‘Waiting Room’ Tells Viewers: Time Is Running Out

It was while artist Richard Kamler was waiting in San Quentin for guards to release him after he visited a friend on death row that he was struck by the inspiration for his next piece. Kamler was with his friend’s mother, who turned to him and said, “Waiting like this reminds me of being in a hospital waiting room 37 years ago until they checked me in to give birth to Guy.”

Here was “the arc of life” from birth to death, “but not a natural death; murder at the hands of the state,” Kamler thought. “I knew then I had to make a waiting room. And so every time I went to the prison, I began to memorize everything in that waiting room. I measured and counted the tiles in my mind, the number and size of the concrete blocks, the warning signs on all the walls, what was in the vending machines, everything.”

Kamler has re-created San Quentin’s waiting room as a multimedia interactive art installation at the Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Texas. Huntsville is the home of the prison where Texas executes an average of two inmates a week.

“I had to take this to Texas, the state-sanctioned murder capital of the world,” says Kamler, a bitter opponent of the death penalty. (Two hundred and six prisoners have been killed in Texas since 1982, 119 of them since 1995, when George W. Bush became governor, with two more scheduled to be executed this week.)

The sound of time running out--a metronome ticking and a heart beating--infuses “The Waiting Room.” The 13 hanging banners in the installation are made of thin sheets of lead to symbolize toxicity, Kamler explains. He has also fashioned trays with prisoners’ last meals cast in lead. Kamler downloaded the menus from a list on a ghoulish Web site run by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. (Most of the condemned ordered burgers or T-bones and French fries. Alcohol and cigarettes are forbidden. Some ordered nothing. Few ordered dessert.) Each tray is etched with the executed prisoner’s name and his last words.

Viewers can take a “meal” and sit in one of 60 plastic chairs bolted to the floor. A stack of video monitors runs tapes Kamler recorded with murderers and with victims’ families.

“I hope people wait there,” Kamler says. “To me waiting is a pause, a kind of momentary clemency, a time to reconsider. When you witness an execution, you’re assembled, then wait, then the person is killed and you have to wait to be released from prison yourself.”

Although the metronome keeps up its regimented, infinite ticking in the background, every so often the heartbeat stops. “Some people grab their chests to see if their own hearts are still beating,” Kamler reports.

Kamler, 57, a native San Franciscan, has been making art about prisons and the death penalty since 1979, when a friend invited him to show his slides to prisoners at San Quentin. “It was the din that hit me, people in your face shouting, the TV blaring, metal on metal, concrete on concrete. Everything is hard and boom, boom, boom. I was just stunned and excited.”

Kamler signed up to work with prisoners as an artist-in-residence, first at San Quentin, then in San Francisco’s city jails.

As a young art apprentice in 1963, he had an epiphany while waiting to introduce himself to Austrian American sculptor Frederick Kiesler. Kamler overheard Kiesler say to a visitor, “Through art, we can change the laws of the world.” Kamler has been trying to change the laws of imprisonment through his art ever since.

In 1992, he set up gigantic speakers on a boat off San Quentin to broadcast a recording of lions roaring when Robert Alton Harris was executed. In 1993, he astonished San Francisco by installing in a field opposite the city jail 100 painted plywood buffalo he’d built with prisoners. (The jail grounds housed a herd of tubercular buffalo, moved there by the city from Golden Gate Park.)

“Oh Give Me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam,” as the piece was called, prompted San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey, one of Kamler’s fans, to comment, “Richard saw the unmistakable irony, the buffalo being kept at the jail for their own protection alongside hundreds of prisoners supposedly being held for our protection.”

Kamler, with his Fu Manchu mustache, shaved head and uniform of watch cap, denim shirt and jeans, looks like an ex-con himself. But his work is more than mere propaganda. In a 1997 piece on Kamler, Sculpture Magazine wrote, “Whether inside or outside the confines of the gallery/museum setting, [his art] explores the realm of protest as the content of fine art.” Alchemy is a persistent metaphor. His last piece, “The Table of Voices,” installed at the former prison on Alcatraz Island, featured a table bisected by Plexiglas, as in a prison waiting room.

Viewers could sit on one side of the table, pick up a phone and listen to a murderer talking about his crime or pick up the phone on the other side to hear a family member of a murder victim--a wrenching dose of reality. But Kamler’s table was also a beautiful art object: half lead--the basest of metal, the stuff of bullets--and half gold--the most precious. In places on the table, lacy patches of gold filigree broke through the lead and caught the light, as if change had begun.

In “The Waiting Room,” Kamler says, “the alchemy is personal, not visual.” He has been fascinated for years by the transformation of some murder victim’s families from supporters of the death penalty to abolitionists.

Kamler has surrounded “The Table of Voices” and “The Waiting Room” with a series of panel discussions to which he invites murderers who have served their time, families of murder victims, pro- and anti-death-penalty activists, police officers and policymakers.

At first, he hoped the dialogues “might help heal the families who’ve lost loved ones and everyone else dragged into murder’s vortex.” But after pro-death-penalty activists tried to break up the discussions at Alcatraz, Kamler isn’t so optimistic about healing.

He hopes now to just temper the revenge he believes drives those who support capital punishment.

“I just hope a few of the people who sit in ‘The Waiting Room’ might go through what it’s like to wait for someone to be executed and find a way to change themselves,” Kamler says.