Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.
Jerry Saltz
The Cantor sits there on Stanford’s campus like every other institutional temple to dead things under glass, all that marble and hush and carefully calibrated light designed to make you whisper and feel appropriately small. The architecture itself is violence. It says this matters and you don’t in the same breath. It’s the deal we make: come gaze at beauty, but know your place.
So when Aleta Hayes brings Chocolate Heads into that space, when she puts actual living, breathing, moving bodies among the statues and carefully preserved fragments of other people’s civilizations, something breaks open.
Fashion Fable. Even the title refuses to genuflect. Not “Response to the Permanent Collection” or some other academically neutered horseshit. Fashion. Fable. Two words that admit their own artifice, that know they’re putting on a show, and don’t apologize for it.
The photographs catch these moments: a dancer’s body curved against a sculpture, muscle and stone in conversation. Another figure suspended mid-leap in a gallery designed for contemplation, not kinesis. These aren’t dancers performing for the art. They’re performing with it, against it, through it. The museum wants stillness. The dance says fuck your stillness.
There’s that Saltz quote about museums as wormholes, as ecstasy machines. Yeah. Okay. But you have to earn it. You have to break through the institutional membrane first, that thing that makes museums feel like mausoleums, like the past is dead and untouchable rather than something still happening in how you move through space.
Site-specific dance refuses the black box theater, refuses safe distance. It says: right here, right now, in this place that wasn’t designed for this, we’re going to make something that couldn’t exist anywhere else. The space isn’t neutral. The space is the point. The friction between what the Cantor is (that hushed temple to cultivation and old money and proper appreciation) and what the dancers do in it creates something neither could achieve alone.
You can see it in these frames. Bodies that are Black, that are here, claiming space in an institution that historically hasn’t exactly rolled out the welcome mat. Not making a speech about it. Just being. Moving. Existing with a physicality that refuses to be polite or quiet or tasteful. The performance becomes haunting in reverse: not ghosts in the gallery, but life asserting itself against the museum’s impulse toward death.
And I am here documenting it. This kind of work is vapor. It happens once, then it’s gone. The photographs are evidence that something real happened, that made those galleries less like tombs for junior and more like actual ecstasy machines.
The realness is in the bodies’ refusal to be artifacts. In the way movement disrupts the museum’s carefully constructed narrative of permanence. In how for one night the Cantor became a little less sure of itself, a little more alive.
Nobody tells you this about making art in institutional spaces: the institution is never neutral. It’s always fighting you, always trying to absorb and neutralize what you’re doing. The only way to win is to make something so present, so now, so undeniably here that the building can’t swallow it.
Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads performing a site specific dance, Fashion Fable, at the Cantor Museum, Stanford University.