Marina’s sitting there talking about Columbus and failure and presence, and here’s the thing that’ll piss off half the MFA programs in Brooklyn: she’s actually right, even when she’s being provocative as hell. This bit about Columbus, fuck yeah, it’s problematic, we all know the colonialism lecture by heart, but strip away the historical baggage for a second. What she’s driving at is that beautiful, terrifying space between intention and accident. The asshole thought he was going to India and stumbled into a whole different continent. That’s not about celebrating imperialism; that’s about the creative process being fundamentally about fucking up in interesting ways. Every site-specific installation I’ve ever built, every frame I’ve shot that actually mattered, it came from being willing to be catastrophically wrong.
The “one good idea” thing? That’s the kind of statement that sounds elitist until you’ve been in the weeds long enough to realize it’s kind of true. Most of us, and I’m including myself here, are recycling, remixing, iterating on that one core obsession. If you get two genuinely original impulses in a lifetime, you’re Beckett. You’re Pina Bausch. The rest is craft, which matters, really really matter, but let’s not confuse craft with vision.
What gets me is this insistence on presence. Not “mindfulness” in some commodified wellness-retreat sense, but the actual phenomenological demand of performance: you are HERE, in this body, in this space, with these witnesses, and there are no second takes. As a photographer and theater-maker, I know this viscerally, the difference between documentation and event, between the thing and the record of the thing. Abramović‘s spent fifty years making work that exists only in the durational now, that can’t be possessed or replayed, only remembered or missed entirely.
Her advice to avoid routine? That’s not some motivational poster platitude. That’s survival strategy. Routine is death for artists, it’s the comfortable groove that becomes a rut that becomes a grave. Do the work that scares you. Not the work that gets you grants or gallery representation, but the work that makes you question whether you can actually pull it off.
Gsell:What astonishes me, is that your way is so different from that of other sculptors. They prose the model. Instead of that, you wait till a model has instinctively or accidentally taken an Interesting pose, and thon you reproduce It. Instead of your giving orders to the model, the model gives orders to you. Rodin:I am not at the model’s orders; I am at Nature’s. Doubtless my confreres have their reasons for proceeding as they do. But when one constrains Nature in that way and treats human beings as mannikins, one runs a risk of getting nothing but dead, artificial results. A hunter of truth and a trapper of life. I am careful not to follow their example. I seize upon the movements I observe, but I don’t dictate them. when a subject requires a predetermined pose, I merely Indicate It. For I want only what reality will afford without being forced. In everything I obey Nature. I never assume to command her. My sole ambition Is a servile fidelity. Gsell:And yet, you take liberties with nature. You make changes. Rodin: Not at all. I should be false to myself if I did. Gsell: But you finished work is never like the plaster sketch Rodin:That is so, but the sketch is far less true than the finished work. It would Impossible for a model to keep a living attitude during all the time it takes to shape the clay. Still, I retain a general idea of the pose and require the model to conform to it. But this is not all. The sketch reproduces only the exterior. I must next reproduce the spirit, which is every whit as essential a part of Nature. I see the whole truth — not merely the fraction of it that lies upon the surface. I accentuate tho lines that best express the spiritual state I am Interpreting.
Paul Gsell (translated from La Revenue), “Rodin on realism. He interprets the beauty of ugliness”, Boston Evening, March 15, 1910
Before Saul Bass showed up, movies started the way your grandfather’s funeral did, dignified, respectful, boring as hell. You sat there while names scrolled past like credits on a tax form, waiting for the actual movie to kick in, and that was supposed to be enough. That was the deal.
Bass walked into that temple of commercial filmmaking, after spending years making gas stations look iconic, and said, “What if these sixty seconds of contractual obligation could make you feel something? What if they could unsettle you, seduce you, prepare you for what’s coming like the opening chords of ‘Gimme Shelter‘?”
The Man with the Golden Arm wasn’t just a title sequence. It was a visual overdose, a graphic panic attack, that fractured, twitching arm wasn’t decorating the credits, it was screaming the movie’s entire thesis statement before a single frame of narrative even rolled. This was 1955, when Eisenhower was president and everyone was supposed to be comfortable and complacent, and here’s Bass serving up heroin addiction as abstract expressionism, making you complicit before you even knew what you were watching.
And he kept doing it. Kept refusing to let those opening minutes be throwaway real estate. The deconstructed body parts in Anatomy of a Murder, pure Basquiat-before-Basquiat brutalism. That swooping, vertiginous plunge into New York in West Side Story that made you feel the city’s violent poetry in your gut. The prowling cat in Walk on the Wild Side moving like sex and danger incarnate through simple white titles.
But the Around the World in 80 Days move? That was pure audacity, creating a twenty-minute short film and sticking it at the end like a fuck-you to convention, like he was saying “I’ll tell you when the movie’s over.” That’s not craftsmanship. That’s revolution disguised as graphic design.
Bass understood what the suits never did: those opening moments aren’t just names on a screen. They’re the ritual, the ceremony, the moment when you stop being you and start becoming the audience. He turned utility into poetry, commerce into art, and he did it with a straight face while everyone else was still figuring out what the hell just happened.
You stand there at Fort Point, that old Civil War relic, bricks and iron and ghosts of soldiers who never fired a shot in anger. It’s eleven o’clock, maybe close to midnight.
The fog rolls in off the Pacific devouring the bridge above you, that International Orange monument to human ambition and engineering hubris. From down here, looking up through the cold mist, you can barely see it. Just the massive towers disappearing into gray nothing.
Your hands are numb. Your face is wet. And you get it. You finally fucking get it.
This isn’t about beauty, though Christ knows the bridge is beautiful. It’s about the seduction of an ending. The simple geometry of it. The bridge doesn’t judge. It just waits, patient as a bartender at last call, offering one final drink to anyone who asks.
There’s something about this spot, the cold, the fog, the industrial romance of it all, that makes the darkness feel almost poetic. Almost reasonable.
You understand why they come here. Not because you want to jump. But because standing in this place, at this hour, you feel the weight of every small defeat Bukowski wrote about. Every accumulation of mundane horror. You feel seen by the void, and sometimes that’s almost a comfort.
Small.. unnerving occurrences.. keep coming up one after the other: haphazard dumb accidents of freakish chance- the tiring tasks that are part of our routine and the sundry other ever-recurring annoyances– all these inevitable small defeats and sorrows rub and push continually up against the moments the days the years until one almost wishes almost begs for a larger more meaningful destiny. I can almost understand why people leap from bridges. I even understand in part those who arm themselves and slaughter their friends and innocent strangers. I am not exactly in sympathy with them and I decry their reckless behavior but I can understand the ultimate undeniable persistent.. force of their misery. the horrific violent failure of any one of us to live properly says to me that we are all equally guilty for every human crime. there are no innocents. and if there is no hell, those who coldly judge these unfortunates will create one for us all.
I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It’s made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there’s only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything. James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
This whole intelligent design hustle, this super natural con job, it’s the kind of beautiful lie that only works if you never actually open your eyes and look at what’s sitting right in front of you. These witches want you to believe that some all powerful, all knowing force had infinite time and infinite juice to build this thing, and this, this broken, blood-soaked carnival, is the best they could do? The pinnacle of divine imagination?
Come on.
You’re telling me that given unlimited power, unlimited wisdom, and millions upon millions of years to get it right, the best cosmic architect in the business couldn’t dream up something better than genocidal maniacs wrapped in bedsheets, or thugs in Hugo Boss marching people into ovens? That’s the masterpiece? That’s the opus?
If you buy into even the most basic scientific understanding, the stuff we can actually measure and prove, then all of this, everything, every struggle and triumph and beautiful disaster, it’s all just a temporary accident. A brief chemical fluke happening in the slow motion death rattle of our star. We got lucky with the temperature, lucky with the conditions, and for one flickering moment in the vast, indifferent darkness, the building blocks assembled themselves into something that could think and feel and ask questions it’ll never answer.
And then? Look up at the moon sometime. Really look at it. That cold, dead rock? That’s our future. That’s where this whole thing is headed. No encore. No second act. Just silence, darkness, and the same cosmic indifference that was here before we stumbled onto the stage.
I’m full of shit, we’re all full of shit, every last one of us. And that’s not cynicism, that’s the most liberating truth you’ll ever swallow. We perform every goddamn day. For our lovers, our bosses, ourselves in the mirror at 3 AM when the pills have worn off and we’re wondering who the hell that person is staring back.
I walk into the Old Union at Stanford and I’m already making choices, how to stand, what to say, which version of myself to trot out for inspection. My “authentic self”? That’s a performance too, maybe the most carefully rehearsed one of all. I’m constantly telegraphing who I want to be, begging for someone to see through the act while simultaneously perfecting the choreography.
But here’s where it gets interesting, where it stops being depressing and starts being human: I trust performances precisely because they are performances. There’s more truth in deliberate artifice than in whatever bullshit “genuine” moment people are selling. At least Becky or Rebecca know what they’re doing. They’re trying, reaching out across the void, saying “this is how I want you to see me, this is the story I’m telling about myself.”
That vulnerability, that desperate hope that someone will recognize the person you’re trying so hard to be, that’s the realest thing about us. We’re all just doing our best impression of ourselves, hoping someone in the audience believes it enough to love us anyway.
Rebecca Chalef & Rebecca Ormiston PSi Conference Performance Old Union at Stanford
As on the smooth expanse of crystal lakes The sinking stone at first a circle makes; The trembling surface by the motion stirr’d, Spreads in a second circle, then a third; Wide, and more wide, the floating rings advance, Fill all the watery plain, and to the margin dance. Alexander Pope. Temple of Fame
There’s something that happens when people form a circle. Something primal. Something we’ve been doing since we figured out fire wasn’t just for warmth but for gathering around. The circle says: we’re in this together. No hierarchy. No front or back. Just us, acknowledging the shared madness of being human.
And rituals? Rituals are the things we do when words fail us. When the universe is too big and too indifferent and we need something, anything, to make sense of the chaos. We create patterns. We repeat them. We convince ourselves that if we do this thing, in this way, at this time, maybe we’ll touch something real. Something that matters.
Fort Point sits under that massive orange bridge like a secret. Like a bunker where history got trapped and forgot to leave. The walls are thick brick and cold stone, built to repel enemies that never came. Now it’s just there, bearing witness to the fog rolling in, the tourists above taking selfies, the water churning below with currents that don’t give a damn about your Instagram feed.
When you bring ritual and circle together in a place like that, under that iconic bridge, something shifts. The actors form their circle in the shadows. They breathe together. They ground themselves before becoming witches and kings and ghosts and murderers. Before embodying a 400-year-old Scottish play about ambition and blood and how power corrupts everything it touches.
The circle becomes a membrane between worlds. Between the person you were walking in and the character you’re about to inhabit. Between the audience’s reality and the fiction you’re about to make real. The ritual, whatever words they speak, whatever gestures they make, is the permission slip. The crossing over point.
And maybe that’s what we’ve always needed rituals for. Not to control the universe, but to mark the moments when we willingly step into the unknown. When we say: yes, I’m ready. Let’s do this terrible, beautiful thing together.
O, never Shall sun that morrow see! Your face, my thane, is as a book where men May read strange matters. To beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under’t. He that’s coming Must be provided for: and you shall put This night’s great business into my dispatch; Which shall to all our nights and days to come Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.5
The thing about watching someone become Lady Macbethbackstage is this: I’m seeing the moment before the monster puts on her face. Not the performance, fuck the performance, but that last second when Ava Roy is still herself, before she becomes the thing that whispers murder into sleeping ears.
There’s something obscene about it. Something you’re not supposed to see. Like watching someone pray, or shoot up, or cry in a bathroom stall. It’s the private transformation, the ritual nobody talks about, the moment when an actor stops being a person and becomes a conduit for something ancient and terrible.
Shakespeare knew what he was doing with that flower-and-serpent speech. It’s not just about deception, it’s about the split, the fracture, the necessary psychosis of performing evil. Lady Macbeth has to look like herself while becoming something else entirely. And Ava’s getting ready to do exactly that, here, in this Fort Point built to kill ships and now hosting ghosts.
The backstage photo always tells you more than the performance shot. This is where the work happens. This is where the actor sits with the darkness, invites it in, makes room for it. Not Ava anymore, not quite Lady Macbeth yet. Suspended in that liminal space where all real art happens.
Site-specific theater at Fort Point means performing Shakespeare where the cold Pacific wind screams through gun ports designed for Civil War cannons that never fired a shot. Perfect place for Macbeth. Perfect place for all that murderous ambition and guilt. The architecture itself is violent, even in its abandonment.
And somewhere in that stone fortress, Ava’s about to walk onstage and convince everyone that evil is just another form of love gone wrong.
You always said, “Dear, let’s live together until our hair turns gray and die on the same day.” How could you pass away without me? Who should I and our little boy listen to and how should we live? How could you go ahead of me?
How did you bring your heart to me and how did I bring my heart to you? Whenever we lay down together you always told me, “Dear, do other people cherish and love each other like we do? Are they really like us?” How could you leave all that behind and go ahead of me?
I just cannot live without you. I just want to go to you. Please take me to where you are. My feelings toward you I cannot forget in this world and my sorrow knows no limit. Where would I put my heart in now and how can I live with the child missing you?
Please look at this letter and tell me in detail in my dreams. Because I want to listen to your saying in detail in my dreams I write this letter and put it in. Look closely and talk to me.
When I give birth to the child in me, who should it call father? Can anyone fathom how I feel? There is no tragedy like this under the sky.
You are just in another place, and not in such a deep grief as I am. There is no limit and end to my sorrows that I write roughly. Please look closely at this letter and come to me in my dreams and show yourself in detail and tell me. I believe I can see you in my dreams. Come to me secretly and show yourself. There is no limit to what I want to say and I stop here.
Here’s the thing about grief that nobody tells you until you’re drowning in it: it’s not dignified. It doesn’t give a fuck about your timeline or your strength or the face you’re supposed to show the world. This woman, 436 years dead, knew that. She wrote it all down and shoved it into a coffin because she understood something fundamental about human desperation, that there’s no bottom to it. No floor. Just falling.
“Come to me secretly and show yourself.”
Jesus Christ. That line. That’s not poetry. That’s a scream dressed up in ink. That’s what happens when you’ve already lost everything and you’re still trying to bargain with a universe that doesn’t take IOUs. She’s negotiating with death like it’s a bouncer at a club, like if she just says the right words, uses the right tone, maybe, maybe he’ll let her husband slip back through for one night. One dream. One goddamn conversation.
And she’s pregnant. Let that sit there for a minute. She’s carrying new life while decomposing from grief. The cruelest biological joke ever played. Her body is literally creating a person who will never know their father, who will ask “who should it call father?” and she already knows there’s no good answer. There never is.
The raw deal is this: we all make the same bargain this woman and her husband made. “Let’s live together until our hair turns gray and die on the same day.” We whisper it to each other in bed, in cars, in quiet moments when we think we’ve somehow figured out how to cheat the house. And the house always wins. Always. Someone always goes first. Someone is always left holding the bill, standing in the wreckage, writing letters to corpses.
What kills me, what really fucking kills me, is her belief that if she just writes it down, if she puts the letter in his coffin close enough to his heart… he’ll read it. He’ll find a way to respond. That’s not delusion. That’s faith in its most primal, animal form. That’s a human being refusing to accept that the conversation is over, because how can the conversation be over when you still have so much to say?
“There is no tragedy like this under the sky.”
She’s right, but she’s also wrong. The tragedy is that there are millions like it. Billions. Every person who ever loved someone and lost them has written this letter in their head, on paper, in the air, in the screaming silence of their bedroom at 4:27 AM. The words change. The language changes. The century changes. But the howl? The howl is eternal.
We’re all just trying to cheat death with words, with memory, with letters we know will never be read. And sometimes, just sometimes, someone finds them 436 years later, and the dead speak again, and we’re reminded that every person who ever walked this miserable, beautiful planet has known this specific flavor of devastation. That we’re connected across time by our capacity to be absolutely destroyed by love.
There’s no comfort in that. Maybe just the knowledge that when we fall, we fall into a crowd.
