Young unemployed demonstrators in November 1981. Photograph: Jacob Sutton/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images.
I had other things I’ve been meaning to write (about art criticism and returning to a subject, about despair and futility), and a handful of small, niggling administrative tasks to do (send invoices; merge pensions; change standing order to reflect my rent increase; check the kitchen before heading to the supermarket) but I’ve been thinking about time wasting and not really finding the right moment to do something about it. Why not now, in between other more pressing tasks?
Time wasting is easy to reappraise – oh, overwhelmed by this wickedly fast-paced world of ours, I must turn off my phone and go snort some roses – because what we’re imagining is sickly sentimental, and therefore totally disconnected from how life is lived. Time wasting hangs around as a feeling in moments of tiredness, distraction and sickness, although in each of those cases it’s really serving a function of rest, looping back to a form of productivity. In countless op-eds about rediscovering the value of time wasting, this is the unspoken promise – you can work smarter, not harder.
When wasting time, we are often ardently busy. When describing why he taught a class about wasting time on the internet, the poet Kenneth Goldsmith explained in an op-ed: ‘We’ve become very good at being distracted. From a creative point of view, this is reason to celebrate.’ The students were instructed to scroll with feverish abandon, jumping between tabs, across sites, ping ponging between different and disparate ideas with the hope of stimulating new thought, or at the very least, with new words. The clickbait title had a deeper goal: ‘We spend our lives in front of screens, mostly wasting time: checking social media, watching cat videos, chatting, and shopping. What if these activities — clicking, SMSing, status-updating, and random surfing — were used as raw material for creating compelling and emotional works of literature?’
When I think about time wasting, I think about the films of Kevin Smith, although this is quite unfair really, since everyone in Clerks is employed: both the cashier and the drug dealers who hang out by the entrance. Their relationship with labour is light – as if life happened to them, out of nowhere, and they’re simply counting down the hours and minutes until they can relax:)
You close soon?
Yeah, half an hour.
We get off at the same time everyday. We should hang out. You get high?
I should start.
Wanna come with me to this party tonight? – there’s going to be some pussy there, man.
With you? I don’t think so.
Smith cites the influence of his father and Richard Linklater’s Slacker as inspiration for his own directing. His father hated working at the post office, prompting Smith to never want to work a job that he hated, like all of his characters later would. Seeing the low-fi approach of Linklater made him feel like he could make films.
Very few of the characters in Slacker, and if you’ve seen it, that is a lot of people, appear to have a job, instead they wander around aimlessly, ranting and raving; many claim to be various kinds of professions. They are very busy though (“You know me, I’ve been keeping up with my, uh, JFK assassination theories, y’know.”).
I’d prefer to be keeping up with JFK assassination theories than browsing social media, although the two activities overlap a lot nowadays. A more modern account of time wasting might be Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, a book of essays about how digital platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify ‘took over our modes of cultural distribution in the past decade’, producing a kind of flattening effect on culture. His discussion of ‘ambient TV’ is quite profound I think – a term which describes how much culture is created to provide ‘sympathetic background for staring at your phone’.
In a standard Netflix show, the plot is too thin to be confusing; you can scroll at will while it chugs along, even reading commentary about the show while it unfolds. Chakya writes:
‘It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions.’
Ambient TV contrasts slow TV, where long unedited scenes would unfold, which Chakya describes encountering as if he was a character in Clerks: ‘I recall the videos chiefly from parties at my artist friends’ house, where everyone would inevitably end up stoned on the couch, gasping as the train entered a tunnel and the screen blacked out. Slow TV inspires a kind of awe at realness, the texture of experience itself; it’s a phenomenological exercise that heightens our perception.’
I can imagine the Kenneth Goldsmith essay praising this – the trace-like sublime of contemporary culture is reminiscent of religious ecstasy – and I suppose time wasting does always trade in a certain utopian hope, just as many stories of utopia imagine the world without work and toil.
The utopian claim to time wasting is often made as a promise about what will happen after the revolution; less convincing is the claim that time wasting might create a revolution.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Luilekkerland (‘The Land of Cockaigne’) references Cockaigne, a folk tale about a land of plenty where the streets are paved with food, rivers flow with wine or milk and roast chickens soar in the sky before flying directly into a person’s mouth. It’s not exactly a story about time wasting, but outlines gluttony and abundance taken to a bodily extreme – all they do is consume. I’ve written previously about this painting in relation to the work of artist Sam Keogh for The White Review:
Cockaigne, the medieval-era dreamland depicted by Bruegel, is a strange purgatorial place between heaven and hell; the only way you can get there is by being a glutton. One of its earliest recorded examples comes from the KILDARE POEMS, a series of manuscripts from around 1330, which document early Anglo-Irish linguistic developments in the centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. Likely written by a Franciscan order, the bounties of Cockaigne are weaponised as a satire against a rival order of Cistercian monks. The descriptions of a decadent abbey – there are wells full of treacle and affairs with nuns nearby – suggest an idle lifestyle that deviates from the proper duties of prayer and charity. Elsewhere, its etymology can be traced to Middle French for ‘land of plenty’, deriving from a word for a small sweet cake. A Spanish equivalent suggests ‘fools’ paradise’, and a related Dutch term means ‘lazy luscious-land’.
Both Goldsmith and Chakya are often circling around the same question at hand, although with differing judgments about the subject. When Chakya describes the corporate-driven algorithmic push towards passivity (‘Whereas the Internet once promised to provide on-demand access to limitless information and media to anyone willing to make use of a Google search, lately it has encouraged a more passive kind of engagement, a state of slack-jawed consumption only intensified by this past year’s quarantine ennui.’) Goldsmith would relish the opportunity to see what kind of literature and poetry a person might make when seeped in the soft churn of digital content (‘Nothing is off limits: if it is on the Internet, it is fair play. Students watching three hours of porn can use it as the basis for compelling erotica; they can troll nefarious right-wing sites, scraping hate-filled language for spy thrillers; they can render celebrity Twitter feeds into epic Dadaist poetry; they can recast Facebook feeds as novellas; or they can simply hand in their browser history at the end of a session and present it as a memoir.’)
Goldsmith cites the Surrealists as forerunners of creative time wasting, as their valorisation of the unconscious mind – and in particular, sleep – created a different relationship with productivity and authorship. (A Netflix spokesperson once infamously stated their main competition was with sleep).
I like the sound of his reading list: ‘To bolster our practice, we'll explore the long history of the recuperation of boredom and time wasting through critical texts about affect theory, ASMR, situationism and everyday life by thinkers such as Guy Debord, Mary Kelly Erving Goffman, Betty Friedan, Raymond Williams, John Cage, Georges Perec, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefevbre, Trin Minh-ha, Stuart Hall, Sianne Ngai, Siegfried Kracauer and others. Distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory.’
In some ways, I’m treading ground I touched upon in Not Working, which circles around ideas of selfhood and optimisation, maybe:
‘Time is the essential, but most elusive factor. Thousands of words might flow in an hour or two. Days might tick by with little to nothing to show for it. I chase information about the impacts of vitamins and energy levels in the hope to boost my productivity; I run, stretch and adopt various forms of exercise to shake brain fog, to sharpen my mind. It does and doesn’t work. Resolutions don’t yield to the calendar just as the body has its own rhythm.’
Time wasting is ultimately about time, and the agency to spend it as you wish. You might wish to do nothing at all, its own kind of freedom. Ultimately, time is about money, and vice versa.
‘Much of my early work came out of the fact that I had absolutely no money,’ Joseph Kosuth said in 1994. At a different stage in his life, he had money but a new set of responsibilities creates its own kinds of pressures. ‘Because you must cope with having that kind of economic power. Dealing with stocks and bonds and real estate takes away from what you want to be spending your time doing. It's equivalent to hustling around for money, trying to pay your studio rent. There's a very interesting relation between those two, time-wasting aspects of economic life.’
Is Joseph Kosuth a landlord?
Art is interesting to think about in relation to time wasting because mostly art is a waste of time, or more precisely, requires someone to waste a lot of time in the process.
The Irish artist Hannah Fitz titled one of her exhibitions ‘Lookieloo’, which critic Frank Wasser explained, is ‘a term coined by US real-estate agents to describe time-wasting clients, who view properties with no intention of buying them – as an oblique comment on the country’s housing crisis, which has seen affordability and supply plummet in recent years.’
Ultimately, time wasting is about housing.
I remember interviewing Thomas Lawson and writer Susan Morgan about REAL LIFE, an influential art magazine associated with the Pictures Generation. They talked a lot about cheap rents and living off grants, like a lot of stories about artists from the 70s and 80s in New York did. “We were able to survive for the roughly 12 years that we did it because of our support systems that had been put in place in the late 60s and early 70s.”
In the UK, the yBas echoed a similar story: a group of artists doing what they wanted, surviving on welfare, grants and cheap rent. But where magazines like REAL LIFE sought to offer a counter to the commercialised centre of the art world, the yBas had a more ambiguous, if not cynical relationship. Art historian Julian Stallabrass wrote that their DIY exhibitions, like Freeze, “were in part a response to the withdrawal of state grants to individual artists during the Thatcher years. They also evolved in reaction to the changing character of public art institutions in the same period.”
In one particularly striking way, the relationship between Thatcherism and the yBas was direct – many artists took advantage of a UBI-styled entrepreneurship programme, the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, to work as artists.
The details were as follows:
‘The Enterprise Allowance Scheme started in 1981, offering those of working age who wanted to start a business an allowance of £40 a week, for up to one year. Recipients had to have been unemployed for at least eight weeks and have savings or loans of at least £1000, the equivalent to around £3600 today.’
The Guardian profiled Rachel Whiteread’s experience on the scheme:
Whiteread was an unlikely model capitalist. Born into a red-ribbed Labour household in Essex, she was 16 when Thatcher came to power. After art school, she did odd jobs to fund her early exhibitions in 1987 and 88, including as a painter-decorator, a film prop assistant, and working in restaurants and bars. “Multi-talented,” she says wryly.
When she heard about the EAS, Whiteread jumped at the chance. “All you needed was a downpayment, and to attend some kind of induction day.” What was her business plan? “I think I said I was going to be a self-employed artist.”
It proved to be transformative. Whiteread now had the ability – crucially – to rent a studio, which enabled her to begin making the large-scale sculptures and casts she had become interested in. The living-room-sized Ghost came in 1990. “It was hugely valuable, getting the space. I wasn’t trying to make money; I was just trying to find a way of making work.”
Whiteread played a double game – she was able to be an artist, because she said it was a business. Later versions of this scheme would be announced by successive governments, both Conservatives and Labour, yet no similar loopholes were possible for artists to exploit.
Various representative bodies from the wider art world have picked up the idea though and continue to run with it, arguing for the arts through economic metrics, and more recently, adjacent concepts of social impacts like community cohesion and wellness.
I have to go to the shop now – maybe there will be more later, when I have some time to kill.