Slumming It in the Photogenic Apocalypse
Sophocles filtered through Anthony Burgess's manufactured tongue, performed in a converted military chapel on the San Francisco waterfront. May 2017. A staged reading, actors clutching scripts like life rafts while pretending they're drowning in ancient Greek despair. And you know what? There's something almost obscene about the whole setup. Not obscene like shocking, obscene like accidentally true. Because what is Oedipus if not the original "everything you thought you knew is a lie" story? You wake up thinking you're the hero who beat the monster and saved the city. Then, slowly, with the methodical precision of a cancer spreading (their word, not mine), you discover you've been fucking your mother and the prophecy you ran from caught you anyway because it was you. You were the thing you were running from all along. And Anthony Burgess, that clockwork orange brained madman, invents a language for it. Not content with translation, he needs something that sounds ancient and alien, that catches in your throat like you're choking on syllables that predate meaning. Like he understood that sometimes the horror can't be captured in English or Greek, that it needs its own sonic architecture of doom. Fort Mason Chapel, though. That's the real perverse poetry. A military chapel, where soldiers once prayed to come home whole, where God was supposed to be on our side. And into that space you drag Oedipus, walking proof that the universe doesn't give a fuck about your prayers or righteousness, that the gods play with loaded dice. What gets me is that phrase: "A new cancer appears and he is forced to save his people by rooting out the cause." Because Oedipus is the...
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Intersection of Performance, Architecture and Design Chocolate Heads d.school Friday, March 10th 3pm/6pm Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free. Rumi Anticipating the Reckoning: d.school Presentations So Friday, March 10th, 3pm and 6pm, the moment of truth arrives at the d.school. This is where all the beautiful theory we've been force-feeding these students, Bachelard, Lefebvre, Bataille, the heavy artillery of spatial thinking, either ignites into something real or evaporates into academic vapor. For weeks now, Mondays have been the intellectual combat zone, Wednesdays the laboratory where talk crashes into making. We've been asking the dangerous questions: How is art activism? How is art life? What the hell does public space even mean when everything's been privatized and sanitized to death? And now these students have to answer with their bodies, their hands, whatever materials they can scavenge. Limited means. Maximum stakes. No safety net. This isn't some polite showcase where everyone gets a participation trophy. This is the payoff for sending them into the theoretical abyss and demanding they claw their way back out through practice. What's about to emerge, these spatial interventions, these attempts to manipulate psychic weight and reshape perception, they might be brilliant. They might be spectacular failures. Probably both. The chocolate heads, the performances, the spatial narratives: we won't know if they work until people walk through them, stumble into them, feel their vertebrae shift in response. That's the electric current running through this whole enterprise: genuine risk. The possibility of falling flat on your face in front of everyone. Because here's what separates real...
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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.
