Friday

Genre As Material

Genre is the medium of choice for artists raised in a multi-media society. The totality of stimuli caresses the body like an atmosphere that we can’t feel because we’re part of it. That’s the cosmic perspective. We breathe, feel heat and devour nutrients. On the microscopic level, genre is an increment, a unit of flux: poetry, laundry lists, screwball comedies, melodramas, novels, newscasts and dirges…art song, pop song, figurative abstraction, parlor games, jazz… brown Clairfontaine notebooks, nerdy chic, constructivism, queer theory, minimalist dance… Pierre Klossowski is a genre onto himself. Everything can be rendered in genre form. Style, shape, tone and scale are all relevant.

Gregg Bordowitz (Born August 14, 1964, Brooklyn, N.Y.) is a writer and artist. His most recent project is an opera conceived as a collaboration with the artist Paul Chan, titled “The History of Sexuality Volume One By Michel Foucault: An Opera”, which premiered October 1 and 2, 2010 in Vienna, Austria. Bordowitz is the director and librettist for the opera. Afterall Books published his most recent book titled Imagevirus (2010), about the Canadian conceptual art group General Idea. Volition (2009), published by Printed Matter is a volume consisting entirely of questions. It’s a work of philosophy, poetry, or neither depending on how you look at it. 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 currently the Chair of the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.