William Kentridge, the renowned South African artist, began to film himself in his studio during the coronavirus pandemic while he meditated on the practice of self-portraiture. Although he set out to examine the workings of the studio space and how it relates to the production of art, every image seemed to end with a painting of himself as a coffeepot.
The result was “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot,” a nine-part film series. These episodes, now on the streaming service Mubi, are part of “A Natural History of the Studio,” Kentridge’s first show with Hauser & Wirth in New York. All the drawings from the film series — more than 70 — are present for the first time in a single exhibition, alongside new sculptures. They combine into an effusive repertoire: an artist’s study of his disparate selves, and the materiality of his forms.
The drawings follow Kentridge’s recognizable use of charcoal, pastel and colored pencils, usually in the form of a collage on dry paper. Phrases he gathers from his favorite books adorn some of the paintings, like heavy drooping earrings. This effect is most embodied in “Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (The Moment Has Gone),” a 2020 piece depicting a tree with phrases across the work, like, “You will be dreamt a jackal.”
In “Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (Self-Portrait, Crouching),” 2020, a stunning render of himself, the artist is slightly bent forward. It is unclear if he is naked (although he is surely wearing a wristwatch), but his age — he is 70 now — is apparent in the small folds on his head, his back, the quiet protrusion of his belly, a tender rendering of oneself.
Kentridge’s explorations of the human self can result in multiple insights, and contradictions. Often in his video series multiple Kentridges or doppelgängers argue and disagree on ideas, methods and even memories. (These videos are influenced by his engagement with the world of theater, and at the Hauser & Wirth show they are displayed in a corner of the gallery emulating his studio.) Because the artist draws mostly with charcoal, the notions of erasure, overwriting and haziness in the paintings are heightened, making it plausible to debate and even dispute everything.
For many years, Kentridge sourced the charcoal for large drawings from a supplier in Italy. When it became unavailable, he began buying charcoal from a South African supplier that uses the wood of local trees.
Charcoal mining in South Africa, which depends on the burning of wood, has a history that is fraught with violence and exploitation, much like mining in general. In 2012, South African Police opened fire on protesters at Marikana, a platinum mine less than 100 miles from Johannesburg. And in 2020, same year Kentridge was spending so much time in his studio, Fikile Ntshangase, a South African environmental activist who opposed the expansion of a coal mine, was killed in her home.
The mining industry contains vestiges of the apartheid system that ran in the country for the latter half of the 20th century, and they are largely responsible for the economic disparity along racial lines in South Africa today. How is the artist responding to these layers that surround the primary material of his drawings?
Kentridge said during a walk-through of the exhibition that a pivotal moment in his childhood was discovering, among his father’s possessions, photographs from the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, where South African police officers opened fire on Black protesters demonstrating against apartheid laws.
“It made me aware of the country’s political situation,” Kentridge said, “and that discovery is a major influence on my work.” Two charcoal drawings of a landscape — “Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (Landscape Objects With Markers)” and “Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (Mine Dump)” — evoke a sense of a site where violence has happened. The red markers on both images accentuate this feeling, standing out sharply like bloodstains against the monochrome backgrounds.
Some South African artists, like Gerard Sekoto, make work in which racial tension is explicit. In his “Song of the Pick” (circa 1946), Black South Africans work the earth while a white foreman stands to the side. Kentridge seems to have a different response to violence as linked to the country’s earthly resources; for him the tension appears to be implicit in the art itself. In “Mine Dump” and “Landscape With Objects and Markers,” for example, the land looks injured, like the aftermath of a battle after bodies have been taken away.
Much of the work of Surrealists and Dadaists — movements Kentridge does not mind being associated with — questions what we see. What does it really mean to look at an object, say, a bench? If we were to look toward its origin, then a bench may be defined as a tree that has been cut, processed, refined and beaten into a functional shape.
“When I look at charcoal, what I see is wood that has been burned,” Kentridge said during the walk-through. But what do we see when we look at our own face?
“A Natural History of the Studio” approaches this question by externalizing an intellectual struggle. The use of doppelgängers is a nifty technique, allowing Kentridge to oppose and critique himself but making his actual position hard to pin down. The most resonant part of the exhibition is how the artist manages this confusion, and how he presents confusion as a regular and important part of daily intellectual life.
William Kentridge: A Natural History of the Studio
Through Aug. 1, Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street and 443 West 18th Street, Manhattan; 212-790-3900, hauserwirth.com.
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