Banks Violette.

My work proposes to analyze an event or phenomenon in a literary or operatic way. Mostly, I end up referring to things in the world that get read too easily or become miscues, models of information in transition. For example, murders related to heavy-metal culture are about an overt theatrical excess that gets literally enacted. When singing figuratively about killing turns into a literal command--I should really kill somebody--it becomes a miscue, Ideally, I set up the same potential for misreading for the audience. The unreliable narrator is such a clear literary trope, and the fact that there isn't that kind of subject position in art has always interested me. In art, there's always an attempt to moralize after the fact, to resolve and make it legible. And the rhetoric surrounding the appropriation of mass culture has tended to be critical. You could never reference mass culture for pleasure, because mass culture is excess, and excess is trash. But mass culture in America has always been a battleground for the representation of class antagonisms. I'm interested in directly embracing the theater implied by these things, in bracketing those antagonisms instead of going one route and making it hyperbolic.--AS TOLD TO JAN TUMLIR

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