I often refer back in my memory to my first major art residency, the time I spent a year and half traveling between Montreal and the city of Granby, to the artist-run centre 3e impérial (just south of Montreal, in the Eastern Townships). The reason I do is because that was the place where, for the first time, I experienced the possibility of having a long period in which to really get to know a site in order to propose the definitive form of a work. To be able to delve deeply into a process and recognize this as a form of creative making. It’s a very rare opportunity and one that I have consistently sought out since.
The opportunity occurred again with my project at DARE-DARE last season and, once again, I find myself with the incredible spaciousness of a context that allows me to explore on a slow, meandering path.
In a culture where we are often faced with a pressure to produce (and to do so with a certain acceleration) this kind of movement (while happily encouraged within these contexts) can nonetheless occasionally feel stagnant and faltering; like some kind of failure. These feelings don’t take over for very long but when they do emerge, I can find myself entertaining doubt and a feeling of some kind of deficiency. I’m not doing enough. My doing (or non-doing, as it were) is too invisible.
In preparing for a course I’m teaching this fall I came across a quote in an interview with installation artist Ann Hamilton. I was looking at her work for another set of reasons but to my surprise, I found this helpful bit of creative wisdom. What resonated for me was the way in which she described entering into her process of making. In detailing this trajectory, she clearly emphasized the importance of a kind of meditative reception as an integral part of her uncovering the work that will be made. This process is essentially one of waiting. She states:
“I listen to all the millions of small things that give a place its sense. I try to walk it into my body, to feel it, to understand it by moving through it, rather than looking at it. I make lists of words that describe the physical circumstances. I look for their metaphoric possibilities. I wait. That is the practice – to be blank and to listen – and to wait.”
To be blank and to listen, to my mind, is a form of actively doing nothing. At least on the visible surface (as we have repeatedly come to understand that “Doing Nothing” basically masks a whole host of imperceptible, yet present, processes). Her description of “walking it into the body” – hence a direct correlation between walking and receiving (from a space) as a way to reveal the (art)work to eventually be made also acts as a timely inspiration, while I tentatively become familiar with my new residence “home.”
And so this is how I have decided to begin my process in residence at McGill; to walk, and look, and sit, and listen, and wait. To rest, while I receive this new place (and the people who populate it).
Also very timely – and serendipitous – in all of this mix is an intervening performative art project that I have been planning to carry for artist-run centre Folie/Culture’s season opener: Bureau de l’a – POST –. My proposed project has me in the province’s capital of Quebec City over the next two days, occupying a traveling kiosk disguised as a Post Office. The Office on wheels will be my site of pause: A Waiting Room (Salle d’attente) where I consider what it means to wait, and demonstrate waiting (as we once did when, in a previous era, we mailed letters and had to be patient about getting a reply). As I spend this time thinking about waiting, I will also sit and wait, and invite people to come and tell me their stories about waiting…or to simply sit and wait with me. Eventually, something will come.
The Sanctimonious Sect of Nothing Is Sacred 