{"id":4631,"title":"On That Very Uncomfortable Edge: An Interview with Alan Sondheim","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/very-uncomfortable-edge-interview-alan-sondheim","version":"43c3e146252967e86355f8bd9ec0ae4dfcdad363326cfc6b7ade2277642888fc","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9234906+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Robert Godfrey"}],"authorKeys":["Godfrey, Robert"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"The Arts Journal","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"April 1989","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0377","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Alan Sondheim","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022On That Very Uncomfortable Edge: An Interview with Alan Sondheim.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/very-uncomfortable-edge-interview-alan-sondheim.","publication":"Robert Godfrey. On That Very Uncomfortable Edge: An Interview with Alan Sondheim. The Arts Journal. April 1989.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4631.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":17980},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":715}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Title: On That Very Uncomfortable Edge: An Interview with Alan Sondheim Alan Sondheim - writer, teacher, curator, filmmaker, musician and contemporary art theorist - first came to the Southeastern U.S. in 1983 as curator for Atlanta\uFF92s Nexus Contemporary Art Center, a position which he held for two years. From 1986 through 1987 he taught at the University of Texas in Dallas, and last year he served as artistic director of Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York. Recently returned to the Southeast, Sondheim is again living in Atlanta, and is presently teaching courses in contemporary art issues at the Atlanta College of Art and Wester Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C. His work has been widely exhibited, performed and published, and his new book, Disorders of the Real, was recently issued by Station Hill Press. The following interview with Sondheim, in which he addresses a broad range of art-related issues, was conducted in February at Western Carolina University. Leonard Seastone, a WCU instructor and book artist, also participated in the dialog. *You\uFF92ve mentioned your early interest in anthropology.* I began as an anthropology major at Brown University and switched to English. But I\uFF92ve remained interested in ethnographic materials. *My question has to do with whether your current investigations in your art and writing are sparked by your previous interest in anthropology.* This is a difficult question because it is to do with what is meant by anthropology. I think the work, the writing, embodies an anthropology, but I don\uFF92t think it\uFF92s anthropology in the sense of a formative science relating specifically to the traditional \uFF93anthropological field.\uFF94 But it\uFF92s an anthropology in the sense that it\uFF92s a returning to or a compression of writing of theory upon the body, and upon its humanness, and upon the formation of languages within the body. *In terms of your background in literature, what are some of the factors which caused you to rethink issues and subsequently develop a bridge between art and writing?* It\uFF92s a kind of general praxis that I\uFF92m engaged in, that someone will see as one medium or another but which I see as much more coherent, a kind of investigation. In literature, I\uFF92m still interested in a certain type of symptomatic writing. For example, Thomas Chatterton, a poet born in 1752, who killed himself at the age of 17 - was writing in the 18th century in what he considered 14th century verse. I found that as interesting and peculiar as the work of John Clare, a \uFF93peasant-poet\uFF94 perhaps, who wound up in an asylum in the 19th century. Gertrude Stein\uFF92s work is another example... But I also include ethnographic writings, which is where my anthropological interest is foregrounded - in other words, returning to the old Smithsonian Institute Bureau of American Ethnology reports on the Kwakiutl and Haida, for example. *Keith Waldrop wrote he considers you an art maniac poised to meet the world in as many ways as possible. How do you account for what I would call a restless investigation of matrix beyond what you\uFF92ve referred to as working from the notion of a general praxis?* I think it is a restless investigation and an investigation of restlessness. It\uFF92s working across two areas. First, there is a sort of discursivity \uFF93around\uFF94 film. In other words, making film, talking film, thinking film, looking at film, working film theory, theory - film, and so forth - and also working in photography or video as offspring of film. Then it\uFF92s also centered around writing and the problems of writing. But what I\uFF92m trying not to do with writing is to focus on it as one discourse among others, which has to be focused on, because that\uFF92s what I\uFF92m doing. In other words, I want to avoid the idea that one is doing painting about painting because one paints. I don\uFF92t want that self-referentiality, so I\uFF92m continually breaking it down. *In your Disorders of the Real, the introduction gives the reader instruction regarding the concept of \uFF93place.\uFF94* That\uFF92s Tom Zummer\uFF92s introduction, I didn\uFF92t write it. There is deliberate unclarity here. I don\uFF92t mean it\uFF92s confusing, but that a certain kind of structure is broken down, the way that sections are run together - some titled, some untitled; the spacing in the book is designed to create something which is not fragmentary, in the sense of piece/fragment, piece/fragment, etc., but instead problematizes even that - so that the organization of the book as a whole is questioned, questionable. But you were saying something about the word \uFF93place.\uFF94 *Yes, just that the metaphor of \uFF93place\uFF94 seems to be important to you on some level. Is \uFF93place\uFF94 sort of a key word?* It\uFF92s not a key word for me, but probably more so for Zummer and his questioning of the book. By questioning the place of writing, what I\uFF92m attempting to do is not work through a certain kind of metaphysics or foundation-analysis of writing, but to question the place of the subject, the reader, or to question the reader\uFF92s place. The text works at cross-purposes with itself. I started that actually in the book Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America that I edited for Dutton, where I did an introduction that was deliberately contradictory and designed to be a clue, a theatrical cueing device for the artists represented in it. But it was also designed to efface/negate itself as any kind of formal articulation of that notion of an \uFF93introduction\uFF94 as something that might appropriate or tell the reader what these people are really \uFF93about.\uFF94 *Do you have an equivalent form, say in your filmmaking or music?* Yes, the filmwork does that a great deal, and more directly. I use sexual elements in the film, for example, or narrative elements - both of which place the reader in one or another state. Sexuality provides either arousal or disgust, depending on the viewer. The narrative elements will carry the viewer through. They create a certain momentum working off his or her memory. The narrative elements are constantly short-circuited as well, or deconstructed, so that the viewer always \uFF93collapses.\uFF94 There is this continual sense of collapse in my work which is very deliberate. I made video years ago, and I said before I showed them (at one screening) that these particular works were failures, that I saw them as failures, and I wanted to discuss this because I thought they way they failed was more interesting than what I thought of as more successful tapes. It\uFF92s a kind of effacement and certain sort of horizon. It\uFF92s playing it both ways, at the same time problematizing all sorts of discourses on power and quality, on the nature of the medium, on the cultural construction of the viewer. It places a kind of paralysis there. *Could you state your theory of deconstruction?* I don\uFF92t claim to be a deconstructionist. I see my work more as a form of stuttering or lapsing into what I call idle conversation, relating to the notion of das Mann in Heidegger, a sort of everydayness that descends into (subversive) substance. I use that notion of substance or triviality, or awkwardness, as a way of creating a turn that doesn\uFF92t come home to itself. But it\uFF92s not really deconstruction (in the sense of Derrida); it\uFF92s not using the formal devices of frameworking employed there. It doesn\uFF92t examine the curlicues of the text, although I might do that on occasion, and for the purposes of deconstruction. *How would you sum up your work at this point?* I\uFF92m interested in work that is troubling and work that creates a sense of criticality in the viewer, possibly in myself, but definitely in relationship to herself/himself, as a type of critique developing out of the work. A lot of people find my films in a sense not films, or my writing, not writing. I want to keep operating on that very uncomfortable edge, because only there can one look back and against culture. [...] *I find you as both a cynic and a romantic, and as both a voyeur and an exhibitionist.* I would buy into the last two because of the kind of dialectics of sight occurring. A lot of my very recent work is the literal deconstruction of romanticism. But I don\uFF92t buy into cynicism. I buy more into an unalterable sadness. I don\uFF92t buy into cynicism because I don\uFF92t think my work has that kind of irony. I feel that there is too much at stake. I have always been interested in what I call \uFF93foundation work,\uFF94 relating especially to the sciences, artificial intelligence, or propositional logic. How the world is organized; how sentences are organized; how the \uFF93truth value\uFF94 of sentences is determined; how the value of truth itself is determined. This brings all sorts of theory into play, from Saul Kripke\uFF92s back through Wittggenstein\uFF92s and Russell\uFF92s. You may not notice it in the writing, but there is a scientific edge there. I worked off catastrophe theories for example in trying to describe the way certain logical functions behave. I\uFF92m also interested in Kristeva\uFF92s Revolution in Poetic Language, the origin of semiosis in general. I don\uFF92t want to slide into humanism on one hand, or into concepts of substance, materialism, or material substance on the other. It\uFF92s a very peculiar realm, but how much can you scrape away? I talk about the notion of inscription, of how the ego is not really a structure but a coagulation, a disorderly appropriating structure. These \uFF93coagulations\uFF94 are linguistic in nature, somewhat in the process of organizing, operating by inscribing. They inscribe the environment. They project, introject. *What about your work in terms of the written word being spoken?* When I do a reading or lecture I try to make the reading occur as a speaking, because if I do otherwise, it won\uFF92t be understood, and there\uFF92s really no reason for that speaking body to be there. That\uFF92s why my films are jammed with texts. The textual element is critical; the scripts are designed to be repeated over and over again. Phrases will be repeated that build up a certain rhythm in relation to the film, that the film will either fortify, reinforce, or subvert. I wouldn\uFF92t try to read one of my technical pieces. Every text I do, I think will literally be my last, since I want every text to resonate with every other and to embody every other. In a way this makes the writing quite dense; it also makes it \uFF93European.\uFF94 It\uFF92s more engaged stylistically with people like Theodor Adorno, or Jabes, or Maurice Blanchot, or Derrida, than it\uFF92s engaged with American writers such as Marvin Minsky or Noam Chomsky. It\uFF92s as if I\uFF92m engaging these European thinkers as opposed to working off them (although of course the engagement is inauthentic, one-way). It\uFF92s very difficult then for my writing to be a speaking thing. When I do speak, I generally tend to go somewhat into humor, relating, on the surface, to what I\uFF92m writing. *Do you withhold information?* The writing attempts to say everything - and also - and this is where my exhibitionism comes in - to expose everything, the body in its entirety, the psychology/psychoanalytics as well, so that everything appears like a microscopic sectioning. So again the authority is reduced because there are no secrets. It\uFF92s not like I have an authority or knowledge that you don\uFF92t have, but it\uFF92s that the knowledge is the position of the body. But again the contents of the work is not the phenomenology of the body or its effacement, as much as it is everything else as well. *In terms of art criticism, where do you position yourself?* I don\uFF92t see myself as an art critic; it\uFF92s not a professional concern of mine. It\uFF92s a very hard question. The criticism that interests me most is art criticism of the very, very old-fashioned kind which talks about the life and personality of the artist and then talks about how the work came out of that, etc. In this manner I might gain some idea, say, of 19th-century Japanese prints. What I\uFF92ve tried to do in writing art criticism is to collapse the notion of art-history in the first place, because I see this as a product of a mindset related to a late-19th-cen","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":17980,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}