Slow Art Collective

A garden of contemplation built from components of speed. An ecological experiment. A diversion. I am standing in a landscape shaped out of over 17 tonnes of e-waste. Masses of power cords and leads snake around the edges of black mountainous forms. Tiny green and red diodes blink coolly from jumbled depths of electro-waste caves. To my left, a slope of grey keyboards inclines with unsettling grace into a field of copper-sparkling monitor-coils. The ground below is covered in granulated plastic flakes that crunch lightly underfoot … future-sand on the shores of an information ocean. Concentric circles of salvaged computer parts spiral outwards on either side of the narrow path. Packed with soil and re-purposed as pot plants, some are already shooting green sprouts of potato and wheat. From concealed speakers filters a cyclic soundtrack, its tonalities reminiscent of bird-calls, prayer bells, or the blips of arcade games stretched out and slowed through the circuitry of delay.

When I was eight years old, plastic was forever. Every chip packet littering the oval was a potential monolith awaiting discovery by future alien civilisations. Fast-forward to 2009 and the largest human-made structure on Earth is now a former rubbish dump for New York City. Imagine the Great Wall of China scrunched up into a ball and sunk several kilometres into the ground – Fresh Kills Landfill is even bigger. With over 150 million of tonnes of food scraps, construction materials, clothing and domestic waste, the structure is clearly visible from space. After the dump’s closure in 2002, Fresh Kills was slated for development as NYC’s biggest public park. Which makes me wonder where the 36,200 tons of garbage generated in Manhattan every day will now go.

The Slow Art Collective are drawn to similar questions and comparable scenarios. A collaborative enterprise founded by Tony Adams, Chaco Kato, Ash Keating and Dylan Martorell in 2009, SAC focuses on waste, environmental issues and the promotion of sustainable art practices. TS2 (Transfer Station 2) was their first major project. The installation was constructed over three weeks with support from the Incinerator Art Complex, two e-waste recycling companies in Melbourne and the Moonee Valley City Council Waste Transfer Station. This station is conveniently located next door to the Incinerator Arts Complex gallery, and is one of the few in Victoria to facilitate the recycling of toxicological electronic waste. The raw materials donated for the project included hard plastics, sound-cards, printer-cards, network-cards, cables, keyboards, disk drives, slag, monitor coils, motors, fans, heat sinks, brushes and one thousand, one hundred and eighty-seven mother boards. All of these elements were loaned on the proviso they were returned for recycling after the project’s completion. After three weeks, SAC’s giant avant-garden was dismantled and the parts returned to the station for usage elsewhere.
As SAC explain, the idea is to minimise footprints by ‘creating art works on site from zero that go back to zero, in order to seek the meaning of work that doesn’t last.’1 With values that reflect those of the Slow Movement, Slow Art prefers materials plucked from local contexts and gleaned from the surrounding environment. If Slow Food promotes locally grown produce, organic materials and long Sunday afternoon lunches, Slow Art is the artistic equivalent. Processes are privileged over finished products; materials are sourced from the immediate environment and surroundings. Life and art are both regarded as durational, ephemeral experiences that coalesce over time.

So what is gained by going Slow? And how is it even possible to take control of one’s time? In his 2004 book In praise of Slow, journalist Carl Honoré describes how the clock came to be ‘the operating system of modern capitalism, the thing that makes everything else possible.’2 The world has only operated on ‘clock time’ for around a century – the first wind-up clocks were released in 1876, and it took until 1911 for most countries to standardise their time-keeping systems to Greenwich meridian time. Before standardised time, production was indexed to the natural cycles of the sun, moon and seasons. In cultures in which ideas of cyclic or seasonal time still prevail, it is often possible not only to ‘lose time’ but also to ‘make time’ – time does not race like a train toward some eschatological destination but is rather regarded as something of a renewable resource. These temporal possibilities were all but obliterated with the onset of modernity, and its attendant addiction to speed, excess and surplus value.

In recent years, many artists have been slowing the pace and re-connecting with more flexible temporal frameworks. In 2005, curator Nicolas Bourriaud observed that contemporary art now finds affinity with ‘forms of sustainable development, renewable energies that are able to filter in between the cracks of existing forms.’3 These enterprises often involve relational aspects, non-permanent materials and non-invasive methods of construction and presentation. During TS2, for example, the gallery operated as a construction site, with visitors able to encounter the work in various stages of completion. The artists also hosted small events involving members of the local community, such as the ‘computer key poetry’ workshop. The ‘opening’ of the show was delayed until the final days of installation, in recognition of the gallery as a generative rather than a closed environment.
Expanding the time of construction and consumption has been a key element of Ash, Chaco, Dylan and Tony’s individual practices for some years now. Ash Keating’s 2020? at the Meat Market (on which Chaco also worked) took the form of a progressive, collaborative installation crafted from tonnes of non-compostable material destined for land-fill – a conglomerate of waste momentarily diverted from its normative trajectory. Tony Adams’ Green Transfer Station assembled a bowerbird-like collection of ‘green things’ together with an invitation for visitors to confess their ‘green sins’ (I recall one note inscribed in tight, sad handwriting that read ‘I have one hour long showers’). Green things and eco-systems are also found throughout Dylan Martorell and Chaco Kato’s works. Chaco has grown sculptures from grass strands and staged ‘visible composting’ workshops, while Dylan’s entropic exhibitions frequently combine sonic elements with living organisms: a patch of grass; a colony of mushroom spores; a decaying ecology.

Slow Art is not about doing everything in slow motion. It’s about recognising that people live and work at different temporal rhythms and that time, as W.G. Sebald once wrote, is ‘by far the most artificial of all our inventions’.4 The trick is to take your time finding the right speed at which to do things, while resisting the arbitrary imposition of external scheduling. Most galleries, for example, are only open on certain days at certain times, and many are dedicated solely to the presentation of ‘finished’ works. In Chaco’s words, ‘an artist creates an artwork at the studio, sends the work to be installed, and after the show it is packed away and goes into storage’.5 Process-based installations are still vastly outnumbered by discreet exhibitions of art objects. The same time codes appear over and over again: openings on weeknights at 6pm, exhibitions closed on Mondays, three week exhibition slots ... What emerges is a conceptual and material discrepancy between art works that are in essence durational – works that take days and weeks or even years to evolve – and the flash in the pan circuitry upon which art markets appear to thrive.

TS2 allows us to proceed without haste through an organic landscape of sound, form and image – to take a walk through an installation that is also a temporal environment. Pausing at one curve of the garden path, it seems we are looking back from the future on the remains of the present. The melted chunks of black and grey computer parts arranged in rock-pool like formations appear as fossils of forms whose purpose has long been forgotten. I imagine a world in which all records have disappeared to be replaced by the ‘deep time’ of the palaeontologists and geologists: a realm in which events are glacial and temporal markers are stretched over millions of years. The trajectories of objects – their origins, their future – are here reconsidered from the perspective of a new chronology. By slowing things down, time emerges not as a line but as a lattice of tangential possibilities.