I’m trying to make art about art, standing outside the spectacle while photographing bodies suspended in mid blur, freezing dancers who’ve already evaporated into the afternoon fog. But here’s the thing: it’s essentially one decent frame I caught of dancers locked into YBCA’s courtyard geometry and a goddamn bird that decided to photobomb the whole enterprise.
RAWdance, Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein’s athletic truth telling machine, took their piece Through my fingers to the deep and scattered it across three simultaneous locations like they were trying to choreograph the very idea of paying attention. You had to choose. You had to miss something.
Joel St. Julien’s score presumably did something, though you wouldn’t know it from the silence of this still photograph, which is exactly my point about documentation being its own weird necrophilia. But that bird, that accidental collaborator, reminds you that the performance happened in real air, real time, real space where seagulls don’t give a shit about artistic intentions.
Unlike reproductions of other types of artworks, photographs of performances, by virtues of their focus on artist’ body, allow the viewer to engage with the artist in a haptic, as well as a visual sense. Encountering the shared ontology of the band makes the viewer mindful of his or her own physical presence as witness to the pictured event (even if it well after the fact.
Kathy O’Dell, Contact with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s
I nailed this shot because of the bird. Bodies intersecting with architectural lines, wildlife intersecting with human choreography, the gardens becoming complicit in all of it, proving that downtown San Francisco still has enough feral energy left to let chance collaborate with control. The image works precisely because it admits what it isn’t. It’s not the thing, it’s the ghost of the thing plus an uninvited guest, and maybe that’s all documentation ever wants to be.
Honest about its accidents.