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Jay Critchley

    ART AND ACTIVISM

    Arts of Renewal for Troubled Times

    Jay Critchley’s 40th ‘post-consumption’ Re-Rooters Day ceremony is this weekend

    By

    Amidst the conflagration of World War II, William Carlos Williams — the 20th-century heir to Walt Whitman’s democratic American poetics — wrote a poem about destruction, creation, and the hope for renewal. Titled “Burning the Christmas Greens,” it begins with a ritual (“Their time past, pulled down/ cracked and flung to the fire … burnt clean/ clean in the flame…”) and ends with a transformation (“And we … breathless to be witnesses,/ as if we stood/ ourselves refreshed among/ the shining fauna of that fire.”)

    Forty years later, in another troubled season, Provincetown artist and provocateur Jay Critchley created two ceremonial and participatory artworks that manifested Williams’s imagery. In 1983, early in a terrifying epidemic and in a laissez-faire global economy that would generate unprecedented levels of consumerist consumption, wealth inequality, and environmental damage, Critchley produced one of the nation’s first public performance pieces in response to the HIV-AIDS crisis. In “Immunity Mandala: A Community Ritual,” he recalls how he created a sand painting on the edge of Provincetown Harbor and offered a prayer for “health and wholeness … on this fragile, spiral spit of sand.”

    For decades, Jay Critchley’s Re-Rooters Day ritual has culminated with a burning Christmas tree set adrift in Provincetown Harbor. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    The second of these works, which would become an annual ceremony, was prompted by a chance visit to the Provincetown dump a few days after Christmas. Stunned by the piles of dying trees he found there, Critchley “re-rooted” a dozen or so of them back into the ground. “I stood up the Christmas trees amidst the turkey bones and broken and discarded toys,” he says. He then invited some friends to join him in a ceremony in honor of this re-constituted sacrificial “forest.” A year later, the first “Re-Rooters Day” anniversary saw the installation of a single tree in front of Patti Cozzi’s health food store on Commercial Street. In 1985, when the event moved to Provincetown Harbor, Critchley introduced the ritual that has taken place every year since: the burning of a discarded Christmas tree on a makeshift boat set adrift in the harbor at sunset. The 2023 iteration will take place on Saturday, Jan. 7 in the East End of Provincetown Harbor at 4 p.m.

    Over the years, the Re-Rooters Day ceremony has drawn anywhere from 10 to 100 participants. Attendees at the “post-Christmas, post-consumption” ritual, as Critchley’s website describes it, are encouraged to “re-root” themselves in the Earth by relinquishing not only surplus objects but also the experiences, attitudes, and obsessions that impede their connection to nature. Critchley says that “gallstones, the names of the people met online who never returned calls, porn magazines, paid off mortgage documents, a painting commemorating Castle Hill’s purchase of Edgewood Farm, and numerous personal addictions and political rants” have literally and metaphorically been consigned to the flames over the years.

    Though each year’s ritual still concludes with the floating, burning tree, the themes of individual ceremonies vary with the times: past events have included “Sport Futility Vehicles” in 1999; “Mad Kowtow Disease” in 2004; and “Mobil Warming” in 2016. While Critchley had not divulged the theme of this year’s event by press time, he promised there would be a procession on the mud flats, which he would lead in one of his signature tunics and headdresses, typically composed of remnants of crustaceans and assorted rubbish collected on the beach.

    A Provincetown resident since 1975, Critchley finds the themes — and often the material components of his art — at his feet.

    “I’ve always loved to collect things,” he said in a 2015 memoir recalling an early project in which he gathered discarded popsicle sticks (“the junk food of the 1950s”) and assembled them into “fantasy dwellings” that presaged the environmental and transformative themes of his mature work. “My self-assigned job,” he wrote, “was to gather this consumer detritus as raw material for my creations.”

    As “Miss Tampon Liberty” in a 1986 performance, wearing a costume made from thousands of pieces of plastic that washed up on the Outer Cape, Critchley made an artistic statement about the hazards of nonbiodegradable waste. (Photo courtesy the artist)

    One year Critchley gathered 3,000 plastic tampon applicators that had washed up on Cape Cod beaches as a result of Boston sewage outfall into the bay and sewed them into a dress in which he performed as Miss Tampon Liberty, giving a new meaning to the line “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

    Critchley’s performance pieces exemplify the principles of “new genre public art”: a term coined by artist Suzanne Lacy in 1991 to designate art that is activist in nature and intended not to achieve material permanence or enduring recognition but to facilitate altered vision, difficult conversation, and healing. One of the genre’s earliest practitioners, Critchley credits Provincetown as a uniquely nurturing medium for its practice.

    Critchley’s work can also be understood in the context of other artistic traditions. He brings Whitman’s and Williams’s earthy, common-man aesthetics into the realm of contemporary multimedia and performance art. And he also continues a lineage of visual artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Joseph Beuys who assume a priestly or shamanistic function of redeeming a fallen world through creative re-imagining. Critchley brings a dose of self-mockery, playfulness, and humor to this persona that his forebears have generally lacked.

    A particular sense of place is central to his practice. “If a place can exist both in dream time and waking time, it is Provincetown,” he said. Over nearly half a century, his locally sourced art has rooted and re-rooted itself in both our harshest waking realities and craziest utopian dreams, inviting others to join and stand refreshed in the creative fire, and — since it’s Provincetown, after all — to look beyond the unconventional for something new.

    Destruction and Renewal
    The event: Jay Critchley’s 40th annual Re-Rooters Day Ceremony
    The time: Saturday, Jan. 7, 4 p.m.
    The place: East End of Provincetown Harbor
    The cost: Free

    THE ART OF COVID

    Jay Critchley’s Banner Year

    His show at AMP Gallery puts pandemics into perspective

    By

    As Covid began its roller-coaster ride of infection in early 2020, causing panic, sickness, and death, much of the art world came to a halt.

    Jay Critchley in his Provincetown back yard. (Photo Howard Karren)

    “I read one article after another about artists and what they lost during the epidemic,” says Jay Critchley, sitting at an outdoor table in his back yard on a sunny May afternoon and chatting about his show at AMP Gallery, “Viral Warming,” opening on Friday. “For me, I just feel fortunate living in Provincetown with the means to create art and survive. That’s what makes this place so special and privileged.”

    Critchley washed ashore here 40-odd years ago, doing social work and working in public health until he came out as gay and as an artist. He has been a nonstop creative force ever since. His art is visual, conceptual, subversive, and theatrical — he has even turned his own identity into a performance piece, registering himself as a corporation.

    Viral Warming: Covid is a 3-by-8-foot recycled vinyl street banner by Jay Critchley. It is part of a show at AMP Gallery that repurposes advertising banners with the names of viral epidemics. (Photo courtesy Jay Critchley)

    The Provincetown Community Compact, which he founded, holds the annual fund-raising Swim for Life to support local charities, dune shacks, and artist residencies, but like all of Critchley’s projects, from covering a Truro motel with sand to wearing a dress made of tampon applicators, the Compact itself is a kind of aesthetic commentary.

    He considers himself an environmental activist, and most of his artwork is anti-corporate satire with an aim of speaking truth to power and making ecological sense of our lives.

    Critchley sees a pandemic such as Covid as indicative of the environmental havoc we have inflicted for centuries. “Let’s back up a minute,” Critchley says. “I’ve already been through a pandemic — the AIDS pandemic. How many people have died of AIDS? Around 50 million. How many have died of Covid? Three million. This virus is just another iteration of pandemics. There are other, related pandemics going on: climate change, social injustice, racial injustice, economic injustice. We’ve been living with them all along. It’s all connected.”

    Viral Warming: Ebola, a 3-by-8-foot recycled vinyl street banner, by Jay Critchley. (Photo courtesy Jay Critchley)

    Critchley is a collector, and the objects he collects are fetishes, of a sort, of his art and activism. He collects sand from beaches all over the world. And he has also collected advertising banners, the kind that are hung across Commercial Street, hawking events.

    In collecting them, Critchley says, “I certainly thought it would be an art project, but I had no idea what.”

    Viral Warming: SARS to CARS, a 3-by-8-foot recycled vinyl street banner, by Jay Critchley. This wordplay conflates the SARS coronavirus with the effect of fossil fuels. (Photo courtesy Jay Critchley)

    He had been doing research on the history of the Americas as part of Provincetown 400 — his “Moo Moo World” project — and saw that “pandemics were so defining of the occupation and invasion of the Americas, with cows and horses and pigs.” That correlated to current environmental crises. “Deforesting the Amazon, the palm oil trees in Malaysia — everything is disrupting the ecosystem. Animals are being pushed into close contact.” The result: pandemics.

    “That’s kind of the background of this project,” he says. “What are the banners used for? They herald events. They’re disposable objects. They’re very commercial on Commercial Street. They have a provenance. What are we promoting? What could we promote?”

    In 2003, Critchley turned this Newsweek cover about the SARS outbreak into a critique of fossil fuels. (Photo courtesy Jay Critchley)

    For his “Viral Warming” show, Critchley painted the names of viruses over the ads on the banners. “I usually don’t do two-dimensional work,” he says. “It was me and a paint brush and spray can. Because of Covid, I was working on my own. I used to make a lot of signs when I was younger. Going back to making letters was kind of fun.”

    That resourcefulness is Critchley’s trademark. He took some solar-powered lamps he was going to use on a communal project at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall that was about to be torn down — a project halted by Covid — and turned them into a short film, Provincetown 2020 — 36 Solar Lights, which will be screened at the upcoming

    Provincetown Film Festival. In it, he bikes around town at night with the lights, illuminating the ghostly pandemic landscape.

    It’s all part of a process. “The banners are just the beginning of a project,” Critchley says. “It could be a parade of banners. I could install them in a space for performative actions and involve other artists. It could be a stage set, or whatever. That’s the way I look at my life and work: once something is created, you move on to the next thing.”

    Spread the Word

    The event: “Democracy of the Land: Viral Warming,” an exhibit of banners by Jay Critchley

    The time: Friday, May 28 through June 23

    The place: AMP: Art Market Provincetown, 432 Commercial St.

    The cost: Free

    WASTE NOT

    At Home in Jay Critchley’s Cesspool

    Converting your old soak pit into a rental unit, experts warn, is a no-go

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — In 1997, Jay Critchley uncovered a backyard manhole, peered into a cesspool, and “discovered a new world.”

    He had always known about his property’s cesspit, a pre-Title 5 relic that had sat unused for a decade and a half. But Critchley had never before felt compelled to study the pit, or to consider his defunct, inherited cesspool as anything more than just that.

    The first thought when one lowers oneself into a cesspool, the writer says, is “I am in a cesspool.” Behind her is Saint Francis. (Photo Paul Benson)

    On that day, Critchley, the activist-artist-provocateur, saw a split-level stage, an apartment-slash-commentary-on-artists’-living-conditions. Toned down a level, he saw something simpler: “A gorgeous space.”

    Critchley’s cesspool is shaped like a cinder-block beehive. It swells at its widest point to six feet in diameter and extends five feet underground. In its past life, the beehive could fit a single family’s waste. Now, Critchley claims, it is quasi-livable. Long ago, to make the point, he carpeted the dirt floor, whitewashed the cinder blocks, added a mattress, electrical cord, TV, altar. He called it a Septic Summer Rental.

    This was Critchley’s indictment of Provincetown’s looming affordable housing crisis, not an actual solution to the problem. Provincetown Health Director Morgan Clark stresses that “a livable space needs at least two means of egress, and natural light.” And, as she points out, “a cesspool has neither of those.”

    “I know it’s tempting to make use of something you’ve used in the past,” says George Heufelder, who works with the Mass. Alternative Septic System Test Center in Sandwich. “But I could see no positive thing about using a used cesspool for anything else.” Not even for a root cellar? No, he says. “If there’s remaining organic matter in there, it can create sewer gases like methane, which do things like kill you.”

    These are not facts Critchley cares to take up. His was a “good-sized unit, with a rooftop sundeck and a shared shower,” he recalls. He’d rent it now for at least a couple thousand a week, he says. Except that, after stints as a theater, an opera house, and a poetry stage, his cesspool has moved on.

    The cesspool offers stunning views of the sky. (Photo Josephine de La Bruyère)

    Critchley’s cesspool can fit this reporter, sitting, with room for a friend. Standing is a different story.

    What does it mean to have one’s body in a cesspool and one’s head extending from a manhole, level with Jay Critchley’s shins and a statue of Saint Francis? That, says Critchley, is called “a moment of transformation.”

    The dirt floor is uncarpeted again. But some décor remains: five bunches of fake flowers; a windchime dangles near ground level; some slugs have made themselves at home. The first thought when one lowers oneself into a cesspool is neither “gorgeous” nor “transformative.” The first thought is, likely, “I am in a cesspool.”

    Yet this cesspool does not smell like a cesspool. Its smell is dark, basement-y, two beats from unpleasant. Critchley calls it “flavor.”

    A cesspool operates simply. Pipes carry waste from homes to their backyard pits. In Provincetown, those pits’ sides are mostly walled, with cinderblock or brick or pounded concrete. “This town is a sand dune,” says Critchley. “With no walls, a cesspool would cave in.” But the pit’s floor is open dirt. Liquids leach through it, into the water table; solids compost and decay.

    Critchley has studied up on local cesspools, he says, deadpanning — his gift for deadpan is sublime — that he has seen enough beehives, prisms, and ordinary pits to propose a historic septic district to the town.

    Some septic chic décor remains from the time Critchley’s cesspool was tricked out as a statement on the summer rental situation. (Photo Josephine de La Bruyère)

    Before 1995’s Title 5 legislation, cesspools reigned supreme in Provincetown. Now, the law deems them “nonconforming systems.” They only come up, says Health Director Clark, “because they’re bad and need to turn into something better.” Clark estimates that about 150 functioning ones remain in town.

    But Critchley has a point. Look past the slugs, past the worry about the possible contaminants entering your airways, and a quiet elegance reveals itself. When was the last time you studied a cinder-block beehive? Each of those blocks, says Critchley, was built specifically for its role in the structure. To the extent that cinder blocks can nestle, these ones do. Through the manhole opening above — a circle of blue sky and greenery — is Critchley’s face peeking in.

    “It’s a small space for big ideas,” he says. “Do you feel transformed?”

    Spring Courses at Open University

    By

    The Open University of Wellfleet has announced its virtual spring courses, now available for registration at openuniversityofwellfleet.org. They include “Stephen Sondheim, Songwriter,” with Marc Strauss; “Great Printmakers in New England,” with Lewis Shepard; “Comparing Plays of Recollection by Eugene O’Neill and Brian Friel,” with Steve Reynolds; “Here Comes Dickens!” with Rhoda Flaxman; “Politics in Fiction and Film: Lost in Translation,” with Linda B. Miller; and “Studying the ArtStranders,” with Grace Hopkins.

    Hopkins’s course will take place Tuesdays beginning April 20, 10 a.m. to noon. “The artStrand gallery was a unique endeavor in Provincetown from 2005 to 2016,” writes Hopkins in the course description. “It was a gallery owned and operated by the artists, rather than a single owner, a director, or a collective.” There were six male and six female artists, all of them still active today: Breon Dunigan, Maryalice Johnston, Irene Lipton, Sarah Lutz, Anna Poor, Tabitha Vevers, Bailey Bob Bailey, Paul Bowen, Jay Critchley, Jim Peters, Daniel Ranalli, and Bert Yarborough.

    Re-Rooting for 2021

    By

    The 38th annual Re-Rooters Day ceremony, presented by Jay Critchley, CEO of the International Re-Rooters Society, will be held on Provincetown Harbor, Thursday, January 7th, at 4 p.m. Those wishing to attend should email [email protected] with diatribes as well as items they would like to discard and burn. Masks and social distancing are required.

    The event will be especially cathartic after such a trying year. “Fire belongs to all of us; it is a cleansing element,” says Critchley, who has built an extra-large boat, and plans on burning two trees, rather than the usual one, this year. Though he had not yet chosen a theme at press time (last year it was “extractive democracy”), he had already written his Ten Commandments. —Saskia Maxwell Keller

     Visit the Whiteness House and Shred Evidence

    By

    Jay Critchley has installed a project he created in 2017 at the Santa Fe Art Institute in reaction to Trump’s presidency, The Whiteness House — tarred and feathered, on the patio of Bubala’s by the Bay at 183 Commercial St. in Provincetown.

    The artwork, which is meant to be interactive, will be open to the public from noon to 3 p.m. daily through Sunday, October 25th. Participants — masked and socially distanced in 15-minute time slots — will be asked to write down their thoughts and reactions on paper, then shred it.

    Each day will begin with a “Ringing of the Bells.” Scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 24: Ken Field on saxophone and readings by Isaac “Jaguar” Lopez (“The Language of the Land”), Ann Wood (“Purgatory Problems”), and Brent Thomas (“Ann Hutchinson, American Jezebel”). Sunday, Oct. 25, noon: Brent Thomas; 1 p.m.: Stuard Derrick (“Descants and Deformities,” a duologue) and Jamie de Souza; 2 p.m.: singer-songwriter Tianna Esperanza.

    Critchley’s Whiteness House Coming to Bubala’s

    By

    Jay Critchley’s conceptual art installation The Whiteness House — tarred and feathered will be set up under the patio awning at Bubala’s by the Bay restaurant at 183 Commercial St. in Provincetown from Friday, October 16th, through October 25th. Writers, performers, poets, and others are invited to submit ideas for daily planned activities. Volunteers to staff the installation are also being recruited. Contact Jay Critchley at [email protected]. The Whiteness House is a walk-in scale model of the White House created by Critchley at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico in 2017 in response to the presidential election.

     

    Paved Paradise

    By

    Performer Zoë Lewis and artist Jay Critchley, in conjunction with Swim for Life, are presenting Tarmac Tuesday, an event to clean up the eroded tarmac at Herring Cove Beach. It will take place Tuesday, September 1st, at 5 p.m. Go to Zoë Lewis’s Facebook page for details.

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