "entre de la Vielle "harité, Marseille (solo) Hugo Boss Prize Exhibition, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (group) New Acquisitions, "arnegie Museum of American Art, Pittsburgh (group) FNB Vita Award Exhibition, Sandton "ivic Gallery, Johannesburg (group) Age of Electronic Image: Shoot at the Chaos, Spiral Garden, Tokyo (group) /4th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (group) Dreams and Clouds, Kulturhuset, Stockholm (group) Unfinished History, Walker Art "enter, Minneapolis; toured to Museum of "ontemporary Art "hicago, "hicago (group) Cinco Continentes y una Ciudad, Museo de la "iudad, Mexico "ity (group)
Contemporary Art from South Africa, Riksutstillinger, Oslo at Stenersenmuseet, Oslo (group)
William Kentridge and Kara Walker, "entre d’Art "ontemporain, Geneva (two-artist)
William Kentridge: Recent Editions, Robert Brown Gallery, Washington D" (solo)
Animation Festival of Brussels, Brussels (film screening)
Outbound: Passages from the ’9.’s, "ontemporary Arts Museum, Houston (group)
William Kentridge, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D"; toured in US and South Africa (solo)
Man + Space, &rd Kwangju Biennale Korea 2000, Kwangju (group) William Kentridge,
Lines of Connection, Gallery Mam, Douala, "ameroon (group)
XXVI World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam (film screening) 1999 Projects 68: William Kentridge, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (solo)
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (solo)
William Kentridge: Recent Editions, Robert Brown Gallery, Washington D" (solo)
William Kentridge: New Work, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (solo)
William Kentridge, Galleria Lia Rumma, Naples (solo)
Procession: Sculpture by William Kentridge, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (solo)
La Ville, le Jardin, la Mémoire, Villa Medici, Rome (group) ←REWIND→FAST FORWARD.ZA, Van Reekum Museum, Apeldoorn (group) d’APERTutto, 4;th Venice Biennale, Venice (group) The Passion and the Wave, 6th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (group)
Vertical Painting, MoMA PS/, New York (solo) 3rd Shanghai Biennale, New Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai (group) La beauté in fabula, Palais de Papes, Avignon (group) William Kentridge: Procession, Annandale Galleries, Sydney (solo)
William Kentridge: Sleeping on Glass, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris (solo)
Closer to One Another, 7th Havana Biennial, Havana (group)
International Art Festival, Tachikawa, Tokyo (group)
Contemporary African Art Show, Videobrasil, São Paulo (group)
William Kentridge: Stereoscope, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (solo)
RETREKS: unSUNg CITY, Arts Alive Festival, Johannesburg, toured to Amsterdam (group)
A Sangre y Fuego, Espai d’Art "ontemporani de "astelló, Valencia (group)
International Trick Film Festival, Stuttgart (film screening)
Kunstwelten im Dialog, Museum Ludwig, "ologne (group)
3/nd New Zealand Film Festival, Wellington (film screening)
Carnegie International +999//... CI 99:.., "arnegie Museum of American Art, Pittsburgh (group)
Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (/99/) selected for ‘Jewels of "entury’, Annecy International Festival of Animated Film, Annecy (film screening)
/8th International Film Festival Rotterdam, Nederlands Architectuurinstitut, Rotterdam (film screening) 8th Rencontres Vidéo Art Plastique, "entre d’Art "ontemporain de Basse-Normandie, Hérouville Saint-"lair (film screening) 2000 The Self is Something Else: Art at the End of the /.th Century, Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, Düsseldorf (group)
2001 Mega Wave: Towards a New Synthesis, Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama Exhibition Hall, Tokyo (group) The Short Century, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; toured to Haus der Kulturen der Welt and MartinGropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum of "ontemporary Art, "hicago; MoMA PS/ and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (group)
Arbeit Essen Angst, Kokerei Zollverein (Zeitgenossische Kunst und Kritik), "ologne (group) William Kentridge, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris (solo) ARS .+: Unfolding Perspectives, Museum of "ontemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (group) Animations, MoMA PS/, New York; toured to Kunst-Werke, Berlin (group) The Animated Films of William Kentridge, San Francisco "inematheque, San Francisco (film screening) 2002 William Kentridge, Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan (solo) The Divine Comedy: Francisco Goya, Buster Keaton, William Kentridge, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (group) William Kentridge, Annandale Galleries, Sydney (solo) Documenta ++, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (group) Moving Pictures, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (group) Screen Memories: Imitation of Life, Art Tower Mito, Tokyo (group) Grafinnova /../: International Exhibition of Prints and Drawings, Pohjanmaan Museo, Vaasa, Finland (group) Imagining the Book: International Contemporary Art Encounter, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria (group) Tech/No/Zone: Contemporary Media Art, Museum of "ontemporary Art, Taipei (group) Apparition: The Action of Appearing, Arnolfini, Bristol; toured to Kettle’s Yard, "ambridge (group) William Kentridge: Zeno Writing, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (solo)
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Fundavisual Latina, "aracas (film screening)
William Kentridge, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (solo)
/6th Cleveland International Film Festival, "leveland, Ohio (film screening)
Faces in the Crowd / Volti nella Folla, Whitechapel Gallery, London; toured to "astello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte "ontemporanea, Turin (group)
Cinematic Imaginary After Film: Future Cinema, ZKM/Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe (film screening) 2003 Coexistence: Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham; toured to South African National Gallery, "ape Town (group) William Kentridge, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (solo) 6th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah Art Museum and Expo "entre Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (group) William Kentridge: Journey to the Moon and Fragments for Georges Méliès, Baltic Art "enter, Visby, Sweden (solo) Transferts, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (group) William Kentridge, Mönchehaus Museum für Moderne Kunst, Goslar, Germany (solo) 2004 William Kentridge, "astello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte "ontemporanea, Turin; toured to K20/2/, Düsseldorf; Museum of "ontemporary Art, Sydney; Musée d’Art "ontemporain de Montréal, Montreal; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg; Miami Art "entral, Miami (solo) William Kentridge, Art & and la "RA", Valence; toured to Musée "hateau d’Annecy, Annecy (solo)
Projection of 9 Drawings for Projection films accompanied by live music, Spier, "ape Town, toured to "onstitution Hill, Johannesburg; Kliptown, Soweto; Newtown, Johannesburg (film screening) 6+st Venice International Film Festival, Venice, Italy (commission) 2005 William Kentridge, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (solo) The Experience of Art, 5/st Venice Biennale, Venice (group) William Kentridge , Model Arts + Niland Gallery, Sligo, Ireland; toured to Limerick "ity Gallery of Art, Limerick; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (solo) William Kentridge: Black Box/ Chambre Noire, Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin (solo) William Kentridge, Galeria Lia +umma, Naples (solo) William Kentridge: Fragments for Georges Méliès, Museum of "ontemporary Art, Los Angeles (solo) 2006 William Kentridge/The Magic Flute: Drawings and Projections, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (solo) William Kentridge, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco (solo)
William Kentridge, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (solo)
William Kentridge: Fragments for Georges Méliès, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (solo)
Africa Remix, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; toured to Hayward Gallery, London; "entre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Moderna Museet, Stockholm (group)
William Kentridge: Black Box/ Chambre Noire, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, toured to; Museum Höxter-"orvey, Höxter; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (solo)
William Kentridge, Annandale Galleries, Sydney (solo)
William Kentridge: Preparing the Flute, Art for the World, Isola Madre, Italy (solo)
William Kentridge, Grinell "ollege Faulconer Gallery, Grinell, Iowa; toured to "ollege of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio (solo) William Kentridge, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris (solo)
40 Chronology
William Kentridge, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris (solo) William Kentridge: 9 Drawings for Projection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (film screening)
2007 William Kentridge: Fragments for Georges Méliès and Black Box/ Chambre Noire, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; toured to Malmo Konsthall, Stockholm (solo) William Kentridge: Fragments for Georges Méliès, Journey to the Moon, Day for Night, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (solo) William Kentridge: What Will Come (has already come), Städel Museum, Frankfurt (solo) Il Sole /4 Ore: Domenica (5 large drawings published in consecutive editions of Domenica Magazine), Milan (solo project) William Kentridge: Doppelt Sehen – Neue Zeichnungen und Projektionen, Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen (solo) William Kentridge’s Prints, Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh; toured to Smith "ollege, Northampton, Massachusetts (solo) Zona Franca/Free Zone, Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (group) Fragile Identities, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK (solo) What Will Come, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (solo) GOING STAYING: Movement, Body, Place in Contemporary Art, Kunstmuseum Bonn, (group) William Kentridge: +. Tapestries, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (solo) Shadow Procession; The 59th Minute: Video Art on the Times Square Astrovision, Times Square, New York (film screening) 2008 William Kentridge: Seeing Double, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (solo)
William Kentridge: (Repeat) From the Beginning, Da "apo, Venice; Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’Arte, Turin (solo) I am not me, the horse is not mine, South African National Gallery, "ape Town (solo) Prospect +, /st New Orleans Biennale, New Orleans (group) In Praise of Shadows, IMMA, Dublin; toured to Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; Benaki Museum, Athens (group) William Kentridge: (REPEAT) From the Beginning, Goodman Gallery, "ape Town (solo) 2009 Five Tapestries (with Marguerite Stephens), Goodman Gallery project space, Arts on Main, Johannesburg (two-artist) William Kentridge, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (solo) William Kentridge: 5 Themes, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; toured to Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Albertina, Vienna; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Garage, Moscow; Australian "entre for the Moving Image, Melbourne (solo) Medals of Dishonour, The British Museum, London (group) Encounters Film Festival, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (group) William Kentridge: What We See & What We Know– Thinking about History Whilst Walking, and Thus The Drawings Began to Move, Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (MoMAK); toured to National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Hiroshima "ity Museum of "ontemporary Art, Hiroshima (solo)
The Puppet Show, Vera List "enter for Art and Politics, New York; toured the US (group)
What a Wonderful World, Göteborg International Biennial for "ontemporary Art, Göteborg, Sweden (group)
Home Lands-Land Marks: Contemporary Art from South Africa, Haunch of Venison, London (group)
William Kentridge Tapestries, "apodimonte Museum, Naples (solo)
William Kentridge, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris (solo) William Kentridge, Annandale Galleries, Sydney (solo)
2010 William Kentridge: Ambivalent Affi nities, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana"hampaign, Illinois (solo)
Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside Out, Museum of "ontemporary Art, "hicago (group)
William Kentridge: Other Faces, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (solo)
William Kentridge: Second-hand Reading, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (solo)
Experimentopia, Melbourne Arts "entre, Melbourne (group)
Watch Me Move: The Animation Show, Barbican Gallery, London (group)
Paris Cinema Festival, collaboration with Philip Miller, Vincenzo Pasquariello and Joanna Dudley, Paris (film screening)
I am not me, the horse is not mine, "ité du Livre, Aix-en-Provence (solo)
2014 William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, Institute of "ontemporary Art, Boston (solo)
I am not me, the horse is not mine, In "ontext, Johannesburg Art Gallery; toured in Johannesburg (group) Longing for Sea Change, "antor Arts "enter, Stanford University, Stanford, "alifornia (group) Divisions: Aspects of South African Art +948–/.+., SMA" Gallery, Stellenbosch, South Africa (group) 8th International Biennial, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (group) William Kentridge: Carnets d’Egypte, Musée du Louvre, Paris (solo) World on Its Hind Legs, In "ontext, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (group) Anima Mundi, Rio de Janeiro (group) William Kentridge: Breathe, Dissolve, Return, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris (solo) Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film, Stuttgart (film screening) 011 William Kentridge, Seagull Editions, "alcutta (solo) Three Artists from The Caversham Press: Deborah Bell, Robert Hodgins, William Kentridge, Boston University Art Gallery at the Stone Gallery, Boston (group) Artists, Prints, Community: Twenty Five Years at The Caversham Press, ;0; Gallery, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts; toured to Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg (group) (Re)construções: Arte Contemporânea da Africa do Sul, Museu de Arte "ontemporanea, Niterói, Brazil (group) William Kentridge, Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan (solo) La Negation du Temps – Prologue, Le Laboratoire, Paris (solo) Space. About a Dream (Weltraum. Die Kunst und ein Traum), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (group) Alias, "ontemporary Art Museum, Krakow (group)
Chostakovitch, Atelier "ézanne, Aix-en-Provence (solo) William Kentridge: Other Faces, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (solo) 2012 William Kentridge: Won’t you join the dance?, "A", Málaga (solo) William Kentridge: Universal Archive (parts –/3), Annandale Galleries, Sydney (solo)
William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, Parasophia, Kyoto, Honshu, Japan (solo) William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, Perth International Arts Festival, Perth (solo) William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (solo)
William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance, Marian Goodman Gallery, London (solo) Lichtsicht 5, Bad Rothenfelde, Germany (group) William Kentridge: Drawings for Lulu, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (solo) Double Vision: Albrecht Dürer/ William Kentridge, Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin and Frei Universität Berlin, Berlin (two-artist) William Kentridge: Peripheral Thinking, National Museum of "ontemporary Art, Seoul (solo) William Kentridge: Drawn from Africa, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, toured to the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria and Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania
William Kentridge: NO, IT IS, Goodman Gallery, "ape Town (solo)
William Kentridge: Drawings: East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (solo)
dOCUMENTA (+3), Hauptbahnhof, Kassel (group)
William Kentridge: Tapestries, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (solo)
Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, International "entre of Photography, New York (group)
William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, EMMA, Helsinki (solo)
2016 William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (solo)
2015 William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, IZIKO South African National Gallery, "ape Town (solo)
Fire Under Snow: New Film and Video Works at Louisiana, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek (group)
William Kentridge: FORTUNA, Museo Universitario Arte "ontemporáneo, Mexico "ity (solo)
Hacking Habitat: Art of Control, Wolvenplein, Utrecht (group)
MCA DNA: William Kentridge, Museum of "ontemporary Art, "hicago (solo) William Kentridge: Fortuna, Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro; toured to Fundação Iberê "amargo, Porto Alegre; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo (solo) William Kentridge: I am not me, the horse is not mine, Tate Modern Tanks, London (solo) William Kentridge: Vertical Thinking, MAXXI – Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome (solo) William Kentridge as Printmaker, Bluecoat, Liverpool; toured in the UK (solo)
William Kentridge: If We Ever Get to Heaven, EYE Filmmuseum Netherlands, Amsterdam (solo) Parasophia, Kyoto International Festival of "ontemporary "ulture 20/5, Kyoto (group) ALL THE WORLD’S FUTURES, 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (group)
William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (solo) William Kentridge: Triumphs, Laments and Other Processions, Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan (solo) William Kentridge: Triumphs and Laments, Museo d’Arte "ontemporanea di Roma, Rome (solo)
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Art, London (group)
William Kentridge, NO IT IS!, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (solo)
William Kentridge: The Nose, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (solo)
Triumphs & Laments: A Project for Rome, Tiber River, Rome (public art project)
William Kentridge: Poems I Used To Know, Volte Gallery, Mumbai (solo)
William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera, Ullens "entre for "ontemporary Art, Beijing (solo)
William Kentridge / Vivienne Koorland; Conversations in Letters and Lines, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (two-artist)
William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (solo)
SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms, /4th Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul (group)
2013 David Krut Print Workshop, Editions/ Artists’ Book Fair, New York (group) Le Pont, mac, Marseille (group)
South Africa: 3 Million Years of Art, British Museum, London (group)
41
Selected Theatre, Performance and Lectures
1975 The Goat that Sneezed, actor; Junction Avenue Theatre "ompany, Nunnery Theatre, Johannesburg Ubu Rex, performance; collaboration with Junction Avenue Theatre "ompany, Nunnery Theatre, Johannesburg 1976 The Fantastical History of a Useless Man, script co-author, set design and performance; collaboration with Junction Avenue Theatre "ompany, Nunnery Theatre, Johannesburg; touring 1977 Wooze Bear; set, poster, and programme co-designer; Nunnery Theatre, Johannesburg 1978 Randlords and Rotgut, helps devise and actor; Junction Avenue Theatre "ompany, Nunnery Theatre, Johannesburg Travesties, designer and actor; Market Theatre, Johannesburg Play it Again, Sam, designer; Market Theatre, Johannesburg 1979 Will of a Rebel, director; collaboration with Junction Avenue Theatre "ompany, Nunnery Theatre, Johannesburg Security, helps devise and actor; Junction Avenue Theatre "ompany, venues in Johannesburg and Durban 1980 Dikhitsheneng; The Kitchens, script and director; Junction Avenue Theatre "ompany; toured to venues in Johannesburg 1983 The Bacchae, set designer; Junction Avenue Theatre "ompany, Market Theatre, Johannesburg Emily’s Wheelbarrow Show and the Infamous Mr Sterntrap, writer; Wits Theatre, Johannesburg 1984 Dikhitsheneng; Market Theatre, Johannesburg Catastrophe, director; Wits Theatre, Johannesburg; toured to Market Theatre, Johannesburg
4
1987 Sophiatown, helps devise and co-designer; Junction Avenue Theatre "ompany, Johannesburg; toured to Hampstead Theatre, London 1992 Woyzeck on the Highveld, animation, set design and director; collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany, Graeme "ollege, Grahamstown; Market Theatre, Johannesburg; toured to Europe and the UK 1995 Faustus in Africa!, animation, set design and director; collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany, Reithalle, Kunstfest Weimar, Weimar; toured to Europe, Australia, Israel and US 1997 Ubu and the Truth Commission, animation, set design, director; collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany, E-Werk, Kunstfest Weimar, Weimar; toured to Europe, South Africa and US 1998 Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, animation, set design, director; collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany, Luna Theatre, Brussels; toured to Sofiensale, Vienna; Hebbel-Theatre, Berlin; Stadsschouwburg, Amsterdam; Werfthalle, Zurich; Monument Theatre, Grahamstown; State Theatre, Pretoria; Grande Auditório de "ulturgest, Lisbon 2001 Zeno at 4 a.m., animation and director; collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany, Luna Theatre, Brussels; toured to "entre Pompidou, Festival d’Automne, Paris; Walker Arts "entre, Minneapolis; Museum of "ontemporary Art, "hicago; John Jay Theater, Lincoln "entre, New York; Théâtre d’Angoulême, Angoulême; Théâtre Garonne, Toulouse; Maison de la "ulture d’Amiens, Amiens 2002 Confessions of Zeno, animation and director; collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany, Kaaitheatre, Brussels; toured to Documenta //, Kassel; Kommunikationsfabrik, Frankfurt; "roatian National Theatre, Zagreb; Monument Theatre, Grahamstown; Freie Volksbuhne, Berlin; Kampnagel Festival, Hamburg; Teatro Prima Nazionale, Rome; Teatro Liceo, Salamanca; "entre Pompidou, Grande Salle, Festival d’Automne, Paris;
Théâtre de "aen, "aen; Théâtre d’Angoulême, Angoulême; Spier Amphitheater, Stellenbosch; Victoria Theatre, Singapore; Teatro "uyás, Las Palmas; "ulturgest Grande Auditório, Lisbon; Teatro Principal Antzokia, Victoria-Gasteiz, Spain 2004 Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, in association with Handspring Puppet "ompany, La Monnaie/De Munt, Brussels; John Jay Theater, Lincoln "entre, New York; Théâtre de "aen, "aen; Grand Théâtre du Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Playhouse, The Arts "entre, Melbourne 2005 The Magic Flute, director, animation and set design (with Sabine Theunissen); La Monnaie, Brussels; toured Europe 2007 Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, in association with Handspring Puppet "ompany, La Monnaie/De Munt, Brussels; Théâtre Malibran, Venice; Teatro Municipal, Girona; Théâtre Municipal de Besançon, Besançon, Théâtre de Nîmes, Nîmes; Le Hall aux Grains, Toulouse The Magic Flute, director, animation and set design (with Sabine Theunissen); Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; toured to South Africa 008 Woyzeck on the Highveld, animation, set design and director; collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany, Market Theatre, Johannesburg; toured to Australia, Europe and South Africa I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture/performance with projection, /6th Sydney Biennial, Sydney Telegrams from The Nose, collaboration with performer François Sarhan, /6th Sydney Biennial, Sydney 2009 Il Ritorno di Ulisse, in association with Handspring Puppet "ompany and Pacific Opera Works, Seattle; Moore Theatre, Seattle; Artaud Theater, San Francisco The Magic Flute, director, animation and set design (with Sabine Theunissen); Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, France Il Ritorno di Ulisse, in association with Handspring Puppet "ompany, The Kings Theatre, Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh
Woyzeck on the Highveld, animation, set design and director; collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany, "entre Pompidou, Grande Salle, Paris, Paris; toured in Europe 2010 I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture/performance with projection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hiroshima "ity Museum of "ontemporary Art, Hiroshima; Festival Bo:m, Seoul; Theatre der Welt, Mülheim The Nose, director, animation and set designer (with Sabine Theunissen), The Metropolitan Opera, New York
Woyzeck on the Highveld, collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany; McGuire Theater, Minneapolis; toured to Hopkins "entre for the Performing Arts, Dartmouth "ollege, Hanover, New Hampshire; Museum of "ontemporary Art Edlis Neeson Theater, "hicago 2012 Refuse the Hour, director; collaboration with Philip Miller (composer), Dada Masilo (choreography and dance), "atherine Meyburgh (video construction and editing), Peter Galison, Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Festival d’Avignon, Avignon; Roma Europa Festival, Rome; Onassis "ultural Theatre, Athens
Sounds from the Black Box, concert of live music written for Kentridge’s films, with projections of the films, in collaboration with Philip Miller (composer) and Pi Ensemble; toured to Palazzo Reale, Milan
Six Drawing Lessons, series of six lectures delivered for the Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry, Harvard University, "ambridge, Massachusetts
Telegrams from the Nose, created with François Sarhan, performed by François Sarhan and the Ictus Ensemble, Happy New Festival, Kortrijk; toured to Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Musée du Louvre, Paris; "entre Pompidou, Metz
2013 Refuse the Hour, director; collaboration with Philip Miller (composer), Dada Masilo (choreography and dance), "atherine Meyburgh (video construction and editing), Peter Galison, Paris Quartier d’Été, Théâtre Ephémère – "omédie Française, Paris; Impulstanz Festival, Volkstheater, Vienna
Playing on Image (live concert with projected films and performances by Philip Miller, Jill Richards, William Kentridge), Arts on Main, Johannesburg 2011 The Magic Flute, director, animation and set design (with Sabine Theunissen); Opera de Rouen, Haute-Normandie; toured to La Scala, Milan; Théâtre des "hamps-Elysée, Paris I am not me, the horse is not mine, lecture/performance with projection, Galeria Lia Rumma, Milan (in conjunction with solo exhibition at the gallery); Garage Museum of "ontemporary Art, Moscow (in conjunction with exhibition William Kentridge: 5 Themes); iDANS Festival, Istanbul The Nose (Le Nez), director, animation and set designer (with Sabine Theunissen), Festival d’Aix-en-Provence; Opéra de Lyon, Lyon Refuse the Hour, series of performance events, Market Theatre, Johannesburg
"onversation with Sir Sydney Kentridge in the context of the exhibition The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, curated by Okwui Enwezor, Haus der Kunst, Munich Thinking on one’s feet: A walking tour of the studio, lecture; and Pictures and Texts, symposium; delivered as part of the Humanitas 20/& Visiting Professorship in "ontemporary Art, Universities of Oxford and "ambridge, UK Six Drawing Lessons, series of six lectures; University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, lecture; University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Distinguished Visiting Humanist, lecture; University of Rochester, New York Listening to the Image, lecture; Neubauer "ollegium for "ulture and Society, University of "hicago, "hicago Nuit Blanche festival, lecture; Toronto
2014 Five in the series of Six Drawing Lessons, lectures; Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg Refuse the Hour, director; collaboration with Philip Miller (composer), Dada Masilo (choreography and dance), "atherine Meyburgh (video construction and editing), Peter Galison, Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg Winterreise (song cycle by Schubert); The Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Aix-en-Provence; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Teatro dei Rinnovati, Siena; SOTA "oncert Hall, Singapore; Alice Tully Hall, New York; Grand Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg, Luxembourg Paper Music, collaboration with Philip Miller, Bargello Museum, Florence; "arnegie Hall, New York; Durub Al Tawaya, Abu Dhabi; Interferences – International Theatre Festival, "luj, Romania A Dream of Love Reciprocated: History & the Image, part of Mosse Lecture series, lecture; Humboldt University, Berlin 2015 Refuse the Hour, director; collaboration with Philip Miller (composer), Dada Masilo (choreography and dance), "atherine Meyburgh (video construction and editing), Peter Galison, Design Indaba, "ape Town; toured to BAM Next Wave Festival, New York; Yale University Theatre, New Haven; Perth International Arts Festival, Perth
Refuse the Hour, director; collaboration with Philip Miller (composer), Dada Masilo (choreography and dance), "atherine Meyburgh (video construction and editing), Peter Galison, Foreign Affairs: Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin Paper Music, collaboration with Philip Miller, Foreign Affairs: Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin Winterreise, Foreign Affairs: Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin Ubu & the Truth Commission, collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany, Foreign Affairs: Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin A Guided Tour of the Exhibition: for Soprano with Handbag, with Joanna Dudley, Foreign Affairs: Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin Paper Music, collaboration with Philip Miller, The Print Room, London Lulu, director; English National Opera, London William Townsend Memorial Lecture, Slade School of Fine Art, London
Lulu, director; Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam; toured to the Metropolitan Opera, New York Ubu and The Truth Commission, The Print Room, collaboration with Handspring Puppet "ompany, London Peripheral Thinking, lecture; Design Indaba 20/5, "ape Town; MUA", Mexico "ity; Europalia Festival Brussels; U""A Beijing; Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Yale University Theatre, New Haven O Sentimental Machine, lecture; Princeton University, New Jersey 2016 Six Drawing Lessons, Foreign Affairs: Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin
43
Filmography
1978 Title/Tale (with Stephen Sack and Jemima Hunt) 1979 Untitled (; mm flipbook animation)
1999 Shadow Procession
2015 Notes Towards a Model Opera
Stereoscope (from +. Drawings for Projection)
More Sweetly Play the Dance
Awards
International Art "ritics Association Award (for performance of I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, In conjunction with ‘Performa’)
O Sentimental Machine Sleeping on Glass
1982 Howl at the Moon (with Hugo "assirer and Malcolm Purkey) 1984 Salestalk 1985 Vetkoek/Fête Galante
1987 Exhibition
2001 Medicine Chest 2002 Zeno Writing
2003 Tide Table (from +. Drawings for Projection) Fragments for Georges Méliès
1988 Freedom Square and Back of the Moon, (co-directs with Angus Gibson)
Day for Night
1985 Wins American Film Festival Blue Ribbon Award for Salestalk (/9;4), New York; the film is shown at the London Film Festival 1987 Standard Bank Young Artist Award, Grahamstown Festival, Grahamstown 1991 Rembrandt Gold Medal at "ape Town Triennial Mine wins Weekly Mail Short Film "ompetition (fiction)
Journey to the Moon 1989 Johannesburg, /nd Greatest City after Paris (from +. Drawings for Projection) 1990 T&I (director)
Learning the Flute 2005 Preparing the Flute
1992 Receives the Quarterly Vita Award 2003 6th Sharjah Biennial Prize, United Arab Emirates
Black Box/Chambre Noire Monument (from +. Drawings for Projection) 1991 Mine (from +. Drawings for Projection) Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old (from +. Drawings for Projection) 1992 Easing the Passing (of the Hours) (with Robert Hodgins and Deborah Bell) 1994 Felix in Exile (from +. Drawings for Projection) Memo (with Robert Hodgins and Deborah Bell) 1996 History of the Main Complaint (from +. Drawings for Projection) 1997 Ubu Tells the Truth 1998 Ulisse: ECHO scan slide bottle
Kaisserring Prize, Mönchehaus Goslar 2007 What Will Come (has already come) 2008 I am not me, the horse is not mine Breathe Dissolve Return 2009 Drawing Lessons (ongoing series) 2010 Carnets d’Egypte 2011 Anti-Mercator Other Faces (from +. Drawings for Projection)
Hotel (with Robert Hodgins and Deborah Bell)
44
2004 Honourary Degree of Doctor of Literature, University of Witwaterstrand, Johannesburg 2006 Jesse l. Rosenberger Medal, University of "hicago (and Kovler Fellowship) 2007 National Orders Petoria, South Africa awarded Order of Ikhamanga (Silver)
NO, IT IS! De Como Nao Fui Ministro do Estado
2013 Second-hand Reading Tango for Page Turning
Doctor of Literature honoris causa, London University, London 2012 Presented the "harles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University Elected a member of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, "ambridge Elected a member of the Académie Royale des Sciences , des Lettres, et des Beaux-arts de Belgique, Brussels
Musée d’Art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg Museo de Arte "ontemporáneo de "astilla y León, Spain Museu d’Art "ontemporani de Barcelona, Spain
Albertina, Vienna, Austria
Museion – Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst, Bolzano, Italy
Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, US
Museum of "ontemporary Art "hicago, US
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Museum of "ontemporary Art, Los Angeles, US
Art Institute of "hicago, US
Museum of "ontemporary Art Oslo, Norway
Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, US Broad "ontemporary Art Museum, Santa Monica, US
Museum of "ontemporary Art, San Diego, US The Museum of Modern Art, New York, US
The "ontemporary Museum, Honolulu, US
Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
Des Moines Art "enter, Des Moines, US
National Gallery of "anada, Ottawa, "anada
Laureate of the Dan David Prize (for the Present Time Dimension in the Field of Plastic Arts), Tel Aviv University
Ellipse Foundation, Alcoitão, Portugal
National Museum of African Art, Washington D", US
Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell, US
National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan
2013 Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, Yale University
Fondation "artier pour l’Art "ontemporain, Paris, France
Named Commandeur des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of "ulture and "ommunication
2014 Honorary Doctorate of Literature, University of "ape Town 2015 Honorary Academician, Royal Academy, London Apollo Magazine Artist of the Year
2008 Honorary Doctorate, Rhodes University, Grahamstown Oskar Kokoschka Award, Vienna
2012 The Refusal of Time, collaboration with Philip Miller, "atherine Meyburgh, Peter Galison and Dada Masilo
Sonnets WEIGHING … and WANTING (from +. Drawings for Projection)
Selected Public Collections
Overvloed
Automatic Writing David Goldblatt, documentary (director)
Southern Graphics "ouncil International Award for Lifetime Achievement in Printing, Saint Louis
Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Picardie, Amiens, France GOMA – Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, US Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, US San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, US
Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, "hina Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan, US
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, US IZIKO South African National Gallery, "ape Town, South Africa
Kiasma – Museum of "ontemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland
Studio Stefania Miscetti, Rome, Italy
Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Tate, London, UK
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein
UNISA Art Gallery, Pretoria, South Africa
Kyoto Prize (for contributions in the field of Arts and Philosophy), Inamori Foundation, Kyoto
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark
University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa "ity, US
2011 Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Letters
MAXXI – Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome, Italy
Walker Art "enter, Minneapolis, US
MASSART President’s Award for "reative Achievement, Boston
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
2010 Honorary Doctorate of the Royal "ollege of Art, Royal "ollege of Art, London
45
Selected Bibliography
46
Adolphs, Volker, Going Staying: Movement, Body, Place in Contemporary Art (Ostfildern: Hatje "antz, 200;)
Block, René; Babias, Marius, 4th International Biennale of Istanbul (Istanbul: The Istanbul Foundation for "ulture and Arts, /995)
Antonio, Juan; Reyes, Álvarez, Mignolo, Walter D., Geopolíticas de la animación (Sevilla: "entro Andaluz de Arte "ontemporáneo; Vigo: Fundación Marco, 2007)
Bloom, Doris; Kentridge, William, Memory & Geography: Bloom, Kentridge (Johannesburg: /st Johannesburg Biennale, /995)
Ardalan, Ziba; Dreyfus, Laurence, Momentary Momentum, Animated Drawings (London: Parasol Unit Foundation for "ontemporary Art, 2007) Arlene Stone, Jennifer, Freud’s Body Ego or Memorabilia of Grief: Lucian Freud and William Kentridge (New York: javariBooK, 200&) Arlene Stone, Jennifer, Politeness of Objects: William Kentridge’s Noiralle (New York: javariBooK, 2005) Attwood, Philip; Powell, Felicity, Medals of Dishonour (London: British Museum Press, 2009) Barstow, Oliver; Law-Vijoen, Bronwyn (eds.), William Kentridge & Gerhard Marx: Fire Walker (Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, 20//) Basualdo, "arlos et al., Cream: +. Curators, +. Writers, +.. Artists (London: Phaidon, /99;) Basualdo, "arlos (ed.), William Kentridge: Tapestries (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 200;) Benezra, Neal, et al., William Kentridge ("hicago: Museum of "ontemporary Art and New York: New Museum of "ontemporary Art in association with H.N. Abrams, 200/) Berman, Esmé, Painting in South Africa (Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, /99&) Bernadac, Marie-Laure, William Kentridge: Carnets d’Egypte (Paris: Éditions Dilecta/Éditions du Musée du Louvre, 20//)
Bonami, Francesco, Delta (Paris: AR" Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, /997)
de "orral, Maria; Martinez, Rosa, 5+st International Venice Biennale: The Experience of Art (Milan: Marsilio, 2005)
Bonito-Oliva, Achille, Encyclopaedia of the Word: Artist Conversations, +968–/..8 (Milan: Skira Editore, 20/0)
Doepel, R. T., Ubu ±+.+: William Kentridge, Robert Hodgins, Deborah Bell (Johannesburg: French Institute of South Africa and Art Galleries, University of the Witwatersrand, /997)
Bonito-Oliva, Achille; William Kentridge: Streets of the City (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 20/0)
Enwezor, Okwui, Contemporary African Art since +98. (Bologna: Damiani, 2009)
Bunn, David; Taylor, Jane; Introduction, TriQuaterly: South Africa – New Writing, Photographs and Art (Evanston: Northwestern University; reprinted by "hicago University Press, /9;6)
Enwezor, Okwui (ed.), The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, +945-94 (London and New York: Prestel, 200/)
"ameron,Dan; "hristov-Bakargiev, "arolyn; "oetzee, J.M., William Kentridge (London: Phaidon, /999)
Enwezor, Okwui, Trade Routes: History and Geography. Transversions (Johannesburg: 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, /997)
"hristov-Bakargiev, "arolyn, William Kentridge (Brussels: Societé des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, /99;)
Enwezor, Okwui (et. al); William Kentridge, Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture (London, Phaidon Press, /99;)
"hristov-Bakargiev, "arolyn, William Kentridge (Milan: "astello di Rivoli Museum d’Arte "ontemporanea, 200&)
Fietzek, Gerti, Documenta ++ Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje "antz, 2002)
"hristov-Bakargiev, "arolyn; Taylor, Jane, William Kentridge (Milan: Skira Editore, 2004)
Francés, Fernando; de "orral, María, William Kentridge : No Se Unirá Usted al Baile? (Malaga: "entro de Arte "ontemporaneo de Malaga, 20//)
"hristov-Bakargiev, "arolyn; Blazwick, Iwona, Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today (Milan: Skira Editore, 2004) "onrad, Dennis, et al., William Kentridge: What Will Come (Has Already Come) (Frankfurt: Städel Museum; Stroemfeld, 2007) Danto, Arthur "., Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005)
Bester, Rory; Enwezor, Okwui (eds.), Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life (London and New York: Prestel, 20/2)
David, "atherine; "hevrier, JeanFrançois, Documenta X: The Book (Kassel: Museum Fridericianum and Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje "antz, /997)
Biesenbach, Klaus (ed.), Animations (Berlin: KW Institute for "ontemporary Art and New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 200&)
Davies, Hugh, et al., William Kentridge: WEIGHING…and WANTING (San Diego: Museum of "ontemporary Art San Diego, 2000)
48 Selected Bibliography
Davis, Geoffrey; Fuchs, Anne (eds.) ‘“An Interest in the Making of Things”: An Interview with William Kentridge’, in Theatre and Change in South Africa (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, /996) p. /40-/54,
Friis-Hansen, Dana; Herbert, Lynn M.; Irvine, Alexandra, Projected Allegories (Houston: "ontemporary Arts Museum, /99;) Friis-Hansen, Dana et. al., Outbound: Passages from the ’9.s (Houston: "ontemporary Arts Museum, 2000) Fuchs, Anne, Playing the Market: The Market Theatre, Johannesburg (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002) Furlong, William, Speaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversation (London; New York: Phaidon, 20/0) Galison: Peter L.; Kentridge, William, Meyburgh, "atherine and Miller, Philip William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time (Paris: Editions Xavier Barral, 20/2)
Garb, Tamar; Enwezor, Okwui; Vladislavić, Ivan; Home Lands: Land Marks : Contemporary Art from South Africa (London: Haunch of Venison, 200;) Geers, Kendell; Contemporary South African Art, The Gencor Collection (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, /997) Godby, MichaeL, William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection. Four Animated Films (Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, /992) Godby, Michael; William Kentridge’s History of the Main ComplaintNarrative, Memory, Truth, Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa ("ape Town: Oxford University Press, /99;) Goldberg, Roselee (ed.), Performa .9: Back to Futurism (New York: Performa, 20//) Groeninck, Marie-"laire, The insolent eye: Jarry in art = L’oeil insolent: Jarry dans l’art (Philadelphia: Locks Gallery, 20//) Hanhardt, John; Spector, Nancy, Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Museum Collections (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2002)
Kentridge, William, Cyclopedia of Drawing (Valence: art& and Annecy: Ecole d’Art de l’agglomération d’Annecy, 2004) Kentridge, William; Breidbach, Angela, William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud: Conversations with Angela Breidbach ("ologne: Walther König and New York: David Krut Publishing, 2006) Kentridge, William; "udel, Valerie (ed.), Everyone Their Own Projector (Valence: "aptures Editions, 200;) Kentridge, William; Miller, Philip; William Kentridge: I am not me, the horse is not mine (Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, 200;) Kentridge, William, NO IT IS! (Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, 20/2)
Kruger, K.; Schalhorn, A; Werner, E. (eds) Double Vision: Albrecht Dürer, William Kentridge (Berlin: Sieveking, 20/5) Law-Viljoen, Bronwyn, William Kentridge: Flute (Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, 2007) Lewis, Sarah; Belaso, Daniel, The Dissolve:SITE Santa Fe: 8th International Biennial (Santa Fe: SITE Santa Fe, 20/0) Lissoni, Andrea; Bonami, Francesco, William Kentridge (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2006)
Kentridge, William, William Kentridge: Repeat-from the Beginning (Milan: "harta, 200;)
Loder, Robert; Green, Len et al. Cross Currents: Contemporary Art Practice in South Africa: An Exhibition in Two Parts (Somerset: Atkinson Gallery, 2000)
Kentridge, William; Law-Viljoen, Bronwyn, William Kentridge: Nose: Thirty Etchings (New York: David Krut Publishing, 20/0)
Luntumbue, Toma Muteba, Transferts (Brussels: Societé des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 200&)
Kentridge, William, William Kentridge: Lexicon (Bar Harbour: A.S.A.P, 20//)
Malbert, Roger; Steeds, Lucy, Apparition: The Action of Appearing (Bristol: Arnolfini Gallery, 2002)
Hecker, Judith B., William Kentridge: Trace. Prints from The Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 20/0)
Kentridge, William; Galison, Peter L., +.. Notes – +.. Thoughts no. ..=: The Refusal of Time (Kassel: dO"UMENTA (/&) in association with Hatje "antz, 20//)
Hickey, Tom, (ed.), William Kentridge: Fragile Identities (Brighton: University of Brighton, 2007)
Kentridge, William, De Como Não Fui Ministro d’Estado (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Moreira Salles, 20/2)
Hilty, Greg; Pardo, Alona; Watch Me Move: The Animation Show (London: Merrell Publishers, 20//)
Kentridge, William, William Kentridge: Six Drawing Lessons ("ambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 20/4)
Jaukkuri, Maaretta; Papastergiadis, Nikos; Rogoff, Irit, ARS .+: Unfolding Perspectives (Helsinki: Museum of "ontemporary Art Kiasma, 200/)
Kentridge, William, /nd Hand Reading (Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, 20/4)
Kastner, Jeffery, Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon Press, /99;)
William Kentridge: NO IT IS! ("ologne: Walther König, 20/6)
Kentridge, Matthew, The Soho Chronicles: +. Films by William Kentridge ("alcutta: Seagull Books, 20/5)
Kissane, Séan (ed.), In Praise of Shadows (Milan: "harta/Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 200;)
Kentridge, William; Marvà, Jerome, Curs pràctic de gramática catalana : grau elemental per Jeroni Marvà : regles gramaticals i exercici (Barcelona: Museu d’Art "ontemporani de Barcelona, /999)
Krauss, Rosalind E.; Mc"rickard, Kate; Malbert, Roger, A Universal Archive: William Kentridge as Printmaker (London: Hayward Publishing, 20/2)
Komoto, Shinji et al., William Kentridge: What We See & What We Know, Thinking About History While Walking and Thus the Drawings Began to Move (Kyoto: National Museum of Modern Art, 2009)
Marta, Karen (ed.); Tinari, Philip; Murck, Alfreda; Solomon, Andrew; William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera (Beijing: Ullens "entre for "ontemporary Art; London: Koenig Books; New York: Marta and "onsentino, 20/6) Mc"rickard, Kate, William Kentridge (London: Tate Publishing, 20/2) Morris, Rosalind ".; Kentridge, William, That Which is Not Drawn; Conversations ("alcutta: Seagull Books, 20/&) Morris, Rosalind ".; Kentridge, William, Accounts and Drawings from Underground: East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, +=.6 ("alcutta: Seagull Books, 20/4)
Pousette, Johan; Prado, "elia, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art /..=: What A Wonderful World (Göteborg: Röda Sten, 2009)
Villaseñor, Maria-"hristina, William Kentridge: Black Box/ Chambre Noire (Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, 2005)
Purkey, Malcolm, Tooth and Nail. Rethinking Form for the South African Theatre, Davis, G. and Fuchs, A. (eds.); Theatre and Change in South Africa (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, /996)
Williamson, Sue, Resistance Art in South Africa ("ape Town: David Philip, /9;9)
Rosenthal, Mark (ed.), William Kentridge: Five Themes (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009)
Williamson, Sue; Jamal, Ashraf, Art in South Africa: The Future Present ("ape Town: David Philip, /996)
Sauerländer, Katrin, dOCUMENTA (+3) Catalogue 3|3: The Guidebook (Ostfildern: Hatje "antz, 20/2) Schaffner, Ingrid; Kuoni, "arin (eds), The Puppet Show (Philadelphia: Institute of "ontemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 200;) Siebrits, Warren, States of Emergence: South Africa +=6.+==. (Johannesburg: Warren Siebrits Modern and "ontemporary Art, 2002) Smith, Trevor, Divine Comedy: Francisco Goya, Buster Keaton, William Kentridge (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery in association with Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2004) Sollons, Susan et al., Art /+: Art in the Twenty-first Century, Season 5 (New York: Art2/, Inc., 2009) Stewart, Susan et al., William Kentridge Prints (Grinnell: Faulconer Gallery, Bucksbaum "enter for the Arts, Grinnell "ollege, Iowa, 2004) Stewart, Susan et al., William Kentridge Prints (Jonannesburg: David Krut Publishing and Grinnell: Grinnell "ollege, Iowa, 2006) Szeeman, Harald, 48th Venice Biennale: d’APERTutto (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, /999) Taylor, Jane, Ubu and the Truth Commission ("ape Town: University of "ape Town Press, /99;)
Njami, Simon (ed.), Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (Ostfildern: Hatje "antz /London: Hayward Publishing, 2007)
Tone, Lilian, Projects 68: William Kentridge (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, /999)
Nuttall, Sarah; "oetzee, "arli, Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa ("ape Town: Oxford University Press, /99;)
Tone, Lilian (ed.), William Kentridge: Fortuna (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Moreira Salles, 20/2; later published in English by Thames & Hudson, London, 20/&)
49
Selected Articles and Reviews
1978 Staff Reporter, ‘Ranlords and Rotgut’, Wits Student, Johannesburg, /& February Daniel Raeford, ‘ Zany Quadrille’, Rand Daily Mail, Johannesburg, 2; May
Rosanna Negrotti, ‘William Kentridge’, What’s On, Johannesburg, /0 June
1979 R. Greig, ‘Breyten the Man- And the "ause’, The Star, Johannesburg, /6 March
"harles Hall, ‘William Kentridge; Vanessa Devereux Gallery’, Art Review, June, vol. 44, pp. 224-225
Erica Emdon, ‘From the courtyard’, Financial Mail, Johannesburg, 2& November
Garalt MacLain, ‘Exceptional Synthesis a Wonder to Behold’, The Star Tonight, Johannesburg, // September
1983 Stephen Davimes, ‘Musing over Masks’, Sunday Express, Johannesburg, // September 1984 Joe Popbrey, ‘A Lesson in Dramatic Architecture’, Business Day, Johannesburg, /7 July 1985 Samantha James, ‘Powerful Imagery of Haunted World in "harcoal’, The Star, Johannesburg, 26 April Joyce Ozinski, ‘William Kentridge’s rich and expensive art’, Rand Daily Mail, Johannesburg, & May 1986 Ivor Powell, ‘Interview with William Kentridge’, Weekly Mail, Johannesburg, 7 November Samantha James, ‘Talent sets Trap for Kentridge’ The Star, Johannesburg, /4 November 1987 Elizabeth Hillard, ‘William Kentridge: Vanessa Devereux Gallery’, Art Review, vol. &9, ; May, p. 295 Alan "rump, ‘Standard Bank Young Artist Award’, Art Design Architecture, no. 4, "ape Town
50
1992 Hazel Friedman, ‘Not for the Walls But For the Soul …’, The Star Tonight, Johannesburg, // March
Kathy Berman, ‘Mixed Medium Marvel, “Woyzeck on the Highveld”’, Vrye Weekblad, Johannesburg, /7 September Daryll Accone, ‘Animated Encounters in &-D’, The Star Tonight, Johannesburg, /; September "harl Blignaut, ‘Making Sense of Darkness’, Vrye Weekendblad, Johannesburg, /;/24 September Daniel Raeford, ‘Woyzeck on the Highveld’, Weekly Mail, Johannesburg, /;/24 September 1993 Michael Godby, ‘William Kentridge: Four Animated Films’, Revue Noire, no. //, December/January Rosemary Simmons, ‘Das Wunder in der Puppe’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 July Rosemary Simmons, ‘Romancing the Plate’, Printmaking Today, vol. 2, Winter 1994 Margaret Heinlen, ‘Woyzeck on the Highveld’, Puppetry International, no. /, New York Andrew Solomon, ‘The Artists of South Africa: Separate, and Equal’, The New York Times, 27 March
1990 Ivor Powell, ‘Kentridge’s Free-floating Art of Ambiguities’, Weekly Mail, Johannesburg, 26 April
Penny Francis, ‘Woyzeck on the Highveld, Handspring Theatre’, Animations, August/September
Kendell Geers, ‘William Kentridge; "assirer Fine Art and The Gallery on the Market’, The Star Tonight, Johannesburg, 9 May
Lawrence Van Geldser, ‘Woyzeck, as Puppet, Still Yanked Around by Life’, The New York Times, ; September
1991 Horst Gosser, ‘Not Half "razy’, Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 24 March
Hedy Weiss, ‘Puppets People Expanded Woyzeck’, Chicago Sunday Times, /6 September
Poul Erik Tøjner, ‘Meeting Place Johannesburg’, Weekendavisen, "openhagen, December 1995 Renate Klett, ‘The Voice of Africa’, Theater Heute, 9 September Robert "ondon, ‘Mayibuye, Bernard Jacobsen Gallery and On the Road, The Delfina Studio Trust’, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 4, Spring Ruth Rosegarten, ‘Inside Out’, Frieze, no.2&, Summer Ruth Sack, ‘Faust’s Journey to Africa’, Mail & Guardian Weekly, Johannesburg, /5/22 June Peter Laudenbach, ‘Faust aus Afrika’, Berliner Zeitung, 29 June Daniel Reaford, ‘Brilliant Adaption’, The Citizen, /9 July Gillian Anstey, International "ritics in Frenzy over SA play’, Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 2& July Mark Gevisser, ‘Empire in all its delirium’, Mail & Guardian Weekly, Johannesburg, 2//27 July
Iwona Blazwick, ‘"itynature’, Art Monthly, no. 207, June, pp. 7-/0 Brenda Atkinson, ‘Kentridge and the Big League’, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, /&//9 June Lorenz Tomeruis, ‘König Ubu’s Terror in Afrika’, Welt am Sonntag, Berlin, 29 June "atherine Bédarida, ‘Les anges et les démons sud-africains de William Kentridge’, Le Monde, / July Jürgen Berger, ‘Alles im Rohzustand’, Die Tageszeitung, Berlin, 7 July René Solis, ‘Ubu d’aprés apartheid’, Libération, /2 July Robert Brand, ‘Ubu’s Exploits Hold a Mirror to SA’s Violent Past’, The Star, Johannesburg, ; August Hazel Friedman, ‘The Horror …’, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, ;//4 August Andrew Worsdale, ‘Pulling Strings’, The Sunday Times, Johannesburg, /7 August
Peter Hawthorne, ‘ The Devil You Know’, TIME, /4 August
Brenda Atkinson, ‘"ollaborations (/9;7-/997)’, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, 29 August
1996 Jean Marie Wynants, ‘Faust s’impose en Afrique’, Le Soir, 9 May
1998 A. "urto, ‘William Kentridge’, Juliet, no. 90, December/January
Oliver Schmitt, ‘ Inattendus parfums d’Afrique du Sud’, Le Monde, /& July
Leslie "amhi, ‘Mind Field’, The Village Voice, 27 January
René Solis, ‘Woyzeck et Faust en ombres africaines’, Libération, /& July
Holland "otter, ‘Vertical Time’, The New York Times, &0 January
1997 Kendell Geers, ‘Kentridge Bridges the Gap’ The Star, Johannesburg, /4 March
Roberta Smith, ‘William Kentridge’, The New York Times, 6 February
Franklin Sirmans, ‘William Kentridge: "rowning a Star’, Flash Art, no.200, May/June "arol Becker, Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Second Johannesburg Biennale’, Art Journal, vol.57, no. 2, Summer, pp. ;6-/07 Philippe Moins, ‘William Kentridge: Quite the Opposite of "artoons’, Animation World Magazine, no. 7, no. &, October William Kentridge, ‘Landscape in a State of Siege’, Stet, vol. 5, no. &, November, pp. /5-/; Okwui Enwezor, ‘Truth and Responsibility: A "onversation with William Kentridge’, Parkett, no. 54, pp. /65-/70 1999 Leah Ollman, ‘William Kentridge: Ghosts and Erasures’, Art in America, vol. ;7, no. /, January, pp. 70-75, //& Adrian Searle, ‘Nasty, "omic and "rude. It Must be History’, The Guardian, 20 April Roberta Smith, ‘William Kentridge: Projects 6;’, The New York Times, 2& April William Packer, ‘Moving Drawings’, Financial Times, 24 April Lilian Tone, ‘An Interview with William Kentridge’, MoMA magazine, vol. 2, no. 4, May, pp. /4-/5 2000 Barry Schwabsky, ‘Drawing in Time: Reflections on Animation by Artists’, Art on Paper, no. 4, March-April, pp. &6-4/
Jenni Sorkin, ‘William Kentridge’, Frieze, no. 6&, November-December 2002 Emily Apter, ‘The Aesthetics of "ritical Habitats’, October, vol. 99, Winter, pp. 2/-44 William Kentridge, ‘Some Thoughts on Obsolescence’, October, vol./00, Spring, pp./6-/; Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, ‘Ambivalent African’, Los Angeles Times, /4 July "hristopher Knight, ‘Work that Seems to Hold that Thought’, Los Angeles Times, 29 July 2003 Shane Graham, ‘The Truth "ommission and Post-Apartheid Literature in South Africa’. Research in African Literatures , vol. &4, no. /, pp. //-&0 2004 "heryl Kaplan, William Kentridge, ‘The Time-Image’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 27, no. 2, May, p. &2 Jessica Dubow, Ruth Rosengarten, ‘History as the Main "omplaint: William Kentridge and the Making of Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Art History, vol. 27, no. 4, September, pp. 67/-90
Roberta Smith, ‘Shadowy Nomads, Writ in Warp and Wool’, The New York Times, &/ December 2008 William Kentridge, ‘“Fortuna”: Neither Programme nor "hance in the Making of Images’, Cycnos ++, no. /, January, pp. /6&-6; William Kentridge, Robin Rhode, ‘Free Forms’, Modern Painters , vol. 20, no. 5, June, pp. 64-69 Jane Taylor, ‘Spherical and Without Exits: Thoughts on William Kentridge’s Anamorphic Film What Will Come (Has Already Come)’, Art & Australia, vol. 45, no. 4, Winter, pp. 609-6/5 2009 Richard Lacayo, ‘Artist William Kentridge: Man of "onstant Sorrow’, TIME, /9 March John Lloyd, ‘Interview: William Kentridge at Teatro La Fenice’, Tate Etc., no. /5, Spring
Victoria L. Rovine, ‘South Africa from North America: Exporting Identities through Art’, African Arts, vol. &7, no. 4, Winter, pp. 4;-55, 94-95
Dale Berning, ‘Artist William Kentridge on charcoal drawing’, The Guardian, /9 September, p. &4
2006 Alexis Salas, ‘The Materiality of Thought: An Interview with William Kentridge’, Chicago Art Journal, vol. /6, Autumn, pp. /00-/0;
Roberta Smith, ‘Performa 09: William Kentridge on Divided Selves’, The New York Times, /2 November
Lorna Ferguson, ‘SA Slumbers as Artist Wakes the World’, Sunday Times, Johannesburg, /5 February
Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection’, October, no. 92, Spring, pp. &-&5
Okwui Enwezor, ‘Swords Drawn’, Frieze, no.&9, March/April
William Kentridge, ‘Out of Africa’, Interview, May, pp. ;0-;/
Roger Taylor, ‘Momento’, World Art, Melbourne, May
Sue Hubbard, ‘William Kentridge: Stephen Friedman’, Time Out, ;//5 April
Leslie "amhi, ‘Drawing the Shades’, ARTnews, vol./00, no. 9, October, pp. /50-5&
Okwui Enwezor, ‘On the Nature of Vision and Visuality in the Landscape of South Africa: William Kentridge Speaks with Okwui Enwezor’, FYI, no. /, pp. /6-25
Adrienne Sichel, ‘The making of Ubu Offers Fragments of "reative Madness’, The Star Tonight, Johannesburg, 2; May
Rosetta Brooks, ‘William Kentridge: The Drawing "enter/ Museum of "ontemporary Art, San Diego’, Artforum, no. &6, April
Roselee Goldberg, ‘Live "inema & Life in South Africa. A Telephone "onversation in "hicago’, Parkett, no. 6&, pp. 96-///
2007 "atherine Bindman, ‘Suspended Animation’, Art on Paper , vol. //, no. 4, March-April, pp. &;-&9
Andrew Patner, ‘Puppets come to Life in Faustus’, Chicago Sunday Times, // April
Vicky Bigmore, ‘Fragile Identities – A William Kentridge Festival in Brighton’, Culture/4, 2/ November
Emma Jordan, ‘William Kentridge: Weaving the "rusader Tale’, Wanted, September
Leah Ollman, ‘A Laconic Film Far from Silent’, Los Angeles Times, ; February
Sarah Kaufman, ‘The Soul of a Puppet’, The Washington Post, & April
Adrian Searle, ‘The Stone Age Auteur’, The Guardian, 20 November
Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘“Specific” Objects’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 46, Polemical Objects, Autumn, pp. 22/-224
2001 Janet Berry Hess, ‘Regulating/ Representing the Body: South Africa. A Syllabus’, Art Journal, vol. 60, no. /, Spring, pp.60-69
Kendell Geers, ‘William Kentridge: Applied Drawings, Goodman Gallery’, The Star Tonight, Johannesburg, 2/ March
Kim Valdez, ‘William Kentridge Prints, Edinburgh Printmakers’, Interface, July–September
Nikki Moore, ‘William Kentridge: Weighting … and Wanting’, Austin Chronicle, & November
Dorothy Spears, ‘Laughter in the Dark’, Art in America, December, pp. //4-/22 William "ole, ‘On Some Early Prints by William Kentridge’, Print Quarterly, vol. 26, no. &, pp. 26;-27& 2010 "alvin Tomkins, ‘Lines of Resistance: William Kentridge’s rough magic’, The New Yorker, /; January Roberta Smith, ‘William Kentridge: Five Themes’, The New York Times, 26 February
51
"aitlin Dover, ‘Review: William Kentridge at MoMA’, Print, / March David Brody, ‘Taking the World by Drawing: William Kentridge and Animation’ (artcritical.com), /6 June Leora Maltz-Leca, ‘The Nose’, Frieze, no. /&2, June–August, p. /9&
2012 Michael Rothberg, ‘Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice’, Narrative, vol. 20, no. /, January Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘William Kentridge’s Norton Lectures’, Artforum, vol. 50, no. /0, Summer
Holland "otter, ‘William Kentridge: ‘The Refusal of Time’’, The New York Times, 29 November Jane Kinsman, ‘BORN IN SOUTH AFRI"A’, Artonview, no. 74, Winter, pp. /;-/9
Anthony Tommasini, ‘William Kentridge Directs a Masterful ‘Lulu’ at the Metropolitan Opera’, NYTimes.com, 07 November Heidi Waleson, ‘‘Lulu’ Review: William Kentridge Draws Death and Despair; At the Metropolitan Opera’, The Wall Street Journal Online, 9 November
Robert Bell, ‘William Kentridge’, Artonview, no. 74, Winter, pp. &2-&&
James Jorden, ‘William Kentridge "ommits Murder Most Excellent at the Met’, Observer, // November
2014 Karen Wilkin, ‘A Room of His Own’, Wall Street Journal, /4 January
"hris Fite-Wassilak, ‘More Sweetly Play the Dance’, Art Review; vol. 67, no. 9, December, p. /24
Aidan Mac Guill, ‘Two Kentridge Shows "ome to Paris’, The New York Times, /0 August
Margaret K. Koerner, ‘Death, Time, Soup: A "onversation with William Kentridge and Peter Galison’, The New York Review of Books blog, (www.nybooks.com/ daily/20/2/06/&0/kentridge) &0 June
Andrew Frost, ‘William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time – interview’, The Guardian Blog, 2/ February
William "ole, ‘Privileged Access, Judiciously Shared’, Art Journal, vol. 74, no. 4
Robyn "urnow, ‘William Kentridge, The South African Artist Drawing Apartheid’, CNN.com: African Voices, /4 August
Hedy Weiss, ‘M"A Revisits the Moveable Magic of William Kentridge’, Chicago Sun-Times, /; September
Gabrielle Selz, ‘William Kentridge: How to Leave a "oncrete Trace in the World’, Huffpost, / September
2016 Geoffrey O’Brien, ‘A Very New Lulu’, The New York Review of Books, /4 January
Ed Krčma, ‘"inematic Drawing in a Digital Age’, Tate Papers, no. /4, Autumn
Richard Dorment, ‘William Kentridge, Tate Modern, review’, The Telegraph, /9 November
Tim James, ‘Message on the Bottle’, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, 6-/2 August, p. 9
Maria Gough, ‘Kentridge’s Nose’, October, vol. /&4, Autumn, pp. &-27 William Kentridge, ‘I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine’, October , vol. /&4, Autumn, pp. 2;-5/ Leora Maltz-Leca, ‘Taking Public Liberties: Three graces in an African metropolis’, Public Art Review, vol. 22, no. /, Fall/Winter, pp. &0-&& 2011 George Loomis, ‘The Nose Pared Down to its Essentials’, The New York Times, 27 September Lina Espinosa, ‘"onversación con William Kentridge. Una línea entre Johannesburgo y Bogotá’, Revista Clave, Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, Universidad de los Andes, pp. 79-99 Peter Erickson, ‘Probing White Guilt, Pursuing White Redemption: William Kentridge’s 9 Drawings for Projection’, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art , no. 2;, pp. &4-47 Terry Smith, ‘William Kentridge’s Activist Uncertainty During and After Apartheid’, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 2;, pp. 4;-57
5
Selected Articles and +eviews
Miriam "osic, ‘William Kentridge’s Artworks are Drawn from Life’, The Australian, & March
Michael "ooper, ‘Making Opera of Art and Vice Versa’, NYTimes.com, /7 October
Ben Luke, ‘William Kentridge: I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, The Tanks at Tate Modern, SE/’, The Evening Standard, 4 December 2013 Leora Maltz-Leca, ‘Process/ Procession: William Kentridge and the Process of "hange’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 95, no. / ‘William Kentridge’s Artwork "omes to India’, India Times, / February
Oliver Roberts, ‘The time traveller’s life. William Kentridge’, The Sunday Times, /9 October Alanna Martinez, ‘William Kentridge and Philip Miller "ome Full "ircle With ‘Paper Music’’, New York Observer, 27 October 2015 Phil Brown, ‘Power and passion’, Brisbane News, 29 July ‘Black and White South African artist William Kentridge talks to Emma "richton-Miller about politics and printmaking’, Apollo Magazine, no. 6&&, July/August
Rosalyn D’Mello, ‘A "onversation with William Kentridge – Part /’, Blouin Art Info, /4 February
Alastair Sooke, ‘William Kentridge: I seek out awkwardness and unsolved riddles’, The Telegraph, /2 September
Rosalyn D’Mello, ‘A "onversation with William Kentridge – Part 2’, Blouin Art Info, /; February
Laura "umming, ‘William Kentridge; Marian Goodman Gallery’, The Observer, /& September
Rosalyn D’Mello, ‘A "onversation with William Kentridge – Part &’, Blouin Art Info, /9 February
Rachel Spence, ‘William Kentridge, Marian Goodman Gallery, London – interview’, Financial Times (FT.Com), /& September
"olin Gleadell, ‘William Kentridge sells out in New York ahead of Bonhams sale’, The Telegraph, /2 March
Martin Herbert, ‘Previewed’, Art Review, vol. 67, no. 6, September, pp. &7-42
Jackie May, ‘MASTER MIND. How Kentridge draws you in’, The Times, 27 June
Louisa Buck, ‘William Kentridge: dancing to the music of time’, The Telegraph Online, 25 September
Laura "umming, ‘A Universal Archive: William Kentridge as Printmaker’, The Observer, 25 August
Michael Glover, ‘More Sweetly Play The Dance (20/5)’, The Independent, 26 September
Rosemarie Buikema, ‘The Revolt of the Object: Animated Drawings and the "olonial Archive: William Kentridge’s Black Box Theatre’, Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. /;, no. 2 Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘William Kentridge: Tapestries – A "ollaboration with Stephens Tapestry Studio’, African Arts, vol. 49, no. /, Spring, pp. ;5-;; David Frankel, ‘William Kentridge’, Artforum, vol. 54, no. ;, April, p. 2&2 Jessie "ohen, ‘ART – The Big Frieze’, The Financial Mail, Johannesburg, 22 April Elizabeth Grenier, William Kentridge, ‘"hronicler of Political and Philosophical Uncertainty’, Deutsche Welle, /2 May Homi K. Bhabha, William Kentridge, Artforum, vol. 55 no. 2, October
Acknowledgements The Whitechapel Gallery, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and The Whitworth, The University of Manchester wish to thank the following individuals and organisations who have helped our research efforts during the course of the project William Kentridge and Anne Stanwix Anne McIlleron, Natalie Dembo, Linda Leibowitz and all the team at William Kentridge’s studio in Johannesburg Marian Goodman, Roger Tatley, Andrew Leslie Heyward at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/ Paris/London Liza Essers and Damon Garstang at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg Paola Potena and Francesca Vitullo at Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan/Naples Kate "rane Biggs, Director, "ulture "onnects, "ape Town Andrea Lewis, Acting Director, IZIKO South African National Gallery, "ape Town Philip Miller Matthew Partridge, Director, "ape Town Art Fair Marguerite Stephens, Stephens Tapestry Studio, Johannesburg Paul Masck, The Metropolitan Opera, New York Helga Rabl-Stadler, President; Markus Hinterhäuser, Artistic Director, Salzburg Festival, Salzburg Exhibition design and installation Sabine Theunissen Gavan Eckhart, Janus Fouché, Jonas Lundquist, "hris-Waldo de Wet and "hristoff Wolmarans Publication Authors: Homi K. Bhabha, Iwona Blazwick, Sabine Breitwieser, Michael Juul Holm, William Kentridge, Joseph Leo Koerner and Denise Wendel-Poray Designers: Lorenz Klingebiel and Dominik Krauss Karen Angne, Hirmer Verlag Lutz Stirl, Berlin
The Whitechapel ,allery, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and The Whitworth, The University of Manchester wish to thank all those lenders who have supported the exhibition along with all their staff Greta Goiris, Brussels Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/London Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, "ape Town The Handspring Puppet "ompany, "ape Town Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan/Naples Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark MAXXI. Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome The Metropolitan Opera, New York and those who wish to remain anonymous
Whitechapel ,allery Supporters This Exhibition has been generously supported by M A R I A N G O O D M A N G A L L E RY
William Kentridge Exhibition "ircle: Vanessa Branson Sakurako and William Fisher Wendy Fisher Goodman Gallery Brenda R. Potter Faisal Tamer and Sara Alireza
And those that wish to remain anonymous Whitechapel ,allery Trustees "hairman: Alex Sainsbury Swantje "onrad, Maryam Eisler, Ann Gallagher, Anupam Ganguli, Runa Islam, Nicola Kerr, "llr Amina Ali, Farshid Moussavi, Dominic Palfreyman, "atherine Petitgas, Alice Rawsthorn, Rohan Silva. Whitechapel ,allery Staff Director: Iwona Blazwick Managing Director: Tony Stevenson Gayathri Anand, Louise Andrews, Stuart Andrews, Anne Akello-Otema, Verissa Akoto, "hristopher Aldgate, Sam Ayre, Safwan Bazara, Antonia Blocker, Poppy Bowers, Jussi Brightmore, Gino Brignoli, Judith Brugger, Emily Butler, Gabriela "ala-Lesina, Vicky "armichael, William "lifford, Erin "ork, "lio Declour-Min, Dan Eaglesham, Sue Evans, Tim Gosden, Gary Haines, Bryony Harris, "lare Hawkins, Daniel Herrmann, Oscar Holloway, Alexandra House, Jessica Johnson, Anna Jones, Rashid Khan, James Knight, Alexandra Lawson, Michael Lawton, Jenny Lea, Patrick Lears, Georgina Levey, Selina Levinson, Andrea Ziemer-Masefield, Rose Mazillius, Livvy Murdoch, Rummana Naqvi, Thomas Ogden, Alex O’Neill, Rene Odjidja, Divya Osbon, Dominic Peach, Justine Pearsell, Patricia Pisanelli, Darryl de Prez, "ornelia Prior, Katherine Proudlove, Habda Rashid, Pamela Sepulveda, Antonia Seroff, Harpreet Sharma, Vicky Steer, "andy Stobbs, Sofia Victorino, Francesca Vinter, Nina Voss, "helsea Williams, Lydia Yee, Nayia Yiakoumaki
The Whitechapel ,allery would like to thank its supporters, whose generosity enables the ,allery to realise its pioneering programmes. Exhibitions Programme Sirine and Ahmad Abu Ghazaleh Dilyara Allakhverdova and Elchin Safarov The Artworkers Retirement Society Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V. Stuttgart Balassi Institute, Hungarian "ultural "entre London The Barjeel Art Foundation "zech "entre, London Reza Derakshani Diversity Art Forum Division of Labour DOMOBAAL Maryam and Edward Eisler FA"T Fluxus Art Projects "andida and Zak Gertler Marian Goodman Gallery Galerie Gisela "apitain, "ologne Galeria Graça Brandão Jennifer and Matthew Harris Hauser & Wirth Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. Institut Français Royaume-Uni Embassy of Israel to the UK Fady Jameel Jack Kirkland The Korean "ultural "entre Kunststiftung NRW LUMA Foundation Fatima Maleki Maryam Massoudi The Paul Mellon "entre for British Art Government of Mexico as part of the Year of Mexico in the UK 20/5 Adam Mickiewicz Institute The Henry Moore Foundation MOP Foundation Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie Multimedia Museum/Moscow House of Photography Dina Nasser-Khadivi The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands NEON The Royal Norwegian Embassy in London Outset Estonia Outset Israel "atherine and Franck Petitgas Phillips Polish "ultural Institute in London Ringier "ollection Zurich The Robert Lehman Foundation Romanian "ultural Institute Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation
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Office for "ultural and Scientific Affairs of the Embassy of Spain in London Maria and Malek Sukkar The Embassy of Sweden in London Swiss "ultural Fund UK V-A-" Foundation The Vinyl Factory White "ube Wingate Scholarships David Zwirner, New York/London and those who wish to remain anonymous Public Events Programme Institut Français Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Stanley Picker Trust Pictet & "ie Embassy of Sweden in London Education Programme Aldgate and Allhallows Foundation Bawden Fund The British "ouncil "apital Group Mrs Gillian Eeley The Garfield Weston Foundation The Paul Hamlyn Foundation The Mondriaan Fund NADFAS Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Stavros Niarchos Foundation The Swarovski Foundation The Royal "ollege of Art The London Borough of Tower Hamlets The Trusthouse "haritable Foundation Artworks insurance partner Hiscox Framing Partner Pendragon Traineeship Programme Heritage Lottery Fund Transport Partner Martinspeed Whitechapel .allery Corporate Supporters "apital Group "hristie’s Gensler Haacht Hix Martinspeed Max Mara "ollezione Maramotti Paddle; Pendragon Phillips Sotheby’s The Vinyl Factory
54 Acknowledgements
Future Fund Founding Partners Mahera and Mohammad Abu Ghazaleh Sirine and Ahmad Abu Ghazaleh Swantje "onrad Mr Dimitris Daskalopoulos NEON Maryam and Edward Eisler V-A-" Foundation Sir Siegmund Warburg’s Voluntary Settlement Arts "ouncil England "atalyst Endowment Fund Future Fund Supporters John Smith and Vicky Hughes Dominic Palfreyman Whitechapel .allery Director’s Circle Erin Bell and Michael "ohen D. Daskalopoulos "ollection Greece Joseph and Marie Donnelly Maryam and Edward Eisler Peter and Maria Kellner Yana and Stephen Peel "atherine and Franck Petitgas "harlotte Philipps and those who wish to remain anonymous Whitechapel .allery Curator’s Circle "hris Kneale Ida Levine Adrian and Jennifer O’"arroll Dasha Shenkman and those who wish to remain anonymous Whitechapel .allery Patrons Malgosia Alterman Ariane Braillard and Francesco "incotta Miel de Botton Beverley Buckingham Sadie "oles HQ Swantje "onrad Alastair "ookson Aud and Paolo "uniberti Donall "urtin Dunnett "raven Ltd Sarah Elson Nicoletta Fiorucci Lisa and Brian Garrison Alan and Joanna Gemes Richard and Judith Greer Louise Hallett Pippy Houldsworth Frank Krikhaar Victor and Anne Lewis Victoria Miro Gallery Jon and Amanda Moore Heike Moras Bozena Nelhams Genie Oldenburg Stéphanie Ollivier Maureen Paley Dominic Palfreyman Jasmin Pelham Mariela Pissioti
Alice Rawsthorn Alex Sainsbury and Elinor Jansz "herrill and Ian Scheer Karen and Mark Smith Bina and Philippe von Stauffenberg Mr and Mrs "hristoph Trestler Audrey Wallrock Kevin Walters Susan Whiteley
The American Friends of the Whitechapel .allery Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation
Yassi Sohrabi Joe Start Louisa Strahl Roxana Sursock Karam Gerald Tan Billal Taright Nayrouz Tatanaki Ross Thomas Rebecca Tooby-Desmond Lawrence van Hagen Giacomo Vigliar Elisabeth von Schwarzkopf "laire Walsh Alexandra Werner Fabrizio Zappaterra Lian Zhang
and those who wish to remain anonymous
and those who wish to remain anonymous
Whitechapel .allery First Futures Phoebe Armstrong Katharine Arnold "edric Bardawil Edouard Benveniste-Schuler Fiorina Benveniste-Schuler Amanda Bryan Aretha "ampbell Livia "arpeggiani Ingrid "hen Bianca "hu Nathaniel "lark Patricia "rockett Michelle D’Souza Sonata Dallison "elia Davidson Michael De Guzman Alessandro Diotallevi Olga Donskova Emilie Faure "hristopher Fields and Brendan Olley Brett Frankle Matt Glen James Green Dr "lare Heath Hemmerle "ontemporary GmbH & "o. KG Katherine Holmgren Lili Jassemi Anastasija Jevtovic Zoe Karafylakis Sperling Tamila Kerimova Ezra Konvitz Marie Krauss Petra Kwan Alexandra Lefort Laetitia Lina Di Luo Xi Liu and Yi Luo Julia Magee Supriya Menon Alexander Meurice Indi Oliver Katharina Ottmann Benjamin Phillips Hannah Philp Maria "ruz Rashidan Eugenio Re Rebaudengo Henrietta Shields Marie-Anya Shriro Tammy Smulders
We remain grateful for the ongoing support of Whitechapel Gallery Members.
and those who wish to remain anonymous
The Whitechapel Gallery is proud to be a National Portfolio Organisation of Arts "ouncil England.
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Museum der Moderne Salzburg Staff
The Whitworth is supported by
Director: Sabine Breitwieser
The University of Manchester
Assistants to the Director: Birgit Berger, Kim Habersatter
HEFCE
Image Credits David Ballam: p. 48
Arts Council England Director’s Office Marketing and Communication: Susanne Susanka (Head), Anna Feiler Press and Public Relations: Hannah Zundel Generali Foundation Study Center: Jürgen Dehm (Generali Foundation Study Center Curator), Cattrin Ramesmayer (Librarian)
Louisiana's Main Corporate Partners
Museum Security, Head: Thomas Fenninger and team Technicians: Gerald Horn (Head), Friedrich Rücker (Audiovisual Media), Christian Hauer, Alija Salihovic
Sponsor of Louisiana Literature, Louisiana Live, Louisiana Channel
Sponsor of programs and exhibitions at Louisiana
Clärchen & Matthias Baus and Dutch National Opera: pp. 152-56, 165 Cathy Carver: pp. 110-11 Thys Dullart: pp. 4, -9-107, 137, 140-45, 147-49, 1--, 23--39, 246-47 Sahir Ugur Eren, courtesy of Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts: pp. 202-03, 227 EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, 2015; photograph: Studio Hans Wilschut: pp. 126-27 Brian Forrest: pp. 10-11, 26-27
Exhibitions and Collections Curators: Beatrice von Bormann (Modern Art, Head of Collection), Christiane Kuhlmann (Photography and New Media Art), Antonia Lotz (Generali Foundation Collection Curator), Tina Teufel (Contemporary Art) Registrar: Susanne Greimel Assistant Curator: Christina Penetsdorfer
Sponsor of architectural exhibitions at Louisiana
Heritage Lottery Fund and a range of other public and private funders
Curatorial Assistants: Barbara Herzog (Digitalization and Picture Archive), Verena Österreicher (Photography and New Media Art), Marijana Schneider (Director)
Courtesy David Goldblatt and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town: p. 195 John Hodgkiss: pp. 53, 60-61, 160, 166 © Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera: pp. 13--39, 162-63 Johan Jacobs: p. 161 Kentridge, William (b. 1955): The Refusal of Time, 2012. New York, © 2016. Image Copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Art Resource/Scala, Florence: p. 7--79
Art Education: Martina Pohn (Head), Lena Hofer, Elisabeth Ihrenberger
Stella Olivier: pp. 112-13, 172-73
Administration Administration and Finance Director: Christian Prucher
Anthea Pokroy, image courtesy of the Goodman Gallery: pp. 52, 170-71, 1-0--1, 1-6--7
Assistant to the Administration and Finance Officer: Daniela Eibl
Tamsin Relly: pp. 54-55
Head of Accounting: Jürgen Kinschel Museum Store, Head: Brigitte Fortner and team Museum der Moderne Salzburg Supervisory Board
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: Rainer Iglar: p. 199 Kunihiro Shikata, courtesy of Parasophia Office. © William Kentridge: pp. 5--59 Franz Wamhof: p. 131
Heinrich Schellhorn (Chairman) Gertrud Frauenberger Heideswinth Kurz Brigitta Pallauf The Museum der Moderne Salzburg is sponsored with funds provided by the Province of Salzburg
Luke Younge: p. 160 Invitations, posters and catalogue images William Kentridge studio: pp. 233, 23--39, 246-47
255
Published on the occasion of the exhibition: William Kentridge Thick Time Organised by Whitechapel Gallery, London and Museum der Moderne Salzburg and touring to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek and The Whitworth, The University of Manchester 1 September 016 – 15 January 01) Whitechapel Gallery 77-;2 Whitechapel High Street London E/ 7QX United Kingdom whitechapelgallery.org 16 February – 18 June 01) Louisiana Museum of Modern Art GI Strandvej /& &050 Humlebaek Denmark louisiana.dk 9 July – 5 November 01) Museum der Moderne Salzburg Mönchsberg &2 5020 Salzburg Austria museumdermoderne.at 1 September 018 – 3 March 019 The Whitworth, The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M/5 6ER United Kingdom manchester.ac.uk/whitworth Exhibition Whitechapel Gallery "urator: Iwona Blazwick Assistant "urator: "andy Stobbs Head of Exhibition Design and Production: "hristopher Aldgate Gallery Manager: Patrick Lears Installation "oordinator: Will "lifford MA Placement Exhibitions: Eilidh Mc"ormick Louisiana Museum of Modern Art "urator: Mathias Ussing Seeberg "uratorial "oordinator/Registrar: Maria Therming "onservator/Exhibition Producer: Børge Igor Brandt
First published 20/6 by Whitechapel Gallery, London © 20/6 Whitechapel Gallery and the authors All artworks and photographs unless otherwise noted on p.255 © 20/6 William Kentridge studio Publication Editors: Iwona Blazwick and Sabine Breitwieser Project Editors: "andy Stobbs and Tina Teufel Editorial Assistant: Eilidh Mc"ormick Publications Manager: Francesca Vinter Production "oordinator: Emma Woodiwiss "opy Editor: Melissa Larner Proofreader: Tanya "oles Designed by Lorenz Klingebiel and Dominik Krauss "olour reproduction by DL Imaging Ltd, London Printed by Graphicom SPA, Italy ISBN 97;-0-;54;;-250-2 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Whitechapel Gallery 77-;2 Whitechapel High Street London E/ 7QX whitechapelgallery.org Distributed by "entral Books 50 Freshwater Road, "hadwell Heath, London RM; /RX Tel: +44 (0)20 ;525 ;;00 orders@centralbooks.com Available in North, "entral and South America through: ARTBOOK | D.A.P. /55 Sixth Avenue, 2nd Floor, New York, N.Y. /00/& Tel: (2/2) 62+-/999 Fax: (2/2) 62+-94;4
Museum der Moderne Salzburg "urator: Sabine Breitwieser Assistant "urator: Tina Teufel "onsulting curator: Denise Wendel-Poray (Theatre section) Registrar: Susanne Greimel Exhibition installation and technicians: Gerald Horn (Head), Friedrich Rücker, "hristian Hauer, Alija Salihovic The Whitworth, The University of Manchester Director: Maria Balshaw Exhibition "urator: Poppy Bowers Engagement Manager: Ed Watts Thick Time Exhibition Design Sabine Theunissen
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"over image: William Kentridge, still from O Sentimental Machine, 20/5 (detail)