Artist Profile Series: Terri Sarris

Arts Agenda

Artist Profile Series: Terri Sarris

Interview By Lou Hillman

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someone hangs on to then l've somehow entered into their memory as well.

Hillman: So much of our identity-formation and subjectivity seem to come from our music and images, our heroines and heroes and role models. When I talk to people, one of the biggest walls or limits to creating a life is a feeling of domination by economics, not only in what it takes to produce a body of work, but also to sustain one's self ...

Sarris: ... I feel really fortunate to be able to do both (dance & video) and have access - because I teach at U-M - to facilities to be able to do the editing. If I were trying to do everything on my own it would be so expensive, there's no way I could. So in some ways, l'm dependent on the institution.

   When I was invited to Chicago and I was invited to the D.l A, people started respecting - in the institution - what I was doing. It turned my head, of course it did. They were paying me to come to Chicago and l'd be hypocritical if I said it wasn't nice to get paid for doing it. lt costs a lot of money, so it's nice to have someone turn around and pay you for it

Hillman: ... so you're still pretty autonomous, you feel like you're able to pursue those sorts of areas that are meaningful to you, that help you form meaning and also disseminate meaning?"

Sarris: Well, autonomous in the sense that l'm able to be the video maker and choreographer and the performer. The pieces are so personal, I don't know if I could communicate to another dancer what it is l'm trying to do in the interaction between the dance and the image. So right now, l'm choosing to work that way. But not autonomous in the sense that f I didn't have my job at the University, I wouldn't have access to their facilities ... I simply couldn't afford it.

Hillman: Does your work as a lecturer border on any of the critical kinds of issues such as "mediatization," "corporate mediatization" and the "image industry"?

Sarris: Very much. l'm teaching a video art class and we talk about those issues. What is video-art and where did it come from and who's doing it and what does it mean? And one of the things we start with is the idea of trying to find ways to make a work that gives people a different way to interact with it, not make it "interactive" necessarily, but to be aware of what you provide the viewer and what you ask the viewer, and how you leave spaces for them.

   Look at something like "Jurassic Park." It's a narrative where there are these archetypal characters: you have all these expectations of what these characters will do and there are no spaces left. You sit back and open your eyes and it just feeds into you; you don't have to think about it.

   It's important to me when people respond to my work in a way that Iets me know they've actually thought and connected it to their own lives, that it's somehow part of their lives and not this thing they go to for escape from their lives.

  Because, why should we be escaping our lives?  That's all we have! And our lives shouldn't be so bad that we have to escape them. That's the sadness of industrial society - the sense that people hate their jobs and hate their lives and they don 't know why they've made their choices - and instead of really thinking about that, they just try to run away from it So they get addicted to this, that and the other and they need escapist entertainment and they hate their spouse, and all that stuff is really sad.

   Ideally, my work helps people start connecting with their choices and thinking intelligently about them. I know this sounds really privileged, because a lot of times people don't have the means to do that - there is a certain sense of entrapment and so the only other option is to escape - but it's the sense of being brave enough to think outside of the way things are supposed to be, the way we're told they're supposed to be. And not just hate yourself because you don't measure up.

   I think people have a crisis of ing in their lives and I think a lot of it comes from not having a sense of self and not recognizing they they're a valued person. Again, I think socio-economically, it must be tremendously difficult for people who have very little, when all they see is Jim Carey making x-number of millions per film. There's something so wrong about that, and the "dream-factory," and the messages they send ... the sense that you think you need to get all these things, when it's important to simplify.