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  • William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose by Jane Taylor
  • Hazel Rickard
William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose. By Jane Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017; pp. 224.

Jane Taylor’s William Kentridge: Being Led by the Nose explores William Kentridge’s 2010 production of The Nose for the New York Metropolitan Opera. Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1928 opera is based on Nikolai Gogol’s satire (1836) of the same name in which the nose of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev abandons him and succeeds him in rank. Taylor argues that the theme at the heart of The Nose is the internal contradiction of the divided self, and that this can be seen as an allegory for William Kentridge’s mode of art-making. The dialectical relationship between parts of the self drives Taylor’s project in content and form, and the style of writing itself performs the main thrust of the argument. By deliberately employing her writing to mirror Kentridge’s mode of working, Taylor creates not only an insightful critical study of Kentridge’s creative process, but a sophisticated piece of performative writing as well.

In her first chapter titled “Nasal Passages,” Taylor discusses the prehistories of the production, including the life of Shostakovich and Kentridge’s position as a political artist in South Africa. She explores the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize art under a totalitarian regime: most significantly, that double-speak is necessary to survive and that consistent identity is almost an impossibility. Taylor goes on to explore how Kentridge’s oeuvre investigates this problem, as well as how he strategically employs internal division in his process. In the second chapter, “Nose Bleeds,” she describes the range of media, images, and ideas that emerged while making The Nose. In the third chapter, “A Special Theory of Relativity,” Taylor explores issues of artistic lineage and familial relation as it informs Kentridge’s art. “Object Lessons,” her fourth chapter, centers the type of dialogue that happens between “Kentridge the artist” and “Kentridge the filmmaker,” which she argues are two separate though dialectically related entities (121). In his studio the critical impulse is held at bay while the hand plays, and in the secondary phase of filmmaking he employs a mode of repair rather than invention. During this later time of reflection when drawings are revised, compiled, and animated to create a film, certain themes emerge in new ways, but they are always grounded in the material work of the other Kentridge.

The theme of splitting and possible reconciliation appears throughout Taylor’s book, and in her fifth chapter, “Collegiate Assessments,” she frames this predicament as the problem of modernity: that there is anxiety over internal personal coherence in environments wherein censorship makes it almost impossible to reconcile disparate parts of the self; one must hide and show certain things strategically. Taylor poses the question: “Can allegory and history be viewed through a single frame?” (147). In other words, can the absurd contradictions of life be seen through the same artistic lens as the very real and specific terrors of political regimes? Kentridge and Taylor attempt to do so. Kentridge proceeds by bringing negative images in his work (distance, separation, shadow, or the black space of a censored page) into light (erasing an image until the screen is bare, for example). He sometimes reverses the cinematic image to make a broken image whole again. Taylor shows that, on the one hand, there is hope and humor in his artistic gestures, but on the other that there is a deep seriousness, a sense of division and loss.

Taylor chose the form of dialogue to stage an encounter with Kentridge as other authors have done before, most notably Angela Breidbach in William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud (2006) and Rosalind Morris in That Which Is Not Drawn: Conversations (2014). Like them, Taylor develops insightful commentary on Kentridge’s work, but she also engages critically with the form of dialogue itself. She takes as her model Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets (1748), which is an absurd and magical conversation with female genitalia. Gender politics aside, Taylor finds the gem [End Page 597] at the heart of the work that is relevant for the...

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