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, and I caught the moment when something sacred punched through the profane. That’s not just ironic, that’s cosmically correct.
Because Ginsberg was always trying to make the sacred scream at street level, right? “Moloch whose buildings are judgment!” He wanted to grab American commerce and conformity by the throat and shake some kind of mystic truth loose. And Grotowski’s people, Mario and the Open Program crew, they’re after the same impossible thing: the moment when the performer stops performing and becomes a live wire, when technique dissolves and you’re just watching someone burn themselves down to find something real underneath all the cultural scar tissue.
My photographs wrestle with the central problem: how do I document a thing that exists specifically to resist documentation? These aren’t actors playing at transformation. They’re using songs, shouts, those calls from the American South (which carry their own freight of pain and transcendence) to actually do something to themselves and anyone watching who’s brave enough to stay open.
Stanford University’s Roble Gym becomes this accidentally perfect space for it. No theatrical pretense, no velvet curtain between the sacred and the sweaty. Just people in a room where bodies have been pushed to their limits in a hundred different ways, now being pushed toward some other kind of limit entirely. The walls have seen competition; now they’re seeing something that makes competition look like a child’s game.
The photographs become evidence of something that can’t be fully captured, which might be exactly what they should be. Proof that it happened, that people still try to burn away the bullshit in front of strangers, that there’s still space in this country for the kind of raw, uncompromised seeking that both Ginsberg and Grotowski insisted was not just possible but necessary.
