Obviously, if you're not new around here, you'll appreciate my proclivity towards enjoying, to a perhaps unusual degree, the world of anonymous chat sites. So it understandably meant I was pretty curious as to what she had created, and her own reasons behind visiting these sites.
Perhaps it was that her work reflected much of my own experiences on such sites. Stark mentions in her interview 'One Question: Frances Stark' that "to be honest, I've been wasting a lot of my time on it..." and that "the only one looking bad is me, the attention whore...". Boredom and seeking attention, eh. Sounds familiar. Too familiar.
But. What I like about Stark is her take on language as a whole and the way she has incorporated her style of art with the art of communication. For instance, in Stark (2008) we see this analogy about conversational partners being likened to tennis:
"I previously suggested that when you play tennis with someone who is better than you, you play better. When you play with someone who isn't so good, you yourself play worse and chase more balls than you get. Of course, playing tennis is only standing in for another kind of play, the precise meaning of which is pretty difficult to wrangle from its metaphorical raiment. By tennis, I guess I mean talking, and by talking, I guess I mean talking about important things, and by important things, I guess I mean things that may be potentially be deemed philosophical. I wondered whom it was that we expected to take on the responsibility of being the better player...".
Thus, the question may be, what does one deem an important or philosophical conversation? I've had my fair share of interesting conversations on Omegle, I guess, but not many have bordered on the philosophical...
Therefore, to finish, a small snippet of the conversation I had with my own Italian stranger on Omegle. Although we didn't quite get to the stage of sharing our views on Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, let's just say:
It's probably best to not get into what happened after, to quote the Italian man in Stark's My Best Thing "Life can be more absurd than you can imagine".
I can only deal with so much *absurdity.
*penis.
Further Reading:
- Mary Leclère (2007) For Some Perverts the Sentence is a Body: On the work of Frances Stark. The Glassell School of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
- Stark, Frances (2008). “Notes Towards the Eroticism of Pedagogy.” In Hey Hey Glossolalia (After). New York: Creative Time
