Gregg Bordowitz, Visiting Artist Lecture 2023

Interdisciplinary artist, activist, and teacher Gregg Bordowitz gives a lecture at Skowhegan. Bordowitz talks about the joy he has found over the years in teaching, activism, video making, writing, drawing, and printmaking. Bordowitz strives to infuse all of his work with radical pedagogy, and this has helped him cultivate his interdisciplinary practice. Bordowitz shares that the greatest joy he has received is by inhabiting genres and mixing them with other genres in his work as an artist. Bordowitz then goes to explain the difference between being a transdisciplinary artist, a multidisciplinary artist, and an interdisciplinary artist. For Bordowitz, being a transdisciplinary artist means being completely interested in defeating and dissolving the boundaries between mediums for the purpose of producing new and emergent forms. A multidisciplinary artist means to wear many hats, work in many mediums and still retain the disciplinary boundaries among mediums. An interdisciplinary artist is someone who bounces off the walls and among defined disciplines to produce friction and conjugation in their respective practices. An interdisciplinary artist also hopes that parts of the defined boundaries and disciplines rub off on each other. Bordowitz is also discusses his investment in exploring notions of stillness in his work which has made him reflect on the ways he approaches his own practice. He then begins to talk about institutions and the role they play in his life. For Bordowitz, no institution is monolithic and no institution is beyond navigation, interrogation and change. Poetry also plays an important role in Bordowitz’s practice, because it has made him reflect on the collective nature of authorship, and the ways in which crisises end, exist, and begin. Bordowitz ends his lecture by stating that the most radical thing art does is that it brings people together and creates audiences that have never imagined themselves sitting together.