Böcker av William Kentridge

For more than three decades, the author has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment's legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. In this book, he explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, and the activity of the viewer.

Art, William Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of academic disciplines. The studio is where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity.

The completion of William Kentridge's Domestic Scenes (2021) and Catalogue Raisonné Volume 1. Prints and Posters 1974-1990 (2022), both published by Steidl, was an opportunity to pause and take another more intimate look at a series of prints, singular and influential in Kentridge's oeuvre, titled "Carlton Centre Games Arcade" (1977). The Carlton Centre in Johannesburg, owned by the mining company Anglo American, was the most expensive and prestigious hotel and shopping complex on the African continent at the time, and was just a short walk from Kentridge's father's legal practice. It is then no surprise that this complex was where he decided to begin the process of observational drawing which would lead to Kentridge's first prolonged engagement with intaglio printing. Not only is this book an opportunity for all Kentridge enthusiasts to catch a glimpse of this never before exhibited and little-known early series of 14 etchings, but it also gives the reader a further taste of the ongoing catalogue raisonné project.

An exploration of phrases and excerpts that inspire a major contemporary artist.   Over the past several years, renowned South African artist William Kentridge has made a collection of particular phrases and sentences that have called out to him from the pages of whatever he has been reading. And these phrases, which he has written into a studio notebook titled Words, have been put to work in many of his artistic projects. Kentridge has often begun a project by paging through the notebook, waiting for a phrase to claim its place in the new work. The text excerpts come from many sources: Aimé Césaire, Yehuda Amichai, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Setswana proverbs, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto, and a range of eastern European poets. This volume presents a selection made from the notebook, with phrases arranged neither randomly nor with a clear agenda but finding a space in between. Cleverly designed by the artist and beautifully produced, Words is a thought-provoking collection that provides a window to the mind of a contemporary creative genius.

With fifteen stunning new color drawings by Kentridge and an additional coda, this revised edition of Accounts and Drawings from Underground continues its remarkable documentation of the stories of migrant laborers and the flows of capital and desire, providing us with a palpable sense of a vanished world.