All posts tagged: lecture
Thinking About the Forest and the Trees
William Kentridge thinks a lot about thinking: its errant trails, its spasmodic lurches, its spectacular leaps. Drawing, he has often stressed, can function as a form of thinking but equally– and especially when chased by the artist's eager eraser – it enacts a wilful un-thinking in which every notion can potentially be undone, and every idea arrives partnered with a nay-saying dialectical double. These revisionary "second thoughts" often assume human, usually Kentridgian form, striding onstage during the artist's public lectures to chide, correct and contradict. Fingers are wagged, eyebrows raised, eyes rolled in exasperation. "The horn of the rhinoceros is in the wrong place," one superego character chimes. "I don't want to hear it," the other retorts. "But if you would just take the time to look at these textbooks, you could see how it could be done better…" the first nags. "Just fuck off! Just fuck off!" the second repeats exasperatedly. At "Second-Hand Reading," Kentridge's recent keynote lecture at the University of Rochester, the themes of second thoughts and second selves (the latter, Stanley …
Introduction to "Second Hand Reading," a lecture by William Kentridge
William Kentridge is principally a maker of drawings, but his work of drawing extends itself into the making of sculptures, animated films, theater works and operas, books, installations, and a myriad of more hybrid works that are difficult to describe. You might think of the artist's drawing in this sense as a drawing out, a drawing up, and a drawing forth. Or a drawing across. It is also like the drawing of a bow—and one knows from the end of the Odyssey that this is not an easy thing. Among many images from Kentridge's work that stick in my memory is one from the installation piece "Black Box," first shown in Berlin in 2005. You could describe this as a kind of mechanical toy theater, an elaborate construction with a series of odd, homely automaton figures, clockwork creatures moving back and forth across the small stage, further elaborated with a complex program of projections—including animated drawings by Kentridge, both abstract and figurative, photographs of old newspapers and ledgers, as well as archaic film footage. What …
IVC Presents: William Kentridge at the University of Rochester
InVisible Culture has partnered with the English Department to present a digital extension of William Kentridge's visit to the University of Rochester in September of 2013. Kentridge, the renowned South African artist, filmmaker, and theater and opera director, was this year's Distinguished Visitor in the Humanities at the University of Rochester. His visit comprised of four main events: Wednesday, 9/18 at 8 pm at the Dryden Theater – a screening of the entire series of Kentridge's works of experimental animation, "Drawings for Projection," followed by a talk with the artist. Thursday, 9/19, at 9:30 AM, in the Welles-Browne Room, Rush Rhees Library – a conversation with William Kentridge, led by Nigel Maister, about his decades-long career as a director of theater and opera. Thursday, 9/19 at 1:30 pm, in the Gowen Room, Wilson Commons – a panel discussion, led by Leora Maltz-Leca, focusing on Kentridge's work in visual arts and film, with some focus on its South African context.1 Thursday, 9/19 at 4:00 pm, at the Interfaith Chapel – a public lecture initially entitled, "Everyone …