On Boredom

Essays in Art and Writing

Author: Rye Dag Holmboe and Susan Morris

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Description

An idiosyncratic volume featuring artwork and essays on the history of boredom.

What do we mean when we say that we are bored? Contributors to this volume, 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—featuring Mathew Hale, Martin Creed, and Susan Morris—help turn this volume into a material expression of boredom itself. It will appeal to readers in the fields of art history, literature, cultural studies, and visual culture.

About the Author

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 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.