Notes

This lithograph is one of four print variations featuring typewriters produced by master printmaker Mark Attwood in 2012 on a contract basis for William Kentridge’s studio. The text collage in the right, bottom corner directly links this work to two important Kentridge projects from 2012: an installation in Germany and a six-part lecture series in the United States. The Refusal of Time is a five-channel audio-visual installation featuring four steel megaphones and a breathing machine. Commissioned by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev for the thirteenth edition of Documenta in Kassel, where it also premiered, this ‘complex, meticulously programmed sound-and-light work’¹ was acquired jointly by the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The Refusal of Time is the product of collaboration, notably with Peter Galison, a professor of the history of science and of physics at Harvard University. Galison is credited for the work’s dramaturgy. The Refusal of Time deals with science and its metaphors. Kentridge offered a more expansive explanation in his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 2012: "The project … began with considerations of different kinds of time, but as the work progressed it became clear that it was as much about Fate as about Time; and our attempts to escape from that which insists on what and how and where we are.’²

Endowed in 1925, the annual Norton lectures are Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities. Kentridge’s lectures were autobiographical and yet also intellectually ranging. They culminated in a complex deliberation on time. The title of this image directly quotes from the final passage of the lecture: ‘When mass is huge, gravity grows until it is irresistible. A black hole traps all that passes, allowing out of its gravitational field no object, no light, no trace of light, that has been attracted to it. A black hole the size of a full stop swallows the sentence. Others swallow a house, a city, a galaxy.’³

^1. Holland Cotter (2013) ‘William Kentridge: The Refusal of Times’, New York Times, 29 November, page 31.
^2. William Kentridge (2014) Six Drawing Lessons, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pages 165-66.
^3. Ibid, pages 185-86.

Provenance

Artists' Press Studio, White River, 2012.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Hayward Gallery, The Bluecoat, Midlands Art Centre, QUAD, United Kingdom, A Universal Archive: William Kentridge as Printmaker, 2012 to 2013.

Literature

Nadine Monem and Faye Robson (ed) (2012) A Universal Archive: William Kentridge as a Printmaker, exhibition catalogue, London: Hayward Publishing, illustrated in colour on page 117 with the title 'The Full Stop'.

Lilian Tone (2013) William Kentridge: Fortuna, London: Thames & Hudson, illustrated on page 53.