If you can’t be an elephant, you might as well be an artist.
The possibilities are endless in the rich and wondrous world of one of the greatest living artists, William Kentridge.
Kentridge opens the doors of his Johannesburg studio and unique creative process, painting a singular self-portrait in this witty and astute nine-episode series: Self-portrait as a coffee-pot.
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The artist’s studio is a wondrous place: an Aladdin’s cave of creative accumulation. Across the cluttered surfaces of its workstations, ink pots and wedges of charcoal jostle for position among repurposed bric-a-brac, while reams of discarded paper hold the secret, half-rendered histories of an idea’s rise and fall.
“These are the fragments,” says William Kentridge, “that are allowed to swirl around the studio and then rearrange, before being sent back out into the world as a drawing, as a film, as a story.” In Self-portrait as a coffee-pot (2024), the South African artist’s nine-part anatomisation of his creative practice, Kentridge – renowned for his sculptures and drawings, animated films, projections, and large-scale theatre and opera performances – evangelises for the value of mess and procrastination, for the trails of detritus that the act of making leaves in its wake.
This colossal work is Kentridge’s generous invitation into his creative process. In each of the 30-minute episodes, the artist welcomes the viewer not just into the studio itself, but into the intimacies of ideation. For newcomers to his 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.
Sometimes, Kentridge will be joined by collaborators and assistants. Other times, he’ll summon a series of alter egos with whom to squabble, debate, and disagree – playfully externalising 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. Whimsy and triviality – even “stupidity” – are all part and parcel of the act of making here. For Kentridge, the series stands as a “record of thinking in slow motion,” one in which process is not a means to an end, but the sum total of the work itself.
