Accounts and Drawings from Underground

The East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, 1906

Rosalind C. Morris, William Kentridge

 

8.25 x 11 inches, 196pp, 61 colour plates February 2015

ISBN : 9780857422057

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Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a worldwide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris bring us an unprecedented collaboration, where they have taken the pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation and transformed it into something wholly new. Kentridge contributes forty landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining created and as a visual epitaph to a history of disappearances. For her part, Morris plumbs the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account. Reading down and across the columns of the pages as though they were themselves shafts in the earth, she draws together the stories of migrant laborers and charts the flows of capital and desire, overwriting the text of the book to give us a palpable sense of the world that gold mining created.

Rosalind C. Morris is professor of anthropology and former associate director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. A scholar of both mainland Southeast Asia and South Africa, she has published widely on topics concerning the politics of representation, the relationship between violence and value, gender and sexuality, the mass media, and the changing forms of modernity in the global south. She is also the author of New Worlds from Fragments: Film, Ethnography, and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures (1994) and In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand (2000).

William Kentridge is one of most prominent contemporary artists in the world. Best known for his animated films based on charcoal drawings, he also works in prints, books, collage, sculpture and the performing arts. In the past two years, his work has been seen at the Metropolitan Opera and MoMA in New York, Jeu de Paume and the Louvre in Paris, La Scala in Milan, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Albertina Museum in Vienna. In 2010, Kentridge received the Kyoto Prize in recognition of his contributions in the field of arts and philosophy. In 2011, he was elected as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa by the University of London.

 

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