Anti-entropy as it applies to art - think of it as a sort of explosion in reverse - results, ultimately, in the annihilation of creativity because each step toward the completion of a project rules out more and more of the random possibilities of what that project otherwise might have been. "The infinite becomes finite," says Kentridge in this lecture, as he seeks an answer to the question "Can we avoid the end of all potentiality?" A partial performance...

In this lecture, William Kentridge explores the concepts of self and other, transformation and deformation, and translation and mistranslation by yoking together the African funerary sculpture called an asen, a film loop of a panther pacing in its cage, Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Der Panther," Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of a rhinoceros created from bits of second-hand description, and Pablo Picasso's bronze sculpture of a she-goat cast from an assemblage...

In the first two of William Kentridge's "drawing lessons," "the South African filmmaker argued that rationality has often served as a mask for power and control, as ideas of what is 'rational' privilege one group's understanding of reality over another's," says Harvard Magazine. Kentridge carries that theme forward in this lecture - which is anchored by his short animated film Mine - as he delves down into "the legacy of his home country's multiple...

The idea that uncertainty and improvisation in art can help in negotiating the dangerous passage between passive acceptance and authoritarian subjugation is a theme that William Kentridge continues to expound upon in Drawing Lesson Four. He uses his short film Journey to the Moon - a tribute, in part, to George Méliès' 1902 cinematic classic La Voyage dans la Lune - as a part of a discussion praising cinema as an art form that exemplifies, as...