Introduction: As Slowly as Possible

Abstract

Introduction:As Slowly as Possible Katja Kwastek (bio) and Erin La Cour (bio) This special issue of ASAP/Journal is dedicated to the concept of slowness. The title of our introduction, "As Slowly as Possible"—apart from serving as a pun on the commonplace connotation of the acronym for the Association for the Study of the Art of the Present—honors John Cage's signature 1987 piece ORGAN2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) by underscoring the relationality of the notion of slowness: slow is always "slow in relation to." In this issue, we explore what engaging with slowness as relational can reveal—and what it can bring to a journal specifically committed to the arts of the present. We second ASAP's observation that our increasingly complexified present urges us to constantly engage with our own contemporaneity, and we put forward the notion of slowness as highly productive in interrogating our current political and aesthetic climate, not least in terms of globalization, consumerism, media regimes, and ecology. While slowness is thus addressed as key to an art of contemporaneity in this issue, what also comes to the fore is that the manifold aesthetics and politics of slowness enable us to connect the past to the present, often in a nonlinear manner. In exploring the thick layers of various time regimes, an art of the present, as a practice of contemporaneity, cannot do without acknowledging the individual and collective histories that constitute us. Relatedly, in exploring concepts of processuality across fields and genres, this issue demonstrates the fruitfulness of bringing the various arts of the present into conversation. It reveals how the notion of slowness takes on different meanings if performed or reflected upon through different artistic media (film, video, painting, literature, music, sound, [End Page 457] performance, and dance), and is furthermore complicated by today's manifold intermedial art practices. Taken as such, slowness as relational resonates with the increasing interdependence of the various aesthetic and political processes that inform our global contemporary society by encouraging us to acknowledge the multilayeredness of these connections.1 CONCEPTUALIZING SLOWNESS Contemporary discourse on slowness, much of which originated in reaction to Carlo Petrini's Slow Food movement in 1986, has gained increasing relevance in our ever-accelerating and globalizing present. Far from merely promoting a slowing down, slowness encourages us to address the complexities of contemporary society's production and reception processes with a heightened sensibility to multilayered temporalities and time scales. The relational nature of speed can also serve as a fruitful metaphor for the complex interrelations of spatial and temporal orders in aesthetics and politics, and encourages us to question other persistent binary notions of active versus inactive; individual versus collective; culture versus nature; digital versus analog; human versus machine, animal, or planetary time; as well as any categorization of the arts according to affordances, disciplines, genres, or medium. While on the aesthetic level this leads to an emphasis on cross-media resonances, on the political level it allows for a cross-historical, transnational, and/or intersectional approach, interrelating the effects of class, gender, age, race, and colonial politics. It thus comes with no surprise that slowness, as it is framed within the arts and humanities, is not only a broad but also often a contested theoretical concept. While some see it as a description of decelerated processualities, others emphasize its capacity to sensitize us to an abundance of information and the multimodal affordances of the contemporary. Some suggest using it to invite considerations of perceptual processes, whereas others focus on the temporalities of production. [End Page 458] While the contributors to this special issue engage with persistent understandings of slowness in the arts in terms of deceleration, slow motion, endurance, duration, or stillness, they often work toward challenging such connotations by revisiting their media-theoretical genealogies and historical and local contexts. Similarly, they revisit works that have become signature pieces within the discourse of slowness in the arts, including, in addition to John Cage's ORGAN2/ASLSP: Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967), which features a forty-five-minute zoom into an apartment; Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993), which presents Hitchcock's signature film in extreme slow...