P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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2008 Spring

Faith Wilding: Re-done, Undone, Done Again

P.S.1 Curatorial Assistant Kate McNamara invited artist Faith Wilding to reflect upon her installation Crocheted Environment (Womb Room) and the performance Wait-With.

Faith Wilding

Courtesy the artist

The original Crocheted Room was made in Womanhouse in 1971-72 and at the closing of Womanhouse, we held an auction and sold all the ephemera. However, the night before the auction, the Crocheted Room was stolen and has never been seen again. In 1995, Lydia Yee curated an important exhibition at the Bronx Museum, The Division of Labor: “Women’s Work” in Contemporary Art and asked me to recreate the Crocheted Room. At first I was very reluctant to do so since the piece was made in the very particular context of Womanhouse. I finally agreed because I felt it was important for students to know the lineage of “women’s work” and to actually be able to see it rather than just read about it. 

I recreated the work with two of my students from Cooper Union, and we made quite a different work than the original. It was a fanciful, airy, complex web-work of forms suggesting bridges, body parts, ladders, chandeliers, grottoes, umbilical cords and doilies. As we worked, we talked about our lives, our grandmother’s lives, computers, machines, feminism and much else. Museum workers came by to eat their lunch in our space and to visit with us. When I re-installed this new version at L.A. MoCA, the dimensions of the room were not quite right and I had to spend quite a bit of time crocheting on it. Later one of the installers told me that this had inspired a group of mostly male installation workers to crochet a collaborative work on their lunch break, which they then showed in a separate exhibition. I think this is a pretty amazing chain of influence to have inspired.

The content and meaning of Wait-With has been seen differently through the lens of contemporary performance theory than it was in the context of Womanhouse, the feminist art movement, and the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement. Jane Blocker wrote about Wait-With in her book “What the Body Cost” but she knew Wait-With only from the iconic photograph and the text; she never saw it as a live performance or even a video. Yet her critical re-creation of it helped me see the way Wait-With fits into my life’s work differently than I had before.  Blocker’s analysis gave me new ways of understanding how and why I could re-do Wait-With.

In 2007 I re-performed Wait-With in a completely re-done—undone—version for Los Angeles. It feels risky to be re-doing a work that has become iconic. While the original Wait-With was not autobiographical, I did not want a repetition of the desperation the work exuded—I am no longer waiting to be waited for. I wanted to think about waiting as “active”, as productive; to think about the power of passivity and quite other ways of performing the act of waiting. I did not want a list of complaints. I did not want to make a “timeless,” “universal” work. I wanted to do something modest, yet poignant, that reflects what preoccupies me now, and is open-ended, questioning. A very important part of the performance was to involve the audience as participants in thinking-with-me and creating a space of active waiting and exchange.

In L.A. the performance was done in the Reading Room, an intimate space lined with shelves of books about feminist art, and furnished with couches and chairs. The audience/participants were invited to enter the space and told to sit and wait quietly with me. After performing the text, I quietly told the audience that they were welcome to leave or to sit and wait with me, or that they could speak, respond to or ask questions about the text. Remarkable discussions followed each performance. Each audience was constituted differently; many of my former and current students came from all over the country, as did faculty colleagues, artists, strangers who were visiting WACK!. There was an atmosphere of respect, of thoughtful questioning, of loving discourse. We laughed a lot.