continue to be — an expert. Indeed I am yawning as I write this down, and perhaps this has amicably led you to one, too, as you read. Rarely is something so easily communicable. The piece is a one-liner. But three intervals and sixty seconds in, things were not going well. I stood there, mouth gaping wide, in heartfelt concentration, exerting something like physical strain (whether or not that was palpable to a spectator), but not a single yawn. I had overlooked a crucial detail: I had not practiced standing up. And I had not attempted yawning while nervous. I guess it is a difficult thing to rehearse. Attempts up to this point took place seated at a desk, with relaxed limbs, a brain at ease, in calm contemplation of sleep and with an audience consisting solely of myself. But in the presence of a crowd I was not tired in the least — there is nothing particularly tiresome about anxieties. This was no good. It was crucial, however, not to fake the yawns — this was not even an option, as this would have turned the whole exercise into melodrama. Out of necessity I tried to readjust. It became clear that I couldn’t do it on my own, nor should I have to. What, then becomes the spectator’s active role in such a dire situation? This is the thing. In this situation, the audience is comfortably seated in the dark, fortified by numbers, while the actor has a spotlight in his face, standing up. The audience is present and seated and relaxed, the actor standing and nervous, the audience is now nervous and also bored, exhausted perhaps, exasperated perhaps, and the actor cannot act. Who is even in the better position to act? Who leads whom? Perhaps when an actor or a spectator is performing truly well, there is a remote opportunity for an inversion of their supposedly preordained roles. Those who
believe they are observing are in fact acting, and those acting are the ones observing, waiting for the event to mercifully play itself out. Scanning the near-capacity crowd of the auditorium, I began to look directly at individuals, speechless, singling out those I knew personally, with my mouth wide open and ‘signifying yawn’, hoping that a combination of my visual cues and their empathy would bring them to yawn, so they in turn could bring me to yawn.
Scientifically, I am told this process is called ‘positive feedback’.
Architectural acts are in many ways inherently public presentations, but public presentations in their myriad forms can be comprised of speculative architectural acts. They are composed of found and built configurations with unique shapes and durations, and are rehearsals of spatial practice, ranging from the one-off to the quotidian. They bundle communities together, forming a temporary bond, and they literally play dialogues out. A seemingly incommunicative figure is no less an attempt at dialogue. With Exhausted Figure , speech and imagery yield to alternate forms of a real, mutual compulsion to communicate. The provisional silence also acted as an intermission, so perhaps someone took a brief nap. In the meantime, I received a variety of responses from audience members, which included: smiles,
confused smiles, passive incredulity, stone-faced disinterest, open-faced inquisitiveness, and an eye-roll.
So it came and it went. Far from any act of protest, here there was little provocation; rather, a gentle nudge that is soon forgotten. Such interventions are diversions at best (and by ‘at best’ I might also mean ‘in the best possible way’) as any delusion of its grandeur would send it hurtling off towards larger, more ravenous audiences and publics. Content at its scale, necessarily temporary, it harbours no such ambition.
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In six minutes and forty seconds, I was able to muster two successful yawns. c
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