William Kentridge and Annandale Galleries

Films, Sculpture, drawings, and etchings

To complement their current exhibition of William Kentridge’s works entitled, Telegrams From The Nose, the Annandale Galleries of Sydney have produced, under Anne Gregory’s guidance, a marvellous book-cum-catalogue, of the same title, which serves as both a handbook to those attending the exhibition, and a valuable read in its own right.

The book showcases quite a breadth of Kentridge’s artistic production – from sculpture to drawings, etchings, tapestry, and even shots of his stereogravures – but opens with a perceptively biographical piece written by noted critic of the Sydney Morning Herald, John McDonald. McDonald faithfully depicts Kentridge as an artist whose intimate creative outpouring and whose appreciative audience is both “international and intensely localized”. McDonald intimates that Kentridge’s art is one that transcends dichotomous barriers, whether those that exist between past and future, private and public, or even truth and deception. It seems evident from McDonald’s exposé (although he does not say so explicitly) that Kentridge has been in the wonderfully fortunate position of riding a wave of strong post-colonial social and artistic sentiment which quite naturally found one of its most effective forms in the acerbic ‘struggle’ art of the apartheid period in South Africa. However, McDonald projects a level of interpretation which recreates Kentridge as a didactic artist – one who seeks to draw “political and moral lessons” from which we, the viewers, are ostensibly intended to draw conclusions and internalize them as a form of conceptual mimesis.

The book gives us a broad sense of Kentridge’s aesthetic variability which is mesmerizing to say the least; with unerring talent he flits from etching to sculpture as easily as politicians in “The New South Africa” defect across the parliament floor as it suits them. The director of the Annandale Galleries, Bill Gregory, also gives some insight into the reality of Kentridge’s creative experience. He details his visit to the Kentridge house in Johannesburg in preparation for the opening of Telegrams From The Nose, and shows Kentridge to be a consummate artist but also a person of great empathy and certainly what some might call a polymath with his wealth of talent and breadth of interests. Gregory is correct in surmising that Kentridge’s real power lies in his ability to reveal the pitfalls in representation and our concomitant weaknesses with perception and, therefore, what we believe to be true and obvious. We are often lured as willing participants into Kentridge’s work by an arcane beauty, one which moves us like that of Gericault or Gentileschi, but then find ourselves confronted with unexpected dimensions or deceptive surfaces of expression. Every work brings something different to appreciate but, like the work of all great artists, keeps us tethered to a thread of aesthetic constancy that is undeniably Kentridge’s own. Gregory suggests that “How People See” could be the subtitle of the show. And indeed, given the various written pieces and the images in the book, the book itself could be subtitled “How People See William Kentridge”, and I think that it is this ‘in-the-round’ biographical approach that the Annandale Galleries have taken in the book that is the book’s greatest strength in its attempt to portray such an interesting artist and human being.

- Harry Inglis

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OUT OF PRINT

‘Land and Lives’ is one in a sequence of revisionist exhibitions that have attempted to change our

understanding of race, modernity, and the artistic canon. This was the aim of the 1985 BMW Tributaries

show and 1988 Johannesburg Art Gallery’s ‘The Neglected Tradition’, to name but two. In ‘Land and Lives’,

however,curator Elza Miles offers a different perspective. What she does is bring to a level of

consciousness a series of invisible connections: for instance, the surprising juxtaposition of Louis Maurice

and Selby Mvusi (both of whom exhibited at the First Quadrennial Exhibition of South African Art in 1956),

or Job Kekana and Ernest Mancoba (both of whom studied under Sister Pauline at the Diocesan College at

Grace Dieu). To appreciate these synchronicities fully you need to turn to the catalogue. Elza Miles is one

of this country’s most importantand least appreciated archivists. Over the years, in a career of fidgeting

and ferreting, she has established a remarkable collection of information about unrecognised black artists.

It is an archive based on interviews, stories, and records of training.

Published to accompany an exhibition presented by Michael Stevenson, Michael Graham-Stewart and Johans Borman, ‘Take your road and travel along’ pairs South African artists including Gerard Sekoto, George Pemba and Ernest Mancoba with their contemporaries from other parts of Africa, such as Ben Enwonwu from Nigeria and Sam Ntiro from Tanzania. It also includes the work of the next generation - artists associated with the Zaria Art Society and Oshogbo workshops in Nigeria, the Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg, Frank McEwen’s workshops at the National Gallery in Harare and the initiatives of Pancho Guedes in Maputo. The essay and commentary on the works are by Michael Stevenson and Jost Bosland.

Because of her cultural background in South Africa, Dumas stands at a distance from Western culture and has readily absorbed references from African and Japanese art. Her existential approach to her subject, unbiased by culture, and her openness to references, as such, have engendered her unusual style.

Ceaselessly changing in her work, Dumas applies her individualistic interpretation of painting in depicting discrimination, prejudice, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and so on, thereby producing a social portrait rich in the complexity that defines our times. In this exhibition together with Banality of Evil (1984) and other examples of her brightly colored, bewitching oil portraits of the 1980s; her renowned grouped-portrait series, Female (1992-1993), consisting of 217 drawings; and her nude portrait series MOT will display works from her latest series, Man Kind (2002 2006), dealing with mistaken identities and fears concerning global terrorism.

As befits a presentation of Dumas works in Japan, the exhibition will reflect, in its composition, the artists interest and involvement in this country. Her new work Broken White, from which the exhibition title derives, will be displayed along with the Nobuyoshi Araki monochrome photograph that served as its model and also a Ukiyo-e print by Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (1839-1792), whose grotesque world of Eros resonates with Dumass works and strongly caught her interest. The first exhibition in Japan to introduce the full scope of Dumass chief worksthrough 150 works, including some 10 new creationsBroken White will precede major Marlene Dumas retrospectives scheduled for 2008 at Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Marlene DumasBroken White is co-curated by Yuka Uematsu, Chief Curator, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art; and Yuko Hasegawa and Masami Yamamoto, respectively Chief Curator and Assistant Curator of Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

Essay by Rudi Fuchs.
Description: M+M begins with the patently romantic story of these two artists’ first meeting– one surprised the other by coming to her aid in conversation–and continues through a detailed scrapbook of their recent collaborations, from ideas to installation views. Highlights include handwritten notes, shown in white on glossy black, under such headings as “I never use the F word unless I’m swearing.”

Verbalising the Visual acknowledges the unstable relationship between language, objects and meanings and explores how we translate the experience of visual culture into written and spoken words. Its primary aim is to examine and clarify a representative range of language; formal and informal, academic and colloquial, global and local, which characterises current art and design discourse.

The book includes theory , practice of formal and informal language be it written or spoken presentations, and other written documents, along with international case studies and student exercises.

Every year since 1955 an international jury has convened in Holland under the auspices of the World Press Photo Foundation to choose the finest press photographs of the year. Universally recognized as the definitive competition for photographic reporting, it has been described by Michael Rand - for many years Art Director of The Sunday Times Magazine - as ’the international photographic contest.’

Publishing the results of the most recent annual World Press Photo Contest, this exceptional book contains some of the most haunting and inspiring photographs from 2007 - over 170 pictures submitted by photojournalists, picture agencies, newspapers and magazines throughout the world. Selected from over 80,000 images taken by over 5,000 photographers representing 125 countries, these prizewinning photos capture the most powerful, moving and sometimes disturbing events of the year.

An innovating artist whose ground-breaking work changed the course of contemporary photography.

• Stephen Shore (b. 1947) is a true artistic innovator whose work has opened up new frontiers for contemporary photography.
• His photographs of everyday American scenes unveiled the exceptional beauty to be found in banality, at the same time laying the groundwork for contemporary photographic genres such as the diaristic snapshot and the monumentalized landscape.
• This monograph offers the first complete look at the artist’s long and storied career, from his residency at Warhol’s Factory to his experiments in conceptual photography, from his landmark series American Surfaces to his continued exploration of emerging techniques.
• One of the first art photographers to work in colour, Shore’s high-key portraits of America’s chromatic landscape can be found in the permanent collections of major museums all over the world.

Hassan’s exhibition, Fixing Time at SMAC includes a series of his beautifully delicate watercolours, paper cut-out constructions and two intricate installations: one a collection of old spectacles and a similarly fused-together amalgamation of broken clocks. These works, like all of Hassan’s, reflect the fragility of the world around them. How much has time really changed? What has been seen by the former owners of these spectacles throughout South Africa’s troubled past, and the world’s? What do they see now?

Certainly the view we imagine is an uneasy one, as evident in the complex visions of Hasan’s torn paper constructions, delicate watercolours and, of course, his disquieting installations.