Prologue: DESIRE

This is the tell-all confession of my love affair with gift theory. It includes all the sorrid, seamy and sentimental details that will draw you into the story & to me. You will like me, or revile me, but you will become intimately involved with me.

I have chosen to tell you a story about my desire. My desire for rewarding relationships with people and things; my desire to communicate with and understand other people; my desire to balance the distribution of power in relationships.

I will begine the story of my love affair with gift theory with first infatuation--my irrepressable &, perhaps, irresponsible pursuit of a gift relationship. As time passes & I begin to know & understand the entity (gift theory) that causes my heart to beat so [Pause dramatically, hand on heart, for effect.] passionately, and I learnt to accept the limits of gift theory and attempt to mediate the power of the gift to bind people (to me).

Put simply, my love of gift theory has to do with my desire to enact a "better world" through art.

Chapter I: A GIFT OF THE SELF

Roland Barthes notes that we seek to hold the other with a gift of the self: "By this object I give you my all." "The gift is contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched, a 3rd skin unites us."

When I first moved to Regina, I found a box of old cassette tapes that I hadn't listened to in years. I spent days immersing myself in the music, and in the memories that each song held for me. I was so excited by this cache of artifacts from my past that I constantly forced my friends to listen to them with me. Not that I gave them a chance to hear the music; I was too busy telling them what each tape meant to me.

I decided to create Sandee Moore's Young Adult Cassette-tape Library, so that I could share music & conversation with who have relationships with and through music.

This project evolved over 2 years into Sandee Moore's Mobile Cassetteotheque. It can occupy freely accesible public spaces & presents opportunities for people to give as well as receive through the library.

How can I give you, as Roland Barthes puts it, "my all" in this talk?

I used to fantasize that Joey Ramone was my boyfriend. We would go on dates to the amusement park and the video arcade, and maybe later, the Motel 6. He would call me "baby" and I wouldn't even mind at all, because he's Joey Ramone. We would make an odd site walking down the street, because Joey is so tall and I am so short that he would be stooped like a question mark in order to hold my hand. But he wouldn't complain. He would just go on being inscrutable behind his long, lank black hair and cherry glasses. And I would be happy. We might even, I had let myself dream in the days when Joey was still alive, get married. I wrote love songs that were also witchy spells to cause Joey to fall in love with me and drew pictures of us together with hearts fluttering around our heads like butterflies.

And so I expose the silliness of a rock start crush in an attempt to give you my all, to make myself vulnerable to you. To admit to love. These songs and drawings, by the way, can be found along with my Ramones tapes in Sandee Moore's Mobile Cassetteotheque.

"My all" should also include my body. Suzanne Lotbiniere-Harwood suggests that even in academic models it is possible to acknowledge the essential difference of gender in forming our subjectivity, "It's not papers we give, it's our bodies."

[Now, if you're at the live performance, you get to see me air guitar to the Ramones. It's entirely un-rehearsed. I just let loose as if I'm alone.]

The problem with an art practice based in a gift of the self is that it tends to focus on me as the giver.

"If you could marry any rock star, alive or dead, who would it be...and why?"

You see, as the performer and the gift-giver I have the power to compel a response, a reciprocation of my gesture.

Chapter II: DEMANDING A GIFT IN ADVANCE

The Story of My Life, As Performed by Sandee Moore is an attempt to shift the focus fromt he narrative of my life, as with the Mobile Cassetteotheque, to the lives of other people.