The focus on Slow Practices extends from questions, issues, and conversations emerging within the Summer Lodge symposium, Doing Deceleration (2017) co-curated with Henk Slager in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary.1 Here, doing deceleration is less a call to ‘slow down’, retreating from the process of production as such, than to conceive new relations between acceleration and deceleration, activity and rest. We asked: How might we disrupt the impinging pressures of acceleration and proliferation that arguably underpin our contemporary culture of immediacy and urgency, with its privileging of multitasking, perpetual readiness, and ‘just-in-time’ production? How might the art school, the artists’ studio, or even the space-time of the artistic residency provide alternative models of practice or even resistance? What might deceleration affirm or enable?
Yet deceleration is neither a solution nor an end in and of itself. However, the practice of slowing down might open intervals for the creative capacity of lingering, tarrying, waiting, drifting, trepidation, anticipation, doubt, and hesitation, alongside the generative experience of boredom, not knowing, and doing nothing.
In Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution (2016), Michelle Boulous Walker critiques the speed and utilitarianism of the contemporary academy, arguing how slow modes of engagement enable transformation rather than simply acquisition; deceleration is deemed necessary for exploring complexity and intensity.2 She questions the modern institutional context, where the “pressing demands of time, efficiency and productivity make it more and more difficult to adopt a contemplative or intense attitude toward our work”, where our work and world are reduced to “nothing other than resource”.3 Boulous Walker asks: How can we engage with the world and our work in meaningful, non-utilitarian ways? Her call for slowness is not simply the call to do things slowly, but rather the “preparedness to return time and time again”. Unhurried practices. Slow practices. For Boulous Walker, slowness “is first and foremost, the patience involved in ‘sitting with’ the world and of being open to it”.4 Significantly, her slowness does not necessarily mean ‘going slow’ (referring to the velocity of action) but rather refers to a quality of attention and of engagement, a certain disposition, the capacity to inhabit and engage with self and world in a certain way. The slowness she describes involves the sustained act of returning, reassessing, reconsidering, re-engaging, a relational and ethical attentiveness based on intimacy and proximity, increased receptivity to complexity, difficulty, even strangeness — the invitation to share. She asserts that slowness has an ethical dimension, for unhurriedness is a precondition for being more available, receptive, and open to the other, as well as to the experience of ambiguity, strangeness, and uncertainty.
As Hartmut Böhme argues in The Art of Deceleration, what we need is a “new wisdom that does not pit speed and slowness against each other”5, for speed itself is not to blame but rather the restlessness, carelessness, inconsiderateness, vagueness, negligence, imprudence, impatience, and hurry that result when haste “tears us away from the present toward a destination”.6
How is the relation of ‘slow practices’ to creative process, to performing process? How is the relation of a certain kind of slowness (lingering, tarrying, dwelling, residing) to creative processes of thinking and making. The matter of Slow Practices can be approached from different perspectives or angles: Through critique: identification and lamentation of the accelerated conditions of contemporary life; Through affirmation: identification, recuperation, nurturing, valuing, advocating of various practices, that offer a different or alternative mode of engagement and inhabitation.
1. This framing text for Slow Practices draws on Emma Cocker's introduction to the Doing Deceleration symposium [Speakers included Henk Slager, Mick Wilson, Adrian Heathfield, Finn Janning and Danica Maier. Chaired by Emma Cocker], a modified version of which is published here, alongside fragments from Cocker's keynote presentation at the Society of Artistic Research conference (2021) which can be encountered here.
2. Michelle Boulous Walker, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).
3. Boulous Walker, 2016, p. xiv.
4. Boulous Walker, 2016, pp. 8 – 9
5. Hartmut Böhme, The Art of Deceleration: Motion and Rest in Art, (Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2011), p. 1.
6. Böhme, 2011, p. 3.
Bibliography/links
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
Hartmut Böhme in The Art of Deceleration, The Art of Deceleration: Motion and Rest in Art, (Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2011).
Michelle Boulous Walker, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).
Byung-Chul Han, Burnout Society, (Stanford University Press, 2015).
Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering, (Polity Press, 2017).
Gilles Deleuze, "The Exhausted", in SubStance, Vol. 24, No. 3, Issue 78 (1995), pp. 3-28, 1995.
Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness, Towards and Aesthetic of the Contemporary, (Columbia University Press, 2014).
Marzena Kubisz, Resistance in the Deceleration Lane; Velocentrism, Slow Culture and Everyday Practice, (Peter Lang, 2014)
Tom Mcdonough and Iwona Blazwick, Boredom (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art, 2017).
Marian Milner, An Experiment in Leisure, (Routledge, 2011), first published 1937.
Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, (Faber and Faber, 1993).
Harmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
Lars Svendsen, Philosophy of Boredom, (Reaktion, 2005).
Lars Svendsen, Work, (Acumen, 2008).
Harold Schweizer, On Waiting, (Routledge, 2008).
Carolyn Strauss, Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, (Valiz, 2016).
Carolyn F Strauss, Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection, (Valiz, 2021).
Shari Tishman, Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation, (Routledge, 2017).
Joseph Vogl, On Tarrying, (Seagull, 2011).
Reading Group
Slow Practices (21.04.2022)
During this reading group we engaged with two texts as a way of opening up a conversation around the creative and critical potential of ‘process’ within practice, and the roles that slow observation and a contemplative attitude might have within process-focused exploration.
Readings
The first text was a chapter from The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering by philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han. In this book, Han proposes an alternative or even antidote to his diagnosed burnout society of achievement, where he argues that to give back life its time and duration, we should reclaim our capacity to dwell and linger, for reflection and contemplation. Chapter 12: Vita Contempativa focuses on the necessity of rest/leisure for contemplative lingering, exploring how a shift towards the privileging or even compulsion of work (as non-rest) and devaluing of the vita contemplativa risks reducing human life to that of animal laborans, a restless laboring animal incapable of thought. So how might we reengage contemplative lingering within our practice, our teaching, our lives?
The second text was the final chapter of Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation, by Shari Tishman. She explores how slow looking nurtures a patient, immersive attention and opportunities for sense-making that might not be possible through more accelerated modes of information-delivery and pedagogical encounter. Whilst focusing on how to develop different tactics or structures for slow looking particularly within education contexts, she reflects on how slow looking might also enable us to see more deeply, helping us to engage with complexities of life that cannot be grasped at a quick glance.
Reading Group Attendees
Lesley Beale
Emma Cocker
Laura Cooper
David Eckersley
Tom Fisher
Danica Maier
Darren O'Brien
Sarah Tutt
Fu Xing
Gathering of questions arising through discussion
How is our experience of time and time passing — does it feel accelerated or unhurried? What factors contribute to this sense of temporal acceleration or unhurriedness?
Are these factors personally (individually) or culturally (collectively) experienced?
How can the individual focus of the vita contemplativa be explored through the lens of collectivity and collaboration? How might relational and collaborative practices open up other ways of conceiving of and experiencing contemplative lingering?
What strategies and practices can we conceive for activating slowness, and the experience of contemplative lingering? Is there a list of practices that we can gather from our collective experiences?
The examples of slow looking and contemplative lingering (in the two reading group texts) come from different perspectives (e.g. from the scientific practice of close looking as well as visual looking practices [originating in museum practices of art appreciation] and from philosophy). What practices emerge from an artistic perspective?
Consider the art school experience (examples of the life class and observational drawing) — how might such practices become reactivated in the present rather than the loss lamented in nostalgic terms?
How does lingering “presuppose the gathering the senses” (Han, 2017)? How are slow practices necessarily embodied, perhaps even aesthetic practices?
Is slowness a privilege?
Who has opportunity for slowness and slow practices, and who is excluded?
How have various modalities of slowness (e.g. the ethics of craft and care associated with working class traditions of making) become commodified, and to what effect?
Or else, does the ethical dimension of slowness and slow practices (as a prerequisite for becoming more open to otherness, to complexity, to uncertainty, to strangeness) require that slowness is less a privilege and more of a responsibility? What is really act stake in the invitation to “take time” in our encounters?
How is the disjuncture between aspiration and reality experienced — the desire for slower forms of practice and living, colliding with increased sense of busyness and overcommitment?
What do we perpetuate by our own busyness — in doing so, what values and ethos do we keep in play?
How can we refuse the imperative to ‘be busy’, the insidious competition of overwork and exhaustion?
How might we navigate some of the false dichotomies and binaries invoked by the discourse of slowness and contemplative lingering — which can appear to pitch action and reflection in opposition.
How might we unsettle or trouble some of the unchallenged assumptions of such discourse — the hierarchies of value which privileges the activity of the mind above that the body, philosophizing over other forms of contemplative thought?
What other modes of contemplative thought can we discern beyond the model of philosophical reflection/thinking?
What kinds of assumptions and unspoken biases remain in relation to this notion/image of thought, and to thinking?
How is thinking within an artistic context?
How might contemplative lingering manifest in and through artistic practice and research — with different media and materials, through different media and materials?
What different practices can we discern for activating a quality of contemplative lingering with and through materials and media?
How can we shift from a focus on the extensivity of time (extended duration) towards intensity of time (focused moments) — enabling the possibility of dwelling and lingering to become uncoupled from the prerequisite of extended available time and space?
Can slow practices be activated in pockets of time without them becoming rushed and hurried?
Where can we carve out spaces within the complexity of contemporary life?
How might the values and ethos of art school pedagogy resonate with the wider discourse of slow practices — and how can this resonance be more fully brought to the fore?
How can we make small changes in our practices (including teaching practices) that resist the ‘pressure to perform’? How can we inhabit and encourage others to inhabit the sometimes discomfort of slowness and doing nothing?
How might art create conditions for contemplative lingering (for others)?
Does art have a role in creating contexts and provocation for others to slow down, to linger, to dwell?
How can we enable our institutions to become spaces for lingering and dwelling, for the cultivation of slow practices?
How might our institutions (academy/gallery etc) nurture this potential for lingering, for slowing down further?
What comprises the political — how might slowness and slow practices have a political dimension and potentiality?
How do we navigate between the imperatives of purpose (doing things for a specific end goal) and the openness of slow practices that perhaps might be autotelic or without a goal identified in advance?
How do slow practices sharpen one’s attention and focus?
What is lost in the rush of hurry, and what practices can be installed to intervene?
How do we recognise our own complicity in the accelerated experience of our contemporary lives?
What systems and values do we reproduce in and through our daily micro-gestures, intentional or otherwise?
Where do we have agency to affect changes?
What can we let go of?
How might we shift from a mode of understanding based on grasping and capture (an eagerness to attain, to know, to control) towards a more receptive mode that allows for unfolding and gradual revelation?
How is the relationship between direct strategies (of slow looking — such as inventory, categorisation, use of viewing devices) and indirect ways of operating, that hold the space of exploration open through meandering, detours, tangents, circling?
How can hesitation or hesitancy be recuperated as a positive quality?
Can we differentiate between the hesitancy that opens up (as a generative pause or breathing space) and that which stops the flow of a creative process in its tracks?
What conditions do we need to nurture or find for these practices?
What kinds of research process, outcome and dissemination emerge through an emphasis on slow?
What are the unspoken values at play in this debate — what is privileged, what is marginalised?
How might we structure our time, taking care of the intervals and transitions, the beginnings and endings of our creative activity?
How might structure (perhaps even conceived as ‘enabling constraints) counterintuitively open up the possibilities of practice? How might structure paradoxically bring release?
How can we conceive of “ends” in other ways than “goals” — more as a temporal marking indicating the transition from one activity to another, rather than as telos as such?
Can the activation of ritual beginnings and endings operate outside of a system of linear logic and time?
Consider the principle of ‘la perruque’ (See also Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life) — the work one does for oneself under the guise of doing work for one’s employer — as a way of taking time back?