For nearly five decades, whether in drawing, painting, sculpture, video, theater or opera, William Kentridge, 70, has explored the history of violence and its effects on humanity. Often he makes charcoal or ink drawings of scenes of South Africa, where he was born and has lived nearly all of his life, and where the fallout from colonialism and apartheid persists, though he’s just as likely to look further afield. Yet despite what the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakgiev calls its “ethical bearing,” Kentridge’s work isn’t didactic. His recent chamber opera “The Great Yes, the Great No” (2024), with music written with the composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu, a frequent collaborator, is set on a ship that, in 1941, sailed from Marseille to Martinique, carrying intellectuals away from Vichy France. In Kentridge’s Surrealist telling, the passengers hail from various eras; at one point, Joséphine Bonaparte and Josephine Baker dance an unlikely duet.
As a child, Kentridge had a greater critical awareness of the system he was living in than many of his classmates at his all-white boys’ school in Johannesburg, no doubt because he comes from a family of liberal lawyers, and perhaps, too, because his great-grandparents had fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe. In 1958, Kentridge’s father, Sydney Kentridge, now 102, represented Nelson Mandela and some 90 others who were on trial for high treason for anti-apartheid activism. In 1979, the artist’s mother, Felicia Kentridge, co-founded the Legal Resources Centre, which sought to undo the legal underpinnings of apartheid. More recently, it’s taken on the mining industry that, as is evident in much of Kentridge’s work, has shaped Johannesburg’s topography and economy.
In the early ’80s, after what he considers failed forays into acting and commercial filmmaking — and after he and his wife, Anne Stanwix, a rheumatologist, had their first child — Kentridge returned to his first artistic love of drawing. Within five years, he’d arrived at his technique of photographing a single drawing as it evolves through erasure and redrawing, then stringing the images together into animations. He became an artist of note thanks to the Johannesburg Biennial in 1995 and Documenta X in 1997. Laura Hoptman, the executive director of the Drawing Center, where Kentridge had his first New York solo show in 1998, describes this period as a watershed moment. “Not only was his work figurative, it was narrative. Not only was it narrative, it was allegorical,” she says. Hoptman compares him to Titian or Veronese, “people who were painting history” — except, she says, he’s tackling “big, big subjects using paper and a piece of charcoal.”
Viewers can get an intimate and playful look at Kentridge’s practice in “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot” (2024), a nine-part video series he shot in his studio, located in the garden of his Johannesburg home. The coffee pot in question is the classic Bialetti design, which Kentridge likes for its anthropomorphic form, but the artist also appears as himself, and frequently twice over: The footage was edited so that we tend to see two or more versions of him simultaneously, and these split selves are apt to disagree. This one prefers the etchings of Goya; that one, the paintings of Manet. This one enjoys making lists; the other considers them a substitute for thinking. But they both like making art, and the series shows Kentridge starting in on piece after piece. The videos, along with many of the works that appear in the videos — large-scale drawings of South African landscapes, cryptic diagrams or peonies in a glass — are now on view at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea. The back room of the ground floor has, in another instance of doubling, been made to resemble the studio Kentridge depicts onscreen, right down to the sousaphone he keeps around like an old friend.
Most of this conversation, which has been edited and condensed, took place in mid-March, the day after a dress rehearsal of “The Great Yes, the Great No” at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, Calif. The artist responded to additional questions a week or so later, once he was back home and in the studio.
Kate Guadagnino:
What was the starting point for this new chamber opera?
William Kentridge:
K.G.:
Where was that?
W.K.:
K.G.:
Breton is presented as a bit of a blowhard, but the piece itself is deeply Surrealistic. What about him and his crew appealed to you?
W.K.:
The Surrealists were responding to a European rationalism that led to the growth of fascism. Questions of colonization and what to do with its history are still very much in the air, and a kind of fascism is rearing its head around the world again.
K.G.:
Do you think certain artistic modes like Surrealism are better suited for this current moment?
W.K.:
I don’t think of it in those terms. I just find an affinity with them. Dada, Surrealism and collage all have to do with uncertainty, doubt and an understanding that we construct meaning rather than receive or discover it. There’s an ongoing polemic [in my work] of using processes that are familiar in the studio to show things that are invisible outside. It’s not surprising to look at a collage and understand it’s a construction of different fragments that have a provisional coherence, but it’s harder to understand ourselves as [having] that same provisional coherence, made out of things we’ve read, heard and remembered.
K.G.:
So the self is also fragmented?
W.K.:
You’ve probably had the experience where you’ve written something, it feels really great and, the next morning, you read it and think, “Who wrote that? Not me. I would’ve written something much more intelligent.” One tends to disappoint oneself, and that split is very common in the studio.
K.G.:
In “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot,” you talk about wanting to show the chaos of the studio, which you’ve said should be a place for stupidity, in your work. Are the two ideas related?
W.K.:
The hope is always that the work knows more than the artist. “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot” was very much about giving a sense of the incoherent ways one’s mind works when making things. You can do an improvisation and think, “Well, I don’t understand it, but let’s try it out. Let’s give the impulse the benefit of the doubt.” It’s like a psychoanalytic free association where you say whatever comes to mind, because it’s coming from somewhere. And if we can follow it or listen attentively, something will jump out that does make sense. That’s the goal, not to end up with something stupid, but to understand that if you write the essay before you make the work, you’re in a bad space.
K.G.:
Have you ever tried to do it the other way around?
W.K.:
Yes, I have. I wrote film scripts when I was much younger, but I’m a very bad scriptwriter, a very bad constructor of narrative. Luckily, none of them got made, and I came to understand that the only hope for the work was to start somewhere in the middle. The animated films are all made on the principle that there’s no starting story. There’s a vague idea and a couple of images but, if it all gets worked out ahead of time, you miss too many things along the way.
K.G.:
Can you think of an instance when your process yielded a great surprise?
W.K.:
K.G.:
How did you arrive at the title “The Great Yes, the Great No”?
W.K.:
K.G.:
Were you thinking about your own family at all, or about what it means to work as an artist in a place that isn’t where you’re from, as so many of the Surrealists did during World War II?
W.K.:
I mean, I know my family came from Eastern Europe, but we’ve been in South Africa for three generations, so we’re not displaced in the same way. The show is very much about questions of migration. We bring in Joséphine Bonaparte to touch on the slave era. When Napoleon came to power, he reinstated slavery throughout the French colonies [though it had never been abolished in Martinique]. But there are also contemporary questions of migration — who’s welcome and who’s not — that are certainly relevant here in the United States at the moment.
K.G.:
Do you think South Africa is the reason the personal and the political intersect in your work?
W.K.:
Growing up there, the question of emancipation was obviously very central: Would we be stuck with the apartheid state for the rest of my lifetime, which seemed very likely at points, or would it be transformed, and how? (In the end, none of the pundits or experts predicted the way in which transformation came, which is one of the things that gives me pause about all claims to certainty about the future.) As a white artist, to have ignored that part of life, to have shown interest purely in formal matters and make the kind of apolitical art that was implied in a lot of New York School color field painting, would have felt like resting on one’s privilege. Not to say there wasn’t privilege — of course there was — but there had to be some kind of acknowledgment of that in the work.
K.G.:
Do you find it necessary, if not to silence the world, then to quiet it when you go into the studio?
W.K.:
It’s not a question of quieting it. The world comes into the studio, and then the demands, the grammar of the work, takes over. So it’s not as if you have to have tears in your eyes while making the work, even if the starting point is grief or anger.
K.G.:
Your animations emphasize an object’s transformative potential, and in “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot,” you cite the example of a table and say it’s “the memory of a tree” and “the premonition of a fire.” Do you think that view is ultimately optimistic?
W.K.:
I think my experience of South Africa has been that one has to keep an optimism and a pessimism together, and neither by itself is accurate. But I do think there has to be a moment of emancipatory hope for the work to proceed, for any of us to proceed. It’s too depressing, otherwise, just to get lost in a neoliberal world of objects and transactions.
There’s a separate thing, too, which is the optimism of the studio itself, or of the activity [of making]. It seems you can’t avoid optimism in the activity of doing something rather than not, because it implies a desire to make a mark, to leave something that’s of you but more than you. It may be a misplaced optimism, but nonetheless.
K.G.:
What do you make of Elon Musk, this child of South Africa?
W.K.:
It feels to me that both he and Trump are like kids who’ve been given the keys of a car and say, “Well, where should we go? What should we do? Let’s try to do a spin. Oh, we knocked those 20 people over. Pity. Let’s try something completely different. Maybe we can get this to go really fast across the swimming pool. It’s OK, we’ve got another car in the garage.” And you have judges running around like ineffectual parents, saying, “No, no, no. What you’re doing is not safe.” There’s a nice poem by W.H. Auden called “Epitaph on a Tyrant” (1939). I’ll find it: “Perfection of a kind was what he was after, / And the poetry he invented was easy to understand. / He knew human folly like the back of his hand, / And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; / When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, / And when he cried the little children died in the streets.”
K.G.:
Is ambiguity something you try to protect in your art?
W.K.:
K.G.:
I wanted to ask about your relationship to the mundane because we find Trotsky and mine dumps and World War I-era African soldiers in your work, but we also find coffee pots and telephones and pinstripe suits.
W.K.:
It has to do with finding objects that meet the world of drawing halfway. There’s something about the angularity of a coffee pot, and it has to do with the history of still-life drawing, whether by Philip Guston or [Giorgio] Morandi or [Jean Siméon] Chardin. With an old-fashioned Bakelite telephone, the dark blackness is like the darkness of charcoal. It also has a wire that connects it to the wall and eventually to a switchboard, so it’s possible to make graphically evident, with lines that correspond to the wires, the invisible connections. We’re in this state of being deluged with lines of invisible connection coming into our head — every phone call, every email, every WhatsApp. We’re like pincushions for information.
K.G.:
When did you become confident saying you could make it as an artist?
W.K.:
K.G.:
W.K.:
He told me that he preferred figurative painting. It just happened that all the best painters at the time were abstract painters. And he said, “Take care of the art and the politics will take care of itself,” a piece of advice that still resonates with me.
K.G.:
What grows in the garden outside your studio, and does that affect your work?
W.K.:
It’s a beautiful garden. I think there are something like 700 different flowering plants and shrubs by our current count, a mixture of indigenous plants on the hill behind the house and flowers from all over in the garden. And yes, both the lushness of the garden and particular flowers, like irises and peonies, come into the work. There’s something of the paper quality of their petals that seems to call for them to be drawn.
K.G.:
W.K.:
Yes, they’re a homage. I have a strong love-hate relationship to Bruce Nauman, to his position as Mr. Artist in America, dating back to when I was a student. His work seemed to have such confidence — and what was that confidence? Confidence in the great American state to do such minimal work and think it was of importance. That you could just walk backward and forward in the studio, and that in itself was enough because you were at the center of the universe, the center of the art world, whereas if you were elsewhere doing similar kinds of actions, it was very unlikely they’d be noticed. But I do also love his films.
K.G.:
In one segment of “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot,” you grapple with the body and aging, and there’s a part where you dance cheerfully alongside an animation of a skeleton.
W.K.:
K.G.:
What was the impetus, elsewhere in the series, for drawing yourself in the nude?
W.K.:
To take stock of who one is without the protection of clothes. Also, to follow in the long tradition of artists looking at themselves and other people naked and trying to find rough equivalents for aging flesh. The first self-portraits I did were when I was 18 or 19. It’s a sobering view, to look at what the work of gravity has been.
K.G.:
Are you feeling retrospective?
W.K.:
I’m turning 70. In biblical terms, that’s my life expectancy and everything over that is gravy. But no, I’m not yet at the point of counting how many years I still have to keep drawing. I’m not like lots of friends who’ve had to retire because they’d been in university positions with mandatory retiring ages. Luckily, that’s one of the things you don’t get in the studio. I mean, I still have a father, so I’m not even on the front line. The way my 102-year-old father greets his almost-70-year-old son is to say, “Hello, my boy.”
K.G.:
I read that you used to design elaborate birthday cakes for your children. What would you do if you were going to make one for yourself and go all out?
W.K.:
No, you see, these were never really going all out. They were quite simple cakes with drawings on top done with icing. But I hope, now that I’ve got three grown children and three grandchildren, that somebody else will make the cake. That will be better than the cake I make.
Photo editor: Esin Ili Göknar. Digital production and design: Danny DeBelius, Chris Littlewood, Coco Romack, Carla Valdivia Nakatani and Nancy Wu
