Slowness

We complain about speed a lot. Everything moves too fast to grasp or control. So we find ways to slow down – slow food stands against the McDonaldization of our diets. There’s even a World Institute for Slowness out there.

But we don’t want everything to move slow, argues Lutz Koepnick in his recent On Slowness. Sometimes, we still complain about things going too slow. The economic recovery, for instance:

“While this desire to slow down one’s life might be extensive, the slowing down of the global economy in the wake of the financial crises of 2008 has done very little to correct our perception of too much speed and temporal compression. On the contrary. Slowness, as it were, has very different connotations in the realm of economic affairs than it has in the sphere of lifestyle choices. To praise slow markets and slow retail sales would border on the perverse and self-destructive. Many may fault the way in which global capitalism distributes its wealth and produces large arenas of poverty, but neither economic theorists nor populist politicians would seriously promote a decelerating of production, distribution, and consumption as a cure to the calamities of the market.”

Kopenick’s book is an attempt to sort through our ambivalence about slowness by assessing contemporary photography, film, video, sound and installation art, and writing that experiments with “extended structures of temporality, with strategies of hesitation, delay, and deceleration, in an effort to make us pause and experience a passing present in all its heterogeneity and difference.” The art – or, the “installations” – that he examined don’t look back nostalgically to a slower world or offer salvation from speed. They are meditations on “the meaning of temporality and of being present today in general, of living under conditions of accelerated temporal passage, mediation, and spatial shrinkage.”

The book is based on the assumption that “To experience the present aesthetically and in the mode of slowness is to approach this present as a site charged with multiple durations, pasts, and possible futures; it is by no means hostile toward memory and anticipation. . . . Slowness enables us to engage with today’s culture of speed and radical simultaneity without submitting to or being washed over by the present’s accelerated dynamics. Slowness demonstrates a special receptivity to the copresence of various memories and anticipations, narratives and untold stories, beats and rhythms in our temporally and spatially expanded moment.”

All very interesting as social commentary, but is that what art is for?