The lockdown days of the COVID-19 pandemic inspired people to make creative use of their time. Some people baked bread, others tried mixing cocktails, and others worked themselves into shape. Many people turned to documentaries, too, and binge-ate potato chips like Tiger King that passed the time and left them hungry for more. South African artist William Kentridge, however, offers a worthy riposte to all the pandemic projects of fleeting distraction. His Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, a nine-episode work now streaming on MUBI after premiering at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. It’s perhaps the most inspired and thought-provoking “pandemic project” yet, if perhaps a bit too effective in reminding viewers about the ennui-filled days not too long ago.
One could call Self-Portrait a web series simply for lack of other qualifier. However, the energetic exercise offers a rambling self-reflexive work that almost screams for a multi-screen installation, so hooking up a few monitors to MUBI, queuing different episodes, and touring around one’s apartment while the series plays might actually be the ideal viewing experience. (Put that idea under your cap for the next pandemic.) Moreover, the slight distance from the lockdown days proves beneficial, as one may have a stronger emotional and intellectual response to it thanks to the buffer.
Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot spans nine episodes that each run roughly half-an-hour. They observe as Kentridge putters away in his studio and occupies himself with art projects. He’s always adorned in the same professorial uniform of black slacks and a white shirt. The shirts gradually accumulate streaks and smudges as Kentridge paints swathes of black charcoal and earthy watercolours onto his canvasses. He conjures some awesome images—including, yes, a self-portrait as a coffee pot—with the kinetic editing that accentuates the creative process with a dizzying staccato rhythm.
All the while, his mind races, as one was prone to do during the over-stimulated lockdown days. He asks himself big questions with a second Kentridge edited into the frame, and sometimes a third as an intermediary. The Kentridges ponder the nature of coffee pots and other things. They spar with musings both existential and epistemological. It’s some heady stuff, but Kentridge understands that the seeming abundance of “free” time forced by COVID can be an artist’s gift even though it drove many people to the brink of madness.
The precipice that marks the drop between sanity and off-the-edge is on full display in Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot. Kentridge percolates with the cabin fever that viewers know all too well. The exercise is intermittently annoying with the whiplash of déjà vu, yet proves consistently fascinating.
The Coffee Pot brews stronger Joe as the episodes progress. It’s worth sticking with even if Kentridge’s exercise isn’t immediately one’s cup of tea. At first, Coffee Pot seems like an intellectualized time-waster. Asking himself when a coffee pot stops becoming a coffee pot if the artist uses it as an inkwell admittedly has a level of self-indulgence. But the ideas grow with the cultural climate of the COVID era. It’s often as funny as it is thought-provoking, though, so there’s method to the madness.
The work captures the passage of time as noted by the calendar on the wall, the evolving art works, and the accumulating tally of COVID cases and deaths. Moreover, Kentridge marks the duration of his exercise with the growing depth of his questions. This period of self-reflection inspires Kentridge to situate his studio and the artworks birthed within it amid a larger canvas. His works tackle the history of colonialism in South Africa, a point notably underscored by the emphasis on earthly materials. The art pieces become more complex and rooted in history as Kentridge grasps that he has nothing but time.
Moreover, the series marks the gradual easing up of COVID restrictions in tandem with the opening up of Kentridge’s creative process. Eventually, Kentridge gets some helpers in his studio. Art is no longer a solitary affair. He welcomes the elements of human interaction that in turn engage with the creative process. He gets actors, readers, carpenters, and dancers to join the party, many of whom are Black and gamely engage with the colonial dynamics interrogated through the work.
Coffee Pot really hits its stride in the seventh episode when Kentridge and company confront the recorded histories of colonialism. They engage and re-appropriate audio recordings, still images, official recordings, and cinematic documents. The project’s inherently de-colonial form invites Kentridge, his participants, and the audience to write something new with fragments of history.
The project ultimately proves optimistic as Kentridge finally gets to escape the studio and social isolation. His work evokes the idea that isolation isn’t natural to the human condition. The thought process considers how, as social animals, humans need to interact, learn from each other, and ultimately question themselves to create functional, mutually respectful society.
It’s a lot of big ideas, but Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot stimulates as a creative time capsule of the COVID era. Many projects from the era suffer from the constraints of pandemic-forced downscaling in cast, crew, and scope, or the self-indulgent nature of making a movie simply as something to do (see: Zendaya’s Malcolm & Marie). But through its frenzied form, its overly-stimulated thought process, and its desire to use art for social good, it’s a welcome self-portrait of the collective re-awakening inspired by 2020. No film encapsulates the restlessness of the COVID days quite like this one, but also the itch many of us felt to put this time to good use.