On Boredom
Essays in art and writing
Rye Dag Holmboe (Editor), Susan Morris (Editor)
What do we mean when we say that we are bored? Or when we find a subject boring? Contributors to On Boredom: Essays in art and writing, which include artists, art historians, psychoanalysts and a novelist, examine boredom in its manifold and uncertain reality. Each part of the book takes up a crucial moment in the history of boredom and presents it in a new light, taking the reader from the trials of the consulting room to the experience of hysteria in the nineteenth century. The book pays particular attention to boredom’s relationship with the sudden and rapid advances in technology that have occurred in recent decades, specifically technologies of communication, surveillance and automation.
On Boredom is idiosyncratic for its combination of image and text, and the artworks included in its pages – by Mathew Hale, Martin Creed and Susan Morris – help turn this volume into a material expression of boredom itself. With other contributions from Josh Cohen, Briony Fer, Anouchka Grose, Rye Dag Holmboe, Margaret Iversen, Tom McCarthy and Michael Newman, the book will appeal to readers in the fields of art history, literature, cultural studies and visual culture, from undergraduate students to professional artists working in new media.
List of figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: on boredom
Rye Dag Holmboe & Susan Morris
1 Where is the rule?
Rye Dag Holmboe
2 Prayer and other lyrics and drawings
Martin Creed
3 Twenty years of boredom
Susan Morris
4 There was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour
Mathew Hale
5 Extract from Satin Island (2015)
Tom McCarthy
6 Creative boredom and Thomas Demand
Margaret Iversen
7 Professionally boring: the psychoanalyst’s tragedy
Anouchka Grose
8 Warhol’s indifference
Josh Cohen
9 Yawns of boredom
Briony Fer
10 The long and the short of It: boredom Michael Newman
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781787359468
Number of illustrations: 51
Publication date: 22 April 2021
PDF ISBN: 9781787359468
EPUB ISBN: 9781787359499
Hardback ISBN: 9781787359482
Paperback ISBN: 9781787359475
Rye Dag Holmboe (Editor)
Rye Dag Holmboe is currently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UEA, where his research examines the relationship between creative process and psychoanalysis. He completed his PhD at UCL in 2015 where he was an AHRC Doctoral Scholar. Holmboe has published books on contemporary artists as well as articles on art, literature and theory. His book on Sol LeWitt will be published by MIT Press in 2021 and he is currently writing a monograph on Howard Hodgkin, which is supported by the Howard Hodgkin Legacy Trust. He is also in the third year of training at the British Psychoanalytic Association.
Susan Morris (Editor)
Susan Morris is an artist interested in the relation between automatic drawing, writing and photography. She uses various media including chalk on paper, inkjet printing and Jacquard tapestry. Works are often generated directly from recordings of data such as her sleep/wake patterns (using a scientific-medical device called an Actiwatch) or her unconscious bodily movements as recorded in a motion capture studio. Recent essay writing includes ‘Drawing in the Dark’ for Tate Papers No. 18, 2012, and ‘A Day’s Work’, catalogue essay for the exhibition for A Day’s Work that Morris curated for SKK, Soest, Germany, 2019.
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