Power is the most free-flowing element in society, maybe next to money, but in fact they both motor each other. And it’s everywhere. And it’s in this room right now, it’s at every dinner table, every board room, every bedroom … every social situation is rife with the consequences of power. And I feel compelled to address that, because it is the major constituent in determining what our lives feel like, what our every-days feel like, what our days and nights feel like.
Words are powerful, and we speak them every moment, so why not exercise that medium? But I’m really interested in questions more than answers. Everybody’s got answers, and I think it’s more generative and engaging for me to think about questions and to think about doubt. Not to the point that it becomes crippling and self-destructive, but it’s a definite balancing force. Power slices in lots of ways, you know. And it can deal with the inequities of money; it can deal with the inequities of color; it can deal with the inequities of gender. And how some voices have been unheard, and some faces unseen, and I’m interested in how that plays out in culture, and how it changes, and how that change changes culture, and how America is a different place now than it was thirty years ago because of those changes, and how those changes in fact become [of] global and not just national interest. But we’ve seen how the battles around difference, around sexuality, around color, around nationalism, are daily changing the character and the balance of power globally.
Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions. I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.
it is what it is 