The Covid-19 lockdowns may seem like a lifetime ago and yet — perhaps aided by the return of Donald Trump to the White House, which spurs a kind of traumatic recall — those strange days also feel recent. Vivid memories coalesce and blur. What did we all do, those of us who were not heroically maintaining essential services or fighting to stay financially afloat? Some baked bread and some brewed pineapple beer. For many artists, it was an opportunity to spend longer hours in the studio: experimenting, dreaming, inventing.
I have been making my way, with delight and wonder, through the nine episodes of William Kentridge’s Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot. Filmed in 2020, the series made its debut at last year’s Venice Biennale and can now be viewed via the streaming service Mubi. “Trapped” in his studio, the artist shares insights into his creative process through a performative dialogue between twin selves — two Kentridges who are happily at odds with one another.
The result is both earnest and absurdist; Kentridge knows not to take himself too seriously lest he seem pretentious or self-important, but he is also firmly committed to art’s exploration of the profound and the tragic, the epic and the archetypal. His erudition is on display. So too is his tendency towards self-mockery and self-doubt.
The Kentridge doppelgängers argue over the details of childhood anecdotes as often as they bicker gently about politics and art history. One Kentridge cherishes the solitary act of drawing; the other affirms the joy of collaboration (and indeed, a number of his collaborators visit the studio). One Kentridge is averse to the chaos and mess of the studio; the other revels in its infinite possibilities.
Still, somehow, with the blank page before him, and an entire universe of potential subjects ... he draws a coffeepot. A second blank page, a fresh start: another coffeepot. Kentridge acknowledges and embraces his obsessions — the iconography that has recurred throughout his career — and this series tests the coffeepot’s metonymic range.
Kentridge jokes that it has to stand in for him because he can’t draw his own face properly. Yet it carries a plenitude of other implications in his oeuvre. Coffee blends into ink, and thus the various media and materials he works with, charcoal in particular. Since the fusion of coffee plunger and mineshaft in his early stop-frame animation films, Kentridge’s coffee also invokes the relationship between race, capital and labour in SA.
Shifting between analogue and digital modes, the series merges studio drawing and painting, 20th-century film and the new methods of animation that Kentridge has employed to create his associative fantasias. The exploitation of miners in the apartheid era, mine dumps as markers of the Johannesburg landscape, the Marikana massacre — all these end up in the brew. The coffeepot, in turn, can be deconstructed and reconstructed into a rhinoceros, a bird, a dancer, a soldier.
With a touch of licence, Luigi di Ponti’s century-old Moka design also calls to mind some of the figures in traditional Russian outfits who populate the Tsarist and Soviet contexts that so intrigue Kentridge. Then there is the different socialist discourse of liberationist figures such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Josephine Baker, who are among the fascinating array of characters in Kentridge’s chamber opera The Great Yes, The Great No.
This theatrical work, in turn, overlaps with another Kentridge film project, To Cross One More Sea, the centrepiece of a new exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. In addition to film, the exhibition includes drawings, sculptures, works on paper and installations related to The Great Yes, The Great No and Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot.
Kentridge’s Covid-era work, unsurprisingly, dwells on the simultaneous frailty and majesty of the human form. Unlike the sturdy, indestructible coffeepot, his body is mortal. By contrast, his furious productivity appears exemplary of the artist’s impulse to produce something lasting.
And yet, as he playfully bemoans the “snail trail of drawings” he has left behind or recites extracts from Ozymandias (Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetic meditation on the folly of pride and the futility of monuments), Kentridge the coffeepot is keenly aware of his limitations as an artist.
• ‘To Cross One More Sea’ is at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, until March 20.
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