History as the main complaint: William Kentridge and the making of post-apartheid South Africa

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In this Subject: Arts (General)
By this author: Jessica Dubow ;&nbsp; Ruth Rosengarten

Authors: Jessica Dubow; Ruth Rosengarten

Source: Art History, Volume 27, Number 4, September 2004 , pp. 695-696(2)

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Abstract:

This essay considers the relation of history to memory in the process of radical political change. Looking at the work of William Kentridge in the context of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it argues the ways that the language of nation-building fails to account for the experience of trauma as it resists absorption into the structures of historical time and the ‘talking cure’. In particular, it considers how Kentridge's unique graphic techniques of film animation contest the logic of closure, recovery and renewal that the political and psychic imperatives of ‘new’ nationhood seem to demand. In the radical upheaval to which he submits visuality as much as chronology and teleology, and in the eruption of historical debris through the visual surface, his work disables all sense of resolution.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.444_10_10.x

Publication date: 2004-09-01