Slow art
In one of the essays in Art in the After-Culture, Ben Davis cited this lecture by art historian Jennifer L. Roberts about her efforts at “teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention.” I can’t remember if it is cited in Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing,but it’s of a piece with it.
During the past few years, I have begun to feel that I need to take a more active role in shaping the temporal experiences of the students in my courses; that in the process of designing a syllabus I need not only to select readings, choose topics, and organize the sequence of material, but also to engineer, in a conscientious and explicit way, the pace and tempo of the learning experiences. When will students work quickly? When slowly? When will they be expected to offer spontaneous responses, and when will they be expected to spend time in deeper contemplation?
I want to focus today on the slow end of this tempo spectrum, on creating opportunities for students to engage in deceleration, patience, and immersive attention. I would argue that these are the kind of practices that now most need to be actively engineered by faculty, because they simply are no longer available “in nature,” as it were. Every external pressure, social and technological, is pushing students in the other direction, toward immediacy, rapidity, and spontaneity—and against this other kind of opportunity. I want to give them the permission and the structures to slow down.
Thus Roberts requires students to spend three hours looking at some specific object before writing about it. This seems like a nice enough idea, but it also seems somewhat one-sided, abstracting the idea of mental “speed” away from specific contexts and putting forward a fetishized idea of “slowness” as intrinsically deep and rewarding. There is an economical, quantitative understanding of attention that characterizes this approach just as much as it characterizes “speed reading” or “doomscrolling” or the various techniques that try to make cultural consumption more efficient.
Your brain will generate ideas just as easily by staring at a blank wall for three hours as at a particular painting. What gets lost is the work involved in calibrating attention to specific objects, and explaining to oneself how one arrives at those decisions to keep looking or to look away.