La pause
Maybe the thing I miss most these days is time alone to do nothing and hear nothing. Maybe that’s the most luxurious thing, not to have a plan, not to have a purpose, to just be.
NYC’s cafés don’t have terrasses. I find it criminal! It means you can’t sit and drink a cup of coffee and watch the world go by. You must take it to go and drink as you walk… there is no pause. There are no public benches either. So no kissing on les bancs publics either. Where do you make out in this fast paced city?
La pause (with an elongated auuuu in American English as if to mimick or mock this elongated moment in time) reminds me of Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing up bébé. I listened to it on my AirPods while pushing the stroller in the street and remember laughing out loud with recognition. La pause is the moment when a parent is meant to stop themselves from rushing to their crying baby to rescue them. What if instead one did nothing and waited and see? Could the baby calm itself? Is that the magic trick with infants, to do less? Probably.
But what about threenagers who scream bloody murder when they can’t detach the buckle of their helmet or don’t want to be left alone at night?
Camille Henrot’s show at Hauser and Wirth right now is full of children’s sounds and fury, despite their obvious absence I could hear them laugh and shout and feel them zoom past me as I walked into the gallery. The floor designed by Charlap Hyman & Herrero is a soft playground floor. It reeks of the plastique smell of the indoor gym of my primary school. The show is wonderful, full of whimsy and wit. It asks about power and play. It confronts the social norms that weigh so heavily on parents, the dos and dont’s that the artist explores in her paintings.
In her large bronze sculptures, Henrot takes inspiration from kids abacuses, ubiquitous toys found in pediatrician waiting rooms. In their enlarged form they represent to me the weight of expectations that looms over parents, parents tethered to duties like the sculptures of dogs on leash at the entrance of the show.
A pair of cast bronze gloves thrown on the floor are also called ‘La pause’. I wondered if the artist had to take a break from the studio to go attend to her children’s needs.
In Henrot’s series of essays on motherhood called Milkyways, I was moved by her quoting from Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text ‘the writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body’, leading Henrot to ask ‘ is sculpture’s subversive purpose to serve as a substitute for the mother’s body when they are no longer within reach? Do sculptures also stand in as substitutes for language, for intimacy, for our need to feel cared for?’
Her sculptures definitely accomplish that in her current show A number of things and that is no small feat.
May we all find a moment to pause amid caring for children and working, a moment to pause and do nothing.
To see: Camille Henrot at Hauser and Wirth till 04/12
To read: Milkyways, by Camille Henrot