Archive — Jamie Lyons
An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption
Nobody's going to hand you shit. Not the lights, not the space, not the audience sitting there in uncomfortable chairs waiting to be moved. You want theater? You build the goddamn thing yourself: bolt by bolt, cue by cue, ego by bruised ego.
There's this beautiful, filthy romance to it. The kind of thing that gets under your nails and stays there. You're in some black box that smells like ancient dust and somebody's abandoned dreams, hanging lights at 2 AM because the show's in two days and your lighting designer in the hospital after electrocuting himself. Your back's screaming. Your bank account wants to break up with you. And yet, and yet, you're more alive than those poor bastards sleepwalking through their open concept biophilic designed shared office spaces.
Industry. The word meant building from within before it meant anything else. Structure rising from the inside out. That's what this is: indigenous diligence, the stubborn insistence on erecting something where nothing stood before. Gaffer tape holding together what should, by all reasonable measures, collapse. The stage manager who memorized 200 cues, the set builder who figured out how to make plywood look like marble, the sound designer mixing in a closet. These aren't just jobs. They're small acts of defiance against entropy, against the universe's insistence that nothing matters.
Here's what the assholes just don't get: making something from nothing is the only honest transaction we have left. You start with a script, or hell, not even that, maybe just an idea scratching at your brain at 4 AM, and you pull this thing into existence through sheer bloody minded persistence. You find people equally deranged, equally committed to putting bodies in a room and showing them something true, even if that truth is ugly or uncomfortable or wrapped in absurdist comedy.
This whole apparatus runs on energy you can't bottle or budget. It's cosmic and ridiculous all at once. You're tapping into something older than capitalism: the raw human need to make, to structure experience, to build meaning from chaos. Sure, the industry will chew you up and forget your name before your coffee gets cold. But that's missing the point entirely. The point is the work itself: the late nights, the impossible problems solved with ingenuity and spite, the moment when all those disparate elements finally click and you've got something breathing on stage.
You do it because not doing it isn't an option. Because somewhere in the wreckage, you found something that feels like purpose. The machine runs on foolishness and faith, and yeah, that'll probably destroy you eventually. But what a way to go.
Industries / Wanderlust 2026
The sky looks like it’s thinking about violence. Not cinematic violence. Not the slow motion hero shot nonsense. The real kind. The kind that does not care if you are ready, if your leash is waxed, if your head is right. The kind that has been doing this since before our species figured out how […]
Read
Industries 2026
There’s a moment when the body stops lying to you and starts telling the truth so hard it breaks something open. This is that moment. Yujin, caught in the gnarled throat of Golden Gate Park’s oldest arguments, those trees that have been twisting toward and away from each other for longer than any of us […]
ReadIndustries 2024
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is spitting poetry, and Wendy Whelan is doing things with her body that make you question every lazy decision you’ve ever made. Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. Because when everything’s burning down, when the whole damn country is doom-scrolling itself into oblivion, when families aren’t talking and everyone’s pre-unfriending half their social […]
Read
Industries 2023
Let me be clear about something: Deep River works. It fucking works. But not because every element is worth a damn. It works because Alonzo King and Lisa Fischer have something real, something that cuts through the usual artist-meets-artist mutual noise. Alonzo doesn’t use Lisa Fischer as a voice. He listens. She doesn’t just sing […]
Read
Industries 2022
I’ve been in rooms where beauty and horror held hands and French kissed. But you know those nights, the ones that grab you by the throat and won’t let go? The ones where you’re sitting there in the dark and something happens that makes you forget you’re supposed to be the asshole taking photos? The […]
Read
Industries 2022
Photographing live performance? You get one shot at it. No retakes, no mulligans, no “can we do that again but with better light?” The thing happens once, in real time, and you either capture it or you don’t. That’s it. So I’m at YBCA, dress rehearsal for Alonzo King’s Deep River. But there’s an audience, […]
Read
Industries 2021
So I’m screwing around on Google Scholar, because that’s what you do when you’re procrastinating on real work, and there it is. My photograph. We Players’ Macbeth at Fort Point, 2014. On the cover of Theatre History Studies. Published by the University of Alabama Press. An actual academic journal with peer review and footnotes and […]
ReadIndustries 2020
At 5:40Am. on March 23rd, 2020 the world’s falling apart, and I’m standing in front of a bronze surfer on Santa Cruz‘s Westside, taping up PPE to enact a 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy that nobody’s read in its entirety because, and here’s the beautiful, fucked-up part, it’s lost. Gone. Euripides wrote it, and then history ate […]
Read
Industries 2019
Children of the future Age Reading this indignant page, Know that in a former time Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime. William Blake This is the sickness, right here. The moment we decided that ecstasy needs credentials. That you can’t just be happy, you have to justify being happy, prove you’ve earned it, demonstrate […]
Read
Industries 2019
There’s something obscene about freezing a body mid-flight against all that falling water, obscene in the best way, the way that makes you understand why cameras were invented in the first place. Ive got these LINES Ballet dancers, people who’ve turned their spines into questions and their limbs into arguments, and I’ve set them against […]
Read
Industries 2019
Shooting this production felt like documenting a beautiful corpse. And I mean that with all the love and heartbreak that implies. The students were great, of course they were great. They always are. Committed, sweating under those lights, believing in every goddamn note. That’s not the problem. The problem is watching a department that once […]
Read
Industries 2019
Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world. Patti Smith These Polaroids of bodies caught mid-leap off Reunion Island’s volcanic rock, they’re not documentation, they’re evidence of a crime against physics. In those original […]
ReadIndustries 2019
The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel Standing on top of a volcanic ridge in the middle of the Indian Ocean, watching two impossibly flexible […]
Read
Cinematics / Industries / Speculation 2019
The deep art… That’s the part that has to be guarded like a miser would his money… Like a dope addict would his dope… Like a lover with their love. Alonzo King What I’ve got here is the real raw nerve ending of creation caught mid spasm: dancers drilling themselves into some kind of […]
Read
Industries 2018
The Planetary Dance by Anna Halprin in 1980 was created as a call to enact a positive myth in dance. “The Planetary Dance is a dance that transcends cultural and temporal barriers, a dance that speaks to the community that makes it, and a dance that addresses contemporary issues as they are experienced by all […]
Read
Industries / Resistance 2018
Anna Halprin Blank Placard Dance: at the invitation of the De Young Museum, A piece originally performed in 1967 with members of the San Francisco Dancers Workshop in San Francisco as a reaction to the Vietnam War and the growing social unrest of the time. The dance is a walk by some forty dancers who carry […]
Read
Collusion / Industries 2018
Big name/legendary collaborations are usually a letdown. Two “titans” get in a room together and suddenly everyone’s so fucking precious about their legacy that nothing actually happens, just a lot of careful posturing and committe meeting compromise dressed up in press release language about “exciting new directions” and “boundary-pushing work.” But thirty-five years? Thirty-five years […]
ReadIndustries 2018
I’m not going to pretend I understand what Alonzo sees when he makes a ballet, but I know what it feels like to hunt something elusive with a camera, that split second when bodies in motion become something else entirely. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, October 2018, Alonzo’s remount of his baroque meditation Handel, […]
Read
Industries 2018
We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment — bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset […]
Read
Industries 2018
That is what the title of artist means: one who perceives more than his fellows, and who records more than he has seen. Edward Gordon Craig What the hell are we supposed to do with theater documentation anyway? It’s the corpse of the thing, the empty bottle, the setlist scrawled on a napkin after the […]
Read
Industries 2018
Cunamacué rehearsing their “Son De Los Diablos.” A performance inspired by the Afro-Peruvian dance Son de los Diablos to activate public spaces and reclaim ancestral practices of ceremony and ritual. Created by Carmen Roman and Pierr Padilla Vasquez The performance traveled to various sites in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood with the route beginning at 35th Ave […]
Read
Cinematics / Industries 2018
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that […]
ReadIndustries 2018
So here’s the thing about these images: they’re documentation masquerading as art, or maybe art pretending to be documentation, that beautiful, fucked-up place where nobody’s quite sure what they’re looking at anymore. Rush Rehm’s doing Euripides like it still matters, like these 2,400-year-old words about women destroyed by war and men destroyed by their own […]
Read
Industries 2018
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl. Charlie Chaplin Bodies moving in a public park at whatever-the-fuck-o’clock on a Tuesday is a beautiful fuck you to the entire premise of art as commodity. You’ve got these dancers, trained Alonzo King LINES Ballet dancers, the kind who’ve […]
Read
Industries / Speculation 2018
Painters have canvas and pigment, writers have words and delusions, musicians have strings and wood and air. But dancers? They’ve got meat and bone and the ticking clock of their own deteriorating ligaments. Every arabesque is a negotiation with gravity and mortality. You can’t separate the art from the artist because the artist is the […]
Read
FalseArt / Industries 2018
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. […]
Read
Industries 2018
The phone rings. Can’t tell you who. I’m sworn. But trust me, Google images knows things. ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción, y el mayor bien es pequeño; que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son. What is life? A madness. What […]
ReadIndustries 2018
Alonzo King LINES Ballet hosted an evening of music, dance, and discussion highlighting the company’s upcoming Spring Season world-premiere of SUTRA. Held at the Taube Atrium Theater, Wilsey Opera Center
Read
Industries 2018
Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s Desire Lines: Retrofit If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy […]
Read
Industries 2017
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while Marx, (Groucho) The whole fucking premise is so simple it hurts: you take artists, real ones, not the kind pumping out content for the algorithm gods, and you put them somewhere beautiful and remote and you say, “Here. No deadlines. No […]
Read
Industries 2017
If you want to understand what Raegan Truax is doing, you’ve got to throw out everything you think you know about performance art. Forget the pretentious gallery openings, the wine sipping theorists nodding knowingly at shit they don’t understand. This is something else entirely. 37 hours. Thirty. Seven… Barefoot. No breaks. No food. No clock. […]
Read
Industries 2017
Performed at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco Lolas was a performance installation by Ryan Tacata that explored notions of cultural assimilation and resistance through one lola’s garden, an assemblage of found materials, religious icons and constructed identities.
ReadIndustries 2017
David Greig took the 2011 Norway massacre, where some kid walked into a summer camp and shattered everything, and decided to make a play that doesn’t give you easy answers or comfortable catharsis. Because there aren’t any. And Shotgun Players at Berkeley’s Ashby Stage produced it. I photographed this thing for set designer Angrette McCloskey. […]
Read
Industries 2017
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm. “Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?” – “Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht? Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?” – “Mein […]
Read
Industries 2017
The lobby at Bing Concert Hall is all soaring glass and clean California geometry, the kind of space that makes you wonder if anyone’s actually allowed to breathe wrong in here. I’m here to photograph which means I’m basically a voyeur, trying to freeze what shouldn’t be frozen: movement, breath, sculpture, sound, the precise moment […]
Read
Industries 2016
The universe is real but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it. Alexander Calder Look at this thing. Sitting there outside the law school like some kind of predatory bird that decided mid-flight to just fucking freeze, arrested in steel, suspended in […]
Read
Industries 2016
The thing about Ghost Architecture: A Palimpsest is that it understood what most commemorative performances miss entirely, that a building isn’t just bricks and sweat stains, it’s every body that ever moved through it, every kid who learned to fail there before learning to fly. Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads took that renovated gym, all shiny […]
ReadIndustries 2016
What we’ve got here is the kind of conceptual sleight of hand that makes the museum going bourgeoisie feel dangerous for an afternoon. Lucky Dragons (Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck) dragged peace itself into SFMOMA and roughed it up, reverse engineered it like they were hot wiring a stolen Cadillac for good intentions. They took […]
Read
Industries 2016
Performers Under Stress presents the West Coast Premiere of BLACK RIVER FALLS by Bryn Magnus.
Read
Industries 2016
My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love it is to me, That I must love a loathed enemy. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1.5 We’re all so fucking scared of being earnest that we’ve turned every production into a knowing wink, a deconstructed […]
Read
Industries 2016
Built in 1937, Memorial Auditorium squats at the heart of Stanford’s campus, a monument to the dead of World War I that somehow became a venue for everything from visiting orchestras to corporate motivational speakers hawking the next big disruption. The interior is vast and unforgiving. Those hard seats don’t give a damn about my […]
Read
Industries 2016
There’s this thing that happens when you walk into a space like YBCA and someone’s decided to call the thing a retrospective. That word alone, retrospective, it’s already half-dead on arrival, embalmed in institutional reverence before the first note even sounds. But what I’m getting from this image, from whatever the hell Luciano conjured in […]
ReadIndustries 2016
Contemporary chamber ensemble Wild Rumpus perform Fausto Romitelli’s 2003 video opera An Index of Metals at Freight and Salavage in Berkeley. Nathaniel Berman conductor…
Read
Industries 2016
A zookeeper, a docent, an animal behaviorist, and a mental health professional arguing over the proper protocol for a conflicted anteater. That’s not theater, that’s a fever dream someone had after reading too much Ionesco while working at a municipal zoo. It’s beautiful. It’s completely deranged. It’s exactly the kind of thing that makes you […]
Read
Industries 2016
The body is living art. Your movement through time and space is art. A painter has brushes. You have your body. Anna Halprin The city that gave us the Beats and the Summer of Love is turning into an open-air dormitory for software engineers who make more in a year than most families see in […]
Read
Industries 2016
The academics want you to believe that live performance (the sweating, breathing, bleeding out loud presence of actual human bodies in actual space) carries some sacred charge that recordings can’t touch. That there’s magic in the ephemeral, nobility in the disappearing act. Every moment unique, finite, gone the second it happens. Like watching your best […]
Read
Industries 2016
Book 6. Nausicaa. The one where Odysseus washes up like human driftwood, salt-caked and wrecked and basically naked, and has to beg a princess for help without seeming like either a pervert or a pathetic case. It’s about being broken and trying to hold onto some shred of dignity while you’re covered in seaweed and […]
ReadIndustries 2015
This isn’t some gauzy statement about the fragility of memory. It’s literal: the Tinikling, that Filipino folk dance where you hop between bamboo poles that snap together like jaws, came out of Spanish colonial rice field punishments. People got their ankles crushed. And here’s Gerald Casel, generations later, making something beautiful out of inherited trauma […]
Read
Industries 2015
‘Change life! ‘Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. Henri Lefebvre So here’s the thing about fairy tales performed at dusk in an amphitheater: someone decided that the only way to properly fuck with Grimm and Perrault was to drag their corpses outside, shake the dust off those cautionary […]
Read
Industries 2015
I’m trying to make art about art, standing outside the spectacle while photographing bodies suspended in mid blur, freezing dancers who’ve already evaporated into the afternoon fog. But here’s the thing: it’s essentially one decent frame I caught of dancers locked into YBCA’s courtyard geometry and a goddamn bird that decided to photobomb the whole […]
Read
Industries 2015
inkBoat 95 Rituals for Anna Halprin a Site Specific Dance performance at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten. Anna Halprin
Read
Industries 2015
I am interested in ceremonies of the present. What is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary. Diane Arbus, 1962 Nathalie Brilliant’s performance art piece at Fort Mason, San Francisco Art Institute To get at what’s real, and every artist worth a damn knows this is the whole rotten game, you need to fuck […]
ReadIndustries 2014
Durational performance art is the kind of thing that makes most people want to check their phones after ninety seconds, and that’s precisely the fucking point. We live in a world built on the three-minute song, the fifteen-second clip, the swipe-left mentality. Everything’s pre-chewed, pre-digested, designed to go down easy. But then some lunatic decides […]
Read
Industries 2014
Victoria Theater, San Francisco: Yeast Nation (the triumph of life) presented by Ray of Light Theatre
Read
Industries 2014
We Players Vessels for Improvisation at Hyde Street Pier with inkBoat and Rova Saxophone Quartet. In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. Charles Darwin
Read
Industries 2014
You’ve got these three women, Dread, Horror, and Alarm, the Graeae, those primordial hags who share one fucking eye between them, and they’re not tucked away in some theater where the already converted file in with their tote bags and good intentions. No. They’re at Aquatic Park, which if you know anything about San Francisco, […]
Read
Industries 2014
I’ve seen a lot of places where people decide to make art happen, and most of them are lying to you about what they are. Di Rosa is different. It’s not lying. 22 acres of Northern California wetlands and this weird, sprawling collection that refuses to behave like a proper museum, it’s got that swampy, […]
ReadIndustries 2014
The government shutdown ran them off last year, locked the gates mid production like some kind of Kafkaesque joke, but they came back. The Golden Gate’s up there doing its thing, that low thrumming hum of bridge cable and wind and traffic I feel in my chest more than hear. The light comes through these […]
Read
Industries 2014
Looking at the Fool in Lear is like staring into a cracked mirror at 1:34 AM with bourbon on your breath and truth seeping through the fissures. This isn’t some jingling court jester doing pratfalls for the Renaissance crowd, this is the guy who sees the wreckage before the crash, who speaks in riddles because […]
Read
Industries 2014
So here we are in the Cantor, Stanford’s marble temple to the idea that culture can be contained, catalogued, made safe for the children of tech money and inherited privilege. And into this pristine space comes Aleta Hayes with her Chocolate Heads, turning off the goddamn lights and switching on the black lights like some […]
Read
Industries 2014
I know what it looks like already. The body suspended mid leap or run, caught in that freeze frame mythology we’ve all agreed means “transcendence” or “freedom” or whatever bullshit someone is packaging this week. The lighting just so. The composition that genuflects about “liminal space” ever thumbtacked to a corkboard. It’s pornography, really, image […]
Read
Industries 2014
Rebecca gets it. She understands that friendship is the most important thing there is because it requires you to show up without armor, without an agenda, without any guarantee that the other person won’t just look at you like you’re speaking Martian. It’s vulnerable and stupid and necessary, and most of us are too chickenshit […]
ReadIndustries 2014
That title. Mud. One syllable that lands like a boot heel in primordial ooze. It’s the sound of being stuck, of drowning slowly in the ordinary. Because Mud doesn’t traffic in the redemption industrial complex. Mae, Lloyd, Henry: they’re not climbing out of anything. They’re sinking, and Fornes just watches with the cold, clear eye […]
Read
Industries 2013
Damn everything but the circus!…The average ‘painter’ ‘sculptor’ ‘poet’ ‘composer’ ‘playwright’ is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown’s mouth, orchestrate twenty lions. E.E. Cummings, Staging Modern American Life: Popular Culture in the Experimental Theatre of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, Palgrave Macmillan, 25 October 2011, p. 60 […]
Read
Industries 2013
I’m full of shit, we’re all full of shit, every last one of us. And that’s not cynicism, that’s the most liberating truth you’ll ever swallow. We perform every goddamn day. For our lovers, our bosses, ourselves in the mirror at 3 AM when the pills have worn off and we’re wondering who the hell […]
Read
Industries 2013
I stand there in the damp brick corridors of Fort Point with a camera and Shakespeare’s murder ballad echoing off Civil War-era walls, and I start to understand something about why I do this stupid, beautiful thing called documentation. Not because theater needs more goddamn photos. But because Ava and her company decided to stage […]
Read
Industries 2013
Margaret Tedesco Cameo. Nights, and Night Margaret Tedesco sits in a semi-dark room and watches entire feature-length films with the sound off and the projection blocked by her own body, then just tells you what she’s seeing, not the plot, not the names, just “she walks across the room, he touches the wall, they stand in blue light, […]
ReadIndustries 2013
Marcia Farquhar once performed a thirty-hour monologue, thirty goddamn hours of talking, which is longer than most people can stay awake, longer than most marriages last, longer than anyone should have to listen to anyone else under any circumstances. She called it The Omnibus because apparently she wanted to get everything in there, the whole messy sprawl of whatever […]
Read
Industries 2013
They asked me to document a site specific performance piece called Out of Water at Fort Funston for the Performance Studies international conference. Fort Funston… where the cliffs give up and the Pacific takes over. Helen Paris and Caroline Wright had assembled the whole apparatus: commissioned sound scores, UK sopranos, singers and swimmers spread across […]
Read
Industries 2013
Aleta Hayes, Signing in The Room Performance Studies international conference Stanford University Aleta Hayes took the Goldilocks story, you know, breaking and entering, eating someone’s porridge, napping in their bed, and turned it into a solo dance-song cycle about trespassing as sacred practice. She’s got koken with her, those “invisible” stagehands from Japanese theater who […]
Read
Industries 2013
Performance Studies Stanford University hosting the Performance Studies international conference #19. I was very careful not to use film or video to record most of the performances, because I think most people, then, were not sophisticated enough to look at a video or film and necessarily understand that they were not seeing the real thing, […]
Read
Industries 2013
I’ve seen a lot of people try to stare down the void and most of them blink, but performance artist Julie Tolentino doesn’t blink, she opens her mouth, that perfect O, same shape your lips make when you’re about to come or about to die (which might be the same fucking thing), and she just […]
ReadIndustries 2013
There’s this guy Luciano Chessa, Italian, classically trained at Bologna’s conservatory, PhD from UC Davis, teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory, and he’s here at the Performance Studies International conference making a goddamn piano sing like it’s possessed by the ghost of Luigi Russolo himself. He’s performing Variazioni su un Oggetto di Scena, Variations on […]
Read
Industries 2013
What the hell are you supposed to say about photographing Guillermo Gomez-Peña that doesn’t immediately become part of the problem? The minute you start explaining, contextualizing, footnoting the fucking thing, you’re doing exactly what his work exists to detonate, the impulse to contain, to translate, to make the raw and impossible thing safe for academic […]
Read
Industries 2013
Institutional death rituals: make no mistake, that’s what this was, a four-day wake for a building that would come back Botoxed and unrecognizable, they reveal everything about what we pretend culture is versus what it actually fucking is. But there is something almost pornographic about watching an institution mourn its own temporary absence, you know? […]
Read
Industries 2013
Ann Carlson The Symphonic Body in Bing Concert Hall The Symphonic Body is a performance made entirely from gestures. It is a movement based orchestral work performed by people from across the Stanford University campus. Instead of instruments, individuals in this orchestra perform gestural portraits based on the motions of their workday. These portraits are […]
Read
Industries 2013
“Our job may be to open up a temporary utopian/distopian space, a de-militarized zone in which meaningful “radical” behavior and progressive thought are hopefully allowed to take place, even if only for the duration of the piece. In this imaginary zone, both artist and audience members are given permission to assume multiple and ever changing […]
ReadIndustries 2012
[Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will Ten hours. Ten plus hours. And for what? To watch someone refuse separation, refuse the neat severing of this […]
Read
Industries 2012
Underground venues are a photographer’s nightmare. The light’s always wrong, some amber wash from a single gel, maybe a practical lamp someone dragged in from their living room, and darkness everywhere else. Viracocha is no exception. I’m fumbling with ISO settings, knowing most shots are gonna have grain like sandpaper, trying to find an angle […]
Read
Industries 2012
What gets me is how performance becomes the only honest medium for dealing with governmental dishonesty. You’re creating something live, ephemeral, something that by its very nature can’t be perfectly preserved or controlled, the exact opposite of Nixon’s paranoid recording compulsion. There’s something genuinely radical about taking the most documented presidency in history up to […]
Read
Industries 2012
Let My People Go isn’t some polite meditation on mortality. This is Astrid Bas standing in a room and saying: here are two women who made extraordinary things and then they were gone. One chose to go. One had that choice ripped away from her in the most obscene way human beings have ever devised. Sarah […]
Read
Industries 2012
Look, there’s a violence to beauty this complete, this unrelenting. You stand there among these temples (thousands of them, no bullshit, actual thousands) rising out of the dust like broken teeth in some ancient god’s jaw, and the whole damned thing refuses to comfort you with meaning. It just is. Stupas and pagodas crumbling in […]
ReadIndustries 2011
Niki Ulehla’s jewelry and small puppets are about control and the illusion of it. She’s making something so fucking small that you have to pay attention, they demand you slow down and actually see them. In a world screaming at maximum volume, Niki’s working in whispers. These aren’t just tiny baubles or pocket-sized marionettes. They’re a middle […]
Read
Industries 2011
These photographs. Bodies bent, faces caught mid transmission, that particular quality of light that happens when people stop performing and start doing. This is what happens when you take two traditions that refused to lie and smash them together in a room in San Francisco. Look at that close up, the woman’s face split open […]
Read
Industries 2011
The title: I Am America. As if the work itself is saying, this howling, this reaching for something beyond commerce and comfort and the whole sick machinery, this is what America actually is when you strip away everything false. And the Workcenter doing Ginsberg in a gym, that quintessentially American space of humiliation and aspiration, […]
Read
Industries 2011
Vericocha… is dying. Not in some romantic, poetic way, but in the way all good spaces in the Mission are dying now, rent creeping up, city breathing down their neck, same old San Francisco story of things that matter getting squeezed out for things that pay. It’s one of those spots you walk past a […]
Read
Industries 2011
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is not a squat, not a nightclub, not someone’s living room where furniture gets shoved against the walls and something unrepeatable happens at 3:12 AM. It’s a museum. White walls, institutional lighting, the whole architecture of cultural legitimacy. And somehow, impossibly, the Workcenter agreed to bring Electric Party […]
ReadIndustries 2011
It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids. Hunter S. Thompson I don’t know what the fuck I expected. You show up at a museum, they hustle you into an elevator, and suddenly you’re trapped in a metal box with strangers while someone’s doing something that might […]
Read
Industries 2008
What strikes you first isn’t the exotic otherness or the golden pagodas catching light like they’re trying to blind God himself. It’s the faces. Christ, those faces. They’re not performing for the lens; they’re just there, existing in that specific frequency of humanity that only emerges when people have learned to live under the boot […]
Read