Sleep Mode and the Cultural Politics of Time

As part of the Sleep Mode takeover week, we welcome back curator Sarah Cook to reflect on co-curating our 2019 exhibition 24/7: A Wake-up Call for our Non-stop World and to draw our attention to how artists work and play, then, and now, and how we might all pay attention differently after lockdown.

Hyphen-Labs (whose Gospel According to Yawn features in the Sleep Mode broadcast on Friday night) wrote:

"The work never stops, we inject sleep and play into our lives whenever we can. Our average arrangement is work 11 hours; sleep 7 hours; play 4 hours. The hours are flexible and change depending on the project, but art, and thus, our work, is intertwined between our waking and dreaming minds."

The different members of Hyphen-Labs all had different equations for their division of time (work 3 hours; sleep 4 hours; play 17 hours), not all of which added up to a normal 24-hour day.

Douglas Coupland (whose Slogans for the 21st Century were the mantra of 24/7 and are the new mantra for life in lockdown) wrote:

"I’m a sleep freak. I get nine and a half hours every day of my life, and it’s why I’ve been self-employed since 1988 – I’ve based my entire life on getting those nine and a half hours, and it’s why I never do a morning radio or TV work or take early flights. Sleep always comes first."

It struck me that when asked about their sleep, most artists instead talked about their work. As a curator it is essential I ask artists about their work, but I’ve learned that I should ask all artists about their sleep, in part because of the way they often juggle the practice of making art with other forms of labour, whether self-employment or freelance contract work. Lockdown has exposed the fragility of those routines in professional and personal lives. 

A favourite book of mine, Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, details the eccentric working (and sleeping) routines of great creative people and is the ideal counterpoint to the 'highly effective habits of successful people' - genre of motivational or self-help guidebook which usually crowd out the novels on the shelves of an airport bookstore (buying a book before boarding a plane - remember that?). Georgia O’Keefe would take her half-hour walk before breakfast at 7 a.m. (hot chili with garlic oil, eggs, bread, jam, fruit, coffee) and then paint all day, with a lunch at noon and light supper at 4.30 p.m. so that her evenings were free for a long drive in desert. Proust didn’t leave his bed, and wrote, ate, and drank there; Mozart was up and had his hair done by 6 a.m. before a day of composing, teaching and attending concerts. Curators too have particular work/sleep routines: Hans Ulrich Obrist famously commented that he used to sleep 15 minutes every three hours. Me? I sleep a solid 7 hours but wake most nights at about 4.33 a.m. and listen to the silence - or the dawn chorus - before falling back into dreamland.

I, like others, find that the pressures of work shape the times of the day I can switch off. This is more evident during lockdown when the other thing that used to shape my work time - travel - is not possible anymore. Working on 24/7, the meetings to develop the exhibition were measured in increments of time, which started out stretched and unstructured, and then became fixed the closer we got to deadlines. The six hours on the train from home in Scotland to work in London served as time for me to read and write so that the eight hour day could be scheduled with meetings. My own recognition of the distinction between my working time and my leisure time was often determined by external factors and technology: laptop battery power left; wifi speeds; my phone telling me whether the article is a long read or a two minute read; the failure of the power coupler on the train’s engine resulting in a delay. As cultural theorist Sarah Sharma points out in her essay Speed Traps and the Temporal, discussions of time spent tend to be about pace (how efficient or fast are you?) rather than about how time constraints shape us as citizens in a shared society:

I am someone who is often asked how I do it all - using the train as my office and the commute as productive time. My being in sleep mode or not, efficiently working or distracted and tired, doesn’t really matter, and I am privileged to even consider it. As Sharma notes, it’s one thing to analyse the conditions of one’s working life, and the role technology plays in creating or enabling those conditions, but such an analysis doesn’t “deal with the uneven cultural politics of time”.

These uneven cultural politics are highlighted now many of us are #WFH or furloughed, and learning to structure our days differently, and balance work with family life, or, as Alan Warburton pointed out, becoming aware of our being subject to inhuman kinds of rhythms instigated by computerised systems. It has brought to the fore the complex relationship between distraction and attention – committing time necessary to get something done, or the time to switch off. That is the matter at the heart of this week’s takeover of Somerset House’s programme to stage Sleep Mode (the off-shoot of 24/7 which was due to be exhibited at Glasgow International in April and was cancelled along with everything else). All exhibitions used to have fixed opening dates and times. There were times when you could pay attention and other times when you weren’t able to, or could give yourself permission not to. Distraction is something we use to break up our working time, to get us through the day. Attention is something we give when we have privilege of time or the inclination to, whether that is work time or leisure time.

Add to the new working/not working conditions the fact that so much cultural activity has now moved online, and this work/rest/recreation balance shifts and blurs again. Before lockdown it seemed we already consumed content via the screen at all hours of the day and night, but it is even more so now. In the absence of an alternative means of being together, we have overwhelmingly given our attention, at the expense of our privacy, to systems which enable us to pay attention (whatever the cost) to other distracting things, together, at the same time. Another watch party tonight? Am I late for the Zoom quiz?

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In his book Infinite Distraction, cultural theorist Dominic Pettman argues that social media might very well be designed for us to be outraged at the same thing, broadly at the same time, but not for long enough to lift our eyes from the screen to do much about it:

This has changed now as the world has changed, seeing a pandemic and protests spread across the globe, with actions fuelled by what has been shared online. As we wrote - almost a year ago now - in the publication accompanying the exhibition, 24/7 - “much of the thinking about tuning out and turning off is not about abdicating responsibility to fight the systems, but a call to action which starts by at least recognising them, and creates regular, recurrent routines which might resist or impede them”. Our work and our leisure, on screen and off, is interrupted, by the real world, and that’s a good thing. We turn our attention to those systems to better serve us. 

The image of the artist as dreamer is nostalgic compared to the picture of the artist as activist, more befitting our current technological and political age. Either way, artists are often referred to as bellwethers, or canaries in coal mines, alerting us through their work to changes in the atmosphere, causing us to look at the world, and our potential shared futures, anew.

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Photo by @Joan0fsnark

In response to our invitation, Jonathan Crary, whose 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep inspired the exhibition, wrote of this political imperative and capacity that artists have to release us from our sleep mode

"Realistic strategies of resistance require the invention of new ways of living. There has to be a radical rethinking of what our needs are, of rediscovering our own desires beyond the flood of destructive and shallow cravings that are promoted unremittingly. Not only must we stop buying what we are told we need, we must disavow the role of consumer altogether. There must be a refusal of the deathliness of billionaire culture, and all the debilitating images of ownership and material affluence with which we’re surrounded. For those with children, it means abandoning the many desperate expectations they now carry to compete for individual success, and instead providing them with anticipations of a livable future shared in common. But these changes would be just the beginning, preliminary to the larger and more difficult challenges ahead."

And so now, here, in the week of the year with the longest day and the shortest night, you are invited to give your attention to works of art that respond to ideas about time, inescapable connectivity, the gig economy, surveillance and the balance between public and private. In the context of the current inter-related crises in public health and political empowerment, you might want to give up living in sleep mode, and instead pause, and reset, not go back to your 24/7 life. What new habits and routines have you learned during lockdown and how will those influence your desired ‘new normal’? Perhaps, like Hyphen-Labs' Creative Director, you also now spend your Sundays protesting. The exhibition Sleep Mode was intended to address our diminished capacity to pay attention in a world based on a ceaseless cycle of production and consumption. We hope that now, for many, these works might suggest how we can address the temporal conditions that require our urgent attention (the uneven cultural politics of time) in ways we didn’t consider before.