A Natural History of the Studio

These enlightening if sometimes arcane essays, originally delivered as part of the Oxford University Slade Lecture series, frame the artist’s studio as a site where “fragments” of the world are “rearranged and sent back out in the world” as art. Multimedia artist Kentridge (Waiting for the Sibyl) “reverse-engineers” how he made such projects as “Triumphs and Laments,” a frieze depicting heroes and villains from Roman history on the embankment wall of the Tiber River. He describes collecting sample photos, drawing sketches that used the “lines and margins of the page” to “approximate the lines of the travertine blocks on the wall,” and ordering and reordering the cut-outs in the studio. Also discussed are the challenges of translating artwork from the studio into the real world—after realizing there was more space on the Roman wall than he’d accounted for, he used a blank square to symbolize gaps in the historical record, captioning it “That which I do not remember.” Throughout, the author explores how art frequently turns on such shifts and surprises, as one discards the “perfect” original idea and embraces what arises through craft and improvisation. While some entries meander, Kentridge’s blow-by-blow account of the artistic process is frank, unromanticized, and often moving, as when he speaks of his “solitary conversation with the drawing as it emerges.” Art scholars and students will be rapt. (Apr.)