Read William Kentridge by Kate McCrickard from 2012 Tate publishing.
Great overview with many illustrations.
Page 17; "his bond with the German Expressionists is reciprocal, and the references are looped; the Expressionists took stylistic inspiration from African tribal masks, and now Kentridge looks back to them for his own formal requirements.
Page 20-22, "To him, the art of revered South African landscape painters ... smacked of 'dishonest', unnatural ordering, a propagation of a 'plague of the pastiche'"
Page 29, ... evolving characters, which may be described as leitmotifs, work less through narrative than through associative reference."
Page 45 "Looking at shadows is always finding something we already know. A rational descriptions would be imperfect and arrived at with difficulty. Recognition is immediate and effortless. It describes a different kind of knowledge. It is truth behind the trite adage, 'I know it when I see it'. It understands that the relationship between seeing and knowing is not simple. It proclaims that one does not have to translate what one has seen into a rationalist model before it becomes a usable piece of knowledge". (Kentridge)
Page 55, "The fortuity of failure, so crucial to Kentridge's creative findings, may be linked back to the formal significance of the tear, the shadow and indirect ways of seeing. Tearing and reconstructing images, looking through shadow, and ripping out spreads of antique books, are ways to uncork the creative process and permit an unexpected propagation of images through accident."
Page 62, Kentridge's phenakistoscope described.
Page 65, ants, in negative, used as stars on black sky.
Page 68, re: "Black ox", Brechtian stage work - it's not the traditional view of a willing suspension of disbelief, it's much stronger, more like an unwilling suspension of belief ... look at the pleasure you get from allowing yourself to be deceived" (Kentridge)
Page 77, "Whether you like it or not, who you are is going to come out in the work" (Kentridge).
Page 84, His Majesty the Nose - Kentridge with nose head after Gogol's "The Nose of 1836.
Page 101-103, "An abstract painter might insist their work is just paint but I am saying that's a complete distortion of what it is to be human. It's not a mistake to see a shape in the cloud. That's what it is to be alive with your eyes open: to be constantly, promiscuously putting things together, getting shapes to have a coherence. IT's a kind of act of aggression against the self to try to stop that? (Kentridge)
Page 117, "Nabokov, writing on Gogol, comments that, 'with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent'. The same could be said of Kentridge, who comes to his work through the underbelly, through accident, through 'failure', through fortuna and through others. ... Kentridge is the first to recognize that the dichotomies, flaws and struggles of the early works are what made them."
Great overview with many illustrations.
Page 17; "his bond with the German Expressionists is reciprocal, and the references are looped; the Expressionists took stylistic inspiration from African tribal masks, and now Kentridge looks back to them for his own formal requirements.
Page 20-22, "To him, the art of revered South African landscape painters ... smacked of 'dishonest', unnatural ordering, a propagation of a 'plague of the pastiche'"
Page 29, ... evolving characters, which may be described as leitmotifs, work less through narrative than through associative reference."
Page 45 "Looking at shadows is always finding something we already know. A rational descriptions would be imperfect and arrived at with difficulty. Recognition is immediate and effortless. It describes a different kind of knowledge. It is truth behind the trite adage, 'I know it when I see it'. It understands that the relationship between seeing and knowing is not simple. It proclaims that one does not have to translate what one has seen into a rationalist model before it becomes a usable piece of knowledge". (Kentridge)
Page 55, "The fortuity of failure, so crucial to Kentridge's creative findings, may be linked back to the formal significance of the tear, the shadow and indirect ways of seeing. Tearing and reconstructing images, looking through shadow, and ripping out spreads of antique books, are ways to uncork the creative process and permit an unexpected propagation of images through accident."
Page 62, Kentridge's phenakistoscope described.
Page 65, ants, in negative, used as stars on black sky.
Page 68, re: "Black ox", Brechtian stage work - it's not the traditional view of a willing suspension of disbelief, it's much stronger, more like an unwilling suspension of belief ... look at the pleasure you get from allowing yourself to be deceived" (Kentridge)
Page 77, "Whether you like it or not, who you are is going to come out in the work" (Kentridge).
Page 84, His Majesty the Nose - Kentridge with nose head after Gogol's "The Nose of 1836.
Page 101-103, "An abstract painter might insist their work is just paint but I am saying that's a complete distortion of what it is to be human. It's not a mistake to see a shape in the cloud. That's what it is to be alive with your eyes open: to be constantly, promiscuously putting things together, getting shapes to have a coherence. IT's a kind of act of aggression against the self to try to stop that? (Kentridge)
Page 117, "Nabokov, writing on Gogol, comments that, 'with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent'. The same could be said of Kentridge, who comes to his work through the underbelly, through accident, through 'failure', through fortuna and through others. ... Kentridge is the first to recognize that the dichotomies, flaws and struggles of the early works are what made them."
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