In 2005, William Kentridge’s production of The Magic Flute premiered at La Monnaie in Brussels. It went on to venues in France, Italy, Israel and the United States to critical acclaim. In September 2007 it will open in Cape Town and Johannesburg. These performances in South Africa will be the culmination of a remarkable artistic journey that included the creation of the opera, an outpouring of drawings and prints on themes related to the production, and the completion of a seminal project, commissioned by Deutsche Guggenheim, called Black Box, that was unveiled in Berlin in 2006 before moving to the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

William Kentridge Flute traces the process of Kentridge’s creation of The Magic Flute, his astounding collaborations that produced Black Box, and the host of other works that flowed out of preparations for these two important productions. The book, edited by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, contains an interview with the artist, essays by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Stéphane Roussel and Kate McCrickard, gorgeous full-colour photographs of the productions, pages from Kentridge’s preparatory notebooks, and images of the many prints and drawings executed while Kentridge was working on the opera and Black Box.

Written by graphic designer Michael MacGarry, and featuring the work of leading design professionals, and targeted at designers, A Primer in South African Graphic Design features design fundamentals and principles; practical advice and guidance; designing for and within the local context; example of work by designers; Q & A with experienced local design professionals; and a glossary of highly-relevant resources and information.

The book provides an intelligent balance of educational material relevant to design students and practical content to help young professionals embark on their careers, whilst providing sufficiently advanced material and content to appeal to mid-level and experienced designers and allied industry practitioners alike.

SKILL SET: Knowledge Resource and Educational Series is a new multi-volume series for specialised design disciplines. Using a practicable, outcomes-based approach, Skill Set will provide instruction in various fields of design, including graphic design, stage design, fashion design and industrial design – serving as a resource for both amateurs and professionals alike. Though neither a textbook nor a design manual, the book will help develop specific skills, intelligent design solutions, and effective project outcomes. It will be a resource on the fundamental principles of graphic design, a source of inspirations and ideas, a business tool for designers, and a much-needed critical showcase of local graphic design.

The Skill Set series will feature content relevant to both a local and international context, as well as commentary and work by leading local design professionals. The series is aimed at a broad audience that includes learners at secondary schools and tertiary institutions, as well as emerging and experienced professionals.

This first title will be officially launched at the Design Indaba 2009.

Author Michael MacGarry is a graphic designer, writer and artist based in Johannesburg. He began his design career in Dublin and London before returning to South Africa to work with The Trinity Session as designer, copywriter, and researcher. He is currently Senior Designer at Fever Identity Design. MacGarry has an MFA from the University of the Witwatersrand, and is also a visual artist who has exhibited locally and internationally. He is owner of www.alltheorynopractice.com and is a founder member of art-collective AVANT CAR GUARD. As a writer, MacGarry has been published in several local magazines, and recently co-published, along with Lloyd Gedye, a limited-edition magazine titled The Pavement Special.

OTHER DESIGN BOOKS AVAILABLE FROM OUR BOOKSTORES

Design Books distributed by David Krut Publishing

Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, New York
Design for the Other 90%
Piranesi as Designer
Design Life Now

TATE Publications, London
Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From Bauhaus to the New World
Pop Art
Julian Opie
Internet Art
The Stage of Drawing

Further Titles available from our Bookstores

10 x SA Fashion Week
An A – Z of Type Designers
Craft Art in South Africa
Design Like You Give a Damn
Design Thinking
Design, Writing, Research
The Designer’s Desktop Manual
Inspiring Designers: A Sourcebook
Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design
Modern Architecture and Design
Notes on Book Design
Ogilvy on Advertising
Points for Departure
Thinking with Type
Understanding Design

Universal Principles of Design
The Visual Dictionary of Fashion Design
Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone Wire Basket

REVIEWS OF SKILL SET 1: Graphic Design

Mail and Guardian

Designing Ways Magazine

This visually compelling publication highlights The Museum of Modern Art’s unparalleled collection of prints and books by William Kentridge – nearly fifty works spanning the past three decades. The book also features a succession of artistic interventions made by Kentridge especially for the occasion. Kentridge’s practice brings together drawing, film animation, books, sculpture and performance. Too little is known to the extent of which the artist applies his astonishing draftsmanship to the techniques of printmaking, including etching, screenprinting, lithography and lino cut. In fact printmaking has always been essential to his work, from his first forays into visual art in the 1970s to his recent large-scale operas.

“Printmaking has been not just an edge to or a side journey from the work that I’ve been making over the last 30 years or so,” the artist has said, “but is very much a key to it.”

Kentridge’s love of the printed image extends to an embrace of books. He often draws and prints on unbound pages from encyclopaedias, ledgers and the like, the readymade support adding nuance and complexity to his work. He has extended these practices in William Kentridge: Trace, using translucent pages interspersed throughout the book to respond to his prints reproduced between them in a visual dialogue between the past and the present. The book also includes an essay, an annotated checklist, a chronology and the text of a lecture by Kentridge on printmaking, illuminating its relevance to his broader practice. The publication coincides with the Museums presentation of the touring exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes. MoMAs presentation will be unique in its addition to the numerous collection works, including most of the prints reproduced in this volume.

William Kentridge’s art brings together drawing, film animation, sculpture and performance. He also applies his astonishing draftsmanship to the techniques of printmaking, including etching, screenprinting, lithography and linoleum cut. In fact printmaking has always been essential to his work, from his earliest forays into artmaking in the 1970s to his recent operas.  Kentridge’s love of the printed image extends to books, and he often draws and prints on unbound pages from encyclopedias, ledgers and the like. In Trace, both a catalogue of prints from the Museum’s collection and an artist’s book, Kentridge uses translucent pages interspersed throughout the book to respond to his prints reproduced beneath them, in a dialogue between past and present. The book also includes a lecture by Kentridge on printmaking, illuminating its relevance to his broader practice.

OTHER WILLIAM KENTRIDGE TITLES

• Prints
• Nose
• Five Themes
• Thinking Aloud
• Flute
• Everyone Their Own Projector
• I am not me, the horse is not mine
• Handspring Puppet Company
• (Repeat) From the Beginning
• Drawing the Passing

The Johannesburg Art Gallery’s Retrospective on Thami Mnyele and the Medu Art Ensemble, which opened in 2008, was the culmination of years of work. It was not only a retrospective of a group that perished violently 23 years earlier, but the story of the artist and of cultural workers and Medu’s particular struggle from exile. The retrospective also paid tribute to the zenith of Medu’s activities: hosting a symposium in 1982 where cultural workers in exile and working in South Africa met to define future strategies for the cultural front.

Thamsanqa Harry ‘Thami’ Mnyele featured at the centre of the exhibition. His talent as an artist and his political activism were fundamental to consolidating Medu’s political and cultural profile. The exhibition follows Thami’s intellectual and creative development as an artist, through his images and texts which mirrored the plight but also the dreams and aspirations of South Africa’s disenfranchised.

The retrospective was the first time that Medu and Thami’s stories were told comprehensively in the context of the liberation struggle in South Africa. It was set up in the spirit of paying tribute to all Medu’s member’s, and to Thami Mnyele in particular, but added to it an open question: How have cultural workers in today’s South Africa matched expectations for a thriving democratic cultural environment, as expressed in 1982?

The retrospective is chronicled in this book, which is complemented by essays of art historians and Medu members. The book looks back on Thami’s work and the life and abrupt ending of Medu, but also reflects on their legacy in today’s South Africa.

More on Thami Mnyele + Medu

Art + Revolution: The Life and Death of Thami Mnyele

Chris Hani’s assassination in 1993 gave rise to one of South Africa’s great imponderables: if he had survived, what impact would he have had on politics and government in South Africa? More pointedly, could this charismatic leader have risen to become president of the country?

Hani was a hero of South Africa’s liberation, a communist party leader and Umkhonto we Sizwe chief of staff who was both intellectual and fighter, a man who could inspire an army but carried a book of poetry in his backpack. Hani led MK into its earliest battles, and carved a formidable reputation as a thinker, debater and peacemaker.

Hani: A Life Too Short tells the story of Hani’s life, from his childhood in rural Transkei and education at Fort Hare University to the controversial Memorandum of 1969, the crisis in the ANC camps in Angola in the 1980s and the heady dawn of freedom. Drawing on interviews and the recollections of those who knew him, this vividly written book provides a detailed account of the life of a great South African.

Janet Smith is an executive editor of The Star and a special writer at Independent Newspapers, concentrating on socio-political stories, essays and profiles. She is the author of two award-winning novels for young South Africans and the co-author of a third prize-winning book for teenagers. A mother of three, she lives in Kensington, Johannesburg.

Beauregard Tromp is a senior reporter at The Star newspaper in Johannesburg. He was awarded the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Journalist of the Year in 2009 for his coverage of the xenophobic violence in Johannesburg in 2008. He is a previous Africa Correspondent and has travelled extensively throughout the continent covering the events which have helped shape Africa in the past decade.

In this selection of columns, Jonny Steinberg walks through Pollsmoor Prison on the eve of the invasion of Iraq and believes he sees in the jail’s corridors why the US’s impending war in the Middle East will fail.He meets a poverty-stricken old man who spends most of his state pension maintaining a black Mercedes Benz, and explains why this shows that government’s welfare programme is working. He tells us why he thinks Thabo Mbeki is an Afro-pessimist and why a South Africa ruled by Tokyo Sexwale will be as riddled with corruption as Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy.

Steinberg has an eye for the strangeness of our fractured country. For the last five years, he has been recording the things he sees on his travels across South Africa in his fortnightly column on Business’s Day’s leader page. Here are the best of those columns.

Xolela Mangcu’s latest book takes the temperature of our democracy at this moment and provides an informed prognosis of our future. In particular he looks at the health of our institution  – such as political opposition, the court an the media – and the state f our enviroment , espcially  South Africa’s position in the emerging world order. At the heart of the book is an examination of Preasident Jacob Zuma’s style and philosophy of goverment. Above all. Mangcu seeks to answer the question whether Zuma has the emotional temperament, ethical commitment, political willingness and institutional resources to engage in the revival of democracy after the Mbeki era and the resolution of this country’s socioeconomic problems. In so doing he offers us a glimpse of the kind of leader Zuma might yet become.

Trenchant and provocative as always, Mangcu provides an acount of our times that will stimulate thought. provoke discussion, and help us understand where we are as a society and a nation.

On 9 June 2003, a 43-year-old coloured man named Magadien Wentzel walked out of Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. Behind him lay a lifelong career in the 28s, South Africa’s oldest and most reviled prison gang, for decades rumoured to have specialised in rape and robbery. In front of him lay the prospect of a law-abiding future, and life in a household of eight adult and six children, none of whom earned a lioving.Author, Jonny Steinberg met Wentzel in prison in the dying months of  2002. By the time Wentzel released, he and Steinberg had spent more than 50 hours discussing his life experiences. The Number is an account of their conversations and of Steinberg’s journeys to the places and people of Wentzel’s past. Most of all

Over the past two decades Getway has excited the armchair traveller and inspired the adventurous to explore the continent. More than any other publication, it has captured the spirit of African travel, reaching millions of readers, The magazine has covered most of the greatAfrican subject: the Serengeti migration, Mali’s mud cities, the Namib’s many moods, gorillas in the leafy mist, orthodox liturgies at lalibela and Namaqualand’s spring blooms.

Photographs from Getaway’s archive have, over the years, worked their way into almost every media avenue. From billboards to television and from coffeetable books to commercials, they are embedded in the South African memory.

For Rian Malan the blessing of living in South Africa is that every day presents him with material whose richness beggars the imagination of those who live in saner places. ” Rian Mala could always see the story when others had long since lost the plt. Sometimes he went completely off his head as he drew out the fugitive detail, digging in dirt for a diamond, shaking up the grievously overlooked. He tried to escape the word. He went fihing for five years, trying to hide from the relentlessly pursuing plot, but to no avail. When it comes to writing, Malan is dangerously good and there is no getting away” by Lin Sampson

Resident Alien is a provocative and engaging collection of writings that have appeared in The Spectator, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The observer, Maverick, The Sunday Independent. Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere since My Traitor’s Heart.