From one of the art world’s most inimitable figures, MUBI’s Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot offers a compelling glimpse into the psyche and studio space of William Kentridge. A mesmerising dance of creative ideation, the nine-part series is the direct result of pairing a prolific, political artist with the isolated rumination of the COVID pandemic. Packed with fleeting vignettes, collaborative performances, and historical narratives of greed and apartheid in Johannesburg, Kentridge imparts more aimless contemplations than self-portraits. And really, that is the point.

The series is produced in Kentridge’s typical style; charcoal etchings and paintings swirl together with animations, projections, and impressive camera work to achieve a surreal blend of reality. The striking images are matched with intimate sound design, featuring the sweeping winds of empty landscapes, the crowded bustle of the streets, and ASMR-inducing foley work of charcoal scratching, paper fluttering, and paint splashing. In each episode, Kentridge marries a piece of artistic practice or theory with musings about identity, the world, and, most importantly, the studio. Indeed, a critical step in dissecting Kentridge’s work is understanding the chaos of the studio and its many parallels to his personal context growing up as a child of anti-apartheid Jewish South African barristers. 

So why the coffee pot? For Kentridge, it is a sort of stand-in for what he feels is an impossibly difficult task, a likeness that is altogether devoid of meaning and yet filled with it. As he wryly remarks in the second episode, “whether the drawing looks like me or doesn’t look like me is not really the heart of it… I should have bought one of those books on how to draw the human face. Then I wouldn’t have to hide behind a coffee pot.”

But there isn’t very much hiding from Kentridge in this series─it’s quite the opposite. In frequently recurring static shots, Kentridge enters the scene as a double of himself, appearing on either side of a table like a set of twins. He uses this doubleness to engage in rigorous debate and self-analysis, whereupon he frequently pokes at and disagrees with his other persona. It is a clever device for illuminating the challenge of painting a truly representational self-portrait in all its scattered contradictions, especially when the claustrophobic isolation of the pandemic amplifies internal doubt. 

The doubling also allows Kentridge to play both philosopher and critic; in response to his own string of postulations about the nature of memory and what is concretely knowable about the past, he responds to himself, “these are nonquestions.” In the final episode, Kentridge orders himself to cut out scenes that have very little purpose, to which he declares: “Sometimes what is not needed is essential. If everything is in position and logical, then we aren’t showing the studio.” Then comes the blunt response from his alter ego: “That is a very easy and, if I might say, feeble excuse.”

His self-reproach is a sly defence against outward critique, certainly developed from a lengthy career in the art world. In a particularly revealing confessional, Kentridge admits that much of how he sees himself is filtered through the public perception of his work. It is no wonder then, that he finds it so difficult to separate his own thoughts from how they might be received.

While his deflection is convincing enough to encourage my engagement with the fragmentary mess of the studio, I am inclined to agree with Kentridge’s critical persona at times. The lengthy series is not without pacing troubles, where searching for the point is a provocative yet demanding task. More importantly, as much as Kentridge attempts to obfuscate such a critique, the lines between self-portrait and self-indulgence are sometimes blurred. He seems to revel in the introspective tête-à-tête, clouding his genuinely stimulating meditations with an excess of navel-gazing. 

Regardless of these gripes, Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot is an insightful picture of the manifold connections, influences, and paradoxes that weave into the fabric of the self. If anything, its many unanswered questions will sufficiently and existentially complicate things for me the next time I try to take a selfie in “portrait mode.”