'Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot': Chaos and creation in the studio
This series of video essays is a brilliant dissection of William Kentridge’s artistic practice and a lively covid diary
A portly white-haired man walks into the frame and, even before he’s sat, addresses the camera with some urgency. “Before he arrives, there are some things I just want to say. It’s about the nature of the structure of, and the destructure, and the non-structure of what we see." He lists the disparate thoughts running through his head: a green cake he once ate in Naples, the fish pie he must take out of the freezer, a line from Mayakovsky, digging in The Great Escape and as a young boy on the beach, a row of coffins for mass burial, the impending birth of his granddaughter.
The speaker is South African artist William Kentridge. The absent “he" is also William Kentridge. They’re the hosts of a beguiling new series of video essays, Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, written and directed by Kentridge. The artist’s two selves argue and question and contradict each other, like siblings or a vaudeville act. They’re dressed the same, are clearly the same person, yet they act like different people. But then, this is a series made during the covid years. Didn’t we all start talking to ourselves at some point?
Self-Portrait is a rare thing in the modern film landscape: an unhurried look at the nuts and bolts of artistic practice, with digressions and puzzles and unanswered questions. Over nine, roughly 30-minute episodes, Kentridge—a white South African in his late 60s with an orator’s voice and a piercing gaze—creates art and talks about his process (or, I should say, the Kentridges create and talk). The works we see him create are dense and charged, paintings, charcoal drawings, sketches, cut-and-paste collages, even Dadaist performance and musical theatre, which draw on personal history but also South Africa’s long civil rights struggle.
Kentridge’s professorial manner—he holds forth on art theory, Greek myth, the Russian revolution—is undercut by the presence of his unimpressed doppelganger. They can’t even agree on whether they’re in the same room, or whether there’s a coffee pot on the table (“It is a paint holder," one Kentridge says). It’s a simple but brilliantly effective way for Kentridge to pose philosophical questions but not have them intimidate. Tearing up a paper with a rough drawing on it, he says: “What emerges is a mess… this is just chaos." The other argues, “This is all potential. This is all possibility." And, sure enough, we see the bits of paper rearrange themselves to form the figure of a rhinoceros, which dances with a reconstituted coffee pot.
Self-Portrait scratches a personal itch—I love squiggly, rough animation that looks like its being made up in real time. Apart from his printmaking and theatre work, Kentridge is known for his hand-drawn animation, which involves drawing a frame, filming it for a second or two, then making a change to the image, filming that, and so on. We see this throughout Self-Portrait, as well as other inventive lo-fi strategies: stop-motion, trick photography, miniatures, puppetry. The screen is rarely ever calm—either Kentridge is vigorously painting or cutting and pasting or something he’s rendered comes to riotous life. This feverish activity might be seen as a response to the time when the film was made, maximising the potential of a closed space when a closed space is all you have.
Throughout, Kentridge makes a case for spontaneous, intuitive creativity unburdened by theory or ready explanation. “What are we thinking?" he asks his double at one point. “I’m not thinking," Kentridge replies. “The torn paper, the charcoal, that’s where the thinking is. There is no answer."
“I wanted to try to make the films... without a script in advance, not with any shooting script," Kentridge told the website Designboom. “Because it was filmed in the studio over a long period, I might shoot for a day, have a conversation, and then do some editing, and then a day later say, ‘Ah, this was a drawing that was needed, that could come into it,’ and work on that, which would suggest other elements."
There are small moments that make the mind leap. In the third episode, we’re shown a landscape in black charcoal that’s constantly redrawing itself. Red markers appear. A small bird flies across the length of the canvas, starting from the top left. But when it reaches the other end, it doesn’t stop but continues its path along the wall. In the subtlest way possible, Kentridge is saying there are no boundaries.
The best-known name on this project is sitting quietly in the end credits. Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient) does a standout job as sound supervisor, pairing the array of visual tricks with subtle aural accompaniment (I loved the rustling of the animated mice that scurry around the studio every night). The music is equally inventive, ranging from ragtime and Western classical to traditional African harmonising. One sequence in particular brings all of Kentridge’s multi-disciplinary enthusiasms together. We see a projection on a large screen of his hand painting a triptych in broad strokes of black paint, Japanese-style. A violinist improvises to this in real time, joined by a soprano and a contralto, underlined by the whirr of the projector.
Like John Berger’s ‘Painting a Landscape’ or John McPhee’s Draft No. 4, this is a work dedicated to illuminating the creative process. The polish and certainty of finished product is eschewed in favour of the unglamorous reality of doubt and infinitesimal progress. Most of the drawings have sight lines and horizons and initial markings left in. In one scene, Kentridge literally shows us strings being pulled, as painted papers fly up from the floor and settle on a wall to form a collage. It’s the kind of simple trick you might see in very early silent film. Yet, the effect is hypnotic.
Towards the end, one of the Kentridges declares himself sick of confinement. “Do you need a deus ex machina to rescue you?" the other asks in irritation. And, sure enough, this is what happens, the artist escorted by a marching band into sunshine and crowds. There’s a final wry joke, a message stencilled on one of the buildings in giant letters: To What End? Though the other Kentridge has stayed behind in the studio, he’s clearly still arguing with himself.
‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ is on MUBI.
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