George Anastaplo — 19 covids
paper and marine binding twine
55 cm x 45 cm x 10 cm (overall)
May 2020

19 covids
paper and marine binding twine
55 cm x 45 cm x 10 cm (overall)
May 2020

books on the living room window sill
printed books
19 books, printed 1955-2020, collected for “an essay on reading”
July 2020 - January 2021

the card piece
livestream performances with playing cards
19 minutes +/-
December 2020 - April 2021

George Anastaplo

covids

I could cut and stitch every day, but until I started paying attention to what I was doing and to myself doing it, that was just time spent.

an essay on reading

Reading is a way not to be in the world, but still to have a relation to it. By reading, I practice being in between, being with things I can’t touch, like attachment or memory, while being surrounded by things I can, like this table or that lamp.

By reading more than one book, I practice different habits of reading. If I am awake to my experience, I can shift my focus onto these habits themselves and tease out what is fixed from what is malleable about them. This is an essay, a place to try things out. I want to try out the idea that reading has its own agency and practiced patterns, that reading is independent of individual readers and of all writers.

the card piece

I first titled the piece “Repetition Compulsion,” so I first talked about that, about Freud and Deleuze. I talked about making the bed and washing the dishes and how what we do every day can give each day its nuance. I talked about shows I had already given and how like a gyring flock their shape was becoming. The more I tried out, the more precarious the script became, until I did not know what to say at all. Because I had tried what felt like everything else, I decided just to say what I was thinking about as I laid the cards down, no matter how mundane. I decided to stop trying to make a point. When I did that, the script wrote itself. I changed the title to “the card piece.”