Accumulation 2: The Lightning Speed of the Present

 

Márcio Carvalho and Shannon Cochrane

by Shawn Hill

Accumulation 2
The Lightning Speed of the Present
808 Gallery, Boston University
Through March 30, 2014

As part of the challenging and experimental Lightning Speed of the Present exhibition at Boston University’s 808 Gallery, local performance artist Sandrine Schaefer has staged a multi-week performance series called Accumulation. The concept is simple and open-ended: each week a new artist performs on Wednesday. Whatever they bring or use must be left behind for the next performance.

Effectively (as my friend and fellow habitual attendee Maggie Cavallo said at Week Three) it’s like having a season pass to a concert series, only it’s free and you have no idea what to expect from week to week. A clue to the goings-on is provided by the curators, however, as each artist involved in the show (both exhibitors and those involved in Accumulation) was asked to provide a list of topics of interest to the their work. These topics were then searched in Wikipedia and the relevant articles were then reprinted in catalogues of ideas available in the gallery. It’s a brilliant idea, as Wikipedia provides scholarly level articles (depending on the topic) without the need for individual authorship or credit. The book for Accumulation is a doorway into insight about an array of divergent artistic practices.

Márcio Carvalho

Schaefer opened the event in Week One with a daylong performance that was meditative, spiritual and repetitive. Clad in a lumpy cowled sweater, she paced around the ample perimeter of the gallery, singing into a small tape recorder. She asked each of the artists to give her a song or piece of music (some did not comply) which she would then sing, hum or mumble for one hour in honor of their coming participation in the event. Involving transcendental Indian rites of cleansing, rebirth and asceticism, the event seemed like a ritual invitation for the creativity to follow, and an active gesture of thanks to her fellow artists. Completely self-involved, Schaefer walked, kneeled, lay or rested, often times trailing audience members (each potential participants, of course, in this sort of work) in her wake

Sandrine Schaefer

Another component of the show is a wall fitted with listening stations and mp3 players. Each week, a new recording is made, eventually resulting in eight stations where aural remnants of the events can be re-experienced, like echoes.

Week Two involved sound artist Philip Fryer. His performance was short and sweet, an hour of actions and sound events aided by an array of low-budget or toy instruments and sound equipment he brought. A blank computer screen, cloths with blinking lights, old microphones that amplified Schaefer’s tapes from the week before … somehow it all removed us from the familiar gallery space and invited us along on a sequential series of experiments that followed a linear logic of their own. Making the recording for the listening station as he went along, Fryer noted (to himself) that he’d rarely talked as much during any previous performance.

Shannon Cochrane

Week Three brought us near Valentine’s Day, and Kelly Hunter and Dan DeRosato seemed to be deconstructing the holiday slowly through their props and costuming. There was a table. There were flowers in vases. There were balloons in red and white. Guests were invited to the table. Chocolate was consumed. T-shirts in red, white and black were exchanged. Their event, too, was all day long, and I only made it for less than an hour, driven away ultimately by the cacophonous percussive soundtrack accompanying that portion of their piece. But what I glimpsed did seem to concern sensory perception, whether overloading into cliché or exploring to some extent the symbolic rituals we associated with holidays.

Philip Fryer

Week Four was another collaboration, between Shannon Cochrane and Márcio Carvalho. These were seasoned performers who brought an array of odd props (a skeleton, a bag of flour, fruit and eggs, a reading stand, an inner tube, a knife) that they used to challenge each other in short vignettes. Asking each other what could be done with these minimal, disparate items, they challenged themselves physically and as on-the-spot inventors of metaphor. Cochrane at one point straddled a precarious ladder, while Carvalho filled a trash bag with bones and wrapped it around his arm in order to make a wild sound. At one point Cochrane filled an attenuated box with flour, placed it on a table and then crawled through it, spewing white powder from the other end as she emerged.

Amusingly, Carvalho found a smaller box, added a different stuffing, and forced himself through an even less likely birth canal in a reprise sequence. But my moment of epiphany came when Cochrane was presented with a bouquet of flowers and traveled around the audience, shoving them gently into everyone’s face. Though she responded to those who nodded “no” (allergic perhaps), there was something both generous and strange about being given that particular gift.

Schaefer mentioned to me in an earlier week that she expected more objects to accumulate faster. The spacious gallery is perhaps a bit much to fill up even with this protracted and collaborative sort of event. Each week so far has served as its own surprise. There are three weeks to go as I write