Abject/Object (2006) was a Mobius-commissioned performance in conjunction with In-Between, a public event held during Memorial Day Weekend on Boston City Hall Plaza at the height of the War in Iraq. This durational, interactive performance was conceived in collaboration with Mari Novotny-Jones and Anna Wexler. Using ritualized manufacture of cast wax figures as our core performative action, the work distills and deconstructs histories of military-industrial production. Our ritual process involves intensely focused and systematized acts of mass-production, imagined as embodied cycles of creation and destruction. As performance, our physical process is durational, without beginning or end, just as the war machine generates production into perpetuity. We chose to create a space of regeneration here, with living plant matter gathered to create a locus of renewal – persisting against planned obsolescence (of all species).
Abject/Object (2006) | Performers: Mari Novotny Jones, Catherine Tutter, Anna Wexler | Photos: Dennis Friedler and Bob Raymond | Plaster molds and figure pattern: Dennis Friedler
Catherine Tutter 