Time Out of Joint: Art Against Efficiency

The pursuit of “efficiency” has often come at the expense of democratic processes. This year, we have seen it lead to the rapid undoing of policies that protect women, migrants, refugees, the poor, the environment, and others. In light of the fetish of productivity and speed, we invite artists, scholars, and curators to consider art and theory that center not-doing or slow-doing as forms of resistance.

We call for papers that engage radical acts of making one’s body or work out of sync with capitalist productivity, nationalist modernization, and technological acceleration. This may look like nonproduction or withdrawal, lethargy or tang ping, abject failure, “aesthetics of disengagement,” and projects that disrupt the financial and legal timeline of art ownership. We take special note of how race, gender, class, and disability figure into performances of non-work. As Big Tech dreams of speeding into the posthuman era, what might we learn lingering on the body and materiality, on nonwestern/Indigenous technics, and on the lags and glitches that disrupt devices of war and policing? We also invite projects that grapple with the nonlinear time of change-making—including the unfinished projects of decolonization, reparation, and climate justice, and moments of friction and impasse in allyship- and community-building.

By foregrounding the politics of time, this panel asks how contemporary art histories might be told not through moments of breakthrough, but through inching forward or refusing to move at all. Transnational and diasporic perspectives that complicate Eurocentric readings of labor, futurity, and agency are encouraged.