Archive — Jamie Lyons
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. The Soul of Man Under Socialism The whole goddamn enterprise is rigged from the start. You want to be different? Congratulations, so does everyone else scrolling through their feeds at 12:18AM, desperately curating a personality from thrift store finds and half-remembered opinions they picked up from a podcast. Authentic rebellion got co-opted the moment someone figured out they could sell it back to you in digestible chunks. The machinery doesn't care if you're a conformist or a contrarian, it just needs you performing, needs you convinced that your particular brand of weirdness matters more than the next guy's. And maybe it does. Or maybe we're all just rats in different sections of the same maze, thinking our route is somehow more profound. But I'll tell you something else, something that matters: the real freaks, the ones who actually changed things, they weren't trying to stand out. They were too busy being consumed by whatever vision or obsession or demon drove them to give a damn about the crowd. They stood out because they couldn't fucking help it, because compromise would've killed them slower than any vice. You want individualism? Stop asking how to package it. Stop thinking about the crowd entirely. Find the thing that makes you forget about all this noise, the thing you'd do even if nobody was watching, even if it earned you nothing but strange looks and empty pockets. Then do that thing until your hands bleed or your mind cracks or you finally produce something that makes the machinery pause, just for a second, uncertain how to categorize you. But here's the truth… most of us won't stand out, and that's fine. It sucks, but it’s fine. The world needs its anonymous believers, its quiet obsessives, its people who show up and do the work without the performance. But if you're built different, if there's something genuinely strange burning in you, then for god's sake, stop managing it. Stop thinking about optics and strategy. Let it be messy and ugly and smelly. Let it be unmarketable. Let it scare you a little. Better yet, let it scare your neighbor. The crowd's going to be there either way, judging or ignoring you in equal measure. Might as well give them something real to work with.
Individualism 2023
You walk into Roble Gym expecting, I don’t know, something mystical maybe. Incense. Robes. The kind of earnest California spirituality that makes you want to jump off a bridge. What you get instead is bodies. Real bodies, doing impossible things with physics. These dancers move like they’re negotiating a peace treaty with the floor, every […]
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Individualism 2020
Here’s the thing about paradise during the apocalypse: it makes me feel like an asshole for even having the thought that I might be suffering. The Westside’s giving you everything, that relentless California sunshine hammering down like some kind of cosmic joke, the Pacific doing its eternal churn six blocks away, and I’m sitting there […]
ReadIndividualism 2019
The man built a wall that refuses to be a wall. It doesn’t keep anything in or out. It just exists, this undulating spine of sandstone crawling through grass and under trees, going nowhere in particular, and that’s exactly the fucking point. It’s not trying to be profound. It’s not begging for your approval. It […]
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Individualism 2019
I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump. Zora Neale Hurston The broom thing, this gorgeous, stolen-back piece of history that slavery couldn’t kill, sitting there at a wedding where half the guests have sleeve tattoos and the other half are wearing dashikis from Ashby flea market, where there’s no church, […]
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Individualism 2019
“To Honor Surfing” Statue by Thomas Marsh Lighthouse Point, Santa Cruz. “Our conversation changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves on Tavarua. But out in the lineup, once the swells started pumping, large pools of awe seemed to collect around us, hushing […]
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Individualism 2018
Love Me. Love my Umbrella. James Joyce. I’m standing there in Golden Gate Park with my Leica and two dancers decide to play with gravity under an umbrella built when the last century was still drawing breath, and what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do when two bodies make architecture […]
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Individualism 2018
You don’t understand what it means to be in that room until you’re in that room. Not watching, that’s what tourists do, what the assholes with the expensive seats do. I mean in it, close enough to see the sweat, the micro-adjustments of his fingers, the way his whole body becomes an argument with silence. […]
ReadIndividualism 2018
The Condemned Men of Palo Alto So here’s the shot. Stanford’s quad, that cathedral to optimism and endowments, and right there in the middle: six bronze figures who understood that sometimes the price of collective survival is individual annihilation. Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. Cast number seven, if anyone’s counting. Look at them. 1347, their city […]
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Individualism 2017
Auguste Rodin Gates of Hell at Sunset (Stanford University)… To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists.Auguste Rodin and Paul […]
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Individualism 2017
Resistance: Ars Technica editors Annalee Newitz and Joe Mullin speak to UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Lindsey Dillon about how the Trump administration has been removing scientific and environmental data from the Web.
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Individualism 2016
The first time doesn’t exist in my head, it’s just gone, one of those origin stories you lose in the noise. But there’s your laugh, like gravel and light, cutting through those parties at my parents’ place. There’s me, just a kid, watching some play you’d put together, and you, you, asking what I thought. […]
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Individualism 2016
That public men publish falsehoods Is nothing new. That America must accept Like the historical republics corruption and empire Has been known for years. Be angry at the sun for setting If these things anger you. Robinson Jeffers, Be Angry At The Sun, 1941 The stone holds everything, every failed marriage, every dead child, every […]
ReadIndividualism 2016
Betty Reid Soskin at ninety-four, ninety-four, standing there receiving an award named after Carey McWilliams, and the only thing more beautiful than the image is knowing she didn’t wait for permission to make history happen. She made it happen, hustled it into existence, because that’s what you do when the official story is a lie […]
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Individualism 2016
Look at those hands. Two generations of women who’ve spent their lives insisting that the body means something beyond what commerce wants to sell us, beyond what convention wants to contain. Anna Halprin, 90 something years deep into the radical proposition that movement is democratic, that anybody’s dance matters, holding hands with Tonyanna Borkovi, who’s […]
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Individualism 2016
She was the kind of woman who understood, fundamentally, that comfort is the enemy of everything worth doing, that real power doesn’t come from being liked but from being necessary when everything’s falling apart. In the art world she knew every hustle, spotted every inflated price, every lazy shortcut passed off as craftsmanship. Storekeepers saw […]
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Individualism 2015
To great dreamers of corners and holes nothing is ever empty, the dialectics of full and empty only correspond to two geometrical non-realities. The function of inhabiting constitutes the link between full and empty. A living creature fills an empty refuge, images inhabit, and all corners are haunted, if not inhabited. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics […]
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Individualism 2015
Last week I spent some time with this gentleman outside the Old Mint. He’s a jazz musician. Played with some of the greats up and down California, the kind names you’d recognize if you knew anything about the real music, the stuff that mattered before everything got packaged and sold back to us as nostalgia. […]
ReadIndividualism 2014
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My […]
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Individualism 2014
Here’s a guy who couldn’t even show up to his own exhibit because the Chinese government had his passport. Think about that. They locked him down, kept him from leaving, and he responds by creating this massive installation about freedom and imprisonment in one of America’s most notorious prisons. That’s not just art. That’s a […]
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Individualism 2014
Look at these three women perched on the Fort Point rooftop in San Francisco, caught between acts of this site integrated Macbeth production, and what you’re seeing isn’t stagecraft. It’s the raw, unvarnished truth of what it means to be fully present in the middle of nowhere that matters. They’re witches, sure, but right now […]
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Individualism 2013
Gsell: What astonishes me, is that your way is so different from that of other sculptors. They prose the model. Instead of that, you wait till a model has instinctively or accidentally taken an Interesting pose, and thon you reproduce It. Instead of your giving orders to the model, the model gives orders to you. […]
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Individualism / The City 2013
Look at Brian Yarish. Six-foot-five in his stockings, but he’s not wearing stockings tonight, he’s wearing five, maybe six inches of platform heel that would break my ankle in three places just looking at them. He’s working his way down Franconia like he owns the concrete, like he invented concrete, and you know what? Maybe […]
ReadIndividualism 2013
There’s something about catching a human being in a moment of pure, unself-conscious grace that makes you realize how much of our lives we spend performing the wrong goddamn play. Ava’s sitting there beneath all that steel and majesty, and the bridge doesn’t give a shit about her and she doesn’t give a shit about […]
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Individualism 2012
I’ve spent time with supposed intellectuals, credential-clutching Ivy League types who couldn’t find their own ass with both hands and a roadmap, people so wrapped up in their own mythology they’ve forgotten what actual intelligence looks like when it’s staring them dead in the face with those dark, knowing eyes. And then there’s Sharka. This […]
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Individualism 2011
So Steve Jobs died last week, and I’m sitting here trying to figure out what the hell that means to me, this guy I never actually knew but who was always just… here. Growing up in Palo Alto, I couldn’t escape him. Not in the celebrity sighting way, not in the “oh look, there’s someone […]
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Individualism 2011
What we’ve got here is the whole beautiful fucked up contradiction laid out at ankle level. Those heels, man. They’re not asking permission, they’re not apologizing, they’re just there in the frame like some kind of manifesto written in sequins and fuck you platform architecture. This is what happens when the theater of identity stops […]
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Individualism 2011
Comfort is a fucking lie we tell ourselves. Pretty is a lie. You want pretty, go buy a goddamn Hallmark card or scroll through Instagram until your eyeballs bleed from all that curated, soft-focus horseshit. These portraits of Niki, this is what an artist actually looks like. Not the romantic bullshit version, not the tortured […]
ReadIndividualism 2010
No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being I can count on one […]
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Individualism 2006
Here I am stumbling down some nameless Paris side street, half in the bag on a bottle and a half of wine I probably couldn’t afford but bought anyway because what the hell, life’s short and I’m already here aren’t I, and I’m hauling this ancient Kodak with a Polaroid back, juryrigged on because I’m […]
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Individualism 2005
Site Specific Art at The Avignon Theatre Festival (Festival d’Avignon). I’m standing in some medieval stone square and the light’s doing that thing where it’s too golden to be real, and there’s a woman in white doing something with her body that shouldn’t be possible, and you think maybe you’ve finally lost it. Maybe that […]
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Individualism 2005
We’d just stumbled out of Cremaster, brains still melting from Matthew Barney’s latex and petroleum jelly fever dream, trying to articulate what the fuck we’d just witnessed, all that obsessive bodily mythology, those baroque genital landscapes, when the alley starts filling with them. White painted bodies coming at us like a slow motion avalanche of […]
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Individualism 1998
Psychedelic Art: Bill Ham inventor of the Light Show. Maybe this is how it all started. Me thinking I’m a photographer. That I have what it takes to make pictures that other people actually see. Not the travel snapshots everybody takes, the trite bullshit clogging up social media feeds from here to eternity. But real […]
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