I Can’t Wait
Luisa Duarte
Time asked time how much time time has. It is by listening to this inquiry that Lenora de Barros’ exhibition I Can’t Wait begins. Here we have a clue pointing to the experience that permeates the entire show, an experience that speculates about time in dialogue with language and the body. Whilst contemporariness offers us a colonized temporality, an automated language and an anesthetized body, the works brought to us here are about subverting those imperatives, reminding us of our chance to offer a renewed fate to this triad, which, as it is, gives shape to the fabric of our lives.
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Through the construction of regulating numeric symbols, the awareness of time has been detached from something multiple to be turned into a pattern. As such, we have moved away from a mode of counting time associated, for instance, to seasons or tides. On behalf of productivity and a world order independent from the natural elements, mechanical clocks have become protagonists. It is precisely a fragment of these time controlling devices that is at the core of many different works presented herein.[i]
In the video What Time is It? (2023), a sort of rain made of clock-hands falls through a sieve and lands onto a glass surface, generating a myriad of tiny ticks. We are faced with an action aimed at decanting time. Devoid of function and free from the resigned obedience of clocks, if the hands could answer to the question that gives title to the work, they would say: time, but what time? We have left this form of counting time behind. Whilst the swarm of clock-hands translates the shattering of chronological counting, Lenora knows that we cannot change our relationship with time without a shift in the connection between body and space, hence the video being projected on the gallery’s ceiling. Almost always rushing, and subjected to a repertoire of automated movements, our gaze is simultaneously anxious and disperse. Therefore, any call for a change of rhythm must necessarily engage the body: to stop, to sit, perhaps to lie down and move into the torrent of clock-hands to the background of the question – What time is it? – which emerges, as a surprise, in the voice of Hélio Oiticica.[ii]
The gesture that symbolizes care, present in the act of sieving time, also appears in Previsão [Prediction] (2023), a photograph in which two open hands hold, zealously, a series of clock-hands. Whilst the clocks evoke a way of predicting time based on a precise calculation, here we are pointed to the possibility of “reading” the lines on the palm of a hand in order to predict the future. Note how the clock-hands form a shape that trails the lines on the skin. Those who have followed the artist’s trajectory throughout the last four decades understand the importance of the body as a depository of a certain graphism, of a certain primeval text that is there to be read as a sort of epidermic language, which, therefore, generates a tactile knowledge of the world. It is also worth noticing, how, through this concise act, Lenora tells us about having time on our hands. If time always seem to take more away from us than us from time, that is, if time seems to be the subject, and us, the object, in this case, the opposite is true. Whilst in What time is it? time is turned into a torrent, in the photo series called Nebulosas [Nebulae](2009-2023), time becomes ether, forming clouds of clock-hands camouflaged into cosmic powder gravitating in silent darkness.
It is only in Camadinhas [Little Layers] that the clock-hands as objects, and not as images, are found in the exhibition. Whilst our daily existence is all about hurrying and inattentiveness, everything here evokes the contrary. We must get very close, carefully, in order to see the extremely thin glass sheets holding several tiny clock-hands, around which we read, also in small letters, the word “now”. Lenora reminds us that to inhabit the instant, the now, we must paradoxically know how to slow down time and touch it with the zeal that only fingertips can achieve.
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As early as the first half of last century, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) showed us the importance of shattering clocks, interrupting the course of linear history and, therefore, redeeming the past in light of the urgency of the present.[iii] The game of moving between different times can be seen in the works Vida e morte [Life and Death] (2023), Quanto tempo o tempo tem [How Much Time Time Has] (2009-2023) and Ventre [Womb](2023). In the first one, we see a pair of rear-view mirrors very close to each other. One of them features the word “life”, and the other “death” – one reflecting the other and projecting their shadows onto the wall. If we agree that it is death that gives value to the time of life, we can think that, looking at Lenora’ rear view mirrors, we are launched not into the past, neither into the future, but into the elusive and intense dimension of the multiples nows that constitute our passage.
The theme of a present in relation to finitude continues in the sound installation Quanto tempo o tempo tem (2023). Here, we listen to a dialogue between two voices, one, a child’s voice, and the other, a grown woman’s voice. The conversation is played between Lenora (whose voice was intentionally distorted to become child-like) and her mother, Electra, who was 90 at the time, a few years before her death. For three minutes we listen to an exchange of time with itself – time asked time how much time time has / time replied to time that it had no time to talk about its time and it was also not interested in knowing how much time time has…
We know how time has a strong abstract dimension, hence the famous lines by Saint Augustine: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know”. For now, we have no sign of the passage of time that is more concrete than the death of those who gave us life and the aging of our bodies. Therefore, mother and daughter stage the clever dialogue between time and itself. Note how here a fundamental element in the artist’s practice emerges: the voice. It is within the voice, the conjunction point between sense and flesh, that we have the clearest sign of a person’s here and now, giving birth to a not-so-abstract sense, a sense that is merged into the skin of language. It is through the use of the deviating power of humor, another marked feature in Lenora’s practice, that were are invited to visit the dense conversation between times – at the frontier between life and death –, and we can’t help but giving a side smile.
The photo-polyptych Ventre (2023) completes the triad that deals with the movement between past, present and future, in which the artist handles clay (a certain erotization of the experience is another constant in Lenora’ work) over the body fragment where the beginning of the counting of our time on Earth is gestated.[iv]
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Expanding on the series that the artist began in 1990 using ping-pong as a poetic receptacle, Ping-Poems [from the series “Não vejo a hora”] (2023) unravels propositions for imaginary ping-pong games aimed at subverting time. At the center of the work, there is a ping-pong table whose original features were altered: half of the table top was mirrored and lifted, so we are called to play against our own reflection in the mirror. Next to the table, boxes hold sets of equally modified (cut, emptied, etc.) rackets, nets, and balls. Each box evokes a type of chronological break: to delay time / to divide time / to surpass time / to stop time.
Far from being a harmless activity, every game brings with it a transgression. The person who plays sets up a playful order that escapes the productive logic of capital. It is not by chance that the etymology of the word “diversion” (as in recreation) is linked to the notion of deviation. We are in the territory of the homo ludens, as opposed to the homo faber; of idle hours, as opposed to working days.[v] Ping-Poems is part of the universe of oppositions that inhabit our managed lives and timed leisure.
We know how the advent of metropolises corresponds to a sense of temporal acceleration, in the same way that the urban experience is linked to an increasing dullness of senses. In order to be able to coexist with the flood of stimuli typical of large cities, our synesthetic system inverts its role and becomes, instead, anesthetic.[vi] It is precisely in the counter flow of this dynamic, activating the public space as a locus for an encounter with the unexpected and making us slow down our pace, that the work that gives title to the exhibition, Não vejo a hora (2023), emerges. Installed in the gallery façade in São Paulo, on the corner of Avenida Paulista with Avenida Angélica, a large moving LED with red letters displays words related to time: slow down, anticipate, perennial, delay, predictable, temporal, bring forward, distant, duration, posterior, anterior, temporalize, advance, wait, outdated, lengthy, setback, provisional, meantime. By appropriating a colloquial expression widely used in Brazil as a sort of ready-made, the artist merges language, temporality and the faculty of vision within a single brief formulation: “Não vejo a hora”, which literally means “I don’t see time” but in its most common use translates as “I can’t wait”. The expression can be interpreted as the expectation of the yet-to-come, a refusal to see time or, even, the deliberate decision to turn our back to the passage of hours.
The presentation of this poetic event right at the nerve center of Avenida Paulista – a place where the times of capital, society and politics coexist – summarizes much of what Lenora de Barros is showing us in her exhibition: a verb-vocal-visual act whose aim is to make time dance, instead of march.
[i] In light of our current living, we can think of smartphones as playing the role of clock today. As we know, not only cell phones are colonizers of time but also of subjectivities. On clocks, Julio Cortázar wrote on his Cronopios and Famas: “When they present you with a watch they are gifting you with a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. (…) They gift you with the job of having to wind it every day, an obligation to wind it, so that it goes on being a watch; they gift you with the obsession of looking into jewelry-shop windows to check the exact time, check the radio announcer, check the telephone service. They give you the gift of fear, someone will steal it from you, it'll fall on the street and get broken. They give you the gift of your trademark and the assurance that it's a trademark better than the others, they gift you with the impulse to compare your watch with other watches. They aren't giving you a watch, you are the gift, they're giving you yourself for the watch's birthday”. In turn, on the theme of the internet and the associated smartphones, Paul Preciado warns us in his An Apartment on Uranus: “The apps that can be downloaded from Facebook, Google Play or Apple Store are the new operators of subjectivity. We should be aware of the fact that when we download an app, we don’t install it simply on our mobile phones, but directly onto our cognitive apparatus.”
[ii] The fragment in which we hear Oiticica asking “What time is it?” was taken from a recording made between Oiticica and the poet Haroldo de Campos, on 23rd Street, in Manhattan, in front of the Chelsea Hotel, in the 1970s.
[iii] See Walter Benjamin’s thesis 15 on the concept of history: “Thus the calendars do no measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows: ‘Qui le croirait! on dit qu’irrités contre l’heure De nouveaux Josués, au pied de chaque tour, Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour’”. BENJAMIN, Walter. Sobre o conceito da História. In: BENJAMIN, Walter. Magia e técnica, arte e política. Obras Escolhidas, vol. I. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987a, p. 230.
[iv] This work unfolds from a photograph of the video A cara. A língua. O ventre. [The Face. The Tongue. The Womb] (2022). About this work, see: Numa outra corpo by Pollyana Quintella, exhibition catalogue “My Tongue”, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2022.
[v] “Homo Ludens: o jogo como elemento da cultura”, by Johan Huizinga, Editora Perspectiva, 2007
[vi] See BUCK-MORSS, Susan, Estética e anestética: uma reconsideração de A obra de arte de Walter Benjamin. In: Benjamin e a obra de arte – técnica, imagem, percepção. Contraponto, Rio de Janeiro, 2015. Article originally published on October, v.62, Fall 1992, pages 3-41.
