Heterogeneous Spectacles(Jamie Lyons News) ❖ Jamie Lyons

Heterogeneous Spectacles

DIAMOND TEARS AND BURNING CHÂTEAUX: When the Rich Wore Their Madness on the Outside

What went down 50 years ago at the Château de Ferrières on December 12, 1972 wasn’t just some party. It was the kind of decadent, surreal fever dream that makes you question whether you’ve been living wrong your entire life or whether these people had simply lost the plot so completely that they’d achieved some kind of transcendent madness.

Marie Helene de Rothschild, and Christ, you’ve got to hand it to her, didn’t just throw a costume party. She orchestrated a waking hallucination, a Dalí painting brought to sweating, breathing, champagne-soaked life. The invitations arrived written backwards, fucking backwards, readable only when held to a mirror, which is either brilliantly pretentious or pretentiously brilliant, and honestly, at this level of wealth and audacity, what’s the fucking difference?

The chateau itself was lit orange to look like it was burning. THE ENTIRE CASTLE. Like some apocalyptic vision, some end-times theatre that said “yes, we have so much money we can make our home look like it’s being consumed by flames FOR FUN.” And you walked up to this supposedly burning building past footmen dressed as cats, not people in cat masks, mind you, but people in full feline regalia, pretending to sleep on the steps, because why wouldn’t you? The line between reality and madness had been erased entirely, and everyone agreed to pretend this was normal.

Inside, Audrey Hepburn, AUDREY HEPBURN, glided through rooms hung with black ribbons wearing a birdcage on her head. What really twists the knife: this wasn’t performance art, not in the modern sense. This was just Tuesday night for these people. Who the fuck holds parties on Tuesdays? Only the filthy rich. This was what passed for entertainment when you had dynasties of money, when your last name alone could move markets and topple governments.

Salvador Dalí sat there like a mad king, because where else would Dalí be?, at a table decorated with deformed plastic dolls, probably pontificating about the liquefaction of time or the erotic geometry of the unconscious or some other brilliant nonsense that was simultaneously profound and completely full of shit. And Helene Rochas, the perfumer, wore an actual gramophone on her head. A GRAMOPHONE. Not as irony, not as commentary, but as genuine surrealist commitment to the bit.

But the hostess, Marie Helene wore an oversized stag’s head, antlers spreading like a crown of thorns, decorated with tears made from actual diamonds. DIAMOND FUCKING TEARS. Because regular tears weren’t enough. Maybe the village peasants were all cried out, who knows? Regardless, when you’re this rich, even your costume’s emotional display needs to be literally priceless.

What absolutely destroys me about all this? It’s not the excess, excess I can understand, excess is human, excess gives us the pyramids and the Spice Girls… it’s the natural endpoint of desire freed from consequence. It’s that these people understood something about breaking reality that we’ve lost. They knew that life is a performance, that identity is costume, that meaning is what you make of it when you’ve got a château and infinite money and absolutely nothing left to prove.

The dress code was “black tie, long dresses and surrealist heads,” which is simultaneously pretentious and genius. Like they weren’t asking people to dress up, they were demanding conscious participation in a shared delusion. They were saying: leave your pedestrian reality at the door. Tonight we’re all living inside the melting clocks.

This was 1972, Vietnam still grinding on, Watergate about to crack open, the world coming apart at the seams, and here were these people in a French castle pretending to be burning, dressed as fever dreams, dancing with mannequins and nightmares. Was it decadent? Absolutely. Tone deaf? Undoubtedly. But was it also somehow honest about what we all are, these desperate creatures playacting meaning in an absurd universe, only with better costumes and more diamonds? Maybe. Probably. Hell, definitely.

The reality is we’re all wearing surrealist heads. We’re all pretending. They just had the money and the audacity to make the pretense spectacular. To turn the performance into art. To say fuck it, if life is meaningless chaos, let’s at least make it beautiful, bizarre, unforgettable chaos. Let’s wear the gramophone. Let’s light the castle on fire. Let’s put on the stag head with the diamond tears and own the absurdity completely.

And you know what? Standing here fifty years later, drowning in our own mundane performances, our LinkedIn profiles and Instagram aesthetics and carefully curated authenticity, maybe the Surrealist Ball of ’72 wasn’t the problem. Maybe we are, with our pedestrian pretenses that we’re not performing at all.

At least they committed to the madness. At least their masks were honest about being masks.

Dec 12, 2022 | Categories: FalseArt | Tags: France | Leave A Comment »

Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman: A Brief Manifesto

What we have here is a middle finger in epistolary form, three guys in 1943 Brooklyn, broke as hell probably, telling some poor bastard at the Times that his confusion is the whole goddamn point. And they’re right, which makes it even more dangerous.

This isn’t a manifesto, it’s a divorce decree from the entire notion that art owes you an explanation. They’re saying what every real thing worth a damn has always said: if you need me to hold your hand through this, you’ve already missed it. The “consummated experience between picture and onlooker”, Christ, that’s not flowery bullshit, that’s the actual transaction, the only one that matters. Everything else is marketing copy.

June 7, 1943Mr. Edward Alden Jewell
Art Editor, New York Times
229 West 43 Street
New York, N. Y.Dear Mr. Jewell:To the artist, the workings of the critical mind is one of life’s mysteries. That is why, we suppose, the artist’s complaint that he is misunderstood, especially by the critic, has become a noisy commonplace. It is therefore, an event when the worm turns and the critic of the TIMES quietly yet publicly confesses his “befuddlement”, that he is “non-plussed” before our pictures at the Federation Show. We salute this honest, we might say cordial reaction towards our “obscure” paintings, for in other critical quarters we seem to have created a bedlam of hysteria. And we appreciate the gracious opportunity that is being offered us to present our views.

We do not intend to defend our pictures. They make their own defense. We consider them clear statements. Your failure to dismiss or disparage them is prima facie evidence that they carry some communicative power.

We refuse to defend them not because we cannot. It is an easy matter to explain to the befuddled that “The Rape of Persephone” is a poetic expression of the essence of the myth; the presentation of the concept of seed and its earth with all its brutal implications; the impact of elemental truth. Would you have us present this abstract concept with all its complicated feelings by means of a boy and girl lightly tripping?

It is just as easy to explain “The Syrian Bull”, as a new interpretation of an archaic image, involving unprecedented distortions. Since art is timeless, the significant rendition of a symbol, no matter how archaic, has as full validity today as the archaic symbol had them. Or is the one 3000 years old truer?

But these easy program notes can help only the simple-minded. No possible set of notes can explain our paintings. Their explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker. The appreciation of art is a true marriage of minds. And in art, as in marriage, lack of consummation is ground for annulment. The point at issue, it seems to us, is not an “explanation” of the paintings but whether the intrinsic ideas carried within the frames of these pictures have significance. We feel that our pictures demonstrate our aesthetic beliefs, some of which we, therefore, list:

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
2. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
3. It is our functions as artists to make the spectator see the world our way — not his way.
4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

Consequently if our work embodies these beliefs, it must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration; pictures for the home; pictures for over the mantle; pictures of the American scene; social pictures; purity in art; prize-winning potboilers; the National Academy, the Whitney Academy, the Corn Belt Academy; buckeyes, trite tripe; etc.Sincerely yours,[signed]
Adolph Gottlieb
Marcus Rothko
130 State Street Brooklyn, New York

Note point four: “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.” That’s the whole war right there. Not dumbing it down, not complicating it up, finding the shape of the thing itself. The unequivocal form. Because equivocation is death. Hedging is for cowards and academics. And they knew the difference between being difficult and being true.

But here’s where it gets bloody: they’re also full of shit in the most necessary way. All that stuff about “tragic and timeless” subject matter, the primitive and archaic, that’s them building their own mythology while claiming to strip everything bare. They’re posturing even as they reject posture. They’re creating their own academy while burning down all the others.

The really vicious part? That last paragraph, that list of insults, “pictures for over the mantle,” “the Corn Belt Academy,” “trite tripe.” They’re not just rejecting the marketplace, they’re spitting in its face and then wondering why it doesn’t understand them. But maybe that’s the only honest relationship an artist can have with a culture that wants to neuter everything into decoration.

These three understood something that gets forgotten: the audience doesn’t complete the work through interpretation, they complete it through collision. You don’t explain a wreck. You either walked away from it or you didn’t.

Nov 13, 2022 | Categories: FalseArt | Tags: Artists | Leave A Comment »

CELEBRATION OF ALONZO KING & ZAKIR HUSSAIN

I’ve been in rooms where beauty and horror held hands and French kissed. But you know those nights, the ones that grab you by the throat and won’t let go? The ones where you’re sitting there in the dark and something happens that makes you forget you’re supposed to be the asshole taking photos?

The dancers moved like Hussain’s fingers were puppeteering their souls. I’m not waxing poetic here, I mean it literally looked like the sound was moving them, like rhythm had become gravity and they were falling up. Hussain sat there, hands a blur, pulling sounds out of those drums that I didn’t know existed. Sounds that felt like they were coming from inside your own chest.

Meanwhile Alonzo’s choreography… bodies doing things bodies shouldn’t do. Defying physics like physics owed them money.

I took a lot of photos for LINES over the years. Probably too many. But this one from, that night, this one is maybe my favorite of anything I’ve ever shot for them. Maybe my favorite period. It captures… something. I’m not sure if anyone else sees this photo the way I see it. Feel it. I don’t know if what I see is really there or if it’s just my imagination spooning my memories. If my memories are cracking open meanings that don’t exist for anyone else. If I’m seeing ghosts because I need to see ghosts.

You know what? Fuck it. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

This was a retrospective, a “look what we built” kind of evening. Twenty years of two masters from completely different worlds pushing each other, challenging each other, making something that belonged to neither tradition completely and somehow belonged to both entirely.

I talked with Zakir afterwards. He was always generous and warm. You shoot the shit, you say the things you say. You never think it’s the last time. You never think: remember this, remember his face, remember the sound of his laugh. You just assume there’s always going to be a next time.

Addendum added December 24, 2024

A little over a year later they’d announced Scheherazade is coming back. The collaboration remounted in the Spring. The thing they’d built together. And now Zakir is gone.

Dead.

Some collaborations, you realize way too fucking late, were miracles. Were lightning strikes. Were things you witnessed and somehow, stupidly, took for granted because you thought beauty like that was reproducible. Renewable.

It’s not.

Alonzo King LINES Ballet

Celebration of Alonzo King & Zakir Hussain. Hussain’s mastery of classical Indian percussion brought him a Grammy award and worldwide renown. His collaborations with Alonzo King renew classical forms, holding respect for the old and ushering in the new with a keen eye for innovation.

William Saroyan

Saroyan wrote about this place. The Armenian families, the immigrant hustle, the particular loneliness and joy of Central Valley life. He got it. That beautiful, messy, complicated thing about America that most writers either romanticize into oblivion or treat like a sociology report. Saroyan just… told the truth. With style.

My partner Lindsey’s family comes from here. Her grandfather Irwin made packing crates for farmers, honest work, the kind that built this valley one box at a time. One day, Saroyan’s mother asked Irwin for a favor: give her boy a ride back to town. Sure, Irwin said. Why not? So Saroyan gets in. They drive. And when they get to town, Saroyan asks to be dropped off at the local brothel.

That’s the whole story. That’s the whole writer, really, the guy who won a Pulitzer Prize and told them to shove it because “commerce should not judge the arts,” then spent the afternoon at a whorehouse. The guy who wrote about grace and desperation with equal tenderness.

Because Saroyan understood something essential: we’re all just trying to make sense of this beautiful, heartbreaking mess. And sometimes, that’s enough. Sometimes, that’s everything

Everything is changed for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the world has always been full of that loneliness.
William Saroyan, The Human Comedy

Sep 25, 2022 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: Writers Against Forgetting | Leave A Comment »

Euripides Enclose the Divine

The Fragment: What house shaped by builders could enclose the divine form within its enfolding walls?

So here’s the thing about garbage. About the stuff we leave on sidewalks. That dollhouse sitting on the curb, some kid’s entire universe, once upon a time. Rooms where dolls had dinner parties and tucked themselves into beds the size of matchboxes. Where everything was perfect and miniature and controllable.

And now? Now it’s on the pavement. Waiting for the truck. Waiting to become nothing.

We discard shit constantly. Furniture, relationships, dreams, gods. Especially gods. We’re spectacular at throwing away the things we used to worship.

But Euripides, that magnificent bastard, he knew exactly what question to ask: “What house shaped by builders could enclose the divine form within its enfolding walls?”

Look at that dollhouse. Really look at it. Up in the attic, three women. Figures clustered together in that cramped space under the roof, balancing themselves on the wobbly framing of this whole broken structure. They’re not trapped up there. They climbed up there. They chose the highest point, the most precarious perch, the space that was never meant to be the main stage.

Three women. Maybe they’re just dolls. Or maybe they’re the Moirai. The Fates. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. The spinners of destiny, hanging out in a discarded dollhouse attic in Santa Cruz, still doing their work after everyone stopped believing in them. Still spinning, measuring, cutting the threads of human lives from their wobbling perch above the world.

Think about it. Where else would the Fates end up in our disposable culture? Not in some grand temple. Not on Olympus. In the attic of a broken dollhouse on a curb. Still together. Still working. Still deciding who lives and who dies and how long each thread runs, from the most unstable room in the most discarded structure imaginable.

And down on the lower floor, those two-dimensional cutout characters. Flat. Literally flat. Not even pretending to be three-dimensional like the women above. Just paper-thin representations of human forms going through the motions of whatever play they were designed for. Living their lives as pure surface, no depth, no interior. Safe in their prescribed rooms. Stable. Dead. Unaware that above them, three women are literally controlling the universe.

Here’s what strikes me: The three-dimensional women took the attic. The unstable space. The room that’s all angles and wobbling beams and potential collapse. While the flat characters stay below in their neat little rooms with their neat little lives, the Fates above are doing the real work. They’re taking a risk. They’re living on shaky ground. They’re finding freedom in the margins while they measure out destinies.

Where’s the divine in this? Right there. In those three figures. In the possibility that the Moirai never left, they just got pushed to the attic. In the refusal to stay on the ground floor where everything is predetermined and two-dimensional. The divine is in the three women balancing on broken beams, creating their own geometry, their own community, their own precarious heaven in a space that was never supposed to matter, still spinning the threads that control everything below.

The two-dimensional figures on the main floor don’t even know what’s above them. They’re playing it safe. They’re staying in their lanes. They’re performing the roles that got built into them. But those three women in the attic? They’re alive. They’re three-dimensional in a structure that’s falling apart, and they don’t give a damn. They’re not waiting for stability. They’re not waiting for permission. They’re just up there, together, balancing on the wobble, spinning fate itself.

We build these containers. These houses. These lives. We assign rooms and roles and proper places for proper things. And some people stay where they’re put, flat as paper, safe as death. But the Fates? They climbed. They found the cracks in the structure and made them into doorways. They took the attic and turned it into the control room for the entire cosmos.

The divine doesn’t live in the safe rooms. It lives in the wobble. In the three women who chose the highest, most unstable point and decided that’s where they’d do the most important work in the universe. In the refusal to be contained, to be flattened, to be assigned a proper place in someone else’s design. In the knowledge that destiny itself operates from a broken attic in a discarded dollhouse.

Nothing material lasts. Everything material matters. You can’t enclose the divine. But sometimes you can see exactly where it refuses to stay on the ground floor. Where it climbs to the attic, balances on broken beams, and spins the threads of every life that ever was or will be.

That’s the fragment. That’s what Euripides knew. The divine doesn’t need your walls or your stability or your safe rooms. It just needs three women brave enough to take the attic and make it the center of everything. Three Fates in a dollhouse, still working, still mattering, still divine in the ruins.

This piece, this moment, this dollhouse: I incorporated a text fragment from one of Euripides’ lost tragedies to an image of an abandoned dollhouse discovered on a sidewalk. Informally, the piece is called Enclose the Divine. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the remaining textual fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Fragments speaking to fragments. Ruins honoring ruins. The discarded making the discarded sacred again.

This piece, this moment, this dollhouse: I incorporated a text fragment from one of Euripides’ lost tragedies to an image of an abandoned dollhouse discovered on a sidewalk. Informally, the piece is called Enclose the Divine. This work is part of a larger project called IOTA that brings to life the remaining textual fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Fragments speaking to fragments. Ruins honoring ruins. The discarded making the discarded sacred again.

Aug 23, 2022 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: Euripides, Performance Art Photography / Documentation, Santa Cruz, Site Specific Art | Leave A Comment »

Charlie at the Gates of Hell

Father’s Day, 2022. Lindsey’s taken us to Stanford, which is either the most perfect thing she could have done or the cruelest, depending on how you look at it. This is the place where my father taught. Where I grew up. Where I went to school. Every corner of this campus is a ghost, a memory, a version of myself I barely recognize anymore.

And here’s Charlie. One year old. One. This tiny human who doesn’t know about any of that history, who doesn’t care that we’re standing in front of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, that monument to damnation and desire that’s been watching over this place since before I was born. He just knows there are steps. And steps, when you’re one, are the entire universe. They’re Everest. They’re possibility.

So he climbs.

And I’ve got Also Sprach Zarathustra playing in the background because apparently I’m that guy now, the one who soundtracks his kid’s toddler mountaineering with Strauss, with that opening that Stanley Kubrick made synonymous with evolution and cosmic revelation. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The übermensch. The eternal return. All that Nietzschean grandiosity playing while my son hauls himself up stone steps one determined little fist at a time.

The absurdity is not lost on me.

Behind him, Rodin’s damned souls writhe in bronze, tumbling through Dante’s vision of eternal suffering. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. And in front of them, Charlie, who is pure hope, pure forward motion, completely unaware that he’s performing his own tiny drama about ascent and ambition right there at the threshold of hell.

This is what kills me about being a father: everything means too much now. It’s not just a kid climbing steps. It’s generations. It’s my father, who walked these paths. It’s me, who grew up here, who learned here, who became whatever I am in these shadows. And now it’s Charlie, who doesn’t know any of that yet, who’s just living in this perfect present tense where the only thing that matters is the next step.

My son. One year old. Climbing.

And Strauss swelling in the background like the universe is holding its breath.

Maybe it is.

The main thing is to be moved,
to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.
Be a man before being an artist!
Auguste Rodin

Rodin’s Gates of Hell
Stanford University

Jun 10, 2022 | Categories: Finca Fiasco | Tags: Auguste Rodin, Charlie Lyons, Stanford University | Leave A Comment »

Alonzo King LINES Ballet Deep River

Photographing live performance? You get one shot at it. No retakes, no mulligans, no “can we do that again but with better light?” The thing happens once, in real time, and you either capture it or you don’t. That’s it.

So I’m at YBCA, dress rehearsal for Alonzo King’s Deep River. But there’s an audience, overdressed board members who showed up for the social credit, teachers and staff exhausted from the days work, and a hundred-plus amped-up dance students who are about to lose their minds. It’s a weird mix: dilettantes in the orchestra section, true believers in the balcony. Then Lisa Fischer walks out.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

If you’ve never heard Lisa Fischer sing live, you don’t understand. I spent several years on the road with Mabou Mines touring their production of Gospel at Colonus, Sophocles reimagined through Pentecostal service, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama embodying Oedipus and ancient Greek tragedy through gospel and call-and-response, and even after all that, this stops me cold. This isn’t background vocals for the Stones, this isn’t studio work. This is a human being channeling something ancient and profound through her body. Gospel, spirituals, the sound of survival and transcendence wrapped into one impossible instrument. You feel it in your chest, in your bones. The camera feels irrelevant. Who the fuck am I to try to capture this?

But that’s the job. So you work.

Jason Moran. MacArthur genius. Kennedy Center jazz director. All the fancy credentials. And none of it means shit compared to what’s happening in that room. I’m tasked with capturing a conversation between tonally complex music, a singular voice, a dozen bodies… with something larger than all of them. Try photographing that. Try freezing a moment when the whole point is the flow, the relationship, the thing that can not be repeated.

And the dancers, these freakishly talented humans with their impossible extensions and their bodies that shouldn’t be able to do what they do, they’re moving through choreography born from three years of pandemic weirdness. Three years of working in bubbles, in Golden Gate Park, on farms, in the Sonora desert. You can see it in the movement: the isolation, the reaching, the determined hope against impossible odds.

You’re shooting through all of this. Not hosing it down like some hack $300 wedding shooter, some talentless dipshit with a kit lens who thinks a thousand shitty frames equals one good photograph. I’m using a Leica M+P, manual focus, manual everything. It’s fucking masochistic. Every frame matters because I can’t just spray and pray with this thing. I’m here because I can make split second choices: Fischer mid-note, mouth open, head back? A dancer suspended in mid-leap? The ensemble moving as one organism?

The thing about photographing performance… especially something like Deep River, which is essentially an hourlong meditation on love and resilience, is that you’re not really capturing the work. You can’t. In truth, all you can do is just leave evidence that it happened. That people gathered. That something special, maybe holy, occurred.

That has to be enough.

Deep River, a collaboration with composer Jason Moran and vocalist Lisa Fischer. Bending the lines between classical and contemporary ballet, Alonzo King draws on the strengths of his extraordinary dancers, altering the way we look at ballet today.

Bolinas Morning

Bolinas doesn’t want you to find it. The locals keep tearing down the highway signs, a middle finger to the hordes from San Francisco who’d otherwise choke this place with their Range Rovers and organic kombucha stands. It’s deliberate, this obscurity. And I respect the hell out of it.

You wake up at five-thirty. It’s dark. It’s always dark. The cold hits you like a slap from an ex-girlfriend who’s decided you’re not worth the energy anymore. But you go anyway, because you’re an idiot, because something in your reptile brain insists that paddling into frigid Pacific water while normal people are still asleep is somehow a reasonable life choice.

The drive down that narrow road feels like entering another dimension. Mist hangs over everything like the place is still deciding whether to fully materialize. The beach parking lot is dirt and gravel, no frills, no pretense. A few beat-up trucks, boards strapped to roofs. These aren’t tech bros doing their wellness routine. These are people who need this.

I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would.
William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

The paddle-out is baptism and punishment in equal measure. Your hands go numb. Your chest tightens. The wetsuit feels like a cruel joke. But then there’s that moment. That first sit on the board, bobbing in the lineup, watching the horizon turn from black to gunmetal to that impossible violet-orange that makes you understand why people write bad poetry. Why I write this.

It’s stupid and sublime. You’re freezing, probably slightly hypothermic, muscles screaming. But you’re also more present than you’ve been in months. No phone. No email. Just you and the ocean’s indifference, which is somehow the most honest relationship you have.

Finnegan is right. There’s no choice here. Just surrender.

Mar 21, 2022 | Categories: Adventure | Tags: Bolinas, Sunrise, surfing | Leave A Comment »

Chocolate Heads at Stanford’s Cantor Museum

Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.
Jerry Saltz

The Cantor sits there on Stanford’s campus like every other institutional temple to dead things under glass, all that marble and hush and carefully calibrated light designed to make you whisper and feel appropriately small. The architecture itself is violence. It says this matters and you don’t in the same breath. It’s the deal we make: come gaze at beauty, but know your place.

So when Aleta Hayes brings Chocolate Heads into that space, when she puts actual living, breathing, moving bodies among the statues and carefully preserved fragments of other people’s civilizations, something breaks open.

Fashion Fable. Even the title refuses to genuflect. Not “Response to the Permanent Collection” or some other academically neutered horseshit. Fashion. Fable. Two words that admit their own artifice, that know they’re putting on a show, and don’t apologize for it.

The photographs catch these moments: a dancer’s body curved against a sculpture, muscle and stone in conversation. Another figure suspended mid-leap in a gallery designed for contemplation, not kinesis. These aren’t dancers performing for the art. They’re performing with it, against it, through it. The museum wants stillness. The dance says fuck your stillness.

There’s that Saltz quote about museums as wormholes, as ecstasy machines. Yeah. Okay. But you have to earn it. You have to break through the institutional membrane first, that thing that makes museums feel like mausoleums, like the past is dead and untouchable rather than something still happening in how you move through space.

Site-specific dance refuses the black box theater, refuses safe distance. It says: right here, right now, in this place that wasn’t designed for this, we’re going to make something that couldn’t exist anywhere else. The space isn’t neutral. The space is the point. The friction between what the Cantor is (that hushed temple to cultivation and old money and proper appreciation) and what the dancers do in it creates something neither could achieve alone.

You can see it in these frames. Bodies that are Black, that are here, claiming space in an institution that historically hasn’t exactly rolled out the welcome mat. Not making a speech about it. Just being. Moving. Existing with a physicality that refuses to be polite or quiet or tasteful. The performance becomes haunting in reverse: not ghosts in the gallery, but life asserting itself against the museum’s impulse toward death.

And I am here documenting it. This kind of work is vapor. It happens once, then it’s gone. The photographs are evidence that something real happened, that made those galleries less like tombs for junior and more like actual ecstasy machines.

The realness is in the bodies’ refusal to be artifacts. In the way movement disrupts the museum’s carefully constructed narrative of permanence. In how for one night the Cantor became a little less sure of itself, a little more alive.

Nobody tells you this about making art in institutional spaces: the institution is never neutral. It’s always fighting you, always trying to absorb and neutralize what you’re doing. The only way to win is to make something so present, so now, so undeniably here that the building can’t swallow it.

Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads performing a site specific dance, Fashion Fable, at the Cantor Museum, Stanford University.

La Réunion (again) with LINES Ballet

I don’t do second takes. I don’t revisit. The world’s too big, too full of places I haven’t screwed up yet, haven’t disappointed myself in. But La Réunion? La Réunion gets a pass.

First time around, I barely scratched the surface of this French-African-Indian Ocean fever dream floating off Madagascar’s coast. This time, I’m back with LINES Ballet and Robert Rossenwasser, and we’re chasing dancers through rainforests that smell like the earth’s first breath. We’re stupid with ambition, drunk on the impossible: capturing bodies in motion against waterfalls that have been falling since before any of us decided art mattered.

Here’s the thing that breaks my brain: they’re performing Pole Star, and the video projections dancing behind the dancers? I shot those. Years ago. On this same island. So I’m watching my own images… waterfalls, volcanic rock, that particular quality of light that only exists here, made into something larger, folded into choreography, given new life by bodies moving through space. It’s recursive. It’s unsettling. It’s kind of perfect.

And then they showed me the exhibition. Large C prints of my photographs, mounted, framed, hung on actual walls like I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t ready for that gut-punch. You spend your life looking through a viewfinder, and you think you know what you’ve made. Then you see it big, outside yourself, and something shifts. They’re beautiful in a way I didn’t quite believe when I pressed the shutter. Moving, even. Especially the waterfalls, the fog in the mountains. Who knew?

The thing about shooting dancers at elevation, in the clouds, literal clouds rolling through volcanic mountains, is that it’s profoundly idiotic. It’s also transcendent. Watch a perfectly trained human body extend, balance, defy physics on a ridge where the fog is so thick you can’t see three feet ahead, and tell me there’s a god. I dare you.

Between setups, we’re stopping at a banana plantation where the light hits the leaves like Vermeer had a say in it. The dancers stretch against rows of green going on forever, and I’m thinking about colonialism, agriculture, beauty built on complicated histories, the stuff that should make you uncomfortable but instead just is.

I was wrong to think once was enough. Some places demand you come back. Some islands won’t let you leave, not really.

Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries—the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited, and for which I had always been vainly searching.
H. P. Lovecraft

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