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 […]
Continue Reading →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 […]
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Why do we sacrifice so much energy to our art? 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 […]
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So What the Hell IS Real Anyway? 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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
Continue Reading →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 […]
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