Instructions For Serious Grown-Ups
Childhood is a way of paying attention.
Children inhabit the world differently. Their scale, expectations, fears, and habits of looking shape another experience of ordinary life. Objects may carry meanings that adults no longer recognize. A bed can contain a hiding place. A marble can become evidence that the world is full of spheres. Thunder can be confused with a trash bin dragged across concrete. A waiting room can divide into two separate worlds depending on the height from which it is seen.
The installations create small shifts in perspective through familiar materials, spaces, sounds, and actions. They require no special knowledge. Some ask visitors to take, give, listen, crouch, wait, or look again. Others offer no instruction at all.
The exhibition is only one form the work takes.
Upon leaving, each visitor receives a booklet titled Instructions for Serious Grown-Ups. The booklet is a parallel body of instructions intended to be carried into ordinary life. Some can be completed immediately. Others may take months or years. They unfold in kitchens, on sidewalks, in waiting rooms and bedrooms, during conversations and rainstorms, and through chance encounters long after the gallery visit has ended.
The booklet moves through wonder, play, attention, debt, misbehavior, celebration, disappearance, memory, and grief. It asks the reader to carry a marble, listen to a city, pay back the Tooth Fairy, write to a childhood television character, speak out of turn, watch a friend leave, revisit a vanished place, and tell a childhood photograph what survived.
The exhibition ends.
The work continues elsewhere.
Proposed Installations
Wonder
A vessel filled with marbles.
Visitors are invited to take one.
Instruction:
Take a marble.
Keep it in your pocket.
When you no longer need reminding that the world is full of spheres, give it to someone else.
Attention
A dark room.
Two speakers.
One plays recordings of distant thunder.
The other plays recordings of trash bins being dragged across concrete.
The sounds play without announcement.
No instruction is given.
Debts
A modest bedroom.
A neatly made bed.
A pillow.
A jar of five-dollar bills.
Instruction:
Take a five-dollar bill.
Leave it under your pillow tonight.
Pay back the Tooth Fairy.
Luck
A single penny rests on the gallery floor.
Visitors may pick it up.
Instruction:
Take the penny for luck.
Leave another somewhere else.
Procession
Two synchronized videos of the same line of ants play simultaneously on CRT televisions.
One screen is mounted at an adult’s eye level.
The other is mounted at approximately a child’s.
The ants never change.
Only the height from which they are seen.
Two Waiting Rooms
An ordinary doctor’s waiting room.
At adult height are clipboards, paperwork, diplomas, and a reception desk.
At child height are toys, coloring books, stickers, and a bead maze.
Visitors are invited to stand.
Then crouch.
Nothing in the room changes.
Animation
A drinking straw.
Its paper wrapper.
A drop of water.
Instruction:
Remove the wrapper.
Wet it.
Watch carefully.
It was moving before you knew what to call it.
Under
A bed.
Instruction:
Look under the bed.
Stay there for one minute.
Before you turn out the light,
make sure the closet door is closed.
Meaning
Two sets of materials are presented.
Choose one:
A sheet of white paper
An X-Acto knife
A black pen
or
A sheet of pink construction paper
A pair of safety scissors
A box of crayons
Glitter glue
Instruction:
Choose your tools.
Make meaning.
Sign your name.
Place your work on the wall, ranked from most meaningful to least meaningful.
You may move one other person’s work to make room for yours.
Photograph the wall before you leave.
The Booklet
Each visitor leaves with a copy of Instructions for Serious Grown-Ups.
The booklet contains the complete body of instructions, including works not present in the exhibition. It is organized into sections including Debts, Things That Go Away, Attention, Gifts, Trouble, Play, Celebrations, Wonder, Ghosts, and Small Miracles.
It is intended to be lived with rather than read once.
Some instructions are small and immediate:
Carry a marble in your pocket.
Listen to the city.
Find a favorite sound.
Drink apple juice from a champagne flute.
Celebrate something small.
Others require time, memory, or another person:
Watch a friend leave your house.
Walk them to the curb.
Wave until they are completely gone.
Find a photograph of yourself as a child.
Tell them what survived.
Tell them what didn’t.
Walk through the neighborhood where you grew up.
Look for something that no longer exists.
Stand where it used to be.
Wait.
As the instructions are carried out, the work passes quietly beyond the institution and enters ordinary life.
Growing up is often described as the accumulation of knowledge.
This work considers what may disappear alongside it: particular ways of noticing, imagining, fearing, playing, and assigning meaning to ordinary things.
The exhibition does not ask visitors to become children again.
It asks what remains available from that way of paying attention—and what might happen if it is practiced deliberately.
You were once trained by the world in a different way. Some of that training remains in your body. Some of it was taken from you. Some of it may still be useful. Some of it may still frighten you. Pay attention.
Debts
Leave five dollars under your pillow tonight.
Pay back the Tooth Fairy.
Leave a penny on the ground.
Replace the one you picked up for luck.
Leave a few quarters on the edge of a fountain.
For the next child you will never meet.
Leave money on the doorstep of your childhood neighbor.
Pay them back for the Halloween candy.
Write a letter to your favorite Sesame Street character.
Thank them for keeping you company.
Tell them what they taught you.
Tell them what they were right about.
Mail it if you can.
Return a library book early.
Things That Go Away
Watch a friend leave your house.
Walk them to the curb.
Wave until they are completely gone.
Spot a shooting star.
Watch it fade away.
Go to the park.
Lie in the grass.
Name the shapes you see in the sky.
Watch until they change.
Buy some bubbles.
Pop some.
Let others drift away.
Watch until none remain.
Attention
Listen to someone drag a trash bin across concrete.
Wonder if it’s thunder.
Sit by a window during a rainstorm.
Stop trying to see anything else.
Listen to the city.
Find a favorite sound.
Notice who says bless you.
Notice who doesn’t.
Notice which one you’ve become.
Gifts
Keep a handful of orange Starburst in your pocket.
Give them away unexpectedly.
Find a pretty weed.
Pick it.
Give it to the next stranger who feels like a friend.
Make a valentine.
Say something sweet
Blush.
Give it away.
Draw a picture with crayons.
Sign your name.
Hang it on the refrigerator.
Tell everyone how good it is.
Give it away to the first person who agrees.
Trouble
Listen to an argument from behind a closed door.
Know you shouldn't.
But do.
Learn to pick a side.
Learn to let that go.
Sing loudly while the real adults are talking.
Put yourself in a time-out.
Think about what you've done.
Speak out of turn.
Say the wrong thing.
Watch faces change.
Regret it.
Discover that regret is survivable.
Buy candy cigarettes.
Hold one in your mouth.
Find a temporary tattoo.
Put it somewhere you're not supposed to.
Tune out the teacher.
Forget to read the book.
Go to detention.
Watch the room.
Listen to it.
Imitate it.
Then do something only you would do.
Play
Ask someone to marry you.
Have a wedding on the playground.
Invite everyone.
Take it very seriously.
Play with toy trains.
One yellow.
One red.
One blue.
Get frustrated.
Throw one across the room.
Play the recorder very poorly.
Take a bow.
Find the biggest stick you can hold.
Hit it against things.
Make a sound.
Draw a treasure map.
Hide something.
Come back to it when you're older.
Make a paper boat.
Or a paper airplane.
Write a hope or a fear on it.
Watch it go.
Celebrations
Drink apple juice from a champagne flute.
Celebrate something small.
Celebrate something that nobody else would think to celebrate.
A finished book.
A healed bruise.
The first warm day.
The first rain.
Wonder
Carry a marble in your pocket.
Take it out occasionally.
Remember that the world contains spheres.
Take a domino out of a set.
Feel the smoothness of its edges.
Put it back.
Find a prism.
Wait for the rainbow.
Find a feather.
Keep it until you understand why.
Find a key.
Imagine what it opens.
Stand at the edge of the water.
Hesitate.
Wonder what’s below.
Find a sheer scarf and cover a lamp.
See what color the world becomes.
Buy glow-in-the-dark stars.
Stick them to your bedroom ceiling.
Create your own order.
Find your own night sky.
Listen to the world speaking.
What is it saying?
Start a game of telephone.
Pass it along.
Notice what it becomes.
Lift a child onto your shoulders.
Show them the world from your point of view.
Then crouch down to see theirs.
Ghosts
Call a phone number you memorized as a child.
If someone answers,
thank them for keeping it safe.
Fall asleep while watching TV.
Wake up to Adult Swim.
Look around.
Notice how the edges blur.
The static in the room.
Walk through the neighborhood where you grew up.
Look for something that no longer exists.
Stand where it used to be.
Wait.
Sit alone in your house after midnight.
Listen to it settling.
Remember that it moves when nobody is watching.
Look at your face in the mirror.
Try to remember the first time you saw it.
Find a photograph of yourself as a child.
Tell them what survived.
Tell them what didn't.
Sit upstairs in your room while your friends have a party.
Don't come down.
Listen to the sounds from the other room.
Sit in ambiguity.
Visit someone who has passed.
Sit down beside them.
Ask a question.
Notice what answers.
Say goodnight to the world.
Miss the daylight.
Wait for it to wake you again.
Small Miracles
Watch children leave a playground.
Notice that they never want to go.
Notice that they eventually do.
Before you go to sleep,
think of one thing you received without earning it.
Tomorrow,
leave something behind for someone else.
Something the child you were would have left behind as well.