Series – William Kentridge: Unobtrusive virtuosity

You can also approach experimental documentaries through the mood they create. The images and sounds of the nine-part series “Self-Portrait As A Coffee Pot,” which can be seen on the streaming service Mubi, initially radiate calm without having a sedating effect. There is something incredibly centering about watching artists at work. At least if this work does not initially come from an excited conceptuality, but from a learned craft, in order to formulate it in an appropriately conservative way.

»Self-Portrait As A Coffee Pot« shows the Johannesburg-based painter, filmmaker, performance artist and director William Kentridge in production. Mostly on large canvases that are lying on the floor or hanging on the wall and are worked on with various devices, brushes and drawing pencils, of course, but also with foils, collages and bicycle tires. You could watch for hours as a few lines that initially seem like scribbles first become shapes, then figures, and then figures in entire landscapes.

Kentridge paints and draws in such a way that the virtuosity is noticeable but never intrusive. The provisional, sketch-like quality is still contained in even the most elaborate image designs, not as a technique but as a visual impression. This is one of the reasons why these pictures seem incredibly alive.

The creation and its reflection, which does not seem to precede the production as a plan and concept, also have a lively and invigorating effect. The liveliness of this work comes not only from doing it, but also from talking about it. The artist has doubled himself using the camera and in “Self Portrait As A Coffee Pot” discusses elementary questions with his double, who usually playfully assumes the opposite position: whether one prefers to work alone or in collaborations, what it means to show oneself (be oneself one in the representation for others, the artist reasons), and how much one has gained in waist circumference as one gets older.

One of these very relaxed, deep and funny conversations is about the relationship suggested above between reflection and working with the hands, with the material. “What are we actually doing here?” asks William Kentridge, and he asks himself: “You mean, in all these hours, in all these years?” Kentridge’s doppelganger completes itself, so to speak, “in all these decades in this Studio”. The answer: “We are working.”

But that is not an answer. »What do we think? I don’t think so: the torn paper, the ink, the charcoal traces. The absorption of the answer by the medium is the answer. This means: The ideas not only unfold during the production of the image, they only emerge during and with it.

Nevertheless, the production processes that are documented and shown in the nine episodes do not seem purely intuitive or spontaneous. The difference between William Kentridge’s work and many other forms of modern art is its cosmopolitanism, with the simultaneous presence of the achievements of modernity, primarily reflexivity and self-reference.

However, both are pursued here by someone who knows about the violence of the past and present of the society in which he produces his art. South Africa’s history of violence appears again and again in this work, and its symbolic treatment in art is in constant tension with the work of Kentridge’s parents, who were both civil rights lawyers. Legal logic is one thing, artistic (and one might add contradictory and contradiction-loving) logic is another, says William Kentridge. One thinks in legal terms and possibilities, the other in images. The new South Africa, that of post-apartheid, is not categorically different, says Kentridge, but rather a painting over the old one.

When asked what gives him hope in the face of all-encompassing futility, Kentridge’s answer is again: work. And the space that “Self Portrait As A Coffee Pot” honors as the center of artistic practice and as a kind of extended perceptual apparatus of the artist: the studio. Hope comes “first and foremost from the physical work in the studio.” The feeling of well-being experienced correlates with the feeling of liveliness. »In addition, in the studio I am surrounded by a small circle of employees who are involved in the work. There are people like me who in this way create a model, a pleasant society in miniature, through which they design and visualize a different way of living and creating.«

What William Kentridge postulated in an interview with the magazine “Kunstforum” in 2017 is presented in the nine episodes of “Self-Portrait As A Coffee Pot” in the form of a documentary essay, which is, above all, a film about the production of artistic worlds by an artist who not only formulates positions inherent in the art field, but can also paint the world, for example a landscape. First comes the painting, the drawing, the collage of images (and the editing of films). Only then comes the reflection on one’s own work, which also arises from this productive activity.

Available on Mubi.

You could watch for hours as a few lines that initially seem like scribbles first become shapes, then figures, and then figures in entire landscapes.

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