Speculation: LINES Ballet rehearsal with Babatunji Johnson in the studio, tremble…
Tremble: your whole life is a rehearsal for the moment you are in now.
Judith Malina
Heterogenous Spectacles
Your whole life is a rehearsal
Jasper Ridge
The reservoir damn on the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, Stanford University.
When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world’s thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain…
Robinson Jeffers
Women’s March San Francisco 2018
I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.”
I began to ask each time: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, “disappeared” or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.
Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.
And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
Audre Lorde
Women’s March, 2018
San Francisco
The Magus
‘During the war, when I had a great deal of time to think, and no friends to amuse me, I conceived of a new kind of drama. One in which the conventional separation between actors and audience abolished. In which the conventional scenic geography, the notions of the proscenium, stage, auditorium, were completely discarded. In which continuity of performance, either in time or place, was ignored. And in which the action, the narrative was fluid, with only a point of departure and a fixed point of conclusion. Between those points the participants invent their own drama.’ His mesmeric eyes pinned mine. ‘You will find that Artaud and Pirandello and Brecht were all thinking, in their different ways, along similar lines. But they had neither the money nor the will —an doubtless, not the time — to think as far as I did. The element they could not bring themselves to discard was the audience.’
John Fowles, The Magus, 1966
SFMOMA: Desire Lines – Retrofit
Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s
Desire Lines: Retrofit
If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy fit of anger over some word I might have said without the perfect sweetness that works on her like a charm, if ever the magic Mare looks over her shoulder and whinnies: “So! You don’t love me!” and bucks me off, sends me flying to the hyenas, if ever the paper ladder that I climb so easily to go pick stars for Promethea—at the very instant that I reach out my hand and it smells like fresh new moon, so good, it makes you believe in god’s genius—if ever at that very instant my ladder catches fire—because it is so fragile, all it would take is someone’s brushing against it tactlessly and all that would be left is ashes—if ever I had the dreadful luck again to find myself falling screaming down into the cruel guts of separation, and emptying all my being of hope, down to the last milligram of hope, until I am able to melt into the pure blackness of the abyss and be no more than night and a death rattle,
I would really rather not be tumbling around without my pencil and paper.
Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea
DESIRE LINES: RETROFIT
SFMOMA Performance
thru January 13th
Gina and Stuart Peterson White Box
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Hawaiian Automobiles
Stories: Hawaiian Automobiles (all crashed) on the island of Kauai
Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.
Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203, The Paris Review, #192, Spring 2010
Kauai Chickens
Stories: the Wanderlust of Kauai Chickens…
We all like chicken
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Goal
A Brecht Poem… feel free to switch out acting with whatever task being performed; instant can be the thing you are creating.
Whatever you portray you should always portray
As if it were happening now. Engrossed
The silent crowd sits in the darkness, lured
Away from its routine affairs. Now
The fisherman’s wife is being brought her son whom
The generals have killed. Even what has happened
In her room is wiped out. What is happening here is
Happening now and just the once. To act in this way
Is habitual with you, and now I am advising you
To ally this habit with yet another: that is, your acting should
At the same time express the fact that this instant
On your stage is often repeated; only yesterday
You were acting it, and tomorrow too
Given spectators, there will be a further performance.
Nor should you let the Now blot out the
Previously and Afterwards, nor for that matter whatever
Is even now happening outside the theatre and is similar in kind
Nor even things that have nothing to do with it all – none of this
Should you allow to be entirely forgotten.
So you should simply make the instant
Stand out, without in the process hiding
What you are making it stand out from. Give your acting
That progression of one-thing-after-another, that attitude of
Working up what you have taken on. In this way
You will show the flow of events and also the course
Of your work, permitting the spectator
To experience this Now on many levels, coming from
Previously and
Merging into Afterwards, also having much else now
Alongside it. He is sitting not only
In your theatre but also
In the world.
Bertolt Brecht, John Willett, trans.
Poems Brecht wrote between 1947-1953.
The eye exists in its primitive state.
The eye exists in its primitive state. The marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the marvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have for their witness only the wild eye that when in need of colours refers simply to the rainbow. It is present at the conventional exchange of signals that the navigation of the mind would appear to demand. But who is to draw up the scale of vision? There are those things that I have already seen many a time, and that others tell me they have likewise seen, things that I believe I should be able to remember, whether I cared about them or not, such, for instance, as the facade of the Paris Opera House, or a horse, or the horizon; there are those things that I have seen only very seldom, and that I have not always chosen to forget, or not to forget, as the case may be; there are those things that having looked at in vain I never dare to see, which are all the things I love (in their presence I no longer see anything else); there are those things that others have seen, and that by means of suggestion they are able or unable to make me see also; there are also those things that I see differently from other people, and those things that I begin to see and that are not visible. And that is not all. […]
Andre Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 1928
El Camino Real, Palo Alto, CA
So fine was the morning…
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Klimpt & Rodin, Legion of Honor
The City: Klimpt and Rodin Legion of Honor Exhibit…
I have the gift of neither the spoken nor the written word, especially if I have to say something about myself or my work. Whoever wants to know something about me -as an artist, the only notable thing- ought to look carefully at my pictures and try and see in them what I am and what I want to do.
Gustav Klimt
divino inferno screening at Cantor Art Museum
Bruno Aveillan: RODIN AND THE GATES OF HELL
The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before
art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of
his own creation.”
Auguste Rodin
written by Zoé Balthus and and Bruno Aveillan
Following the screening there was a Q&A with Bruno, Zoé,
and Jean-Babtiste Chantosieau (Editor, Musée Rodin)
October 12, 2017, Oshman Hall, McMurtry Art Building
Screening presented by Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University
Aleta Hayes: Djerassi Resident Artists Program
Santa Cruz Mountains Art / Dance
Aleta Hayes work
at Djerassi Resident Artists Program
in the Santa Cruz Mountains
Djerassi Resident Artists Program
Djerassi Resident Artists Program: Yield To Whim
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while
Marx, (Groucho)
There is nothing special about me
SFMOMA Self Portraits: an interactive art exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women… There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night… Who ever wants to know something about me… ought to look carefully at my pictures.
Gustav Klimt
Raegan Truax: Citation
Raegan Truax Citation: a 37 hour performance that began 9am Friday September 22 and ended 10pm Saturday September 23 at Counterpulse in San Francisco
Exhausted by words, decorating skeletons, erasing everything to begin again. In this 37-hour durational performance, Raegan Truax foregrounded the artistic body as embedded within and created from its archive and experience. Once the performance began, Truax did not leave the stage, sleep, or take breaks. She performed in silence and without a clock.