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. David Hockney but then…
The photograph isn’t good enough. It’s not real enough. David Hockney
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
Evil exists. Full stop. Why? Nobody knows. The play doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Healing isn’t a straight line, isn’t even guaranteed, isn’t something you achieve and then frame on your wall
We’re all responsible for each other, somehow, even when we can’t explain how or why
Hope isn’t naïve optimism, it’s the desperate, clawing refusal to let darkness have the final word
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.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it. Dorothea Lange
You walk into the Stanfordd.school, this temple of design thinking, this cathedral of sticky notes and whiteboards where tomorrow’s disruptors learn to disrupt, and you’re expecting the usual performance art nonsense. The kind where someone’s going to stand in a corner for three hours or wrap themselves in cellophane while reading Foucault through a bullhorn.
But what actually happened here, what Aleta, John and myself managed to pull off, was we took a bunch of students (not just undergraduates and graduates, but anyone affiliated with the university), force-fed them the good stuff (Bachelard, Lefebvre, Bataille, the heavy hitters who actually understood that space isn’t just empty air between buildings), and then said: okay, now go make something with your hands and bodies and whatever shit you can find. Limited means. Maximum stakes. No safety net.
This is the bastard child of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings and the entire lineage of site-specific work that’s been trying to rescue art from the hermetically sealed gallery, that airless mausoleum where art goes to die of respectability. Since the 60s and 70s, when artists finally said “fuck the white cube” and started making work in garbage dumps, on borders, in the actual world where actual people might accidentally encounter it, there’s been this electric current running through performance: the idea that place matters, that context is content, that the where and the how shape the what.
And the questions, Christ, the questions we’re wrestling with are the right ones, even if they’re phrased in that particular academic dialect that makes your teeth hurt: How is art activism? How is art life? What the hell is the “res publica” anymore when public space has been privatized, sanitized, and surveilled to death?
The class structure itself was smart, Mondays for the big ideas and the theory, Wednesdays for getting your hands dirty, for arguing about what Monday actually meant when you’re standing in a room trying to figure out how to make emptiness speak. Lectures and screenings, sure, but then: teams, projects, the actual making of things that might fail spectacularly.
Because here’s what separates the real thing from the academic exercise: risk. The willingness to fall flate on your face. The moment when theory crashes into practice and you realize that reading about spatial narratives is one thing, but actually creating one, actually manipulating the air and light and psychic weight of a room, is something else entirely.
What you’re looking at in these images, whatever that chocolate-head situation is, that’s the evidence. Students trying to manifest their personal interpretation of space, trying to create communication and exchange with limited means. Maybe it worked. Maybe it was a beautiful disaster. Maybe it was both. But they did it. They took the Bachelard and the Foucault and the Lefebvre and they didn’t just write papers about it, they translated it into something you could walk through, stumble into, experience.
The d.school, for all its design-thinking™ buzzword bullshit, gave them permission to fail interestingly. And we didn’t coddle them. We threw them in the deep end with the theory and said swim. That’s how you learn. Not by talking about space, but by trying to reshape it. Not by reading about place and non-place, but by standing in the actual contested, complicated, messy geography of now and asking: what happens if I do this? Or this? This?
The performances were the moment of truth. When the spatial narratives either sang or fell flat. When months of debate and reading and making either coalesced into something that mattered or evaporated into well-intentioned nothing.
But they showed up. They made the work. They put it in front of people.
Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free. Rumi
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.
“Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?” – “Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht? Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?” – “Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif.”
“Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir! Gar schöne Spiele spiel’ ich mit dir; Manch’ bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand, Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand.” –
“Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht, Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?” – “Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind; In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind.” –
“Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehn? Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön; Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn, Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein.” –
“Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?” – “Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh’ es genau: Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau. –”
“Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt; Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ ich Gewalt.” – “Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an! Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!” –
Dem Vater grauset’s, er reitet geschwind, Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind, Erreicht den Hof mit Müh’ und Not; In seinen Armen das Kind war tot. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Erlkönig
So here’s Carl Weber and here’s the ocean and here’s a German poem about death snatching up children which is maybe the most on-the-nose metaphor for mentorship ever because isn’t that what the good ones do, the real ones, they snatch you up out of your comfortable bullshit existence and carry you off somewhere strange and necessary and you either die in the process or you become something you never imagined you could be, and either way you’re not the same person who started the ride…
I’m thinking about all the ways I fail the people who matter, not through malice but through the simple stupid fact of being human and scared and convinced I have more time than I do, more chances to get it right, more opportunities to show up and mean it and BE there not just physically there but actually PRESENT in the way that costs something, and Carl was one of those people who was always present, always paying attention, always taking me seriously when I was just some fucked up kid who didn’t know jack about anything but he looked at me like I was already the thing you might become…
What absolutely destroys me about people like Carl? They see the future and they don’t keep it to themselves like some kind of prophecy they’re hoarding, they just tell you straight up: You’re going to have a life in theater. Not maybe, not if you work hard enough, not if the stars align, just: this is what’s going to happen. And you think they’re crazy because you can’t see it, you’re too busy being young and stupid and terrified, but they’ve already watched it play out in their heads, they’ve seen the whole arc, and they’re willing to wait, to watch you flail and struggle and sometimes disappear for years at a time because they know…
Dinners that didn’t happen and performances he never saw and all the ways I wasn’t there when I should have been, when it would have mattered, when he could have known that what he gave me didn’t just disappear into the void but became something, became everything, became the through-line that holds when nothing else does…
Goethe knew something about fathers and sons and the things that take us in the night, but he didn’t write the poem about the ones who show you how to see, how to think, how to take the raw material of being alive and turn it into something that means something, even if what it means is just: I was here, you were here, we saw each other, and that seeing made all the difference.
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The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn art introduced me to the Revolution! Albert Einstein
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
The lobby at Bing Concert Hall is all soaring glass and clean California geometry, the kind of space that makes you wonder if anyone’s actually allowed to breathe wrong in here.
I’m here to photograph which means I’m basically a voyeur, trying to freeze what shouldn’t be frozen: movement, breath, sculpture, sound, the precise moment when muscle memory becomes something like prayer.
The Japanese have a word for what I’m chasing here: ma. That interval, that negative space between the notes, between the gestures, between the bodies and Will Clift’s sculptures. The silence that gives shape to everything else. In the West, we don’t have a word for this. We just stumble around trying to capture it without knowing what to call it.
The light is impossible and perfect, pouring through those windows like it’s been waiting its whole life for this exact angle. The dancers, Ko Ishikawa (Japanese Mouth Organ), Nao Nishihara (Sound Environment), and the rest, carve through space like they’re making it visible. Like they understand that emptiness isn’t nothing. It’s substance.
I’m just trying not to mess up. Trying to photograph the space between things, which is maybe the most arrogant thing a someone can attempt.
Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space“. Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses… Isaac Stern described music as “that little bit between each note – silences which give the form“… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission. Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways (Phaidon, 2001) p 370.
