On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780231168328)

Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes we understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporary--a decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the present's velocity.

As he engages with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely; the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer; the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola; and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.

Author: Lutz Koepnick
ISBN-10: 0231168322
ISBN-13: 9780231168328
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/07/2014
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 10/15/2014 pg. 97