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 kind of beautiful fuck-you to the whole enterprise of museumification.
Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? Not the dance itself, though Christ, the dance, bodies moving in that ultraviolet glow, every white surface suddenly phosphorescent, electric, the institutional space transformed into something that pulses and breathes and refuses to sit still in its frame. But the audacity of putting bodies, sweating, striving, uncontainable human bodies, into a space designed to keep everything at arm’s length, behind velvet ropes and climate control.
Museums, whatever their content, are logical design arenas. Their renewed vitality reflects a spreading curatorial perception that a museum is a designed situation more than it is a warehouse open to the public. This in turn has made it possible for a great many people, including children, to perceive museum-going as something to do, rather than something that is done to you.
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Caplan says museums are “designed situations” now, not warehouses. Fine. But what Aleta does is redesign the design, breaking the fourth wall between the art and the artifact, between what you’re supposed to look at and what you’re supposed to be. The black light doesn’t just illuminate, it transforms. It makes everything fluorescent and strange. The white of teeth and eyes suddenly the brightest thing in the room. The architecture dissolves. The hierarchy of sightlines collapses.
Maybe you can’t just see this performance, you have to be inside it, complicit in it. The dancers aren’t on a stage you can politely observe from your seat. They’re among the Rodins and the antiquities and whatever else Stanford’s hoarded in there, moving through the space like they own it. Because in that moment, in that darkness punctured by UV light, they do own it.
This is what art does when it refuses to be well-behaved. When it insists on its own aliveness in a place built to preserve the dead.