Speech

Cheng Ying & Wang Shuo -

“History as ‘Peripheral Thinking’: William Kentridge’s Dialogue with China’s Cultural History”

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This article is interested in how artistic practices open up new possibilities to understand geopolitical categories such as China-Africa, Third World, and global south by excavating common histories and triggering nuanced conversations about politics, culture, and society. We focus on South African artist William Kentridge’s recent exhibition Notes Towards a Model Opera (2015), in which the artist explores the dynamics of cultural diffusion and metamorphosis through the formal prism of eight model operas of the Cultural Revolution. By playfully overlaying the aesthetic and ideological transformations of ballet, he considers the dance form both as a cultural phenomenon and as part of a history of dance that spans continents and centuries: starting from its central origins in Paris, transplanted across the globe to peripheral contexts as disparate as Shanghai and Johannesburg. The exhibition makes manifest a concept of “peripheral thinking,” “a way of looking at the unlikely connection” between artistic practices in China and South Africa. Recycling and remixing languages, images and forms from the (pre)history of Cultural Revolution in China, Kentridge’s work recalls and references the struggles for independence on the African continent and the social realities of post-apartheid South Africa.

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We argue that Kentridge’s exploration of “peripheral thinking” suggests the instrumental role of art in our reflection on temporalities, ideologies and poetics shared across history and geography. The peripheral connected by the past becomes the space for a particular kind of thinking, a new framework different from the model of postcolonial criticism that emphasizes and strengthens the hierarchy of core-and-periphery. This framework of “history as peripheral thinking” troubles the “Third Worldism and/or nationalism” that supposedly binds the peoples of non-Western societies “in conflictless brotherhood” (Mukherjee 1993, 27),” and provokes reflections on the commonalities and contradictions within “the postcolonial other”. The article also relates Kentridge’s work to the artistic practices of Chinese artist Xu Bing, and examines the how the layered allusions of historical art forms generate more contextualized conversations of social and culture history in the south.