Books by William Kentridge

Six Drawing Lessons (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

by William Kentridge

Over the last three decades, the visual artist William Kentridge has garnered international acclaim for his work across media including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theater. Rendered in stark contrasts of black and white, his images reflect his native South Africa and, like endlessly suggestive shadows, point to something more elemental as well. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons is the most comprehensive collection available of Kentridge’s thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio.

Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and it cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of traditional academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial location for the creation of meaning: the place where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity. Drawing has the potential to educate us about the most complex issues of our time. This is the real meaning of “drawing lessons.”

Incorporating elements of graphic design and ranging freely from discussions of Plato’s cave to the Enlightenment’s role in colonial oppression to the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons is an illustration in print of its own thesis of how art creates knowledge. Foregrounding the very processes by which we see, Kentridge makes us more aware of the mechanisms―and deceptions―through which we construct meaning in the world.

Accounts and Drawings from Underground: The East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, 1906 (The Africa List)

by William Kentridge, Rosalind C. Morris

Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a worldwide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris bring us an unprecedented collaboration, where they have taken the pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation and transformed it into something wholly new. Kentridge contributes forty landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining created and as a visual epitaph to a history of disappearances. For her part, Morris plumbs the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account. Reading down and across the columns of the pages as though they were themselves shafts in the earth, she draws together the stories of migrant laborers and charts the flows of capital and desire, overwriting the text of the book to give us a palpable sense of the world that gold mining created.

Accounts and Drawings from Underground: The East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book (The Africa List)

by William Kentridge, Rosalind C. Morris

In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, published in 2015, renowned artist William Kentridge and scholar Rosalind C. Morris brought us an unprecedented collaboration, taking pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation in South Africa and transforming them into something entirely new. While Kentridge contributed breathtaking landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining created, Morris plumbed the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account.

Now, they revisit those ruined mines, with a visual and verbal addendum that provides an account of the ongoing metamorphosis of the world that gold mines created. Kentridge works on the threshold between the visible and the invisible, while Morris mines the unsaid in order to make it understandable. Together they’ve created a landmark book that chronicles the exploitation of African communities and sheds further light on global Black history. 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.

William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera

by Andrew Solomon, William Kentridge, Karen Marta, Freda Murck, Philip Tinari

To accompany William Kentridge's (born 1955) Notes Towards a Model Opera project in China, the artist's personal notebooks--filled with annotations, drawings and ideas--were meticulously reproduced in this eponymous publication to allow the reader into Kentridge's own thought process. With an in-depth profile of Kentridge by author Andrew Solomon, and essays by China art historian Alfreda Murck and UCCA director Philip Tinari, Notes Towards a Model Opera is a personal exploration of the layered meanings behind the aesthetics and ideals of socialist China as well as an exploration of the artist himself.

That Which Is Not Drawn: Conversations (The Africa List)

by William Kentridge, Rosalind C. Morris

For more than three decades, artist William Kentridge 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. At the same time, his creative work has stretched the boundaries of the very media he employs. Though his pieces have allowed viewers to encounter the traditions of landscape and self-portraiture, the limits of representation and the possibilities for animated drawing, and the labor of art, no guide to understanding the full scope of his art has been available until now.

For five days, Kentridge sat with Rosalind C. Morris to talk about his work. The result—That Which Is Not Drawn—is a wide-ranging conversation and deep investigation into the artist’s techniques and into the psychic and philosophical underpinnings of his body of work. In these pages, Kentridge explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, the nature of translation and the activity of the viewer. And together, Kentridge and Morris trace the migration of images across his works and consider the possibilities for a revolutionary art that remains committed to its own transformation.

“That’s the thing about a conversation,” Kentridge reflects. “The activity and the performance, whether it’s the performance of drawing or the performance of speech and conversation, is also the engine for new thoughts to happen. It’s not just a report of something you know.” And here, in this engaging dialogue, we at last have a guide to the continually exciting, continually changing work of one of our greatest living artists.

William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison: The Refusal of Time: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 009 (English and German Edition)

by William Kentridge, Peter L. Galison

In this notebook, artist William Kentridge and science historian and filmmaker Peter L. Galison preview their Documenta 13 collaboration on the subject of non-standardized temporality, realized in drawing, text, music and film.

That Which Is Not Drawn: In Conversation (The Africa List)

by William Kentridge, Rosalind C. Morris

For more than three decades, artist William Kentridge 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. At the same time, his creative work has stretched the boundaries of the very media he employs. Though his pieces have allowed viewers to encounter the traditions of landscape and self-portraiture, the limits of representation and the possibilities for animated drawing, and the labor of art, no guide to understanding the full scope of his art has been available until now.

For five days, Kentridge sat with Rosalind C. Morris to talk about his work. The result—That Which Is Not Drawn—is a wide-ranging conversation and deep investigation into the artist’s techniques and into the psychic and philosophical underpinnings of his body of work. In these pages, Kentridge explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, the nature of translation and the activity of the viewer. And together, Kentridge and Morris trace the migration of images across his works and consider the possibilities for a revolutionary art that remains committed to its own transformation.

“That’s the thing about a conversation,” Kentridge reflects. “The activity and the performance, whether it’s the performance of drawing or the performance of speech and conversation, is also the engine for new thoughts to happen. It’s not just a report of something you know.” And here, in this engaging dialogue, we at last have a guide to the continually exciting, continually changing work of one of our greatest living artists.

A Natural History of the Studio

by William Kentridge

South African artist William Kentridge, one of the leading artists of our time, offers a personal insight into his work, his childhood, and his artistic techniques, and the studio spaces he has occupied throughout his life

What is of us, and what is not? Where to find our edge? This is another theme of these talks: what is me and what is the world beyond me? And particularly, what are the negotiations that happen at this border, the meeting point where the world comes towards us, and we go out to meet it?

For more than three decades, South African artist William Kentridge has created a vast body of work of charcoal-, pencil- and black ink drawings and multimedia installations about history and politics that have been exhibited in museums, opera and art houses, film centers, galleries and outdoor installations worldwide. At the same time, his creative work has stretched the boundaries of the very media he employs.

The six chapters of A Natural History of the Studio immerse us in the artistic, intellectual, and production processes of his outstanding body of work. They also provide philosophical, autobiographical, technical and practical commentary and give intimate insight into the studios where he has created throughout his life - from his first workspace as a young student to his current studio in Johannesburg, where all his projects start.

A Natural History of the Studio is not only a must-read for admirers of Kentridge's work, but also a vibrant personal and philosophical exploration of the creative process and a critical look at the world and the human condition.