the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Gregg Bordowitz

Belief and Volition

This lecture took place on September 16th, 2008 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

I have an embarrassing admission to make. I still believe that art can change the world. I know a work of art can’t feed the hungry or cure AIDS, but a video, a painting, a poem, all works of art, are endowed with a capacity to alter a viewer’s perspective on the world. Perhaps, that capacity is weak, and profound experiences provoked by art may be rare, but my own experiences affirm that shattering encounters with art can and do occur. My belief in art derives its vitality from this potential.

In this lecture, I will talk about the conflicting impulses and philosophical contradictions that inform my work in order to examine structures of belief. I will specifically address the role of belief regarding volition-the faculty of power to exert one’s will.

About Gregg Bordowitz

Gregg Bordowitz (Born August 14, 1964, Brooklyn, N.Y.) is a writer, film and video maker. 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. A collection of his essays, titled The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003, was published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. For this collection, 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.  Bordowitz is a member of the faculty of the Film/Video/New Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

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