February 8, 2004
Frances Stark on idleness
Sometimes I wish I had a job that wasn't all about me. Sometimes I hate myself and so I hate this life of thinking constantly of the style of my thinking and always wishing I had better captured my thinking so that my thinking could then capture someone else besides myself. In the letter of Musil I quoted above, he talks a great deal of idleness; he writes down a quote and paces the room until the sun sets, or reads a line from a book and lies around smoking cigarettes, quietly forgetting his ideas because he doesn't write them down. "Thus I often lay on my divan and slave away at this kind of self-annihilation."
Sometimes I wish I had a job that wasn't all about me. Sometimes I hate myself and so I hate this life of thinking constantly of the style of my thinking and always wishing I had better captured my thinking so that my thinking could then capture someone else besides myself. In the letter of Musil I quoted above, he talks a great deal of idleness; he writes down a quote and paces the room until the sun sets, or reads a line from a book and lies around smoking cigarettes, quietly forgetting his ideas because he doesn't write them down. "Thus I often lay on my divan and slave away at this kind of self-annihilation."
Frances Stark, in "A Craft Too Small," included in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Bas Jan Ader: Filme, Fotografien, Projektionen, Videos und Zeichnungen aus den Jahren 1967-1975