On Slowness
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On Slowness

Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary

Lutz Koepnick

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eBook - ePub

On Slowness

Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary

Lutz Koepnick

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About This Book

Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes we understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporary—a decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the present's velocity.

As he engages with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely; the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer; the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola; and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.

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Year
2014
ISBN
9780231538251
ONE
SLOW MODERNISM
1 /
In Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson wrote in 1889 that feelings of joy accompany our orientation toward the future, whereas sadness and sorrow result from our failure to embrace movement and overcome physical and psychic passivity.1 Bergson’s notion of joy reads like a motto for what we have come to associate with European high modernism, its departure from the dominance of tradition as much as its stress on the exhilarating effects of velocity, acceleration, shock, and ongoing mobility. According to conventional understandings, industrial modernity, as it began to sweep across the European landscapes of the nineteenth century and introduced technologies such as the steam train, the telegraph, the telephone, the cinema, and the automobile, inaugurated an age of unprecedented time-space compression.2 Modernity brought the thrill of speed and motion to the sluggishness of preindustrial life. It provided unknown physical sensations, perceptual pleasures, and psychic agitations and, in this way, it not only reworked the entire human sensorium, but promised a future joyfully different from the past. What, in turn, defined aesthetic modernism as modernist, following this prevailing understanding, was its relentless desire to tap into modernity’s valorization of speed. Modernism, it has been concluded, surfed the waves of modern haste and rupture. In all its different manifestations, it explored the nervousness and distraction of the modern mind as a source of artistic experimentation.3 Though not immune to the idea of a timeless masterwork, modernist artists intoxicated themselves with the thrills of accelerated movement in an effort to emancipate the work of art from static expectations, to jolt audiences away from habitual modes of perception and in so doing to situate recipients as active participants in the construction of art’s future meaning.
In 1931 Aldous Huxley famously pronounced: “Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”4 Speed, for Huxley, became most palpable when using his automobile at maximum velocity. The automobile’s thrill, in Huxley’s perspective, was thereby at least threefold. First and foremost, a car’s speed allowed for an exhilarating shrinkage and annihilation of space, speed here being understood as the physical rate of movement across space, and space being understood, not as a sphere of factual relations and possible interactions, but as the mere measure of distance. Speed actively participated in how modernity reorganized everyday life and collapsed preindustrial differences between center and periphery, the near and the far. It enabled motorists to pursue nothing less than the pleasurable adventure of allowing temporality to triumph over and erase the rigidity of space. Second, unlike the primarily receptive experience of nineteenth-century train passengers, the car driver’s perception of velocity was one in which a quasi-Nietzschean assertion of transformative power went hand in hand with a peculiar decentering of the driver’s sense of self. In steering his car around rapidly approaching obstacles, the driver’s body seemed to conquer the world of modern machines as much as it authorized these machines to recalibrate the body’s perception of its own limits and extensions in space. Third, and finally, the pleasure of driving cars at high speed provided ample resources to question how nineteenth-century bourgeois culture had started to divide modern civilization into the seemingly exclusive realms of disembodied and intellectually demanding high art, on the one hand, and, on the other, of materialistic and consumer-driven mass culture. To maneuver a car at high speed, in the eyes of Huxley and others, unsettled these normative hierarchies. It allowed for a heightened sense of activity and a dramatic sharpening of sensory perception, while it also promised to emancipate the subject from the strictures of bourgeois culture and employed modern consumer culture to explode given templates of identity.
As we will see later in this chapter, Huxley’s praise of speed and car travel as modernity’s principal pleasures echoed the voices of many other artists and intellectuals during the heyday of European aesthetic modernism. For now, it shall simply serve us as a paradigmatic example of how various modernisms in the first decades of the twentieth century not only valorized accelerated rates of movement as sources of aesthetic thrill and experimentation, but in so doing also articulated profound misgivings about all those unwilling to hurl themselves down the road and straight into the future. In the wake of modernism’s joyful adoration of rapid motion, slowness became largely denigrated as both antiprogressive and antiaesthetic.5 It was seen as rooting the individual in the fixity of place and as taming the energies of temporal change, subjecting the individual to the burden of tradition and containing any desire to explode the confines of bourgeois identity. To go slow was to resist modernism’s categorical quest for newness, and it thus not only suspended the possibility of aesthetic experimentation, but obstructed the way in which various modernist projects sought to couple aesthetic innovation to political reform. In much of high modernist discourse, and in how later generations have come to think about it, slowness has been typecast as a sad remnant of preindustrial longings and sentiments—as something that combats the peculiarly modern sense of temporal contingency, flux, and indeterminacy; that blocks the progress of artistic and social affairs; and that quells the seeds of individual change and liberation.
Slowness, in the eyes of many a modernist in the early 1900s, not only invited space to triumph over time, but articulated a desire to turn one’s back on everything that defined modernity as truly modern, including its hope to emancipate the present from the normative burdens of the past. To slow down meant to contest the joys of movement and temporal passage. It was antiprogressive and anti-Enlightenment, privileging static over dynamic interrelations, binary oppositions over dialectical energies, mindless contemplation over critical engagement, escapist flight over nonsentimental commitments, nostalgia over activism. Whereas, for the fast and furious, velocity held the promise of unsettling traditional hierarchies and subject positions, slowness was perceived as the cultural elite’s last straw to hold on to their former privileges and resist the storms industrial culture had cast over the scenes of modern life. To advocate slowness, in Huxley’s modern age of speed, meant to shut out the metropolitan thrills and energizing stimulations that inspired true modernists to depart from the canon of the past. As a rhetorical figure of unbending conservatives and romantic fundamentalists, slowness wanted to recenter the subject’s sensory systems, reinstate the subject as an autonomous agent of her perception, and in this way reject how modernism in its most emphatic stances translated the adventures of temporal displacement into new artistic forms.
This book pursues a categorically different framing of slowness, one whose roots can be traced back to an alternate understanding of various modernist projects and one that is far from hostile to the main elements of aesthetic modernism: sensory experimentation, ongoing movement, change, and indeterminacy. Recent scholarship has urged us to complicate seasoned notions of modernism. As a result, we have rightly come to speak of multiple modernities, alternate modernisms, and vernacular modes of modernist experience, not only in order to extend the concept of modernism to aesthetic practices, institutions, and interventions formulated outside of or in opposition to its primarily Western European (and often colonialist) model but also to overcome dominant associations of modernism with a relatively narrow historical time frame (roughly the 1880s to 1930s) and a particular class of cultural producers and consumers.6 What this chapter, with no doubt rather bold strokes, will delineate as slow modernism participates in these recent conversations about the heterogeneity and plurality of aesthetic modernism. As I understand it here, slow modernism defined one of various folds within the fabric of high modernism. It challenged certain modernist credos of speed and ceaseless temporal displacement and it precisely thus prefigured some of the central aspects of what this book explores as today’s aesthetic of slowness. My point is not to argue that aesthetic modernism as a whole was much slower than it is, in spite of all its celebration of speed and flux, shock and rupture, believed to be. What is at stake instead is to show that the normative association of Western modernism with pleasurable speed and ceaseless movement often rested on rather lopsided definitions of the temporal as a sphere of dynamic change and of space as a dimension of static simultaneity. Such reductionist notions not only resulted in inadequate understandings of both velocity and slowness. They also had lasting effects on our ability to recognize the disruptive and transformative power of what this books identifies as a contemporary preoccupation with the slow and the durational and with space as a site of open-ended stories and vectors of change.
This introductory chapter recalls two critical moments of modernist aesthetic culture in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of modern velocity and aesthetic contemporaneity. I will first revisit the formative history of Italian Futurism between 1909 and 1913, often seen as the primary locus of modernist fantasies of speed. In an effort to complicate dominant accounts of modernist speed culture, I identify the seeds of a modernist aesthetic of slowness in the very center of some Futurist artistic practices. In a second step, I will then focus on the work of German literary critic Walter Benjamin and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose respective interventions of the 1930s urge us to distinguish between different articulations of modern slowness and thus warn us against seeing desires for slowness in modernist culture as one unified program. In discussing these two constellations of modernist culture, my aim is to reconstruct the possibility of recognizing important strains within aesthetic modernism that refused to consider slowness as antimodern, nostalgic, and antiaesthetic. Modernist slowness was far from inviting readers, viewers, and listeners to hang on to bygone traditions, rhythms, and identifications. Nor should we think of slowness simply as a corrective to the presumed modernist privileging of the temporal over the spatial, as an attempt to play out what might be homogeneous, stable, and tame about space against the rapid and discontinuous pace of modernity’s clocks, vehicles, and tools of telecommunication. Modernist slowness instead defined a peculiar mode of engaging with the various temporalities and trajectories that energized the spaces of modern life, and, in so doing, it emphasized the coeval, imbricated, and indeterminate relationships of the temporal and the spatial. Slowness is what allowed modernists to register, represent, and reflect on how modern culture not only accelerated the rhythms of preindustrial life but in this way also reconfigured material relationships and immaterial interactions across different geographies. Rather than first defining time and space as binary opposites and then presenting modernity as a period in which temporality came to triumph over the fixity of space, modernist slowness took heed of the mutual implications of the spatial and the temporal, with space being seen as a dynamic simultaneity of disparate trajectories and dissonant narratives, and time being understood as a dimension whose emphasis on change required open interactions between discrete elements and agents.7
Modernist slowness, then, does not figure merely as modernist speed’s repressed—a forgotten orphan of how cultural critics throughout the twentieth century have come to associate high modernism with rapid change and the intensity of shock. Nor do I understand modernist slowness simply as a reactive desire seeking to reverse Huxley’s velocity and hence as an attempt to reinforce the safe pleasures of distance. Instead, as it emerged within the force field of high modernism, aesthetic slowness brought into play a mode of experiencing and conceptualizing motion that was fundamentally at odds with the intoxicating visions of modernist speed addicts. Its principal aim was to emancipate the hype of modern mobility from narrow conceptions of movement as a mere traversal of space and elimination of distance and, in this way, it aspired to open the subject’s senses to a much wider and temporally multivalent landscape of present experience. What I call modernist slowness fully recognized the importance of movement—including movement at accelerating rates—for any process of perceiving objects in time and space. Yet its primary ambition was to experience mobility as a force allowing us, not merely to move effectively from A to B, but to establish unpredictable connections and correspondences, to come across lateral and nonintentional perceptions, and to engage in categorically open interactions with nonidentical particulars. The point of modernist slowness, in sum, was not to abandon the speed of modern life and to bond the future back to the past. Rather, it was to define mobility as a form of communication and interrelation able to sharpen the subject’s perception of the present—a present constituted by the contemporaneity of multiple pasts and futures, proximities and distances, movements and speeds.
The seminal modern theorist of the durational, Bergson saw joy in forms of movement that decidedly propelled the subject toward and into the future. As it reads modernism’s stress on movement against the grain of its speed theorists, the point of this chapter is to identify modernist experiments with slowness that prefigure—in spite of a number of fundamental historical differences—the various artistic practices discussed later in this book. In its final section, three brief theoretical readjustments become necessary to effectively set the stage for today’s practitioners of aesthetic slowness. The first has to do with Bergson’s work itself and its normative privileging of the temporal over the spatial. Though Bergson’s interest in extended structures of temporality is of considerable importance for this project, it helped shore up binary views of space as static and time as transformative that have obstructed our full understanding of expanded concepts of mobility present in both modernist and in more contemporary aesthetic practice. The second intervention serves the purpose of reconstructing modernist discourses on medium specificity in such a way that we can accommodate how aesthetic slowness today cannot do without actively recognizing and recalibrating the temporal logic of its respective media of expression. Though aesthetic slowness today is part and parcel of what Rosalind Krauss has termed our postmedium condition,8 it urges us to reflect on the extent to which the material bases of certain media profoundly matter in artistic strategies of meaning making. The third adjustment finally wants to reclaim the ground for a strong concept of aesthetic experience in which structures of absorption and the noninstrumental can go hand in hand with states of attentiveness and self-awareness. As an art of pursuing contemporaneity, aesthetic slowness today not only relies on the use of various technologies of reproduction; in doing so it also strives to settle the conflict modernists such as Benjamin saw between traditional art’s quest for contemplation and modern media’s emancipatory power of distraction.
2 /
The emergence of transportation technologies such as cars and airplanes figured as a decisive engine of how Italian Futurists shortly before the outbreak of World War I hoped to deliver artistic practice from the burdens of the past. The modern acceleration of visual, tactile, and aural stimulations caused Futurists painters such as Giacomo Balla to rally against the representational frameworks of traditional art and explore velocity as modernity’s site of the sublime.9 For Balla, the Renaissance’s perspectival system was of no more use to capture how modern speed seemed to make traversed topographies advance upon the moving subject and thus question the former role of the subject as a sovereign master of space. As a consequence, in paintings such as Racing Automobile (1913; figure 1.1), Balla transformed his canvas into a vortexlike structure whose frame appeared unable to contain the image’s dynamic orthogonals. For writers and poets such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the velocity of modern industrial culture required a new language of telegraphic immediacy that had no patience for long-winded sentences, syntactic complexities, conceptual nuances, let alone conventional punctuation.10 Futurist language was to shortcut linguistic signification and instead grasp its objects directly and physically—like a fist hitting its target, like a torpedo striking its aim. In the realm of music, finally, Futurist speed addicts such as Luigi Russolo encouraged composers to break away from the codes of classical music because, in an age of fast-paced machinery, technological recording, and earsplitting warfare, the modern ear had lost its ability to stay tuned to the conventional arcs of melodic progression and chromatic modulation.11
In all of these examples, the speed of modern industrial society not only caused the artist to envision new aesthetic strategies representing what seemed to defy representation. As important, it led to calls for a radical break with how nineteenth-century society had placated the energies of aesthetic experience within the iron cage of the art museum, the reading room, and the concert hall. As embraced by Futurism, modernity’s culture of velocity was welcomed as generating its own normativity. Speed justified any attempt to shatter the vessels of the past, and it sanctioned all those who had no patience for lingering in a stagnant present. Though its primary objects of fascination might strike today’s historians as rather slow in motion, Western speed culture circa 1913 promoted visions of a future-oriented present as a space of Dionysian ecstasy—as a dynamic ground liberating the subject from the confines of individuation and granting the pleasu...

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