This week we celebrate the season of waiting. One day might as well be a thousand in toddler time. For the last 21 days we talked about our list for Santa, the miracle of snow in the South, and all the players in the nativity… now we are overwhelmed with waiting. They can imagine Santa, but they cannot fathom three more days (or any quantity of time). My children’s anxiety for what is coming, but has not yet come is unfiltered. I can have the same emotions about waiting, but they are usually triggered by different things. For my sanity (and theirs), I put together a few thoughts about the beauty of waiting. It makes sense to me to jump quickly from art installation to children’s books to performance. I hope you enjoy the connections.
When I visited the Mo Willems exhibition at the High Museum of Art (open thru 1/16), I picked up his book, “Waiting Is Not Easy!” In fits and groans, Gerald (the elephant) can’t stand to wait for Piggie’s surprise. There is not much to the story except a lot of emotion and the perfect surprise. My four year old knows how to groan and empathizes with Gerald…who is so pleased with the Milk Way that he is motivated to wait for the sunrise. It’s not often that you find a children’s book that models longing for nature (over toys or fitting in).
Talking about stars seems perfectly seasonal since we celebrate the Winter Solstice today and the days are short. Oliver Jeffers‘ character in “How to Catch a Star” is also longing for a star. He has a clear longing from the beginning. Then he takes his own tour of failed ambition, strategies, and labor to get it. And when he least expects it, he finds a star. It tells it’s own picture of striving and waiting with just the right amount of detail for preschoolers.
I like Sally Lloyd-Jone’s book about stars. It is poetic and has a creative angle on a familiar story. On each page you read “It’s time, It’s time…” This week, the problem is… it’s not really time!! I’m so pleased that the badger and the owl and the pig and the peacock are getting ready… but it’s not time yet. I’m looking for a more nuanced way to deal with the complexity of the season, rather than the magic of it.
More like Marina Abramović and Igor Levit Blend’s new collaboration at the Park Avenue Armory in New York that just closed this past weekend. In the New York Times, Zachary Woolfe writes a favorable review of the performance that starts, “Alert: spoilers below. Classical music critics don’t get many chances to write those words.” Patience and surprise are key to the experience. Abramović is great at durational performances, and this specifically explores the role of waiting in our perception of beauty. She says in the press release, “We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.” It’s one of those lessons I would like to have inside a protected and creative environment. I did not go to things like that as a child, but I wonder if it is possible to learn character lessons through art that can transfer over to the hard situations in life (or at least prepare the soil for them). We need the memory of silence as a blessing in order to develop long suffering. Art can help us be more empathetic, but can it enable us to keep our sanity when we suffer?
In “Remy the Rhino,” Andy McQuire tells a story of an angry rhino who is learning a lesson. He learns trust the process and to choose peace when don’t feel calm. Something we talk a lot about in my house.
This year I curated a collection of artist multiples for CIVA Labs, which included this black bag by Lex Thompson. Inside is a photograph of “the white vapor of phantom breath under the canopy of a tree.” The image is unstable and removing it from the bag will cause it to slowly darken. The choice is to value the ephemerality of the image or the intangibility of the photograph. The object is always just outside of your reach and that’s better than having it. I mean you have it, but you don’t have it yet. If you just take a cheating glance then it takes away from the presence.
Yasuaki Onishi uses words like air, reverse, and making to describe his work. The photo above records his installation at Rice Gallery in 2012. The form makes the space feel both tortured and free. I am waiting for it to collapse, wondering what froze that moment, and captivated by the repetition. I translate the combination of tension and lightness to the beauty of waiting.
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