Heterogeneous Spectacles(Jamie Lyons News) ❖ Jamie Lyons

Heterogeneous Spectacles

Euripides The Man Who Knows

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 it, leaving us with these weird little textual breadcrumbs.

We’re wiping down our groceries with Clorox wipes like they’re contaminated evidence. Toilet paper has become a luxury item, a currency more valuable than cash.

The piece? I’m calling it The Man Who Knows. Which is either pretentious as hell or exactly the kind of cosmic joke we need right now, I haven’t decided yet.

It’s part of this larger project, IOTA, where I’m basically playing archaeological grave robber with the shattered remains of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Taking these fragments, these orphaned sentences that somehow survived when everything around them burned, and jamming them into the contemporary landscape to see what happens. Environmental art meets public art meets whatever this is.

Sometimes you just have to put ancient Greek wisdom on a surfing statue during a pandemic and see if anyone notices.

The Fragment:

The man who knows how to heal well must look to the lifestyles of a city’s inhabitants and to their land when he examines their illnesses.

Mar 23, 2020 | Categories: Industries | Tags: Euripides, Santa Cruz, Site Specific Art, Site Specific Theatre, theatre photography / documentation | Leave A Comment »

Coronavirus: plague town extra in a dystopian film I never auditioned for

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.
Albert Camus, The Plague

So here we are. Day whatever-the-fuck of the new normal that isn’t normal at all. Just you, me, and that statue staring at nothing in particular, same as everyone else behind their windows, wondering if this is real or if we collectively mainlined some bad batch of reality.

Camus knew. The French always know about this shit, about how quickly the carnival shuts down, how fast the lights go out, how we’re all just stumbling around looking for meaning in the dark while pretending we’re not terrified.

Two weeks ago we were invincible. Immortal. Going about our little errands, our coffee runs, our meaningless meetings, our performances at BAMPFA. Then someone flipped the switch and suddenly we’re all plague-town extras in some dystopian film we never auditioned for. The streets empty like someone called last call on civilization itself.

And you can feel it, can’t you? That weird electricity in the air. Part terror, part relief. Like maybe we’d been waiting for permission to stop. To just… stop. Stop performing. Stop pretending. Stop moving. The machine finally seized up and we’re all standing around it like mechanics with no manual, no tools, just our bare fucking hands and this creeping realization that we never really knew how any of this worked in the first place.

The statue doesn’t care. Never did. It’ll stand there long after we’ve either figured this out or haven’t. That’s the thing about monuments, they’re built to outlast the people who built them, to witness their builders turn to dust, to mark time that doesn’t give a shit about any of us.

Pestilences and victims, Camus said. But here’s what he didn’t tell you: in between, there’s just this vast ocean of waiting. Of staring at walls. Of wondering if the people you love are okay. Of rationing your sanity like it’s toilet paper. Of realizing how much of your life was just motion for motion’s sake.
The plague doesn’t care about your plans, your ambitions, your carefully constructed identity. It just is. And we just are. And somewhere in that terrifying simplicity is something almost… pure? No. That’s not the word. Honest. Brutally, nakedly honest.

Mar 15, 2020 | Categories: Absolute Solipsism | Tags: Albert Camus, Public Art, Santa Cruz | Leave A Comment »

Sophocles Laocoön at BAMPFA

On the evening of March 9th, 2020, right before the world went to absolute shit, we’re doing something that has no business being as cool as it was. We staged a fragment of Sophocles‘ Laocoön at the Berkeley Art Museum. Berkeley. My first memories are from these streets, this place. Coming back here to do this? That meant something.

This is part of something called IOTA, this beautiful, slightly mad project where we’re resurrecting fragments, literally pieces, scraps of lost Greek tragedies. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Plays that have been gone for two thousand years, and we’re bringing them back, breathing life into the shadows.

Now, about Laocoön. Forget Virgil’s version for a minute: forget “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” forget the Trojan Horse. Sophocles had a darker, more personal story. His Laocoön was Apollo’s priest who fucked up in the most human way possible: he broke his vow of celibacy. Got married. Had kids. And Apollo, being the vengeful prick that gods tend to be, sent serpents that killed both his sons. But here’s the twist: Laocoön lives. He has to stand there and watch his children die because he dared to be human.

The play itself? Gone. What survives are fragments, references from other writers, vase paintings, echoes. But the story, the story had legs. It inspired that famous Hellenistic sculpture, the one that made El Greco and the Renaissance masters lose their minds.

The craftsmanship, the ambition of doing this, taking these broken pieces and making theater out of them, in the city where I first learned to see the world. That’s the kind of thing that reminds you why any of this matters.

The Fragment

And fire shines on the altar in the street
as it sends up a vapor from drops of myrrh,
exotic scents.

Poseidon, you who range over the capes of the Aegean
or in the depths of the gray sea rule over the windswept waters above the lofty cliffs…

And now at the gates stands Aeneas,
the son of the goddess,
carrying on his shoulders his father
with his linen robe
stained with the discharge
caused by the lightning,
and about him
the whole horde of his servants.
And with him follows a crowd,
you cannot imagine how great,
of those who are eager to take part
in this migration of the Phrygians.

When one is no longer weary, labors are delightful.

For one takes no account
of trouble that is in the past.

The Location

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive sits at 2120 Oxford Street in downtown Berkeley. Used to be a UC printing plant, the same one that printed the official UN Charter in 1945. The document that was supposed to prevent World War III, hammered out on industrial presses in right here.

In 2013, the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro came in and redesigned the whole space. These are the architects behind The High Line and the The Shed in New York City and The Broad in Los Angeles. They took this industrial workhorse of a building and turned it into a spectacular contemporary museum and film archive.

Collaborators:

Babatunji was breaking on street corners in Hilo at fifteen. Street corners. In Hawaii. Not some fancy conservatory with mirrors and barres and trust funds. And somehow that kid, moving his body to the beat in all the wrong places by all the right measures, ended up with Alonzo King and created something entirely his own. Ballet meets breaking meets contemporary meets hip hop.

Aleta Hayes started as a performer for Robert Wilson, Robert Wilson, the guy who makes theater that’s like watching glaciers if glaciers wore Armani and had something profound to say. You learn something working for a visionary like that. You learn that rules are just suggestions and that weird is a compass, not a warning. At Stanford she leads the Chocolate Heads Movement Band, interdisciplinary, multi-genre, all university words that usually mean nothing, but in Aleta’s case she’s done the work. Princeton, Tisch, the Sorbonne. She knows the rules well enough to break them properly. That’s the difference between rebellion and revolution.

What these two have in common is this: they understand that movement is language, that the body tells truths the mouth can’t, and that the best art comes from people who have traveled far from where they started and refused to forget the journey.

Sophocles Laocoön at BAMPFA

Mar 10, 2020 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: Site Specific Dance, Site Specific Theatre, Sophocles, theatre photography / documentation | Leave A Comment »

Laocoön Rehearsal at BAMPFA

If Morality was Christianity Socrates was the Saviour

יה [Jehovah] & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim
of Solomons Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact, or History of Ilium
      Art Degraded Imagination Denied War Governed the Nations
Evil
Good & Evil are
Riches & Poverty a Tree of
            Misery
      propagating
Generation & Death

The Gods of Priam are the Cherubim of Moses & Solomon: The Hosts
of Heaven
Without Unceasing Practise nothing can be done Practise is Art
If you leave off you are Lost

The Angel of the Divine Presence

מלאך יהוה [Angel of Jehovah]

ΟΦΙουΧος [Serpent-holder]

                  HEBREW ART is
            called SIN by the Deist SCIENCE
All that we See is Vision
from Generated Organs gone as soon as come
      Permanent in The Imagination; Considerd
            as Nothing by the
                  NATURAL MAN

What can be Created
Can be Destroyed
Adam is only
The Natural Man
& not the Soul
or Imagination

Good

לילית [Lilith]

Satans Wife The Goddess Nature is War & Misery & Heroism a Miser

      Spiritual War
Israel deliverd from Egypt
      is Art deliverd from
            Nature & Imitation

A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect : the Man
Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian
You must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art

The Eternal Body of Man is The IMAGINATION, that is God himself
The Divine Body } ישע [Yeshua] JESUS we are his
Members

            It manifests itself in his Works of Art (In Eternity All is Vision)
The True Christian Charity not dependent on Money (the lifes blood of Poor Families)
      that is on Caesar or Empire or Natural Religion
Money, which is The Great Satan or Reason
      the Root of Good & Evil
            In The Accusation of Sin

Prayer is the Study of Art Praise is the Practise of Art
Fasting &c. all relate to Art The outward Ceremony is Antichrist

Where any view of Money exists Art cannot be carried on, but War only
Read Matthew C X. 9 & 10v
by pretences to the Two Impossibilities Chastity & Abstinence Gods of the Heathen

He repented that he had made Adam
(of the Female, the Adamah)
& it grieved him at his heart

Art can never exist without
      Naked Beauty displayed
The Gods of Greece & Egypt were Mathematical
                  Diagrams
                  See Plato’s
                  Works

            Divine Union
      Deriding
And Denying Immediate
Communion with God
The Spoilers say
Where are his Works
That he did in the Wilderness
            Lo what are these
Whence came they
These are not the Works
Of Egypt nor Babylon
Whose Gods are the Powers
Of this World. Goddess, Nature.
Who first spoil & then destroy
Imaginative Art
For their Glory is
War and Dominion
Empire against Art See Virgils Eneid.
Lib. VI.v 848
For every
Pleasure
Money
Is Useless

      There are States
            in which. all
            Visionary Men
                  are accounted
                  90Mad Men
            such are
      Greece & Rome
      Such is
      Empire
or Tax
See Luke Ch 2.v l

Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists Their Works were destroyd by the
Seven Angels of the Seven Churches in Asia Antichrist Science
The unproductive Man is not a Christian much less the Destroyer

The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art
SCIENCE is the Tree of DEATH
            ART is the Tree
            of LIFE
            GOD
            is JESUS

The Whole Business of Man Is
The Arts & All Things Common
            No Secre
            sy in Art
What we call Antique Gems are the Gems of Aarons Breast Plate
110Christianity is Art & not Money
Money is its Curse
Is not every Vice possible to Man
      described in the Bible openly
All is not Sin that Satan calls so
      115all the Loves & Graces of Eternity

William Blake, c. 1826-7

Rehearsal for Sophocles‘ Laocoön
at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
using William Blake’s Laocoön as inspiration

Mar 09, 2020 | Categories: Speculation | Tags: Sophocles, theatre photography / documentation | Leave A Comment »

The last day of Fry’s Electronics Palo Alto

The Fry’s chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they’re gone for the day—if not the week—and can’t be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair.
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs.

The OG. The first Fry’s, before the empire, before the madness spread across the valley like some beautiful, doomed fever dream.

And they went Wild West with it.

Not ironically. Not in that winking, aren’t-we-clever way that makes you want to put your fist through drywall. They committed. Each location had its own thing, its own weird, ambitious theme park aesthetic… but this one? Saloon doors. Wooden facades. The whole cowboy fantasy, right there between the RAM modules and the HDMI cables.

It was absurd. It was perfect. It’s gone now, of course.

Fry’s Electronics Palo Alto

Jan 20, 2020 | Categories: Engineering | Leave A Comment »

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the frequently asked questions you’re gonna ask anyway so let’s get it over with, how I work, what this site-responsive crap actually means when it’s not grant-proposal poetry, where to catch a show if you care enough to look up from your phone, and why I shoot photos like some wire-service burnout instead of every other art-school casualty with a ring light and daddy issues. Zero bullshit. You want theory, go read October Magazine and hate yourself.

What’s your artistic approach?

I give a shit about the material. I give a shit about the people who show up. That’s it. That’s the secret. You make work that doesn’t insult anyone’s intelligence, you don’t price people out of the room like some Lincoln Center circlejerk, and you do it the same way every goddamn time because consistency isn’t boring, it’s called not being an asshole.

I also happen to think this matters. Not in some grant-application, save-the-world way, but actually matters. To people. To the planet we’re currently strip-mining for Instagram content.

The playbook goes something like this:

* Don’t lie to people. Trust them. They’ll know if you’re faking it.
* Do it better than you did it last time. Every time.
* No cutting corners. You know when you’re cutting corners. So does everyone else.
* Nobody makes anything alone. Stop pretending you’re the auteur genius.
* If it’s not broken, sure, break it. Try something. Fail interestingly.

How do I find out about shows?

There’s a thing at the top of the page. Or follow me on whatever social media hellscape you prefer. I’ll be there, hating myself for being there.

What does “Site Specific” mean?

The Guggenheim, which I’m sure you visit constantly, says it’s when an artist does something in a place, with a place, not just plops their usual shtick into a different zip code. The work and the location actually talk to each other. It’s about the room, the dirt, the history, the weird echo in the corner. Indoor, outdoor, whatever. The place matters.

That’ll do.

Why “Site Responsive”?

Because “site specific” started sounding like marketing copy the second MFA programs got hold of it.

Here’s what I mean: the place tells me what to make. Its ghosts, its architecture, what happened there before I showed up, that’s the material. We build everything from what’s already there. Each show is built for that room, that moment, those walls. You can’t just pack it up and do it somewhere else like a touring Broadway knock-off.

For SophoclesSinon, we built the Trojan Horse out of whatever we found on site. That’s not a gimmick. That’s the point.

How are you documenting this?

No Photoshop. No filters. No “elevated” the contrast to make it “pop.” I follow the press photographers’ code because they figured this out already: don’t lie.

The rules are simple and most people ignore them:

* Show what actually happened.
* Don’t let someone stage something and pretend you caught it.
* Give people context. The whole story.
* Don’t traffic in stereotypes. You’re better than that. I hope.
* Know your biases. You have them. I have them. Don’t pretend they’re not there.
* Treat people like human beings, not content.
* Document. Don’t interfere. Don’t become part of the story.
* Edit honestly. No manipulating images. No adding sound. No making it “better.”
* Respect what actually happened.

The moment happened. My job is to not fuck it up

Dec 20, 2019 | Categories: Absolute Solipsism | Tags: Notes | Leave A Comment »

There Is A Happiness That Morning Is

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 its utility. Meanwhile, misery just walks in the door. Depression needs no references. Despair is always pre-approved.

Look at this photos, three people in some black-box theater in San Francisco, making the case for what every animal on earth knows without thinking about it: that morning feels good, that being alive occasionally doesn’t suck, that sometimes, not always, not even often, but sometimes, there’s a reason to keep going that can’t be reduced to bullet points.

Blake knew the score two centuries ago. He saw them coming, all the future scolds and accountants and puritans who’d want to put love in the dock, who’d demand that beauty justify itself while ugliness gets a free pass. The ones who insist you explain why you’re not grinding yourself into paste for someone else’s profit margin.

And Maher, centuries later, still fighting the same fight. Still staging the same trial. Which tells you everything you need to know about how we’ve “progressed.” We’ve got better lighting and sound systems, but we’re still prosecuting the same crime: the crime of feeling something real without permission, without paperwork, without a goddamn whitepaper explaining the ROI of waking up and not wanting to die.

The indignant page. That’s what Blake called it. And that rage, that’s the tell. You only get indignant when something precious is under attack. When the barbarians aren’t at the gates, they’re inside, wearing badges, demanding you prove you have the right to experience a moment of grace.

Mickle Maher There Is A Happiness That Morning Is presented by Performers Under Stress.

Mickle Maher There Is A Happiness That Morning Is
Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason Street, San Francisco
Performers: Geo Epsilanty, Valerie Façhman and Scott Baker
Directed by Katja Rivera

Nov 07, 2019 | Categories: Industries | Tags: Performers Under Stress, theatre photography / documentation | Leave A Comment »

Autumnal Equinox

[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Do you get why I’d paddle out into the cold Pacific just south of Davenport on the exact day when the light tips into something else, when summer finally admits defeat and the whole goddamn world exhales?

That Stegner quote: “another fall, another turned page”, that’s the whole thing right there. This September feeling. Doesn’t matter if I’m not in school anymore, doesn’t matter if I haven’t cracked open a textbook in thirty years. My body remembers. Something in my DNA says: summer’s over, time to get serious, time to reckon with what I’ve been avoiding while I was drunk on sunshine and denial.

And so I go to ********. I go at dawn when the water’s slate-grey and unforgiving. Not because I’m punishing myself, but because there’s something honest about it. Something true. The equinox doesn’t give a shit about my problems, my deadlines, my existential dread about getting older. It just is. The waves just come. And for a few hours, that’s enough.

This is California’s dirty secret, not the tech billions or the wine country or the farm-to-table horseshit. It’s this: cold water, empty beaches, the ritual of suiting up when any sane person would stay in bed. That’s where the real locals live. That’s where you find something like grace.

Sep 23, 2019 | Categories: Adventure | Tags: Santa Cruz, surfing | Leave A Comment »

Frank Bacon

San Jose kid. Fourteen years old, he’s working a sheep ranch. Three years of dirt, animals, isolation. Then he apprentices with a photographer in San Jose. Learns the trade, opens his own studio. Four years of portraits, making people look good for posterity.

Gets bored. Moves into newspapers. San Jose Mercury News. Then buys The Napa Reporter. Starts The Mountain View Register. Tries running for public office a couple times. Loses. Nobody wants him.

Newspapers and politics aren’t doing it. So he goes back to San Jose, joins a stock theatre company. His words: “turned respectable and became an actor.”

What followed was decades of grinding. Stock. Repertoire. Vaudeville. Seventeen years at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco, over 700 parts. Seven hundred. Different character every week, sometimes multiple in a night.

1921, someone asks him about his acting theory. He says: “I don’t know anything. Learn all about acting and then forget it. Be natural. Believe in yourself.”

1906 earthquake hits. San Francisco’s done. He moves to New York.

Fourteen years later, he’s 54. Lightnin’, a play he’d been writing for forty years, finally gets produced. He stars in it himself.

It breaks every record. Eclipses everything Broadway’s ever seen. 1,291 consecutive performances. Three years and a day. George M. Cohan calls him America’s greatest character actor.

When it closes to go on the road, President Harding congratulates him. The mayor of New York and the U.S. Secretary of Labor lead a parade with the Police Band. Hundreds of actors escort him to Penn Station. They give him a championship belt, seriously… the world champion of playwriting and producing.

1922. 58. Dead.

His manager said it best: “A kindly man, of simple tastes, who gave much to the public and asked little in return. He really died on the Saturday night when he gave his last performance—and his greatest.”

Forty-four years of work. Four years of glory. That’s the ratio.

Sep 17, 2019 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: actors, Artists | Leave A Comment »

Chocolate Heads Bird’s Eye View

Chocolate Heads: Bird’s Eye View at the McMurtry Art Building (Stanford University) for the ACSA 2019 Fall Conference: Less Talk, More Action

Anybody will be able to observe how much more easily a painting,
and above all sculpture or architecture can be grasped in photographs than in reality.
Walter Benjamin

Sep 16, 2019 | Categories: Collusion | Tags: McMurtry Art Building, Stanford University | Leave A Comment »

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