The Brooklyn Rail

William Kentridge has produced what is perhaps one of the most complex works of art, in any medium, to emerge from the COVID-19 lockdown. My recommended viewer prerequisite is the artist’s 2012 Harvard Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons—for Kentridge, drawing is an extension of the thinking process. In his film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (2024), on display at Hauser & Wirth, he describes the studio as a giant head. Cinematically, we are party to his thoughts and to the making of the works displayed in the gallery. His studio is also a theater, and it is no accident that his long-time set designer Sabine Theunissen has designed the two floors of the gallery as an extension of the studio recreation. In the films, Kentridge first appears as the solitary actor, then is joined by a host of collaborators including cameramen, musicians, cinematographers, dancers, designers, editors, sculptors, and paper rats representing the studio unconscious. Here, his dual-selves argue, one preferring solitary creation and the other frantic collaboration. Kentridge is a multifaceted artist, working with a gifted ensemble of international talent.

The film begins in his garden studio situated behind his Johannesburg childhood home. It is hard not to think of another backyard studio, the fin-de-siècle glass studio of his antecessor, fellow actor, and creator of magical cinematic special effects, Georges Méliès. Like Méliès, Kentridge has double dialogues with himself, green-screen technology replacing Méliès’s multiple exposure techniques. Unlike the silent Méliès, Kentridge voices interior dialogues, reflections on mortality, childhood memories, conflicting views, and meditations on the self. The artist studied mime in Paris in his youth and is an engaging and accomplished performer. His multifaceted genius is on full display here: draughtsman, theater professional, writer, magician, and maestro. Few artists can equal his articulation of the creative process and prodigious intellect.

I kept thinking of a 1901 Méliès film, The Man with the Rubber Head, where Méliès constructs a rubber self-portrait head which can be blown up to huge proportions. It is comically over-inflated by a clown assistant and explodes with a puff of smoke. Kentridge’s genius lies in allowing similar catastrophes: great thoughts may be crushed by falling trash cans, scurrying paper rats spill ink on a drawing, or wind blows papers aloft. As Kentridge says, the studio is “a place of undoing certainties.” A mess becomes possibilities. Like Méliès’s goofy assistant, Kentridge’s studio has its own impish sprites, and it is often when chaos interrupts the script that the viewer is most transfixed. Kentridge is at his best when his pristine starched white shirt becomes paint splattered, when he abandons himself in a dance, or becomes an equestrian statue on a large hobby horse precariously constructed of tripods atop a drawing table. The tragedy of a Black miner in the pits etches in our memory more deeply, precisely because of the periods of silly pantomime dispersed throughout the films. Sketchbooks are tossed and caught midair using film reversals, and Kentridge transmogrifies into a dancing skeleton using stop frames (his tribute to the Lumière brothers’ 1897–98 Le Squelette Joyeux). The Greeks, he quotes, knew tragedies in the morning had to be followed by comedies in the afternoon.

It is optimal to see Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot in the gallery setting of his reconstructed studio with the works of art produced in the film displayed on two floors of the gallery. The film is divided into nine segments, each around thirty minutes in length. For Kentridge, life is quantified by the thousands of drawings he has produced: drawing equals memory. In “Episode 3: Vanishing Points,” we return to the world of Soho Eckstein, the ruthless randlord, and his 1989–91 series on the mines. The gold has largely been extracted and the Black work force reduced from seven hundred thousand to seventy thousand. We are told, “the informal sector finances the formal sector.” Images of this informal sector in the form of miners crushing rocks with hammers and the face of a miner looking up from a grave-like pit are heart-wrenching. His drawings capture unmanageable grief.

“Vanishing Points” is also a meditation on the ill-gotten gains that have financed many of our cultural institutions. Before fleeing to England, Florence, Lady Phillips (wife of mining magnate Lionel Phillips) donated a collection of European paintings to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, as though European landscapes would somehow atone for the plunder and mine dumps blighting the South African countryside. At the end of the segment, the museum dissolves in a cloud of dust through an act of artistically controlled demolition. On the gallery walls we see the drawings referencing this segment: Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (Mine Dump) (2020) and Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (Landscape with Objects and Markers) (2021).

In “Episode 4: Finding One’s Fate,” a tree becomes a self-symbol—the tree of life. Here, the artist’s drawings of leaves proliferate, referencing the Greek myth of the Cumaean Sibyl who inscribed men’s fates on oak leaves. When supplicants came to her cave and opened the door, the West Wind would blow in and scatter the leaves, leaving them to wonder if they were getting their fate or another’s. In the film, bits of paper blow about and coalesce, creating the giant tree shown on the back gallery wall, Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (The Moment has Gone) (2020). Fate is fickle. The artist tells us that the tree planted in his childhood garden, meant to last a lifetime, has been struck by lightning and died. He laments, “death grows its tree inside of you.” Recounting the death of Perseus’s father in Argos, told to him as a child by his now ninety-eight-year-old father, Kentridge ponders, “How long will I live?” The winds of fate and mortality are constant themes.

In “Episode 6: A Harvest of Devotion,” we revisit The Head & the Load, the artist’s 2018 theatrical commentary on the Black lives lost in the colonial conflict on the African continent between Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany in World War I. In a poignant vignette, Kentridge and African actors read the Reverend John Chilembwe’s 1914 censored letter protesting the deaths of the Nyasaland Africans serving as porters in the King’s African Rifles campaign against the Germans in Tanganyika. After inciting a failed rebellion, Chilembwe was later tracked down and killed. We see a drawing of the Reverend’s blown-up church. “Darkness has eaten her own child.” Drawings of the tsetse fly that brought disease to the African porters and birds being blown to bits, symbolizing the conflict, were projected in The Head & the Load.

As if the artist and his collaborators were not busy enough during the lockdown, they also produced the artist’s film on the horrors of the Soviet period, Oh to Believe in Another World (2022), during that period. New Yorkers saw a five-channel immersive installation of this production in 2023 at the Marian Goodman Gallery, and the New York Philharmonic’s 2024 production of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 accompanied the Kentridge film. Set designer Sabine Theunissen and costumer Greta Goiris collaborated remotely at first during the pandemic but later appeared in the film. Goiris built puppets, which inspired bronze sculptures like Washer (2023) and Tap (2024), installed on the second floor of the gallery. Seeing the construction and manipulation of Theunissen’s paper model of the Soviet museum for Oh to Believe in Another World is a high point. Photographed with a special miniature camera for a Lilliputian invasion, the set-model became Oh to Believe in Another World’s location. We glimpse collaborators like Janus Fouché, Žana Marović, Joshua Trappler, and Octavia Sonyane coming in and out of frames. Drawings of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lilya Brik, and Vsevolod Meyerhold are seen in drawings, and prints of the aforementioned may be seen at the Hauser & Wirth 18th Street location.

The film’s final “Episode 9: In Defence of Optimism,” opens with a vase of peonies we see depicted in the monumental Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (Let me Live Again) (2021), hanging on a cork wall in the gallery’s first room. Through film-reversal techniques, the drawing constructs itself from papers scattered on the floor. This is all about flux, the flow of Heraclitus’s river, the forward moment of time versus the reversal of time lodged in memory. We see South Africa’s dark underside with images Black miners in the subterranean pits. Optimism comes with the peonies and in the final sequence as a brass band pulls the artist’s more pessimistic double out into the sunlit streets. Asked “What are we doing in the studio?” Kentridge’s alter-ego responds, “The absorption of the answer by the medium.” Creativity is the path forward suggested by his processionals. This exhibition and the accompanying exhibition of works on paper at the gallery’s 18th Street location are a high point of the New York season, not to be missed.