Auguste Rodin Gates of Hell at Sunset (Stanford University)…
To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists.
Auguste Rodin and Paul Gsell. Art, Publisher Boston, Small, Maynard &
Co, 1912. Translated by Mrs. Romilly Fedden. p.7
Look at this. Just… look at this.
Lindsey… that face could stop traffic on Highway 1. The kind of beautiful that makes you forget what you were going to say. Natural, unforced, the real thing. And Sharka, with those soulful eyes, gorgeous in that way only dogs who’ve been loved properly can be.
Cheap wine in the coastal Bonny Doon tasting room in Davenport, where the world drops off into the Pacific and nobody’s pretending to be anything they’re not.
This is what matters. Not the Michelin stars or the Instagram-perfect moment. This, a stunning woman, a beautiful dog, wine that doesn’t lie to you. The kind of afternoon that reminds you why you’re alive.
Sometimes you stumble into perfection: the light, the company, the wine. Lindsey laughing, Sharka knowing exactly where she belongs. This is love. This is happiness.
I pray you, do not fall in love with me,
for I am falser than vows made in wine.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Resistance: Ars Technica editors Annalee Newitz and Joe Mullin speak to UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Lindsey Dillon about how the Trump administration has been removing scientific and environmental data from the Web.
The Fifth Circle
Interstate 5. The great American scar tissue running through California’s gut. You want to know what we are? What we’ve become? It’s all right here, stretched out under that merciless Central Valley sun for mile after goddamn mile.
You smell them before you see them. That’s the thing nobody tells you. The reek comes through your air conditioning, through your closed windows, through whatever mental defenses you’ve constructed to get you through the five-hour slog from LA to San Francisco. It’s the smell of ten thousand animals living where ten should, standing in their own shit, waiting to become the burger you’ll eat without thinking about it at some rest stop another hundred miles up the road.
And then you see it. The feedlot. Harris Ranch, or any of its brothers in industrial-scale animal misery. It goes on forever, a sprawling, dusty, Hieronymus Bosch nightmare of black and brown bodies packed into pens that stretch to the horizon. This is where your food comes from. This is the sausage factory. And yeah, you really don’t want to see how it’s made.
So I pull over. Because someone should look at this. Someone should bear witness to what we’ve decided is an acceptable price for $.99 hamburgers and all-you-can-eat steakhouses.
The white pickup comes fast. They always do. Guy gets out, young but sun-damaged, radio on his hip, and that particular American combination of authority and aggression that comes from a few years of telling people to move along, nothing to see here.
“You need to move on.”
I don’t. I’ve got my camera up. I’m framing it just right, the cattle, the pens, and there, in the distance, the fire. Because of course there’s a fire. California’s burning, has been burning, will keep burning, and here we are, raising methane factories in a tinderbox, because we’ve decided this is fine. This is all fine.
“I need you to leave. Now.”
He’s closer. The radio crackles. He’s letting someone know there’s a problem. That I’m being “difficult.” That’s what they call it when you refuse to look away, when you insist on seeing the thing they’ve spent millions of dollars and countless man-hours trying to hide from the Interstate, from the public, from anyone with a conscience and a camera.
I’m not moving. Not yet. I want this shot. I need the fire and the cattle and the sheer apocalyptic weight of it all in one frame. This is America. This is us. This is what we don’t want to see when we’re bombing down I-5 with our cruise control set at 85, our minds carefully blank, our music loud enough to drown out the cognitive dissonance.
He’s really close now. Close enough that I can see he’s not a bad guy. He’s just doing his job, a shitty job and he knows it. Protecting the brand. Protecting us from having to think too hard about where our food comes from and what it costs, not in dollars, but in suffering, in water, in dignity, in climate futures we’re pissing away one feedlot at a time.
Click.
I got it. The shot. The cattle. The fire. The whole rotting gorgeous horror of it.
The thing is, I’ll eat beef again. Hell my fingers still smell of the In and Out Double Double and French Fries. I’m not preaching. I’m not better than all this. But I saw it. I stopped. I looked. And for one moment on that burning highway, I refused to let someone tell me to move along, to stop seeing, to participate in the collective delusion that none of this is happening.
Not being able to escape is the most awful thing. I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It’s like…you’re just eating misery. You’re eating a bitter life.
Alice Walker
Here’s the thing about Burden’s forest of castiron streetlamps standing there like some municipal graveyard outside LACMA: it’s the kind of gorgeous, stupid, absolutely necessary gesture that makes you want to laugh and weep simultaneously. Two hundred and two vintage lampposts salvaged from the gutted streets of Los Angeles, arranged in rows like soldiers who’ve forgotten what war they were fighting. It’s pure American excess meeting accidental grace, which is maybe the only honest relationship America’s ever had with beauty.
This lamp will last 10,000 years. …
It’s such a weird idea, to make an object that is designed to be around for several thousand years. Nobody ever thinks in those terms anymore. At all. Do you know what I’m saying?
Chris Burden
There’s something almost obscene about that ambition, isn’t it? We’re talking about a species that can barely plan for next Tuesday, building monuments to a future we can’t even conceptualize. Instead of No Future, it’s screaming ALL THE FUTURE, EVERY FUTURE, FUTURES YOU CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE, while everything around it crumbles into planned obsolescence and quarterly earnings reports.
The piece works because it shouldn’t. These streetlamps are obsolete technology, discarded infrastructure, the bones of a city that ate itself and shit out freeways. But Burden takes this junk, this beautiful antiquated junk, and makes it sing. At night, when they’re all lit up, it becomes this impossible cathedral of light: not religious, not spiritual, just there, glowing like some fever dream of civic pride that Los Angeles never actually had.
What kills me is the innocence of it. The naive belief that permanence matters, that we should build things to last millennia when we’ve proven we can’t even maintain the things we’ve got. It’s ridiculous. It’s heartbreaking. It’s exactly what art should be: a beautiful, defiant middle finger to entropy itself.
John Warren Travis’ Design for Oedipus Rag
I’ve seen Greek tragedy done in every godforsaken venue from The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus to prosceniums that smell like 1950s cigarettes to black box theaters where you can hear the toilet flush from the dressing room, but there’s something absolutely primal, something that cuts through all the academic horseshit, about staging Sophocles in a chapel at Fort Mason. We’re taking this ancient story about a guy who literally can’t outrun destiny, and we’re jamming it into this liminal space between the sacred and the profane, between military history and contemporary art practice…. and that’s where the good stuff lives.
The thing about Anthony Burgess’ adaptation is that it doesn’t fuck around with false reverence. It’s got teeth. It knows that tragedy isn’t about feeling sorry for some ancient king. It’s about recognizing your own face in the wreckage. I sit in that chapel, those walls that have witnessed God knows how many confessions and prayers and desperate bargains with the universe, and I watch Oedipus realize he’s been sleeping with his mother, killed his father, and I think: Christ, we’re all just fumbling around in the dark, aren’t we? We’re all so goddamn sure we’re the heroes of our own stories until the moment we realize we’ve been the monster all along.
Fort Mason itself is this beautiful ruin, this ghost of military infrastructure reanimated as art space, which is maybe the most San Francisco thing imaginable. And here I am with Natty Justiniano, Tonyana Borkovi, Aleta Hayes, Muriel Maffre, all of them) doing what good theater does: making something ancient feel like a knife against your throat right now, in this moment, making the 2,500-year-old text breathe with contemporary urgency.
You want catharsis? This is how you get catharsis.
thank you Muriel Maffre, John Warren Travis, Nathaniel Justiniano, Tonyanna Borkovi, Aleta Hayes, Val Sinckler, Benjamin Cohn, Daniel Guaqueta, Amber Levine, Timothy Lee, Son Nguyen, Yula Montoya, Kellen Hoxworth, Becky Chaleff, Jeff Schwartz, San Francisco International Arts Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, and Museum of Performance + Design
I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in sacred spaces, but Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads turning Stanford’s Memorial Church into some kind of Byzantine hallucination hits different when that same building held my father’s memorial service. When my brother, who hated Stanford with a kind of pure contempt that honestly scared me, inexplicably chose to get married there anyway.
That’s the thing about these monuments to institutional grandeur: they collect your personal ghosts whether you want them to or not. The mosaic walls, all that gold-leaf reverence and architectural pomposity, suddenly become a stage for something that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. Aleta understands what few artists grasp: the friction between the profane and the divine, between family mythology and artistic intervention, isn’t a problem to solve, it’s the whole fucking point.
Bodies moving in that cavernous space, sound bouncing off stone that’s heard a thousand sermons about salvation, weddings, eulogies… and here comes performance that doesn’t give a shit about my comfort level or my memories.
There’s something almost violent in the honesty of it. What Aleta does with Chocolate Heads is create spectacle that matters, that uses every inch of that ornate space to ask uncomfortable questions about bodies, presence, and what we allow ourselves to witness when we gather together. The Church becomes complicit, its architecture framing the work like it was always meant for this kind of disruption.
Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does anything weird,
But the God who knows only four words.
And keeps repeating them, saying:
‘Come dance with me, come dance.’
Hafiz (translation by Daniel Ladinsky)
Memorial Church has historically been an important center of spiritual and ceremonial life at Stanford University since the church was dedicated in 1903. The Church is open to all, wherever you may be on your spiritual journey: University Public Worship, Sunday mornings at 10:00 am in this spectacular and sacred venue.
Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann
Featuring dance by Chocolate Heads
Oedipus and Tiresias (Nathaniel Justiniano and Tonyanna Borkovi) rehearsing for a site specific staged reading of Anthony Burgess’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus The King to be performed in the Fort Mason Chapel for the San Francisco International Art Festival and produced by the Museum of Performance and Design
Oedipus and Tiresias walk into a Japantown coffee shop…
TIRESIAS
This I know. This you do not know.
Your marriage is a sin. Your love is a sin.
Your bed is stained with sin.
OEDIPUS
Impunity- you think your blindness and age grant you
TIRESIAS
The truth grants it, not I, the mere
Bearer of the truth.
The Chocolate Heads came slithering through Pace Gallery’s pristine white corridors like they’d been unleashed from some wild ritual, all limbs and fabric swaddling their skulls, moving against David Hockney‘s lurid iPad Yosemites like beautiful vandals crashing a country club. This wasn’t some precious dance meets art dialogue. This was collision, the kind where you can’t tell if bodies are worshipping the work or trying to desecrate it.
Hockney’s digitized wilderness, those electric greens, those too blue blues screaming off the walls, needed this interruption. Needed these shrouded figures writhing through the sterile gallery air like the ghost of something real. The Chocolate Heads didn’t complement the paintings; they contaminated them, made them mean something beyond their market value and critical consensus. Aleta Hayes understands what most choreographers chickenshit away from: art galleries are mausoleums until you put something breathing and sweating and uncomfortably alive inside them.
The dancers moved through Hockney’s manufactured sublime like they were tunneling out of it, their chocolate swaddled heads refusing to see what they were supposed to see. The Palo Alto audience, wine clutching, opening night types, couldn’t decide whether to be delighted or deeply uncomfortable. That hesitation, that split second of not knowing how to react, that’s where something actually happened. The performance didn’t ask permission. It just was, feral and committed, making the whole expensive enterprise feel dangerous again, even if just for an hour before everyone shuffled back to their cars.
What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.
but then…
The photograph isn’t good enough.
It’s not real enough.
David Hockney
Presented with the PACE Gallery in Cooperation with StratLab:
Visual Performance in Art Spaces and Museum class
(Stanford Theater and Performance Studies + Anderson Collection)
David Greig took the 2011 Norway massacre, where some kid walked into a summer camp and shattered everything, and decided to make a play that doesn’t give you easy answers or comfortable catharsis. Because there aren’t any. And Shotgun Players at Berkeley’s Ashby Stage produced it.
I photographed this thing for set designer Angrette McCloskey. Which means I was there, in the room, trying to capture something that resists capture, how do you photograph the aftermath of incomprehensible violence? How do you frame hope without making it look cheap? You don’t.
What It’s Really About
Angrette’s set design understood that sometimes less is more, you don’t need elaborate staging when you’re dealing with the weight of actual human trauma. The space held the story without overwhelming it. So if you wanted a night out where you could forget about the world’s darkness, this wasn’t it. If you wanted theater that treats you like an adult who can handle difficult truths without narrative safety nets, that acknowledges we’re all wading through this mess together trying to find meaning in the meaningless, then yeah, this was something worth showing up for.