Tagged — Jamie Lyons
What I do is fucked up, but necessary.
Call it Performance Art Photography. Call it Performance Art Documentation. Live Art Documentation if you're feeling fancy. Or, if I've had three drinks and I'm trying to seduce someone: capturing ephemeral moments. That usually works.
Performance art dies the second it's born. That's the whole point. It's a moment, raw, unrepeatable, gone before you can fully process what you just witnessed. Like watching someone you love walk away for the last time. You know you'll never get that exact configuration of light, breath, and desperation again.
And here I am, camera in hand, trying to kill it slower.
Because here's the thing nobody wants to admit: I'm violating these artists. They know it, I know it. Every time I press the shutter, I'm taking something that was meant to vanish and I'm pinning it down like a butterfly in a case. I'm seeing them in ways they'll never see themselves, mid-scream, mid-transformation, caught in that precise moment between intention and collapse. I have knowledge of them they can never possess. I turn their ephemeral gestures into objects, their moments into property.
It's a soft murder. Appropriate for our anxious, desperate age where we can't just experience things anymore, we need proof, we need the trophy, we need something to scroll past later.
But without the photograph, these moments truly disappear. No script survives. No tradition forms. And maybe that should be okay. Maybe I'm the asshole here, documenting shooting stars when I should just be watching them burn.
Still, I keep shooting. Because the whole point of doing this, of capturing what was meant to be uncaptured, is that some truths refuse to be reduced to words. They only exist in that fraction of a second when the world cracks open and shows you what's underneath.
FalseArt 2026
February 5, 1989. Beijing. The National Art Gallery opens China/Avant-Garde, the summing-up, the big one, a decade of work by artists who spent that decade being told there was no decade. Somebody hangs a no-U-turn sign on the banner outside. At about 11:10 in the morning a woman walks up to her own installation and […]
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FalseArt 2026
Kyoto, July 20, 1964. Yamaichi Concert Hall, on a program billed as Insound and Instructure, which tells you everything about the room’s appetite for a good time. A woman kneels on the floor in her best clothes. Her best, on purpose, because she wanted the cloth to be part of the offering. She sets a […]
ReadIndustries 2024
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is spitting poetry, and Wendy Whelan is doing things with her body that make you question every lazy decision you’ve ever made. Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. Because when everything’s burning down, when the whole damn country is doom-scrolling itself into oblivion, when families aren’t talking and everyone’s pre-unfriending half their social […]
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FalseArt 2023
The spectacle Joseph Beuys pulled off in Frankfurt was pure, uncut confrontation dressed up in mystical horseshit, and that’s exactly why it mattered. You walk into that theater in ’69, Europe’s still got the psychic stench of the war clinging to everything like cigarette smoke in an underground bar, and there’s this German shaman motherfucker […]
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Engineering 2022
The Fragment: What house shaped by builders could enclose the divine form within its enfolding walls? So here’s the thing about garbage. About the stuff we leave on sidewalks. That dollhouse sitting on the curb, some kid’s entire universe, once upon a time. Rooms where dolls had dinner parties and tucked themselves into beds the […]
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Cinematics 2021
How funny things are! You go to those museums and galleries and think what a damned bore they are and then, when you least expect it, you find that something you’ve seen comes in useful. It shows art and all that isn’t really waste of time. W. Somerset Maugham, Theatre Adji Cissoko, moving through a […]
ReadAbsolute Solipsism 2020
If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe. Werner Herzog I’ve shot a thousand bodies contorted in a thousand supposed […]
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Industries 2017
If you want to understand what Raegan Truax is doing, you’ve got to throw out everything you think you know about performance art. Forget the pretentious gallery openings, the wine sipping theorists nodding knowingly at shit they don’t understand. This is something else entirely. 37 hours. Thirty. Seven… Barefoot. No breaks. No food. No clock. […]
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Industries 2017
Performed at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco Lolas was a performance installation by Ryan Tacata that explored notions of cultural assimilation and resistance through one lola’s garden, an assemblage of found materials, religious icons and constructed identities.
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Industries 2016
What we’ve got here is the kind of conceptual sleight of hand that makes the museum going bourgeoisie feel dangerous for an afternoon. Lucky Dragons (Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck) dragged peace itself into SFMOMA and roughed it up, reverse engineered it like they were hot wiring a stolen Cadillac for good intentions. They took […]
ReadIndustries 2016
There’s this thing that happens when you walk into a space like YBCA and someone’s decided to call the thing a retrospective. That word alone, retrospective, it’s already half-dead on arrival, embalmed in institutional reverence before the first note even sounds. But what I’m getting from this image, from whatever the hell Luciano conjured in […]
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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 […]
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Industries 2016
Book 6. Nausicaa. The one where Odysseus washes up like human driftwood, salt-caked and wrecked and basically naked, and has to beg a princess for help without seeming like either a pervert or a pathetic case. It’s about being broken and trying to hold onto some shred of dignity while you’re covered in seaweed and […]
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Collusion 2015
Three of us got together one October night and decided to fuck with Sophocles in a bathtub… spiritually, archaeologically, perversely. Rebecca Ormiston, Ryan Tacata, and I took one measly line from a dead Greek’s lost play and turned it into something called Cloud Talk for this outfit we hoped would be called Artist Weather TV, […]
ReadCollusion 2015
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. Victor Hugo Art that actually fucking means something: it doesn’t happen in galleries with wine and cheese and people pretending to understand what “liminal space” means. It happens in a bookstore that’s half-collapsed into its own beautiful chaos, where the shelves lean like drunks and the […]
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Collusion 2015
So here’s how it ends: not with a bang but with institutional validation, which is the same as saying it ends with a whimper dressed up in gallery lighting. Franconia Performance Salon #14. The Museum of Performance + Design. A “joint collaboration,” which is fancy talk for “we got legitimized.” From Michael’s living room with […]
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Individualism 2015
To great dreamers of corners and holes nothing is ever empty, the dialectics of full and empty only correspond to two geometrical non-realities. The function of inhabiting constitutes the link between full and empty. A living creature fills an empty refuge, images inhabit, and all corners are haunted, if not inhabited. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics […]
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Industries 2015
I am interested in ceremonies of the present. What is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary. Diane Arbus, 1962 Nathalie Brilliant’s performance art piece at Fort Mason, San Francisco Art Institute To get at what’s real, and every artist worth a damn knows this is the whole rotten game, you need to fuck […]
ReadCollusion 2015
The wine was flowing, cheap and plentiful. The food? Thrown together. Not Michael’s usual spread, no carefully considered dishes that made you remember why communal eating matters. The kind of afterthought that tells you nobody’s heart is really in it anymore. The audience. Fuck me, the audience. The Game of Thrones Burning Man type has […]
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Industries 2014
Durational performance art is the kind of thing that makes most people want to check their phones after ninety seconds, and that’s precisely the fucking point. We live in a world built on the three-minute song, the fifteen-second clip, the swipe-left mentality. Everything’s pre-chewed, pre-digested, designed to go down easy. But then some lunatic decides […]
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Industries 2014
You’ve got these three women. Dread, Horror, and Alarm. The Graeae, those primordial hags who share one fucking eye between them, passing it back and forth like it’s the last spliff at the end of the world. And they’re not tucked away in some theater where the already converted stumble in with their smug pretensions […]
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Collusion 2014
Decay, it doesn’t announce itself with trumpets. It seeps in through the cracks like cigarette smoke under a bathroom door, until one night you’re sitting in what used to be a vital space and you realize you’re watching a wake, not a party. Franconia Performance Salon #11. By this point, the whole enterprise had that […]
ReadIndustries 2014
I’ve seen a lot of places where people decide to make art happen, and most of them are lying to you about what they are. Di Rosa is different. It’s not lying. 22 acres of Northern California wetlands and this weird, sprawling collection that refuses to behave like a proper museum, it’s got that swampy, […]
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Collusion 2013
So it’s basically a haircut. Performance art as a goddamn haircut. Niki with scissors, Michael sitting there probably feeling vulnerable and exposed and wondering if this is profound or if he’s just getting a trim in front of an audience that showed up because there was cheap wine and they knew the artists. And you […]
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Collusion 2013
The images themselves are gorgeous in that way that makes me suspicious. Too composed, too deliberate. This first shot with the bodies arranged like they’re performing an autopsy on performance itself. And that Gertrude Stein quote stuck at the bottom like a fortune cookie aphorism: “This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.” Yeah, no […]
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Industries 2013
Margaret Tedesco Cameo. Nights, and Night Margaret Tedesco sits in a semi-dark room and watches entire feature-length films with the sound off and the projection blocked by her own body, then just tells you what she’s seeing, not the plot, not the names, just “she walks across the room, he touches the wall, they stand in blue light, […]
ReadIndustries 2013
Marcia Farquhar once performed a thirty-hour monologue, thirty goddamn hours of talking, which is longer than most people can stay awake, longer than most marriages last, longer than anyone should have to listen to anyone else under any circumstances. She called it The Omnibus because apparently she wanted to get everything in there, the whole messy sprawl of whatever […]
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Industries 2013
Performance Studies Stanford University hosting the Performance Studies international conference #19. I was very careful not to use film or video to record most of the performances, because I think most people, then, were not sophisticated enough to look at a video or film and necessarily understand that they were not seeing the real thing, […]
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Industries 2013
I’ve seen a lot of people try to stare down the void and most of them blink, but performance artist Julie Tolentino doesn’t blink, she opens her mouth, that perfect O, same shape your lips make when you’re about to come or about to die (which might be the same fucking thing), and she just […]
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Industries 2013
There’s this guy Luciano Chessa, Italian, classically trained at Bologna’s conservatory, PhD from UC Davis, teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory, and he’s here at the Performance Studies International conference making a goddamn piano sing like it’s possessed by the ghost of Luigi Russolo himself. He’s performing Variazioni su un Oggetto di Scena, Variations on […]
ReadIndustries 2013
What the hell are you supposed to say about photographing Guillermo Gomez-Peña that doesn’t immediately become part of the problem? The minute you start explaining, contextualizing, footnoting the fucking thing, you’re doing exactly what his work exists to detonate, the impulse to contain, to translate, to make the raw and impossible thing safe for academic […]
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Individualism / The City 2013
Look at Brian Yarish. Six-foot-five in his stockings, but he’s not wearing stockings tonight, he’s wearing five, maybe six inches of platform heel that would break my ankle in three places just looking at them. He’s working his way down Franconia like he owns the concrete, like he invented concrete, and you know what? Maybe […]
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Industries 2013
Institutional death rituals: make no mistake, that’s what this was, a four-day wake for a building that would come back Botoxed and unrecognizable, they reveal everything about what we pretend culture is versus what it actually fucking is. But there is something almost pornographic about watching an institution mourn its own temporary absence, you know? […]
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Industries 2013
Ann Carlson The Symphonic Body in Bing Concert Hall The Symphonic Body is a performance made entirely from gestures. It is a movement based orchestral work performed by people from across the Stanford University campus. Instead of instruments, individuals in this orchestra perform gestural portraits based on the motions of their workday. These portraits are […]
ReadCollusion 2013
I don’t know what the fuck happened in that room, but I know something happened. This is the thing nobody tells you about live performance, about actual live performance, not the kind where everyone’s mentally composing their Instagram caption while politely golf clapping: it’s supposed to be theft. Grand fucking larceny. That’s the whole beautiful, […]
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Industries 2013
“Our job may be to open up a temporary utopian/distopian space, a de-militarized zone in which meaningful “radical” behavior and progressive thought are hopefully allowed to take place, even if only for the duration of the piece. In this imaginary zone, both artist and audience members are given permission to assume multiple and ever changing […]
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Collusion 2013
You walk into the Performance Art Institute expecting some precious meditation on process, maybe a little performative navel gazing with power tools as props. What you get instead is Angrette dropping a fucking bomb on the whole polite machinery of artistic intention, and she does it with hammers, two by fours, the San Francisco Building […]
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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 […]
ReadCollusion 2012
You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don’t… you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother’s son. Witold Gombrowicz Gombrowicz understood something most people spend their whole lives avoiding: silence is the ultimate obscenity in a world built on […]
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Collusion 2012
My photographs catch people mid-transformation, Yula Paluy suspended in whatever private negotiation she’s having with gravity and self. Tiffany Trenda projecting outward while the room pulls inward. What’s gorgeous and sad is knowing these salons are a kind of endangered ecosystem, people still willing to show up, sit down, shut up, and be there for […]
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Collusion 2012
These aren’t just photographs of bodies doing things in rooms, they’re evidence of something that mattered, at least for one night, in a living room that was never the same afterward. Kelly Rafferty, Michael Hunter, Derek Phillips, Niki Ulehla, Angrette McCloskey and Raegan Truax… these aren’t just names that matter to seventeen people in the […]
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Collusion 2012
It’s a hot summer night in San Francisco, the kind that feels like a mistake, like the city forgot what it’s supposed to be, and I’m at Michael’s house for salon number three. I don’t want to be here. I should be literally anywhere else. And for some reason as I’m thinking about this night […]
ReadCollusion 2012
So here’s the real truth: I’d just bought a Canon 5D Mark II and I’d found this gorgeous 1950s Zeiss 35mm lens, put an adapter on it, and I was looking for any excuse to shoot with the damn thing. That’s it. That’s why these photos exist. That’s pretty much why this website exists. And […]
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Individualism 2005
Site Specific Art at The Avignon Theatre Festival (Festival d’Avignon). I’m standing in some medieval stone square and the light’s doing that thing where it’s too golden to be real, and there’s a woman in white doing something with her body that shouldn’t be possible, and you think maybe you’ve finally lost it. Maybe that […]
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Individualism 2005
We’d just stumbled out of Cremaster, brains still melting from Matthew Barney’s latex and petroleum jelly fever dream, trying to articulate what the fuck we’d just witnessed, all that obsessive bodily mythology, those baroque genital landscapes, when the alley starts filling with them. White painted bodies coming at us like a slow motion avalanche of […]
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