Memorial

At the very heart of Sarah Cameron Sunde's sublime 36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea, I find an ineluctable, deeply ingrained memorial logic. The artist's own account of the work's origins reads like a revelatory prose poem:

On Monday, August 12, 2013,
I was sitting on the rocks by a tidal bay in Maine,
thinking about New York City's current relationship to water
and the contemporary relationship of art to suffering and sacrifice.
The tide was rising and I marveled at how quickly the environment
changed.

Rocks were being swallowed whole.
Oh, the strength of the moon!
My foot was soon underwater and it looked other-worldly.
I imagined a human being in the middle of the bay, water slowly moving
upward.

I imagined my own body being swallowed and then the water subsiding,
leaving me bare.
It had to be done—this was urgent!
Thursday, August 15 was three days away.
It would be my ½ birthday—an ideal moment to begin this new
measurement of time.

Isn't every memorial also a "measurement of time?" This parable of birth and rebirth was just days before her half birthday, her thirty-sixth and half birthday—"an ideal moment to begin this new measurement of time." Like any birthday, or even half birthday, this would be a commemoration of life—of her life in particular, of her birth from water, of the lunar cycle that is also a woman's fertility cycle. Mother Earth is really Mother Water, both sustainer and inundator of life. We float atop it; sink below it; or, as Sunde would do, stand upright in and with it as a kind of tidal measure—to be swallowed whole before being reborn again.

In reference to the commemorative function of the calendar and the ways a particular day of remembrance can be assigned to and thereby shape our memory of historical events, I once wrote the following:

As ordered by the … calendar, time offers itself as an insuperable master plan by which … lives are lived, past history remembered and understood. For only time, when patterned after the circular movements of earth around the sun, and moon around the earth, can be trusted to repeat its forms perpetually. Grasped and then represented in the image of passing seasons, in the figures of planting and harvest, cycles of time have traditionally suggested themselves as less the constructions of human mind than the palpable manifestations of a natural order. As a result, both our apprehension of time and the meanings created in its charting seem as natural as the setting sun, the rising moon. By extension, when events are commemoratively linked to a day on the calendar, a day whose figure inevitably recurs, both memory of events and the meanings engendered in memory seem ordained by nothing less than time itself.¹

In Sarah's case, birthdays become rebirthdays, celebrations of life in concert with the rising and falling of tides.

As the earth orbits the sun, and the moon orbits the earth, and as the earth rotates once every twenty-four hours, the gravitational pull of moon and sun combine to coax a kind of global swelling or bulge on the surface of the earth's oceans and large bodies of water—a repeating cycle of tides, twice a day each for a twelve-to-thirteen-hour interval, 365 days a year. It is roughly a six-hour pulse, akin to the earth's heartbeat—a sign of life—between high tide and low tide. Depending on the alignment of earth, moon, and sun and on the topographical contours of the body of water, the tides can vary from a two-or three-foot differential to twenty-or thirty-foot tidal flows in narrow-mouthed straits and bays, which exaggerate and amplify the tide by squeezing it between masses of land. Think of the Bay of Fundy at high and low tides, or of the flooding in New York Harbor and Long Island Sound during Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

It turns out that days before her thirty-sixth and half birthday in 2013...