Feature

The Waiting Game

Marcus Verhagen on the politics and aesthetics of time

Roman Ondák, Good Feelings in Good Times, 2003

In an era when even time can be monetised, artists like Elmgreen & Dragset, Tobias Rehberger and Roman Ondák have explored crossovers between time spent waiting or queueing in life and in art.

In Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04, the narrator and his close friend Alex queue for an hour to see a portion of Christian Marclay’s video The Clock, 2010, at the Lincoln Center in New York. In Marclay’s celebrated work, thousands of short clips from classic films, each briefly showing a clock or watch, are arranged in a 24-hour sequence; when the work is shown, the time indicated on screen coincides throughout with the viewer’s extra-diegetic time. But while Lerner’s narrator is watching it, he finds himself occasionally checking the time on his phone. What fascinates him about The Clock is that the video, with its constant narrative jolts, leads him away from a perception of time as linear and unchanging – he forgets that what he is looking at is also a clock.

This passage is one of many in which the author expands with wit and insight on the complexity of our efforts to orientate ourselves in time. The humourist in Lerner plainly enjoys the apparently circular idea of having his characters wait in line to watch the passing of time. And, significantly, he refrains from painting the interval spent queueing as an oppressive preamble to watching the video. We generally view waiting as an unwelcome imposition, as time immobilised and lost, but Lerner’s characters spend their hour or so in the queue doing what is revealingly known as ‘catching up’, that is to say, they re-synchronise their friendship, they bring it up to date by telling one another stories. Their wait is not the taxing other of their time in the projection room. Both are filled with narrative streams that lift the two characters out of what Walter Benjamin called ‘homogeneous, empty time’, that is to say, the measurable time of schedules and deadlines, time that has to be made productive.

Does it matter how we experience, or conceptualise, waiting? Yes, patently it does. We in the UK spend, on average, about six months of our lives queueing. We wait in hospitals and surgeries, in traffic, at supermarket tills, in call centre queues. For some, waiting is not an occasional but a near-permanent experience. In Sweden officials use the term ‘waiting cultures’ to describe the lives-in-suspension of convalescents and asylum seekers. In her influential reflections on time, the social scientist Helga Nowotny points out that social inequalities tend to be shadowed by temporal inequalities at a time when speed is widely associated with achievement, and that many forms of slowness, suspension or waiting, such as unemployment, bring social marginalisation. Commentators also note that the ability to make others wait is a measure of power – and is occasionally exercised to underline that power, as it was, for instance, at the time of the Iran-Iraq war when Saddam Hussein made Sweden’s then-prime minister Olof Palme wait for days in Baghdad before receiving him.

Waiting is often experienced as enforced subjection to the will of another. Plainly, it is a practice that is conditioned by, and so sheds light on, larger social and economic forces. And that is truer now than ever. Recent years have seen the emergence of various enterprises designed to address the needs and preferences of the cash-rich and time-poor and in particular to help them side-step waiting. Air travellers can pay to avoid queues – at check-in, on boarding and in certain airports at security. Some amusement parks in the US allow customers who pay a premium to bypass queues at popular attractions. On a motorway in the US state of Georgia drivers who pay a supplement can slice through traffic in a lane closed to others. All of these ventures are premised on the notion that one person’s time may be more or less valuable than another’s. That notion is also and more explicitly expressed in the increasingly common practice of hiring others to wait in line. In New York, ‘line sitters’ save time for their customers by queuing for them at product launches or the ticket offices of popular Broadway shows, working either independently or for ‘line companies’. Digital ventures offer similar services: TaskRabbit, for instance, invites customers to ‘hire a Tasker to queue in line for restaurants, special events, the post office, and more’. In a more and more frenzied and unequal social environment, the monetisation of time has reached a new stage with the development of a market in which intervals spent waiting can be bought and sold. And with all these opportunities for translating economic advantage into temporal gain, a person’s orientation in time is marked in powerful new ways by his or her socio-economic position.

As the experience of waiting has changed, becoming an emblematic expression of new pressures in a fast-paced society, artists have turned their minds to it. Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset’s ‘Welfare Show’, 2006, at the Serpentine Gallery described situations of neglect and isolation in installations that conjured the slow and monotonous cadences of dead-end jobs and institutional care. A patient lying on a hospital trolley could be glimpsed through an opening, a row of unoccupied chairs lined the wall of a waiting room littered with discarded number tickets, a solitary suitcase circled on a baggage reclaim carousel. The show repeatedly touched on the experience of waiting, which it associated with precarity and bureaucratic indifference. The unclaimed suitcase on the carousel, with its Luton-Ibiza tag, was particularly revealing, indicating as it did that areas of deceleration coexist with the culture of speed and the technologies underlying it. Adrian Paci invoked the experience of waiting in similarly jarring terms when he filmed a number of men and women, many apparently of Latin American origin, as they approached and then climbed up and waited on an airport gangway, the camera then panning out out to reveal that the gangway was situated on a runway but not connected to a plane (Centro di Permanenza Temporanea, 2007). He brought the ‘waiting culture’ of these would-be migrants into visible contact with the apparatus of high-speed travel, as if they could overcome the economic and political obstacles to their relocation with patience alone. Artists such as Elmgreen & Dragset and Paci have concerned themselves with the zones of deceleration that have developed throughout contemporary society and specifically around transport hubs. Slowness is not an anomaly in today’s fast-moving world, pockets of it are everywhere. As these artists have indicated, whole communities are desynchronised, cut off from the advantages of speed.

But slowness too has its advantages, of course. We are constantly enjoined to slow down, by adepts of yoga, meditation, slow food and Tantra, by self-help books, lifestyle gurus, holiday brochures and medical authorities. Slowness is good, apparently, for our health, relationships, peace of mind and concentration. In 24/7, a book-long howl of protest at our culture of near-permanent availability, Jonathan Crary focuses on sleep as the last line of defence against global capitalism and its round-the-clock demands (Editorial AM371). Waiting opens onto a paradox that is touched on by Lerner in 10:04: although slowing down is widely seen as desirable, waiting is not. Before waiting in line and then seeing a few hours of The Clock towards the middle of the night, Lerner’s characters queue to see the video twice, leaving after a while on both occasions as they are put off by the length of the line. But when they return and stay, the paradox melts away as the characters chat about relatives and acquaintances, worries and plans. Is this glimpse of another view of waiting in 10:04 just an idle projection? When the two characters stay in line and chat, turning their wait into a pause worthwhile in itself, can we see there the germ of an alternative to imposed temporalities? For Lerner, waiting is both a symptom of acceleration and a release from it. How convincing is that position?

That, roughly speaking, was the question animating ‘Waiting’, a major show curated by Brigitte Kölle at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg earlier this year. It ran the gamut of contemporary treatments of waiting, with, for instance, pieces featuring adolescents waiting in a deserted car park, a man waiting to die and actors waiting to appear on stage. It certainly didn’t shrink from the boredom of waiting, or the pain and humiliation that can shadow it: also among the works on display were Paul Graham’s photographs of men and women sitting in dismal unemployment offices in 1980s Britain (‘Beyond Caring’, 1984-85) and Andrea Diefenbach’s shots of Moldovan children waiting for their parents, migrant workers in western Europe, to come home (Land Without Parents, 2008/13). But the show also repeatedly alluded to the pleasures of anticipation and through them to the role of waiting in sharpening desire.

Of the works in the show, two in particular presented waiting in richly unstable terms. The first was a slightly woozy installation positioned at the beginning. Titled Daughter from Basel Waiting for Adidas, it was a waiting room created by Tobias Rehberger in 2004 and reworked for inclusion in the show. A vaguely claustrophobic space lined with roughly finished chipboard panels, each fringed in neon yellow or orange paint, it had benches modelled on those in the waiting room at Basel train station. Coloured light emanated from between the panels while three digital clocks were affixed to their surfaces, each displaying a different time, and books addressing questions around slowness and waiting, including Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, were scattered on the benches. The space was forbidding: with its reading materials it called to mind waiting rooms at dental surgeries and medical practices, the title and benches also pointing to train stations and through them to the stresses of travel. The effect of these associations was compounded by the misleading clocks, garish lighting and crudely finished surfaces. This was a waiting room with echoes of Alice in Wonderland and Franz Kafka.

At the same time, the work explicitly referred to the pleasures of anticipation in its title, which gestured to the adolescent’s experience of waiting for a sought-after accessory. And though the reading materials recalled the boredom and apprehension felt in other waiting rooms, they also invited visitors to pause before moving on through the show, to stop, leaf through texts on waiting and absorb thoughts that might then colour their experience of Rehberger’s work and others in the museum. Pieces not made in a time-based medium rarely dictate or explicitly comment on the duration of our attention to them. By contrast, this work brought about a mise-en-abyme, both describing the waiting of another, the daughter of the title, while casting the viewer in a similar role and equipping him or her with additional means to reflect on it. The installation revalued boredom, suggesting that the experience might catalyse thoughts that are closed to us in periods of more focused, goal-directed activity, when attention is more closely keyed to immediate relevance.

The show included another pivotal work in Roman Ondák’s Good Feelings in Good Times, a performance that was first put on at the Cologne Kunstverein in 2003 and has been staged in several other venues since (Interview AM345). Here too the experience of waiting was conceptualised as fundamentally ambivalent. The artist worked with volunteers who lined up in a queue on various days throughout the show. On each of those days they stood in line for 40 minutes before disbanding, taking a break and then lining up again elsewhere in the museum or outside by an entrance, always in front of a closed door. What were they waiting for? Entry to a particular show, a symposium, the permanent collection? A performance that had gone viral? A job interview perhaps? Museum-goers were bound to wonder but the volunteers were instructed to respond evasively if asked. And as visitors tried to work out why Ondák’s volunteers were waiting in line, their curiosity may have been streaked with anxiety – should I join the queue?

The spasm of concern a visitor might feel on seeing Ondák’s queue reflects a wider tendency to compare leisure pursuits with a view to optimising the allocation of time. In its treatment of time the work in fact touches on two issues at once. To the anxiety around waiting, and so wasting time, is added the anxiety around not waiting and so missing a potentially rewarding experience (aka FOMO, fear of missing out): both are symptoms of social acceleration. Of course, when the visitor learns that the queue is an artwork, those projected anxieties dissipate. Like other works by Ondák, Good Feelings in Good Times has a quietly humorous undertow, the humour arising in this case from the release of those tensions in our perception of the gratuitous character of the wait. Ondák envisions time spent queuing as an imposition, a result of wider pressures, while also seeing it as an open-ended interval that can conceivably ease those pressures. For the artist as for Lerner in 10:04, boredom opens onto a slacker time that can be spent in any number of ways, in daydreaming, for instance, or in chatting, as it is by the writer’s characters.

While some forms of waiting are solitary, queuing is not. It is carried out in the company of others and this social dimension is crucial to the effect of Ondák’s work. The social implications of queueing are outlined by Crary in 24/7 when he writes of ‘the dignity of waiting, of being patient as deference to others, as a tacit acceptance of time shared in common’. In standing in line we recognise the claims of others around us, as Crary intimates, and may on occasion pass the time by speaking with them. A queue has the makings of a (temporary) community. Occasionally chatting, Ondák’s volunteers present their time as a shared interval, the sunny title of the work conceivably also referring to queuing as a social activity. The title can also be understood as pointing to the experience of queuing outside shops in Ondák’s native Slovakia before the fall of communism – and not ironically, it would appear, as in an interview he has evoked memories of communist-era queuing in surprisingly positive terms. Not only do his queuing men and women form a kind of proto-community, with mutual obligations and opportunities for dialogue, but that incipient community can also be seen as engaging in something akin to a ritual.

On certain occasions, queueing has a ceremonial function, as it does for instance when guests line up to congratulate newlyweds after they have given their marriage vows. It can act as a sign of homage: a quarter of a million Americans stood in line for up to ten hours to pay their respects to John F Kennedy when he lay in state outside the Capitol Rotunda in 1963. Waiting is not always a response to external constraints, it can also be a freely given demonstration of affiliation or devotion. Some trace of this ceremonial waiting is detectable in a teenager’s eagerness for her soon-to-arrive trainers and in the patience of friends waiting in line to see a well-received artwork. With its collective character and muted, enigmatic air, Good Feelings in Good Times also seems to have one foot in this tradition of ceremonial queuing, the volunteers serving as participants in a solemn, or mock-solemn, occasion that marks nothing other than its own temporary existence as a trigger for thought and conversation.

Waiting matters. The show in Hamburg was an astutely conceived reminder of the significance of an activity that we tend to view as negligible in itself and quickly forget. Waiting matters inasmuch as it exposes some of the more acute pressures and inequities of today’s world. Bottlenecks and queues pervade fast-moving societies, demonstrating in a paradoxical key the tightening grip of a purely instrumental conception of time, one that seeks to capitalise on the benefits of acceleration, to quicken the tempo of productive activity, but also results in zones of deceleration. In those zones the effects of growing inequality on the disposal of time stand out in high relief.

Yet the show in Hamburg turned away from a view of waiting as always and necessarily a hardship. It touched repeatedly on the experiences of those sidelined by today’s culture of mobility and speed, highlighting, like Elmgreen & Dragset in the ‘Welfare Show’, the frustration and distress that waiting holds for many. But as the subtitle, ‘Between Power and Possibility’, indicated, the show was also designed to present the experience as one that can at times spell relief from social acceleration, as it does for Lerner’s characters when they turn their time in the queue into a chance to catch up. And this is what we see in the works by Rehberger and Ondák: the wait becomes a pivot, an interval that can be experienced as an inconvenience and a source of stress but also as a release from ‘homogeneous, empty time’. Both drain waiting of its purpose so that, while it retains its connection to similar experiences and through them to feelings of oppression, it also sketches a temporality without tension, that is to say, a more sociable time, an expanded present that can accommodate conversation, inquiry and indeed doing nothing at all. They sketch a less constraining temporality but without losing sight of the constraints that ordinarily weigh on our disposal of time – on the contrary, they present it as the unexpected flip-side of an experience that epitomises those constraints. And, crucially, they suggest an analogy with the viewer’s own time. Rehberger and Ondák interpret the experience of waiting in terms that raise the question: what distinguishes it from what we do in galleries and museums? Rehberger’s waiting room calls on viewers to sit and wait but they are waiting already, there and before other works – waiting to notice details, make connections, gauge their own responses, hazard readings and so on. The books lying on benches really only underline and extend a connection between waiting and viewing that was always there. Likewise, what makes Ondák’s queue so disconcerting is not that it is out of place but the contrary: with their quiet chatting, their air of expectancy and patience, his volunteers look like other museum-goers. These works liken waiting to the time of art viewing and so implicate the viewer in their investigations into the cadences of the present. What makes these works, in which waiting is so revealing a concern, such forceful interventions in larger conversations around time is that they couple this more expansive time with the larger temporal pressures to which it is the exception, so that one cannot be conceived without the other.

Marcus Verhagen is an art historian.

First published in Art Monthly 410: October 2017.