We don’t know where this waiting room is, but the impression it conveys is one of anxiety, boredom, and anonymity. People are distributed among numbered cubicles — ciphers who are thrown together and at the mercy of someone or something for which they are consigned to wait. They wait in separation from each other, unspeaking. The lighting is harsh, the room untidy and uncomfortable. This could be a doctor’s office or a hospital waiting room, or any uncomfortable place where people are made to feel anonymous and at the beck and call of an unfeeling bureaucracy.
Tooker depicted waiting for a more specifically governmental bureaucracy in his painting, “The Government Bureau.” In that painting, the waiting people are reproduced several times to emphasize their anonymity, and the multiple bureaucrats peer out from frosted windows with only their eyes and noses visible — bringing to mind the concept of the “medical gaze” promulgated by the French philosopher, Michel Foucault.
In another Tooker painting, “Ward,” he renders patients’ anonymity and a sense of abandonment in the hospital setting–with government bureaucracy invoked by the American flags hanging on the wall.
Image Credit
The Waiting Room, George Tooker, 1959. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Image used for educational and critical commentary purposes.
George Tooker documentary videos from Columbus Museum
