William Kentridge: Lexicon

Description

Lexicon is a facsimile cloth edition of an antiquarian Latin-Greek dictionary which William Kentridge has embellished with black ink drawings of what might seem at first to be animal silhouettes. In reproducing the work (which is uncollected elsewhere), this beautifully designed artist’s book mischievously pits the model of the flipbook against the fragility of the antiquarian original, and flipping its pages animates Kentridge’s lively, spiky drawings into a continuously morphing image that transforms from a cat to a coffee pot over the course of the book’s 160 pages. This image is based on a disintegrating sculpture that reflects the artist’s interest in the instability of objecthood. Lexicon is accompanied by a DVD containing a short film in which Kentridge flips the pages himself to display the morphing image of the cat often seen in Kentridge’s work, and recently created in a very large scale six-part etching called Scribble Cat (image below).