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The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
Six Drawing Lessons
Over the last three decades, the visual artist William Kentridge has garnered international acclaim for his work across media including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theater. Rendered in stark contrasts of black and white, his images reflect his native South Africa and, like endlessly suggestive shadows, point to something more elemental as well. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons is the most comprehensive collection available of Kentridge’s thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio.
Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and it cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of traditional academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial location for the creation of the place where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity. Drawing has the potential to educate us about the most complex issues of our time. This is the real meaning of “drawing lessons.”
Incorporating elements of graphic design and ranging freely from discussions of Plato’s cave to the Enlightenment’s role in colonial oppression to the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons is an illustration in print of its own thesis of how art creates knowledge. Foregrounding the very processes by which we see, Kentridge makes us more aware of the mechanisms―and deceptions―through which we construct meaning in the world.
Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and it cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of traditional academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial location for the creation of the place where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity. Drawing has the potential to educate us about the most complex issues of our time. This is the real meaning of “drawing lessons.”
Incorporating elements of graphic design and ranging freely from discussions of Plato’s cave to the Enlightenment’s role in colonial oppression to the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons is an illustration in print of its own thesis of how art creates knowledge. Foregrounding the very processes by which we see, Kentridge makes us more aware of the mechanisms―and deceptions―through which we construct meaning in the world.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
May 21, 2024
-واقعن فکر میکنی هیچ جایی برای روشنفکران در کارگاه وجود ندارد؟
-من این را نگفتم. آنها باید برای قهوه دعوت شوند. ولی در کل، وقتی کار در حال انجام است، بهتر است روی نیمکت پشت در بنشینند.
-من این را نگفتم. آنها باید برای قهوه دعوت شوند. ولی در کل، وقتی کار در حال انجام است، بهتر است روی نیمکت پشت در بنشینند.
October 31, 2014
Six Drawing Lessons proves Kentridge to be just how you would hope: thoughtful, skilled, lighthearted, and well-grounded. Not revolutionary, but thoroughly enjoyable and well made. Worth it for time and distance as universal image archive.
November 11, 2014
I enjoyed this book.
Given as the Norton Lectures at Harvard, it was printed a short time after I had seen the Kentridge exhibition at MoMA without knowing of him at all.
From the opening lecture, the central issue is one of indeterminacy, represented by emergence of the occupiers of Plato's cave and their problems with "the light" and the "reality" of what they had seen previously only as shadows. Kentridge is concerned with the way we are wired to impose structure (and meaning) to fluid experience; he uses clouds as an obvious example but also refers to artistic construction, e.g., the way viewers will discover a cat in an assemblage of paper strips, and so on.
Much of this he gathers in the 6th (final) lecture: "This is the artist's project: needing the fragments, even delighting in them, in the process of wresting meaning from them.
"The meaning is always a construction, a projection, not an edifice--something to be made, not simply found. There is always a radical incoherence and a radical instability. All certainties can only be held together by a text, a threat, an army, a fatwa, a sermon--that holds the fragments in an iron grip" (p 185).
The book is itself well made but contains numerous interesting and sometimes lovely illustrations. And the writing generally matches these qualities. I am reminded of THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES by the ceramicist Edmund de Waal, one of the loveliest nonfiction books I have ever read; I wish I had it to hand just at the moment to cite it.
I shall return to this volume as I do to a favorite book of poetry, to dip into it time and again.
Given as the Norton Lectures at Harvard, it was printed a short time after I had seen the Kentridge exhibition at MoMA without knowing of him at all.
From the opening lecture, the central issue is one of indeterminacy, represented by emergence of the occupiers of Plato's cave and their problems with "the light" and the "reality" of what they had seen previously only as shadows. Kentridge is concerned with the way we are wired to impose structure (and meaning) to fluid experience; he uses clouds as an obvious example but also refers to artistic construction, e.g., the way viewers will discover a cat in an assemblage of paper strips, and so on.
Much of this he gathers in the 6th (final) lecture: "This is the artist's project: needing the fragments, even delighting in them, in the process of wresting meaning from them.
"The meaning is always a construction, a projection, not an edifice--something to be made, not simply found. There is always a radical incoherence and a radical instability. All certainties can only be held together by a text, a threat, an army, a fatwa, a sermon--that holds the fragments in an iron grip" (p 185).
The book is itself well made but contains numerous interesting and sometimes lovely illustrations. And the writing generally matches these qualities. I am reminded of THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES by the ceramicist Edmund de Waal, one of the loveliest nonfiction books I have ever read; I wish I had it to hand just at the moment to cite it.
I shall return to this volume as I do to a favorite book of poetry, to dip into it time and again.
December 8, 2015
Exquisite erudition. Humbly thoughtful. Adventureous. William Kentridge's fantastic lectures set the standard high indeed for public intellectuals, artists, and writers when they address the complex and tightly interwoven strands of contemporary reality.
November 27, 2014
Interesting treatise on an artist's personal reflections and journey, and commentary on art at large. The print version is beautiful and well done, though I wonder if this was much better as a lecture, in the medium it was meant to be delivered in.
June 5, 2017
One of the best books I have read this year. I highly recommend also watching the Harvard Norton lectures along with the book as there are video and performance parts to the lecture that don't translate into book form.
April 17, 2020
Perhaps the best book I have ever read on art, creativity, and the relationship between art-making and the society in which it occurs.
This book, which was a gift, is very heady. There were things I did not understand. But there were also stunning insights, connections and visions, which now feel like lessons permanently learned.
The author is a South African artist and filmmaker whose emphasis is on the before and after of apartheid. This book is a collection of six lectures Kentridge gave at Harvard over the span of a year.
I can honestly say that this book changed my understanding and patience with ambiguity. I will never look at a statue of a man on horseback again. And Plato's cave, which I hardly comprehend to begin with, is enlarged to encompass much of human understanding.
Clearly this book is not for everyone. But there is brilliance on every page.
This book, which was a gift, is very heady. There were things I did not understand. But there were also stunning insights, connections and visions, which now feel like lessons permanently learned.
The author is a South African artist and filmmaker whose emphasis is on the before and after of apartheid. This book is a collection of six lectures Kentridge gave at Harvard over the span of a year.
I can honestly say that this book changed my understanding and patience with ambiguity. I will never look at a statue of a man on horseback again. And Plato's cave, which I hardly comprehend to begin with, is enlarged to encompass much of human understanding.
Clearly this book is not for everyone. But there is brilliance on every page.
January 20, 2015
in book form, kentridge's norton lectures at harvard in 2012, so 6 lessons in making art. some parts as detailed as how to make/do drawing exercises with anamorphic projections (the round, cylindrical mirror surrounded by your distorted drawing) and how to do the "claude glass" exercise, which makes the body a crude camera. other areas are the notion of geographic "reality" and how that can change, even in human time, and how artist can deal with that, how being 'dumb' and 'stupid' can free artist mind and preconceptions to get new ideas of making art, how political and social realities can affect the artists pov , if she will only search that out. and much more.
a do-it-yourself master class for artists. boy it would have been cool to attend these lectures in person.
harvard has all six lectures more or less documented on web, here is #1 http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard...
a do-it-yourself master class for artists. boy it would have been cool to attend these lectures in person.
harvard has all six lectures more or less documented on web, here is #1 http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard...
April 10, 2018
A beautiful book for those who appreciate art and philosophy.
William Kentridge is a beautiful artist. What I enjoy most of his artistic style is his emphasis on strong concept that drives brevity whilst invoking deep consideration. Investing time to look through his illustrations is an exercise of subtle education. My experience of reading Six Drawing Lessons was nothing short of enrichment and it left me with a yearning to find more of his work or other artists that communicate with such clarity.
Kentridge's language and his literary style is accessible beyond academia but can be challenging for those who aren't accustomed to such a meditative format. It is a good idea to watch his videos to learn what to expect of this title.
Beyond his illustrations, to have this gorgeous book to read is such a pleasure. I am so happy to have this title on those days that I wish to unwind and enjoy the lush words within it.
William Kentridge is a beautiful artist. What I enjoy most of his artistic style is his emphasis on strong concept that drives brevity whilst invoking deep consideration. Investing time to look through his illustrations is an exercise of subtle education. My experience of reading Six Drawing Lessons was nothing short of enrichment and it left me with a yearning to find more of his work or other artists that communicate with such clarity.
Kentridge's language and his literary style is accessible beyond academia but can be challenging for those who aren't accustomed to such a meditative format. It is a good idea to watch his videos to learn what to expect of this title.
Beyond his illustrations, to have this gorgeous book to read is such a pleasure. I am so happy to have this title on those days that I wish to unwind and enjoy the lush words within it.
December 29, 2023
Pretty different style of writing -- using art as the carriage to explain philosophy. was recommended to read this by a professor when I was thinking about exploring craft vs automation. Good read if curious about how an artist views and contextualizes their work for non-artists
Read
August 17, 2023Will not be rating because I read it for school.
May 14, 2021
Ci ho messo molti mesi a leggerlo, intervallato con altri libri. Non è un libro prettamente di arte, nonostante il titolo. É la trascrizione di sei lezioni tenute dall'artista ad Harvard. È abbastanza frammentario e pur essendo interessante e io l'abbia sottolineato qua e là, non sono riuscita ad entrarci in sintonia (tranne forse per la parte su Platone).
May 31, 2023
The title, Six Drawing Lessons, sounds perfectly simple, straightforward and orderly, perhaps even a little didactic. It introduces a relationship between Kentridge -- a very well-known artist whose gift for writing was not so well-known -- and us, his readers and, in most cases, viewers: he is showing and telling, a story about how he came to draw as he does. He's teaching us, in a sense, not exactly how to draw as how to understand drawing as he does -- the most basic, immediate, immersive means of making some sense of visual experience. The six chapters form something like layers or deposits around a core. At the centre -- Chapter 1 -- lies the famous image of Plato's cave, the example often said to have launched Western philosophy. In this story we -- through the philosopher -- find a group of prisoners in a dark cave, chained in place so that they can see only a show of shadows produced by figures moving in front of an artificial light -- a fire. The just and noble and powerful philosopher-king tries to rescue these prisoners, showing them that what they see is false, artificial and leading them up, out of the cave, into sunlight and the real world. Kentridge convincingly sets the story at the heart of the Enlightenment myth that came to justify worldwide imperialist violence, a matter of setting the prisoners free, bringing them from darkness to light.
Around this core, Kentridge sets his own history, his visual experience growing up as a man of European heritage in South Africa, against "history," as it has most usually been understood from a Western European standpoint. He recounts visual experience of horrific violence (his father was a lawyer who defended the victims in some cases of appalling racial violence). His own visual experience of landscape and distance and change is often at odds with the kind of vision recorded and celebrated in Western art history -- Africa hardly appears in that history in any case. In another layer, He describes his own way of working in the studio, which might be called animated drawing. It is an enormously time-consuming, exacting process: he usually draws in charcoal, photographing a drawing in one state, moving back to change it, photographing again, and then linking the photographs together to form a film of the drawing coming into being. This does not displace drawing as the core of the practice, but builds in a temporal dimension. Even small changes register, time can be collapsed or extended or reversed, a drawing disappearing, reappearing. Various scenes, various stories, open the range of a filmmaker's dramatic possibilities -- with character and scene, drawing and story aligned or in conflict with one another. The studio emerges as a central focus of the book, the place where the unique events of one man's life experience shape actual material, in the present, and so become perceptible to others. The text describes complex and simple patterns, repetitions and departures, a play with time -- or temporal order --and meaning. There are even regressions, doing things backwards, in the interest of stimulating departures, all in a keen consciousness of time and an immediate, physical relationship to drawing.
Six Drawing Lessons was commissioned as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 2012. That is, they were read aloud -- spoken -- before they were published; a reader does have the advantage over a listener of being able to go back and re-read occasionally, but also the disadvantage of not seeing the films Kentridge used as illustrations at the point he chose, or the stills large-scale -- or the nuances of a speaking voice or the sense of an immediate performance. The text makes us aware of text, of its differences from speech, of the dramatic effects of film on drawing, on the ways these things shape perceptions every day, inevitably shaping our respective realities. Instituted by Harvard University in 1925, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures have always sought to provide a contemporary view of "poetry in the broadest sense." It is, I think, exactly where Six Drawing Lessons should be.
Around this core, Kentridge sets his own history, his visual experience growing up as a man of European heritage in South Africa, against "history," as it has most usually been understood from a Western European standpoint. He recounts visual experience of horrific violence (his father was a lawyer who defended the victims in some cases of appalling racial violence). His own visual experience of landscape and distance and change is often at odds with the kind of vision recorded and celebrated in Western art history -- Africa hardly appears in that history in any case. In another layer, He describes his own way of working in the studio, which might be called animated drawing. It is an enormously time-consuming, exacting process: he usually draws in charcoal, photographing a drawing in one state, moving back to change it, photographing again, and then linking the photographs together to form a film of the drawing coming into being. This does not displace drawing as the core of the practice, but builds in a temporal dimension. Even small changes register, time can be collapsed or extended or reversed, a drawing disappearing, reappearing. Various scenes, various stories, open the range of a filmmaker's dramatic possibilities -- with character and scene, drawing and story aligned or in conflict with one another. The studio emerges as a central focus of the book, the place where the unique events of one man's life experience shape actual material, in the present, and so become perceptible to others. The text describes complex and simple patterns, repetitions and departures, a play with time -- or temporal order --and meaning. There are even regressions, doing things backwards, in the interest of stimulating departures, all in a keen consciousness of time and an immediate, physical relationship to drawing.
Six Drawing Lessons was commissioned as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 2012. That is, they were read aloud -- spoken -- before they were published; a reader does have the advantage over a listener of being able to go back and re-read occasionally, but also the disadvantage of not seeing the films Kentridge used as illustrations at the point he chose, or the stills large-scale -- or the nuances of a speaking voice or the sense of an immediate performance. The text makes us aware of text, of its differences from speech, of the dramatic effects of film on drawing, on the ways these things shape perceptions every day, inevitably shaping our respective realities. Instituted by Harvard University in 1925, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures have always sought to provide a contemporary view of "poetry in the broadest sense." It is, I think, exactly where Six Drawing Lessons should be.
September 25, 2021
I give this book four stars only because William Kentridge is so painfully obviously smarter than I am. How ironic to have a subheading called 'A Safe Place For Stupidity' when I felt very stupid for the majority of the book. That said, when I properly could focus and pay attention to the ideas, they were all fascinating and unique observations built up from a good range of sources. The lectures all connect so it feels like a cohesive journey from the beginning to the end. The book itself was just beautiful, with the text itself being well designed, as well as tons of images of Kentridge's own work. I was only sad I hadn't been in attendance at any of the actual lectures.
December 16, 2015
An interesting assemblage that follows a somewhat circuitous route. It falls in line with the standard special lecture series with high points (discussion of childhood and South Africa) and low points ( the arguments in the studio make little sense without a video component). There are moments of inspiration and insight.
October 9, 2018
Lilting prose, at times too mystic and woo for my tastes. Where a typical book is made to be consumed in sips, this book is a firehose. A beautiful mess of the components that go into Kentridge's process, mixed with his take on apartheid, colonialism, and the chaotic human psyche.
October 22, 2014
Brilliant.
March 25, 2015
There are some interesting ideas in this book, but I think they might have been better as a lecture. I just didn't find this as intellectually entertaining as I had hoped.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews