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.