My Autobiographie(s)

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Performing “10,000 Acts of Artistic Mediation” in August, 2004 in New York City during the Republican National Convention.

I have lived many lives and personae, some documented, some fleeting moments in my imagination, and some in the form of dreams or fantasies. These lives come and go, but they are all part of who I am, at least at any given moment in time. They are all artistic renderings and rearrangements of my reality, whomever I want to be, I can be because as an artist, anything is possible, if you can imagine it. All things imagined have the potential of coming into being, or not, according to the need required.

So I contemplate authoring my autobiographie(s), capturing as best I can, the inherent truth that lies at the center of one’s own multi-threaded mythology, or as Jean Cocteau said:

“I have always preferred Mythology to History because History is made up of truths that later become lies and Mythology is made up of lies that later become truths”

If in fact my autobiographie(s) constitute a mythic narrative of who I am and who I have constructed as my many selves, then in fact, the telling of this mythology is the only way to reach some form of truth about myself, and about how I view the world. It is the multiplicity of self in the age of identity mutability and plasticity that gives cause for the necessity of a new autobiographical form, one that is not only subjective, but plays with fact and fiction in ways that speak to the rapid oscillation between what is real and what is not.

In my various guises, I have been many and all things: a talk show host, a virtual government official, a renegade explorer of the other world, an instigator of creative disturbances, a scholar of invented histories, a director of mythic theater, an orchestrator of the gesamtkunstwerk, a producer of social networks, a professor of the uncategorizable, and many, many more yet to be born.

It is only through the interweaving of these identities that I can tell the whole story as a complete synthesis of my being in the creation of an artist’s personal, mythic world.