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.
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
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
On October 9th, 2015 Rebecca Ormiston, Ryan Tacata and myself created an experimental piece for Artist Weather TV that incorporated a text fragment from one of Sophocles’ lost tragedies: Sophocles Fragment #137. Informally, the piece is called Cloud Talk. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the remaining textual fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
The Fragment
The oaths of a woman I write in water.
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.
performance exposes the fact I view the body of the performer as a constructed image
I am trained through the intensely mediatized nature of cultural experience to respond to all stimuli as though I were receiving that data within a media event
the boundaries between technologically experienced information and information received without that frame have become permeable sometimes seamless
mediatized images operate within the consciousness as the real
example no. 1 the body of the actor playing Oedipus in Sophocles‘ tragedy the singular site of two forms of self and civic identification the language spoken by the actor identifies his body as that of the Corinthian stranger who has become the First Citizen of Thebes after the anagnorisis his identity expands to include information that the Corinthian stranger began his life as the child of Laius and Jocasta the Corinthian stranger is indeed the Theban the biological child of his wife – Jocasta the adoptive child of Merope
the tragedy builds itself on the incompatibility of these Corinthian and Theban identities
example no.2 Aeschylus‘ Orestes is identified and identifies himself as the celebrated savior of Argos who avenged the assassination of his father – Agamemnon at the same time he is an abhorrent criminal guilty of matricide
in performance the body of the actor (a singular, unified image) becomes the site of a conflict between identities or forms of identification
the tension between the stability of the image of the actor’s body and the instability or equivocation of the language of the text depends on the perception that as a signifier the body is a more simple a direct instrument of communication in comparison with the complexity fluidity transforming nature of language
the image of the actor’s body within the theories of people like Judith Butler becomes much more like a text like a folio sheet that accepts the inscription of my writing
theories that textualize the body suggests that the actor and the actor’s language are both instabilities indeterminate and subject to deconstruction within a spectator’s response to that image
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows, Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet1.Prologue
Three frames of Romeo and Juliet playing dress-up.
The first shot, Romeo alone, backlit, all brooding silhouette, clutching that jug of milk like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to earth, wants you to believe in solitude, in the pure ache of romantic longing. And the milk, Christ, the milk. That primal, infantile hunger for the breast, for sustenance, for the thing you can’t name but would die without. That’s the longing that makes you stupid and reckless. The second gives you Juliet in close-up, and suddenly the whole story pivots, becomes hers, becomes about the interior life we project onto that face. The third? Both of them together, and now it’s about the space between bodies, the tension, the whole doomed machinery of desire and death. Three pictures. Three realities. All true. All bullshit.
My camera: it doesn’t capture jack shit. What it does, and this is the magic of my camera (really all cameras), the filthy gorgeous magic, is it makes you believe it captured everything. The whole moment, the complete truth, all wrapped up and delivered. You look at one of these shots and your brain goes, “Yeah, that’s it, that’s the whole story,” and you stop questioning. You move on satisfied.
But stack three of them together from the same afternoon, same location, same two bodies in absurd costume, and suddenly that sense of completeness shatters. You see what the frame included and what it left out. You see the choice, this angle not that one, this instant not the one three seconds later. What you’re looking at isn’t some objective record of what happened; it’s my editorial decision, my instinct about what mattered in that specific sliver of time. It’s atruth, one version, one take, one way of seeing not the truth that somehow contains all the others.
What photography really did, what it continues to do when we’re not too lazy or too scared to admit it, is prove that reality isn’t some fixed catalogue of facts we can measure and pin down like dead butterflies. Reality is a roiling ocean of relationships, shifting, bleeding into each other, refusing to hold still. Every frame is a decision about what matters right now, and the next frame will contradict it, and they’ll both be right.
These aren’t documents. They’re arguments. They’re three different people trying to convince you of something real, something that mattered, something worth freezing in silver and light. And the beautiful, terrible thing is: maybe we did.
So here we are, in the courtyard of this 96,000-square-foot monument to interdisciplinary aspiration, and the dancers are turning Brancusi’s old line, “Architecture is inhabited sculpture”, into something that bleeds and sweats and refuses to be theoretical.
The McMurtry Building wants to be unified, wants its art practice and film studies and documentary programs to play nice under Diller Scofidio + Renfro‘s geometry. But the courtyard, this negative space between the Cantor Arts Center and a parking structure, that’s where the truth lives. Where bodies become the sculpture inhabiting the sculpture, where the rehearsal is the thing itself, not some prep for the real event.
The lens catches what the architects couldn’t plan for: the way a dancer’s spine contradicts a wall, how movement exposes what 96,000 square feet of “integration” really costs. Those screening rooms and the Experimental Media Art Lab humming inside, they’re watching through glass while we’re out here making the courtyard confess what it actually is.
This isn’t gallery bullshit where everyone nods politely. This is architecture getting inhabited by the one thing it can’t control: bodies that remember they’re mortal, that know October 2015’s dedication ceremony will be just the beginning of the building’s real education.
