48. Studio Practice
William Kentridge, Drawing, Information Graphics, and my new favorite summer punk song.
Welcome to Jarrett Fuller’s (that’s me!) newsletter, a monthly-ish roundup of what I’ve been working on, thinking about, and consuming. In this issue, a long review/celebration of William Kentridge’s nine-part series Self Portrait As A Coffee Pot, remembering David Hockney, and some new music I’ve been enjoying.
Remember, too, my new book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, is coming out in September from Princeton Architectural Press. You can preorder it!
Self Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is a Brilliant Defense of Art-Making
For many of us our worlds suddenly got smaller in March 2020, when the first COVID lockdowns were put in place. No more offices or schools or trains or grocery stores. Instead of venturing out, the world came to us, through video calls and Zoom meetings, news alerts and delivery services. For the South African artist William Kentridge, his world became the studio where he’s made drawings, prints, performances, and films since the 1970s. Confined to the studio, Kentridge did what he has always done: He drew. He painted. He made films. But he also checked in on family around the world — his 90 year old father, his newborn granddaughter — while compulsively following statistics of infections and deaths. He also wrote and directed Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot, a nine-part mini-series that is not just a brilliant record of those early months but also a profound meditation on the studio itself and why we make art. The entire series, which premiered at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in 2024, is now available to watch on the streaming platform MUBI. It’s one of the best defenses of creative practice I have ever seen.
“When I was three years old, I wanted to be an elephant. I failed at that. When I was fifteen, I wanted to become a conductor of orchestras. But then I was told that to be a conductor, you had to read music,” Kentridge says in the opening scene of the first episode. “So, I was reduced to being an artist.” This introduces the tensions of the series: what is the value of art in the face of imaginable tragedy and horrors? Attempting to “do a picture of the whole universe,” he every drawing seemed to result in an image of the Moka Pot he uses to hold his paints. “You start again on another sheet of paper and everything is possible again, and what emgerges but…another coffee pot,” he continues. “Possibility and inevitability. These are the two poles between which a drawing hovers and moves.”
For Kentridge, drawing, specifically, and art, more generally, is a form of thinking. A drawing can be anything; a drawing can make anything. Throughout the series, multiple Kentridges (doubles? companions? doppelgangers?) enter the studio, engaging in dialogues with each other. They debate the merits of his work, often one Kentridge plays the role of the artist, always making and moving, open to possibilities, while the other Kentridge assumes a more critical or editorial role, often appearing as a quasi-therapist, questioning his assumptions and preoccupations.
In between these dialogues, we a body of work slowly develop: charcoal drawings of landscapes and bodies, paintings of birds and trees, collages with lines from his favorites books cut out and pasted on top of drawings. He creates stop-motion interludes that turn sheets of paper into crumbled mice who move through the studio and, when he’s able to invite people back into the studio, he stages practice runs of new plays, creating masks and puppets.
For the last fifty years, Kentridge’s work has explored colonialism, the history of violence, apartheid, nostalgia and personal history, and landscape. But his work has also often been about, in my view, art itself. As with so many of the artists I admire, there’s a self-reflexivity to his work, an interrogation of art-making itself. When his charcoal drawings become animated films, we become aware of his lines and marks, he see the process of building up a composition. So much of his work, I’ve come to believe is about the work of making a drawing. (This was also explored in his earlier project, Six Drawing Lessons, a series of lectures delivered at Harvard and later turned into a great book.)
Considering reflexivity, I found myself thinking of the quiet power of the 2011 documentary Gerhard Richter Painting. In that film, we’re given insights into Richter’s process through long, quiet sequences of the artist building up a canvas. Here, too, we’re treated to what feels like an intimate look into Kentridge’s process, watching his hand work and rework the drawings as they get built in shades of greys and blacks with accents of red pencil. Another comparison I kept thinking of was designer and Cranbrook Graphic Design head Elliott Earls’s YouTube channel, Studio Practice. Filmed inside Earls’s studio at Cranbrook, the intimate look at process becomes a guide for artmaking. In both series, the editing and presentation reflect the artist’s work: Earls is a highly frenetic, highly edited series where Kentridge’s is more meditative, almost meandering at times.
These comparisons got me thinking about that phrase, “studio practice”. A studio practice is central to the artists’ process but can seem like a foreign concept for designers. The design fields are structured around “projects” and ideas emerge within the constraint of that project. An art practice doesn’t always have pre-defined projects so a studio practice where one is spending time creating in search of a project is critical. “The central tenet of the studio,” Kentridge writes in the introduction to the book version of Self Portrait, always published by Hauser & Wirth, “is to give the image the benefit of the doubt in the ope that the image is more intelligent than its maker.” Watching Self Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, I found myself thinking about the opportunties of a studio practice, and what that could look like, for the designer. Designers aren’t always encouraged to explore, to create, to make, for the sake of it. It happens, obviously, but it’s not central to how we think about work. I wonder what new ideas, new forms, new concepts of what design can be and what it is for could emerge.
Kentridge describes the studio as “an enlarged head” where ideas can emerge from the edges. The studio is not separate from the world, but a place where the world filters in. Everything that happens in the studio is an attempt to synthesize these inputs: the drawing, the writing, the making, the starting over, the procrastinating. In the studio, anything is possible: a crumbled piece of paper can become a mouse, ink on paper can become an image from childhood, a drawing can become a film, a collage turns into a play, a self-portrait can be, of course, a coffee pot. Everything one makes is a self-portrait of sorts, just as everything unmade is equally a portrait of the artist. This seems to be the argument Kentridge is making: the making is a record of a life lived, a positioning of one’s place in the world.
In the final episode, a marching band enters the studio, forcing Kentridge outside for the first time in the series. The episode closes with Kentridge walking down the road, disoriented, marching band surrounding him. The world enters the studio then the work made in the studio goes back into the world. That’s what art is for: it’s a way to make sense of the world, through a process that doesn’t make sense at all.
Scratching the Surface
The final episode of the Spring season of Scratching the Surface is a conversation with data designer and Pentagram partner Giorgia Lupi. I’ve been interested in data visualization for nearly my entire design career — I did a fair amount of projects early in my career around data — but have moved away from that space over the years. This was a nice way to think through the relationship between data and design today. It’s a fun one!
Though we won’t be recording new episodes again until the Fall, our Substack will stay busy. I just released a long interview with Robin Sloan for members to talk through Robin’s printing practice, most notably his recently launched Penumbra’s Print Shop. We talk about his term “media invention”, his interest in printing, and how he sees this new work as a critique of our current digital world. This one is only for paying supporters of the show — for just $50 a year and you can help support my work and get more conversations like this.
And then for the second issue of The Book Review, our new monthly books column, I wrote about BIG Atlas, the new monograph from Bjarke Ingels and BIG. I was interested in, frankly, how boring this book was compared to his previous monographs and used it as an occasion to think about how Bjarke has used publishing to build his public persona — from superhero to climate expert to techno-optimist to conventional studio.
And we’ll be back in September with new episodes!
Books and Films
While spending a week at the beach, I tore through the first volume of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series. It’s a strange book that I really loved. If you’re not familiar with the plot, a woman gets stuck, Groundhogs Day style, in a single day that she can’t escape. It’s strange because, in a way I haven’t figured out yet, basically nothing happens and yet there’s a propulsion to it that kept pulling me forward. I’m excited to keep reading through the series. (For some reason, the book it reminded me of at times was China Mievelle’s The City and The City. In that book, there are two cities that occupy the same territory but are culturally and politically separate. A crime occurs in one city and somehow slips into the other. This slippage, essentially between worlds, I think, was the connecting thread for me between Mievelle and Balle. Anyway, I recommend them both!
While at the beach, I picked up Dave Eggers’s new novel, Contrapposto. When I moved to San Francisco in 2013, I read through most of Eggers’s books. He seemed like a very SF/Bay Area writer to me. I was in my early/mid twenties and so many of his early novels felt like they were speaking directly to my sensibilities. In the decade since, he’s dabbled in children’s books, young adult fiction, and fables and Constrappasto feels like a return, in some sense. This story follows two characters — Cricket and Olympia — from childhood to old age and how they build a life around art. I’m only about a quarter of the way through but am already fully invested. I’m excited to se where it goes.
I also really, really enjoyed Eddie Huang’s documentary Vice is Broke, a sort of gonzo doc on the rise and fall of Vice Media. I was never a big follower/viewer/reader of Vice but got to visit their Brooklyn HQ a decade ago when I was a participant in the Triple Canopy Publication Intensive. I’m generally fascinated with the business of media and Huang brings a personal perspective — as a writer and presenter for Vice — exposing the grift and branding from the inside.
Links and Ephemera
I was saddened to hear that David Hockney died at 88 earlier this month. Hockney is one of those artists, for me, who feels like he’s been in my life that whole time. I have no memory of not loving him, no memory of life before Hockney. A turning point, however, was when I was in graduate school and wandered into a library sale. Tucked in a back corner was a hardcover copy of Camera Works, his monograph of Polaroid collages for $25. That’s a book I’ve returned too many, many times in the last decade for I’ve always been partial to his photography work a bit more than the painting. Then a few years later, I got to see the big retrospective of his work at the Met in New York. That’s when I really got the paintings! The best! RIP.
Another death that saddened me was the British menswear designer Nigel Cabourn. My fashion interest is paradoxical: I wear, mostly, the same thing every day yet my interest in fashion designers is eclectic and wide-ranging. Cabourn, perhaps, finds the common ground between those and feels like he made the clothes that feel most like me.
I’ve taught the philosopher Jurgen Habermas in my classes for the better part of a decade — his work on the public sphere, in my estimation, should be part of all design theory courses — so I loved this accounting of his influence from the great Alex Ross in The New Yorker last week.
The smart Nicolay Boyadijev, in an interview on Discourse:
I have to say I’m suspicious of beauty in the same way that I’m suspicious about taste; it tends to re-entrench the status quo and launder a set of inherited social advantages into a vague possessed faculty for people already in positions of power. ‘Taste becomes whatever tasteful people possess’, nevermind that ‘tasteful people’; happen to be the same emperor-wears-no-clothes people as before, only now their lack of rigor and work ethic is intellectually justified rather than tiptoed around.
This long profile of Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr is full of surprises and anecdotes. More on basketball, how fun were David Remnick’s joy-filled recaps of the Knicks’s NBA finals championship run? There have been a handful of moments since leaving where I really missed New York…this was one of them.
The first single from punk band Perennial’s forthcoming album, What’s New on the Beat Scene, very quickly became my summer jam. Highly recommend listening in the car with the windows down…
Olivia Rodrigo shifts from 90s pop punk to 80s new wave for her new album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love, and I am here for it! This is like the sweet spot of music that feels like it was made just for me!
If those aren’t your speed, Lawrence Pike’s new album, Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet, has been my morning soundtrack the last few weeks. Experimental jazz! Electronics! It’s all here!
The summer feels like it’s going too fast. Projects are cooking. Writing is happening. There’s more to share soon. Thanks, as always, for following along.
J