Tagged — Jamie Lyons
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 […]
Read
FalseArt 2024
Ruth Escobar looked at a perfectly good theater in São Paulo in 1969 and said, essentially, “fuck this”, then proceeded to destroy it. Not metaphorically. Literally excavated the stage five meters down, erected a cylinder clear up to the fly loft, 20 meters of vertical madness, 86 tons of iron, elevators, cranes, suspended cages, gynecological […]
ReadFalseArt 2024
Here’s the thing about rehearsals that nobody wants to admit: they’re not more truthful because they’re purer. They’re more truthful because the lie hasn’t settled yet, hasn’t hardened into the kind of official story you can sell tickets to. A rehearsal is where readings collide, actors, designers, text, space, institution, like cars entering an intersection […]
Read
FalseArt 2024
FalseArt 2023
I’ve spent enough time in theaters (dark ones, bright ones, ones that smelled like decades of dust and ambition) to know this much: we’re fucked when it comes to how we actually see bodies anymore. Three ways to watch someone perform. Theater: you’re in the room, sharing oxygen, watching sweat happen in real time, no […]
Read
FalseArt 2023
So What the Hell IS Real Anyway? Maybe the text is just sitting there like last week’s corpse… cold, rigid, embalmed in academic formaldehyde, while the actor’s body is out there in the trenches, sweating through the shirt, bleeding into the floorboards, happening in real time like a Mahler Symphony you can feel in your […]
Read
FalseArt 2023
I watch people. I mean I really watch them. The way you move through a door when someone’s behind you, the little apologetic shoulder-hunch you do when you’re taking up space, the whole elaborate dance of who-goes-first at the intersection. These tiny rituals that nobody talks about but everybody performs like their life depends on […]
ReadFalseArt 2020
Here’s what this thing is actually trying to do, and why it matters: I’m not talking about phenomenology as some pristine moment of pure experience, that whole “unmediated presence” thing is academic horseshit and we all know it. This is about phenomenology as a verb, as something you do: you tune yourself to what’s actually […]
Read
Absolute Solipsism 2017
So here’s a Bertolt Brecht poem, and here’s the thing: where he says acting, plug in whatever the hell you’re actually doing… writing, painting, fucking, dying, making breakfast, making art, making sense of the wreckage. And that instant he’s talking about? That’s whatever you’re trying to bring into the world before it crushes you. Same […]
Read
Individualism 2016
The first time doesn’t exist in my head, it’s just gone, one of those origin stories you lose in the noise. But there’s your laugh, like gravel and light, cutting through those parties at my parents’ place. There’s me, just a kid, watching some play you’d put together, and you, you, asking what I thought. […]
Read
FalseArt 2016
“Notes to myself on beginning a painting” by Richard Diebenkorn 1. Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion. 2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued – except as a stimulus for further moves. 3. DO […]
ReadFalseArt 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 […]
Read
Industries 2016
The academics want you to believe that live performance (the sweating, breathing, bleeding out loud presence of actual human bodies in actual space) carries some sacred charge that recordings can’t touch. That there’s magic in the ephemeral, nobility in the disappearing act. Every moment unique, finite, gone the second it happens. Like watching your best […]
Read
FalseArt 2015
What the Fuck Are We Even Doing Here? Performance photography and critical writing: we’re both chasing the same fucking unicorn. Trying to tell you what went down in that room when the air got thick, when something cracked open and spilled out onto the floor, when you could feel it in your teeth. Except we’re […]
Read
FalseArt / 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, […]
ReadFalseArt 2015
There’s this thing happening, right? This raw uncut shit we’re all doing every goddamn day, playing ourselves like we’re method actors who forgot we’re acting. I’m not talking about the sanitized Broadway version of life, the stuff you package up nice for the tourists. I’m talking about the performance embedded in just being, the way […]
Read
Individualism 2015
FalseArt 2015
You walk into rehearsal with this thing in your head: this perfect, shimmering bastard of an idea. And then reality shows up with a tire iron and starts beating the shit out of it. But here’s the thing: that’s not a bug, it’s the whole goddamn point. I’m working with other people, right? Some of […]
Read
FalseArt 2014
The Hustle Never Stops, It Just Gets Smarter Post-Structuralism didn’t die, it went corporate. Burned bright, ate itself, and what’s left is a set of moves you can pull at faculty meetings, a way to sound dangerous while keeping your parking spot. Derrida says kill your idols, declares the author dead, and sure, on the […]
Read
Speculation 2014
I never said all actors are cattle, what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle. Alfred Hitchcock Here’s the thing about getting notes: it’s the moment where every actor or crews carefully constructed self mythology gets shredded like wet newspaper. I’m standing there, I’ve just done what I thought was brilliant work, […]
ReadFalseArt 2014
Here’s what happens when you come see one of my pieces. You’re watching three things at once. Three different versions of reality: or “ontologies of the real,” if we’re being insufferable academics about it. Which, fine, I am. PhD and everything. Doesn’t mean I have to sound like one. First: the actors. Right there. Meat […]
Read
Speculation 2013
Look, I have nothing against scholars. Hell, I am one, PhD and all, even if that fact makes me want to punch myself in the face sometimes. But there’s a particular kind of fuckery that happens when really smart people theorize about performance in ways that completely erase how it’s actually made. When they’re basically […]
Read
FalseArt 2013
When you’re watching a film, and I mean really watching it, not scrolling through your phone while Netflix drones on in the background, that glass eye of the camera? It becomes your eye. It’s a kind of beautiful con job, really. The director, the auteur, whatever pretentious film school dropout term you want to use, […]
Read
FalseArt 2005
July in Avignon, watching Belgian weirdo Jan Fabre, the festival’s designated madman-in-residence, make his performers roll around in their own sweat while reciting what I can only assume was poetry, though my French was drowning after the third pastis. The whole goddamn city had become one sprawling theatrical acid trip, and I was here for […]
ReadWanderlust 1997
I was the advance man for Mabou Mines, stumbling off an Aeroflot red eye from Seattle, my brain doing somersaults somewhere over Siberia while my body arrived in Moscow like a sack of wet cement. Nineteen ninety-seven. Yeltsin was still clinging to power, the Soviet Union was barely cold in its grave, and Moscow was […]
Read