Chaos and creation in the artist's studio

William Kentridge's 'Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot' is a brilliant dissection of his creative practice

- Uday Bhatia

A portly white-haired man walks into the frame and, even before he's sat, addresses the camera with some urgency. "Before he arrives, there are some things I just want to say. It's about the nature of the structure of, and the destructure, and the non-structure of what we see." He lists the disparate thoughts running through his head: a green cake he once ate in Naples, the fish pie he must take out of the freezer, a line from Vladimir Mayakovsky, digging in The Great Escape and as a young boy on the beach, a row of coffins for mass burial, the impending birth of his granddaughter.

The speaker is South African artist William Kentridge. The absent "he" is also William Kentridge. They're the hosts of a beguiling new documentary series, Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, written and directed by Kentridge. The artist's two selves argue and question and contradict each other, like siblings or a vaudeville act. They're dressed the same, are clearly the same person, yet they act like different people. But then, this is a series made during the Covid years. Didn't we all start talking to ourselves at some point?

Self-Portrait is a rare thing: an unhurried look at the nuts and bolts of artistic practice, with digressions and puzzles and unanswered questions. Over nine, roughly 30-minute episodes, Kentridge—a white South African in his late 60s with an orator's voice and a piercing gaze—creates art and talks about his process (or, I should say, the Kentridges create and talk). The works we see him create are dense and charged, paintings, charcoal drawings, sketches, cut-and-paste collages, even Dadaist performance and musical theatre, which draw on personal history but also South Africa's long civil rights struggle.