Trying to describe what William Kentridge does is like describing our constantly changing weather or the color blue. One resorts to comparison, like blue is the color of the sky or the March temperature felt like last August’s, and we’re none the wiser. Kentridge is an artist, yes. He makes puppets and opera. He is a performance artist and interviews himself. He is an animator and an excellent draftsman. He lectures convincingly in gibberish, and a marching band plays in his studio. His materials are mostly charcoal and India ink. He uses rulers and cameras, makes scurrying rats out of paper that dart across his work table, constructs paper vases and pots that he rearranges on the shelf like a Morandi painting. He’s a filmmaker and a printmaker. He works alone; he has assistants. He is constantly improvising.
Kentridge doesn’t start with an idea, plan or storyboard. The gesture tells him what to do next—the sweep of charcoal across a blank page, for instance, becomes a body in motion. Movement provokes the next action into endless associations. He dramatizes the process so that the viewer can watch his mind in the act of creation. He shows us how his mind works: fluid, flexible, florid and unique. His images are not fixed but march into the next and the next, seemingly without end. For instance, a woman turning into a tree, “… is a metamorphosis and always comes at a crisis point—a way to earn transformation.”
In his film, Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, he interviews himself, clearly demonstrating his double-nature in the studio, a duality all artists grapple with.
KENTRIDGE TWO: “What makes the self? Not only who I am, but how does one represent that in the studio? It’s as if the energy and the marks that are made are who I am, and whether the drawing looks like me or doesn’t look like me isn’t really the heart of it.”
KENTRIDGE ONE: “If it doesn’t matter whether it looks like you or doesn’t look like you, then, for once, could it look like me?”
He goes on to say that he could paint a tree or a rhinoceros and they would both be a self-portrait, so why not a coffeepot? It is this absurdity that captivates and provokes the viewer to think. He offers no answers, no guideposts or solutions, asking endless questions of himself that his other self continually contradicts.
The film is divided into nine half-hour segments that all started from a shard of an idea, an impulse, a line, an irritation. From there, he lets loose and follows where the materials lead him, not analyzing or fixing but ripping up, erasing, overlaying the image. The film is made up of his drawings, animation, performance, music, stop-action. He is alone in the studio, dialoging with himself, with collaborators or with a marching band. He is always in his studio.
Studying his work, you recognize yourself—the constant shifting of ideas, the gymnastic nature of thoughts tumbling one over another, the self-contradictions. Like your own thoughts, he shows you the gaps in time, its instability, the crazy transformation of a drawing of a peony turned into scurrying rats across the drawing table as he works. Transformation is the modus operandi of Kentridge’s artmaking; just as in life, all is process, rearranging itself before your eyes. “The agency of making… trusting the materials at hand and what you see in front of you emerging. You don’t have to have a brilliant idea to start. It’s the category of recognition rather than the category of knowing.”
He demystifies art-making, and yet his work surges into the realm of magic. Like a magician, the images in the film are constantly being created and disappearing. Now you see it, now you don’t. It’s a demonstration of the nature of reality, of time, of thinking. It shows us what’s really going on in our minds.
KENTRIDGE ONE: “…what are you doing here?”
KENTRIDGE TWO: “You mean, all these hours?”
KENTRIDGE ONE: “After all these years, all these decades in the studio.”
KENTRIDGE TWO: “We are working.”
The dialogue continues and, as usual, arrives at an impasse. So like being human.
Hauser & Wirth has mounted a spectacular exhibit at its 22nd Street gallery, “A Natural History of the Studio.” Do not miss it. You will see the results of four years of creating in Kentridge’s studio, begun at the beginning of the COVID lockdown in 2020. On the first floor are seventy works on paper: charcoal drawings used in animation in the film, some massive. In the third space is an evocation of Kentridge’s studio as well as segments of the film playing on a screen. “The studio is an expanded head.”
On the second floor are his large torn paper silhouettes made out of aluminum and supported by steel rods, Paper Procession. The shapes are hand-painted in bright orange, red and yellow, backlit by spanning windows letting in natural light. In another room, an animated video, Fugitive Words (2024), plays, showing Kentridge’s many notebooks, with shifting words and images appearing and disappearing. The film is a tribute to his father, Sir Sydney Kentridge, a prominent anti-apartheid lawyer. It is the full length of Beethoven’s moving Grand Duke piano trio, his father’s favorite music. In another room are his black bronze sculptures: a stretching cat, telephone, carrier pigeon, tree and others. Four long white shelves hold small “glyphs,” black sculptures of vases, birds, trees, cones and other indefinable objects.
I talked to Kentridge in the gallery. He had just celebrated his 70th birthday and was wearing his proverbial ironed white button-down shirt and black trousers—also his standard attire in the studio. He somehow manages to keep the white shirt unmarred, even with his continual use of dusty black charcoal. We talked about the joys of working alone and the concentrated, extended opportunity to work during the lockdown. He also loves working in collaboration with a number of camera operators, editors, musicians and actors. We talked about the miracle of the human brain and our favorite poets: Adam Zagajewski, Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz. He told me that his wife, Anne Stanwix, a doctor, gives her patients poems.
Kentridge’s generosity is exuberant. Listening to him talk, whether privately or in interviews, he speaks eloquently, in complete sentences with no filler words, in the beautiful soft song of the South African accent. He’s lived his entire life in Johannesburg and often makes art that is political—apartheid, colonialism, gold mining that strips and neuters the natural world, dictators. “Do you deal with a tyrant as a tragedy or a comedy or the absurd?”
You can watch the film Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot on Mubi and see its construction in the 22nd Street gallery in New York. The excellent catalogue of the film is also available at Hauser & Wirth, illustrating the nine segments with words and images. Whichever you do, prepare to be mesmerized. And to fall in love.
“A Natural History of the Studio” at Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street gallery with thirty additional prints at the 18th Street location through August 1, 2025.
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