Premium
HISTORY AS THE MAIN COMPLAINT: WILLIAM KENTRIDGE AND THE MAKING OF POST‐APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
Author(s) -
Dubow Jessica,
Rosengarten Ruth
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.00443.x
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , politics , psychic , contest , history , aesthetics , literature , art , archaeology , law , political science , medicine , alternative medicine , pathology
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.