Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0704252350040.25794@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: M'Work
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 23:50:14 -0400 (EDT)
M'Work There are certain misapprehensions in relation to my works in various fields - music, sound, photography, film, video, texts, media in general. I am assumed to be a producer bypassed or deflected, that my work refuses steadfastly one genre or another. In fact, I neither produce masterpieces nor specific works, and am uncomfortable with the thinking that references a litany of key objects in my career. Instead, I construct discourses, albeit with myself - discourses of such a nature that it seems irrelevant to complete those things that might complete a career - a series for example, or critical moments. I insist on discourse, because this is the means of progress, of thinking itself; to stop at the wayside of this or that thing cluttering up the environment means a waste of energy and a good deal of the limited time we are all given in the first place. As far as funding is concerned, I believe that such thought, such discourse, should be rewarded in particular by granting agencies or good samaritans, since there is little change of sales or recompense for the creation of working-through streams of thought occasionally resulting in partial reconstructions of philosophy, phenomenology, or any other and all modes of conceiving the world. What is the world, but scaffolding which constantly is renewed, destroyed, forgotten, abandoned at death, crudely stumbled upon at birth? To examine this world, to truly occasion studies and thinking without compromise, I am forced to forgo stases, strange and familiar attractors - forced to avoid these at all costs, however seductive they might appear. This is not to say that I remain aloof from the marketplace - only that I appear deeply unfit for it, and am forced to search elsewhere for financial support. But everywhere I look, it is the same story - give me the goods, and I might consider, on one level or another, rewarding you - but nothing further. There are no gifts in this life, but only exchanges, and even these come at high psychological cost. I honestly try to acquiesce; it is useless, tawdry; nothing seems to come of it - something in my character. Given this, I plod onward, carrying my sickness with me and an insane desire to believe that reward exists somewhere through the journey itself, rather than the destination alone. However, the thrust of this memo is elsewhere - a counter to those who critique my working as a contamination of site, cite, and sight - those who are blind not to see value in the difficult motion of thinking among the ongoing world. This is what I do; I think, give signposts, memoranda, exempla, and inhabitants of the imaginary, and this, I believe, is the goal and guise of the true artist, never to rest, never to complete what is already known, but to search out elsewhere for whatever knowledge might be gained along the ways. http://www.asondheim.org/gloom.mov at least no one else is doing this stuff at least on a daily basis.