William Kentridge's Metonymic Line: The Art of Transformation

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William Kentridge’s Metonymic Line: The Art of Transformation (2012)* Stephen Clingman

At this point, in his mid-fifties, William Kentridge as artist, as person, takes on the appearance of a fully global phenomenon. Feted at galleries and museums worldwide, the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, he is regarded as something of an artistic polymath through his work in multiple forms. At various stages in his career, and sometimes simultaneously, he has worked in etching, drypoint, charcoal drawing, sculpture, tapestry, film, theatre (including life-sized puppet theatre) and opera direction. Frequently these forms will be overlaid one upon another, as in his stagings of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Shostakovich’s The Nose, which feature both his drawings and his animated projections as intrinsic elements of the production. Just one emblem of his achievement is that in March 2010, Kentridge was the subject of a one-man retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York featuring, among other things, his animated “drawings for projection,” while across town The Nose was being staged under his direction at the Metropolitan Opera. All this comes from an artist who, in terms of his sense of belonging or domicile, has never left South Africa, yet whose work melds geographies, visual and technical histories, and domains of allusion constellated through various layers of artistic and political space and time, all the while being suffused with its own unmistakeable atmospherics.

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Note: this essay was originally written as an extended version of a conference presentation.


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