I documented Aleta Hayes and The Chocolate Heads‘ Space Launch thing at McMurtry, and it’s exactly the kind of beautiful, ridiculous, necessary chaos that makes you remember why live art matters. They’re building these chocolate head sculptures like some kind of collective ritual… tactile, ephemeral, with that Warhol meets launch pad energy where high concept crashes into actual human hands getting dirty with cocoa and wild ambition. This is what happens when you give artists space and permission to get weird: performance stops being polite and starts becoming something you can taste, touch, and lose yourself in. You want to see what collaborativespectacle looks like when it’s actually allowed to breathe? The documentation is here. It’s not asking for your approval, it already left the atmosphere while you were deciding whether to pay attention.
The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion and the other inner forces… the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating. Jackson Pollock
But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around. William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
Look at that shit, man in a wetsuit under the Golden Gate, Alcatraz looming like some brick middle finger to freedom, and he’s out there chasing walls of cold Pacific death. Finnegan nailed it: that fear line, that horizon where all your friends disappear and it’s just you and the void and the question of whether you’re brave or stupid or both.
This is what we’re always chasing, isn’t it? That place where the noise stops. Where Instagram can’t follow. Where it’s not about being seen but about seeing yourself stripped down to ligament and breath and the animal calculation of when to paddle, when to dive, when to let the beast pass over you.
Fort Point. A Civil War relic nobody remembers, waves nobody wants, water so cold it’ll shrink your soul. And still they go. Because somewhere between that brick fortification and that island prison, between the infrastructure of control and the infrastructure of punishment, there’s this third thing, this moment of almost-drowning that feels more alive than anything your carefully curated life will ever offer you.
The fear line. The place where you can’t fake it anymore. Where authenticity isn’t a marketing term but a prerequisite for survival. That’s the real spectacle, one person, one wave, zero audience.
It should feel ridiculous. People howling Shakespeare at the Pacific wind inside concrete walls built to kill other people, it’s the kind of high-concept art project that makes regular humans roll their eyes so hard they can see their own brain stems.
But it doesn’t feel ridiculous. It feels necessary.
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over… Death is not anything… death is not… It’s the absence of presence, nothing more… the endless time of never coming back… a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound… Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Stoppard is right and he is also full of shit. Death isn’t romantic, sure, anyone who’s actually sat with it knows that. It smells wrong. It’s banal and bureaucratic and it takes forever and then it’s over in a second that you missed while you were checking your phone. But death is also the only thing that matters, the only thing that’s ever mattered, the period at the end of every sentence we’re all pretending isn’t coming.
And here’s Ava and John in the ruins of American empire, in this monument to death we built and then abandoned, performing the oldest con game in the world: pretending to die so that we can practice watching, so we can rehearse the grief before the real show starts.
Shakespeare knew. The old bastard knew that the only reason we pack into dark rooms to watch people suffer is because we’re terrified it’s going to happen to us. And it is. It absolutely is. Count on it. The wind blowing through Battery Wallace doesn’t give a shit about your bank account, your zip code, or even whether you really “got” the subtext. It just blows.
They’re capturing four people in the Marin Headlands trying to make sense of absence, trying to find a shape for the hole, trying to convince ourselves that if we can see it clearly enough, name it precisely enough, frame it just right, maybe it won’t hurt so fucking much when it’s real.
When the water rises, the fish eat the ants; when the water falls, the ants eat the fish. Laotian Proverb
These photographs aren’t chasing some National Geographic wet dream of exotic authenticity, they’re tracking the messy, gorgeous aftermath of a place that got carpet bombed with our good intentions and somehow, against all mathematical probability, kept breathing. The shots hit like field recordings from a civilization that decided technological progress was a sucker’s bet and doubled down on existing in three dimensions while the rest of us flattened ourselves into pixels.
Look at that river, brown and indifferent, carrying the weight of monsoons and unexploded ordnance like it’s all the same cosmic joke. The boats aren’t picturesque; they’re functional, scarred, held together by the kind of indigenous ingenuity that makes our subscription based existence look embarrassing. These aren’t poverty porn tableaux for liberal guilt to feast on, they’re documents of people who figured out how to live without needing validation from Palo Alto or Shanghai.
The faces staring back through my lens aren’t performing for the camera. They’re engaged in the radical act of being present in their own lives, which in our current algorithmic hellscape reads like revolutionary praxis. That kid in traditional dress isn’t a cultural artifact preserved in formaldehyde, he’s navigating the same impossible balancing act we all are, just with better textiles and less existential hand wringing about whether his life has meaning.
Those mountains in the background, wrapped in mist like they’re hiding from DARPA satellites, they’ve seen empire after empire roll through, each one convinced it had the answer, the system, the five year plan that would finally make sense of this place. The mountains remain magnificently unbothered.
There’s no redemptive arc here, no triumph of the human spirit, no neat little packages tied with jute twine for the Etsy crowd. Just the ongoing, unglamorous work of negotiating with gravity, weather, economics, and the casual cruelty of geopolitics that turned your backyard into the most bombed country per capita in human history and then largely forgot about it.
The proverb says when water rises, fish eat ants; when it falls, ants eat fish. I knows the water is always moving, and survival means understanding you might be predator or prey depending on the season, the rainfall, the whims of forces so far beyond your control they might as well be weather systems.
It’s about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, “Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.” That’s what artists do. It’s really a pointing activity. ChrisBurden
Three of us got together one October night and decided to fuck with Sophocles in a bathtub… spiritually, archaeologically, perversely. Rebecca Ormiston, Ryan Tacata, and I took one measly line from a dead Greek’s lost play and turned it into something called Cloud Talk for this outfit we hoped would be called Artist Weather TV, which sounds either brilliantly absurd or absurdly brilliant depending on how many shots you’ve had.
The fragment itself? “The oaths of a woman I write in water.” Seven words that survived whatever apocalypse claimed the rest of Sophocles Fragment #137. That’s it. That’s the transmission. Everything else, the context, the characters, the other 45 minutes of theatrical machinery, gone, baby, gone. Dust. Ash. The void.
Where the whole enterprise stops being some precious academic exercise and starts becoming something you can actually feel: We took that line about erasure and impermanence and staged it in Ryan’s bathroom, in his actual bathtub, with bubbles and clouds and water doing what water does, which is refusing to hold anything, refusing to remember, refusing to be anything but itself.
The location wasn’t the Getty Villa or some black box theatre space where you genuflect before Art with a capital A. It was a bathroom. A bathtub. The most democratic, vulnerable, human space imaginable. Where we’re all just flesh and steam and the things we wash away.
This is part of something bigger I’ve been working on called IOTA, a project resurrecting textual scraps from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, playwrights whose greatest hits we still read but whose deep cuts got lost in the cultural fire sale that history becomes. What Rebecca, Ryan, and I understand, what we’re enacting, is that those fragments aren’t dead things to be preserved in amber. They’re living provocations. They’re question marks without context, little bombs of meaning that go off differently depending on where you place them.
Put “the oaths of a woman I write in water” on a stage with proper lighting and dramatic pauses, it’s one thing. Put it in someone’s bathtub with bubbles and a camera and call it art? That’s something else entirely. That’s honoring the text by acknowledging its incompleteness, its porousness, its refusal to be pinned down like some dead butterfly in a collector’s case.
Because water doesn’t hold oaths. Water doesn’t give a damn about your promises, your contracts, your carefully negotiated settlements with reality. Water just moves. It evaporates. It circles the drain. It returns to clouds and weather systems and the atmospheric churn that makes life possible but promises nothing.
And maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe the reason this fragment survived when the rest didn’t is because it contains its own truth about survival, that nothing lasts, nothing holds, nothing is guaranteed except the fact that we keep trying anyway. We keep writing in water. We keep making oaths in bathrooms to people who won’t remember and gods who aren’t listening.
I’m going to tell you about something that happened on a Saturday afternoon in October, and you’re going to think it’s either the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard or you’re going to get it immediately. There’s no middle ground here. That’s just how it is.
2:45 p.m., October 3rd, 2015. The hold of the C.A. Thayer, which is a schooner, a real one, not some Disneyfied replica, sitting there at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park like a wooden ghost that somehow avoided being turned into condos or a themed restaurant. Below deck where the light doesn’t quite reach and the wood still smells like salt and history and the accumulated sweat of every sailor who ever gave a damn.
And there was me, performing the only surviving fragment from Aeschylus’ The Argo. One fragment. That’s what’s left of an entire play about the early stages of the Argonaut expedition, maybe even its very beginning. The moment when the shipwright Argus, with Athena herself guiding his hands, built the Argo. That legendary vessel with a piece of prophetic timber from the sacred forest of Dodona set into her prow, speaking oracles to sailors brave enough or stupid enough to listen.
Now, if you know this story at all, you probably know it from the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts, that glorious Ray Harryhausen spectacular with the stop-motion skeletons and the bronze Talos and all that Technicolor myth-making. Which is fine. That film is a goddamn masterpiece of its kind. But understand: what I was doing here is the exact opposite of that. No special effects. No swelling orchestral score. No Hollywood heroics. Just one voice speaking fragments of a play that predates that film by 2,400 years, fragments about a ship that would eventually be consecrated to Poseidon and translated (that’s the word, translated) into the sky as the constellation Argo Navis.
Everything else about this play? Gone. Lost. Burned. Rotted. Thrown away by people who couldn’t be bothered to recognize what they had. And this fragment, these few lines that somehow survived, I spoke them in that dark hold to five people. Five. The duration: maybe one minute.
The weather? Partly cloudy. 74 degrees. Perfect California indifference.
You see the fucking poetry of this, right? Performing a fragment about the birth of a ship on another ship. The Argo, which became stars. The C.A. Thayer schooner, which became a museum piece, a monument to its own obsolescence. Both vessels pulled from their intended purpose and transformed into something else, something that bears witness. While somewhere, probably, someone’s streaming that 1963 film on their laptop, half-watching, scrolling through their phone during the slow parts.
This isn’t some one-off vanity project. This is IOTA, a genuinely lunatic, beautiful, impossible mission to perform every existing fragment from the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. I’m talking about thousands of lost plays. Thousands. And what remains? Scraps. Sentences. Sometimes just words quoted by some ancient critic making a grammar point.
Most people would look at that and see nothing. A fool’s errand. Why bother? But that’s exactly the point. That’s exactly why it matters. Because someone has to bear witness to what we’ve lost, to what existed before Hollywood, before everything got turned into content and spectacle. Someone has to stand in a ship’s hold and speak these words about a ship being born to five people who bothered to show up, who understood that this moment, this absurd, magnificent, completely uncommercial moment, was worth being present for.
One minute of ancient Greek verse about beginnings, performed in the belly of a ship that’s reached its ending. Five people willing to sit in the semi-darkness and listen. Partly cloudy skies that couldn’t give less of a shit about any of it.
The Fragment…
The holy speaking beam of the Argo
groaned aloud
The Location…
Let me tell you about the C.A. Thayer, because if you’re going to perform ancient Greek fragments about a mythical ship in the belly of an actual ship, you should probably know what kind of ship you’re standing in.
1895, Hans D. Bendixsen, Danish-born shipbuilder working out of his Humboldt Bay yard, builds this three-masted schooner. And for seventeen years she does exactly what she was built to do: hauls lumber from E.K. Wood’s mill in Grays Harbor, Washington down to San Francisco. Sometimes Mexico. Sometimes she gets ambitious and makes it all the way to Hawaii, even Fiji. She’s a working ship doing working ship things, which is the only thing that matters.
Then in 1912 a heavy southeasterly gale beats the hell out of her. Her lumber days are done. But here’s the thing about ships: if they’re built right, they don’t just die. They transform. So the C.A. Thayer enters the salmon trade.
Every April from 1912 to 1924, she’s hauling 28-foot gill-net boats, bundles of barrel staves, tons of salt from San Francisco to Western Alaska. Every September she comes back with her hold stacked with barrels of salted salmon. This is brutal, dangerous work. And in one of those journeys, a reporter named Max Stern from the San Francisco Daily News is on board, documenting everything. His reports changed labor laws. That’s not nothing. That’s a ship that mattered beyond just moving cargo from point A to point B.
World War I breaks out and suddenly she’s carrying Northwest fir and Mendocino redwood to Australia. From 1925 to 1930 she’s making yearly runs from Poulsbo, Washington to the Bering Sea codfishing waters, carrying supplies and thirty men north into conditions that could kill you if you made one wrong move.
Then the Depression hits and she sits. A decade in Lake Union, Seattle, doing nothing. Until the U.S. Army buys her from J.E. Shields, a prominent Seattle codfisherman. They rip her masts off and turn her into an ammunition barge in British Columbia. An ammunition barge. Like turning a racehorse into a plow animal.
But after World War II, Shields buys his ship back. Fits her with masts again. Returns her to cod fishing. And in 1950, the C.A. Thayer makes her final voyage and enters the history books as the last commercial sailing vessel to operate on the West Coast. The last one.
The State of California buys her in 1957. She gets transferred to the National Park Service in 1978. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1984. Which means she went from working ship to monument, from tool to artifact, from doing to being.
And that’s where I found her in 2015. Except that’s not exactly true. When I was a kid, my 4th grade class slept aboard the Thayer. And at eight years old, I had the 3AM to 6AM watch. So I’d known this ship since I was small enough to think standing watch in the middle of the night on a museum vessel was the most important job in the world. In the hold of a ship that hauled lumber and salmon and men and ammunition and hope and desperation for fifty-five years. A ship that survived gales and wars and the Depression and the indignity of having her masts removed. A ship that, like the Argo, got translated into something else entirely.
You want to perform fragments about the birth of a legendary ship? You do it in a ship that earned its own legend the hard way, one voyage at a time, one storm at a time, one transformation at a time.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. Victor Hugo
Art that actually fucking means something: it doesn’t happen in galleries with wine and cheese and people pretending to understand what “liminal space” means. It happens in a bookstore that’s half-collapsed into its own beautiful chaos, where the shelves lean like drunks and the floor creaks with the weight of ideas that matter.
It happens because someone like Nathalie Brilliant understands that curating isn’t about arranging pretty things in rooms, it’s about creating the conditions for something real to ignite. She’s orchestrated this happening through MAPP, turning The Mission into what it’s supposed to be: dangerous, alive, uncompromising. But here’s the thing, Nathalie doesn’t just stand outside the work pointing at it. She played Chantal in The Balcony. Chantal. The revolutionary who becomes the symbol, the woman who walks out of the brothel’s illusions into the actual revolution, who gets devoured by the very image-making machinery she tries to fight.
You wanna know about real? Try teaching inside San Quentin. Try directing Genet, Genet who didn’t write for graduate seminars (though they love him there); wrote from the guts of the machine, from cells and street corners and the places where society dumps the people it doesn’t want to look at.
Then Nathalie takes my photographs and hangs them on the walls of Adobe Books, not some sterile white cube where collectors come to invest, but a real bookstore, the kind that’s become practically extinct. She creates the whole circuit: performer, curator, revolutionary in the truest sense. That Victor Hugo quote isn’t decoration; it’s the whole goddamn point.
This is what art looks like when it refuses to be domesticated, when the people making it understand they’re supposed to be inside it, not above it, when it remembers it’s supposed to be dangerous and true and connected to actual human beings rather than market trends and institutional approval. It’s not polite. It shouldn’t be.
MAPP is a community and a series of arts, music and activist events operating in The Mission for over 14 years. Their events are happenings in common places within The Mission that include live music, Spoken word, Performance art, Film screenings, BBQ’s, garage sales, and unorthodox conversations.
Nobody wants to cop to this, but here’s the raw nerve: when you’re watching someone up there, flayed down to what the program notes call their “truth,” you’re not getting some uncut vérité feed. You’re getting a setup. A con job so clean you mistake it for catharsis. Not some fever dream, not wish fulfillment, but a reading that’s been sweated over, rehearsed into your central nervous system by everything you’ve ever been taught about who gets to mean what. Performance doesn’t strip away the bullshit; it maps exactly how the bullshit gets under your skin.
The body onstage isn’t pure signal. It’s not the last honest thing in a world gone digital. But it’s also not just another LCD panel. Screens refresh, reboot, go black between scenes. Bodies don’t get that mercy. They pile up contradictions like scar tissue. They carry incompatible frequencies simultaneously and won’t give you the satisfaction of clarity. That’s what separates the thing from the simulation.
We tell ourselves we’re beyond all this, too smart, too jaded, marinated in meta until nothing sticks. Mediation wall to wall, frames inside frames, the whole world a greatest hits reel. But theater’s a stubborn bastard. It still shoves one body in your sightline and dares you to make it make sense. Not through some clever pivot of interpretation but through time. Through sitting there while the wound refuses to close. Through watching something that will not cut to commercial.
Take Oedipus. One body carrying freight it can’t deliver. The script insists he’s the golden boy from Corinth, the riddle solver, the guy who pulled the city back from the brink. Then the trap springs, not as a plot twist but as a pileup of certainties. He’s also the mother fucking son, the cursed genetic bad news, the walking proof that bloodline and cosmic ledger already closed the book. These aren’t two angles on the same guy. They’re two locked truths that can’t share space and can’t be pried apart. The tragedy isn’t about maybe. It’s about too much, too many systems claiming the same meat at once.
Same with Orestes. Apollo’s righteous blade. The Furies’ quarry, dripping matricide. Duty and desecration, divine mandate and unforgivable crime, wearing the same face. There’s no wiggle room, no interpretive jazz hands. The whole engine runs on the fact that these demands can’t be reconciled. Somebody’s got to carry them. And that somebody bleeds.
This is where the fantasy of bodily truth gets its hooks in. We’re conditioned to think bodies are cleaner than words, more direct, harder to fake. Like flesh could nail down what language keeps slipping. But that’s the sleight of hand Judith Butler actually calls out, not that the body’s a blank screen for our projections, but that it materializes through enforcement. Bodies look solid because norms and repetitions and regulations beat them into shape. Performance doesn’t unveil the body’s essence; it cranks the pressure until the mold cracks.
The performer’s body isn’t virgin territory. It’s ground zero for colliding imperatives: cultural, narrative, familial, juridical. And because it’s constrained, it becomes the breaking point. When tragedy lands, it’s not an invitation to riff; it’s a forced confrontation with the fact that meaning’s already been tattooed on in too many incompatible styles.
Which means the audience isn’t running the show. They’re not conjuring meaning from the void. They’re applying it, arriving preloaded with training from culture, genre, ideology, taught to parse certain bodies in certain grooves. The “violence” of interpretation isn’t personal neurosis; it’s structural rot. Performance matters because it’s where those applications short circuit, where the reading starts smoking and won’t stick.
So no, nothing just evaporates under scrutiny. What happens is uglier. The body won’t stabilize the contradiction we’ve dumped on it. It doesn’t float above mediation; it bears it, every ounce. It doesn’t rescue us from ambiguity; it makes ambiguity visceral, inescapable, and permanent.
The sick punchline isn’t that everything falls apart. It’s that somebody still has to stand there while it doesn’t.
