Cradle: Three Stations, Six Platforms
It’s a few minutes before noon on the first humid spring day. At the Madison el station a handful of weary-looking souls are spread out across the northbound and southbound platforms, immobile, practically inert, making every effort to ignore one another. Trains that are mostly empty dawdle by. Four CTA workers in blue uniforms and orange reflective vests squeegee the panels of the warming booth.
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This is the beginning of Cradle: Three Stations, Six Platforms, the latest lyrical nonhappening from Men of the World. Cradle is something of an aberration for artists Mathew Wilson and Mark Alice Durant, who created the work. When they formed Men of the World in 1991, they performed their odd public rituals exclusively as a duo: giving each other water on a sidewalk in San Francisco, shaking hands for 30 minutes at a time in front of “sites of power” in Chicago, walking from LA’s skid row to the O.J. Simpson trial and tagging everything in their path with Men of the World postcards, crawling on their hands and knees around the Houston city hall with flowers trailing from their pants (a piece Wilson half jokingly calls “The Men of the World Grand Prix”). Cradle is only their second group effort (though Wilson has masterminded other group pieces), their first being the 1996 We Want to Believe–White Handkerchiefs of Good-bye, in which 100 or so people lined up at the end of Navy Pier, gazed out at Lake Michigan, and waved white handkerchiefs. They weren’t waving at anything, of course; Men of the World rarely do anything that might be mistaken as having a purpose.
By 12:15 the flower holders are a formidable presence, outnumbering the regular passengers four to one. (They’ve also gathered at the Randolph station to the north and the Adams station to the south–about 30 of them at each of the three stations.) A lone CTA maintenance man sweeping up cigarette butts and gum wrappers strolls among these strange intruders, sneaking sidelong glances at them. The few faces drifting by on the trains look puzzled, and some even seem a bit threatened.
“You’re waiting for the train?”
On the Randolph platform two CTA officials huddle together, deep in a serious conversation. Are these people going to dump their flowers on CTA property when they’re finished? “I mean, if they had a bucket or something to put them all in, it would be a totally different story,” one says. They think it’s time to marshal the janitors. Still, one of them takes a moment to look at the flower holders lining the platform. “I think it’s a treat,” she concludes.
