Heterogeneous Spectacles(Jamie Lyons News) ❖ Jamie Lyons

Heterogeneous Spectacles

Four Days to Vanish: A Wake for a Building That Isn’t Even Dead

Institutional death rituals: make no mistake, that’s what this was, a four-day wake for a building that would come back Botoxed and unrecognizable, they reveal everything about what we pretend culture is versus what it actually fucking is.

But there is something almost pornographic about watching an institution mourn its own temporary absence, you know? Like, the building’s not dying, it’s getting a facelift and a trust fund injection, yet here we all are, showing up for the spectacle of ending, because San Franciscans, … we’re so desperate for anything resembling a genuine moment that we’ll attend the funeral of a renovation.

And yet. AND YET.

Luciano Chessa’s making some beautiful cacophonous racket that sounds like machinery having an existential crisis, and Meklit’s voice doing that thing where Ethiopian scales meet jazz meets something you don’t have a name for yet, and Desiree Holman’s in there somewhere doing, what? Movement? Sound? Some hybrid thing that refuses categorization because categorization is for cowards and Niki’s turning the space inside out, and for four days, maybe, maybe, the museum stopped being a museum and became what it always should have been: a container for the thing that can’t be contained, the mess, the liveness, the unrepeatable moment that makes all this marble and money and mission statements mean something beyond SOMA real estate development.

Because performance, real performance, not TED Talk performance or corporate presentation performance by “creatives”, is the one art form that tells institutions to go fuck themselves just by existing. It happens and then it’s gone. You can’t acquisitions committee it. You can’t put it on the wall with a little placard explaining what you’re supposed to feel. It just is, and then it was, and all you’ve got left is the memory and maybe some grainy footage that captures about 2% of what actually happened.

So maybe the whole thing was a perfect accident of honesty: the building disappearing, the performances disappearing, everyone disappearing into the night with nothing to show for it but the lived experience, which is the only thing that matters anyway and the one thing museums can never really hold onto no matter how hard they try.

Or maybe I’m romanticizing the whole thing and it was just another party where people who work in the arts got drunk on free wine and felt important for a minute. Probably both. Probably always both.

But I hope, and this is the sentimental part I’d deny if you asked me about it later, I hope somebody there felt something crack open. Some kid, some civilian, somebody who wandered in not knowing what they were getting into and got ambushed by weirdness and beauty and walked out different. That’s the only metric that matters. Not the press release, not the attendance numbers. Did it change anybody? Did it need to happen?

If the answer’s yes, then the building can take all the time it wants.

SFMOMA Closing Celebration: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Jun 02, 2013 | Categories: Industries | Tags: Iphone, Performance Art Photography / Documentation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art | Leave A Comment »

Steel and Skin and One Honest Moment

There’s something about catching a human being in a moment of pure, unself-conscious grace that makes you realize how much of our lives we spend performing the wrong goddamn play. Ava’s sitting there beneath all that steel and majesty, and the bridge doesn’t give a shit about her and she doesn’t give a shit about the bridge, and somehow that mutual indifference creates this perfect fucking equilibrium.

The thing about Fort Point is that it’s been there watching this city eat itself and reinvent itself and lie about itself for more than 150 years. It’s seen the dreamers and the conmen and the artists and the tech bros, and it just sits there, immovable, honest in a way that people stopped being honest about three decades ago.

And here’s this performer, because that’s what she is, isn’t she?, caught between the machinery of the past and that soaring orange monument to human ambition hanging over her shoulder like some kind of ancient god that traded in sacrifice for Instagram opportunities. But she’s not performing here. Not in this frame. She’s just being, which is the hardest thing any of us ever have to do.

This is the real We Players shit right here: you put a human body in dialogue with space and architecture and history, and if you’re lucky, if you’re really fucking lucky, you capture that split-second when all the artifice falls away and what you’re left with is just the raw fact of existence. One person. One place. One moment that’s already gone.

Jun 01, 2013 | Categories: Individualism | Tags: Fort Point, Golden Gate Bridge, Portraits, San Francisco Bay | Leave A Comment »

Ann Carlson The Symphonic Body

Ann Carlson The Symphonic Body in Bing Concert Hall

The Symphonic Body is a performance made entirely from gestures. It is a movement based orchestral work performed by people from across the Stanford University campus. Instead of instruments, individuals in this orchestra perform gestural portraits based on the motions of their workday. These portraits are individual dances, custom made for each person, choreographed from the movements they already do. The particular choreographed gestures themselves become part of a larger movement tapestry within each performer and within the piece as a whole. By engaging with this performance practice members of the Stanford community come together in concert to expand, renew and re-experience the artistry embedded in the everyday.

May 30, 2013 | Categories: Industries | Tags: Artists, Choreographers, Dance Documentation / Photography, dancers, Performance Art Photography / Documentation, Stanford University | Leave A Comment »

Franconia Performance Salon #7

I don’t know what the fuck happened in that room, but I know something happened.

This is the thing nobody tells you about live performance, about actual live performance, not the kind where everyone’s mentally composing their Instagram caption while politely golf-clapping: it’s supposed to be theft. Grand fucking larceny. That’s the whole beautiful, fucked-up point. You stand up there and you take something from the audience, then someone else gets up and steals it from you, and if you’re lucky, if you’re really lucky, the whole night becomes this escalating series of heists until nobody knows who owns what anymore and everyone’s covered in fingerprints.

Ryan and Angrette apparently understand this. Once again Ryan and Angrette steal the show. They make these salons. Then Kellen stole it from them, he understood the assignment. Then… Angrette and Tonyanna steal it all back, which is where it gets good, where they apparently said fuck your narrative arc and reclaimed this whole mess.

My photographs don’t come close to capturing the magic and electricity that happened this night. Of course they never do. Because a camera can’t catch the moment when a room collectively forgets to breathe, or when somebody says something so raw that everyone has to look at their shoes for a second. I can’t photograph the feeling of watching someone take a real risk in real time.

And the mantra that floats around the kitchen during these salons or out in the street with the smokers about no bullshit and look at how smart and cultured I am performances… that’s the difference between art and performance art studies. That’s church versus the church parking lot where people actually talk.

By far the best salon so far because when you stop performing your intelligence and start performing your guts, something real can finally happen.

Also: I bought the wine for this one too, and it was good wine for a change. Good wine matters. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or broke or both.

Franconia Performance Salon #7:

performances from Ryan Tacata, Angrette McCloskey, Kellen Hoxworth, Jamie Lyons, and Tonyanna Borkovi.

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
Gertrude Stein

May 27, 2013 | Categories: Collusion | Tags: Collected Works, Performance Art Photography / Documentation | Leave A Comment »

Forever Means Until It Doesn’t

You hear something like this and you remember that all our clever bullshit about mortality is just that, bullshit. Because here’s the obscene truth: they DID have their whole lives ahead of them. They had seven months, which turned out to be the whole lives they were going to get together. That’s the con. The promise wasn’t a lie. It just had terms and conditions nobody read.

A Love Letter from Emilie Blachère to Rémi Ochlik

I’ve never found it so difficult to write. My dictionaries are useless. I can already hear you saying, “Sweet Blachère.” So instead I made a list of everything I loved about you.

My angel, my love:

I loved watching you make me coffee every morning, and after eight months it was actually good!

I loved it when you said you wanted to have two children, a boy and a girl.

I loved it even more when you pestered me in front of our friends about having kids: “Look at Thib, Mat, Fred. Their girls are cool, and they’re pregnant!”

I loved it that you decided you wanted to go to Libya, Nigeria and Burma, then Syria, then Tulles, all within five minutes.

I loved it when you told me, “Blachère, you’re making me childish. I’m becoming like you.”

I loved it when I said that you were the best photographer in the world and you said, “Well, you’re biased.”

I loved to see you blush when I told you I was crazy about you.

I loved our routine, our life together, the nights we’d stay up late watching Dexter.

I loved it how at night you would take out your contact lenses and put on your thick glasses. I’d call you Harry Potter and you hated it.

I loved it when you told me that you didn’t miss me at all.

I loved it when you told me you were jealous of Eric, of Ivan, of Pierre, jealous of everyone, even Marcelle, my cat.

I loved it when you kidnapped Marcelle when I was on assignment so she would get used to your cat, and we could all live together, one happy family.

I loved it when you were scared to meet my mother.

I loved it when you took me to Honfleur, and we stopped on the highway and ate a Mars bar and drank a Coke.

I loved it when you told me, “I’m ugly, Blachère, you’re blinded by love.”

I loved it when you left your toothbrush at my house. I took a picture of it and showed it to my girlfriends. I almost posted it on Facebook.

I loved how you stroked my leg at red lights on your scooter.

I loved it how you held me tight in the morning, then again at night, as if we had been apart for months.

I loved watching you smoke at the window. You were so sexy. But, like you said, I’m biased.

I loved to hear you say to Julien, your best friend, your brother, “Look out — Mama Squirrel’s here,” when I was waking up.

I loved it when you said at first, “Julien’s my wife; you’re my mistress.” After two months it was the opposite. Sorry, Julien.

I loved your timid smile, the way you laughed, your almost feminine delicacy, your juvenile tenderness.

I loved it how you texted me every five minutes to ask me to marry you, with emoticons and all. We promised each other we’d get hitched in Las Vegas.

I loved it how you left me love letters in my notebooks when you came over to feed Marcelle.

I loved your courage, your admiration, your rigour. I’m so proud of you, my angel. I admired you as a photojournalist and as a man. You’ve become so big.

I loved it when you told me: “Blachère, we have our whole lives ahead of us.”

I loved to hear you tell me how everything was going to be all right when I was depressed. If only I could hear you tell me that today.

I loved it so much how on February 10, a Friday, the last time we saw each other, you told me that I made you happy.

Look at that letter. “I loved it when you took me to Honfleur, and we stopped on the highway and ate a Mars bar and drank a Coke.” That’s it. That’s the whole fucking game right there. Not the big moments – the stupid Mars bar on a highway. The toothbrush she almost posted on Facebook like some lovesick kid. The way he stroked her leg at red lights.

You accumulate these tiny moments thinking you’re stockpiling them, building toward something, when really you’re just… spending them. And then the spending stops, and you’re left holding a mangled camera and a box of souvenirs and the sickening knowledge that “our whole lives” turned out to be shorter than most people’s engagements.

He died doing what he loved. People say that like it’s comfort. It’s not. It’s just what happened. He died happy and she’s alive with his destroyed camera next to her bed. Tell me which one got the better deal.

May 15, 2013 | Categories: FalseArt | Leave A Comment »

The dreams of youth grow dim

Solipsism on a boat: Ava‘s sailboat Ingwe…. And a sweater, the best one I ever had, that I miss dearly.

The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life? What follows is not a blueprint for the man entombed; not many people find themselves in a situation paying a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year (as if any man is worth that much). But the struggle is relative: it’s a lot hard to walk away from an income like that than from a fraction thereof.
Sterling Hayden, Wanderer, 1963

May 12, 2013 | Categories: Absolute Solipsism | Tags: sailing, sunrise | Leave A Comment »

Against Entropy

If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up the men to gather wood,
divide the work and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea…
Antoine de Saint Exupery

There’s something almost obscene about seeing a boat out of water, like catching your grandmother naked or finding out your hero kicks dogs. Ingwe sits there on blocks at Berkeley Marine Center, exposed, vulnerable, her wooden hull revealing every scar, every rot pocket, every place where time and saltwater conspired to fuck her up. And there’s Ava, working alongside her father, Don, both of them covered in dust and bottom paint and the particular grime that only comes from truly giving a shit about something.

This is hands bleeding, backs aching, the kind of work that makes you question every decision that led you here. But watch them, really watch them, and you see something else entirely. The way Don shows Ava how to fair a plank. The silent understanding when they both know a seam needs re-caulking. The wordless choreography of two people who’ve done this dance before, who understand that maintaining a wooden boat is less about the boat and more about maintaining yourself against the entropy of the universe.

Because here’s the thing about wooden boats: they demand everything. They’re needy, expensive, occasionally treacherous mistresses that will sink on you if you don’t pay constant attention. They’re beautiful, difficult, completely impractical in the modern age, and absolutely worth it.

You can see it in these photos. Ava up on a ladder, scraping, sanding, sealing. Don underneath, inspecting through-hulls with the concentration of a surgeon. Both of them engaged in this fundamentally hopeless but utterly necessary act of preservation. The marine railway looming behind them like some industrial cathedral, the Berkeley Marina stretching out beyond, and somewhere in the distance, the bay that Ingwe was born to sail.

This is heritage. Not the sanitized museum kind, but the real deal: knowledge passed from father to daughter through scraped knuckles and shared frustration. This is how you learn that some things are worth the blood sacrifice. That beauty requires maintenance. That the best things in life will absolutely break your heart and your back, and you’ll come back for more because what else is there? What else matters but this: hands on wood, family working together, keeping something alive that by all rights should have rotted away decades ago.

May 10, 2013 | Categories: Adventure | Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | Leave A Comment »

Postcards from the Margins: A Hunters Point Billboard

You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.
Banksy

Here’s this billboard in Hunters Point advertising postcards. “Pick up US Postcards. available 24/7. 101 Hall by PT. Office.” Not even proper grammar, just this broken commercial poetry.

Postcards… that weird artifact of tourism and displacement, that thing you send to prove you were somewhere else, somewhere better, somewhere worth documenting. “Wish you were here”, the ultimate lie of the postcard, because if you really wished they were there, you wouldn’t have left without them.

And the location, Hunters Point. Not some scenic vista. Not Fisherman’s Wharf or the Golden Gate Bridge. A neighborhood that’s been systematically poisoned, redlined, pushed to the margins, a place where the Navy left behind more contamination than opportunity. What kind of postcards are you picking up at 101 Hall by the PT Office? Views of the Superfund site? Greetings from environmental racism?

I put that Banksy quote underneath, but the billboard itself is doing something Banksy could never touch, it’s accidentally profound. It’s not trying to be art. It’s just there, this weird little commercial enterprise hawking nostalgia technology in a neighborhood that everyone’s trying to forget exists.

Available 24/7. Because insomnia and displacement don’t keep business hours.

That’s the thing about the margins, all the infrastructure of normalcy shows up broken, half-translated, eternally open because there’s nowhere else to be. The billboard’s not trying to sell you anything, really. It’s just marking territory in the only language capitalism knows how to speak, even when there’s almost nothing left to say.

Apr 24, 2013 | Categories: The City | Leave A Comment »

Franconia Performance Salon #6

Most of this is complete bullshit. Not because the artists are frauds, though some are, but because they’re trying. They’re performing performing. They’ve got this idea in their heads about what transgressive looks like, what experimental sounds like, what matters, and they’re executing that idea with all the spontaneity of a tax return.

And then someone like Megan Dunn gets up there and just… sings.

No concept. No framework. Just her voice and a room full of people and the understanding that this moment is what it is and nothing more. That’s the radical act nobody talks about: presence without pretense. Being there without the safety net of irony or the armor of intellectualization.

The rest of that night, Martin Schwartz doing his thing, Michael Hunter with his “large-scale hair choreo-poem” (fuck, even the description is exhausting), they’re operating in that space where art becomes a barrier between the artist and the audience. Look at me being strange! Look at me being brave! Look at me subverting your expectations! It’s performance about performance, critique dressed up as creation, and everybody in the room knows the game well enough to nod appreciatively while they’re secretly wondering when they can leave.

But Dunn? She bypassed all that horseshit and went straight to the vein. No mediation. No translation required. Just the raw fact of a human being making sound for other human beings in a shared space and time that will never happen again in exactly that way. That’s it. That’s the whole impossible miracle we keep trying to capture with all our theoretical frameworks and provocations and interventions.

The honesty is in the not trying. Or maybe it’s in trying to do only the one thing: be here, make this sound, let it land where it lands. Everything else that night was an elaborate negotiation with the audience’s expectations. Dunn just showed up and sang.

That’s rarer than you’d think. Harder too.