As one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, William Kentridge has been building a remarkable catalogue raisonné since the 1970s. Today, Kentridge continues to work across mediums spanning print, charcoal drawing, sculpture and animated films to explore an expansive collection of ideas ranging from the colonial oppression in his native South Africa to the artist’s sense of self.

For his latest project, Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, Kentridge unpicks the intrinsic relationship between the artist and the studio in a nine-episode film series, laying bare the inner workings of his creative process. Born from the isolation of the Covid pandemic, a series of vignettes meditate on both the philosophical and political, bringing together hand-drawn animations, collage, performance and music. Acknowledging the ways the space an artist inhabits becomes an extension of the self, a continual dialogue is shared throughout by Kentridge and his doppelgänger in a nod to the conflict felt between alternate possibilities of reality. Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot is an invitation into the sprawling imagination of a creative visionary, bridging Kentridge’s timeless practice with the digestible format of modern-day streaming.

Ella Joyce: Firstly, can you tell us about the meaning behind the title of your new series, Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot?
William Kentridge: There are different ways of thinking of a self-portrait, one is to do a drawing or a painting which has a superficial resemblance to the subject of the portrait, the eyes are in the right proportion, the shape of the nose, a kind of analogue facial recognition image. But one can also have a sense of a person, for example, from the books they’ve read in their lifetime, you see the bookshelf someone has and that gives you a different portrait of them. In the same way for an artist, if you cumulatively take all the drawings that they’ve done over decades, the list of subjects they’ve drawn gives you some sense of who they are, their desires, their fears, a portrait in the third person in a slightly different way. One could also do a negative portrait of all the things they’ve not drawn, all the space around them. And I suppose the coffee pot is one such image that occurs frequently in my work. But also fundamentally, it’s about the activity of drawing, the physical movement of the hands. The relationship of the charcoal to the paper is very similar whether you’re drawing a face, or whether you’re drawing a coffee pot. All of those are encapsulated in the title of the series.

EJ: Where did the creative process for this series begin?
WK: The creative impulse for the series began in two directions. One was the fact that I’ve been doing many projects about the nature of the studio, and what it is to be making meaning inside the studio in different short films like 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, for example. The other was the possibility of the streaming platform as a new way of looking at film, where there’s a new form of people either binge-watching five hours at a time or breaking it up, stopping a programme, going to do something else and coming back to it. That flexibility and the fact that an audience can be small but in many different places and cumulatively make a substantial audience worthwhile for a streamer to show such a project. Both of those things were present in how the project began. The third element that made the project possible was the Covid lockdown, where I knew I had several months of not travelling, of being in the studio to work on this. The circumstances of Covid also shaped the piece itself. It meant it was about isolation, it was about being alone in the studio. The studio became a kind of metaphor for one’s head.

Initially, it was made with the one person who was also locked down with me in the studio, and later on, as the restrictions were reduced, a larger crew and other collaborators came into the studio. But the premise of the episodes was that everything happens in this one physical place. It’s my studio in the garden of my house in Johannesburg, which is about six metres wide and twelve metres long. So it’s a fair size for a domestic studio. It’s not an industrial space, but a lot of the time is spent walking from one wall to the other, from the camera to a drawing. As the argument of the whole series goes, there’s also a way in which this physical activity of making also becomes a way of making meaning. So I suppose there’s an argument: can one make meaning without it starting with clear, rational thinking? Can there be an impulse in the body physically, the arm and the hand and the charcoal that produces some construction of meaning in the world?

EJ: The series was shot in Johannesburg, how has the environment shaped your work over the years? Do you feel a sense of ‘home’ or ‘memory’ shapes your practice?
WK: Johannesburg is where I was born, and where my parents and grandparents were born, where I’ve lived for my 69 years. It certainly shaped it in different ways. The city itself is something that remakes itself physically. The gold mines around it have been reprocessed, the hills have been physically excavated and removed. There’s an animation of the landscape itself. It has a hidden underbelly in Johannesburg, of all the mining activity underneath the city, which gives a sense of a hidden history. The first half of my life was lived under apartheid, and the second half in a post-apartheid era, so this also shapes the question of the nature of politics, the uncertainties of it, the ambiguities and paradoxes of it. But then also the collaborators that I work with, the musicians, the singers, the majority of them come from Johannesburg.

EJ: The inclusion of physicality in the series at a time when the use of AI is becoming more prevalent feels particularly important. How do you go about exploring that relationship?
WK: So, the activity of making art is physical it’s not sitting at a computer with a mouse or a keypad. It’s either walking across to the wall in the studio with a piece of paper or standing over a table, but the movement of the arm and the whole body in the process of making is important. There’s a sense of impulses, not without ideas, but the ideas shift and change as they come into physical making, the reality, and the imprecision of charcoal and paper is important. I think working with paper, charcoal and ink is different than it would be simply with a keypad and mouse. I think that’s a temperamental and an age-related thing. I’m sure there are many artists now who work completely comfortably and can only think on a keyboard or can only think with a mouse. But for me, some surprises and insights come from the physical analogue materials in the studio.

“I’m interested in discovering what people take away, there’s a broad theme that goes through it, which has to do with both the agency of making and the need for our stupidity in the studio.”

EJ: We often see you interacting with your doppelgänger, what was the intention behind this dialogue shared between two versions of yourself?
WK: The conversations with myself had existed before the series began, but they were pushed further in the series. It’s possible now with very simple editing techniques, cutting a frame in half and doubling it, putting a second take into it once your camera is locked off. So technically, the principle of it is simple. It gets quite sophisticated when multiple people are overlapping each other, but that’s done by the editors. But, it was an acknowledgement or an exploration of the fractured nature of the self, the fact that we are always constructing a possible version of ourselves, rather than being something fixed. The series [exists in an] odd space between being documentary and autobiographical, a memoir, and a record of what happens in the studio.

EJ: This series marks significant progress in intersecting fine art and streaming platforms, what do you hope viewers take away from watching it? 
WK: There’s never a single meaning that I want someone to take away and I also can’t predict what someone takes away. What comes to the viewer is often based on a mixture of the films and everything they project onto their associations, their memories, other things they’ve seen. Other documentaries of artists, an imagined idea of what an artist studio should be or what should happen in it? I’m interested in discovering what people take away, there’s a broad theme that goes through it, which has to do with both the agency of making and the need for our stupidity in the studio.

Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot is streaming now on MUBI.