Waiting,
the shape of the pause, communicates a particular relation to time.
We wait in a state of suspended animation, looking toward an elusive
future horizon that counters our present moments of boredom. Idling
in the terminal, everyday spaces of airports, lobbies and stores,
we knock off hours, minutes and seconds, waiting to be elsewhere.
But as Siegfried Kracauer suggests, a certain virtue may be found
in boredom and wasted time, where we find a space that opens beyond
tireless objectives. Yvette Poorter seeks to map this listless time
of waiting. She comes highly qualified as one who waits, and now
offers her extensive experience as a service, free of charge. In “I’ll
Wait for You,” a performance that is part of her Monumoments series, Poorter collects lost and wasted time by waiting for others.
She queues up and lingers in banks and stations, calling others when
their number comes up or appointment occurs. By collecting these
idle moments, Poorter transforms waiting into something other than
an empty space. Instead, she reveals how time trips over itself,
and is loaded with the small habitual intervals and yawning gaps
that characterize our public spaces and exchanges. To
capture this sense of anticipation and delay, Poorter clocks her
task against the spinning video of an ocean horizon in the installation “The
Continuous Surface.” She records the slow time of a shipping
freighter making its way across the Atlantic, where hours stack up
and accumulate across multiple time zones. The stark and oceanic
horizon does not give way to the appearance of land, however. Instead,
Poorter rotates the spare horizon clockwise at the speed of a second
hand, so that the space of expectation becomes a dizzying timepiece.
The clock is installed as an artificial horizon in the gallery, which
becomes another kind of waiting room where we witness the art of
waiting.
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