The ever-productive South African artist William Kentridge used the focused isolation of COVID-19 lockdown wisely. In March 2020, he started imagining the project that would result, four years later, in a nine-part series about the artist’s studio. Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot was recently released on the subscriber service MUBI.
It’s a bit astonishing that Kentridge could sustain this claustrophobic focus on the studio through all nine roughly 30-minute segments. But then again, this is an artist who has spent his career cracking open the quotidian acts of mark-making to tap into deeper frequencies of philosophical thought — only Kentridge, for instance, can summon from a scribble of charcoal or some torn paper bits an image of a horse that then somehow embodies all horses, from Pegasus to Napoleon’s Marengo.
In the series, Kentridge endlessly circles the studio, mumbling about the absurdities of an art practice. He often talks to a double of himself, a seamlessly inserted video doppelganger. The two Williamses sit at a table, look at work, discuss life, aging, art, myth, the human body, and family memories. They gently argue.
Central to an art practice, Kentridge says, is the need to undo certainties. “You start thinking you’ll do a picture of the whole universe,” he says in episode one, “but you end up with a coffee pot.” While an occasional singer, dancer, or French horn player may appear in the studio, it is Kentridge’s own inventions and imaginings that tie the episodes together. Interventions of animation transform a piece of crumpled, discarded paper into a mouse. Later, more mice appear, leaving tracks of charcoal dust like traces of the artist’s own meandering thoughts in the nighttime studio. “The truth is the blurring of edges, multiplicity,” Kentridge says in another episode, “The certainties falling apart when you examine them.”
This interview began with a Zoom call and continued with Kentridge recording audio responses to questions I sent via email while enjoying, as he put it in his recorded notes, “a beautiful summer’s evening after a big thunderstorm, alone in the studio in the garden in Johannesburg.” It has been edited for length.
Hyperallergic: The studio is a private place, generally. Why was it important for you to share this inner sanctum with the public?
William Kentridge: It’s not a place the public generally gets access to, but there’s a long history of artists working with the studio as a subject in itself, whether it’s the famous Philip Guston painting of a studio, or Courbet’s equally famous painting of the artist in his studio, or the images of Jackson Pollock painting in his studio, or Bruce Nauman doing strange dances and walks in his studio.
For about the last 15 years, it’s been one of the subjects I’ve looked at — not simply as a romantic artistic space, but as a space in which meaning can be made, as well as drawings and paintings and performances, so that the processes of the studio can lead to wider thoughts outside of the immediate ambit of the studio.
H: The series started during COVID-19 without a script or storyboard. Can you describe more of how that worked, how the themes emerged, how the structure unfolded?
WK: The series was initiated without a script, but it’s not random, nor is it planned. This is the way that all the animated films I’ve made over my life have been done. When I started out, I wrote screenplays. But I realized that to get those made, I would spend my life jumping through producers’ hoops, trying to get up the enthusiasm of other people. And rather than that, I thought I should find a form in which as soon as I wanted to make a film, I could begin that day without having to justify it, explain it. Just working with the energy, the impulse, and the first image.
But this project didn’t start from nowhere. There were topic headings: Fate, Utopia, Optimism, Landscape. Each of them connected to some project that I had done or was thinking of doing. And then the discussing of them, or the making of the drawings for them, became a way of thinking about a broader topic.
So with each topic, there was a broad terrain in which the different episodes would work. And in many of them, I had a specific reference of some work that I’d done in the past that could be an anchor. And then each day as I came to work, we’d think, right, we need a conversation to explain this point, and then in the morning I would write the dialogue, and we’d then film it later in the morning, and then edit it that afternoon to check that it was right.
The filming was quite spasmodic; not every day for a short period, but rather intermittently over a long period. And the form comes very much with the editing. There was a lot of material filmed, some of which was discarded entirely, a lot of which was shaped and shortened and brought into a watchable form. I hope watchable.
H: In episode one you say and then repeat, “Truth is beauty, beauty truth.” What does this mean?
WK: That is a line from Keats, I think. “Truth is beauty, beauty truth, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know.” It’s a kind of provocative statement, a kind of art for art’s sake statement. But there is also something more to it. It’s a sense of saying, “Stick to your métier, to your activity, whether it’s poetry or the studio.”
H: You said in one episode: “I take a drawing, fragment it, and see what emerges. What emerges is a mess…just chaos. This is all about potential, all possibilities.” Why, as an artist, is it so important to keep that door open? The door of potential rather than fixed states.
WK: When making a drawing, if the drawing is going well, it’s very difficult not to slow down and become more cautious as it proceeds. You’ve done a good beginning, and you don’t want to mess it up, so there’s a cautiousness which comes to protect and preserve what you’ve made. Sometimes when a drawing really starts off and it goes off the rails and starts going badly wrong, that’s a wonderful opportunity to either cut it up and rearrange the pieces, or to erase it with a cloth or an eraser, but to take risks and bold steps. It’s a mess already, it can only get better. And a lot of the best work happens out of what starts as, if not a disaster, at least as a disappointment.
You might recognize different fragments coming together in a new way that gives a new image or a new sound to what you had expected. And that’s what one hopes for, that’s what one looks out for. And I think that keeping the door open to potential is both about being open to seeing what you’re making, to keeping the conversation between yourself and the artwork ongoing and open.
It’s also about putting strategies in place to make that possible. Not having a script or a storyboard is one such strategy.
H: Throughout the series, the twin William Kentridges engage in conversation in the studio and often disagree with one another. This idea of doubling and talking to yourself — was that a COVID theme? But you say in Episode 2: “The mirror won’t help you.”
WK: The mirror won’t help you. I have no idea what that means, but it’s at the edge of meaning.
I’m sure you feel it just in your taste buds. The mirror won’t help you. I try to interpret it as a literary critic here, but it is not where I started from. It’s not even as if I thought, ah, this is what it means and so I’m going to use it. It could refer to the disappointment we see in the mirror of ourselves.
The same old, same old. You stare at yourself in the mirror hoping for something new to happen, and it doesn’t. Which is different than the two of us next to each other. Because then there’s a fragmentation, obviously, of having to try to remember what the first person said when the second person speaks. And hope that the rhythm of the two talking together will fit together.
[This doubling] became a central form of the series, partly, when we started, because there’s the isolation of COVID. I didn’t want it to turn into a documentary of talking heads talking about the work.
There’s a nice line from a Brecht poem. “I look in the mirror, I know what I need. I have to sleep more. The man I am is no good for me.”
H: How do the materials call to you? Do you just know what is needed? And why such an adherence to the elemental: paper, charcoal, ink? Do you have to fight against complicating things?
WK: Every now and then I see some really beautiful minimalist work, whether it’s in sound or painting or graphic work, and I think, Ah! Do less, do less, do less.
And I keep on thinking I’m going to do less, and it always somehow expands. I think I’ll do a play, just with two performers in it, and it turns into a chamber opera with five musicians, a chorus, and six people.
So it’s not resisting or welcoming the complication, it’s just temperamentally the need for extra elements to grow.
H: It seems that what is important, then, is to anchor big ideas of life, time, and mortality in small, quotidian objects.
WK: I mean, I think the work is with the small quotidian objects, whether they’re cardboard coffee pots and milk jugs or glasses. You work with them in the hope that something wider than just objects on a table will emerge, that you do a drawing of it and, yes, it is a drawing of a tree but it’s also a kind of self-portrait, or it’s an intimation of different kinds of thoughts and fates.
I mean, there have been so many trees drawn now. I keep on thinking, am I a tree? Is the tree my father? Who is the tree? It’s more. It’s a tree but it’s obviously more than a tree.
H: Is the studio a metaphor for the brain?
WK: In a way it is. I mean in the most literal sense, you can think of the studio as an enlarged brain.
In the studio, there’s the walk around the studio and looking at an image on one wall — yesterday’s drawing, the drawing you are busy with at the moment, pinned up to the wall, waiting to be moved out of the studio. And in a way, you can say, well, that’s just an enlargement of the movement of thoughts in your brain, which is also a physical movement, not across the eight meters, the 25 feet of the studio, but across the three or four inches from one side of your brain, from your memory to your current thinking to your current computing to different sorts of associations to the visual cortex.
All of these are actual. It’s impossible to feel, but in fact there are movements of either impulses, chemical impulses, electrical impulses, and art going on. Several centimeters. The understanding of the world is made of so many different fragments that arrive in one place in the brain from many different sources, and some part of one’s computing consciousness and unconsciousness puts these fragments together to make a provisional coherence, something that could make sense of yourself, of the world.
And that’s the same provisional coherence that one makes in the studio.
H: What role does doubt play in your work?
WK: I think that doubt is there when one understands the provisionality of knowledge: That knowledge is put together from certain fragments, but it could be put together from different fragments, which might give you a different nuance or a different meaning. Drawing ends up as one thing, but it could go in many different directions along the way.
I think the key thing is to relax into that and not fight it, but to welcome it.
H: You say, “The wind will speak. The leaves will cover us.” Can you open that a bit? It is about fate and death, I suppose.
WK: No, I don’t want to say anything about that.
H: I am curious about how important movement is in your work, including the movement of your body in the studio.
WK: I think the theater training I did in Paris for one year, which is a theater school of movement, Lecoq, not a theater school of mime or of spoken theater, gave me an understanding of how the impulse of everything starts somewhere near your belly and moves out. Whether that’s about your breath or your word, or your gesture as an actor, or your movement as a draftsman making a mark on a sheet of paper, it is a kind of an embodied movement.
H: Do you often not know where you are headed? Things begin as a scribble, then turn into monumental sculptures, or set pieces.
WK: I’d love to know where I’m headed. It’s not out of a desire to not know. But when I try to set a ground plan in advance, a route map, it’s always a bad map. And it’s much better if I find the way as we’re going along. Even though it’s maybe more risk and certainly more uncomfortable at four in the morning.
H: Would the world be better off and would people be nicer to one another if everyone had a studio space in which to play and discover?
WK: Some people temperamentally would hate that, would hate the studio space, the uncertainty, the openness. You know, many artists work in the studio and hate the idea of other people seeing what they’re doing.
For me, it’s always been a relatively open space. I need to look at other people looking at what I have made to see what I have made.
H: I’m curious about how you chose to conclude the series — the finale.
Okay, thank you for that question. One of the first images I had, if we’re doing the studio and we’re saying the whole world can come into the studio, was of bringing in a brass band. This was one of the first thoughts I had in the year before I even started with the series, and sort of hung onto that.
It was the brass band I’d worked with before. The noise of a brass band in an interior space is spectacular. I wish we could have had that full sound. But I’d made the decision that everything would happen inside the studio and only right at the end would there be a glimpse of the world outside, a glimpse of Johannesburg.
Otherwise, I thought I would get lost, that it would turn into another documentary trying to explain Apartheid and post-Apartheid and the history of Johannesburg and situating the studio in it which would turn it into a much more ordinary documentary, which I’m not very good at and not particularly interested in doing.
But in the last episode we open the shutters, there’s a bit of sunlight that comes in, and then finally one of the two of me goes out into the world. Which felt accurate, also: that one does actually go out and gets their hands dirty, not in the studio, but outside too.
Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (2024) is streaming on MUBI.
