A Natural History of William Kentridge’s Studio

Editor’s Note: The following text is a chapter titled "Lapis Lazuli" that has been excerpted with permission and adapted from A Natural History of the Studio (2026) by William Kentridge, published by Grove Press and available online and in bookstores. The book gathers the Slade Lectures delivered by Kentridge in 2024 at the University of Oxford.

Some years ago, two friends gave me a block of watercolour, pure lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. Lapis lazuli is a precious pigment used sparingly in Renaissance painting, now more generally replaced by French ultramarine. But there is an intense blueness in lapis, a colour coming off the paper towards you that is unmatched by any synthetic colour. In projections and photography and printing, this blue always loses its power.

I don’t use colour in my drawings. But I painted some squares and circles to see the colour I was given. I was caught, wanting to devour the blue and not knowing how to bring it into anything I was drawing. While waiting to solve what I should do with the blue, I started painting texts and phrases with it. I have a notebook in which I write down phrases or sentences I have come across, which, through their idiosyncrasy, or particularities, feel they need to be held, put into a painting of words to be used later.

GOD’S OPINION IS UNKNOWN, a Setswana proverb. WEIGH ALL TEARS, a line from a poem by Czesław Miłosz. YOU WILL BE DREAMT BY A JACKAL.

In the Middle Ages, books of prayer would have both the words of the prayer and instructions on what to do while praying (a kind of stage instruction). These were painted or printed in red ink, in so-called rubrics. I think of my blue texts as rubrics, something at the edge of discursive language. The texts are generally painted on the pages of old books: religious texts from the eighteenth century, or a record of stargazing from Cape Town in the nineteenth century. A half-coherent fragment, a half-coherent thought, on top of a considered older thinking.

Phrases like:

THE OLD GODS HAVE RETIRED YESTERDAY’S GOOD IDEA STRUGGLE FOR A GOOD HEART A BOX OF SHAME HISTORY ON ONE LEG FIND THE LESS GOOD IDEA RECREATIONAL DANGER A SAFE SPACE FOR STUPIDITY DEFENSIVE SLEEPING THE PLEASURES OF SELF-DECEPTION ENOUGH AND MORE THAN ENOUGH

I am interested in coherence and incoherence. The limitations of coherence, and the productive possibilities of incoherence. The irresistible pressure to find coherence and avoid the anxiety of incoherence. I am caught between needing a manageable progression of thought and argument, and a wish to allow the fragments to fall where they may. To demonstrate literally the panic inside our rational movement through the world.

Circling the studio

But I want to retreat, to go backwards. The start of this lecture was written in my flat in London, where my wife and I were isolated in COVID quarantine. The studio in the flat is a small room compared to the garden studio in Johannesburg: forty-two paces to circle the studio if one walks in a figure eight. On my table were my notebooks, waiting for words; a full fountain pen, pregnant with all possibilities. But the chair resisted me. I walked around the studio, gathering the words and thoughts in this walking (2,400 steps, according to my phone), all the small tasks one undertakes to avoid sitting down.

There is a kind of Ur-language. Testing some phrases in my head: “Some years ago, a friend gave me a block of lapis lazuli . . .” “Lapis lazuli is the brightest . . .” “I have never seen a blue as bright as . . .” Phrases or sentences, but more than that, a sensing in the muscles. Somehow in the pectoral muscles, in the tastebuds, a move and a tensing, trying to pull the different thoughts together. Holding on to a thought the way one tries to hold on to a dream as you wake. The thought was there, a clarity. Ah, now it is gone. Talk about the lapis blue, then about the periaqueductal grey. As I pace the desk, I write “lapis blue, periaqueductal grey.” One part of my head repeats, start with the lapis. The other part is off on its own journey: “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” Where did Ulysses come from, out of the blue? A glance at the table, notebook still untouched.

My thinking is stopped by watching myself walking, and writing. To will a coherence for thought. The unmoving me at the centre of the room instructs the other self, circling like a circus horse trotting around the ring at the end of a rope. Talk about the words, I instruct myself.

Translation. Tell them about translation in the studio, about the Markov blanket, about images, from ink to sound, sound to ink to colour, about Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate. Check the date of Ursonate and Ulysses. I run out of thought. Now start. I don’t.

Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. The great secular rabbi Sigmund Freud. No, no. “You are just avoiding the book and the pen.” Jewishness in Englishness was the previous lecture.

Did I just say that?

I write down “procrastination.” I write down “productive procrastination.” Then it finally begins, the first words on paper addressing, in this case, words.

This split of the self, one self walking around the room trying to will a thought or series of thoughts into coherence, whilst another voice, another self, admonishes them for the inadequacy of their efforts, is a common sensation, particularly in the studio.

There is the artist as worker, charcoal drawing, close to the paper. And then as the artist steps back a pace or two to see how the drawing looks, a second self emerges, the critic, who sees at once the weaknesses or mistakes of the work on the wall and sends the first self back to the drawing with a series of instructions (move the horizon down, the cloud is too dark) or admonishes, “How can you still get it so wrong after so many years?”

Language, or language in the studio, is the subject of this second essay. Language, of course, using language to discuss the studio; but also, the processes of the studio: to think about language, the translation from word to lapis lazuli; about the colour, but the colour also changing one’s sense of the words. The studio is a place of making, but also a place of making meaning. It is a space and a technique of translation. It starts with blankness, with incoherence, the blank sheet of paper, the words on the paper, hoping they will lead to a coherence, or at least to a provocative incoherence. If the drawing is the finished sentence or the paragraph, then the process of making the drawing can reveal the invisible process behind the spoken or written word. The faster-than-one-can-write, or think, following the processes of our unconscious brain, gathering the fragments, then sending them out through the muscles of the chest, the throat, the larynx, the tongue and the lips into the world. The words come before realising what we are going to say. “Did I just say that? Not me. I would never say such foolishness. If I was in charge of my words, they would be so much more persuasive.”

Periaqueductal grey

This is all slowed down in the studio. The drawing is the thinking before the thought is conscious. The walk around the studio is the preamble even to this.

There is a dispute in neurology as to where the font of consciousness lies. Conventional wisdom has it proceed from perception outwards, the gathering of information about the world, which transforms eventually into awareness of the self, seeing many birds in order to understand bird-ness. But there is another theory that feels much closer to me. Consciousness, this line of argument goes, starts not from the frontal lobes, the most sophisticated part of our mind, but from the periaqueductal grey, a pea-sized piece of grey matter at the brain stem, the most primitive part of our brain, a highly sensitive piece of the body. One side registers pain; the other pleasure. This is the periaqueductal grey. It moves towards and away from the world; towards warmth if we feel our temperature drop; away from the burning heat, if you’re too close to the fire.

This is miles away from rational decision-making. This is the body thinking. There’s an impulse, which will find its meaning later. First, a phrase and later an analysis of what it might mean. Consciousness comes from emotion, desire or repulsion. First, a drawing, and only afterwards a questioning: What does this drawing say? An impulse to make that is prior to the “what” that is made; what the subject is. The pull of the studio is central; the “what” is much less so.

It could be a text, a tree, a drawing of a coffeepot. They are all translations of a much more primitive desire to send something out into the world. This is both me and not me. Something I have made, but which is also more than me. I leave, the drawing remains, a shadow one can leave behind, or a snail trail of the passage of one’s life. This is knowing our edge but working to reach through it.

We construct a Markov blanket, that membrane that defines where we end and the rest of the world begins, the edge of what we can protect against entropy. It is the job of the artist to resist entropy. This metaphoric blanket is not the outside world, but it is sensible to it, and sensitive to it, a membrane of negotiation between that which comes towards us and how we meet it. This blanket is a borderline for all life, for an amoeba, a jellyfish, a human, each resisting their private entropy. Something between us and the world.

In the studio, a drawing will stand in for this membrane; something marking the border between us and the world. This is of course a great simplification of neurology. One must understand the artist as scavenger, half-digesting other people’s thoughts, taking scraps into himself. What is important here is the nourishment provided, the productivity of these metaphors, not their scientific correctness. In this case, I am held by the image of that unreachable centre in our brain, thought circling it. And of the Markov blanket, not as a statistical proposition (which correctly speaking it is), but as a felt blanket draped over

our shoulders, under which all these thoughts and impulses can churn unseen.

Tummelplatz

There is a blindness under the blanket, a stupidity. Let it be said, the studio is a safe space for stupidity. A space where impulses can be given the benefit of the doubt. Freud referred to the psychoanalytic space between the analyst and his patient as a Tummelplatz, a place of tumbling or jousting, a terrain for allowing anything to be said, understanding that there may be a sense to unearth in the flow of images and thoughts that emerge in a stream of consciousness, allowing the unconscious to bubble to the surface. The studio is a Tummelplatz, the artist both patient and analyst; the sheet of paper the terrain on which this jousting takes place. Follow the line, follow the lie, follow the image, and discover who you are.

The translations are numerous, swipe across the paper, a horizon line. This is both an impulse, a sweep of the arm, and the thought dividing the paper, sky and earth, the start of the

map. Here is the world, here is the continent, the field in which I place myself (understanding that, in the end, each drawing is a fragment of a self-portrait). So, the translation from impulse to image. This is what it makes me think of: a horizon, so a landscape, the vertical charcoal marks become interventions in the landscape, short lines become the winter stubble of grass after a veld fire to the south of Johannesburg. Looking at the drawing, 10 percent is the optics of seeing the marks, the lines, the grey smudge of the charcoal; 90 percent is predictive, associative, memory.

The drawing touches the original, the veld outside, but only tangentially. The translation always touches its origin, or its source, like a tangent to a circle.

Moving the saint

But even when translation seems closer, more direct, there is a transformation. A mimesis, the most accurate copying of the real original into an artificial form certainly has its pleasures. A trompe l’oeil drawing of an object, painted with such fidelity that your hand reaches out to touch it. A pencil crayon traced onto a drawing so that from a distance you can’t tell which is the pencil and which is its copy. All these have their pleasures, a pleasure of knowing, yet still believing. The transformation is at the heart of it. Knowing the falseness of what you’re seeing but feeling the tug of its physicalness. Finding the pleasure in the self-deception.

“Translation” in one of its earliest usages refers to the moving of a saint’s relics, literally moving these relics from a small, unimportant chapel to a grander setting, commensurate with the relics now belonging to a saint who has been canonised, and her or his miracles accepted. I imagine a grand procession with a band playing, religious banners preceding and following the box, which contains the saint’s knuckles or foot. We think of translation as an act of moving something from one language into another.

An idea found in one language moves to another, the panther in Rilke’s poem translated from his German cage to an English zoo, knowing that the panther will be transformed by this translation, a single German panther becoming a dozen different translations. The saint’s bones multiply and change. Or, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, English bread is not the same as French pain. Baguette is not the same as German Schwarzbrot. I

am not so interested in what we lose in translation, but in what we gain in its impossibility, in the gaps between the original and its translation; the gaps between the translated logs that let a fire burn. The fire is always the logs and the space between the logs.

The translation in the studio also includes many migrations, a carrying of an image from one form to another, a relic of a drawing placed on another sheet of paper. A starting point may be an image, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu, a sixteen-year-old’s caricature of his teacher as a self-pitying tyrant. I made several etchings first around the centenary of the first performance of the play Ubu Roi in 1896. Jarry had a clear image for Ubu: a large gown, a peaked hood, a spiral drawn on the considerable belly. I used Jarry’s formulation for Ubu in the different scenes shown in the etchings. Ubu on a bicycle, Ubu showering, the self-flagellation of Ubu (scenes from an imagined other story of Ubu). And then there is a second “Ubu,” a self that I put on top of it. I worked with thumbprints in a soft etching ground to make the fleshier alter ego. The completed suite of etchings suggested a performance with white chalk projections, and an actor or dancer moving in tandem with the projections behind them.

These etchings became the basis of a theatre piece, Ubu and the Truth Commission. In the performance we kept the white line drawing, like Jarry’s drawing, as projected animation, but substituted a live performer for the thumbprint figure in the etchings. The production used animation and archival film material to look at the human rights abuses during the apartheid era, as revealed in the sittings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This Commission was established to hear from both victims and perpetrators of state-sanctioned violence under apartheid. Its central premise was that in exchange for full disclosure of crimes, perpetrators could receive amnesty: a kind of pact with the devil in which knowledge was exchanged for justice, the kind of deal that Ubu would have wholeheartedly

approved of. The text used a combination of verbatim transcripts from witnesses and a new text close to Jarry’s style and tone.

The etchings were there in the background. The play touched them only tangentially but essentially. The play was indebted to the original images, but then went its own way. The hope was that the rough animation, provoked by Jarry’s image and language, would give a new way of seeing the archival material: film footage of student protests, of police beating students, of police shooting at schoolchildren. Material that we have become blind to, having seen so much on television and in documentary films. In return, the hope was that this archival material would give a greater weight to the comic grotesque of Jarry’s Ubu.

Later, elements of the animation used in the production became a film in its own right (Ubu Tells the Truth). The animation and archival material coming from the play, but again, given a new form independent of the performance.

Self-portrait in the third person

To complete the circle of migration, there was a further set of drawings that came from the play and the earlier etchings. They were not self-portraits, rather drawings of the self in performance; a self-portrait in the third person. These drawings were a translation in scale, a ten-inch etching becoming a six-foot drawing, thumbprints replaced with footprints, slaps by the hand, a bicycle rolled over the paper, making the drawing a record of the damage done to the paper. I photographed and filmed myself in the studio, lying on a table as an ungainly odalisque, naked riding a bicycle. It was a self in the Tummelplatz. It was “he,” not me. I would never perform, show myself off that way at all. Do not ask me to take responsibility for his actions. But you are here, says the other self. Take responsibility for who you are.

There is a connection, faint but there, between this doubling of the self, artist as maker and artist as observer, that feels like the tug between a first language and that which it is translated into. This tug, this unstable connection, is where we find ourselves in the studio; a clash sometimes gentle, sometimes less so, between the rational and the part of us that rejects this way of thinking.

So, what is this translation?

The work of translation: WK 2: Only when there is a gap can we think, thank heavens for mistranslation. WK 1: A typewriter must remain a typewriter. WK 2: A typewriter is also a bird. WK 1: A tree remains a tree. WK 2: A tree is also a book, a table, a fire, ash. WK 1: We need to keep the meaning. WK 2: We need to remember that a language is as a dialect with an army and navy. WK 1: The poem must stay the poem. WK 2: We need to find an unclarity, to turn things on their heads, to allow a reversal, a somersault, to let a word become a colour, a shadow, a sculpture.

This is talking about language. But the studio work jumps from language to non-language, from lapis lazuli to a phrase, from a word to a colour, not to try to find an exact equivalent, but to hunt for the spark that flashes from these connections. A spark that arcs across from the separation, when the vertical marks on the paper are both grass and charcoal, when the green is both oil paint and the leaf. It is always about recognition, rather than knowing. A second degree of knowledge, closer to the periaqueductal grey than to the frontal lobe.

The challenge of these lectures is to try to bring half-coherent ideas to the rational linearity of a lecture. To undo the processes of the studio, knowing that a description of the chaos is always so much clearer than the chaos itself.

The order of things: An impulse, a memory of a childhood stick figure in a school textbook; the desire for the engine to pick up speed, for the pages to turn; abandoning the subject of the impulse but following the logic of the machine set in motion; learning the rules of what one is doing.

We gather different elements: Pages of a dictionary (not a narrative, but not random: a coherence in the book that the book knows, even if the pages are out of order). The idea of a flipbook. A box of watercolour paints and coloured pencils. A poem, a sonnet to set the pages in motion, to learn the grammar of this undertaking.

How to make it work: How intense must the colour be? One or two layers of watercolour? A base watercolour with a coloured crayon on top? Which colours make the transition from paper to photograph or the projection? How many frames for each page? We take the line: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” Then we start the translation, the disintegration in the studio. I read the text. That’s eight seconds, thirty-three words: four words per second. We paint the pages of the dictionary, so the words of the poem become the coloured pages. Four words per second is about six frames per word, or three frames of each page filmed twice. And what for the air between the words, or the breath between the lines? Do we keep these pages unpainted? The specifics of the poem, a sonnet of Shakespeare, dissolve into questions of making. How quickly should the pages turn? Should the twenty-five frames per second of the film be

twenty-five pages of each page filmed twice, or thrice? How intense must the colour be, one layer of watercolour or two?

These are the questions in the studio, a learning done by testing and repetition. The meaning of the poem recedes into the corner of the studio. All energy goes into this transformation, into the process of transformation, the pleasure of one thing becoming another.

But is it necessary?

My father has always been sceptical of this kind of work, putting projections inside an opera, doing a Büchner play with puppets, adding colours to a sonnet. “I’m not saying it’s impossible,” he would say, “I’m just wondering why it’s necessary.” A question, which I’m still, at the age of seventy, trying to answer. It is not necessary. The poem on its own is fine, perfect. The best answer I could give was that it was essential because it was not necessary. It was an excess, a drowning excess some would claim, but an excess. There is a split here. On the one hand, I am aware of a rational person talking about an exploration, a justification and interpretation after the event, the chaotic excess rolled up inside coherence. On the other side, the other artist not talking, but reacting to the impulse to make the sonnet film. It’s an infantile, unquestioning urge. Let us leap and then look, a desire for an impurity, an overabundance.

Holding on to the grain

A similar project: twenty-four Schubert songs, the Winterreise, and twenty-four films to accompany them. How far could the films stray from the text of the songs and still find a connection to them? In many of the films which are made for the cycle the distance between the image and the words seems so great that they only touch at one point. The film is as a tangent to the circle of the song.

I grew up hearing the Winterreise sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. My father would listen to these recordings lying on the sofa after lunch on the weekends. (My mother would leave the room. She had a precept: after fifty, no German lieder. No Puccini.) Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau accompanied by Gerald Moore, a symbolic postwar rapprochement between Britain and Germany. Even though he enunciates each word of the song perfectly, I had no German. So, the sense of the songs was not in the text. I did not understand the text, but could hear from the impulse, from the emotion, from the volume, from the emphasis, that there was a meaning inside the song. The words were there, but they were not the meaning. There was a quality of a meaning just out of reach. Even later, with many songs sung in English, the effect is the same. I’d either not recognise the words, or I’d hear the words and register them in one part of my brain, and then they would fly off, but the song would remain. Roland Barthes writes of the grain of the song, a vocal quality that contains the essence of a song, rather than just making the words clear. He was a great champion of Panzera, the prewar baritone who sang Winterreise on old 78 RPM records, with all their hiss and crackles. Barthes was very critical of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and his clarity (though this may also have been a dislike for the clarity of 33 RPM long-playing records and a nostalgia for the older 78 RPM sound).

Some of the twenty-four films of the Winterreise are made expressly for the songs, but in many cases, it was a found connection between some of the songs and sections of films I had made many years before. There is something in the rolling rhythm of the songs pushing the walker forward on his winter

journey that also propel the animation of the films, that pull the films through the gates of the projector.

I’m interested in excess. My father would listen to the Wintereisse with his eyes closed, a pure listening. In the recital hall the impurity of the listening is always clear. One watches the pianist’s fingers. How close to the piano will the singer go? It looks as if he might climb right into the piano. What does he do with his hands? Will the page-turner miss his moment? Did I remember to take the fish pie out of the freezer? An excess through which one wades to find the music, or through which the music finds us. But even on the sofa, eyes shut, I’m sure other thoughts would have moved across the music. Memories, anxieties (in a postprandial state, even dreams). Purity is always wishful thinking. Hope to still the chattering in one’s head, impossible. We have to celebrate the anti-Zen in us.

In the song, comprehension lies both in the words and beyond them; in the near breath, in posture, in gesture, in emphasis, in volume. And so with speech. Anne, my wife, begs me not to try to speak French. I change, she claims. I swell up. I become grandiose. Je gonfle, filled with big French vowels: the ai, the oeu, the ou. In German, she says, I sound like a rabbi. I don’t dislike either of these disguises, but make sure not to parade them before her.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was one introduction to language beyond the edge of comprehension. I was of course also surrounded by languages heard but not understood. The African languages which enveloped me, not just in childhood, but still today in Johannesburg: the isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana of all the Africans, both in the house and around, while I was stuck in an English monolingualism, understanding that translation would always be an essential condition for me.

The white spaces

On Friday nights I would attend shul services with my grandfather. The incomprehensible patterns of the Hebrew letters in the prayer book, and the opaque Hebrew rattled off at an impossible rate. I would float along with the service, recognising the songs, familiar with the pauses when the congregation would turn towards the ark and mouth the words to themselves. And then, to make the unmoving clock turn, I would read the prayers in English, comprehensible and incomprehensible. One statement of praise after another. How could God ever bear it, my adolescent thoughts would run, this toadying? What universal ego can put up with this nonstop adulation? Such the thoughts that went in parallel to the incantation of the prayers.

I now have a sense of the understanding. The words are the logs, but the heart of the prayer is the gap between the logs. Everything, not just the words. And to have the fire, we need both the logs and the gaps between the logs. There is a branch of Hasidic Judaism that claims that the words are there, and God understands them, but devotion comes from the white spaces between the words. And so, one discovers who one is, rather than decides. Goose and the gaps. This is who I am.

But if words are so light, so ephemeral, how does one tie them down, give them a weight, which we know they should have?

Svetlana Alexievich, the Russian writer who crafts her books from transcripts of interviews, describes an extreme situation where there is nothing to be gained from ambiguity, from sophistry, from rhetoric. This is from her book on the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s: “The young boy took a long time to die. As he did so his eyes looked around him like a bird. And he said the words of things he could see: sky, mountain, tree . . .” Language at its most essential. The words echo as a chastisement of language that takes off on its own. We want to tie the words to the world, but of course, we cannot.

The weight of a word

How does one give weight to something as light as a word, as a shadow, as a series of signs, of words or phrases? A silhouette or shadow of an object, a phone, a megaphone, an ampersand, becomes a torn paper shape. This can be cut out of cardboard, already some weight gained. Held together with masking tape or glue, the cardboard can thicken, can gain a certain fatness. Then, if it is covered in wax, it can be moulded and cast in bronze, patinated black, and brought back to its original silhouette.

These glyphs are hand-sized, the weight of a fist-sized stone. Gravity pulls them down. The glyphs were made to give a substance to the silhouette shapes, to take something essentially two dimensional, a letter, a shadow, the ink drawing or the paper cutout, and give it heft, to give a shadow its due. Put these together, and there emerges almost a phrase or a rubric in bronze, not a clear meaning, but a push towards an illegible comprehensibility. A riddle which has no answer, but which intrigues us precisely because it has no clear solution.

If the ink drawing or even the paper has the ephemerality of a digital text, has only the weight of a pulsing cursor, the bronze has the hard-won sense of letterpress, of words put together metal letter by metal letter, or having the heavy thwack of the manual typewriter. If the digital carries the malleability, the fickleness of our scattered thinking, the typewriter is its rebuke. These are your words, you can’t escape them, even if you put a line of X’s through the words you need to change, the first thought is there, and shows its changes. The thinking and the process of thinking is there. There is a commitment to the decisiveness, to the striking of the keys, an ethics of the typewriter.

Svetlana Alexievich writes about war and the way the extreme situation reduces language to its most direct, its most indisputable. But war also has the opposite effect, of revealing a language removed from the world. One thinks of the grand words of all

the agreements and treaties of the great powers which become the incomprehensible nightmare of mud and death in the First World War. A clear logic, as clear as a train timetable, that leads to such disaster. If this is what a clear logic does, let us find a less clear logic. If this is language, let us find a non-language.

This was the fundamental principle of the Dadaists in Zurich in 1916, and their legacy since then. Language was a focus of this demonstration of less good logic. An exuberant absurdity where all was possible, where the rallying cry was, “Let us try, for once, not to be right.” The performances, simultaneous poems, came out of the need to destabilise the word, to operate within a destabilised world. To uncertain the word. To show the uncertainty of the thoughts. To take the uncertainty, inside us all, everyone is fighting a huge battle, and put it onstage. As they wrote, “Even God is depressed and can only pick at his food.”

A walk around the studio is the preamble to drawing, a space and time when one is in the chaos of thinking. These lectures are trying to find the point of contact between this invisible origin of image and words, and the words as they are finally put down. The lapis lazuli text, both the words and the colour, and the tang of the riddle that does not have an answer. The writing over the certainty of centuries of letterpress printing, using a charcoal smudge to disturb this clarity. I think of Schwitters’ Ursonate as a trompe l’oeil, not of an object, but of the process coming out from the periaqueductal grey, of trying to tie us to the word and the world, of holding tight, knowing we cannot pin down a sense in the world, but living as if we could.

Excerpted from A Natural History of the Studio © William Kentridge & Cossee Publishers, 2025. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.