A good art exhibition is a lesson in seeing to those who need or want one, and a session of visual pleasure and excitement to those who don’t need anything — I mean the rich in spirit. Grunts, sighs, shouts, laughter, and imprecations ought to be heard in a museum room. Precisely the place where these are usually suppressed. So, some of the values of pictures may be suppressed too, or plain lost, in formal exhibition.
I’d like to address the eyes of those who know how to take their values straight through and beyond the inhibitions accompanying public decorum. I suggest that true religious feeling is sometimes to be had even at church, and perhaps art can be seen and felt on a museum wall; with luck.
Those of us who are living by our eyes — painters, designers, photographers, girl watchers — are both amused and appalled by the following half-truth: “what we see, we are.” And by its corollary: our collective work is, in part, shameless, joyous, autobiography-cum-confession wrapped in the embarrassment of the unspeakable. For those who can read the language, that is. And we never know just who is in the audience. When the seeing-eye man does turn up to survey our work, and does perceive our metaphors, we are just caught in the act that’s all. Should we apologize?”
Walker Evans – Boston Sunday Globe, August, 1st, 1971, p. A-61.
Walker Evans gets it exactly fucking right. Every time I walk into some pristine white cube with its hushed reverence and security guards treating me like I’m a potential vandal, I want to scream, not at the art, but at the entire apparatus designed to domesticate my response to it.
My mother ran an antique print gallery in San Francisco that actually understood this. She let people react, encouraged it, demanded it, even. Laughter echoed off those walls. She held court there, spinning story after story about these long-dead artists, the provenance of each piece, the historical moments and cultural currents that birthed what hung before a visitor. And there was always music, because silence, she understood, isn’t reverence. It’s death twice over. That space proved Evans’ point daily: art doesn’t need protecting from human response. It needs it. Craves it. Dies without it, and these artists were already dead. The least she could do was let their work breathe.
Because here’s the thing: Evans understood what I’m still desperately trying to articulate in my journal and my late-night editing sessions, that the work is a confession whether I admit it or not. Every photograph, every constructed space, every durational performance is me saying “this is what I saw when no one was looking, this is what moved through me, this is the shape of my hunger.” And the museum, that glorious mausoleum, wants to file it under “contemporary practices” and stick a wall text next to it explaining what I allegedly meant.
The “rich in spirit” Evans mentions? Those are the ones who get it without the PhD, who grunt and sigh because the image or the theatrical gesture hit them in the solar plexus before their critical faculties could erect the usual barricades. Meanwhile, I’m standing there with my theoretical frameworks and my Sontag and my Artaud, convinced I need all this intellectual scaffolding to justify what is essentially an act of exposure.
And that vulnerability, fuck, that’s the unbearable part. I’ve spent years in archives (LINES and Mabou Mines) and rehearsal spaces, constructing these elaborate structures of meaning, when really I’m just desperate to be seen. Truly seen. Not what I’ve constructed, or arranged or currated. But me. By someone who reads the language, who catches me mid-confession and doesn’t look away.
Should I apologize? Fuck no. The apology is already baked into the work, in every desperate frame, every constructed sightline, every moment I arrange for an audience I simultaneously court and fear. The museum wants decorum; I’m offering my guts on a wall. The only question is whether anyone’s brave enough to look.
Revolutions don’t start with permission slips. They start in some paint-splattered shithole at three in the morning when you’re too broke and too angry to pretend anymore. They start when you realize the gatekeepers are idiots and their taste is garbage and you’d rather burn it all down than spend one more second nodding along to their institutional bullshit.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announces American Painting Today, which is about as exciting as it sounds. Safe. Sterile. The kind of art that makes you want to claw your eyes out not because it’s challenging but because it’s the visual equivalent of elevator music. So eighteen painters, led by Adolph Gottlieb, did the only sane thing: they told the Met to fuck off. They wrote it down, signed their names, sent it to the New York Times. A manifesto. A grenade lobbed into the marble halls of good taste.
The letter was beautiful in its contempt: “We draw to the attention of those gentlemen the historical fact that for roughly a hundred years only advanced art has made any consequential contribution to civilization.” Which is fancy talk for: you’re curating yesterday’s leftovers while we’re making tomorrow, and we’re done pretending you matter.
Irascible. They called them irascible. But rage isn’t a character flaw when the world is fundamentally wrong. Pollock was slinging paint like a man possessed. Rothko was drowning color in its own weight until it meant something again. De Kooning was ripping women apart on canvas and reassembling them from pure electric fury. These guys weren’t interested in decorating living rooms. They were making art that grabbed you by the throat.
Then Life magazine came calling.
Here’s where it gets messy, because revolutions always get messy when the mainstream comes sniffing around. Life wanted the photo op: put these angry painters on the Met’s steps with their canvases, make it look dramatic, sell some magazines. The artists refused. They weren’t going to pose like supplicants begging to get in. If they were going to do this, it would be on their terms. So Dorothy Seiberling, Life’s art editor, sent Nina Leen to a studio on 44th Street instead.
November 24, 1950. They assembled. Pollock made a special trip with James Brooks because he understood what was at stake. Three originals couldn’t make it: Weldon Kees, Hans Hofmann, Fritz Bultman. Barnett Newman, ever the control freak, insisted they be photographed “like bankers.” Not like rebels. Not like bohemians. Like serious people doing serious business. The artists positioned themselves.
Here’s what you need to know about Leen: she was nobody’s idea of an art world player. Russian immigrant, fled the Nazis, ended up shooting whatever Life threw at her. Animals. Fashion spreads. Celebrities. She had the eye of someone who’d seen enough bullshit to recognize the real thing when it showed up. She took twelve pictures. Only one ran in the magazine.
The photograph is perfect precisely because it’s uncomfortable. Fifteen faces arranged like a high school yearbook photo directed by someone who doesn’t give a damn. Some glare at the camera. Others look bored. Hedda Sterne showed up late, ended up standing on a table in back. The only woman in the frame. Years later she’d call it “probably the worst thing that happened to me.” Think about that. A lifetime of work, eighty years of making art, and she’s known for standing on furniture in the back row of someone else’s protest. “I am known more for that darn photo than for eighty years of work,” she said before she died. “If I had an ego, it would bother me.”
It gets worse: she wasn’t even supposed to be there. Lee Krasner figured Betty Parsons, their dealer, insisted on including her. And the men hated it. “They all were very furious that I was in it,” Sterne remembered, “because they all were sufficiently macho to think that the presence of a woman took away from the seriousness of it all.”
There’s your revolution. There’s your band of rebels. Fighting the establishment’s narrow vision while enforcing their own.
But here’s the thing about that photograph: it captures something true about the whole compromised moment. Life called them “solemn” in the caption. And yeah, many had reservations about appearing in mainstream media at all. Rothko especially. They were supposed to be outsiders, supposed to be pure, supposed to be above all this commercial bullshit.
Except they all knew what had happened to Pollock.
August 8, 1949. Life runs a three-page spread on Jackson Pollock. Three months later his show at Betty Parsons Gallery is a triumph. De Kooning turns to Milton Resnick and says it out loud: “Look around. These are the big shots. Jackson has finally broken the ice.” Within a year Betty Parsons is sending Pollock checks totaling over six grand on sales of more than ten thousand dollars. At a time when two-thirds of American families are living on less than four thousand a year.
So when Life came calling again, they showed up. Every single one of them understood the math. The purity of their position versus the reality of rent. The nobility of refusing the system versus the fact that Pollock’s Life article had literally changed his life. They were invited, at least partly, because of Pollock’s notoriety, which was almost entirely attributable to that article.
The sitting was an uncomfortable accommodation between the values they claimed and the success they wanted. And Nina Leen saw it. “I think they loved having their pictures taken,” she said years later, “but they seemed to be afraid to be nice. They didn’t want to appear too commercial.”
That’s the shot right there. That’s what makes it sing. Not their defiance but their ambivalence. Not their purity but their compromise. They’re trying to look like bankers while pretending they don’t care about the bank. Trying to appear in Life magazine while maintaining they’re above Life magazine. Standing for a photo that will make them famous while resenting the whole apparatus of fame.
Nina Leen caught all of it. The stiffness. The performance of not performing. The way they positioned themselves carefully while pretending it didn’t matter. She’d shot enough assignments to recognize the gap between who people claim to be and who they actually are. And she let that gap show.
The photograph outlived the protest. Outlived the exhibition. Became more famous than most of the paintings any of them made. Because Nina Leen understood how to catch the thing beneath the thing: not just rebellion but the cost of rebellion. Not just defiance but the moment defiance starts negotiating with the machine it claims to oppose.
Within a decade New York owned the art world. Abstract Expressionism was the establishment. The Met came crawling back. The revolution succeeded and in succeeding became exactly what it fought against. The Irascibles turned into museum pieces, their fire preserved under glass, their protest reduced to a footnote explaining why they mattered.
But this photograph still burns because it tells the truth: revolutions are messy. Principles are expensive. And everyone, even the purest rebels, eventually has to decide how much integrity costs and whether they can afford it.
Everything else is just the lie we tell ourselves about how revolutions work.
Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and repeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance or lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves…art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light. Jerzy Grotowski
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I don’t pretend to understand everything about Polish experimental theater. But when the Grotowski Work Center makes its way from Pontedera, Italy to San Francisco, and it just so happens to coincide with Julia and Aram tying the knot, well, that’s the kind of beautiful collision that restores your faith in the universe’s sense of timing.
Franconia. That house where Michael, Niki, and Ciara lived. Where Julia crashed for a while too. The kind of place that becomes more than an address, it becomes mythology. These spaces always do when the right people pass through them at the right time.
They celebrated with song and dance, which is exactly what Grotowski would have wanted. Not some bloodless, intellectualized performance-about-performance bullshit. Real bodies, real voices, real joy erupting in real space. The Polish master understood that theater, real theater, is about breaking down the barriers, filling the emptiness, emerging “from darkness into a blaze of light.”
A wedding is theater. Life is theater. And somewhere in the middle of all this, the avant-garde meeting the ancient ritual of marriage, the Work Center’s rigorous practice colliding with champagne and dancing… there was Sharka. The greatest dog in the world, according to sources. Every great party, every genuine moment of human transcendence, needs a great dog bearing witness. Sharka knew what was up.
This is what happens when you let art breathe, when you stop treating culture like a museum piece and let it be what it was always meant to be: alive, messy, joyful, transformative. Julia and Aram got married. People sang. People danced. The Work Center came to town. Sharka was there.
Maybe the text is just sitting there like last week’s corpse… cold, rigid, embalmed in academic formaldehyde, while the actor’s body is out there in the trenches, sweating through the shirt, bleeding into the floorboards, happening in real time like a Mahler Symphony you can feel in your fillings.
The body’s supposed to be the dangerous one, right? The wild card. The thing that won’t stay in its lane, won’t follow the institutional playbook, won’t sit up straight and recite its lines like a good little soldier of approved meaning.
But let’s cut the romantic bullshit. The body isn’t some noble savage. It’s already been to finishing school. It’s been trained, drilled, disciplined, calibrated like a fine German instrument. Power doesn’t need to break down the door, it’s already inside, moving through the musculature, the posture, the way you hold your fucking wine glass in that pretentious asshole way you do.The body is fluent in compliance before it ever gets near subversion.
So if the body is just another text, and it is, friends, it absolutely fucking is, then what exactly are we pointing at when we say “real”? And how’s it supposed to overthrow anything when it already knows the dance steps by heart?
The Player Who Wept (Or: When Fake Gets More Real Than Real)
There’s this moment in Hamlet, and stay with me here, when these traveling players roll into town. The First Player does his bit: Aeneas speaking to Hecuba about Priam getting carved up like Sunday dinner. And this actor commits. His face goes the color of old newspaper. His voice cracks like cheap plaster. Real tears. The whole bloody catastrophe.
Hamlet watches this performance and it destroys him. Not the play, the watching. Because here’s this professional liar convulsing over a fiction, over a story that means absolutely nothing to him personally, while Hamlet, who’s got a murdered father, a whore of a mother, and every actual reason in the world to burn the place down, can’t move. Can’t act. Can’t do shit.
This scene takes a flamethrower to the comforting fantasy that being and seeming are two different countries with a nice clean border between them. Because what happens when seeming produces real effects? When “actions that a man might play”, pure theatrical bullshit, actually rewire the nervous system of the body performing them?
The grief may be manufactured. The response isn’t. That line we thought separated performance from reality doesn’t just blur, it detonates the moment flesh gets involved.
The Body Doesn’t Know It’s Lying (And Doesn’t Care)
Actors figured this out a long time ago, somewhere between the third drink and the call time. You imitate the external shape of an experience, the slouch, the stammer, the way someone holds themselves when they’re barely holding it together, and the body, that magnificent idiot, fills in the rest. The nervous system doesn’t wait for a philosophical memo. It just responds.
Same thing happens in the audience. Iknow it’s theater. My rational brain is sitting there with its arms crossed going, “This is fake, this is fake, none of this is real.” And still my chest tightens like someone’s standing on it. My breath changes. I cry like a child who’s lost something they’ll never get back.
Somewhere in the circuitry, the information that would normally shut this reaction down, the “this isn’t real” warning label, gets suppressed. Ignored. Overridden. The body responds as if the threat were actual, as if the grief were mine, as if any of this mattered outside the duration of the performance.
And that suppression isn’t a bug. It’s not a malfunction. It’s the condition of possibility. It’s how any of this works at all.
The Real Is What Kicks Your Ass
So stop pretending this is about truth or authenticity or any of that graduate seminar horseshit.
The real is not sincerity. The real is not someone’s precious interiority. The real is not whether the emotion “belongs” to the actor or came from their actual childhood trauma or whatever origin story makes you feel better about paying attention.
The real is what produces effects regardless of its fictional status.
Once you swallow that, and it goes down hard, meaning becomes secondary. Semiotics can map the signs like a good little cartographer, but it can’t account for the force. What matters is what acts on bodies. What changes posture, breath, tempo, attention. What makes you lean forward in your seat or recoil or reach for someone’s hand in the dark.
A lie can do real work. A fiction can reorganize your physiology. That doesn’t make it honest. It makes it effective. And effectiveness, my friends, is all that matters when the lights go down.Yeah, that sentence applies to a lot of things.
Displacement Without Alibis (Or: Everyone’s Stealing From Somewhere)
Call it displacement if that makes you feel like you understand something. A real stimulus, some buried rage, some unprocessed loss, something that actually happened, gets pulled from the actor’s personal wreckage and relocated into a fabricated situation. The emotion is real. The signs are real. The character is not.
And here’s the beautiful, terrible part: no one watching can ever tell the difference.
The source of the emotion is locked away. The process is a black box. The interior is sealed tighter than Donald Trump’s conscience. Which means sincerity is completely useless as a category of analysis. You can’t verify it. You can’t read it. You can only imagine it after the fact, project it backward like a comforting bedtime story about how art works.
All anyone ever responds to is surface, timing, pressure, rhythm, duration. Arrangement. The rest is mythology.
Who Controls the Conditions (Or: Let Me Tell You About Power)
So here’s the real question, the one that should keep you up at night: who controls the conditions under which bodies respond?
I do. Or at least, I try to.
As a director, as a producer, as the person holding the keys to the kingdom, my authority doesn’t come from knowing what’s “real” or having access to some higher truth. It comes from structuring time, space, repetition, exhaustion, anticipation. From deciding how long something gets worked, when it stops, what information is given, what gets withheld. From controlling the temperature in the room and the number of takes and whether people eat or sleep or see their families.Of course, sometimes the unions have a say in this.
Actors don’t cry spontaneously like rain from a cloudless sky. Audiences don’t flinch by accident.
Someone builds the environment. Someone tunes the pressure like a radio dial. Someone arranges the conditions so certain responses become more likely than others, so probable they start to feel inevitable.
That someone is me.
I don’t control outcomes, bodies remain unpredictable, thank god, the last wild thing…but I do control conditions. And that’s where power actually lives. Not in commands or threats or ideology you can argue with, but in the infrastructure of when and how and under what circumstances.
Hegemony, Stripped Bare (Or: Gramsci Without the Sentimentality)
This is where Gramsci becomes useful, if you strip him of all the romantic revolutionary bullshit.
Hegemony isn’t about belief. It doesn’t require agreement or even awareness. It works by organizing effects. By making certain rhythms feel natural, certain responses feel obvious, certain arrangements feel like the only way things could possibly be.
Not because they’re true. Because they function.
Power here isn’t the king on the throne barking orders. It doesn’t command. It engineers environments. It directs rather than dictates. It sets the stage and steps back and lets bodies comply on their own, without force, without resistance, without even realizing they’re complying.
Consent, in this model, is not something you think about or choose. It’s something your body does. You lean in. You hold still. You accept the terms without ever being asked, without a contract, without a gun to your head.
Performance doesn’t sit outside this machinery like some pure artistic space. It is one of its primary techniques.
If performance has force, and it does, it absolutely fucking does, it’s not because it reveals truth or unmasks ideology or liberates anyone from anything. It’s because it rehearses consent. It trains bodies to inhabit certain structures, certain arrangements of power, without questioning them. Without even seeing them.
Affect isn’t liberation. It’s infrastructure. And I’m the civil engineer.
Control Over Truth (Or: Why I Don’t Get To Hide)
Performance doesn’t need truth. It needs control.
Truth is unverifiable. Sincerity is inaccessible. Process is unknowable.
Effects, however, effects are observable. Repeatable. Distributable. Scalable.
And that doesn’t absolve me of anything. It removes my alibi.
Once truth is off the table, once we stop pretending this is about authenticity or good intentions or the purity of the artistic vision, all that’s left is the force I apply and the consequences it produces. The pressure and the bodies it acts upon. The conditions and what they make possible or impossible.
I don’t get to hide behind “but I meant well” or “but it’s art” or “but they consented.” All of that is just noise. What matters is what I do and what it does to people.
The Gap That Won’t Close (Or: The Ethical Field I Live In)
I don’t know where the actor’s emotion comes from. The audience doesn’t either. That gap between surface and source never closes. Never will.
But that gap isn’t a puzzle to solve. It’s not a problem requiring a solution. It’s the ethical field I operate inside.
I don’t get to resolve it. I don’t get to verify it. I don’t get to purify it with good intentions or theoretical frameworks or claims about artistic necessity.
I only get to decide how much pressure I’m willing to apply. How carefully, or carelessly, I arrange the conditions. Who I’m willing to let that pressure act upon. How long. Under what circumstances. For what ends.
And then I have to live with what it does.
Not what I intended. Not what I hoped. What it does.
That’s the deal. That’s the job. That’s the knife I chose to pick up.
And every night, when the show’s over and the audience goes home and the actors stumble into the cold fog, I have to look at what I’ve made, not the beautiful lie of it, but the actual human cost, and decide if I can live with it.
Most nights, I can.
Some nights, I can’t.
But I keep doing it anyway.
Because that’s what power does.aPhotos are from a rehearsal of Theater Theater, a piece created and directed by Erika Chong Shuch in collaboration with Mariah Castle, Aaron Landsman, Dave Maier, Benoit Monin, Rowena Richie, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, and Ryan Tacata. The real bodies. The actual conditions. The work that produces the work.
Photos are from a rehearsal of Theater Theater, a piece created and directed by Erika Chong Shuch in collaboration with Mariah Castle, Aaron Landsman, Dave Maier, Benoit Monin, Rowena Richie, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, and Ryan Tacata. The real bodies. The actual conditions. The work that produces the work.
Let me be clear about something: Deep River works. It fucking works. But not because every element is worth a damn. It works because Alonzo King and Lisa Fischer have something real, something that cuts through the usual artist-meets-artist mutual noise.
Alonzo doesn’t use Lisa Fischer as a voice. He listens. She doesn’t just sing to the choreography, she’s in genuine conversation with it, a dialogue that’s taken years to build. You can see it: the way the dancers respond to her phrasing, the way she holds a note and bodies suspend mid-air, waiting. It’s years of artistic dialogue distilled into movement and sound. That relationship, that’s the spine of the whole thing.
Misrach made his name shooting deserts and environmental collapse. Fine. Deserved, even. But these projections? This is the visual equivalent of Enya. Soft-focus landscapes. Ambient nature porn. The kind of imagery you’d see in a Marriott lobby, behind a TED talk about “finding your authentic self”, or behind some Silicon Valley exec’s LinkedIn headshot. It’s pretty. It’s safe. It’s utterly forgettable.
It’s not just aesthetically bankrupt, it’s a technical catastrophe.
They wash out the dancers in sickly cyan and amber, creating flat, muddy tones that make human skin look either radioactive or necrotic. The contrast is fucked. One minute you’ve got workable light, the next you’re shooting into what looks like a Windows XP screensaver having an existential crisis.
It’s hack work dressed up in art-world credibility.
But here’s the thing: Fischer and King are so good, so ruthlessly committed to the work, that they drag this whole production forward. The dancers, these freakish athletes with their impossible lines and their bodies that shouldn’t exist in nature, they’re not competing with the projections. They’re ignoring them. Dancing through them like they’re weather. Like they’re just one more obstacle to transcend on the way to something true.
Moran’s compositions do the other half of the rescue operation. Complex, uncompromising jazz that meets Fischer’s gospel power head-on without flinching. When Fischer opens her mouth, when those first notes come out, when the dancers respond… that’s when you remember why you’re in the room. That’s when the corporate wellness retreat playing on the walls behind them becomes irrelevant background noise.
As a photographer, you make a choice: document the flawed whole or isolate what actually matters. I chose the bodies. The faces. The moment Fischer’s voice and those dancers’ movements become the same thing. Let someone else shoot the pretty pictures projected on the wall. I’m there for the thing that can’t be repeated, the thing that lives once and then dies.
That’s the only job worth doing.
As artists, which we all are, our obsession is to crumble the veils of delusion, to make the invisible apparent, and to see behind all appearance. If I’ve come to a realization where I’ve left the sense of ‘me‘, and expanded to the sense of ‘we’, finally stepping into the idea of ‘oneness’, how can I exploit a mountain? How can I exploit a people? Because I realize that people and that mountain, is me. That ocean that is being polluted is me. Alonzo King
The spectacle Joseph Beuys pulled off in Frankfurt was pure, uncut confrontation dressed up in mystical horseshit, and that’s exactly why it mattered.
You walk into that theater in ’69, Europe’s still got the psychic stench of the war clinging to everything like cigarette smoke in an underground bar, and there’s this German shaman motherfucker in a fur coat, whispering gibberish to a white horse like he’s trying to exorcise the entire 20th century through some alchemical mindfuck. Sugar cubes and cymbals. Shakespeare’s meat grinder tragedy smashed against Goethe’s prissy redemption fantasy. It shouldn’t work. It’s absurd. It’s pretentious as hell.
But that’s the hook. That’s where Beuys gets his claws in.
Because what he understood, what all the academics writing their tidy essays about “Social Sculpture” keep dancing around, is that Germany couldn’t just think its way out of what it had done. You can’t footnote your way past Auschwitz. You need ritual. You need something primal and embarrassing and raw that makes people squirm in their seats, something that bypasses the intellect and goes straight for the lizard brain where guilt and shame and maybe, maybe, some fucked up version of grace actually lives.
The horse isn’t a symbol. It’s a presence. Dumb, beautiful, incapable of irony. Beuys feeding it sugar while mumbling like a broken radio is him trying to find some language that hasn’t been contaminated by propaganda, by lies, by the bureaucratic syntax of genocide. He’s treating words like felt, his other favorite material, something you compress and reshape until it barely resembles what it was.
And yeah, the whole thing reeks of charlatan energy. The fur coat, the gold cymbals, it’s theater, it’s costume, it’s calculated. But that tension between authenticity and performance? That’s where the electricity is. Beuys isn’t offering you closure or catharsis. He’s offering you a ritual that might mean something, that carries the possibility of transformation even if you suspect it’s all bullshit.
The violence of Titus, that cascade of rape and mutilation and revenge, pressed up against Iphigenie’s civilized forgiveness: it’s not synthesis, it’s friction. Two incompatible narratives grinding against each other, and somewhere in that friction, maybe something sparks. Maybe not. Beuys doesn’t give you answers. He gives you fur and horsehair and the smell of animal panic and human desperation.
And here’s what I love: the documentation, these Tüllmann and Klophaus photographs, they’ve become the canonical version of something that was supposed to be about being there, about the unrepeatable moment. The prints and editions and multiples, Beuys commodified his own ephemerality, turned the anti object into objects you could sell. Hypocritical? Sure. But also honest about how art actually functions in a capitalist system. You can’t escape the market, so you might as well make it part of the work.
What Beuys did in Frankfurt wasn’t entertainment. It was an exorcism that might not work, a spell cast in bad German and horse-breath, an attempt to find some thread of humanity in a culture that had demonstrated its capacity for mechanized inhumanity. Pretentious? Absolutely. Necessary? Maybe that’s the better question.
Because somebody had to stand there in a fur coat with a white horse and make the attempt, however ridiculous, to transmute historical horror into something resembling possibility. The fact that it looked insane was part of the point. Sanity hadn’t exactly covered itself in glory.
There’s something beautifully, recklessly insane about dragging potted trees across America so you can stage Lear in someone’s backyard. It’s the kind of mad devotion that makes you wonder if Ben Greet wasn’t just performing Shakespeare but embodying the whole gorgeous, doomed enterprise of art itself.
Think about it: here’s this Brit at the turn of the century, looking at the pristine theatres with their velvet seats and gas lamps, and he says nah. He says what if we just… didn’t do that? What if we found a clearing, or better yet, made a clearing, hauled in some greenery like we’re setting up the world’s most pretentious yard sale, and let Puck loose while mosquitoes feast on the audience?
That DIY ethos, the understanding that the frame matters as much as the picture, that context is content. Greet got what every hack director forgets: Shakespeare wasn’t written for climate controlled auditoria. Those plays were birthed in the mud and the daylight, in spaces where you could smell the groundlings and feel the weather turn.
The thing that elevates it from gimmick to gospel: those portable trees. Man, those trees. Can you imagine the sheer bloody-mindedness? “The grove isn’t quite right, lads, unpack the birches.” It’s simultaneously the most artificial and most honest thing you could do. He’s literally manufacturing authenticity, and somehow it works because he’s so committed to the bit. It’s theatre admitting it’s theatre while still demanding you believe.
And people did believe. They showed up in summer dresses and shirtsleeves, sat on blankets and benches, and let themselves be transported. Not despite the artifice, but through it. That’s the covenant, isn’t it? The agreement between performer and audience that if you meet us halfway, we’ll meet you there too, in whatever forest, real or fabricated, we’re pretending exists.
Ben Greet understood something essential about longing and displacement. About how art needs friction, between inside and outside, between the staged and the spontaneous, between the script written in 1600 and the grass stains on your pants in 1905. He made theatre physical again, made it something you attended in your body, not just your mind.
And then he vanished, in a way. No permanent address, no monument. Just echoes, all those summer Shakespeare festivals still happening, still dragging “The Dream” outdoors every June, still banking on the idea that given the right conditions, with the real stars overhead and the real earth underfoot, something true might break through all the performance.
The real work happens in the stuff everybody else is throwing out. That’s it. That’s the whole goddamn secret.
Most people file that stuff under “ignore and move on.” They’re right to do that, if they want to stay functional, keep their jobs, not alienate their friends. But if I’m trying to make something that actually cuts, I’m mining that discarded heap like my life depends on it.
You know what I’m talking about. That feeling in your gut at 3:03 AM that you can’t name. The conversation that went wrong in a way that felt right. The shame spiral. The weird obsession. The moment of grace in the parking lot of a strip mall that you can’t explain to anyone without sounding like you’ve lost the plot entirely. Most people, sensible people, they file that stuff away under “ignore” or “suppress” or “Jesus, let’s not go there again.”
But me? If I’m actually trying to make something that matters, I’ve got to go there. I’ve got to dig through it like I’m looking for something you dropped in a dumpster. Because that’s where the truth is hiding, in the stuff that doesn’t fit the narrative, that doesn’t scan on the first read, that makes people uncomfortable at dinner parties.
The world is built on a conspiracy of comfort. We’ve all agreed to pretend that certain things don’t exist, that certain feelings aren’t valid, that the raw unmediated weirdness of being alive should be covered over with nice words and acceptable sentiments. But art, real art, it’s built on betraying that agreement. It’s built on saying “actually, this thing you’re all pretending not to notice? It’s the only thing worth noticing.”
I nurture the discarded stuff because that’s where my actual voice is. Not in the things I’m supposed to care about, but in the things I can’t stop caring about even though I know I should. The obsessions that embarrass me. The beauty I find in places where beauty has no business being. The rage that’s not politically useful. The tenderness toward things that don’t deserve it.
Every worthwhile thing I’ve ever encountered came from someone who refused to be reasonable about what deserved attention. Someone who took the detritus, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, whatever, and said “no, wait, hold on, there’s something here.” While everyone else was moving toward the light, they were rummaging around in the shadows with a flashlight, looking for scraps.
That’s the whole game. Not talent, not genius, not even vision really, just the obstinate, possibly insane willingness to value what the culture has decided is valueless. To build cathedrals out of trash. To treat the shitty moments like they’re treasure maps. To refuse, absolutely refuse, to throw anything away just because everyone else already has.
This burly son of a bitch with hands like a steelworker’s is down on his knees in some Parisian apartment in 1926, making cork-headed wire dolls dance for Duchamp and Mondrian, and somehow that’s not the punchline. That’s the actual art. He’s got corks for heads, clothes pegs for performers, scraps of yarn, basically whatever’s lying around after you’ve cleaned out the junk drawer, and he’s engineering the whole cosmology of the big top in miniature.
These performances sometimes lasted two hours. Think about that. This wasn’t some conceptual gag for the art crowd. The man was committed to the bit in a way that’s almost obscene. His wife Louisa cranking a Victrola while Sandy’s down there making a wire lion roar, making chariots race across someone’s floor while the entire Parisian avant garde sits on whatever furniture they could scrounge because you had to bring your own damn seating.
He’s hauling this whole operation around in five suitcases, schlepping it across the Atlantic like some demented carnival barker who happened to have accidentally invented kinetic sculpture. The portability isn’t cute. It’s everything. He’s literally a traveling showman, except his big top fits in luggage and his audience is composed of people who are about to detonate the entire infrastructure of what art means.
There’s this moment in this ’61 film where one figure asks about a mobile, “What is that thingamajig?” and another responds, “I don’t know, but I think it’s made to sell.” That’s Calder making fun of himself, of what he became, through the mouth of a cork-headed puppet. That kind of self-awareness wrapped in complete sincerity, that’s the contradictory engine of the whole enterprise.
Because underneath all the charm, he’s working out the entire vocabulary of movement and balance that’s going to define everything that follows. The Circus isn’t juvenilia. It’s where movement became his signature material, where he figured out he could compose motions like colors or forms. Every tightrope walker he manipulates with string, every weightlifter whose arms go up when he tugs a wire, he’s teaching himself physics through play, figuring out how to make metal think, how to give weight and counterweight their own consciousness.
And they can’t perform it anymore. It’s recognized now as performance art that can only be presented by its creator. So it just sits there in museum cases, frozen mid somersault, waiting for an animation that will never come. The conservators talk about wanting to bring it to life but knowing they can’t. All that kinetic energy locked down, mummified behind glass.
The whole enterprise was this enormous middle finger to the idea that art had to be precious or permanent or particularly serious. And now it’s the most precious thing imaginable, handled with white gloves in darkened rooms. That’s not irony. That’s what happens when the raw nerve of creation gets pickled in formaldehyde and called legacy. The circus left town a long time ago. What remains is the empty tent and the ghost of laughter.
I watch people. I mean I really watch them. The way you move through a door when someone’s behind you, the little apologetic shoulder-hunch you do when you’re taking up space, the whole elaborate dance of who-goes-first at the intersection. These tiny rituals that nobody talks about but everybody performs like their life depends on it because, and here’s the thing, it does.aGoffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) We’re all doing this twenty-four-hour-a-day show that nobody bought tickets for and nobody can leave, and if you fuck up your lines, if you stand too close or laugh too loud or just generally fail to execute the choreography everyone somehow already knows, you pay for it. Maybe with embarrassment, maybe with your job, maybe with something worse. The show must go on because the alternative is getting kicked out of the theater, except the theater is society and there’s nowhere else to go.bIbid.
Everyday performance is enforced. End of story.
Now Erving Goffman figured this out decades ago. That we’re all actors on stages we didn’t build, performing roles we didn’t write. And everyone treats his work like it’s this cute metaphor, this clever little way of thinking about social life.cIbid. But that’s bullshit. Goffman wasn’t being metaphorical. He was describing a prison. Frontstage, backstage. These aren’t just academic concepts, they’re survival zones. You slip up frontstage and you get punished: shame, exclusion, unemployment, violence. The backstage is just wherever you’re allowed to drop the act for five seconds before somebody walks in and you have to snap back into character. This isn’t theater as art. This is theater as control system. And you can’t refuse to participate because you’re already in the show, you’ve always been in the show, you were born into the fucking show.
Which brings me to the problem, the real problem: actual theater (you know, the kind with stages and lights and programs you pay money for) is supposed to be different from this nightmare.dIser, The Act of Reading (1978) Wolfgang Iser talks about theater as a bracketed space, an “as if” world that’s deliberately separated from reality, and he’s right, that’s exactly what makes it powerful.eIbid. In the theater you can stage murder, betrayal, revolution, impossible desires. All the things that would destroy you in real life. Because everyone agrees it’s not really happening. The distance isn’t a bug, it’s the entire point. That separation is what lets you think instead of just react, what lets contradiction and impossibility breathe for a minute without getting someone killed.
Here’s where I’m going to fuck with you: that distance is also the problem.fIbid. The same thing that gives theater its power (that safety, that separation) is what makes it ultimately toothless. When the bracket becomes absolute, when the audience is completely insulated from consequence, theater stops mattering. It becomes beautiful, sure. Skillful. But it’s a corpse. The alibi that enables thought becomes the excuse for doing nothing. And I don’t know how to resolve this paradox and I’m not going to pretend I do. Theater needs distance to work but distance kills its ability to change anything. Sit with that. I have to.
This is where paratheatrical work comes in. Not as some avant-garde novelty but as a desperate response to the fact that the alibi is failing. Paratheatrical work doesn’t invent performance, it just points at the performance that’s already happening everywhere, all the time, crushing us. It says: look, these aren’t natural laws, these are aesthetic rules, and someone made them up, and someone else enforces them, and we’ve all agreed to pretend they’re inevitable when they’re not. Once you see that, once those rules become visible, power stops looking like spectacle and starts looking like what it actually is: repetition. The same gestures over and over until they feel like the only possible way to be human.
And meanwhile American theater (I’m talking about the big institutions, the subscription-series bourgeois comfort zones) has turned into a fucking museum. You know the drill: sit down, shut up, receive your Culture, clap at the right moments, leave feeling vaguely improved. Herbert Blau was right that audiences are never truly passive, that watching is always an act, but decades of institutional discipline have trained us to be safe. Meaning arrives pre-digested. Risk is cosplay. Nobody’s in danger, least of all the people in the expensive seats.
And look, popular performance promises us something else. Danger, transgression, the real thing. But it’s lying.gDebord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967/1994) Guy Debord saw this coming when he wrote about the spectacle, but his critique needs an update because spectacle has gotten smarter. It doesn’t need passive consumption anymore. It wants your participation, your comments, your shares, your feelings. It wants you to feel implicated, like you’re part of something wild and real, while keeping you structurally insulated from anything that might actually cost you something. We get to perform transgression as aesthetic experience (look how edgy I am!) without any of the ethical exposure that makes transgression mean something. The spectacle doesn’t suppress dissent anymore. It sells it back to you as content.
The whole thing comes apart most clearly when the containment fails and nobody meant for it to fail. The Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter is the perfect case study because it’s a document of exactly that collapse.hMaysles Brothers, Gimme Shelter (1970) The Altamont concert was supposed to be this countercultural performance, this ritual of freedom and intensity and collective rebellion. Instead someone got murdered. Meredith Hunter died on camera while a hundred thousand people watched or didn’t watch or watched without understanding what they were seeing. What collapsed wasn’t just crowd control. It was the entire distance between performance and consequence. The bracket broke.
And here’s what really gets me about Gimme Shelter: it’s not just what the film captures, it’s how watching itself becomes unbearable. The camera doesn’t fix anything, doesn’t stabilize the chaos. It just witnesses the failure. The worst moments come later, when the performers watch the footage trying to figure out what they were part of, what their responsibility was. And their attention changes nothing. Recognition comes too late. The spectacle promised us transgression and delivered blood, and nobody knew what their role was supposed to be once the rules dissolved.
Altamont shows what happens when aesthetic distance collapses by accident: not political awakening, just catastrophe. The audience didn’t become emancipated. They became exposed, implicated without consent, and their attention without responsibility meant exactly nothing.
Now let me tell you about Victor García’s production of The Balcony because this is where someone actually figured out how to stage this problem deliberately instead of letting it explode in everyone’s face. Genet’s play is already obsessed with performance as power. These pathetic men rehearsing authority in a brothel, dressing up as bishops and judges and generals while real revolution happens outside. Power as image, power as role-play, power as spectacle that doesn’t need any actual power to function. García doesn’t clean this up or make it easier to swallow. He makes it architectural.
He built this cylindrical, vertiginous space and stuck the audience around and above the action, suspended in positions that make you feel like authority (elevated, surveying, safe) while simultaneously making you physically vulnerable through height and instability. There’s no innocent place to sit. You can’t just watch and decode meaning from a distance. You have to feel how your looking participates in the whole machinery of domination. Attention isn’t contemplative here. It’s positional. The act of watching aligns you with the thing you’re watching, whether you like it or not.
This is spectacle without the reassurance. García refuses to give you the moral high ground, refuses to let you judge from outside. You’re not outside. There is no outside. Theatrical distance still exists but it’s compressed until it hurts.
And here’s why García matters alongside Gimme Shelter: Altamont shows the chaos that happens when distance collapses and nobody has an alternative framework ready. García shows what becomes possible when you destabilize the distance on purpose, with structure, with intention. He doesn’t invite you to intervene physically and he doesn’t let you off the hook through passivity. You just have to sit there feeling complicit while the performance stays intact as performance.
This is the distinction that keeps me from giving up entirely: danger doesn’t have to mean physical risk to be real. Ethical danger (recognizing your implication in representation and power) can be staged without dissolving theater into chaos or abandoning public accountability. García proves you can expose the audience without erasing them. He offers a counterpoint to Grotowski’s trajectory, which I’ll get to in a second, but the key thing is: he keeps the theater as theater while making watching unbearable in all the right ways.
If Gimme Shelter shows spectacle losing control, García shows spectacle weaponized. Both prove that spectatorship is never neutral, never innocent. But García insists (and this is crucial) that audiences owe more than attention. They owe an awareness of their position, an acknowledgment of complicity, and a willingness to stay with discomfort instead of retreating into safe interpretation. Watching isn’t innocent but it’s still accountable.
The most extreme response to all this is to just burn it down completely, which is basically what JerzyGrotowski did after 1975.iGrotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) He said fuck public theater entirely and disappeared into paratheatrical and ritual experiments where the boundary between performer and spectator doesn’t exist anymore. Everyone’s participating, nobody’s watching, and theater as a public art form just dissolves. This functions less as a model than as a warning about what happens when you follow this logic all the way to its conclusion. What remains might be transformative for the people actually doing it, but it stops being accountable to anyone outside the room. It becomes private, hermetic, sealed off.
So the task (and I’m being dead serious now) isn’t to destroy theatrical distance and it isn’t to preserve it like some precious artifact. It’s to destabilize it deliberately, to keep it uncertain and alive. And just dragging performance outside institutional spaces doesn’t do this automatically. Site-specific work can reproduce the same hierarchies under new management. What’s required is a complete renegotiation of roles, and this is hard, this is the work nobody wants to do.
Performers need to learn listening and responsiveness instead of mastery. Designers need aesthetic systems that accommodate contingency instead of control. And audiences (fuck me, audiences need to be retrained from the ground up).jRancière, The Emancipated Spectator(2009) Not as consumers buying experiences, not as passive receivers of meaning, but as co-present bodies whose attention and choices and refusals carry actual consequence.
This is the ethical demand: not belief, not interpretation, but responsibility. To be present is to be implicated. To watch is to act. Theater stays alive only as long as it keeps testing this unstable boundary between representation and reality. Risking transformation without abandoning public accountability.
That’s the tightrope. That’s the whole game.
Because without that risk, theater just hardens into museum practice. Skillful, elegant, expensive, and completely detached from the conditions under which actual people actually live. I can’t accept that. I refuse to accept that. Theater matters or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t matter then what the hell are we doing here?
