Weary from waiting
As 2020 winds down and election day draws close, patience is a virtue that doesn’t always seem very American
Feel that? That heaviness? That’s the barometric pressure of an incoming election and the anxiety of not knowing howit will turn out.
See that other thing, off in the distance? That’s calm and clarity at the end of an impossible year— that’s the thing T.S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.” That’s aways off.
Sowewait. And whilewewait, in line to voteNov. 3, for the results of an election that may not be decidedNov. 3, for a vaccine to return physically to classrooms and enter a movie theater, for justice for Black Americans killed by police, to see loved ones again (maybe next Christmas), to be furloughed, to receive unemployment, whilewewait for something resembling normal to return to everyday life, here’s a bit of local history that’s rattling in my head:
At theMuseum of Contemporary Art in 1975, the performance artist Chris Burden asked the MCAstaff for a 4-foot-by-8-foot sheet of glass and told the curator
hewould lie on the gallery floor beneath it. Dennis O’Shea, now the museum’s manager of technical production and then amember of the tech crew, remembers Burden being annoyed when he was asked exactly howlong he planned to do this. Burden handed theMCAa statement which read that hewas placing his life into their hands.
“He expected the museum to throwhim out,” O’Shea recalls. “And they didn’t.”
So Burden lay there, waiting.
And the audience filtered past, waiting.
Burdenwet himself the first night, some viewers tossed coins at him, one man leaned in to say the artistwas boring and everyonewaswaiting for him to do something, anything.
“It became a big news item, yet nobody at the museum knew what to do next,” O’Shea said.
Until a doctor showed up and said Burdenwould die if he didn’t go to the bathroom or eat. So, beside the artist, O’Shea placed a pitcher ofwater and a pan for urination. And with that simple act, after 45 hours and 10 minutes, Burden sat up. The show was over. Burden, who died in 2015, was justwaiting for help.
I’ve thought a lot about that since last spring.
Partly because, as January Parkos Arnall, theMCA’s interim senior curator of performance and public practice, explained: “It was about ourwaiting for something, and the dread of not knowing if there is an end.”
That sounds familiar. But, like Burden on the floor, we put ourselves here.
If the past year and the election season, pandemic and protests were defined bywaiting, they’re also marked by our uneasy understanding of patience— the flip side ofwaiting.
We are stillwaiting for yesterday to return becausewe have shown due patience and because, conversely, for others, patience ran out. To enter supermarkets, clinics and schools, we stand in lines nowandwait, patiently. And yet that look in the eyes of students (and teachers) who are virtually learning is like aNintendo energy meter measuring their collective patience and fast approaching zero.
The fact that it seems I can no longer take more than a breath at a green light before someone honks, that’s about patience— as ismy honk at the driver in front of me reading texts. Their iPhone, a cure for their own impatience, means Iwait, growing impatient.
“Take elections, a prime example of something wherewait times produce frustration,” said Jason Farman, author “Delayed Response: The Art ofWaiting From the Ancient to the Instant World” and director of the design cultures and creativity program at theUniversity ofMaryland.
“The complexity of elections isn’t something most of us completely understand, so when it takes longer thanwe’re used to seeing it builds anxiety. I think we’re all about to experience that again, so I think the publicwould benefit from some expectation setting. Ifwe just called thisNovember ‘ElectionMonth,’ see, then that’s suddenly a very different set of expectations.”
He said theway to think of ElectionNight is to think of a buffering icon.
Waiting … waiting …
As a measuring stick of impatience, you might also consider that moment in lateMay when the WhiteHouse sawprotesters tear-gassed and cleared froma park so the president could hold a