The University of Memphis Art Museum kicks off the “Everything Can Be Different,” exhibition tonight with a performance art piece where women wait... and wait... and wait.
The piece, “Rebecca Is Waiting for Anna, Anna Is Waiting for Cecelia, Cecelia Is Waiting for Marie …,” involves women volunteers waiting at a table in the museum. Each sits for 15 minutes before the next volunteer replacement shows up.
“The piece can also be seen as a psycho-social experiment,” said author and performance artist Elin Wikström. “I’m asking the women to be part of a chain of trust. They have to trust that their replacements will show up.”
Wikström said the women’s trust is usually well-founded.
“Out of 12 performers, only maybe two will not show up,” she said, and the women are free to do whatever they want in their 15 minutes.
“Some women make up stories about what they’re waiting for and some just tell about the exhibit,” Wikström said. “There are actually some people who come in and just sit down at the table, not knowing it’s a performance.”
The piece was first performed at a 1994 solo show in Sweden.
“Two weeks prior to the show, I went to any place where women gathered to try to get volunteers,” she said. “I went everywhere from the women’s clinic to hardcore feminist groups and told them about the idea.”
According to Wikström, this idea toys with the concept of waiting for a meeting with somebody.
“It’s like when you’re meeting somebody and you’re the first one there,” she said. “You’re waiting for the other person and you go through a lot of emotions. You’re worried about what happened to them, angry they’re late, and it’s also a loss of prestige because people are thinking, ‘Oh, she got stood up.’”
The performance is also to give people an alternate view of women.
“In commercials and film, women are always given an image of waiting,” she said. “Waiting to grow up, waiting to meet Mr. Right, waiting to have kids and waiting for those grown kids to come visit them. It’s always a passive idea of waiting. So for once, I wanted the women to be waiting for each other.”
This kind of contemporary art is part of a long tradition of performance which originated in the Sixties.
“Performance art started with women in the Sixties and Seventies,” Wikström said. “They reacted very strongly to the fact that the art world was dominated by men. So they stopped painting because it was seen as a male genius. Women had no role in art history so they started working with everyday situations.”
Today, performance art is growing in popularity.
“I’m a professor in Northern Sweden and I notice that now, students see no hierarchy between mediums,” Wikström said. “Now an idea can go through all mediums. Art is moving more from a noun or an adjective to a verb.”
The piece will be performed on alternating Tuesday and Friday afternoons from 1 to 4 p.m. starting Feb. 22 and running through April 13. At each showing, 12 volunteer performers will be needed.
“I visited the sororities around campus, and I promoted the piece to the fine arts department to get volunteers,” Wikström said. “But I’m interested in any woman around campus to take part, including faculty members to create more of an age variety.”
