Volition

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Consisting entirely of questions, Volition is an active, mind-bending engagement with the reader, who is led down paths of inquiry involving art, meaning, philosophy, choice, happiness, and identity. Bordowitz organizes his questions into lists, paragraphs, and stanzas, which are themselves organized into five chapters: Questions, Topics, Aesthetics, Beliefs, and Morals. The resulting text is something like a spiritual guide crossed with an epic poem crossed with a transcription of the meandering thoughts of a philosophic insomniac, kept awake by such questions as “How can I touch creation as a principle without reproach?” and “How does gratitude unfold from virtue?” Originally published as a limited softcover book by Printed Matter, Badlands is proud to reintroduce Volition as a work of breathtaking aesthetic and poetic originality for the twitter generation.

About Gregg Bordowitz
Gregg Bordowitz is a writer and artist living in New York City. In the past year, his films and performances were included in three historical survey exhibitions: This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980’s , Blues for Smoke and NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star . For the past four years, Bordowitz turned his attention to performance. Testing Some Beliefs is an improvisational lecture that he delivered at Iceberg Projects , Murray Guy , Temple Gallery , and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth . He wrote and directed Sex Mitigating Death: On Discourse and Drives: A Meditative Poem, presented March 18th 2011, at the Tate Modern, London. He also directed and wrote an opera titled The History of Sexuality Volume One By Michel Foucault: An Opera, which premiered October 1 and 2, 2010 at Tanzquartier Wien, Austria. His most recent book, General Idea: Imagevirus, was published by Afterall Books in 2010. A collection of his writings—titled The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003—was published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. For this book, Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art Association. In addition, he has received a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among other grants and awards. His films, including Fast Trip Long Drop , A Cloud In Trousers , The Suicide , and Habit have been widely shown in festivals, museums, movie theaters, and broadcast internationally. Professor Bordowitz is the Program Director of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA Low-residency program.