Performance, by its ephemeral and embodied nature, resists permanence. Yet, once it enters the structured timekeeping of the archive, it takes on a different kind of material existence in the form of photographic and video documentation, printed miscellanea, and written instructions for restaging. In this way, the archive does not simply remember; it reshapes the conditions under which performance is accessed, recalled, and potentially recited.
Curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin, “an archive and/or a repertoire” at Tufts University Art Galleries pushes against the presumed opposition between performance and preservation. Instead, it suggests that action art does not simply fade into the archive but can actively negotiate the terms of its own existence—both in terms of artistic practice and within the structural conditions that support it. This argument takes on particular resonance through the exhibition’s focus on Mobius, Inc., the pioneering artist-run nonprofit that has promoted an interdisciplinary, experimental ethos across five decades.
Founded in 1975 by performance artist Marilyn Arsem, Mobius has supported generations of artists working at the edges of their disciplines, fostering a still-active community where risk-taking and process-driven work can thrive. In 2013, Mobius’s extensive administrative records—amounting to thousands of linear feet of material—were entrusted to the Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC), and they are being presented publicly for the first time in “an archive and/or a repertoire.”
Rather than relying on conventional performance documentation, much of the exhibition is composed of administrative records, newsletters, media correspondence, and meeting minutes—materials that capture the conditions surrounding a performance rather than the act itself. Eschewing a chronological approach, these materials are arranged into four research threads—Deep Time explores the temporality of performance and its insistence on the present, Siting Place traces Mobius’s evolving and often contested role within Boston’s urban and cultural landscape, Horizontal Collectivity reflects on late twentieth-century experimental collective models, and Document/Residue considers the traces and imprints that linger after a performance. Together, they chart Mobius’s process of self-organization from early experimental performances to its formalization as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization capable of financially supporting work that is not only difficult or impossible to sell but often costly to produce. In this way, the exhibition highlights how performance’s endurance is often contingent on the continual effort to sustain the networks, resources, and structures that allow performance to take place at all.
Included among these executive documents is Mobius’s selection procedure and criteria (1983), which emphasizes that experimental works should be “directed towards discovering the unknown” and “at the boundary of the current state of performance.” The more recent internal document, Rights and Responsibilities (2023), outlines the organization’s mission and reaffirms the importance of artistic freedom of expression.
This commitment to free expression is also reflected in the collective’s advocacy efforts, particularly in response to funding restrictions in the culture wars of the 1980s. Conveying the urgent need for funding from the Massachusetts Council in the 1989 letter to State Representative Michael Flaherty—warning that “many of its dependent organizations would suffer and smaller ones would die”—and articulating a robust defense of creative practice in the Why Contemporary Art Is Necessary flyer (1989–90), Mobius advocated not only for its own survival but also for the broader value of contemporary art. This stance remains as crucial and urgent today, when funding and visibility for experimental art are under continued threat.
Mobius navigated financial pressures and the need for market visibility, shifting from purely exploratory work to touring and producing finished pieces—necessitating greater investment in programming, documentation, and marketing. A statement prepared for the Artists’ Spaces Conference at the Visual Studies Workshop in 1986 highlights the challenges of maintaining a process-oriented, non-object-making practice within a commodified art market. At the same time, there was internal concern, or a “fear of heading toward an institutional path,” as legal and hierarchical structures became increasingly necessary for sustainability. This tension feels unmistakably evocative of a broader conflict within process-oriented art: While the archive’s structural demands force performance into a stable, fixed form, the institution’s expectations that art conform to predefined notions of stability, permanence, and market-driven logic may complicate, if not compromise, the character of the work.
The exhibition articulates this paradox without necessarily reinforcing or reconciling it, instead staging the dynamic interplay between documentation and embodied transmission. It draws on performance studies scholar Diana Taylor’s concept of the repertoire—knowledge transmitted through gestures, enactments, and oral traditions. By positioning the repertoire as a counterpart to the archive, the exhibition challenges the archive’s authority in historical preservation and suggests that cultural memory is sustained not only through documents, but also through enactment, memory, and affective recall. While the archive holds the performance’s mediated afterlife, it risks flattening the art form’s vitality into mere referentiality. In the spirit of Marilyn Arsem’s manifesto THIS is Performance Art (2011/2019)—“Performance art reveals itself in the present… The time is only now… it cannot be held”—the show proposes that, while the archive can never fully contain performance, the relational repertoire remains the breath that brings it to life.
Where many performance groups are known only through retrospective accounts, Mobius’s ongoing presence enables a living engagement that does not merely reminisce, but actively extends its gestures into new contexts and conditions. This exhibition forges a space where embodied action and its archival record exist in dissonance and resonance simultaneously. Oral histories from artists, activists, and cultural workers add lived experience and an ongoing dialogue to the record. Forbes Graham’s digital collages reinterpret screenshots of Mobius’s Zoom meetings into fragmented, layered compositions overlaid with geometric forms—visualizing the archive’s capacity to be deconstructed and reconfigured over time.
For an exhibition centered on the repertoire, it is notable that no historic performances are restaged. Instead, the focus is on newly commissioned works, some an extension of previous work by Mobius artists, some entirely new by both members and nonmembers. A schedule of live programming continually reshapes the galleries in real time as documentation and traces of performances accumulate. By unfolding in ways similar to the process-oriented art it showcases, the exhibition reflects the same temporality of the present.
On January 31, the program Undoing the Archive featured multiple activations centered on records and memory-mining. In a durational performance, Arsem prompted participants to recall forgotten moments from specific years drawn from a box—an exercise in sitting with, rather than filling in, the gaps of personal memory. Joanna Tam, using a quilt of neon traffic vests to obscure and later transform herself into a flagpole, captured the fragile balance between hypervisibility and invisibility faced by historically disenfranchised groups. Throughout the day, members of Mobius became documentarians, picking up cameras to record each other—gesturing toward the ways performance has internalized archival logic, shaping not only its present moment but also its future legibility.
Other performances embraced unpredictability and play: Jimena Bermejo read and followed instructions sent via mail in real time, resulting in spontaneous movements and participatory gestures; Sara June, initially appearing as an irate professor navigating the Tufts campus, later transformed into a dancing cowboy and other off-kilter personas. Rooted in spontaneity and audience engagement, these performances recall the spirit of happenings—embracing chance and the dissolution of boundaries between performer and spectator.
For Everything Is an Archive, Heather Kapplow cut and toasted slices of homemade sourdough. As Kapplow buttered the toast, participants were invited to sit and share a personal ritual or tradition. In return, the artist offered them both a piece to eat and a small jar of sourdough starter to take home. Kapplow frames the sourdough starter as a living, mutable archive—its bacterial cultures carry a history unique to each batch, continuously evolving with each new caretaker. Here, the archive is not a static repository of memory but is instead rooted in a relational process.
Rather than treating the archive as a closed system or an endpoint, this exhibition positions it as a point of departure—something to be activated, transforming archival materials into a platform for continued dialogue, interpretation, and future experimentation. While it interrogates performance’s temporality—its very structure emerging from and building upon site-specific actions—it is less concerned with reconciling transience than with illuminating how performance, like its traces, accumulates meaning and impact over time.
“an archive and/or a repertoire” is on view through April 20, 2025, at Tufts University Art Galleries, 230 Fenway.
