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Since the 1970s, the South African artist William Kentridge has charted the turbulent terrain of his homeland in both personal and political terms. With erudition, absurdist humor, and an underlying hope in humankind, Kentridge´s artwork has examined apartheid, humanitarian atrocities, aging, and the ambiguities of growing up white and Jewish in South Africa. This October Files volume brings together critical essays and interviews that explore Kentridge´s work and shed light on the unique working processes behind his drawings, prints, stop-animation films, and theater works. Krauss´s understanding of Kentridge´s work as embodying a fundamental tension between formal and sociological poles has been crucial to subsequent analyses of the artist´s work, including the new essay by the anthropologist Rosalind Morris, who has collaborated with Kentridge on several projects.

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Rosalind E. Krauss is University Professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where, from 1995 to 2006, she held the Meyer Schapiro Chair in Modern Art and Theory. She is a founding editor of October and the author of Passages in Modern Sculpture, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths, The Optical Unconscious, Bachelors, Perpetual Inventory, Under Blue Cup (all published by the MIT Press), and other books.

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