bees store their labor and how we do. Ann had been much impressed by a bricklayer in her childhood, and then gone into fine art through textiles. She was interested in how a small gesture repeated enough made something large, and so three quarters of a million gestures laid down that many bits of currency in a shining skin of money.
Somewhere during that process, I got down on my knees and started laying out pennies, and a while later Ann ended up doing the same next to me and we began to talk. We laid the coins out without an attempt to make a pattern, but the natural variation in the long lines made them take on a texture like waves or snakeskin scales, and they shimmered in the light, and the smell of honey rose up from the floor. I don’t know what had changed, but at the beginning of the 1980s I had hardly been able to connect to anyone, and I hadn’t found my people or the conversations I dreamed of. At the end of the decade, I could and I did.
The piece Ann made with many hands’ help was called privation and excesses, and at the far corner of the great carpet of cash was a performer, a person in a white shirt sitting with a wide-brimmed felt hat full of honey in her lap. The performance consisted of wringing one’s hands in the honey and staring off into the distance—of maintaining a calm disengagement from the viewers. To include a performer meant that the grammatical tense of the piece was in the present of making and doing, rather than the past tense of made and done. Later on in other pieces of hers, the performers would be undoing something, unraveling, or erasing, so that the work was being unmade as well as made for the duration of the exhibition.
Later on, Ann took some of the pennies converted back into practical currency and gave it to me to write an essay about the piece. But before that she asked me to be one of the performers. Thinking back it seems enchanted that she invited me into both an ongoing conversation and into silence. To do the latter job, you sat in a straight chair for three hours, looking ahead, blessedly instructed to ignore all the visitors’ questions about what the art meant. There was a pen with three sheep in it behind the sitter, and the sounds and smell of the sheep, as well as the smell of the honey and the pennies, were part of what you absorbed when you took on the task.
As a child you’re told not to get sticky, not to play with your food, not to make a mess, and sinking your hands up to your wrists in honey was a wonderful transgression against all that, as well as a sensual pleasure. If you were the first sitter of the day, the honey was cold and a little stiff at the outset, but it warmed up from the heat of your hands and began to flow. You can hold a double handful of honey, though it will drip, but your job in that artwork was not to hang on to it but to let it move, to lift it out of the hat and let it trickle back, to keep it moving while the rest of you stayed still and silent and looked ahead with a thousand-mile stare.
Restless, nervous, impatient by nature, I had thought I would have a hard time sitting still for three hours, but I found that the instructions protected me from my own sense that I should be available to supply information (and people did come up and demand explanations of the show) and that I should at every waking moment be busy and productive. I found instead that I resented the person who replaced me when I was the first performer of the day or the gallery staff person who told me to wrap it up when I was the last.
One day many years later those hours sitting still with my hands in warm honey came back to me as a recollection of the calmest moment of my youth, a few hours of pure existence as sweet as the honey stuck under my nails, a moment of being rare among all the busyness of doing and becoming.
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