In over-hyped, over-edited Britain, slowness might save us

[imomus]

Something I love about summer -- and I suppose London's season of lowering skies and fleeting rain still qualifies -- is how it makes me walk. I travel, I arrive, and I walk. It's 'walking as an aesthetic practice' (in the words of a favourite book of mine, the one you can click above). I was walking, walking, walking alone in Barcelona last weekend, walking, walking, walking with friends in Paris all last week, and now in London I walk, walk, walk too. This weekend I walked to the ICA, to Tate Modern, to the Japan Centre, to the Whitechapel, to the degree shows up Brick Lane (my favourite London place to walk), to the Barbican, past my old house in Clerkenwell, past my old house in Covent Garden. I noticed new buildings, younger versions of the old faces, blowing litter, booming commercialization of once-neglected corners, changes of use. I smelt familiar smells: sweet and spicy curry, the smell of the tube, piss in dried stains, paint on canvas. My body began to feel really good after all the walking. At walking pace, London passed by reassuringly slowly, although, to my exile's eyes, its changes seemed speeded up, as if by time-lapse photography.

What I mostly don't like, coming back to Britain, is marketing and television and advertising and pop music. All the stuff that's too fast, too repetitious, and too insistent. It doesn't wait patiently for you to stroll over to it, it comes driving up to you like a car, honking. It offers too much, too soon. It's too compulsive, too well-tailored to your appetites and your boredom threshold. It would be easy to say that I prefer slow and boring forms to these fast and interesting ones because I'm simply getting old and grumpy. But it's not that at all. When a young photographer like Anders Edstrom makes a film, he slows time right down to the speed time really has. The now and the now and the now, going on and on, requiring us (as life does) to supply content for it. And then, suprisingly, the shuffling old man we've been watching for twenty minutes, Derek Bailey, starts playing the guitar, filling in this time we've now got the measure of, supplying content which seems all the more extraordinary for the uncompressed time the film puts around him. There are some things that lose all their meaning when you reduce them to a clip, a highlight, a soundbite.

I was really impressed by We Love Ideas, the degree show by students of the Kent Institute of Art and Design (I actually lectured once at their Time-Based Media department in Canterbury), now showing at Atlantis Gallery 2 on Brick Lane. Perhaps in reaction against the appallingly fast and 'interesting' (yet demonic) British television I've been catching glimpses of (Jeremy Clarkson's car programme is 'all-celebrity' now, and Big Brother is still 'compelling viewing'... if you're already in hell), these students are slowing things right down. I liked two video pieces, one in which someone showed long, static, saturated video shots of places he had strong associations with, and narrated what had happened there, and another in which someone made a pop video in real time, playing on toy instruments, editing rarely. In over-edited, over-hyped Britain, slowness might save us.

How much 'impact' can you pack into a thirty second pseudo-commercial on the BBC? How long will it be before programme-makers realise that this vision of speed, impact and interest is anti-human, alienating, and counter-productive? I'm seeing two things happening in Britain right now, and they're contradictory. On the one hand marketing specialists are taking over everything with their intrusive philosophy of hype and 'impact', making everything faster, louder, and more exciting (but not necessarily more efficient or beautiful), making our tiny human eardrums burst and our tiny human eyes stretch clockwork wide. On the other, a whole generation of artists and art students is going in the opposite direction, slowing everything down, making everything personal and humble and human-scaled. Many of these art students will be heading straight into commercial artforms now they've graduated; pop music, television, advertising, film-making. And the question is, will they change these dismally brash, aggressive, hypey forms, scaling them back to something more modest, likeable and humane, or will the forms as they now exist change them, forcing them to cram more into each edit until finally their vision gets lost in the rush, stuck like a frustrated, once-kindly human being trapped in a 'fast' car in a traffic jam?