BWPWAP Desire

The narrative arc of Allucquére Rosanne "Sandy" Stone’s work has followed, more or less closely, the course of her life: refuse closure, insist on situation, foreground multiplicity and fungibility. As Stone points out, her favorite work explores corner cases, situations so ambiguous that if patterns emerge, they may just as well come from the observer's need for epistemic closure as from any purposefulness on the artist's part.

The trick is to sustain the need for closure, without satisfying it, far beyond the audience's comfort zone. At some point in that zone of high tension, we exceed what Stone terms “the consensual hallucination's binding energy”; at which point, metaphorically speaking, the nuts and bolts that hold reality together become visible. According to Stone, the most interesting field of action for such a model is desire, both because it is the most powerful of experiences and because it is a quintessentially human one. For better or worse, she has no wish to theorize desire, merely to employ desire as an artistic tool in the service of exploring what makes humans tick. As opposed to her theoretical work, which is carefully controlled and extensively rehearsed, Stone’s public talks tend to be unpredictable and aleatory, addressing topics like identity, body and gender; they often involve cats, self-pleasure and the audience.