William Kentridge

Film Review: William Kentridge’s Wondrous “Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot”

October 6, 2022
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The nine-part film series focuses on the artist in his studio in Johannesburg. We see William Kentridge as he draws, paints, designs, paces the floor, and thinks out loud — among other things.

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Classical Music CD Reviews: Michael Gordon’s “The Unchanging Sea” and Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck”

February 26, 2019
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Michael Gordon’s score for The Unchanging Sea works better as soundtrack than a concert work; Harmonia mundi releases a DVD of William Kentridge’s powerful staging of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.

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Visual Arts Preview: Nick Cave and William Kentridge at the ICA

February 7, 2014
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Both of these exhibitions challenge our very notions of time and identity and the social structures around us.

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“Anti-Entropy and Uncle Order”: A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Sixth Norton Lectures

April 27, 2012
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Over the past 6 weeks William Kentridge has shown the form of the lecture itself to be obsolete. But over the course of his returns to the podium, he has shown us that the lecture’s fate is not so dire as he had induced us —- for seventy minutes at a stretch -— to believe.

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Fuse Feature: “The Riddle behind the Riddle” — A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Fifth Norton Lecture

April 20, 2012
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Mistranslation weaves through this lecture, for every translation is a mistranslation. But that is what makes them fruitful. As soon as we mis-hear or fail to understand, the brain constructs an instant bit of narrative to bridge the gap in understanding.

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“The Bad Backwards Walking” — A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Fourth Norton Lecture

April 12, 2012
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William Kentridge spoke of the value of using a mirror to re-learn what he already knew how to do; the clear implication was that we are daily surrounded by mirror-images that we do not see for themselves but that hold the potential to alter our relationships to our tools and to our visions.

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Fuse Feature: Vertical and Contingent — A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Norton Lectures

April 6, 2012
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The decisions William Kentridge makes in his minute to-ings and fro-ings are akin to the decisions a poet makes as she works her measure over and over again.

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Fuse Dispatches: The Benefits of Doubt — A Dispatch from the Second of William Kentridge’s Norton Lectures

March 30, 2012
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For William Kentridge history accrues, falls dead, is born, washes up, piles up, and may be artfully arranged, but the most powerful place that this accretion might happen is in the artist’s studio, which is a metonym for the human mind.

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Fuse Dispatches: Lessons Drawn — William Kentridge’s “Six Drawing Lessons”

March 23, 2012
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After hearing just the first of William Kentridge’s six Norton Lectures, I have no doubt that this series of “Drawing Lessons” will be one of the most entertaining and enlightening artistic events of 2012.

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