Next day. Same time. Same place […]
We wait. We are bored. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work!ⁱ

Samuel Beckett’s stasis is by no means a passive inaction. He presents the act of waiting as a dynamic form of stillness; an uneasy temporal stutter that quivers palpably like the video-screen paused awaiting play.ⁱⁱ In Waiting for Godot, his characters appear curiously acquiescent in, rather than strictly resigned to their designated task. As they observe the order of their endless and immutable wait, they seem as though relentlessly and absurdly immersed in its loop of purposeless anticipation. They tell stories and attempt jokes; sing songs; play games; fight and embrace; curse and converse; sleep; dance, get dressed and then undress again. Beckett draws attention to the contradictory nature of waiting and to the sense of expectation therein; for it is a space of simultaneous hope and doubt, of both desire and disenchantment.

Waiting is an episode of time in which the quickening pulse of adrenalin and slow rhythm of boredom struggle to conduct the pace of passing hours. Witness the bored thrill of the anticipatory queue gathering force; or the restless lethargy that seeps into spaces where waiting occurs - the languid non-place of the airport lounge or the back seat of cars, child-filled and travelling along incessant motorways. Waiting is a threshold across which the future is conjured; the interminable limbo of all adolescent dreams; a chasm of pleasure and irritation into which the unspoken fantasies of the everyday might fall or take flight.ⁱⁱⁱ Situational or abstract, it is performed along a spectrum of expectation that ranges from awaiting the familiar or repeated, to anticipating the not yet known. The duration of waiting is equally ambiguous, for it is inevitably too long and yet somehow never enough. Think of those involuntary moments of indecision when the unfulfilled wait is finally abandoned.

The nature of unresolved waiting, when an end or destination remains at a distance, creates the liminal experience of being not-yet-there; a period of restlessness or temporal vacuum in which a range of random, repetitious or equally resourceful practices might develop to occupy the void. Within the recent curatorial programme at Bloc, a number of artists have appeared to evoke the feeling of being not-yet-there by reflecting upon the more disquieting durational processes that underpin the making of work. They seem to draw attention to the habitually unseen or hidden experience of practice - the hours of inaction or hanging around; the doubt, indecision or disappointment; the relentless searching and waiting for something tangible to emerge or for ‘the art to happen’.^iv Arguably there are stages of both intermission and inefficient labour in even the most prolific practice, however in this context such episodes are not only an implicit part of making work, but rather creep in from the periphery to be put to use at the heart of the work itself, where they become strategically emphasised or indulged; deliberately extended or prolonged. The act of waiting becomes the site of practice.

In The Space is Empty and Waiting (2005), Meriel Herbert tries to articulate the state of panic induced by the opportunity of a solo show, where the weight of her own expectations produces a form of paralysis that renders production near impossible.^v A series of video works capture her body in a state of nervous tension, locked into a ritual of ticks and twitches that play out to the sound of shallow breathing and palindromic rhythm of pacing steps. The possibility of exhibition is presented as a form of crisis or catalyst, which should encourage work to approach resolution but instead provokes a kind of creative seizure whereby practice dissolves into a looped spasm of repeated and incoherent action. The artist’s body appears arrested at an impassable standstill like stage fright, stammering at the point between the possibility of the work’s success and the terror of its ridiculous collapse. Akin to the bored child without stimulus, Herbert seems at a loss to find something to occupy the vacuum that she has created, which might hold her attention and bring this fevered waiting to an end. Like the sham séance her formless motions conjure ghosts that never materialise.

For Chris Clarke & Graeme Stonehouse, the moment of their exhibition, Welcome to the Jungle (2006) seemed marked by a kind of flaccid enthusiasm. Stonehouse’s barely inflated Air Dancer was positioned as the disconcerting welcoming committee to the show.^vi Having slipped its habitual haunt of the garage forecourt or student bar; in the gallery space its garish form became claustrophobically restricted by the new surroundings. Akin to the leftover guest at a party it gestured grotesquely as though intoxicated by some inexhaustible fatigue. Anti-hero of exuberant folly, it seemed suspended in a moment of perpetual inebriation - forever falling forward towards the floor and yet always escaping the pull of gravity at the very last instant. Clarke & Stonehouse’s work evokes the kind of slightly surreal observation, association and production that takes place only after hours of inaction or redundancy; a form of practice that emerges out of a period of waiting, as an antidote to combat the experience of boredom or lethargy.

In A Philosophy of Boredom Lars Svendsen proposes that: ‘Boredom contains a potential. In boredom an emptying takes place, and an emptiness can be receptiveness … Boredom pulls things from their usual contexts. It can open ways up for a new meaning, by virtue of the fact that it has already deprived things of meaning. Boredom, because of its negativity, contains the possibility of a positive turnaround.’^vii Certainly in the work, objects slip their habitual anchors and are pulled into alternative narratives that hover at the interstice between the poetic and apathetic; in the gap of experience that separates philosophy from the banal realities of the everyday. The courtship of two pigeons witnessed by Stonehouse on a window-ledge becomes the visual backdrop against which he recalls a catalogue of things lost or missing like it were a litany. A video loop of their charged beaks locked in heart-shape foreplay repeats over and over until the list ends, and their forced abstinence collapses into frantic copulation. In Clarke’s I Wish I Believed in Heaven, a stick that had been painted to resemble a magic wand was left propped against the wall; a gesture that at once seemed to challenge the authority of more accepted leaps of faith whilst proposing a miraculous double-life for the most ordinary of objects. In his sculptural work, You Look, Like I Feel, the melancholic inspiration was drawn from a neglected basil plant, which seemed to mirror the exhausted sentiment of his own emotions. In each of the works there is a feeling of being tired out but of never quite giving up hope or abandoning the task at hand.

Notions of waste and labour are also played out in the work of Kate Allen, where a meticulously constructed novella, is abandoned except as the prompt through which to produce other work.^viii Having written the text Allen decided to omit its ending, to forget one ever existed in order to allow the story to remain unresolved. Hidden or largely undeclared, the narrative is allowed to linger on as a kind of latent structure, a foil or MacGuffin against which to develop an ongoing series of carefully executed pencil drawings.^ix The text serves to create an invisible context; the energy invested in it is stored as if it was a battery to fuel subsequent action. Its presence functions as a ruse which then legitimises the existence of the drawings. However it is as though the text still has a strange hold or order over Allen, compelling her to undertake endless hours of laborious production to provide substance to its characters. Locked into the making of repetitious marks in her studio, Allen conjures the back-stories of the individuals she creates. Enforced physical stasis and the familiarity of repeated gestures, allows her mental space for imaginative wandering or daydreaming. Like others, Allen appears to have drawn up a set of unwritten rules or conditions against which to practice: a system without which her labour intensive actions might not be sustained or endured. ^x

In each of these practices there is a sense of a specific site or location that is used for both the making of work and the killing of time: where often the studio or domestic space becomes a zone of extended or endured moments of immersion and boredom; of both professional and private introspection. The studio is arguably the archetypal waiting room of artistic practice: the hallowed space of the unformed and unresolved. However increasingly as other more public spaces become adopted as the site where work is both developed and disseminated; the traditional solitude or safety of the studio space is left in favour of more open acts of speculative or experimental production. As in the past, the communal spaces of the coffee shop or public house are inhabited as locations for authorised lingering, creative thinking and wilfully wasting time, whilst online spaces such as ‘youtube’ and ‘myspace’ present unlimited vaults in which to air the results of such indefatigable labour.

It is these kinds of spaces that are put to use by collaborative duo, WebsterGotts, whose practice re-contextualises social activities such as time wasting and play through absurdly staged actions and performances. They record micro-dramas in which they appear to wrestle with the nature of ‘being an artist’ and their place within the art world. They document the mock-shock of the rejection letter; chart the quest for the place where artists hang out as a journey of endless coffee drinking; or else video themselves engaged in passing the time by fooling around, play fighting and spilling drinks. In their show in Sheffield they transformed the gallery into Bloc Inn (2007), leaving behind a residue of their absurd activities in the form of an abandoned table, a trail of spilt beer and a series of photographic images and videos in which they appear to mimic the vernacular of pub memorabilia.^xi The event itself seems to have long passed; we are left only with its warm dregs. Through their self-professed laziness and inane commentaries to camera, Alexis Gotts and Scott Webster in fact offer a form of critique against which the performative demands or professionalism of the cultural sector might be taken to task. They play games but refuse to play the game.

Inaction then can be a critical gesture: a moment of pause, questioning and reservation even. Paradoxically, the inaction within waiting operates as a catalyst for alteration or transformation, where the emotions of hope and boredom vie to steer the course of future action. Rather than antithetical, such conditions might be seen to function in a complementary manner, for whilst boredom presents a crisis in the continuum of living - an introspective and reflective breakdown of sorts - hope irrepressibly produces the motivation to act.^xii Many theorists and philosophers have attempted to redeem a critical and creative value for boredom itself. Lars Svendsen asserts that, ‘philosophy is born in the nothingness of boredom.’^xiii It is in boredom’s emptiness, he argues, that questions emerge such as, ‘What is an I?’, ‘How ought I to live?’ and ‘What is to be done then?’.^xiv Whilst in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Adam Phillips suggests that boredom is a ‘developmental achievement’, in which uncertainties are negotiated; desires are crystallised, and one’s sense of independence is born.^xv

Whilst boredom has been culturally maligned as a form of social incapacity or failure, Phillips suggests that it might be seen as an opportunity, ‘integral to the process of taking one’s time.’^xvi Accordingly then, boredom could be reclaimed as a gesture through which to thwart the increasing expectations of the attention-seeking infotainment culture in which we live; where we are perpetually discouraged from wasting time and instructed instead to ‘make the most of now’. In his essay I Can, I Can’t, Who Cares? writer Jan Verwoert asserts the value of not performing or of the anti-happening as an antidote to the post-industrial condition of compulsive performativity.^xvii He challenges the dominant societal mantra of ‘I can’ with the possibility of refusal, resistance and the recuperation of more ‘caring’ parameters for practice. Verwoert proposes a counter-position of non-performativity - a practice of the unsaid, un-shown or un-revealed - and redeems a critical value for the notion of exhaustion and non-compliance. He suggests that we ‘learn to re-experience the beauty of latency’, which like irresolution, is a condition of ‘refraining from actualising and thereby exhausting all your potentials in the moment of your performance’.^xviii

The practices discussed in this essay could be seen to operate according to a model of wilful irresolution. In different ways they adopt the gesture of endlessly working towards but of never quite arriving at resolution; they create an impetus for work that functions rather as a ruse through which to undertake an alternative trajectory of exploration; or instead appear to privilege the indeterminate condition of anticipation and waiting around above the finality of closure. Akin to philosopher Roger Caillois’ description of playing games, their gestures could be seen as ‘an occasion of pure waste’,^xix which resist any sense of finite ending in favour of infinitely repeatable or looped permutations. Caillois argues that, ‘The possibilities of ludus are almost infinite … it is common knowledge that what to begin with seems to be a situation susceptible to indefinite repetition turns out to be capable of producing ever-new combinations’.^xx In this context the notion of an unresolved, incomplete, or endless action; or even of a failed, thwarted or reiterated gesture might present a form of inexhaustible or even Sisyphean performativity - a task without telos or destination - which assuages the need to perform whilst deferring the arrival of any specific goal or outcome. Such practices then subvert the demands of a culture driven by performative success and efficiency, not because they refuse to perform rather that they do not aspire towards ‘completion’: they just keep on performing. They remain suspended in a loop of open-endedness and of what could be.^xxi Less a gesture of psychological angst or the symptom of some involuntary creative paralysis or indecision, they might be seen to reclaim a critical and meaningful value for the endless, unresolved or anti-climatic.^xxii Resolutely, they speak in a language of the provisional, transitional or still incomplete. They present the act of waiting as a temporal site of rehearsal: a space of nascent imaginings.

Emma Cocker 2007

ⁱ Vladimir in Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Faber and Faber, 1956, pp. 72-73.
ⁱⁱ According to Theodor Adorno, Waiting for Godot reveals the ‘paradoxical dynamic of a standstill’, Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic theory, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, (eds) The Athlone Press, 1997, p.17. Martin Esslin suggests that Beckett’s plays ‘display a world in constant, and wholly purposeless movement’, Martin Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd, Methuen Publishing, 2001, p.335.
ⁱⁱⁱ Sustained waiting presents a dilemma for whilst it might all be ‘worth the wait’(or as Meriel Herbert whispers in her work The Space is Empty and Waiting, ‘If you wait long enough something will happen’), equally it might not; a sentiment echoed in Polly Jean Harvey’s disappointed exclamation, ‘Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball’. Listen to ‘Is that all there is?’ by John Parish & Polly Jean Harvey, from the album Dance Hall at Louse Point, 1996.
^iv Meriel Herbert, The Space is Empty and Waiting, Press release.
^v Meriel Herbert, The Space is Empty and Waiting, 8-23 October 2005, Bloc, Sheffield.
^vi Stonehouse’s ‘Air Dancer’ was one of those garishly coloured fan powered ‘wind socks’ in the shape of an endlessly cheery, though not-quite human figure.
^vii Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, Reaktion Books, 2005, p.142.
^viii Kate Allen and Edwin Rostron, The Disaster Area, 7-22 July 2007, Bloc, Sheffield.
^ix The MacGuffin features in a film, play, or book, as something that starts or drives the action of the plot but later turns out to be unimportant.
^x Repetitive games and gestures - such as list-like songs, counting games - might in fact be seen as response to tedium, possibly as a form of mockery or imitation of boredom’s monotony; a means a countering purposelessness with purposeless action. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boredom.
^xi WebsterGotts, Bloc Inn, February 2007, Bloc, Sheffield.
^xii Although in Human, All too Human (1878), Friedrich Nietzsche damned the emotion of hope as the ‘most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment’. Based on a reference at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope.
^xiii Lars Svendsen, 2005, p.127.
^xiv Svendsen, 2005, p.130. Adam Phillips echoes these questions in his chapter ‘On Being Bored, when he suggests that boredom creates the conditions in which questions are asked such as ‘What does one want to do with one’s time?’. See Phillips On Ticking, Kissing and being Bored, Faber and Faber, 1993, p.79.
^xv Adam Phillips, 1993. See especially Chapter 7, On Being Bored, pp.71-82.
^xvi Phillips, 1993, p.73.
^xvii Jan Verwoert’s text ‘I Can, I Can’t, Who Cares’ outlines the curatorial premise for the forthcoming festival Art Sheffield 08, which Verwoert is curating alongside the directors of SCAF. A copy of the text can be found at www.artsheffield.org. See also Jan Verwoert, ‘Use Me Up’, Metropolis M, No.1, 2007.
^xviii Verwoert, ‘I Can, I Can’t, Who Cares’, 2007.
^xix Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, (1958) trans. Meyer Barash, University of Illinois Press,
^xx Roger Caillois, 1958/2001, p.31.
^xxi Here Verwoert’s resistant exclamation ‘I can’t’ could be met with a lingering ‘I might’ - a playfully ambivalent declaration that is both petulant and promising. Depending on its intonation, ‘I might’ can be a get-out clause or a means of biding one’s time. It is a state of existence before things have been finalised and set in stone. Like the term ‘maybe’, it can be a marker of indecision and of stalling; a fork at the crossroads of possibility; or a gesture of reservation at the brink of the still unknown.
^xxii Referring to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, Confessions, Adam Phillips notes how, ‘Satisfaction for Rousseau is the death of possibility’. Obstacles in the way of satisfaction should then be nurtured not mastered, for as Phillips suggests, ‘Anticipation is the mother of invention’. See Phillips, 1993, p.89.