Here’s a thing you probably don’t know about William Kentridge — he is a fan of the lunch break.
He enjoys the act of sitting down and pressing pause. He appears to have a latent sybarite who resides somewhere not so far beneath the cerebral guy who cracks the whip and charges up his punishing work ethic.
This other fellow slips out with regularity to sip a glass of wine and give his attention to the quotidian delights, such as video chats with his grandchildren and the convivial comforts appearing on his plate round about this present hour.
He lunches daily at the studio, with the team (anything between 12 and 18 people at any given sitting). He also likes to lunch in tavernas in Greece on the beach and I am hoping that he will take to the lunch here, at Embarc on 4th Avenue in Parkhurst.
Risky, because I vetoed Tortellino D’Oro — his go-to — primarily because if I had to agree to the number of requests for that stalwart of the Joburg dining scene this column would become terribly repetitive. I have to be strict, you know.
So we meet at Embarc which has the crisp white table cloths and open to the street breeziness that immediately satisfies two of my prerequisites on the happy-place list.
Add the fact that the food is a gastro technical cut above the sort of thing that one could make at home, even with a lot of effort, and I feel we might be off to a good start.
Speaking of home cooking, he is the one doing it — Anne Stanwix, his wife, was always on call at the hospital during her medical training and he picked up the slack in the kitchen.
I turn to the subject of his work ethic. Just this week alone The Head & The Load, the spectacularly ambitious theatrical art work, opened at the Civic Theatre, and the first volume of his catalogue raisonné (a mammoth tome of all his prints — there will be five volumes) was launched yesterday at the Goodman Gallery.
This hot off the back of the retrospective at the Royal Academy. Oh, and an opera in Paris. These are just the things I can rattle off off the top of my head.
How does he keep his energy levels up?
“There’s the paradox that there’s a lot of different events that happen which taken individually would be exhausting, but at the heart of each event — whether it’s a lecture, exhibition or an opera — there is again an energy. In that sense it sustains itself like a chain reaction that grows the energy. At a certain point it will explode, but until that point...” he laughs.
Given all this talk of explosions and the prodigious output, I wonder if he aspires to also outperform on the age front and hit a centenary like his father Sir Sidney Kentridge, who just celebrated the milestone in fine fettle.
“When my dad was 98 he would always say, ‘Who on earth would want to be 98?’ It’s always the man at 97. But he’s lived a much more sober, modest and more spartan life than I have and I think the reward for that is living to this extraordinary age, so I don’t feel that’s an expectation. But we have long-lived genes in the family.”
Is there any inherent benefit to such longevity?
“There are lots of things that can still get done. Also from childhood one’s told that a person’s natural lifespan is 70 and everything over 70 is gravy, so I’m looking forward to the gravy.”
What then is William’s definition of gravy?
“We once had a game with friends around the table where we said if you didn’t have to work what would you do? Some said I’d go to a Greek island, another said I would read all the time in the sun, another said I would be in my garden.
“I thought about it and said if I didn’t have to work I could spend so much time in my studio. But I think that’s the case with artists, I can’t imagine any of them retired. I suppose I could become a Sunday painter. Do oils.”
There’s a connection between the collapse and the richness around the way of thinking about making art
Again the self-deprecating laugh from the man whose medium of choice is very much drawing, even when manifesting on a reimagined theatrical scale in a collaborative cosmic soup of musicians, actors, filmmakers, sound engineers, dancers and artists whose individual planets spin and spark around his singular creative impulse.
You could also say that his medium, or at least the broth in which this abundant art practice stews, is very much Joburg, even as he has found purchase in that rare firmament of artists with an instantly globally recognisable name.
So I wonder how he feels about the city where he lives in his childhood home — to which he returned as an adult to raise his family — and works in his studios and at the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Main Street.
There seems to be a particularly despondent narrative around Joburg at the moment. “I’m sure that like everyone who lives in it, it is a love-hate relationship, and the hate is quite strong. The public spaces are disintegrating, the public art museum is in a state of collapse. My drive from the leafy suburbs to the Centre of the Less Good Idea is a good way of charting the decline of the city — the potholes, the homeless people sleeping in the street, the absence of buildings and growth.
“Having said that it is a very interesting place to work in terms of performers, actors, dancers, singers — it is astonishingly rich creatively, and maybe there’s a connection between the collapse and the richness around the way of thinking about making art.
“A lot of people overseas see our centre and want to replicate it; there's an astonishingly strong response to the way we work. The openness of collaboration. They say ‘we would love to do a centre just like yours’. That’s hard because they have 50 times the budget, so it makes it harder to work in the more intuitive, simpler way that we are forced to.”
They should have lunch together every day, and Thursday night cocktails, which is also a thing at the centre. Just spitballing.
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