Excavation and Entstellung: (Media-) Archaeological Activity and Postcolonial Memory Work in William Kentridge’s Wozzeck and The Head & the Load
Lawrence Alexander
From Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture (2025), pp. 63-82, doi:10.59860/vc.c27707f
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| Part of the book: Citational Media Edited by Annie Ring and Lucy Bollington Legenda Abstract. William Kentridge’s artistic philosophy and modus operandi rigorously defend uncertainty, ambiguity, and contradiction. Alexander approachs the Freudian model of Entstellung (meaning ‘distortion’, but also ‘dis-placement’) not merely as an object of psychoanalytic interpretation, but also as a prevailing condition of contemporary moving image economies and the related practices of aesthetics and politics that Kentridge seeks to engage. These concerns provide a pretext for thinking about media-archaeological practice in general and Kentridge’s confrontation with historical and archival violence in particular. Alexander considers this media-archaeological sensibility as one that illuminates the violent distortions that continue to haunt Western narratives of history and representation, and historical representation, since their inauguration in Plato’s cave. This analysis reads Kentridge’s performative practice as one that mobilises the experiences of spatial and temporal fragmentation — displacements and distortions — that are characteristic of contemporary cultures of moving image circulation. Full text. This contribution is published as Open Access and can be downloaded as a PDF, or viewed as a PDF in your web browser, here: |
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