Painted welded steel, 108 x 60 x 50, 2002.
The title is an announcer’s line. It’s spoken just before an unveiling, when the audience has been held in suspense and the curtain is about to go up, and the sculpture is that suspense built as an object. At nine feet it’s taller than any visitor. A dark tower of vertical ribs stands at the left, capped by a flat plate with a small arched handle. A rectangular frame opens from its side, and the sky and the buildings behind show through it. A large sphere is carried above the frame on the end of an arm. A round tube opens at mid-height, and a smooth plate sweeps down from it to a low stepped base. The parts are arranged like a stage set for an entrance, and the frame, the sphere and the tube each look toward a place where someone or something is expected.
The nearest parallel is De Chirico’s empty squares, which have the same tall dark forms in a still, bare setting, with objects whose purpose is withheld. The open frame carries that quality here. The real sky and the real buildings go on behind it unchanged, so the held moment sits inside an ordinary afternoon.
On the far side a small dome sits on a shelf above a block with a half circle incised in its face. The small dome and the large sphere aloft read as a low and a high point of one day, a globe at the horizon and a globe overhead. Waiting is measured in that span. The title speaks to the viewer directly, and the sculpture supplies the setting for what the viewer has been waiting for and withholds the event itself.
