#sheldonscott

Call him Ishmael. Seriously. At 5am on a cool morning in early October, Andrew Wodzianski launched his thirty-six hour endurance performance called Self Portrait as Ishmael at the (e)merge art fair here in DC. “Launched” is not a metaphor. In the predawn darkness at the Capitol Skyline Hotel, a sixties-era time-warp, Wodzianski slipped a coffin into the outdoor pool and climbed on board. Barefoot, dressed in a 19th Century’s seaman’s jacket and khaki pants, with only a couple of bandanas as props, he floated on top of the coffin until 5 pm the following day. Underwater magnets kept the light wooden coffin gently turning in the center of the pool but it was Wodzianski's careful movements- laying back, sitting up, stretching, kneeling, occasionally dipping his hands in the water- that appealed to me, a convergence of weighty themes and the absurdity of the reality of the performance, and it appeared to fascinate a good number of visitors to (e)merge as well- an art fair that has managed to make performance not only an integral part of its programming, but a centerpiece.

There was, for instance, J.J. McCracken’s The Huntress, which brought some in the audience to tears, (possibly especially me.) The performance was based in part on 19th century Washington, D.C. journalist Anne Newport Royall, who was punished for voicing political opinions. The set featured a tall interpretation of a ducking chair, Royall's punishment device, and a bed of broken eggshells from which McCracken, in a long white dress, and another female performer arose as the performance began. Then from the seat of the tall chair, the other performer, McCracken's sister, fidgeted with a radio playing the sound piece, a cacophony of voices talking about women, from Rush Limbaugh to journalist/activist Lydia Cacho Reberio. McCracken told me, “I wanted the piece to weave different time periods together so I could look at the history of women's speech in the context of the soundscape, made of recent soundbites or on-air discussions of women being punished, chastised, or silenced for speaking out.” McCracken was strapped into a mask bridle with a mouth bit gag attached to a rusted chain. When the chain was attached to the leg of the chair, McCraken began to pull against it, crashing back against the wall each time it broke. Again and again, the chain was reattached by assistants. The assistants, wearing white jumpsuits, then stripped her of her 19th Century gown and redressed her in a black contemporary business suit, forcing her body into a fists-on-hips power pose.

Meanwhile, out on the pool deck, Mandy Cano Villalobos dealt with similar themes in her ongoing project Voces. In connection with a shrine in the style of a Mexican altar overflowing with candles and offerings, Villalobos spent the entirety of (e)merge embroidering the names of femicide victims of Juarez, Mexico onto white shirts. The white shirts themselves referenced the body, while the embroidered names, obtained form Amnesty International and blogs that track obituaries, memorialized each murdered woman as an individual.

At the start of Down in the Valley, Sheldon Scott handed out sealed envelopes addressed to “you,” solemnly instructing each audience member not to open it until the end. He then recited a reinterpretation of Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from Birmingham Jail, adding to it a personal narrative, and sang Down in the Valley, while a projection behind him flashed images culled from popular culture, and a tall suited man in wayfarers and silver glitter platform heels held a noose. Leaning forward, with the noose around his neck, Scott then asked the audience to open the letters and answer the questions, which all read “One line to my unrequited love” and “One line to make them stay.” and personally hand each letter back to him. The performance chillingly combined lynching, auto-erotic asphyxiation, and the enormous suicide rate in connection with the current war.

Ina performative installation, Made in China, Joyce Yu-Jean Lee operated a cart from which she sold for five dollars small red and gold packages, manufactured in the United States and branded with a logo combining the star of the American flag and the Apple logo. Inside the package was a button, saying “Made in China. Bought in the USA.” and text Chinese characters that said the same thing. Using a commercial exchange as the basis for interaction with the artwork was especially fitting in the context of an art fair.

Chukwuma Agubokwu, Holly Bass, and Katie Kehoe each employed story telling, however differently, as an integral part of their performance. Agubokwu's Portrait of the Artist as a Greek Myth told a saga of failure at last year's (e)merge, in which everything that could have gone wrong, did, including a car crash. He invited individuals to casually include their perspective of the events, including past and present (e)merge artists Wilmer Wilson IV, Chajana DenHarder, Ian McDermott, and fair co-organizer Jamie Smith. Agubokwu illustrated the lecture-as-performance with drawn-on photographs on presentation boards, and ended by describing himself as a phoenix, fulfilling his own prophecy with the completion of this year's performance..

Holly Bass twice performed her piece Come Clean, in which she invited strangers to participate in washing her hair in three different stages while sharing personal stories and small talk. Participants concocted their own shampoo and conditioner from provided materials, and audience members were encouraged to chime in at will.

Incorporating improvisation and absurdity, Katie Kehoe performed Mary Ellen Likes Free Magazines intermittently throughout the fair at various locations. Mary Ellen is a “transient character,” a persistent traveler who collects free tourist guides, brochures, anything printed and free, and uses them to attempt to understand her locale. In an exaggerated Canadian accent, Kehoe as Mary Ellen talked about how a DC history pamphlet led her to believe that at one time there were no women in the city because no women were pictured in the pamphlet, and how a vegan guide brought her to the conclusion that everyone in DC is vegetarian. Because of her fondness for things free, she also distributed tote bags and beer koozies emblazoned with “Mary Ellen likes things free” so that audience members could to collect their own free materials, and share her fondness for beer.

Taking comedy and the absurd as a more central theme of his performance, Ian McDermott's A Brief Demonstration of Interface Theory began as something of an ode to the Gaston's opening song in Beauty and the Beast. Performed at the outset for the “wrong” audience, the piece unraveled in layers, collapsing when a planted towns person, the butcher, informs McDermott/Gaston that “Bon Jour” does not mean “hello,” but “goodbye.” The performance then shifted from spectacular musical to a concert incorporating the artist's own sculptures, including a string instrument hat stand, and a guitar/stool. Finally McDermott led the audience to the pool deck, and to a hammock wired to play sound in response to the body lying in it.

In stark contrast to McDermott's elaborately scripted and perfectly timed musical performance, Chajana denHarder performed a piece in the pool more minimal than Wodzianski's Self Portrait as Ishmael. In Singularity, denHarder attempted to perform a kind of watery stasis, simply floating in the pool in a black bathing suit with a clear inflated ball. She performed Stasis on Thursday during the opening party, beginning and ending after dark, and again on Saturday beginning in daylight and ending at after dusk.

But the most surprising performance at (e)merge was Andrew Schrock's immersive performance space installation in the garage area exhibition space. A surprise in part because it wasn't listed on the performance program on the (e)merge website, but also because of its earnest embrace of fantasy as a lifestyle. On his exhibitor's plaque, the New Orleans-based artist's work was titled Large-Hadron-Collosus and the White Snake, next to which the artist had taped a hand-written performance schedule, featuring daily performances of Universal Procession and a final performance of The White Snake by collaborators Vanessa Cronan and Amanda Stone. The installation was made up entirely of materials from an abandoned-space takeover in Richmond, and the performances were firmly rooted in ceremony and ritual, although with a vagabond, Peter Pan Lost Boys spin. The White Snake is a healing ritual in the form of a Butoh dance. On his website Schrock writes, “We dream of art as an on-going daily action that creates a spirit of togetherness and solidarity in a practice of being in the present moment.”

Over the course of (e)merge, which opens Friday, one artist will set adrift on a coffin for 36 consecutive hours in the hotel pool better known for its boozy summertime parties. Another artist will subject herself to a cruel device like those once used to suppress dissidents. A third will wait, blindfolded, for fairgoers to step up and sing along, karaoke-style, to his compositions. And on Friday, a panel that includes contemporary-art curators from major Washington museums will explore the impact of performance, which, after a heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, is again white hot -- thanks in part to New York’s Performa festival and the revival of artists such as Marina Abramovic.

“There’s something consumable about performance art that paintings on a wall don’t allow,” says Sheldon Scott, who will be performing his multimedia piece “Down in the Valley.”

“There’s so much in the breadth and the body of the space that you just don’t get in other media. . . . It’s a complicated version of visual arts. When it’s gone, it’s gone. ”

Here’s a sampling of what you can see at (e)merge:

In the inky-black, pre-dawn hours on Friday, before the fair begins, artist Andrew Wodzianski will set himself adrift in the Skyline’s outdoor pool in an exercise in endurance (and, perhaps, irony). For 36 hours, the lanky artist will perch, dressed in period costume, atop a coffin. Wodzian­ski says the piece is an exploration of the kinship he feels to Ishmael from “Moby-Dick,” who, at the end of the novel, survives the whale battle by clinging to a coffin.

Wodzianski, whose primary medium is painting, says that he plans to fast -- save for a few snacks tucked into his garments -- for the entire time and that he will remain on the coffin, no matter the elements. He has performed the work once before, in a pond on his father’s property, but (e)merge, he says, posed an opportunity to revisit the work in a new context. There’s “new symbolism,” he says, “built into the fact that this is pretty ludicrous that I’m in a pool of an upscale hotel.” But that, he says, is right in keeping with the book’s theme of the “folly of man.”

Friday through 5 p.m. Saturday in the pool.

‘The Huntress’

J.J. McCracken, one of Washington’s most prolific performance artists, returns to (e)merge with an immersive work inspired by Anne Royall, a Washington journalist who, in the 1800s, was convicted of being “an uncommon scold.” (McCracken’s work takes its title from the name of Royall’s newspaper.)

McCracken usually creates intricate installation environments for her works entirely by hand, but this time she commissioned a faithful reproduction of a device used against women in historic times.

“The whole performance is about being gagged, and freedom of speech, and being a woman,” she says. “It’s not exactly about [Royall], but it references her quite a lot.”

Sunday from 1 to 2 p.m. in the performance area.

Each day at noon, Michigan-based artist Mandy Cano Villalobos will begin the meditative task of plucking plain white blouses from a stack and embroidering the name of a single woman on each. Each shirt, she says, corresponds to one woman who has been killed or disappeared as the result of the violent culture around textile factories in Juarez, Mexico. Because the killings continue, Villalobos sews indefinitely, simply adding and adding to her stack.

She begs off the idea that the work is political. “It’s much more about honoring the individuals,” the artist says. “When embroidering, I’m commemorating the women.”

Daily, beginning at noon on the pool deck.

‘Down in the Valley’

“We went from slavery to Jim Crow to oppression to seeing a black man in the highest office in the world, in, like, 400 years,” says Sheldon Scott, who says his piece explores the idea that “black America feels like ‘job’s all done.’ You don’t get off at the next stop because you feel like you’ve arrived.” If civil rights is a chugging locomotive, he says, gay rights is the next destination.

The work is one of the first conceptual pieces for Scott, a Washington-based actor and writer. It blends spoken word, video and movement.

Saturday from 5:30 to 5:50 p.m. in the performance area.

New York-based artist David Smith makes experimental rock under the moniker Doom Trumpet, and for (e)merge, he’ll ask fairgoers to rock along with his simple, repetitive songs. Smith will be blindfolded and will invite others to join him. “I want them to consider this boundary that we place between performer and audience, and imagine this more permeable space for collaboration between audience members and artists,” he says.

“Being in the same creative space as the artist, you’re given this insight into the way an artist works, the process, the powerful connection between the artist and audience. It’s a kind of demystification of artwork.”

Friday from 5:30 to 6:15 p.m. in the performance area.