The Chocolate Heads came slithering through Pace Gallery’s pristine white corridors like they’d been unleashed from some wild ritual, all limbs and fabric swaddling their skulls, moving against David Hockney‘s lurid iPad Yosemites like beautiful vandals crashing a country club. This wasn’t some precious dance meets art dialogue. This was collision, the kind where you can’t tell if bodies are worshipping the work or trying to desecrate it.
Hockney’s digitized wilderness, those electric greens, those too blue blues screaming off the walls, needed this interruption. Needed these shrouded figures writhing through the sterile gallery air like the ghost of something real. The Chocolate Heads didn’t complement the paintings; they contaminated them, made them mean something beyond their market value and critical consensus. Aleta Hayes understands what most choreographers chickenshit away from: art galleries are mausoleums until you put something breathing and sweating and uncomfortably alive inside them.
The dancers moved through Hockney’s manufactured sublime like they were tunneling out of it, their chocolate swaddled heads refusing to see what they were supposed to see. The Palo Alto audience, wine clutching, opening night types, couldn’t decide whether to be delighted or deeply uncomfortable. That hesitation, that split second of not knowing how to react, that’s where something actually happened. The performance didn’t ask permission. It just was, feral and committed, making the whole expensive enterprise feel dangerous again, even if just for an hour before everyone shuffled back to their cars.
What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.
but then…
The photograph isn’t good enough.
It’s not real enough.
David Hockney
Presented with the PACE Gallery in Cooperation with StratLab:
Visual Performance in Art Spaces and Museum class
(Stanford Theater and Performance Studies + Anderson Collection)