Marking Time


As Rita Felski writes, in one sense, the everyday and its temporality is democratic because “[w]e are all ultimately rooted in the mundane,” yet, “[a]t the same time, some groups, such as women and the working class, are more closely identified with the everyday than others.” This panel considers aesthetic practices that utilize quotidian time as a structuring device of an artistic process. Often, such strategies are adopted by women and minority artists, yet such alignments are not commonly considered. Looking at work that privileges the temporal structures of the everyday and its routine activities, we aim to ask how we might understand the politics and values embodied therein. What happens when artworks adopt strategies that express mundane temporalities or subvert quantifiable clock time? How might an attention to everyday rhythms open a perspective onto the world in its complexities? What can be yielded by featuring readings that demonstrate how a work embodies temporal structures that distance it from more conventional aesthetic temporal structures, such as the transcendent or historical? What values are substituted by featuring the minor repetitions of the daily or the deceleration of time that accompanies waiting, boredom, or rote activities? And what connections to gender, race, and class might be illuminated by framing aesthetic practices in this way?

Field of Study:






Chair:
Elyse D. Speaks,University of Notre Dame - espeaks@nd.edu
Discussant:
Katie Anania,University of Nebraska-Lincoln - katie.anania@gmail.com

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