Mono Logical Artistic Statement
For over twenty-five years now, I have considered myself to be an inter-disciplinary artist, working with video, live-performance, original text, film, and music. I am also a published author and editor, and I see these activities as existing parallel to my media art practice.
Fascination and frustration with language, an ongoing concern with boundaries between private and public, a love/hate with "popular culture," and a blurring of performativity and academia-these have been recurring motifs through my practice. A love/hate with structures and bureaucracy has also been prevalent.
MONO LOGICAL premiered in 2003, as a co-presentation between the Pleasure Dome Experimental Film and Video collective and the 7a*11d Performance collective. Pleasure Dome initially approached me to self-curate a retrospective of my film (Super-8) and video work, and I responded by engaging a cut-and-paste aesthetic. Since the mid-nineties, I have preferred to make shorter works, as a reaction to my longer earlier works. The majority of my videotapes have involved myself as singular or pivotal performer. However, with the "public space" or location-centered Super-8 works, my position is primarily mobile and behind-the-camera. But, in response to Pleasure Dome's invitation, I decided to add to the mix a sequence of monologues I had written for an unrealized video project, tentatively titled MONO LOGICAL.
The inter-media performance references the logistics of monologues. Who appears to be speaking and who really is speaking? MONO LOGICAL also plays on tensions between language intended to be communicative and language that isn't. An academic, student, poet, policeman, entrepreneur, musician, and cleric all either lecture or perform. Their theatrical trappings might beg their sincerity, but their orations are to be taken very seriously indeed.
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