Volition

by Gregg Bordowitz

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 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 BordowitzGregg 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 This Will Have Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980’s (MCA Chicago), Blues for Smoke (LA MOCA) and NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (New Museum). For the past four years, Bordowitz turned his attention to performance. Testing Some Beliefs is an improvisational lecture that he delivered at Iceberg Projects (Chicago), Murray Guy (New York), Temple Gallery (Philadelphia), and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas). He wrote and directed Sex Mitigating On Discourse and 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 An Opera, which premiered October 1 and 2, 2010 at Tanzquartier Wien, Austria. His most recent book, General 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 (1993), A Cloud In Trousers (1995), The Suicide (1996), and Habit (2001) 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.

Genres: Art

114 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Bordowitz began his academic career at the School of Visual Arts, then studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program from 1985 to 1986, and at New York University from 1986 to 1987. In 1987, Bordowitz dropped out of school to become a full-time video artist, guerilla TV director and activist with the direct action advocacy group ACT UP.[1] During this time, Bordowitz was central to the formation of the notable video activist collective, Testing the Limits, who produced work documenting AIDS activism that were distributed through television, museums, schools and community centers. He also wrote prolifically on the topic of AIDS activism, contributing heavily to the 1987 "AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism" of the well-respected academic journal October. In 1988, Gregg Bordowitz tested positive for HIV and, as a result, came out as a homosexual man to his mother and stepfather. He left Testing the Limits (now a self-sufficient non-profit entity) to focus on a more 'guerilla' approach to documenting AIDS activism.

In 1988, he met video artist Jean Carlomusto at a demonstration partnered with her to produce the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) cable TV show Living With AIDS, which ran regularly until 1994.[2] In 1989, he, along with numerous other video activists, formed DIVA (Damned Interfering Video Activists), a parter organization to ACT UP, dedicated to accurately documenting the protests organized by ACT UP and providing an alternative representation of the AIDS activist movement than the one presented by the mainstream media.

In 1993, filled with despair at the decline of AIDS activism as well as his own diminishing chances of survival, Bordowitz produces one of his most famous pieces, the documentary/montage Fast Trip, Long Drop. In this video, Bordowitz addresses the public's reaction to and representation of the AIDS epidemic as well as his own fears, insecurities and struggles related to the disease. Fast Trip, Long Drop provides a pessimistic counterpoint to the flood of representations of people "Surviving and Thriving" with AIDS through a collage of documentary footage, staged parody and vintage film clips. For the first time in an AIDS related documentary, people with AIDS were shown addressing and coming to terms with the ever-present fact of their own mortality. As Bordowitz explains in his 1999 interview with the AIDS art forum Artery, "When I made "Fast Trip, Long Drop" I was tired of pretending for the sake of others that I would survive. I became preoccupied with the burdens that sick people bear on behalf of those around them who are well. I wanted to get a handle on despair and put it out there as a political problem. To be recognized and discussed. If we couldn't do this, then it all seemed like bullshit. I wanted an honest media produced in the interests of people living with AIDS." [3] The film, along with many of his other works, has been shown in film festivals, museums and on television ever since with extremely positive response.

From there, Bordowitz continued to address AIDS in his artwork, video work and writing. He taught video art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Brown University, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1995 to 2010, before being hired as a permanent professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His works have been shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as numerous film festivals.

In 2009, Gregg Bordowitz began collaboration with artist Paul Chan an opera adaptation of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Though they envisioned the project as an impossible to complete, they were approached by Viennese museum curator Achim Hochdörfer, and asked to stage a performance at the MUMOK. In 2010, they staged a 6-man performance written and directed by Bordowitz