Instead of waiting for the summer, I read That Which Is Not Drawn right off—another brilliant design from Seagull Books, presenting the artist William Kentridge in conversation once again. This time, he is in Kolkata with the anthropologist Rosalind C. Morris. The topic is the spoken and the hidden, or, what Kentridge has not yet drawn. At the heart of the matter are the distinctions that make his timely art what it is: moving images rather than still; metamorphoses instead of individuals; continuity, not loss. The “virtues of bastardy” is the provocative phrase Kentridge uses to sum it up.
Svetlana Alpers is an art historian based in New York.