‘When a work lands the excitement is physical’: William Kentridge interviewed

Watching William Kentridge’s film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is like being submerged inside his mind, inside the coffee pot maybe. There’s so much going on both visually and intellectually that there’s no room at all for a viewer’s own feeble thoughts.

Superficially, the film is a look inside the South African artist’s studio and an invitation to watch him work. Over four-and-a-half hours and nine themed episodes you see him making his familiar expressive drawings in charcoal and ink, but this studio is also a stage; there’s dance, puppetry, dips into history, astronomy, philosophy. ‘I wanted to try and make something that was not a documentary and that wasn’t fiction,’ he says, and he has. It’s utterly absorbing – and also funny.

Not long after the film begins, Kentridge bifurcates. His single self, heavy-set, nearly 70, silver-haired, dressed in his usual white shirt and grey trousers, becomes two life-size Kentridges who pace the studio, explaining the work, bickering with each other.

‘What are we doing here, after all these decades in the studio?’ asks Kentridge One to Kentridge Two. ‘What are we thinking?’

The result of this is that when the real Kentridge appears on my laptop screen, and throughout our conversation, I find myself half expecting other Kentridges to pop up behind him and join in.

And I don’t like to think about what they’d say to my first question. Some of the images and motifs in Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot are familiar from Kentridge’s past work: the rhinos and coffee pots, the rising water, little swimming fish. Do they have specific meanings for him? ‘The motifs are familiar?’ says Kentridge, nonplussed, ‘There’s always a hope that there are going to be new images, new motifs…’ I backpedal quickly: ‘Well, there’s lots of new images of course, but…’ He laughs.