The Spectator : ‘When a work lands the excitement is physical’: William Kentridge interviewed (by Mary Wakefield)

The genius of Kentridge is that he is a serious artist who doesn't take himself too seriously

atching William Kentridge’s film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is like being submerged inside his mind, inside the coffee pot maybe. There’s so much going on both visually and intellectually that there’s no room at all for a viewer’s own feeble thoughts.

Superficially, the film is a look inside the South African artist’s studio and an invitation to watch him work. Over four-and-a-half hours and nine themed episodes you see him making his familiar expressive drawings in charcoal and ink, but this studio is also a stage; there’s dance, puppetry, dips into history, astronomy, philosophy. ‘I wanted to try and make something that was not a documentary and that wasn’t fiction,’ he says, and he has. It’s utterly absorbing – and also funny.

Not long after the film begins, Kentridge bifurcates. His single self, heavy-set, nearly 70, silver-haired, dressed in his usual white shirt and grey trousers, becomes two life-size Kentridges who pace the studio, explaining the work, bickering with each other.

‘What are we doing here, after all these decades in the studio?’ asks Kentridge One to Kentridge Two. ‘What are we thinking?’

The result of this is that when the real Kentridge appears on my laptop screen, and throughout our conversation, I find myself half expecting other Kentridges to pop up behind him and join in.

And I don’t like to think about what they’d say to my first question. Some of the images and motifs in Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot are familiar from Kentridge’s past work: the rhinos and coffee pots, the rising water, little swimming fish. Do they have specific meanings for him? ‘The motifs are familiar?’ says Kentridge, nonplussed, ‘There’s always a hope that there are going to be new images, new motifs…’ I backpedal quickly: ‘Well, there’s lots of new images of course, but…’ He laughs. ‘You hope for new images and then you realise that you’ve drawn another damn rhinoceros! Actually in one of the episodes I say I’ve drawn 500 rhinoceroses but I’ve never drawn a hippopotamus. And then last week I was looking through some old images and there was a hippopotamus! And I was certain I hadn’t.’

Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot was made during the pandemic. The project of bringing a viewer into his studio and explaining his process had interested Kentridge for a while, but it was lockdown that provided the opportunity. And Walter Scott Murch, who worked on Apocalypse Now and all three Godfathers agreed to be consultant editor.

Did Covid make him anxious at all? ‘No not at all! Part of my feeling was: “Welcome to the world.”’ What does he mean? ‘South Africa is a relatively violent country, so the calmness which exists in Europe and North America, or seems to with the middle classes, the expectation of a kind of imperviousness to the world, was completely shaken as Covid came in. Suddenly people realised they were vulnerable, they couldn’t rely on science, no one knew what to advise. Well – this is how most people live!’

To understand Kentridge, says every piece ever written about him, you need to understand South Africa, where he was born and still lives. His parents were lawyers during the apartheid era. Sydney Kentridge represented Nelson Mandela and defended Steve Biko’s family after he died in custody. He (Sydney) is David Lammy’s all-time hero, as it happens.

In episode six of Self-Portrait, entitled ‘A Harvest of Devotion’, Kentridge directs two dancers as they work on a way of expressing the conflicted feelings of the African soldiers who fought in the first world war. They march, then fall backwards, make a stuttering, half-forced salute. ‘I’d known the story of a revolt in Nyasaland [Malawi],’ Kentridge says. ‘They said, “Why should we go and take part in this white man’s war, why should we do it?” But in Senegal, there were African leaders who demanded the right to take part in the war. First the French said no black soldiers could take part and then the leaders demanded the right to offer what they called “a harvest of devotion” and be allowed to go and die for France.’

When he saw the footage of the dancers’ tortured movements, Kentridge tells me, he thought, ‘now we have the emotional heart of the project’. Is there always a moment in a work that he sees as the heart? ‘Yes, it’s something you can’t define. It’s not about cleverness, it’s not about intelligence, it’s a different sense of that that holds you, that you feel immediately.’

In the Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, the studio is enclosed, but now, peering at my screen, it seems to open up into Kentridge’s office, with a view of the vast window in front of which he now sits. ‘If you are filming you need to control the light, so we built a wall,’ says Kentridge. ‘But also I wanted a sense of being stuck inside. I wanted the claustrophobia. But the garden is beautiful outside, it’s spectacular I think. I could take you for a walk while we talk?’

Kentridge’s garden – the paved paths and palm trees – bobs by and I try to imagine how he manages the great mass of ideas and images that seem to orbit him ceaselessly: 19th-century astrophysics and Greek mythology, the nature of memory and self, his own history, African history.

‘The world is fragmented,’ he says in the film. ‘These fragments are allowed to swirl around the studio, then rearranged and sent back out into the world as a drawing, a film, a story. It’s a place of undoing certainties. Or allowing for a kind of provisionality.’

‘The world is fragmented. These fragments are allowed to swirl around the studio’

But how do you know which fragments fit together? What does it feel like when they do, when you know it’s going to work as a piece of art? ‘Oh, when it lands it is a very physical excitement.’ He says. ‘It’s almost like … You know when you are about to take a bite of a piece of chocolate and you can feel it in your salivary glands? Or it is almost like a sweating, there is a kind of charge and you want to do it straight away.’

Kentridge has every right to take himself very seriously. He’s one of the most admired artists working today. But it’s because he doesn’t that all these thoughts can weave around each other so well – and why for a viewer, all these weighty subjects never seem ponderous. Even the two Kentridge compères of Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot have a sort of levity and poise, the grace of an old-fashioned cinematic duo, Laurel and Hardy, Kentridge and Kentridge – though that sounds like an undertaker.

In episode five, ‘As If’, the Kentridges are not bickering but making art together, putting torn pieces of paper into a collage depicting the limbs and body of a horse which then, with just a few tiny changes, becomes all manner of familiar horses from Pegasus to Goya’s tightrope-walking horse. It’s delightful, magical, until a third Kentridge arrives and says scornfully, ‘Look at them. Like six-year-olds. It’s pathetic.’

It’s the only moment in the studio that I find jarring, that dislodged me from my full Kentrige immersion. What’s Kentridge Three’s problem? The real (I think) artist says: ‘There are two guys, middle-aged… actually not middle aged, elderly guys – nearly 70! – playing with bits of wood the way my four-year-old granddaughter does.’

Is that his father talking, the heroic Sydney? ‘My father’s scepticism of my whole project is much stronger in my head than my mother’s wholehearted acceptance of it.’ He didn’t want him to be an artist? ‘Well, 30, 40 years ago maybe there was some tension – but none now. I can joke about it. When I was asked to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard, the Slade Lectures in Oxford, I phoned to tell him and his comment was, “Well, do you have anything to say?” I said, well, you understand it is a great honour to be invited to give these Norton Lectures and he said, “Yes, I understand and you have that honour. You don’t have to accept. You’ve been invited, that’s the honour, you don’t have to accept.” Which in fact is how I started the lectures, I started the lectures with that story because it’s been a long time and it’s fine now. It’s all fine now.’

Article published on https://www.spectator.co.uk