(Ain’t it a shame that all the world don’t got keys to their own ignitions)
presence
WHAT CAN BE SUSTAINED AND REPEATED WITHOUT EMPTYING OUT?
I am with Garcia Lorca in many things, especially when he says he does not believe in creation but in discovery, doesn’t believe in the seated artist, but in the one who is walking the road. The imagination is a spiritual apparatus. Unable to invent the world, it does the next best thing, and that is to assemble it piecemeal, ugly and strange, bright and clear, and dumbly discovered.
(IN)SCRIPT
(Manuscript of an essay about the making of the tape SIRENSONG, commissioned by Steve Reinke and Nelson Henricks for the forthcoming book By the Skin of Their Tongues, YYZ publications 1997)
I have tried to make scripts and they seem to have little to do with me.[1] Video does seem to have to do with me in the way that writing, drawing and speaking do: their uninflected usefulness, like breath during sleep, walking, salt on the table.[2]
Here I attempt a narrative reconstruction of my process,[3] because the truer story of video’s innate intertextuality[4], and of the slippage produced when video attempts to touch on matters of narrative[5], and of how writing[6] and editing[7] and the video image[8] and the experience of time in video[9] are all, after all, mutually reinforcing inscriptions, is a story I don’t yet know how to tell, except through video itself.