Doctrines of Affection By William Kentridge

Doctrines of Affection. From Studio to Stage By William Kentridge

Size: 13.6 x 21.5cm

Pagination: 160 pages, full colour pages, with numerous illustrations

Binding: Paperback with flaps

An extract from Doctrines of Affection:

The productions and picnics of Glyndebourne were a fixture of my parents’ summers. My father bought a country house in Sussex to be close to the opera house. Now he is too frail to make the journey from London to Sussex. There is a bench in the garden with my mother’s name on it. In due course there will be a second bench. But they are present as the work of the opera proceeds. And if I place my eye close to the pilot light, I can almost persuade myself I see them there in the auditorium, watching as the audience gathers around them, waiting for the moment when the first note sounds.

About the book:

William Kentridge, one of the leading artists working today, explores how his works came
into being, from the first photograph he ever made, through studies in drama, posters for
theatre plays and work in the film industry. In Doctrines of Affection he shows how intuitions, connections and objects migrate from a table-top model in his studio to opera houses and exhibition spaces, how to work with music and to connect this work with the outside world.

Kentridge celebrates the pleasures of the absurd and of self-deception, resisting the purely
rational. When certainties fail, he allows ambiguity and doubt to emerge, and “the less good idea” to flourish. With humour and generosity, he explores how he finds a visual language on a vast scale for well-known classical works from Mozart to Monteverdi thereby enhancing their expression of the human condition.

About the author:

William Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955) is one of the most influential artists of our time,
whose work spans drawing, film, sculpture, theatre, and opera, united by a fluid approach
across media. At the core of his practice lies drawing, which he has described as a way of
thinking in time—marked by erasure, movement, and revision. Growing up in Johannesburg during apartheid, in what he has called a ‘fractured society’, Kentridge’s work emerges from a condition of historical rupture and ethical unease. Rather than offering positions or solutions, it proceeds through uncertainty, contradiction, and provisional meaning, often articulated through irony and a dry, self-questioning humour.