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.

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.

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.