Odell’s primary criticism is of our tendency to stay digitally connected in all spaces and times, such that many of us live in “a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand” (15). Leah Zuidema: Odell’s version of “doing nothing” is actually quite something-she calls readers to be resistors, to notice and intentionally row away from troubling shifts in the currents of the dominant culture. After this time of worldwide removal-the zoom printmaking course, the Facebook Easter vigil, the twitter empathy-Odell can help us emerge and comprehend the renewing significance of doing nothing. At one-point Odell notes that “Most people have, or have known someone who has gone through some period of removal that fundamentally changed their attitude to the world they returned to” (9). I began reading How to Do Nothing while traveling as Covid-19 spread across the country, giving the work a new urgency. As a result, the book is a diverse prairie where Thomas Merton and Diogenes are encountered alongside the San Clemente Dam removal project. She artfully braids interdisciplinary threads to ask why we do what we do, a significant question raised by anyone pursuing a holistic Christian faith. Contexts shape How to Do Nothing as Odell’s nimble thoughts wander in many directions, exploring ecology, technology, art, philosophy, and history.

This desire for context reacts against a cultural drive to displace and dispose.

Odell is an artist and educator from the Bay area whose work is typified by a project at the dump, spending time “photographing, cataloging, and researching the origin of two hundred discarded objects” with the findings presented in a gallery show. Though published in the spring of 2019, Odell’s intentions are all the more prescient and resonant in the spring of 2020. This is because author Jenny Odell sees the book as “a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy…refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough” (xi). Matt Drissell: How to Do Nothing offers a nuanced call to do just that-nothing.

In this symposium style review, Matt Drissell (Associate Professor of Art), Leah Zuidema (Vice President for Online & Graduate Education), and Dave Mulder (Associate Professor of Education) each bring perspectives from their area of expertise. Title: How to Do Nothing-Resisting the Attention Economy

How to do nothing jenny odell review