"Satisfy" by Maggie Cavallo

Performing in conjunction with Accumulation (Phase 2) Kelly Hunter and Dan Derosato performed in service to their fellow artists. Each Accumulation artist was contacted for a pre-performance interview where they were asked to describe a situation in which they hadn’t spoken to someone they loved in a long time. The cycles of Fill the Void were dedicated attempts to satisfy the longings that had been expressed by the interviewed artists. Through their relationship with one another, their interactions with the audience and the consumption of countless confections, Hunter and Derosato’s work culminated into a vision of hollow sweetness that described the essence of the void as much as the process of filling it.

For an hour, Hunter performs in the gallery alone, meticulously preparing the space.

A table is set for three, a salad bowl full of dark and milk chocolates is set out, along with glass bottles of milk, a jug of Carlo Rossi and two wine glasses. Individualized servings of chocolate pudding, Valentine’s Day cookies and a bowl of chocolate frosting are unpacked. Red and white dominate the space, Hunter decorates a small white cake with red icing, red and white carnations and two balloons (one red and heart-shaped, the other round and white) help to set the scene. Hunter sets a recording of a heartbeat through a Honey Tone mini-amp that will play throughout the entirety of the performance. Anticipation builds, Hunter’s nervous energy is hard to discern as performance or reality, eventually Derosato will arrive.

The artists begin the first of seven cycles which with the setting and resetting of red and white accouterment on their table, selves and surroundings. They switch tablecloths, alternate their red and white tee-shirts, pour glasses of red wine that contrast the glass bottles of white milk. With each iteration white paint is added to the red, heart-shaped balloon, red paint is added to the white balloon. They add blush to their faces; chocolates and frosting are set out.

During these phases, the objects the performers allow themselves to touch is dictated by the color of their tee-shirt, causing them to rely on each other to construct the setting each time. They routinely speak with each other throughout the performance. Like the energy that emerged from Hunter’s solo moments in the gallery, it is difficult to render where performance begins and reality ends - do the artists want us to witness this vulnerability? What can we extract from inspecting their relationship in this way? 

Following each table-setting, the artists sit down to consume the treats before them, a pudding cup, spoonful’s of chocolate frosting, cookies, milk and wine. The third chair facing them representing an absence as well as an invitation to audience members to join them. I sit with them, the settings before me encouraging me to take on the role of dinner guest. I feel excited to eat a mini-Reese’s with a fork, to scoop up mini-chocolates as if they were salad - there was a feeling of “playing pretend”, something surreal and nearly cartoonish about all the objects that were laid out before me. Occasionally the artists stare sweetly into my eyes, smiling, sighing and batting their eyelashes. I make eye contact in attempt to connect, but without long look down at my chocolate dinner, feeling an intimacy that I’m not quite sure what to do with. At other times they look off, attempting to catch the gaze of an audience member, again smiling and sighing. I ask for a piece of cake, they quickly shake their heads “no”.

Creighton Paecht Baxter sits down not long after me; Dan offers her a bite of pudding. Baxter reaches for some cake, Derosato smiles sweetly. 

Towards the end smiles grow tired, everything they’ve consumed begins to take its toll - all of their consumption and ritual accumulating in attempt to satisfy the deep voids that their fellow artists experienced. The artists’ final cycles involve a break to collect and connect the belts from previous performances into a large loop around the dinner table. Hunter walks to the West corner of the gallery and begins sewing together the strewn paper hands, originally from Schaefer’s performance and reutilized by Phil Fryer the following week. The hands flutter down the thread; we sense a touch of magic. The artist’s finish by bringing a few other choice items to their table, including fabric and a small flat screen TV from Fryer’s performance.

Each cycle was completed with the writing of a letter to an individual Accumulation artist. At the piece’s finale, we see the letters laid out alongside three jars, each containing a strawberry and turpentine, peroxide and rubbing alcohol respectively. They become the site of white fruit floating in a rosy haze, nearby two helium balloons hang low to the ground weighed down by their new painted surfaces.

In knowing and loving another person, we willingly toy with a nearness to reliance. We allow them to support parts of ourselves that are found wanting, we grow with and from their presence. When these people exit our lives, how do we understand and describe the space that they leave behind? As we turn in on ourselves to fill the empty void, how can we hope to remain what we’ve become alongside another? 

Creighton Baxter's "Tidal" by Evan Smith

Tidal (part 2), the final performance of Accumulation, existed in segments, or perhaps more accurately, in layers. Viewing documentation of the performance on the Accumulation website would suggest an experience entirely different from the one witnessed in person. The performance began several hours before the arrival of an audience at the announced time. The artist, Creighton Baxter, first worked to ‘reset’ the space, undoing the work of the previous week’s artist, who had aggregated all of the physical remnants from past performances into a single pile. Drawing on their memory of the space from past performances, Creighton returned each object back to its approximate place, recasting the gallery within its recent past. Looking back on this gesture, it feels simultaneously like a show of personal commitment to the work that developed in the space over several weeks time, and also as a prelude to the themes of recollection and revisitation that pervade Tidal.

Once the space was returned to its prior state, Creighton acted out a series of physical gestures that echoed previous performances by the artist. Dragging their body across the floor of the gallery, trailing a long thread of saliva from their mouth to create a nearly invisible line through the space; tying a knot with their hair; placing a selection of images on the gallery’s front windows and interacting with them from within and outside the space – all of this, performed for only a handful of people and the documenting camera, left behind only subtle physical traces, not easily discovered without some prompting. Towards dusk, the performance for an audience began. This portion of the work was not recorded in any way, save for the words: “For the final 2 hours of this piece, the artist used marks on their body as sites to activate the body as an archive.”

I came to the performance with the intention of observing and taking notes. When I realized that Sandrine, who had been dutifully recording the performances throughout the series, was packing up her camera, I began to realize that I would need to shift my critical expectations. This was reinforced soon after by the action itself, which took the form of a somewhat informal presentation, conversational in tone and intensely personal, on the floor of the gallery’s west corner, near its tall windows. A small group of people sat facing Creighton, who was beautifully framed by a setting sun in the window behind them, creating a haloed silhouette as it sank behind the horizon over the span of the performance. In an action revisited several times in the past with about a year between each iteration, the artist told personal stories, using their body as a point of departure and reference, a living archive.

In a way, it is impossible to ever truly describe an event as it happened, only to define its membrane. I similarly don’t feel that I can specifically repeat what Creighton shared in the performance. Uncharacteristically, I did not take notes during the performance, instead listening intently with as little barrier between myself and the artist as possible. I didn’t feel the typical audience-performer designation in the sense that, while this was explicitly Creighton’s space of activity with a passive albeit engaged audience, I still felt that there was room for us in the work. We were being acknowledged through the organic structure of the action. Though it consisted almost entirely of speech, it didn’t resemble a spoken-word performance or monologue, but felt more akin to the moment in a conversation where the emphasis shifts to one person, their thoughts build momentum and organically the other party makes room for them by simply listening. I don’t know Creighton personally and I was probably one of the few at the performance who didn’t, but I was by no means made to feel outside the circle of intimacy drawn by their words and actions – in fact their level of attention to the audience members as individuals, their informal approach and the sheer openness of their recollections led me to feel as if I knew the artist on a personal level. They expanded their personal space to create a profound sense of interiority.

While I feel that the details of what was discussed were meant only for those at the performance, I can describe Creighton’s method, and from that I will work to outline a few key concepts that were imparted. Creighton went systemically through the markings on their body – tattoos, scars, brands, their haircut – as an archive of relationships, traumas, abuses, and exchanges. The process of displaying, elucidating, shifting from present to past – itself a poignant response to the theme of Accumulation – wove a narrative of how individuals affect one another, and through physical and psychological marking, stay with them. To use Creighton’s words, “people can haunt you while they’re still living.”

And it’s the idea of haunting, of the Specter, that I think lives at the center of the work. How a person, or a remembered imprint of that person can function simultaneously as living and dead; how an individual can be both present in their body and outside themselves in instances of profound stress; how a space or a time can be so indelibly marked by a person that it carries their psychological traces – in the Tidal series Creighton has constructed a language of actions to make physical these elusive, often unstable concepts. They have worked to make their own body a site for this instability.

There are two audiences to any performance work: those who witnessed it live and those who can only visit it through recordings, remnants and personal accounts. How then does the private, undocumented and deeply personal segment of Tidal haunt the privileged audience’s viewing of the work's documentation, which does not align with their memory of the event? I look back on the remnants of actions that I did not witness as if I were privy to an alternate version of the performance – one that, unrecorded, exists now only in memory. I am forced to reconcile my memories of the performance with the documentation and the subtle physical traces in the gallery itself, which I returned to the following day. In this vacillation between internal and external documents a space opens up, an almost corporeal absence. I repeat the performance in my mind in an attempt at clarification, at setting my memory to truth, at connecting what was said to what was done.

Without going into specifics, Creighton discussed the importance of reinforcement through repetition for a survivor of trauma in their performance. The need to say something again and again, to reexamine it and scrutinize it, altering one’s language slightly in each iteration so that what remains consistent becomes one’s reality, this I believe is the process at work in Tidal. The physicality of performance as a medium lends itself to this kind of work. To charge a space with one’s physical presence allows this reaffirmation to happen at a deep, bodily level for both performer and audience. However, in Tidal, this intensity is tempered through a process of distancing created by the unverifiable elements of the performance: the immateriality of the traces left by the performer, the undocumented spoken action, the limits of disclosure.

I can’t speak about the work without referencing performances that came before and after, elements of the performance that I have not seen. Conversely I can’t speak directly of much of what I saw. I can only approach the work in a hazy area of possibilities, where past and present, private and external are blurred. If Tidal is meant, among other things, to be an examination of trauma and its remnants, this liminal space that Creighton brings the viewer into is profoundly affecting.

Revisiting Tidal in writing, contending with the disparate elements of the performance at a remove has produced an uneasy synthesis. While the undocumented talk feels like an inversion of the physical actions of the series, like their interior, the two occupy the same space in my mind. The site of the performance in my memory contains both knowledge and uncertainty, and I am haunted by what I know and do not know. I think here is the crux of the series’ title, the ebb and flow of what we can access of an event or a person, of their lingering presence.

Jeffery Byrd's "Enough Stuff" by Heather Kapplow

In a brown turtleneck, half-sewn up and drawn over her face, black pants and beige saddle shoes, she sang to herself, audible but muffled within the sweater, starting and stopping in a pattern that seems to reflect the pace of her circling... Songs themselves—or rather song fragments—appeared to change every hour, and a flesh-colored egg timer, is reset each hour. Brown leather belts were periodically shed from the artist’s body. Her feet were just slightly red and raw. Not just as evidence or refuse, but as an invitation.

do _______________________________________________________________

          ta ________________________________________________________________

    la ________________________________________________________________

sol ________________________________________________________________

Eleven-thousand square feet. It was a small, dark blue cloth with four colored, blinking LED lights fabricated into it diagonally that he held up for us to see. Changing the microphone position activates a change of pitch and harmony. He climbs the rungs joining the stringers and sits at the top step with his back to us, looking out over the avenue, the metro tracks, the turnpike. Leather belts. There were several strewn along the ground, all seemingly the same make and style. Their prone appearance came across a little threateningly. Like whips. Dipping the mic on the blanket over the amplifier grill causes feedback. The tape is on again and the mic is covered with a cloth. “Why can't I find a job?”

The performance began with a coin toss. The first pile of fresh materials diminished and the more disheveled collection of the ‘performed upon’ grew. Several actions fell apart before they were finished, adding to the refreshingly unserious quality already implicit in the work’s structure. The faculty for quick mental leaps—the ability to quickly size up the materials and produce an action that referenced what came before. A kind of chain letter or game of telephone stretched across the weeks between artists.

A word pulled apart, doesn’t fall to the ground but rather it seems, becomes a score. These fragments all contain information, even dormant information that is simply waiting to be reconfigured and used again. Their actions become the “thing”, scrubbing, replacing, hiding. They work together to disassemble the relics of other works before storing them so that the work can begin again. Up high where window ledges can conceal objects.

A train goes by, heading inbound. Commuters walk by with groceries. The light begins to change from day to dark. Someone leans on their horn. And then someone else does. There is a hum. The electricity of the room is louder than everything else...except the train going by outbound. Joggers. A bus. Another inbound train. An alarm.

Byrd shuts it off and sits up. He looks at us, has some water, looks out the window.

The truth is, whatever we are handed from the previous generation—from the previous inhabitant of a space—is ours to interpret or reuse or reject as we see fit. Sometimes the question isn't so much what to do with what has accumulated in a place, but why. Why choose to do one thing with it over another? Or who? Who are you addressing with the choice you make when you begin responding to what you have found?

The title here is a big clue. It puts the brakes on the entire curatorial project—protests against its (familiar) agenda to acquire, to collect.

To the window, Byrd sings. No words at first and then a spiritual “Let's go Down to the River and Pray”, begins to emerge from the high, open sound. And stops abruptly.

Byrd's bed is a tie. Or a dress. No, a tie I think, striped and giant-sized. It is heavily reinforced with metal grommets underneath and he begins to load it with the objects that the space has collected... acquired over the past six weeks. His action in the space is to collect and pile the objects on the tie, dragging it with its increased weight from one end of the (long) gallery's longest side to the other.

He makes 50 stops on this journey, singing while he drags, pausing and interacting with many of the objects as he adds them to his pile, and then continuing to drag and sing.

Byrd's voice is full and beautiful. We follow him, all of us in the crowd. Stopping when he stops singing, moving when he sings. He's like the pied piper.

I have an itemized list of everything he adds to the pile, but I won't share it. Suffice it to say that there is indeed enough stuff. Certain things evoke certain responses from him: All fabric is folded, even if it has to be unfolded first in order to be folded. Tape is partially torn free of it's reel. Glass bowls and bottles are ground or tapped together. Shoes are clapped together. Salt is shaken in a circle. Belts are slapped in the air like whips. The choreography of this seems invented on the spot but ritualistic at the same time. Meant to invoke someone or something...

Byrd's voice rings out. He is sweating, the pile is heavy and increasingly harder to drag.

At the last stop, a music stand under an inadvertent spotlight, his singing peters in and out through each verse. I know we are being invited to sing along but no one does.

Byrd removes his shirt and folds it, drinks water, wipes sweat from his brow.

I turn my back on him for a while and look back out through the window at the other end of the gallery, where he started.

It's dark now. Cars sparkle through waving trees. The Citgo Sign, Boston's most quintessential object, goes through it's typical routine.

I hear a slam behind me but count to ten before turning around.

When I turn, Byrd is on the floor, as in the beginning, head resting on the tie-knot pillow. Breathing heavily.

The trace elements that remain as this process takes place are our feelings and thoughts. We are sculpted by an onslaught of information, moved, repulsed; but most often, simply overwhelmed. Here, everything is catalogued and reset.

A ladder was propped up and climbed rung over rung, straddled, and descended again. We process material goods rapid-fire, altering their nature briefly through use and quickly discarding them. A knife, two apples, two onions, an inflatable tire, a bottle of wine, beer, two glasses, a ladder, white plates, black plastic bags, tissues, a music stand, sheets of paper, a dozen eggs, a cabbage, two cardboard boxes, a bucket of water, a saw, a shovel, two sawhorses, a mop, a bell, small plastic figurines, saran wrap.

Should it or could it have played the sound in the grooves? It didn't. Was being in the largeness of this space shortening the perception of time? I was thinking about them later and it reminded me of a friend who, on what to us appears to be an unfathomable impulse, went out to the porch to smoke a cigarette and then hung himself with his belt. Ground the audience into real time.

Her movement intermittently broken by pausing, lying down, or other small gestures, at a pace neither hurried nor deliberately slow. A pitcher and glass of water, from which the artist drank as needed; a lightbulb; and a hammer. The ‘roving eye’ made its way into the action again. This felt at once like an instruction to the performers who will come after, and also a sort of holistic charm on the space.

Cochrane Carvalho - Part 2 - “Replacing the Invisible”by Robert Moeller

ac·cu·mu·la·tion

əˌkyo͞omyəˈlāSHən/

noun

noun: accumulation

“Replacing the Invisible” Cochrane Carvalho

The acquisition or gradual gathering of something

A word pulled apart, doesn’t fall to the ground but rather it seems, becomes a score. A series of musical notes to be struck by the tongue and sent out into the world before disappearing just as quickly. A word is ephemeral, a wholly disinterested and unbiased witness to our struggles. Even the actions that words describe in our head flutter quickly on an electrical pulse before being replaced. Words are a constant stream and constantly leaving us. The trace elements that remain as this process takes place are our feelings and thoughts. We are sculpted by an onslaught of information, moved, repulsed; but most often, simply overwhelmed. Language is the basis for our troubles. It signifies, underlines, falsifies and represents. It sends bodies into motion and fills those bodies with ideas. Words also ground us, leaving only quiet in their wake. They fill everything and leave only traces of things, memories, or memories of objects or simply the objects themselves. Everything begins with words and the accumulation of words and actions.

Fragments…

These fragments all contain information, even dormant information that is simply waiting to be reconfigured and used again. All objects have a history built into them. And that history fires the imagination in a continuing process that edits, reformats and distills what’s come before.   

“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting” is how the poet Robert Frost described the inner mechanics of a poem’s workings. What Frost described so elegantly casts an echo directly through the work of Shannon Cochrane and Marcio Carvalho. The hot stove, in this case, are the things left behind by other artists from previous performances. The melting, as it were, consists of the two artists immersing themselves in the detritus of a used-up environment and reanimating it fully.

Using a janitor’s cart to casually lead a processional much like a ritualized “Stations of the Cross” the artists circle the gallery space with a deliberate spontaneity in which their actions become the “thing”. Collecting the collection, the artists recontextualize everything in their path; scrubbing, replacing, hiding and transforming the objects they find. They are also “scrubbing out” the meaning of things they encounter and rebranding the work that has accumulated.

The cart they use is part altar, part carnival wagon. It also has its practical purposes as a means of transport and utilitarian device. It, too, grounds them in the space simply by being there and carries their things. It is a tool and a companion, a bit player without a line of script but a clear and calculating presence. It can’t be ignored. It also carries a ladder with leads the artists up and out of the gallery space, up high where window ledges can conceal objects and the space is stretched even further. Interestingly, the large windows of Gallery 808 allow people passing by on the street to stop and watch the performance as it unfolds, again adding another level of depth to the field the artists work in. The windows, big as movie screens, are portals to the outside world that broaden the “experience” while at the same time sheltering it from an unorganized outside presence. Here, everything is catalogued and reset.

At root, the performance has an anarchist bent to it. It is questioning and yet abstract. It removes to expand. It archives to erase. Cochrane Carvalho are both collaborators and collaborationists. They work together to disassemble the relics of other works before storing them so that the work can begin again. They work within the curated idea of accumulation while at the same time seek to undermine it as well. The storeroom behind the gallery acts as the epicenter of their work. It is “behind the scenes” and out of view. It is a restricted place, secondary but essential. It is a “storeroom” after all, an archive of “randomness” yet it is central to function and a natural beginning and ending to any process involving the harvesting of ideas and objects.

Acting as stewards of an idea within the larger framework of other artists doing the same thing, Cochrane Carvalho interact with what had come before; deliberating, improvising, and reassembling both the gallery space and an archive of relics from previous performances. The conversation they hold is mainly directed at the other artists involved with the project. Luckily, the dialogue they share, built on gesture and action, was hardly private but rather expansive and open.

Cochrane Carvalho - Part 1 - "Screaming Their Nature" by Evan Smith

Because of its immateriality, as well as its reliance on a specific moment, context and usually an audience, performance art is heavily tied up with contemporary ideas of place, its increasing fluidity and confusion. The performance art festival, for example, breeds a certain kind of output, and with it a network of artists and collaborators that are able to work and exchange beyond constraints of geography. The traveling performance artist requires a sort of openness and flexibility in the face of uncontrollable conditions far removed from the typical concept of a studio practice. Shannon Cochrane and Márcio Carvalho traveled to Boston from Toronto and Berlin respectively to create Screaming Their Nature, not only embodying these characteristics but addressing them critically. The first of two performances by the collaborative in as many weeks, it made comment on the layering of materials and archiving impulse present in the Accumulation project while maintaining a structure that allowed for genuine improvisation.

The two performers, dressed in black slacks and dress shirts, stood behind a folding table covered with a white cloth, a pile of assorted objects stacked off to one side. A knife, two apples, two onions, an inflatable tire, a bottle of wine, beer, two glasses, a ladder, white plates, black plastic bags, tissues, a music stand, sheets of paper, a dozen eggs, a cabbage, two cardboard boxes, a bucket of water, a saw, a shovel, two sawhorses, a mop, a bell, small plastic figurines, saran wrap – an incomplete list among many others – the materials evoked the clichés of performance art while pointing to the highly functional, the innocuous and the everyday.

The performance began with a coin toss, and the selection of an object from the pile by an audience member (the beer). From there, the winner (or loser depending on perspective), Shannon, stepped up to transform this first item, quickly taking the beer can behind the table and destroying it in a spray of brown foam. The can, now spent, was placed on the other side of the table from the pile, against the wall. She then selected a roll of toilet paper from the pile, set it on the table, and stepped back, making way for Márcio’s turn.

Márcio then made use of the toilet paper, wrapping it around a brown bag snatched from the pile, altering it slightly then dispensing of it beside the beer can. He then grabbed the bottle of wine and left it on the table for Shannon.

This process of deliberating on a chosen object, marking it in some way, disposing of it and selecting another for the other performer to take on continued for roughly ninety minutes. As the first pile of fresh materials diminished and the more disheveled collection of the ‘performed upon’ grew, the objects became more absurd, the challenges greater and the actions themselves more frantic. When Shannon selected a large, army-green canvas sack filled with something heavy, apparently so heavy that she could barely manage to get it onto the table, Márcio responded by lifting it, with much effort, over his head. Similarly, a ladder was propped up and climbed rung over rung, straddled, and descended again; a refrigerator-sized cardboard box was crawled through; a bucket of water was dumped unceremoniously over the performer’s head; a saw was desperately and somewhat dangerously employed, to no successful end. These actions took place almost begrudgingly but not without a flicker of humor, both Márcio and Shannon playing campily into the expectation of a performance artist faced with typical performance art objects.

Although some actions felt like ironic references to the tropes of performance art, others appeared to reference the collaboration itself, either recalling past collaborative efforts by the two or actions from earlier in the night. These were easily the most satisfying moments of the performance: when, for example, Márcio was left with the smaller of the two cardboard boxes and attempted awkwardly to climb, legs kicking, through the small container much as Shannon had with a more reasonably sized box earlier on.

The artists have a long personal history and a brief but active history of collaboration, and their shared energy was clear. The two seem to have, in their collaboration, a sustained interest in the traditions and audience expectations present in performance, their work full of references to the potentially overexposed signifiers of performance art. When Márcio was left with a spool of twine, he selected a piece of paper and marker, drew an arrow, and rotated the sign repeatedly around his head with the twine sitting dumbly on the table in front of him. It was a subtle, humorous reference to the overplayed action of wrapping something around the head, which I had expected him to act out. Throughout the performance I was made conscious of the “other material” always at work: the performers’ bodies. How they chose to use this most fundamental tool, not only to mark the objects but to address the expectations of performance art, were surprisingly deft. The two have demonstrated skill in those qualities necessary for this kind of work: physical awareness and, perhaps more importantly, the faculty for quick mental leaps – the ability to quickly size up the materials and produce an action that referenced what came before. Several actions fell apart before they were finished, adding to the refreshingly unserious quality already implicit in the work’s structure of friendly, escalating competition.

The idea of one-upmanship saturated the back-and-forth between the two performers, whose connection is evident in their ability to communicate nonverbally through their actions and the transitions between them. This idea of talking through objects is highly resonant to the performance series as a whole, which could be thought of as a kind of chain letter or game of telephone stretched across the weeks between artists through performance documents. But it’s also resonant in a sense to contemporary living, particularly the way that individuals move through stuff at a prodigious rate. In our consumption habits, we process material goods rapid-fire, altering their nature briefly through use and quickly discarding them. The performance highlighted this, with an interest in the shifting signs that exist in everyday objects. Simultaneously it provided the counter-argument that, even after charged with specific intention, the basic nature of objects are unchanged. In Márcio’s words from an audio interview made after the performance “an apple is still an apple.” Even if that apple has been bit into and had a mouthful of raw onion taped to it.

Philip Fryer's "The Tower" by Jed Speare

do _____________________________________________________________________

          ta ____________________________________________________________________

    la _______________________________________________________________________

sol _________________________________________________________________________

Walking half of the eleven-thousand square feet of the 808 Gallery.

Walking in an oblong circle around the circumference of the exhibition, The Lightning Speed of the Present, that Accumulation is a part of. Phil Fryer is doing this four times to define the open field topography he will work within as well as to set a tempo for himself and the viewer. I thought of the filmmaker, Bela Tarr, who uses walking in this way, to literally ground the audience into real time, in order to make weary, validate, and absorb. I wondered if Fryer had asked for everyone's attention, or if we had all been aware this was the beginning? Was it the beginning? It passed, mostly unnoticed.

Those tones I noted above – I identified them in solfege, heard as melodic intervals in succession, but in their repetition an array takes shape that forms a clustered harmony; a chord. I was wondering what was making these tones; the performance also started this way. Fryer had placed a microphone directly on top of a microcassette recorder, outputting the playback through a small guitar amp. These were strange yet clear pitches, and while I was wondering what was making them, to connect a sonic image that could be relevant to an action, place, or thing, I have been on the receiving end of wrong guesses and assumptions about sounds too many times, so I'll refrain from describing them more, or to say it “sounded like,” something it was probably not. So it was a melody, that turns into a harmony, because those notes in sequence are repeated in somewhat random rhythms, and our brains also group them together as a chord. It's a kind of ambient track with a hitch, a stutter step, that in and of itself defines it with easy yet unpredictable periodicity. It goes on and on so it must be a part of this open field  environment that is unfolding. It is filling one corner of the space and has an effect of orienting and situating us there. Ultimately, Fryer uses one end, width-wise, of the enormous, rectangular 808 gallery space.

At the opposite side across this end, Fryer moves a ladder near the large picture windows facing Commonwealth Avenue. He climbs the rungs joining the stringers and sits at the top step with his back to us, looking out over the avenue, the metro tracks, the turnpike, and the river, tearing off post-it notes in the shape of a left hand from a pad and flipping them so they float downward.  His eyes however, seem level with the top of the window frame, so it appears that it may pose an obstruction. People gaze in as they walk by in passing interest, and the traffic flows on the other side of the thick windows, mutedly.

What is the tempo of this action? Fryer is not in a hurry, but there is more latent urgency than repose in his demeanor. As the performance went on, this characteristic and pace seemed to prevail. Is he  resigned and impatient a few minutes later, when he peels off the remaining pack of notes into a few chunks and piles and flips them to the ground? Their flat landings slap echoes through the gallery.

Tempo is related to energy. At what rate are things proceeding, conveyed by the performer? Also importantly, does the performer  himself, through the inner focus projected from his presence, engage the audience? Fryer came down off the ladder and introduced a new object and image. It was a small, dark blue cloth with four colored, blinking LED lights fabricated into it diagonally that he held up for us to see. The matter-of-fact pacing and demonstrative actions compel Fryer forward yet leave the viewer without much time for consideration. This is probably somewhat intentional. Fryer has a weightless, pixie-like quality in his performing manner that is endearing, yet not meant to be reliable or discerned. So I'm going to leave the question of energy as a rhetorical, floating one.

One of the things left behind in from the first Accumulation for Fryer were leather belts. There were several strewn along the ground and all seemingly the same make and style. Their prone appearance nevertheless came across a little threateningly, by their sheer numbers, like whips. I was thinking about them later and it reminded me of a friend who, on what to us appears to be an unfathomable impulse, went out to the porch to smoke a cigarette and then hung himself with his belt.  Fryer took the lit cloth and draped it over his head, using the belt to secure the cloth around it, like a keffiyeh headdress, holding the belt's extra length out from his head, straight and horizontal, and pausing to stare at us. He repeated this consecutively with each belt in the vicinity. Did you ever see the original cover of Ferlinghetti's book, “Routines”? Two figures stand apart with their heads wrapped and bound, tethered by the same tie. Fryer could have been one of the characters in that routine entitled, “Our Little Trip.”

Looking back at the documentation, I learned that the performance was titled, “The Tower.” I wonder what kind of tower it was: a utopian tower we build from the finite to reach the infinite?  Something referencing the performance site itself, like an academic, ivory tower? Was the tall ladder the tower? Was it an imaginary amplifier “stack” as tower, without old rockers and acid flashbacks to the 70's?

Moving along. There is not any point that the performance quality, its gravity, changes.

Broadcast - bound: an image to be espied, offered by the restricted purveyor, with a monitor held in both hands; an image on paper, unseen at this distance, on top of it, with Fryer's bound feet turning clockwise in a circle.

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Changing the microphone position activates a change of pitch and harmony. The chord of cluster and timbre bringing to mind the  Farben movement with its flying fish in number three of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra. Then the amplifier was covered with a blanket. The microphone was scratched over a 45rpm vinyl record. Should it or could it have played the sound in the grooves? It didn't.

Dipping the mic on the blanket over the amplifier grill causes feedback. The tape is on again and the mic is covered with a cloth.

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The microphone is then placed on the mic stand, for this declamation: “Why can't I find a job?”

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I asked myself this question: was being in the largeness of this space shortening the perception of time? Before I could check to see how much time had elapsed (it was one hour), Fryer stopped. It seemed sudden. I wasn't sure whether actions were occurring closer together, thinking of it now like a stretto, ideas enjambed that come intentionally colliding during the coda of a fugue, or whether in the accumulation of actions themselves there was a possible acceleration, and we were paying closer attention?

Thinking of moment form: when a series of ideas are presented without any apparent connection to what preceded it, and relating it to Fryer's insistent succession of one thing to the next. Discovering through noting and formalizing on the page here the slight difference in tones that resulted from his handling of the microphone and tape player, a continuum that also formed in his returns, an oblique type of variation and recapitulation. And I think it is perhaps through this reckoning that there is distillation now, in a hidden intent and unseen tower of notes climbing and settling, sustained yet changing, the tempo of the actions ramified by their distinctions, differences, and reflections themselves: a fair conclusion, sensing the possibilities of reading performance art with associative musical forms that I wouldn't have expected to bring up or refer to. 

Sandrine Schaefer's "GIVE | LEAVE..." by Evan Smith

It’s a difficult position to navigate, acting as both a curator and an artist within the same project. Specialization is becoming the norm as artists and curators both are increasingly professionalized, and the artist-cum-curator position is often approached with skepticism. Yet it also yields some of the most rewarding experimentation. And in a city like Boston, where opportunities, spaces, and projects need to be carved out by hand and hard work, it only makes sense for artists to create their own opportunities for themselves as well as their peers.

Sandrine Schaefer was invited by Lynne Cooney, exhibitions director for BU’s School of Visual Arts and curator of 808 Gallery, to participate in the exhibition The Lightning Speed of the Present, a group show that looks at how the personal archive functions in contemporary practice. Sandrine used this opportunity to create Accumulation, an eight-week performance series that expanded the conceptual breadth of the show to include how this archiving impulse functions in performance practice, and doubled the number of artists on view.

Sandrine’s performance, the first in the series, lasted eight hours, between noon and 8 pm. While much of the performance felt private and embedded (the artist quite literally cocooned in an oversized sweater, locked into the repetitive action of pacing the gallery and engaging in personally contained gestures, only addressing the audience directly in the last hour), its basic structure alluded to the eight performances taking place over the weeks of the project, with each hour marking a shift in or addition to Sandrine’s actions. The eight-part structure was later revealed to be a direct response to the artists of Accumulation, a division of hours “for” each performer, beginning with Sandrine herself in the first hour and moving through the Accumulation roster over the course of the day. For myself, as a viewer in the space and an observer of documentation after the fact, there was and is a palpable sense of the private co-mingling with the shared on all levels of the performance, from its smallest details to its overarching construct.

I personally witnessed the first two hours and last two hours. In that time the routine changed only slightly, with a quiet build-up of materials and actions that alluded to a gradual marking of time and a transition of elements at each hour.

Two basic actions dominated the performance: singing and pacing. In a brown turtleneck, half-sewn up and drawn over her face, black pants and beige saddle shoes, Sandrine walked around the perimeter of the exhibition, cutting a wide circle through the gallery – along the gallery’s large windows facing Commonwealth avenue, receding into the back of the gallery, and back around again – with her movement intermittently broken by pausing, lying down, or other small gestures, at a pace neither hurried nor deliberately slow: the pace of someone physically passing time rather than performing in the ritualistic sense.

While walking, she sang to herself, audible but muffled within the sweater, starting and stopping in a pattern that seems to reflect the pace of her circling; in each rotation she was likely to sing and pause once, for roughly equal amounts of time. This is not to say that there was a set choreography dictating the movement around the space, but perhaps that the movement through the space and the duration of the singing and pausing consciously or unconsciously shared an internal rhythm private to the performer.

The songs themselves – or rather song fragments – appeared to change every hour, moving through a roster of more or less recognizable pop music: Ani DiFranco, Nirvana, Radiohead, Fleetwood Mac. With two microcassette recorders on her person, Sandrine would record herself on one tape while playing back the last hour’s on the other, creating a feedback loop in which the previous hour was still present in the current. Inactive tapes (as there were eight – one for each hour) sat on the floor toward the back of the gallery, each resting on a small paper hand. Every hour would signal a break in the pacing, at which time the tapes were rewound and changed.

Other materials stowed in the back of the gallery included a flesh-colored egg timer, reset each hour; a pitcher and glass of water, from which the artist drank as needed; a lightbulb; and a hammer, which, in the context of performance art, inevitably leads me to remember the old adage by Chekhov about the gun that appears in the first act which must inevitably be fired by the third. One of my earliest experiences of performance art in Boston, now several years ago, was cut short when I and several others were nearly struck by a large sledgehammer, so of course I’m all too conscious of this prop’s lingering presence in the project and its various potentials in the hands of artists to come. And lastly a glass eyeball tied to a line of red-brown thread lay unobtrusively on the floor of the gallery, functioning as a surrogate for Sandrine’s partially obscured vision and her blocked eye contact, going more or less unnoticed throughout the performance. At one point a viewer accidentally kicked it across the floor. The ‘roving eye’ made its way into the action again only at its conclusion, when Sandrine placed it into the somewhat depleted pitcher of water.

The small collection of objects and materials utilized in GIVE|LEAVE seemed to relate directly to the artist’s person. Clothing, which could easily be dismissed as incidental, took on particular significance here. Sandrine’s use of materials continues to be carefully controlled towards understatement, producing a sense of tightly edited neutrality that is most readily evident in the neutral colors of her chosen objects and props. Some only became perceptible as they entered into dialogue with the performer’s actions: a spool of red-brown thread and a small pair of scissors only appeared for the viewer when Sandrine stopped her pacing to make her way to the corner of the gallery, where they sat on a low sill of the long front windows, waiting to be utilized to move the performance into its next stage.

Early in the performance, brown leather belts were periodically shed from the artist’s body, drawn slowly out of the long, loose sleeves of her sweater as she walked around the gallery; gently lowered, then dragged, then dropped to the floor, scattered in concert with the stopping and starting of Sandrine’s voice and pacing. These cast-offs trace her movement through the space, marking a kind of unwinding of the performance over time. There is an almost scatological quality to them now that the performance is over, as all objects in Accumulation remain in the gallery after the performance ends. In their incidental placement throughout the space they leave a sort of forensic mystery to those viewing the exhibition after the performance.

Of all her materials, perhaps the most loaded with meaning was work’s titular element, revealed at the end of the performance when Sandrine slipped off her shoes (eight hours walking, without socks, her feet were just slightly red and raw: a bit of minor suffering which felt attuned to the subtleties of material and action) and hammered them to the wall, revealing on the inside soles the words “GIVE” and “LEAVE” in the left and right, respectively. This felt at once like an instruction to the performers who will come after, and also a sort of holistic charm on the space – walking in wide circles around the gallery, charging it with these simple commands, Sandrine developed a sensitive yet surprisingly full preface to the series.

Which leads me to what I found most interesting in the work: how GIVE | LEAVE functioned as a sort of meta-commentary on or invitation into the Accumulation project as a whole. The ways in which certain actions were adjusted in each hour alluded to a collaborative authorship with the other artists – perhaps through suggested adjustments to the initial hour’s routine by each artist – as certain shifts in action felt like responses to the structure set in motion in the first hour. From my perspective, the performance became a sort of conversation between Sandrine and the other artists of Accumulation about her role in things and about the project ethos as a whole.

Documentation seems already to be an important theme in Accumulation, and GIVE | LEAVE functions as a comment on that. The materials left in the space present themselves not just as evidence or refuse, but as an invitation to the coming performers, much in the same vein as Sandrine’s original invitation as curator.