Under the logic of capitalism, there can be no greater luxury than the luxury of time or, rather, the crime of boredom. For to be bored is not to have made full use of time, to be inefficient, to waste time. If mainstream cinema’s aim is to provide “escapism” from boredom by utilizing “various forms of speed (activity-filled narratives, rapid camera movement, fast cuts, up-tempo soundtracks, and so on) to keep us entertained” (Misek 2012, 135, 137), the slow art film, on the other hand, “anticipates a spectator not only eager to clarify the value of wasted time and uneconomical temporalities but also curious about the impact of broadening what counts as productive human labor” (Schoonover 2012, 65). A cinema of slowness, therefore, invites us to reconsider the value of waste…
Song Hwee Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness (2014)
“Colonialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natural resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country’s industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.”
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (via 01030104)
Josh Kline, Sleep is For the Weak, 2011 three Bodum Chambord coffee markers on a light box pedestal, one with Red Bull infused with Vivarin, one with DayQuil infused with Dentyne Ice, one with Coke Zero infused with ibuprofen 40 x 36 x 12 inches (101.60 x 91.44 x 30.48 cm)
“We are taught to read not so that we can be creative, have interesting thoughts, engage with the great minds of the past, but so that we can read signs that say ‘no right turn’. We go to school in order to do that – not even in order to learn to read, but so that we shall be taught to punch in by 8:15 in the morning. By the time we have got out of school, we have learned to punch in by 8:15 in the morning, we have learned to read ‘no right turn’, we have also on our own looked at 15,000 hours of unregulated, ungoverned, undecoded images that constitute our real education. I grew up like that – everyone grows up like that, Magellan is a film that, like all things (since I have not had the luxury of perfect alienation, but only the partial luxury of imperfect alienation) comes out of an imperfect understanding of my culture. It is probably easiest to imagine it as a project if it is understood not as a project in drama, or in literature, nor as a project in sculpture, but as one that subsists as a work of sculpture in time rather than space.” – HF
“A ruin is an accidental aesthetic object. If it becomes beautiful, this was certainly not the intention. A ruin is not constructed or maintained. The tendency of a ruin is to crumble down into a heap. The most beautiful parts remain standing despite their wear. The memory of you is what stays up, your body what subsides. Your ghost remains upright in my memory, while your skeleton is in the earth.”
countervisuality 