Over the past few years I’ve made it a habit to begin each day by making myself a coffee and reading. Much of the time I’ll zone out, I’ll bite my nails, and I’ll get confused following the text. One of my favourite writers, Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox and “The Daddy Dialectic”, has said that reading and not understanding, and keeping on reading anyway, is one of life’s pleasures. He poetically elaborates that being lost in this way is related to the development of “a political life”, which he describes as “the extension of ourselves into the world and to the forming and care for the collectivities that we will need to survive this world, and that, perhaps more importantly, we want to survive us into a different future.” Pushing through the difficulty of reading can remind us about the contradictions, complexities and chasms that constitute life, but it can also remind us of our desires. So what does it mean to take this kind of approach—reading, reading differently, learning, and sometimes not—to objects, materials, and sculptural work?
Audrey Pfister writes, and works in the arts and is currently based in Naarm. They have a Bachelor of Art Theory and First Class Honours in Arts (Media, Culture, Technology). You can usually find Audrey in the library.
