William Kentridge: Portraits in Process

William Kentridge is pacing again, circling his Johannesburg studio, engaged in what he calls “peripheral thinking.” Vast charcoal drawings adorn the walls, while a sousaphone lazes on an armchair at its center in anthropomorphic repose. Scattered notebooks and measuring sticks festoon the desks, as an assortment of receptacles reveal their second lives as ink pots—a secret spilled through a smear of black, emblazoned across their chipped lips.

Kentridge evangelizes for the value of mess and procrastination, for the trails of detritus that creativity leaves in its wake. As the multidisciplinary South African artist—renowned for his sculptures and drawings, animated films, projections, and large-scale theater and opera performances—pulls up a chair, he is joined by a second self: a doppelgänger conjured through the magic of filmmaking. 

Cinema has always been fascinated by artists—whether writers, painters, or musicians—but it’s a rare portrait that successfully engages with the creative process itself. Dig out any big-screen representation of the artistic life, and you’ll invariably find the subject attacking a canvas, tapping away at a typewriter, or picking out the first notes of a familiar tune. But what can the viewer actually discern from such performative facsimiles of creative labor? We’re encouraged to see genius in the final result, or find understanding in the facile expression of a single eureka moment, but the work itself—the capitulation to whims and chance, the incremental montage of addition and subtraction, the embattled poles of possibility and inevitability—is habitually elided.

With Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, Kentridge’s nine-part anatomization of his studio practice, process takes center stage. In each of the 30-minute episodes, the artist invites the viewer not just into the studio itself, but into the intimacies of ideation. For newcomers to Kentridge’s work, the series serves as a bewitching introduction to its dazzling scope and variety, as a miscellany of projects old and new are recreated or deconstructed. While each standalone episode possesses an overarching theme, the quicksilver editing—overseen by Apocalypse Now editor extraordinaire, Walter Murch—means we’re never far away from the blossoming of a tangential idea, elegantly mirroring the endless branching of the creative consciousness.

Sometimes, Kentridge will be joined by collaborators and assistants. Other times, he’ll summon a series of alter egos (seamlessly sharing the same frame, Dead Ringers-style) with whom to squabble, debate, and disagree—playfully externalizing the private tussles of the creative mind in action. Such formal and intellectual sprightliness is the beating heart of this fleet-footed series, in which philosophical enquiries into the nature of memory, selfhood, and the paradoxes of colonialism share space and time with scurrying paper rats and dancing rhinoceroses. It becomes clear that whimsy and triviality—even “stupidity”—are all part and parcel of the act of making.

Kentridge has a close working relationship with cinema, as evidenced in the animated shorts collectively known as “9 Drawings for Projection” that he made between 1989 and 2003. The singular techniques utilized in these works—in which a sequence of charcoal sketches are drawn, erased, and redrawn on the same sheet of paper, emphasizing the process by which the animated work is created—can be seen at play in Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, a series enthralled by both the analog wizardry of early filmmaking and the possibilities afforded by the latest digital technologies.

In one of the series’ most powerful episodes, we’re introduced to Kentridge’s work as a theater practitioner through a recreation of the rehearsals for his 2018 performance The Head & the Load. As the artist and his collaborators read aloud from Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’s sound poem “Ursonate”—which uses guttural noises in place of words—Kentridge describes the “spasms of history” that might incite such breakdowns in language. Film projections, mechanized sculptures, and shadow play soon join the copious techniques which Kentridge layers on to the epically scaled creative landscapes of the project. It’s a work of staggering conceptual density and political specificity, made accessible through Kentridge’s warm invitation into the nitty-gritty of its piecemeal construction.

Elsewhere, paper puppets of Lenin, Stalin, and Mayakovsky are given life through the alchemy of green-screen technology and exquisite dioramic miniatures. The recollection of a scenic painting which hung over Kentridge’s grandparents’ dining table ignites a masterclass in perspective in another episode. And a series of anamorphic riddles are accompanied by Tom Waits crooning about eggs and sausage in another. 

Kentridge started work on Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot during the first lockdown of 2020. Just as the series erases the line between private and public space through Kentridge’s generous elucidation of the artist’s inner life, its first presentation sought to replicate this elimination of boundaries. In Venice, where the work premiered at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in April 2024, the physical exhibition took the form of a partial recreation of the artist’s Johannesburg studio, mimicking the closed spaces enforced by the pandemic.

The studio, to Kentridge, “is also an enlarged head, a chamber for thoughts,” and this expansive work—described by the German philosopher and curator Wolfgang Scheppe as both a “plague journal” and “a decameron of self-reflection”—offers a rare opportunity for the viewer to follow the budding of an idea from embryo to adolescence. For Kentridge, Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot stands as a “record of thinking in slow motion.” Here, process is not a means to an end, but the sum total of the work itself.

In the jubilant final episode—appositely titled “In Defence of Optimism”—Kentridge leads a marching band onto the streets of Johannesburg, exploding the confined perimeters of the studio space. It’s a joyous manifestation of what Kentridge describes as the job of the studio: to turn the invisible into something palpable. “The studio is a space of transformation,” he tells us. “We give the impulse a safe space to expand and find its place. We give it the benefit of the doubt, in the hope that at the end we have arrived somewhere different, and can glimpse something new."