10 Questions with William Kentridge

You’ve worked in opera, tapestry, sculpture, puppetry, animation, film and drawing. Is there a through line?
The heart of it is drawing, starting where you don’t know quite what you’re doing and discovering what the drawing will be, rather than knowing the script in advance and following it.

Two American museums just bought your video piece Refusal of Time. What is it about?
I was interested in the pressure we have to try to escape our destiny, which is another way to think about time. And how to materialize time–play music backward and forward, slow it down, run a camera backward, undoing all the things we wish we could.

What did you mean when you wrote in your new book, Fortuna, that the job of the artist is to fight against entropy?
Entropy in its simplest form refers to the tendency of everything to collapse. If you smash a vase and throw the pieces in the air, they won’t reland in the shape of the perfect vase. But the job of the artist is to smash the vase and then fashion something coherent out of those shards.

Your father, a lawyer, represented Stephen Biko and Nelson Mandela. How much has that influenced your work?
I think having parents who are lawyers pushed me to find an activity in which I could find meaning with a different kind of logic that was impervious to cross-examination.

It wasn’t a desire to reflect the situation in South Africa?
There was definitely a sense, growing up in that family, of the unnaturalness of South African society. One couldn’t assume that the police were going to be the good guys, as they are in fiction, that we lived in the benevolent world shown in so many children’s stories.

We’ve just had the 15th anniversary of the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports, in which people confessed their crimes in exchange for amnesty. Looking back, was it a success?
It was a compromise. We had to choose between truth and justice, and we knew we could not achieve justice, which is to say people being held responsible for their actions. That has longer-term consequences of people feeling betrayed, both at the individual and the larger level. I suspect we’re still dealing with this. Or need to be.

Is it true you like to keep a cluttered desk in your studio?
I don’t like to, but it is cluttered. In a sense the studio becomes like an expanded head, with different fragments of ideas moving across it as you lie awake at 4 a.m., and there are 50 different anxieties that your brain jumps between.

I can’t imagine you having 50 different anxieties.
The crow of anxiety always finds some branch to land on.

You’re internationally famous, but only among a subset of people. Is the era when an artist could have a Picasso-like impact over?
Huge numbers of people know Damien Hirst’s shark. People know about Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist who was put in prison, although few people would be able to put an image to his name. But no, there’s no figure like Picasso. Of course not.

Your dad retired last year at 90. Do you foresee such longevity for your career?
I can’t imagine it, but I can’t imagine doing anything else. Somebody did say, “If you didn’t have to work, what would you do?” And I said, “I could spend so much time in my studio.”

How do you keep those glasses on?
You have to have the right kind of nose.