Stories

1981, 12:17 min, color, sound

In Stories, Adams fuses storytelling and performance in a reverie on reality and fiction. The artist sits alone in near darkness while, in voiceover, he relates a series of seemingly autobiographical anecdotes — "inside information" marked by irony, loss and black humor. This stark interrogation of self is accompanied by evocative narrative signifiers: a ringing telephone, a ticking clock, a naked light bulb, flickering TV images of a porn movie. The ambiguity of his stories — memory? dreams? fictions? — implies a tension between the construction of personal reality and the internalization of the conventions of popular fiction. As Adams writes, "The stories are all true. The character, of course, is fiction."