CC: MATOUŠEK, TEA

If we are to deal with the image of the times, it is not only necessary to slow down, it is even necessary not to grow. Although the concept of no-growth was developed as early as the late 1970s by the Austrian-French philosopher André Gorz, it is now becoming resonant for an ever wider range of societies in an era of immense pressure on performance, productivity and production. And if, in his book The Time Virus. A Cultural History of Acceleration (2004), the German historian Peter Borscheid thematizes this currently lived, expensively created system as having in many ways already lost its rational core and as heading inexorably towards absurdity, it is necessary to look for principles how – for example, precisely through art – time can be slowed down, but ideally stopped. The medium of sculpture offers just such a slowing down – and not only to its creator. The creation of an object takes weeks or even months, and what happens in that time is equivalent to the object in question. It holds exactly such a time trace within itself. Its creation cannot be accelerated, nor can it be tricked – the object is a proof of its existence and likewise of the existence of the time that has been devoted to it and within its given boundaries.