Contractions
of Time: On Social Practice from a Temporal Perspective
Nato
Thompson
e-flux
journal #20 November 2010
Many can
relate to a sense of disembodied franticness that expands across the landscape of
our daily lives. We are busy people. We are plugged in to phones and computers,
and constantly on the move. An elusive horizon – the purpose of our quicksilver
existence – has been erased in favor of a go-to emotional state that is the
result of a privatization of time. We are frantic workers even when we work
against the very conditions that produce our franticness.
In his
incisive book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher diagnoses various psychological
ailments (Attention Deficit Disorder, dyslexia, bipolar disorder) that have
emerged from a social environment of deeply privatized and consumable moments:
If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism – a consequence
of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated
consumer culture.1
This
affective control not only perpetuates a form of consumption but, more
basically, a particular temporality. If products demand to be produced and
consumed in ever-expanding contexts, they may also be adapted to durations more
suitable to electronics than to what our bodies can endure. And without a
doubt, the accelerated pace of disembodied consumer desire ultimately alters
the basic structure of our bodies. “The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment
matrix is a twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus.”2
We are plugged in. We are in the matrix. We are atrophied hunger machines.
Fisher’s
lament that life is getting too fast and that people cannot concentrate is
hardly new. And in left-leaning art culture, pointing the finger at capitalism
is no more novel a diagnosis. Certainly, the dominant social order is responsible
for the present social order – the system perpetuates itself and we are its subjects.
And the self-help industry would be much more compelling if its balm for
depression and spazzed-out children included a radical redistribution of
wealth, but that goes without saying. Nonetheless, the picture Fisher paints offers
a clue to an evolving condition of behavior that must be accounted for in the
production of meaning in culture writ large. Any cultural formation that comes
into being now necessarily does so according to the terms of a general cultural
shift toward the twitchy, the disinterested, the agitated, the dyslexic, and the
bipolar.
When
Marina Abramovic sat for hours at a time in the central gallery of MoMA, bright
lights beaming down on her as she met visitor after visitor with her steady
gaze, what shook the audience was her commitment. The act of willfully placing
oneself on a rigorous schedule best suited to an endurance sport, sitting passively
and doing nothing but staring, struck the audience as touching upon the two
poles of the elegiac and nihilistic. The artful meaning of looking into the
artist’s eyes was eclipsed by the pure physicality of it all D how could she
possibly sit there every day?
Marina Abramovic
Having
emerged in the context of 1960s art, the durational performance finds a new
form of reception at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The return of the body and of prolonged time resists the dematerialized, agitated
nature of the current era. Abramovic’s performance brought the world of
spectacle into the two forms of experience many considered beyond its purview:
the body, and time. If spectacle is meant to be consumed rapidly, and from a
distance, then Abramovic’s performance rendered the spectral character of fame
human flesh, placing it front and center for the long term. Imagine Brad Pitt
just standing there day after day, not running away from paparazzi and their
flashing cameras; just a sustained presence. It runs counter to the collective
nature of spectatorship, and for that reason, Abramovic’s performance sparked
the imagination of a mass public. The title of both the work and the
exhibition, the phrase “The Artist is Present” captures a heightened sense of engagement
– as though, for the very first time, the artist is finally here. Elevated to
the stature of an icon by marketing materials promoting the exhibition, Abramovic’s
performance, in a reverse gesture, pulls the artist down into that space we
normally occupy without noticing.
In
witnessing Abramovic’s steady breathing calm, we sense our own fidgety
qualities. We sense our own nervous appetites. The arts have long played host
to patience and duration. One can usually identify contemporary video art, dance,
and performance by its agonizing embrace of all things slow, endless, and
tedious. Operating against the grain of contemporary temporality may not only
be a hallmark of the arts, but also the delineation of their discursive boundary.
How do we know it is art? Because it takes so long to appreciate, it couldn’t
be aimed at a typical consumer. Because it is so annoyingly long it must be
interesting.
Inevitably, the fast pace of consumerism is accompanied
by the tantalizing promise of slow time - Allen Ginsberg once complained of a heart attack
en route to his weekly meditation.
Just as
the arts were reinvented in the age of the camera, so too must they be in the
age of accelerated time. If the internet and the touch screen represent the
apparatuses of our age, then the material and the prolonged have become a niche
for the discursive and formal role of the arts. Much like a spa, the arts play
host to a malnourished subject eager to experience something nostalgically
other. Slow time and tangible bodies become so rare experientially that their
aesthetic value finds a home in the cul-de-sac of scarcity that is art.
Since the
advent of mechanical production, the arts have been the space in which the
hard-to-find seeks refuge. And while the art market has been much discussed, we
now find another form of scarcity in forms of experience. At times in tension,
at times in collusion with capitalist scarcity, the scarcity of experience
encourages forms of art that are not as easily distributed as – and thus more
distinguishable from – the mass produced goods of the broader market. Massive installations,
sculptures, performance, civic institutions (the museum), time-based relational
aesthetics all find value in their experiential distinction from larger
markets. Museums offer special opportunities to experience the body in space.
In this spasmodic era, we find the arts recalibrated as a temporal, spatial,
and bodily escape.
This kind
of shifted aesthetic disposition resists not only the pace of the information economy,
but, perhaps more importantly, our very ability to consume our experience. If
we are frantic, it is only because we need to be so in order to keep up.
Slowness does not only characterize a mode of consumption, but also a mode of
behavior. To that end, we now find numerous forms of contemporary art that gain
resonance by tweaking behavioral codes with regard to the body and temporality.
Some projects comprise bite-sized moments that are quickly consumed,
context-specific chunks of experience that enter the mind and dissipate quickly,
in harmony with the frantic and the contingent. They are brain candy and they
are meant to be delicious. While there is nothing new in describing numerous
forms of participatory art as mere products of an information economy that
caters to the needs of power, their temporal qualities certainly play a role as
pithy and poetic correspondences to capitalist consumption.
2010
could be described as the year that relational aesthetics made its way to the mainstream
in the US, where it had remained quietly operational for ten years. Abramovic’s
retrospective, which could in theory be collapsed into a relational sort of
zeitgeist, garnered the most attention, but there were many other associated
phenomena. Over at the Guggenheim, Tino Sehgal had a multi-generational armada leading
people by the hand in explorations of the idea of progress. At the New Museum,
Rivane Neuenschwander granted wishes on bracelets. At Creative Time, Paul
Ramirez JonasOs project titled Key to the
City allowed the general public in Times Square to briefly participate in a
ceremony that provided them with a key to the city of New York. This object, to
all appearances an ordinary house key, awarded to the public in a brief but intimate
moment at the heart of NYC spectacle, is not only symbolic, but also
functional, in that it opens a myriad of locks across the five boroughs. These
unmediated interpersonal projects take as their starting point a specific
experience, a poetic moment, that is registered, digested, appreciated, and
completed.
Just
upstairs from Abramovic’s time-based project at MoMA, we found a carnival of
discreet projects in which performance artists were hired to enact Abramovic’s
earlier works, bringing new life to these works. The most notable of these works
was Imponderabilia (1977), originally
performed by Abramovic and her partner Ulay, in which the couple stood naked in
a doorway and visitors were required to squeeze between them in order to gain
access to the other side. The 2010 reenactment had a different character altogether;
sliding between the two naked performers became an option and not a requirement,
as one could simply access the same room through an alternate hallway. This slight
transformation reveals something about our present condition, and perhaps also something
about the popularity of the exhibition itself. In place of coercion or daring,
the passage assumed the character of a carnival ride. People opted to
participate, and participate they did. Lines grew as the eager public waited
anxiously to brush their bodies against the bodies of the performers. The
performers’ nakedness became even more tantalizing as people waited in line for
this strangely sanctioned experience. Whereas Abramovic’s central-gallery
project was about duration, the retrospective upstairs was a discreet pleasure
zone, a mall of bodily experiences ready for consumption.
But what
else can a museum or public art organization do? Without question, certain temporal
limits are necessary for artistic projects to be brought to a general audience.
Were the discreet embodied moments of Abramovic’s retrospective limited simply
by the duration of a conventional museum visit? Is there really any value in a
critique that calls for a duration so extensive that no public institution can
actually host it?
Rather
than make normative claims regarding the display or function of these works, my
intention is to clarify the emerging cultural landscape across which these
aesthetic experiments function. The reenactment of these performance artworks
of the past allowed the work to fit neatly into the current aesthetic needs of
a public deprived of its own bodies, wherein any renewed interest in performance
has to be reframed and displayed in a manner that accounts for the
dematerialized and accelerated climate of today. And the aesthetic allure of
Abramovic’s physical presence captured the temporally agitated imagination of a
mass audience.
But this
kind of artistic production also provokes skepticism for its compatibility with
a predatory capitalist economy. It can be bottled and sold as tiny little
moments, all for the taking. Tino Sehgal’s This
is Propaganda (2002) hovered over the exhibition of the Dakis Joannou collection
curated by Jeff Koons at the New Museum, in the voice of a paid performer who sang,
“This is propaganda.” The voice expands melodiously throughout the space and
then states in a rather officious tone, “Tino Sehgal, This is Propaganda,
2002.” What is propaganda? Perhaps self-conscious, perhaps commenting on the
artworks on display, or perhaps commenting on the condition of communication in
general, this reflexivity certainly gains another layer when sung in the public
exhibition of a collection of a New Museum board member. “This is propaganda,”
as the song goes – a song paid for and included in a collection, that whistles
its way into the ears of an audience finding their way through a museum. This
is propaganda.
Tino
Sehgal’s work has enjoyed a tremendous critical reception from the writer Claire
Bishop, who has written:
It is
worth paying closer attention to Sehgal’s aspiration to a “simultaneity of production
and deproduction instead of economics of growth.” It is clear that what is
being deproduced in his practice is the materiality of the art object; but what
is being produced? Gesture – and here it may be worth recalling Giorgio Agamben’s
claim in Means Without End (2000)
that gesture is the purest form of politics (and also of intellectual
activity).3
Despite
Sehgal’s reflexivity, or perhaps enhanced by it, the singular embodied practice
of a song sung during an exhibition nonetheless constitutes a form that is
extremely convenient for a dematerialized economy. It should be noted that
Bishop’s assessment came following Sehgal’s work being on display at London’s
ICA in 2004. But with the intentionally vague “this” of its “this is
propaganda,” the work’s meaning shifts radically depending on context. And
so the performance at the New Museum, situated in an exhibition of a private
collection, had an entirely different character than its ICA counterpart. If the
statement at the ICA had some implications, in the context of the New Museum it
became a confession of outright complicity.
Tino Sehgal casting announcement.
Can it
really be the case that market-friendly forms are simultaneously, and conveniently,
the highest form of political content? Now that information has become a commodity
and advertising codes have penetrated the very essence of what it means to communicate,
we can no longer pretend that art remains magically outside this logic. While
it would be wonderful if the gesture could somehow escape this trap of cultural
production, the museum and gallery are not safe-zones immune from capital and
power. As a result, we must continue to view artistic gestures with the special
skepticism reserved for all cultural production. Reflexivity alone won’t save
it. An advertisement that tells you it’s an advertisement is no less edifying,
just more contemporary.
Even if
the disembodied and easily consumed are not inherently corrupt, they are assiduously
brought into the fold of a transitioning art market. And this quality of economic
acquiescence that characterized relational aesthetics in the ‘90s can now be found
in the United States. So while there are certainly merits to discussing the
limits of the gesture, the commodification of the present nevertheless plays
out across the body and time.
In some
cases, a strategic recalibration of the gesture’s market-friendly quality has resulted
in cultural projects seeking refuge in the long term, in methodologies that
expand across a temporal horizon. Slowness has emerged as a strategy for
resisting the consumable flow of information and developing a form of social cohesion
that withstands the frenetic needs of capital. Artist and de facto urban
planner Rick Lowe’s seventeen-year involvement in the alternative arts and
Project Row Houses certainly
demonstrates an exceptional commitment. Unwilling to follow Richard Florida’s
pro-developer gentrification models, Lowe created a locally based community
housing project that combined cultural production, community organizing, and
artist residencies in an economically depressed African-American neighborhood
in Houston’s Third Ward, even integrating art residencies and housing for
single mothers.4 This peculiar hybrid, multiuse center evolved over
the last two decades into a space of trust and, to use that Deleuzian term,
becoming.
The
community of the area gradually became involved in a process of spatial
transformation. Rather than operate with a top-down model, Lowe introduced the
tools and resources for the neighborhood to rebuild their own subject positions,
and his commitments demonstrate that time is indeed a more valuable social relation
than money. What makes Lowe’s project altogether different is its resistance to
not only the demands of consumer culture, but also to its underlying class and
race determinations.
There are
few corollaries in the arts to Lowe’s work, which has more in common with civic
infrastructures that tend to be far more vernacular and collectively produced
than art projects. Churches, social clubs, fraternal organizations, union
halls, faith-based youth organizations, after-school programs, the workplace,
and schools are all social spaces that evolve over time. As sites of becoming,
they go far beyond the gestural. Unwieldy, loose-knit, and often dealing
directly with sites of power, they hold far more sway than the arts in producing
collective social imagination. And yet, the prospect of undertaking a
seventeen-year project such as Lowe’s Project Row Houses is extremely daunting.
According to the terms of survival in a flexible contingent economy, committing
to such a long-term socially based project seems like economic suicide. Could
such a long-term practice be a little too successful at resisting the market?
How can one gain the social capital (or, for that matter, the capital) necessary
to survive while being committed to a project in the long term? The answer is
not easy and must be negotiated at the heart of the politics of cultural
production today.
Project Row Houses
The
artist Tania Bruguera has said that it is time to put Duchamp’s urinal back in
the bathroom. That is to say that bringing life into art can no longer be
considered an important gesture. Rather, life should be viewed from the epistemological
vantage point found in some contemporary art. If one is interested in a more ambitious
and meaningful project, perhaps it isn’t enough to depend on the niche market
that is art. As accelerated time comes to characterize not only survival in the
arts, but also the default condition of the public, we find forms of meaning that
resist the tide of capital and gravitate toward not only the long term, but
also the profoundly civic.
A certain
interest has emerged in civic infrastructural projects that unfold over an extended
period of time. While a pedagogic turn has been heralded in the field of
contemporary art, it has been accompanied by a temporal logic. As alternative
schools appear, so do more sustained commitments to subjects that resist the
readily consumable moment. This is not to say that these infrastructural
projects are impervious to the needs of the market, but rather that this
shifting economic and cultural landscape has produced heightened interest in forms
of infrastructure (they will most definitely find their own moments of coercion
and vulnerability). Socially based artistic projects in the form of alternative
schools, markets, legislation, and food programs appear to be on the rise as a
move away from the gestural and convenient.
Jakob
Jakobsen and Henrietta Heise’s Copenhagen Free University, which closed its doors
in 2007, used a long-term approach to emancipatory public education; the
Chicago-based artist collective Incubate works as “radical arts administrators”
on alternative funding models for cultural production; the artist Caroline
Woolard’s skill-share trade site OurGoods offers a Craigslist approach to swapping
services in order to escape the logic of capital. In all of these approaches,
we find a civic form of participation whose goals are infrastructural in scope.
They all propose a means of connecting people over an extended period, and
offer a response to the problem of shrinking time. In the long run, these works
may find their resistance to consumable capitalism to have worked all too well.
The production of cultural meaning that resists the flow of capital will need
to ultimately produce forms that contribute to radically altering culture. If
the civic is a space of long-term engagement with subjectivity, then perhaps
the cultural producer interested in producing meaning must find a way to
overcome the economic and temporal logic of the attention-deprived.
Ultimately,
the spasmodic age we live in has created new needs, new desires, new markets. And
the art world has catered to the shifting aesthetic, experiential, and economic
conditions of the contemporary age. Movements along the temporal and bodily
axes have acted as strategic calibrations between the desire to communicate and
the demands of capital. It will not be so simple to locate where these long-
and short-term projects find their place, but in attempting to understand them
we begin to enter their complex politics.
Nato
Thompson is Chief Curator at New York-based public arts institution Creative
Time.
1, Mark
Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester UK: Zero
Books, 2009), 25.
2, Ibid.,
24.
3, Claire
Bishop, “No Pictures, Please: Claire Bishop on the Art of Tino Sehgal,” in
Artforum International 43, no. 9 (May 2005): 215D217.
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