Heterogeneous Spectacles(Jamie Lyons News) ❖ Jamie Lyons

April 19, 2014 · Adventure

Surfing Fort Point

There is something about being small, genuinely, cosmically small, underneath that orange monument to human hubris, surfing Fort Point, while the Pacific tries its damnedest to kill me. The water’s so cold it feels personal, like it has a grudge. My body’s screaming at me that this is a terrible idea, and you know what? […]

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March 19, 2014 · Collusion

Inhabitant – Mission District, San Francisco 2014

Frank Smigiel, from SFMOMA, calls me up and asks if I want to play the Mayor of San Francisco. Not the actual mayor, but some conceptual version of a mayor in a performance piece by these South African artists in the Mission District. I’m thinking: Why me? I’m not an actor. I’m not a politician. […]

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March 15, 2014 · FalseArt

Notes on Live Art and Video (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fragmentation)

Here’s what happens when you come see one of my pieces. You’re watching three things at once. Three different versions of reality: or “ontologies of the real,” if we’re being insufferable academics about it. Which, fine, I am. PhD and everything. Doesn’t mean I have to sound like one. First: the actors. Right there. Meat […]

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Notes on Live Art and Video (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fragmentation)

March 7, 2014 · Industries

The Worst Kind of Fool

Looking at the Fool in Lear is like staring into a cracked mirror at 1:34 AM with bourbon on your breath and truth seeping through the fissures. This isn’t some jingling court jester doing pratfalls for the Renaissance crowd, this is the guy who sees the wreckage before the crash, who speaks in riddles because […]

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March 6, 2014 · FalseArt

Behind Your Forehead: James Joyce, Henrik Ibsen, and the Only Kind of Artistic Courage That Actually Matters

To Henrik Ibsen March 1901 8 Royal Terrace, Fairfield, Dublin Honoured Sir: I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play When We Dead Awaken, an appreciation of […]

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March 5, 2014 · Absolute Solipsism

Cathedral of the Perpetually Lost

We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what […]

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February 25, 2014 · Industries

Chocolate Heads at Cantor Art Museum

So here we are in the Cantor, Stanford’s marble temple to the idea that culture can be contained, catalogued, made safe for the children of tech money and inherited privilege. And into this pristine space comes Aleta Hayes with her Chocolate Heads, turning off the goddamn lights and switching on the black lights like some […]

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