I Was Left Thinking That Kentridge Filled A Gap

This was a more difficult reading to absorb, primarily because I could not successfully draw the suggested meaning from the language of the text.  However, I did cling onto a mention of South African artist William Kentridge's use of reference involvment in his works, which is a similiar use of allusion as I understand the concept.  Kentridge exhibits something which bears significance of another thing, to extend his own intentions.  Kentridge extending also reminds me of abridging; acting as some conjunction in a strange middle of two, more familiar worlds.  Perhaps his place is also a pending one.  In "Mundus Inversus, Mundus Perverus", Cooke seems to make a point of Kentridge's fleeting place in which he identifies as the artist's place.  Throughout the text, Cooke provides situations that exemplify these less accessible places.  One begins with Kentridge addressing apartheid, reading, "These two elements-our history and the moral imperative arising from that-are the factors for making that personal beacon rise into the immovable rock of apartheid.  To escape this rock is the job of the artist" (41).  Kentridge addresses two places that are familiar-apartheid and the moral responses coming from-and to progress from the history is to reach into a less known area, and to conjoin it with the familiars.  In another paragraph, Cooke exhibits Kentridge qualifying his position, "a spot where optimism is kept in check and nihilism is kept at bay...It is in this narrow gap that I see myself working" (41).  Indeed it is a gap, although it is described as a narrow gap, I assume the narrow gap is also infinite, since its margins are also indirect (unconfirmed).  Finally, Kentridge's mode is described to be swinging in between two, impermanent (unconfirmed) points.

Also familiar with Kentridge's draw-erase (inherently-impermanent) animated video work, I found certain passages in Cooke's text that encouraged my interpretation of Kentridge and so forth, the struggle of art-making today, which states, "Coupled with the use of reference as 'a manifestation of content,' this innovative mode of expression-this formal encoding of the temporality of historical narrative-guarantees a crucial dislocation between content and form...Kentridge pace Krauss's argument, avoids both the specularization of memory endemic to much art that deals with political issues and, equally, the sentimentality that bedevils most excercises in redemption"(41).  Focusing on the language of the text, I found correlations between the reality of Kentridge's video work, the flickering condition of his working place, the arguments of art and politics more or less abandonned temporarily, to proceed to the next level of all of this.  Kentridge uses references to discover the reference-free.

Involving Jarry as a reference or a comparative in the text, I find it interesting how Cooke's language changes from "dislocation" and "temporality" to "crystallize" and "imbue"(46).  In describing the produce of Kentridge's work in comparison to Jarry's, Cooke writes, "Jarry's play offers what is essentially an abstract caricature of the traditional metaphysical hierarchy crowned by divine moral judgement, Kentridge crystallizes it, imbuing it an indubitably contemporary caste"(46).  Kentridge moves Jarry's project onward or at the least, to a different position, where it takes on another form along its former.  It seems that with each displacement is a moment which it can be described as an original, and then references converge, original becomes "established" and therefore, a reference.  So what keeps moving?