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Culture

The Art of Slowing Down

by Dorian Batycka

artwork: Felipe García-López – Mechanisms of impermanence, 2017

The trade-off is that while our ability to move goods and people all over the world now takes place at unprecedented speeds, we are not able to cope with the environmental consequences of what mass travel has done to the planet.

Editor’s note: The author submitted this article for publication on February 14th, several weeks before the Covid-19 crisis reached the shores of the U.S.

“We live in a moment of profound cultural deceleration.”

-Mark Fisher1

Since the industrial revolution, time has been used as a means of subjugating bodies, if not entire populations altogether. Colonialism used time as a unit of agricultural labor and stole it from enslaved bodies. Later, after the industrial revolution and the abolishment of slavery, the 8-hour workday / 5-day work week became the new preferred way of dominating and coercing an economic underclass, which had replaced slavery with new, modern forms. Today, with the rise of precarious labor and the outsourcing of work via proxy apps, the art of slowing down now seems to be more precious and valuable than ever before.

From cars to computers to highways, the idea of collapsing time–and by extension distance–is now more possible than ever before. However, despite the fact that we are now no more than a 12-18 hour flight from our loved ones, the advent of the long-haul aircraft seems to offer much by way of advancement, but also much by way of exploitation. Economic migrants now traverse the globe in search of work, trading labour for time in far off places. The trade-off is that while our ability to move goods and people all over the world now takes place at unprecedented speeds, we are unable to cope with the environmental consequences of what mass travel has done to the planet. 

Accordingly, the means by which speed is collapsing space, now bears witness to environmental disasters en masse, the consequences of which are only recently coming to bear. The most violent tendencies of neoliberal capitalism is thus the accelerationist drive to further our own demise, which begs a decelerationist alternative, I would argue. Enter the art of slowing down…

Close up of keys on a typewriter

In Felipe García López’s 8.554 days (2017), as a tear-away wall calendar extends towards the viewer, we encounter one such example. The work asks us to slow down. At its most rudimentary, it’s just a wall calendar, the type you tear away each day. The calendar starts on May 28, 1994, the date of the artist’s birth. It contains another 8,554 pages, days which demarcate the passage of time in the artist’s life. The work references not only the longstanding preoccupation of artists on the subject of time, but also, crucially, the philosophical, social, political and religious constructs of how time has become hardwired into human psychology via capitalism. 

Weaving between reality and perception, López’s calendar seems to reflect on the compression of time and the human desire to record it, it is like a punch-clock into the artist’s time on earth. The only thing missing, perhaps, is a copy of the artist’s health or tax records. Nevertheless, the work seems to contain a sense of urgency, a desire to construct planetary time, the effects of globalization, climate change and hyper-accelerationism, all from the simple prism of a calendar. 

It’s important to note that the history of the Gregorian calendar, upon which Lopez’s version is based, was initially introduced in the 16th century as a means of correcting a phenomenon known as “calendar drift.” Calendar drift basically resulted from a celestial discrepancy relating to the calculation of time. After the Catholic Church became frustrated that Easter was being celebrated in some areas 8 days apart, the Church commissioned a new calendar that would correct calendar drift by introducing what we know today as the leap year.  Though the Gregorian calendar eventually adopted the secular name “Common Era” or “Anno Domini,” the idea of creating a unit of measurement to control time had a less obvious, more subversive function too–that is the ability of the Church to create a universal time standard–which would later give Europe massive geopolitical significance. 

artwork: Felipe García-López – Mechanisms of impermanence, 2017 (detail)

Photo of a lot of papers crumbled into a paper ball

Ecclesiastical reasons aside, artists operating in nearly all media have been concerned with the passage of time for decades, if not centuries. Today, performance and video are increasingly used to examine the passage of time, while in López’s case—printmaking and installation—the recording of time here acts as a kind of demarcation, an acknowledgment of being present here on this earth. 

Time, it can thus be argued, is subjective. Do you ever wonder why, for example, time passes quickly when experiencing pleasure? Or, conversely, how the experience of time slows down while experiencing pain or discomfort? 

López’s work functions like an always departing body, allowing us to reexamine our experiences and memories, but also one not lost on the geopolitical importance on controlling time. Given time’s quantification into units of account, intervals constructed in milli-seconds, seconds, minutes or hours. In López’s case, days, months and years, the bearer of time becomes more malleable. López’s work thus functions like an always departing body. It asks us to examine our conceptual understanding of memory, but also our understanding of the shifting alliances within the global body geopolitic. There, lost in the prism of the artist’s subjective relationship to time, we encounter the events that have informed Lopez’s past and present. 

Thus another way of reading López’s work is in its relationship to On Kawara’s iconic “Date Paintings”, which the artist executed everyday for nearly 50 years. In total, Kawara produced a series of over 3,000 individual works, which mark the passage of time meticulously inscribed in sans-serif monochrome letters and numbers. An archival impulse to be sure, both Kawara and López’s works seem to defy the compression of time in a way that begs us to question our own experience of it at the same time.

artwork: Felipe García-López – The weight of uncertain words, 2018

Time is political, so too the ways in which we inhabit and keep track of it.

While time has always been relative to speed, the idea of slowing down is today perhaps more necessary than ever before. Planetary time should not be wielded like a neoliberal wrecking ball, accelerationism has proven as much. Yet, what López seems to posit are variations of subjective time. The calendar and the clock being the two most important inventions that accommodate the technological capturing of time, so too it’s accelerationist impulse, how we interpret time today might be due for a different conceptual paradigm. The 8-hour work day, the 5-day work week, the compression of time today includes important social, economic and political functions, which we rarely—if ever—question. However, the various ways we have used time also includes important social and economic functions, which are in dire need of retooling today, if not an outright dismantling and reconstruction altogether. Time is political, so too the ways in which we inhabit and keep track of it. Keeping time from the pitfalls of postmodern thought, including, importantly, tenets of neoliberalism and libertarian accelerationism, are today more necessary than ever before. 

As such, the orals of time–artists–should continue to explore the manifold ways time can and should slow down. Lopez’s work thus serves as a kind of metaphor for the subjective malleability of time, so too our inability to capture the minutiae of subjective human experience in ways beyond technocratic. Perhaps time ought to be seen less akin to its atomization via economic capital, but also as a means by which we can develop deeper discourses around spiritual planetary time, decelerating from the very tenets of capitalism that have caused mass inequality and environmental degradation. 

Only now, it seems, has the art of slowing down become fashionable again. Perhaps by collapsing time, Lopez appears to be poising us for the massive but necessary planetary shift toward a decelerated slow time. Thus, 8.554 days can be seen as a fundamental retooling of our relationship to time, but also to speed, globalization and climate change, a work that asks us to stop and consider for a moment what a decelerated world might look like.

End.

1Mark Fisher, ”A social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude”: Popular Culture’s Interrupted Accelerationist Dreams, e-flux journal #46, 2013.

This article is part of a series of special features for the exhibition ‘1-31’ curated by Adam Carr.

Experience Digital Exhibition '1-31'
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