This photography and performance bibliography isn’t a reading list, it’s a goddamn intervention into how we fool ourselves about what it means to witness anything at all. Call it a photography theory bibliography if you need the institutional fig leaf, but this documenting performance bibliography is here to gut the lie of neutral observation. Azoulay […]
Francis Bacon painted the shit we’re all too chickenshit to admit we feel at 3 AM when the numbness wears off. Those screaming popes aren’t about religion or some art history circle jerk, they’re about power eating itself alive, about the cage we’re all trapped in whether we’re wearing purple vestments or a stained t-shirt. […]
Ruth Escobar looked at a perfectly good theater in São Paulo in 1969 and said, essentially, “fuck this”, then proceeded to destroy it. Not metaphorically. Literally excavated the stage five meters down, erected a cylinder clear up to the fly loft, 20 meters of vertical madness, 86 tons of iron, elevators, cranes, suspended cages, gynecological […]
Here’s what happened when the Duke walked into God’s house with a swing band and told the congregation to get off their knees: September 1965, Grace Cathedral, and Duke Ellington’s bringing the whole damn orchestra into this Gothic pile of stone and righteousness like he’s staging a raid on heaven itself. Not asking permission. Not […]
Here’s the thing about rehearsals that nobody wants to admit: they’re not more truthful because they’re purer. They’re more truthful because the lie hasn’t settled yet, hasn’t hardened into the kind of official story you can sell tickets to. A rehearsal is where readings collide, actors, designers, text, space, institution, like cars entering an intersection […]
I’m still hung up on Poulet, Bachelard, and Barthes, specifically that Sur Racine moment when they briefly gathered under what they called the Geneva School of existential phenomenology. The name sounds like something you’d find scratched into a bathroom stall in some Left Bank shithole, and maybe that’s fitting. But the work matters, pulls at […]
The Blood of a Poet is the kind of beautiful, pretentious mindfuck that makes you want to simultaneously punch a wall and weep into your bourbon at 3 AM. Cocteau made this thing in 1930, and it’s still got that raw, narcotic pull, like stumbling into someone else’s nightmare at the exact moment it gets […]
Strauss’s Daphne directed and designed by Romeo Castellucci Castellucci knows what you know but pretend to forget… that pastoral is a lie… always was. Those sunlit meadows and nymphs dancing? Bullshit. The world’s a wasteland and nature’s not your mother, she’s indifferent, she’s cold, she’ll bury you under six feet of snow and not think […]
Antonin Artaud gets out of Rodez, nine years of psychiatric lockup, electroshock frying his brain, and the first thing he does is get near a microphone. Thévenin sets him up with this radio program, Club d’Essai, and Artaud records Les Malades et les médecins. The whole thing’s a middle finger to the doctors: You want […]
I’ve spent enough time in theaters (dark ones, bright ones, ones that smelled like decades of dust and ambition) to know this much: we’re fucked when it comes to how we actually see bodies anymore. Three ways to watch someone perform. Theater: you’re in the room, sharing oxygen, watching sweat happen in real time, no […]
A good art exhibition is a lesson in seeing to those who need or want one, and a session of visual pleasure and excitement to those who don’t need anything — I mean the rich in spirit. Grunts, sighs, shouts, laughter, and imprecations ought to be heard in a museum room. Precisely the place where […]
Revolutions don’t start with permission slips. They start in some paint-splattered shithole at three in the morning when you’re too broke and too angry to pretend anymore. They start when you realize the gatekeepers are idiots and their taste is garbage and you’d rather burn it all down than spend one more second nodding along […]
So What the Hell IS Real Anyway? Maybe the text is just sitting there like last week’s corpse… cold, rigid, embalmed in academic formaldehyde, while the actor’s body is out there in the trenches, sweating through the shirt, bleeding into the floorboards, happening in real time like a Mahler Symphony you can feel in your […]
The spectacle Joseph Beuys pulled off in Frankfurt was pure, uncut confrontation dressed up in mystical horseshit, and that’s exactly why it mattered. You walk into that theater in ’69, Europe’s still got the psychic stench of the war clinging to everything like cigarette smoke in an underground bar, and there’s this German shaman motherfucker […]
There’s something beautifully, recklessly insane about dragging potted trees across America so you can stage Lear in someone’s backyard. It’s the kind of mad devotion that makes you wonder if Ben Greet wasn’t just performing Shakespeare but embodying the whole gorgeous, doomed enterprise of art itself. Think about it: here’s this Brit at the turn […]
This burly son of a bitch with hands like a steelworker’s is down on his knees in some Parisian apartment in 1926, making cork-headed wire dolls dance for Duchamp and Mondrian, and somehow that’s not the punchline. That’s the actual art. He’s got corks for heads, clothes pegs for performers, scraps of yarn, basically whatever’s […]
I watch people. I mean I really watch them. The way you move through a door when someone’s behind you, the little apologetic shoulder-hunch you do when you’re taking up space, the whole elaborate dance of who-goes-first at the intersection. These tiny rituals that nobody talks about but everybody performs like their life depends on […]
What went down 50 years ago at the Château de Ferrières on December 12, 1972 wasn’t just some party. It was the kind of decadent, surreal fever dream that makes you question whether you’ve been living wrong your entire life or whether these people had simply lost the plot so completely that they’d achieved some […]
What we have here is a middle finger in epistolary form, three guys in 1943 Brooklyn, broke as hell probably, telling some poor bastard at the Times that his confusion is the whole goddamn point. And they’re right, which makes it even more dangerous. This isn’t a manifesto, it’s a divorce […]
Here’s what this thing is actually trying to do, and why it matters: I’m not talking about phenomenology as some pristine moment of pure experience, that whole “unmediated presence” thing is academic horseshit and we all know it. This is about phenomenology as a verb, as something you do: you tune yourself to what’s actually […]
There’s this thing that happens when you strip away everything you think you know about a piece of art, when you stop genuflecting at the altar of tradition and just look at what’s actually there, raw and pulsing and strange. Robert Wilson gets this. He gets that Shakespeare’s sonnets were never meant to be polite […]
December 19, 1958. The Palais Garnier. You want to talk about a moment when the universe temporarily stopped fucking around? This might have been it. Maria Callas didn’t just perform that night. She walked into that gilded Belle Époque monument to French self-satisfaction, all those marble staircases and chandelier’d horseshoe balconies where the bourgeoisie had […]
The great ones don’t teach you a damn thing. Not directly. They just sit there in the tenth row and call out the truth until you stop flinching. Carl Weber sat in that tenth row for Brecht. He sat in it for Kushner. He sat in it for me. The man watched the most radical […]
Picture this: Walter fucking Cronkite, the most trusted voice in American living rooms, on New Year‘s Eve 1965, serving up Piero Heliczer’s Venus in Furs with the Velvet Underground grinding through Heroin while Heliczer honks away on saxophone like some deranged angel. On CBS. On network television. Before the ball drops. This wasn’t some slick […]
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for awhile. RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students. RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment. […]
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the […]
“Notes to myself on beginning a painting” by Richard Diebenkorn 1. Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion. 2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued – except as a stimulus for further moves. 3. DO […]
I’m going to tell you something that’s going to sound like complete bullshit coming from a guy who’s made real money with a camera: I fucking hate documentation. Here I am. Supposedly a photographer, though don’t call me that, seriously, someone who’s shot work for Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Ron Athey, Alonzo King. Someone who ground it […]
Here’s the thing about Man Ray sitting in Hollywood in 1948, chain-smoking and staring at photographs he took a decade earlier of nineteenth-century plaster shapes that some French mathematician built to explain shit that nobody except twelve people in the world could actually understand, it’s the most beautiful kind of fuck-you to meaning itself. Think […]
What the Fuck Are We Even Doing Here? Performance photography and critical writing: we’re both chasing the same fucking unicorn. Trying to tell you what went down in that room when the air got thick, when something cracked open and spilled out onto the floor, when you could feel it in your teeth. Except we’re […]
Nobody wants to cop to this, but here’s the raw nerve: when you’re watching someone up there, flayed down to what the program notes call their “truth,” you’re not getting some uncut vérité feed. You’re getting a setup. A con job so clean you mistake it for catharsis. Not some fever dream, not wish fulfillment, […]
Here’s the thing about Glass hauling Disney’s corpse onto the stage at Teatro Real, it’s got that particular American genius for taking something everybody thinks they understand and then shoving it into the meat grinder until nobody’s quite sure what they’re looking at anymore. The Madrid premiere went up in January 2013, and you’ve got […]
Here’s what Hull’s doing in those recordings, and why it matters: He’s a religious education professor, right, teaches people how to teach people about God, and in 1983 his eyes just… quit. Detached retinas, failed surgeries, the whole deteriorating nightmare, and he’s got this Sony cassette recorder and he starts documenting what happens next, not […]
There’s this thing happening, right? This raw uncut shit we’re all doing every goddamn day, playing ourselves like we’re method actors who forgot we’re acting. I’m not talking about the sanitized Broadway version of life, the stuff you package up nice for the tourists. I’m talking about the performance embedded in just being, the way […]
I don’t know what Chris Marker was smoking when he assembled this film, but Jesus Christ, the archaeology of our disposable souls rendered in busted transistors and cracked plastic, every discarded thing a little tombstone for the five minutes we thought it mattered before we needed the new thing, the better thing, the thing that […]
You walk into rehearsal with this thing in your head: this perfect, shimmering bastard of an idea. And then reality shows up with a tire iron and starts beating the shit out of it. But here’s the thing: that’s not a bug, it’s the whole goddamn point. I’m working with other people, right? Some of […]
The Hustle Never Stops, It Just Gets Smarter Post-Structuralism didn’t die, it went corporate. Burned bright, ate itself, and what’s left is a set of moves you can pull at faculty meetings, a way to sound dangerous while keeping your parking spot. Derrida says kill your idols, declares the author dead, and sure, on the […]
Andres Amador is out there on some windswept strip of beach, dragging a rake through wet sand like some deranged Zen monk, creating beach art, massive geometric mandalas, that would make the ancients weep. Two hours of work. Maybe three if he’s feeling ambitious. Intricate, precise, beautiful beyond any reasonable measure of beauty. And then… […]
So there’s this thing from 1964 floating around YouTube, Philip Saville’s production of Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Huis Clos) for the BBC, retitled In Camera because apparently the British needed something that sounded more like a parking violation than eternal damnation. Harold Pinter is in it. Not writing it, acting in it. Playing Garcin, […]
Here’s the thing about Saul Bass’s little twenty-five minute head-fuck Why Man Creates from 1968: it’s the kind of film that makes you realize how completely we’ve commodified and neutered the whole goddamn concept of “being creative” in the decades since. We’re talking about a guy who made his bones designing title sequences, basically the […]
There’s performance and then there’s this thing, this unholy exorcism Billie Whitelaw pulls off where she’s basically a human wound spitting words. Samuel Beckett’s Not I isn’t theatre in any way you’d recognize if you walked in cold. It’s a mouth. Just a fucking mouth hanging in the void, hemorrhaging language at like 200 words […]
In 1995, William Utermohlen, American painter, living in London, doing his thing, gets the diagnosis that makes every other piece of bad news you’ve ever received look like a parking ticket. Alzheimer’s. The brain-eater. The self-thief. The thing that doesn’t just kill you, it dismantles you piece by piece, room by room, until the lights […]
Here’s the thing about Tsukimi Ayano that’ll either crack you open or leave you mumbling platitudes about “healing” and “resilience” like some asshole at a TED talk: she’s not doing this because she’s broken. She’s doing it because she’s whole. Thirty people left in Nagoro. Thirty. Used to be three hundred. You do the math […]
Here’s what happens when you come see one of my pieces. You’re watching three things at once. Three different versions of reality: or “ontologies of the real,” if we’re being insufferable academics about it. Which, fine, I am. PhD and everything. Doesn’t mean I have to sound like one. First: the actors. Right there. Meat […]
To Henrik Ibsen March 1901 8 Royal Terrace, Fairfield, Dublin Honoured Sir: I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play When We Dead Awaken, an appreciation of […]
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hamlet Arnold doing “To be or not to be” with a cigar clenched in his teeth and a .44 in his hand is the most honest fucking Shakespeare you’re ever going to see. You want purity? You want authenticity? Go watch some Yale Drama School graduate emote at you for three hours. What […]
The Thing About Knives and Beauty So here’s Amélie Ségarra, a French ballerina, standing on top of a grand piano in some gorgeous, empty Baroque theater in Girona that’s seen better centuries. But she’s not wearing regular pointe shoes, those pretty pink torture devices that already mangle feet into gnarled question marks by age twenty-five. […]
Here’s the thing about live performance that all our academic seminars and theoretical frameworks can’t quite capture… it’s a fucking high-wire act where the wire is invisible and everyone’s pretending it doesn’t exist until someone falls. What we’re witnessing here isn’t just a “mistake”, that reductive, bourgeois term we use when our pedagogical comfort zones […]
So here I am at Fort Mason, in some rehearsal studio that smells like last week’s ambition and tonight’s desperate grab at relevance. The Magic Theater closed Buried Child and somebody thought I needed cheerleaders. Fucking cheerleaders. And a tuba, or maybe they’re gogo dancers, at this point, who gives a shit? The distinction matters […]
Marina’s sitting there talking about Columbus and failure and presence, and here’s the thing that’ll piss off half the MFA programs in Brooklyn: she’s actually right, even when she’s being provocative as hell.This bit about Columbus, fuck yeah, it’s problematic, we all know the colonialism lecture by heart, but strip away the historical baggage for […]
Before Saul Bass showed up, movies started the way your grandfather’s funeral did, dignified, respectful, boring as hell. You sat there while names scrolled past like credits on a tax form, waiting for the actual movie to kick in, and that was supposed to be enough. That was the deal. Bass walked into that temple […]
To Won’s Father June 1, 1586 You always said, “Dear, let’s live together until our hair turns gray and die on the same day.” How could you pass away without me? Who should I and our little boy listen to and how should we live? How could you go ahead of me? How did you […]
Jean Cocteau understood that love isn’t the beautiful lie we tell ourselves. It’s the phone call at 2 AM where you’re begging someone to remember when they used to think you were worth keeping alive. It’s the sound of your own voice getting smaller and smaller until you’re just static on a dead line. Ingrid […]
I’ve been to enough funerals where people lie, where they smooth over the rough parts and make the departed into saints, but when Fo stood up to talk about Franca Rame, he didn’t do that comfortable, sanitized thing. He told the TRUTH, which is the only real act of love there is, and the whole […]
You hear something like this and you remember that all our clever bullshit about mortality is just that, bullshit. Because here’s the obscene truth: they DID have their whole lives ahead of them. They had seven months, which turned out to be the whole lives they were going to get together. That’s the con. The […]
When you’re watching a film, and I mean really watching it, not scrolling through your phone while Netflix drones on in the background, that glass eye of the camera? It becomes your eye. It’s a kind of beautiful con job, really. The director, the auteur, whatever pretentious film school dropout term you want to use, […]
Somewhere in the vast corporate labyrinth of Children’s Television Workshop, some lunatic. blessed, probably way underpaid, convinced a room full of executives that what American four-year-olds really needed was Samuel Beckett filtered through puppet nihilism. And they were absolutely goddamn right. Because here’s what Waiting for Elmo understands that most prestige television has forgotten: absurdity […]
July in Avignon, watching Belgian weirdo Jan Fabre, the festival’s designated madman-in-residence, make his performers roll around in their own sweat while reciting what I can only assume was poetry, though my French was drowning after the third pastis. The whole goddamn city had become one sprawling theatrical acid trip, and I was here for […]
No. 01
