“Thinking Is a Full-Body Pleasure”: Artist Harry Dodge on Philosophy

This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine:

“My first encounter with the French-Martinique philosopher Édouard Glissant was during a lecture by the poet Fred Moten in Los Angeles. He said, ‘We have to consent not to be a single being.’ It set me thinking, so I read Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, from which Moten was paraphrasing. Part of what’s fascinating is the form — a philosophical text that’s poetic, almost like a song. In it he talks about the interconnectedness of everything and how everything is always changing everything else — ‘Diversity, the quantifiable totality of every possible difference, is the motor driving universal energy.’ To acknowledge every organism or every dot in space-time as different can help us avoid categorical thinking, which in turn can lead to systemic violence or polarisation. Glissant talks about opacity too — this idea of letting the Other, this thing that is unfamiliar to you, remain unfamiliar to you. Not incorporating it into your familiar, which effaces difference. It’s a book I go back to, reread and get new things from all the time. To me, Glissant’s work is an exhortation to tolerate what’s unknowable.”

The Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist Harry Dodge works in sculpture, film and text. What connects his practice across these mediums is feverish curiosity: “Thinking is a full-body pleasure,” he says, “a kind of joyful puzzling.” Dodge has exhibited at the New and Whitney museums in New York and the Hammer Museum in LA, and his sculptures are currently on display in Conversation 8, a joint show at the San Francisco Arts Commission with the painter Alicia McCarthy, a longtime friend of his. In 2020, Dodge published My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing, a memoir-meets-thought experiment about the cosmic interconnectedness of moments, people and matter across time and space. He is now working on a psychedelic science-fiction novella. 

Production co-ordinator: Lino Meoli. Post-production: Samy’s Camera 

This story features in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Order here.