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About: Please tell us about your self. Some of our programs have benefits for art workers - please tell us if you are an artist and mention the most recent work/venue/space/residency where you have worked/developed your practice.: All I have ever wanted is to become a good fool, a good clown. This seems like a most arduous challenge and I am committed to it: creating commentary that gets to the heart of the matter, that is cutting, comic and clear, that gets to the creaturely bottom of things. Clown, I think, is a dramatization of the forces of nature, even if its subject turns out to be the forces of our own nature.

I write for theater and also have a TV show. I frequently hear from theater devotees that live theater has a way of making an audience accountable to what’s happening, that TV is passive, and that passivity is bad. I have rarely seen a person, even one who seemed unmoved during a performance, fail to participate in a standing ovation, so I question how accountable an audience really is. I am more interested in what can happen to an audience member when he is spoken to in the privacy of his own home. Similarly, these boxes I’ve been doing house my writing and drawings in a private theater so that when one looks into the hole, he cannot assume the reactions of the people around him. He’s alone with the idea and hopefully it is cutting, comic and clear and also addresses his creatureliness and hopefully that sinks in. The TV show is next on the agenda. I want to bring the kind of thinking I am doing into homes.

I am also fascinated by science and am working my way through a series of jam sessions with scientists in various fields during which I write poetry and naively attempt to understand the concepts familiar to them and they tutor me privately in whatever science is theirs. I am not sure how I worked out free and private science lessons from professors I like, but I did and the last set has been with a brilliant astrophysicist who has filled some basic gaps in my understanding of things like light and time and dimension. The facts fascinate me, as does the very endeavor of trying to make sense of and quantify the whole universe or the whole history of humanity or the whole anything. To try to get outside of the sticky problem of being human by trying to understand it is a perfectly sane but also funny and futile thing to do. The things I have learned this way flow directly into my work:

Here I am at the onset of womanhood. Here is the shape of time as it distorts and squeezes our particular species. Here is the hunger of my heart now. Here it is demanding commitment. Here it yearns for autonomy. Here, it considers a chart that illustrates its own evolution.

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