At first, when you unlock the studio door, when you pull out the brushes or the charcoal or whatever the hell you’re working with that day, it’s packed in there. Every single person you’ve ever known is crammed into that space with you. Your first music teacher who said you had potential but lacked discipline, that pretentious bastard. That friend who makes blockbuster films while you can barely upload a video onto YouTube. The entire art world, the galleries, the collectors, the other artists whose shows you pretend not to care about while secretly wanting to burn their studios down, all of them standing there, judging. And your own ideas about the work, about what you think you’re making, what it’s supposed to say, they’re there too, the loudest motherfuckers in the room.
But you keep showing up. You keep making marks and scraping them off and making them again, because what else are you going to do? This is the gig. And slowly, so slowly you don’t even notice at first, they start to leave. Your teacher walks out. Your friend splits. Even the art world gets bored and wanders off to the next shiny thing. The concept you came in with, the one you were so certain about? It dissolves like it was never there at all.
And then it’s just you. Alone with the mess and the light coming through the window and the quiet, that beautiful, terrifying quiet.
And if you’re very very lucky, if you’ve earned it, if you’ve put in the time and didn’t quit when it got ugly and painful, eventually even you leave. There’s just the work. Nothing else.
And maybe, if the universe is smiling, that’s enough.
Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1932—back when America thought it had figured out what it wanted to be—she got out. Did the expected thing first: BFA from Bowling Green, MFA from UCLA. But then she did what artists who actually give a damn do: she went to Paris in 1966, to Atelier 17, that legendary print studio where Stanley William Hayter had been churning out revolutionaries: Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Phillips. She studied with Philip Guston and Robert Blackburn in New York, soaking up abstract expressionism when it meant something, when it could hurt you, change your state of being.
By 1971, she landed at UC Santa Cruz—not to coast, but to build. She established the printmaking department there. Trained generations of artists who remembered her name, who came back to see her long after they’d graduated because she was the real thing. A true Professor a true Artist. She retired in 1992, but retirement for Kay just meant she could finally create what she wanted, when she wanted.
And what she wanted was the wetlands. Those muddy, misunderstood, criminally overlooked stretches of southern Santa Cruz County that most people drive past without a second thought. She’d haul her easel out there with her painter friends—Mary Warshaw, Marta Gaines—and chase the light. Plein air in most seasons, “though not all weather,” as she’d say, because even Kay had limits.
Her work ended up where it deserved to be: the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Monterey Museum of Art. Museums in France kept her prints. The Triton Museum gave her a posthumous solo show in 2019 because even dead, her work demands attention.
But here’s the thing about Kay: she didn’t just paint the wetlands—she fought for them. Served on the board of Watsonville Wetlands Watch, helped publish their book, got her hands dirty in the actual work of conservation. She understood something most artists miss: you can’t just aestheticize a place and call it love.
You have to show up. You have to protect it. Give more than take.
She was political. Engaged. A deep thinker who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, which today is usually code for “she made people uncomfortable,” which is another way of saying she told the truth, her truth.
Kay Metz died in Santa Cruz in 2018. She was 86. She left behind students who became artists, wetlands that stayed wild, a beautiful 1925 Craftsman Bungalow and Art Studio that my family is privileged to call home, and paintings that understood something fundamental about light and landscape and the spaces in between that most of us never see.
There are moments that crystallize in memory like amber, perfectly preserved, weightless, eternal. This image of mine, caught between heartbeats that yesterday appeared in a SF Chronicle story, holds one of those moments: Adji and Alonzo in their element, light streaming through studio windows like benediction.
For me, these days, a good photograph isn’t really about what I see, but what i remember feeling when the shutter clicked. The way morning light cut across the floor. The sound of breathing between movements. The electric quiet that fills a room when artists are completely, utterly present.
Sometimes the universe conspires to put you in exactly the right place, with exactly the right people, at exactly the right moment. You don’t plan for grace, you just try to be ready when it arrives and move on when it’s gone. You let it go. Because that’s the deal, beauty doesn’t owe you anything, least of all permanence.
I’ve been places. I’ve seen things. I’ve eaten meals that cost more than my first car and stood in front of art that makes you question everything you thought you knew about beauty.
None of it, and I mean none of it, comes close to watching Charlie tear ass through the garden like he’s being chased by something wonderful. That laugh, that pure, unfiltered joy when you’re gaining on him and he knows it and doesn’t care because the game is everything. The way he throws his whole body into running, no technique, no form, just go go go.
You spend your whole life chasing something, the girl, the shot, the moment, the perfect light, the thing that matters. And then your kid is running circles around a shed in the morning light and you realize: this is it. This was always it. The rest was just noise.
I chase him. He squeals. The light is golden. And for maybe thirty seconds, nothing else exists. No deadlines, no declining cities, no art diva bullshit. Just a kid who hasn’t learned yet that the world can be heavy, and a father trying to remember what that felt like.
That’s the whole game right there. Everything else is just killing time until our next run through the garden.
Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden.
This photography and performance bibliography isn’t a reading list, it’s a goddamn intervention into how we fool ourselves about what it means to witness anything at all. Call it a photography theory bibliography if you need the institutional fig leaf, but this documenting performance bibliography is here to gut the lie of neutral observation.Azoulay opens the whole thing up with this radical proposition that photography isn’t some neutral tech-magic trick but a contract, a civil pact between everyone involved: the photographer, the photographed, the viewer, the whole apparatus. You think you’re just looking at pictures? Wrong. You’re implicated, complicit, responsible. Butler’s three entries hammer this home, speech acts, torture, war, outrage, showing how photography as performance doesn’t just represent violence, it performs it, circulates it, makes it politically operational in ways that should scare the shit out of you.
And Schneider and Taylor? They’re arguing that the real action isn’t in the frozen frame but in the doing, the performing, the embodied memory that a photograph can only ever fail to capture completely. The archive versus the repertoire, one’s the dead storage of colonial knowledge, the other’s the living transmission of what actually happened in bodies and spaces. This is where documentation stops being about preserving and starts being about continuing.
Then McLuhan and Peters drop in to remind you that the medium isn’t just the message, it’s the entire circulatory system through which meaning bleeds out and mutates. Kember and Zylinska push this further, mediation isn’t something that happens to life, it’s how life persists, evolves, refuses fixity. Ritchin’s looking at the digital rupture, what happens after photography eats itself and becomes something else entirely.
The procedural turn, Daston, Galison, Burgin, Bolton, these cats understood that before the image is an image, it’s a series of choices, apparatuses, institutional frameworks. Objectivity isn’t discovered, it’s constructed through elaborate performances of neutrality. Every photograph is already an argument about what counts as evidence, what deserves to be seen, who gets to decide, in this case… me.
Chouliaraki and Sontag bring the ethical hammer down: what does it do to us, this constant diet of suffering at a distance? Sontag’s skeptical of easy empathy, Scarry’s tracking how pain unmakes language and world simultaneously, and Hariman and Lucaites show how certain images become civic totems we use to tell ourselves who we are.
But Barthes, always Barthes, he’s the ghost at this feast, insisting on the punctum, that personal wound, the thing in the photograph that pierces you specifically. Berger’s right there with him, politicizing vision without losing the poetry.
This whole bibliography is asking: what if seeing isn’t passive?
What if every image is a demand, and we’ve been dodging the call?
Documenting Performance Bibliography
Documentation as Iterative Act
Azoulay, Ariella, Rela Mazali, and Ruvik Danieli. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Print.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Butler, Judith. “Photography, War, Outrage.” PMLA 120.3 (2005): 822-827. Print.
Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25.6 (2007): 951-966. Print.
Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.
Mediation, Circulation, and Relay
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Print.
Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print.
Kember, Sarah, and Joanna Zylinska. Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Print.
Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Print.
Burnett, Ron. Cultures of Vision: Images, Media, and the Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Print.
Photography as Procedure (Not Image)
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. “The Image of Objectivity.” Representations 40 (1992): 81-128. Print.
Bolton, Richard. The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Print.
Alvarado, Manuel, Edward Buscombe, and Richard Collins. Representation and Photography: A Screen Education Reader. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. Print.
Burnett, David, Robert Pledge, and Jacques Menasche. 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2009. Print.
Ethical Force Across Time
Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: SAGE Publications, 2006. Print.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Print.
Sontag, Susan. “Looking at War.” The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2002, pp. 82-98. Print.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.
Hariman, Robert, and John L. Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print.
Counter-Positions: Representation, Loss, and Fixity
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print.
Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Print.
Goldberg, Vicki. The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. Print.
Strauss, David L., and John Berger. Politica Della Fotografia. Milano: Postmedia Books, 2007. Print.
Francis Bacon painted the shit we’re all too chickenshit to admit we feel at 3 AM when the numbness wears off. Those screaming popes aren’t about religion or some art history circle jerk, they’re about power eating itself alive, about the cage we’re all trapped in whether we’re wearing purple vestments or a stained t-shirt.
He took Velázquez’s smug Renaissance prince and ripped his face off to show us what’s underneath all that authority: pure, howling terror. The mouth open like a wound. And Francis Bacon did it fifty times because once wasn’t enough, because the scream doesn’t stop just because you captured it.
He painted meat because we ARE meat, beautiful rotting gorgeous meat, and all our pretensions about the soul and dignity are just curtains we hang to pretend we’re not livestock. Those transparent cages in Francis Bacon’s paintings? That’s the social contract. That’s civilization.
I can see right through the bars but I’m still stuck inside.
Bacon was a sadomasochist, a drunk, a magnificent disaster who somehow channeled all that damage into something that makes me feel less alone in my own damage. His figures writhe and dissolve because that’s what it feels like to be human when the lies are striped away. No redemption, no hope, no bullshit, just the raw fact of existence screaming back at me from a purple void.
Charlie’s first time on a sailboat. Monterey Bay at sunset. Three years old and already braver than his old man.
Here’s something to know when you take your kid out on the water for the first time: you’re terrified. Not of the ocean, I know the ocean, respect it, understand that it doesn’t give a shit about my feelings or my careful planning. I’m terrified of being the father who fucks this up. Who makes him scared of something beautiful. Who ruins the moment by being too cautious or too reckless or too whatever inadequacy I’m carrying around that day.
But there he is. Sunset light turning everything gold and impossible. The wind’s steady, the boat’s heeling just enough to feel alive, and Charlie’s looking out at the water like he’s seeing the world for the first time. Which, in a way, he is. This is his first time understanding that the horizon is not just a line but a promise. That movement can be silent. That wind has power.
Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all. Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman got it: “Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only.” Easy to say when you’re writing poetry, harder when you’ve got a three-year-old who can’t swim yet and his whole life ahead of him and you’re responsible for not being the asshole who traumatizes him before he’s old enough to have real memories.
But here’s the thing: he’s not scared. I’m scared. He’s just… present. Taking it in. The way kids do before we teach them to be afraid of everything, to calculate risk, to worry about all the things that could go wrong instead of just experiencing the thing that’s happening right now.
Monterey Bay at sunset is one of those places that makes you believe in something bigger than yourself, even if you don’t know what that something is. The kelp forests below, the whales that sometimes surface, the cold Pacific water that’s been traveling for thousands of miles just to arrive here, now, at this exact moment when my son is seeing it for the first time.
I’m thinking about all the times I almost didn’t do this. All the reasons not to: too young, too risky, too much could go wrong. All the ways fear masquerades as prudence. All the moments I could have stolen from him by being too careful, too worried, too convinced that my job is to protect him from everything instead of showing him how to navigate it.
The boat heels. Charlie laughs. That’s it. That’s the whole story. A three-year-old laughing because the boat’s tipping and the wind’s blowing and the water’s rushing past and none of the rules that govern his small contained life on land apply out here.
“Reckless O soul, exploring.” Yeah. Reckless. Taking a toddler sailing. Believing that he needs this, needs to feel small against something vast, needs to understand that the world is bigger and stranger and more beautiful than the confines of his bedroom or his backyard. Reckless to think that a father who’s made every mistake possible might somehow get this one thing right.
But the light’s fading now, turning everything purple and pink, and Charlie’s still watching the water, still taking it in, and I’m thinking: this is what I’m supposed to give him. Not safety, safety’s a lie we tell ourselves. But this. Experience. The understanding that the world is worth exploring even when, especially when, you don’t know what you’re doing.
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 media contacts, this is when we gather in a concert hall to watch swans and elephants and kangaroos rendered in flesh and verse.
The irony isn’t lost on me. It never is.
I’m trying to capture something. Something that might matter when we look back at this moment, this strange liminal space between one version of America and whatever fresh hell or hope was coming next. I’m watching bodies communicate what words had long since failed to convey. Grace under pressure. Discipline. The small miracle of humans doing something difficult and beautiful just because they can.
Stanford’s intelligentsia filling the seats, stealing an hour or so from their electoral anxiety to watch art do what art does, remind us we’re more than our worst impulses, our Twitter feeds, our red-or-blue team jerseys.
The performers don’t mention the elephant in the room. They embody elephants instead. Smart. Honest. The only sane response, really.
Carnival of the Animals Wendy Whelan, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Francesca Harper October 27, 202 Stanford Live Bing Concert Hall
Here’s what happened when the Duke walked into God’s house with a swing band and told the congregation to get off their knees:
September 1965, Grace Cathedral, and Duke Ellington’s bringing the whole damn orchestra into this Gothic pile of stone and righteousness like he’s staging a raid on heaven itself. Not asking permission. Not apologizing. Just rolling in with Harry Carney’s baritone sax and that whole gorgeous wall of sound and saying, yeah, we’re going to talk to God now, and we’re going to do it in 4/4 time.
Sacred music… it’s supposed to move you, supposed to grab you by the throat and shake something loose in your chest. The Europeans figured out how to do it with pipe organs big enough to fill a cathedral with sound that pins you to the pew. Duke just said, well, what if we did that but made you want to dance? What if the holy spirit showed up in a rhythm section?
I spent years touring with Lee Breuer’s Gospel at Colonus, and I watched it happen every single night. Saw audience members catch the spirit like it was contagious, and it was contagious. You’d see it start in one person, this involuntary movement, this opening up, and then it would ripple through the house. People who came in buttoned up and skeptical would be on their feet, crying, shouting, completely undone by what the music was doing to them. I once knew a woman who would have an orgasm when she heard Beethoven’s Fifth live at the symphony. Not metaphorically. Actually. The music would take her body somewhere her mind couldn’t follow. That’s not entertainment. That’s not even performance. That’s something older and more dangerous than either of those things. That’s ecstasy in the original sense, standing outside yourself because the sound won’t let you stay where you are.
Watch the faces in that cathedral audience. That’s the look of people realizing their whole framework just got detonated. Because here’s Ellington, this elegant genius who could have played it safe his whole career, who could have kept jazz in the nightclubs where white America felt comfortable with it, and instead he’s claiming this space. Not as a novelty. Not as some cultural outreach program. As a rightful heir to the whole tradition of humans making noise to touch something bigger than themselves.
The clergy’s sitting there in their vestments, probably spent weeks debating whether this was appropriate, whether you could really worship with a trombone section, whether letting jazz through those doors would somehow dilute the mystery. And Duke’s answering them without saying a word: this is prayer. This is devotion. This swagger, this joy, this complicated syncopated beauty, this is what it sounds like when humans try to speak in a language bigger than words.
I’m still hung up on Poulet, Bachelard, and Barthes, specifically that Sur Racine moment when they briefly gathered under what they called the Geneva School of existential phenomenology. The name sounds like something you’d find scratched into a bathroom stall in some Left Bank shithole, and maybe that’s fitting. But the work matters, pulls at me like a song I heard once at 4 a.m. that I’ve been trying to remember ever since. Here’s what keeps dragging me back: these guys had almost zero interest in actual theater (Barthes being the exception), and yet their criticism is absolutely soaked in theatrical logic. They were writing theater without admitting it, which makes it realer somehow.
Take Poulet. His whole method is about inhabitation, about entering what he calls the authorial cogito. You surrender your own moment in time to think as Racine thinks. This isn’t interpretation as some grad school parlor trick, some puzzle you crack to impress your dissertation committee. This is interpretation as a durational event, a sustained occupation of another consciousness. You move in. You unpack. You let their furniture rearrange your skull. Bachelard works differently but arrives somewhere similar. He treats imagination not as expression but as architecture, building interior worlds room by room, image by image, each one activated in time by whoever’s paying attention. Before Barthes even gets around to shattering the whole notion of the unified author, these critics are already treating consciousness as something that unfolds, collides, withdraws. Something alive. Something with teeth.
Their analyses don’t read like arguments. They read like performances. Consciousness, in their writing, becomes this mutable field, a space with boundaries that won’t hold still, where images appear, loop back, crash into each other. Vision matters. Rhythm matters. Duration matters. This is theater whether they cop to it or not. A performance happens inside whoever’s reading: images hit their marks, miss them completely, return changed. All of it unfolding in time and darkness, like some song stuck in your head that mutates every time it cycles through.
Barthes eventually just admits the theatricality. His shift away from the unified author toward plurality, grain, pleasure, that’s not abandoning phenomenology. That’s re-staging it. Meaning stops living in some single consciousness you can inhabit and starts living in the event of reading itself, in that live encounter between text and whoever picked up the book. Where Poulet wants coherence, Barthes introduces drift. Where Bachelard constructs rooms, Barthes opens trapdoors and watches you fall.
I don’t think of imagination as something you do. I think of it as somewhere you go. A room with its own weather, its own quality of light. When I work on a play, I’m treating the theater itself as consciousness made physical, a space built to hold and transform psychological processes. A dramatic text isn’t some idea waiting to be illustrated, isn’t a thesis looking for visual aids. It’s a mind under pressure, organized by rhythm, obsession, what it can’t quite say, what it wants too badly. It’s not pure expression. It’s form doing damage control. It’s someone trying not to scream who screams anyway.
Directing is an act of assimilation. I absorb the virtual consciousness embedded in the text, but not through identification. Identification is narcissistic, a mirror game that kills everything interesting about difference. I’m not projecting myself onto the text like some bore at a party making everything about them. You know who you are. I’m creating space inside my own head for the text’s logic to operate. I open the door. I say, come in, burn the place down if that’s what needs to happen. In rehearsal, that logic mutates. It gets bodies, breath, resistance. What comes out the other end isn’t fidelity. It’s variation. A new consciousness assembled from the collision of playwright and director, warped further by designers, actors, the limitations of the room itself. What emerges is bastard consciousness. Hybrid and dangerous and beautiful.
The spectator comes last. If the ideal spectator even exists (I’m not convinced, though I’d love for you to prove me wrong), they don’t receive a message. They receive a situation. What lands isn’t the play but a layered transmission: the playwright’s consciousness filtered through mine, bent again through performance. Consciousness as turducken, excessive and unstable and impossible to fully process. You leave queasy, which means something worked.
Barthes gets closest to naming what happens to the spectator in Leaving the Movie Theater, which is, sidebar, my undergrad film theory students’ favorite essay every quarter. Spectatorship there isn’t about absorption or interpretation. It’s about residue. You don’t exit with meaning locked down. You exit with your consciousness slightly altered, dulled, overexposed, drifting back into the social world at a weird angle. What matters isn’t what you understood. What matters is what won’t leave you alone. What’s in your bloodstream now. Spectatorship as temporal fallout, as consciousness after impact instead of consciousness at attention. Theater, like cinema, does its real work not in the moment you’re focused but in the uneven dispersal afterward. You walk out into the street and the light’s different. Something shifted.
For clarity’s sake, I work with a stripped-down model: three subjects. Playwright, director, audience. This isn’t some ontological truth. It’s a heuristic, a way of tracking how consciousness moves through theatrical form. In reality, every pole fractures instantly. Playwrights are never singular, directors answer to institutions, audiences never cohere into anything unified. But the abstraction lets me ask one precise question: how does subjectivity travel? How does one consciousness reach another without colonizing it, without erasing what makes it separate, without pretending we’re not fundamentally alone in our skulls?
The question matters because I’m not interested in identification. Identification is safe. It’s a mirror game. It’s dead on arrival. Assimilation is riskier, requires hospitality, requires opening yourself to foreign psychological processes without any guarantee of harmony. Sometimes the text refuses entry. Sometimes it colonizes you. Sometimes it cracks open fault lines in your thinking you didn’t know existed. Failure isn’t the problem. Failure is proof something real is happening, proof you’re actually in the room with something that has its own life independent of you.
This is where contemporary theory gets complicated. Hans Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theater sees the collapse of unified perspective but often evacuates subjectivity completely, replaces consciousness with systems and effects. Structure with nobody home. Rancière gives us the emancipated spectator but still treats perception as political arrangement rather than phenomenological event. Blau, and I absolutely adore this guy, gets closest when he describes the audience as constitutively missing itself, always out of sync with its own experience. What these frameworks sometimes lack is an account of what it actually feels like for consciousness to move through theatrical time. The sensation. The vertigo. The fact of it in your body.
Phenomenology, for all its blind spots and limitations, gives us that account, especially when you let it be theatrical instead of forcing it to stay theoretical and pure. Theater doesn’t represent consciousness. It stages consciousness. It builds conditions where subjectivities collide without merging, where assimilation is temporary and unstable, where imagination becomes somewhere we enter together but never occupy the same way. We’re there together but we’re not having the same experience. Alone together, which might be the most honest thing two consciousnesses can be.
That instability is the entire point. It’s hospitable. It’s dangerous. It’s the only way any of this works. You have to risk getting lost. You have to risk the text changing you more than you change it. You walk into the darkness not knowing who you’ll be when the lights come up.
