Slow Art. An Answer to the Excess of Art. Food for Thought by Joan Hus

Seven o’ clock in the morning, I’m sitting in the kitchen, stark naked, my hair in disarray. I’ve just reached the end of a sleepless night – the fifth in a row – I’m dog-tired. While I have a cup of the strongest of all genetically engineered coffees, I take my tablet. Since more than a decade, I keep a record of the weather, my thoughts, and my feelings. Although most entries are written in the first-person, the file in which I store the information is not a diary. I’m not the ‘I’ll-give-you-a-detailed-end-of-the-day-daily-account-of-my-life-Samuel-Pepys’ kind of person. The narration alternates between the split personality mode, typical of critical thinking, the we-all mode typical of political rhetoric, and the uniquely-me mode, typical of freshmen’s poetic effusion. I browse through my notes about the excess of art. The entry from 2011 grabs my attention. I read it, occasionally inserting in between brackets a comment or an explanation.

“Tuesday, 21 June, 10 a.m. Why worry about the enormous glut of agricultural commodities, and not about the incessant accumulation of art objects? Why does nobody worry about that? Should the excess of art objects not be a problem of general public concern? I know, the hungry people on this planet couldn’t survive on paper, ink, canvas, paint, metal, marble and all those other things art is made of; I know, art is not vital; I know, there is no such thing as nutritional deficiency in art – however, it is not because you can’t starve from the lack of some substance, that you can’t die from an overdose of it!”[STOP, i.e. Squeal Tires On Pavement, i.e. hitting my mental brakes. Art? I use the term ‘art’ to refer to any object – including found objects – that serves as a vehicle for a predominantly aesthetic approach.] “The point is, if making art is as harmful to the environment as the manufacturing of automobiles, the production of arms, or making war, then art ought to engage our attention at a ruthlessly realistic, down-to-earth social-political level.” [Follows, a clear example of the split personality mode of critical thinking!] “Oh dear, what an extremely unpleasant, utterly unromantic thought! We can’t live without beauty, can’t we? ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’, you know. Poor Keats, his name was written in water. He did no harm.” [Part of my split personality protests.] “In the first place, don’t take Keats literally. Secondly, the answer to the question whether or not Keats did something wrong, depends on your point of view. If you look at Keats’s work from an ecological point of view, you will conclude that he used paper and ink – a lot of paper and a lot of ink -, and that he used them purposefully, with the intention to convey his thoughts and feelings to the largest possible number of people, or rather, literati; which purpose involves the incessant use of paper and ink, and pens, and all kinds of other stuff, to reach everyone, everywhere, forever and ever.”

I take a sip of hot coffee. Yesterday, young Ms Haslam, daughter of the late old Ms Haslam, my downstairs neighbour, told me apples could wake you up better than coffee, but why should I try, if I prefer coffee to apples. I scroll up to the beginning of the entry “Tuesday, 21 June, 2011, 6 a.m., first day of summer”.

“Nothing rosy about the dawn. Eos keeps the gates of heaven closed. Bleak, damp, gloomy like my state of mind.” [Quite different from current weather conditions – today will be another sweltering day – and from my actual mood – despite my fatigue I’m in good spirits.] “Yesterday, I’ve been busy trying to find new ways of drawing. The incentive to these experiments is the excess of art issue that concerns me.” [Other expressions that refer to this problem are ‘art overproduction’, ‘art mountain’ – by analogy to the ‘butter mountain’ or other food mountains – and ‘art surplus’.] “While I breakfast [too bad, electronic files can’t bear traces of grease, coffee and redcurrant jelly] I’ll put down some of the ideas that occurred to me while I was at work.” [As I see it, a genuine artist is someone whose thinking and actions are blended; they form a uniform mixture, so to speak. By the way, in my experience, the use of irony is a token of disintegration.] “One of the distinctive features of humans is their creativity. Human beings create all kinds of things – plenty of which, they don’t really need – and all things they create are finite”. [Wop wop wop universalpreacherstatementstyle!] “Finite?” [Follows an attempt at explanation.] “The universal statement “All men are mortal,” is the major premise of what is no doubt the most famous syllogism in the history of logic – and rightly so! Life of man is so full of hazards. Sooner are later it comes to an end. Now, if all men can do is to create things according to their image, that is things which mirror who, where, what and how they are, it follows that the creation of immortal things which last forever exceeds their might.” [Do not bother to adjust these statements to the mould of a logically sound argument. Trust me; the reasoning is sound enough. Besides, truth and soundness do not coincide. All sorts of afterlife zealots have challenged the truth of “all men are mortal” without the least affecting the logical soundness of the Aristotelian categorical syllogism of which this statement is the major premise! Indeed, one of the first things freshmen learn is the inadequacy of logic when it comes to solving actual problems. The question whether your lover has betrayed you can never be solved by mere logic. Anyway, thought, worthy of its name, is reasonable enough.] “The limited nature of their creations, does not keep men from bringing things into existence. Creation is the only way of transcending their limits – the only way to eventually outwit the Moirai.” [I.e. the merciless, white eyed destiny administrator, there are only three of them, but that does not make any difference.] “Men create to avoid the approaching doom – their hour of death. The primary purpose of their creativity is to try and find ways to survive. Consequently they create to improve the effectiveness of their actions, to enhance their natural abilities, to strengthen their inherent power, in short, to progress.” [No wonder men became hyper-creative. This is a conjecture, but a nice one, kind of credible really.] “Going back along these lines to the beginning of the Human Era [0 HE], it seems reasonable to assume that the main concern of first-men was their ability to store and retrieve information.”[Seems plausible enough; without proper information life is impossible.] “They did so through sounds and gestures, the use of which they constantly refined, until the signals acquired the precise distinctions and subtlety characteristic of a full-fledged language. Later-men [I’ve chosen this expression in preference to posterior-men or post-men, because the latter implies that all men are mailmen and the former that all men are idiots] invented writing, the printing press, and eventually contrived the most magical of all mind-strengthening-devices, the computer.” [The other part of my split personality takes over.] “Whatever the amazing, beneficial effects of these inventions, the overall result of the evolution outlined above was not entirely positive. Through the one-sided emphasis on the gathering, processing, transmitting and storing of information, later-men imperceptibly changed into a kind of conservative species of collectors and keepers not only of ideas and facts, but also of things and other living beings. This evolution not only affected their mental make-up, it also brought about a change in their habitat. Under the pressure of the stream of things they ceaselessly brought into existence, their habitat lost its equilibrium, and started shifting. Yet, as their urge to create and to preserve remained intact throughout, this shifting went on, goes on, and will go on, until the point of no return will have been reached, which shall be the end of the [last-men’s] story. Bearing this apocalyptic image in mind, we [i.e. several parts of my split personality] now turn back to art and the issue of the excess of art. Sensitive and intelligent as artists generally are, we [all artists – ‘uniquely-me’ included] are the first to realize that one of the reasons for the present global situation of overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, environmental degeneration, economical disaster and political chaos, is the fact that the creation of things has gotten out of hand. Thinking of the alarming global growth rate of art objects per second, it is no longer possible to appreciate in the same relaxed, complacent way the countless art works exhibited in private and public galleries, in museums, art institutions, art clubs, coffeehouses, restaurants, at art fairs and biennials – did you know that the Biennial Foundation has more than one hundred and eighty registered members? What I’m trying to say is that we, artists – creators by excellence – are accountable for this state of affairs; we are morally, personally and collectively responsible for it. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty towards mankind and use our creativity to solve the problem of human creativity!” [People making so-called immersive-environment pieces of art like rain rooms and man-generated clouds enclosed in manmade spaces are on the wrong track. They try to instil ecological awareness by making the beholder learn by experience. Alas, they are bound to fail because their work is in the old tradition. It expresses an updated hotchpotch of the 18th century Sublime Nature conception, the 19th century Schlegelian “all art should become science” idea, and the 20th century Tolstoyan “aesthetical value is defined by ethical value” article of faith. The only effect such works are able to produce is a momentary change of feeling. In fact, this kind of work is completely beside the point, because the major concern of artists today is not how to draw people’s attention to environmental issues, but how artists themselves respond to the ecological problem pragmatically, that is in a practical way that is consistent with the available scientific data. The following appeal must therefore be understood as a worldwide call to artists for devising methods of creating which are ecological sound.] “Let us take the lead, and be the first to enter the new era in the history of human creativity! First of all, we need to do something about the tremendous rate at which we bring art into existence.” [If the visual arts were virtual, there would be no problem, for it is the use of materials that is the cause of environmental damage.] “On closer inspection, the problem of the exponential growth of art worldwide has three aspects, three “regrettable degrees”: too many people are creating, too much art, too quickly. The first “regrettable degree” is not something artists are in the position to change single-handedly.” [Artists cannot change demographic policies. They are unable to forestall Malthusian Growth calamities.] “The number of people on earth is steadily increasing, and as the creative urge is inherent to the human species, human creation is impossible to stop.” [For the sake of clarity, note that censorship is not aimed at stopping creation, but at monitoring political subjects. The censor assists the government by examining everything its political subjects produce, and by suppressing anything politically unacceptable. In the eyes of the censor, each political subject is suspect until proven innocent – not exactly, what one would call a Cesare Beccarian point of view.] “But, contrary to the first one, we could do something about the other two “regrettable degrees”. If we could reduce the rate at which we create, we might even kill two birds with one stone – produce less work over a longer period.” [A period which would be x times the length of time previously needed.] “Indeed, assuming there is a relationship between the pace at which we work, and the total amount of materials and substances we use, and between our pace and our total output, the best way for reducing the per capita production of art, is by limiting the speed at which we create.” [The fact that some of us use few materials and substances, while others use many, and that some of us ‘consume’ materials and substances, while others simply use them, is not relevant here. I hasten to add that I’m perfectly aware of the difficulties involved. I know from experience how extremely difficult it is to ‘kick the habit’. Still, the ideas that I support, are not utopian, on the contrary. The following notes on the effect these ideas have on my creative practice make this clear.] “Assuming – in accordance with the traditional view on art – that artistic freedom is a necessary condition for making art, then the only ‘ecological rule’ that is really acceptable for an artist is a self-imposed one.” [This brings us back to me.]

Half past seven in the morning, I am sitting stark naked in the “gruebleen” kitchen, reading my notes and commenting them, fighting my drowsiness with coffee. The countdown timer on the iPad tells me that I have exactly 45 minutes to finish this job, to take a shower and hurry to the city hall to be in time for the opening of the summer festivities. I will have to speed up a little.

“One of the “ecological rules” that I impose on myself as a creator is the ‘slow art’ rule, i.e. the rule of unhurried creation. This rule states “If creation is virtual, one may proceed at will, but if creation is actual, one must proceed at a much slower pace than the pace one is inclined to.” Though at first sight this rule seems a bit loose, in fact the ‘slow art’ code of behaviour is really severe.” [Indeed, it requires a lot of energy to control a ‘free’ artist’s sense of independence.] “Furthermore, this ‘ecological code of behaviour’ has a profound effect on one’s life as an artist. In my experience, if you apply the ‘slow art’ rule without changing any of the other aspects of your creative work, you will have to face some issues that are not so easy to resolve. First, the people in your environment will be inclined to interpret your slowness as indolence. Secondly, applying for a grant, or getting public or private funding for your projects will become quite a difficult job. Thirdly, if you make less work over a longer period, then – ceteris paribus – the price of your work must raise in such a way that it remains possible to make a living from it. There is, however, also a positive side to all this. First, ‘slow art’ is ecologically beneficial.” [Of course, otherwise we should get rid of this rule immediately.] “Secondly, by forcing ourselves to create at a much slower pace we free up time for trying to find other – ecologically sound – methods for creating; but, more importantly, we could train ourselves to get ready for the new era of virtual creation.” [Note that the ecological approach to art wants to change the concept of artistic freedom by describing other methods for creating and by setting an example, rather than by argument. It is precisely because of its practical, prosaic nature that this view on art is a reaction against the hotchpotch traditional view mentioned above.]

Let’s leave it at that for today. I finished the main part of the 21th July entry. In the remainder, I discuss another rule of ‘ecologically sound’ creation, which says – wait a moment; I let the iPad say it, “If creation is virtual one may proceed at will, but if creation is actual one must process existing art”. Don’t you think its toneless voice is well suited for pronouncing rules? However, now it starts singing in a high-pitched voice, “Time’s up! Time’s up!”. I stop it, and hurry to the bathroom.