You walk into the Stanford d.school, this temple of design thinking, this cathedral of sticky notes and whiteboards where tomorrow’s disruptors learn to disrupt, and you’re expecting the usual performance art nonsense. The kind where someone’s going to stand in a corner for three hours or wrap themselves in cellophane while reading Foucault through a bullhorn.
But what actually happened here, what Aleta, John and myself managed to pull off, was we took a bunch of students (not just undergraduates and graduates, but anyone affiliated with the university), force-fed them the good stuff (Bachelard, Lefebvre, Bataille, the heavy hitters who actually understood that space isn’t just empty air between buildings), and then said: okay, now go make something with your hands and bodies and whatever shit you can find. Limited means. Maximum stakes. No safety net.
This is the bastard child of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings and the entire lineage of site-specific work that’s been trying to rescue art from the hermetically sealed gallery, that airless mausoleum where art goes to die of respectability. Since the 60s and 70s, when artists finally said “fuck the white cube” and started making work in garbage dumps, on borders, in the actual world where actual people might accidentally encounter it, there’s been this electric current running through performance: the idea that place matters, that context is content, that the where and the how shape the what.
And the questions, Christ, the questions we’re wrestling with are the right ones, even if they’re phrased in that particular academic dialect that makes your teeth hurt: How is art activism? How is art life? What the hell is the “res publica” anymore when public space has been privatized, sanitized, and surveilled to death?
The class structure itself was smart, Mondays for the big ideas and the theory, Wednesdays for getting your hands dirty, for arguing about what Monday actually meant when you’re standing in a room trying to figure out how to make emptiness speak. Lectures and screenings, sure, but then: teams, projects, the actual making of things that might fail spectacularly.
Because here’s what separates the real thing from the academic exercise: risk. The willingness to fall flate on your face. The moment when theory crashes into practice and you realize that reading about spatial narratives is one thing, but actually creating one, actually manipulating the air and light and psychic weight of a room, is something else entirely.
What you’re looking at in these images, whatever that chocolate-head situation is, that’s the evidence. Students trying to manifest their personal interpretation of space, trying to create communication and exchange with limited means. Maybe it worked. Maybe it was a beautiful disaster. Maybe it was both. But they did it. They took the Bachelard and the Foucault and the Lefebvre and they didn’t just write papers about it, they translated it into something you could walk through, stumble into, experience.
The d.school, for all its design-thinking™ buzzword bullshit, gave them permission to fail interestingly. And we didn’t coddle them. We threw them in the deep end with the theory and said swim.
That’s how you learn. Not by talking about space, but by trying to reshape it. Not by reading about place and non-place, but by standing in the actual contested, complicated, messy geography of now and asking: what happens if I do this? Or this? This?
The performances were the moment of truth. When the spatial narratives either sang or fell flat. When months of debate and reading and making either coalesced into something that mattered or evaporated into well-intentioned nothing.
But they showed up. They made the work. They put it in front of people.