This workshop aims to critically examine artistic, literary, philosophical, and political strategies and practices of inaction. It looks at how these practices, on one hand, work against dominant cultural and political narratives and, on the other, are absorbed by capitalism and ultimately become neoliberal adjuncts to prevailing economic and political systems. The focus of the workshop will be on artistic and aesthetic practices from the early twentieth century until today, since they offer a particularly fertile testing ground for thinking through strategies of action and inaction. One example might be found with so-called unofficial artists, writers, and intellectuals in totalitarian or post-totalitarian systems. They could not afford to protest in plain sight and thus often chose non-assuming and perhaps counter-intuitive strategies like leisure, ambivalence, and irony for staging their resistance. Also, Eastern European performance art, for example, has long demonstrated that inaction can structure the artist’s presence as much as (if not more eloquently than) action. Here, the typical action, which with its Western connotations is often imagined to lead to a romanticized version of revolution, is subverted.
PROGRAMME
Thursday, 11 July
14:00–14:30 Hana Gründler and Antje Kempe
Welcome and Introduction
From Withdrawal to Distraction
Chair: Simon Godart
14:30–15:00 Helen Lewandowski
‘Powerful’ and ‘Interesting’: Photojournalism and Aesthetics in Luc Delahaye’s Work
15:00–15:30 Jakub Marek
The Right to Be Distracted. On the Problem of Inactivity, Focus, and Distraction
Abandonment and Evasion
Chair: David Ventura
16:00–16:30 Ewa Macura-Nnamdi
Abandoned Lives: On Inaction in Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx
16:30–17:00 Wing Ki Lee
Tang Ping and Contemporary Sinophone: Subconsciousness, Subtext, and Subdue
Productive Inactivity?
Chair: Emir Yigit
17:30–18:00 Tobias Ertl
Artistic Inactivism: Conceptual Art and Modernity’s Productivist Paradigm
18:00–18:30 Anne Gräfe
The Ambiguity of In/Activity in John Knights “The Right to be Lazy”
Evening Lecture
Moderated by Hana Gründler
19:00 D. Graham Burnett
Apophatic Activism. Science, Politics, and Silence in the 1960s
(Livestream available)
Friday, 12 July
Retraction
Chair: Valerio Aparo
9:30–10:00 Michael Krimper
“Le désœuvré, l’oisif”: The Unemployed Writer from Benjamin to Bataille
10:00–10:30 Amanda Wasielewski
Never Work Again: Creative Labor, AI and Radical Retreat
Apathy and Resistance
Chair: Oliver Aas
11:00–11:30 Josip Klaić
Gorgona Group: Inactivity as Resistance to the Socialist Regime
11:30–12:00 Renata Salecl
Apathy, Inactivity, and Alienation: The Three Virtues of Neo-Liberalism
On Doing Nothing and Slowing Down
Chair: Michal Zechariah
13:30–14:00 Ellie Power
Aimless Drifting and Slowness in Urban Films
14:00–14.30 J. Igor Fardin and Richard Lee Peragine
(In)activity and Architecture: “doing nothing apart from…”
(Not) Sleeping
Chair: Magdalena Nieslony
15:00–15:30 Angelica Stathopoulos
Bad Sleep as Moral Good
15:30 Anne Glassner, Performance and Lecture
Active Sleep! I’m Going to Rest