Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Judith Butler's working the frame like she's dismantling a transmission with her bare hands: all grease and precision, no bullshit romanticism about what's underneath. The photograph doesn't capture anything; it's a performance of capture, a con job we've all agreed to fall for. Click. You're frozen. Click. You're legible. Click. You now exist in the grammar of the visible, baby, and that grammar's got rules written by people who were never planning to include you in the first place.
The theater's the same hustle, different stage. You walk out there and the lights hit and suddenly your body's doing this weird double duty: it's yours but it's also this thing being read, interpreted, violated by every eye in the house. Butler gets that the performance isn't some authentic eruption of my true self; it's repetition with a slight hitch, a drag queen's wink at the whole apparatus. I'm iterating norms even as I'm potentially fucking with them.
What's genuinely dangerous about her thinking, is how she yanks away the safety net. There's no "real me" hiding behind the lens or the footlights waiting to be discovered. It's performance all the way down, which means the stakes are simultaneously everything and nothing. The photograph testifies, sure, but to what? A moment that was already performing itself. The body on stage insists on its thereness, its materiality, but that flesh is always already wrapped in signification, marked by power, doing the slow violence of becoming readable.
It's exhausting. It's exhilarating. It's the only game running, and Butler's calling out the dealers while playing her own hand.
FalseArt 2025
This photography and performance bibliography isn’t a reading list, it’s a goddamn intervention into how we fool ourselves about what it means to witness anything at all. Call it a photography theory bibliography if you need the institutional fig leaf, but this documenting performance bibliography is here to gut the lie of neutral observation. Azoulay […]
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FalseArt 2016
I’m going to tell you something that’s going to sound like complete bullshit coming from a guy who’s made real money with a camera: I fucking hate documentation. Here I am. Supposedly a photographer, though don’t call me that, seriously, someone who’s shot work for Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Ron Athey, Alonzo King. Someone who ground it […]
ReadFalseArt / Speculation 2015
Nobody wants to cop to this, but here’s the raw nerve: when you’re watching someone up there, flayed down to what the program notes call their “truth,” you’re not getting some uncut vérité feed. You’re getting a setup. A con job so clean you mistake it for catharsis. Not some fever dream, not wish fulfillment, […]
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