Performatorium - Day 1

In a University classroom of mainly non-arts students, Cindy Baker began the events of Performatorium with a talk that set the festival off on a tone of generosity and openness. After describing the meaning of art as activism, Baker explained the ways in which she was brought to creating a space for the audience’s inevitable reading of her body as content within her performance work, though her early work was not rooted in those meanings. Identifying as an artist with a taboo body, social concerns became foregrounded for Baker through working from the position of “other” (fat, queer, feminist, craft-based artist), allowing her the advantage of being able to see and work from without and within this vantage point. Baker’s talk made explicit to the students that, through art, the world is capable of change; that the ways an artist creates imagery allows audiences access to a dialogue and, through conversation, complicating meaning, and asking pointed questions, gives them access to investment in an alternative to the status quo.  

Cindy Baker makes art that is rooted in the physical. In response to neoliberalism, where indulgence and self-destructiveness are tied through morality to work and work gives a person’s life value, labour intensiveness, the very taxing of the body, proves the worth of the artist. With this statement freezing on the hairs of the students’ inner ears, Baker described the concepts behind Crash Pad, the artwork she would perform that evening at the Dunlop Art Gallery.

Crash Pad is an artwork that allows the artist’s body to do what it needs to on any given day, right down to the blue watercolours depicting and repeating the social intimacies of women’s bodies in and around bedrooms that line the bedspread laid out on the artwork’s sculptural base, and which also populate the wall of the art installation; paintings that were created at a time when laying in bed and making small paintings was what her body was able to do. This kind of recognition of and tenderness towards the body’s needs is an unfortunately radical act in a time when the meaning of self-care has been co-opted by a hollow capitalist agenda.

That night, Baker entered the large sculptural pill pack that is Crash Pad, beginning the durational performance of the interaction of body, mind, and medication. Peeling back the bedspread with those soothing paintings that are the colour of the writing on the packet of her favourite pills, the silver underside reveals beneath it a comfortable round pill(ow) surrounded by the hard metal square platform that delineates the edges of her performance space.

When we take a pill, it becomes a part of us; a foreign object that merges with our blood, cells, neurons, and changes the way we feel and think. Baker enacted this unseen process and its attendant meanings through a multi-hour performance. Skirting, girating, twirling; on, around, under the blanket and pillow; part of it and separate from it, crawling inside, resting, refusing; petulant, glassy, glazed; public and private; balancing and hula-hooping, rocking-turned-smashing, loud, jarring; hiding, peeking, peaking; restless, ambivalent; modified and mollified; conscious, soft and medium and harder; indulgent and self-destructive; surreal dreamy lullaby rocking; contorting, soothing, hair-in-mouth; voyeur and exhibitionist, the patient plays and observes her own state, interacting with and ignoring and spurring on the audience until one comes to play on the crash pad. The game of balance between the audience member and the artist became dangerous as they each teetered on their feet along the metal ledge, trying to tilt the other off while retaining their own footing.

We may be at war with the needs of our own body, or negotiating with it, or understanding it as a new hybrid of drug and self, or considering the larger meaning of the foreign object in the body politic. The only rule of this performance, much like that of ingesting medication, is that once the artist has entered the crash pad blister pack, she can’t leave; as the audience member was toppled off the bed, the artist retained her space and laughed.