Slumming It in the Photogenic Apocalypse
Solo exhibition of my still and motion work with Alonzo King LINES Balletat Théâtre Champ Fleuri on Isle de la Réunion. There's something almost violent about beauty when you strip away the bullshit, when you catch it mid-flight, suspended between intention and collapse. These frames don't apologize. They don't seduce with soft focus or beg you to find them profound. They just are, like a punch or a prayer, depending on what you brought with you. The bodies here aren't performing for you. They're performing despite you, locked in this brutal conversation with gravity and will. Every tendon tells a story about sacrifice nobody asked for but everyone recognizes, that holy desperation of making something matter even when the world's got its headphones on. These dancers exist in some frequency between rage and reverence, and the photographer had the stones to get out of the way and let that frequency hum. This work respects its subjects enough to show them as they are: extraordinary humans doing impossible things for reasons that make no economic sense and all the emotional sense in the world. No romanticism, no condescension... just witness. That's harder than it looks, and rarer than it should be. On view FALL, 2021 through SPRING 2022
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Upcoming November 19th, 2020: “Traveling in Place”, Stanford Theater and Performance Studies. An online live dance performance project. ...what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Traveling in Place Zoom Link
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Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.” Jerry Saltz
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For no city can be safe in which justice and good sense are trampled under foot, and a clever talker criminally grasps a goad and guides the city. Sophocles Phaedra at Sutro Baths
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Bruno Aveillan: RODIN AND THE GATES OF HELL. written by Zoé Balthus and and Bruno Aveillan screened at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit by which Nature herself is animated. It is the joy of the intellect which sees clearly into the Universe and which recreates it, with conscientious vision. Art is the most sublime mission of man, since it is the expression of thought seeking to understand the world and to make it understood. Auguste Rodin RODIN AND THE GATES OF HELL A film by Bruno Aveillan written by Zoé Balthus and and Bruno Aveillan Following the screening there will be a Q&A with Bruno Aveillan, Zoé Balthus, and Jean-Babtiste Chantosieau (Editor, Musée Rodin) October 12, 2017 at 6PM in Oshman Hall, McMurtry Art Building Screening presented by Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University
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Gods and men alike were horrified by Ixon’s murder of his father-in-law Deïoneus none were willing to purify him Zeus took pity on him not only purified him but took him to heaven Ixion, in turn, committed the ultimate hybris by attempting to seduce Hera (Zeus deceived him into lying instead with a cloud in her shape) Ixion was then bound to a wheel on which he rolls around everywhere, proclaiming to mortals that they must repay their benefactors with kind deeds in return The Fragments… Death is less disgraceful than a wretched life. *** The half-size pipe is easily trounced by the big one Location... Ross Alley, Chinatown, San Francisco Summer 2026
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The photogenic apocalypse is what happens when someone actually reads the theory instead of just name-dropping it at openings. They’ve weaponized the Situationists, turned spectacle theory into an actual spectacle, which is either the most honest thing you can do or the most cynical, probably both, simultaneously, which is the only way this stuff ever really works.
The photogenic apocalypse is disaster tourism with a philosophy degree. Every crumbling bath house, every sculpture garden, every back alley becomes another station of the cross for someone who believes, really, truly believes, that staging Greek tragedy in ethnic neighborhoods is going to punch through the screen of late capitalism. And maybe it does, for about forty-five minutes, until everyone goes home and checks Instagram to see if the lighting looked good.
The whole enterprise screams of someone who gets it, genuinely gets the sickness, the alienation, the commodification of everything including resistance itself, and then proceeds to make absolutely gorgeous, utterly complicit art about it anyway. Because what else are you gonna do? Not make art? That’s suicide. So you make it, you brand it “Spectaclism,” and you hope the contradiction doesn’t kill you before tenure does.
