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.”