I used to hate the word procrastination, until I came across the phrase “creative incubation”. Now when I feel inclined to berate myself for indulging in the former, I credit myself with giving space to the latter. It’s transformative, and there are even times when it’s a truer description of the process. Honest.
Along with a growing chorus advocating for a shorter work week — which could give 9-to-5 workers time back for thinking, being, creating and carrying out life tasks beyond the paid workload — there is an important argument for an alternative approach in the mostly self-employed arts.
Recently Lian Bell, the Irish artist and set designer, tweeted about the benefits of slowing down. Equinox Theatre Company, an inclusive performing arts organisation based in Kilkenny, replied: “We’ve been doing the slow thing for a long time now — 2-day week, 6-hour days, 2-3 years to develop and rehearse a show.” Bell responded using the hashtag #slowartsmovement. It hasn’t taken off yet, but it should.
A slow-arts movement could give us all permission to reframe the concept of productivity. A Slow Art Movement already exists, and a Slow Art Day. The American artist Tim Slowinski registered the domain name slowart.com in 1995. It’s home to his fine art company, a magazine and the Limner Gallery, which has a bricks and mortar location in New York. On Slow Art Day, gallery-goers are asked to spend more time looking, an increasingly radical notion in this snap-and-go era of culture consumption.
Slowinski says: “Art is a way of life, a method of being, a way of perceiving the world.” In other words, it’s less about output and more an approach to living. “In a SlowArt life, activity that appears unrelated to art is engaged only as a support structure for art.” Every activity can be seen as part of creative incubation: gardening, laundry, making food, going for a walk.
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In the arts, we tend to measure productivity by whether the show goes on, the song gets released or the book gets launched. We measure it by finished work. Time spent in advance is not a measure of productivity. Is it better to write three mediocre plays in three months or to take three years to complete one masterpiece? Who pays the bills while you’re doing it?
I once worked for a global multinational that had a regular Innovation Day. It was sold to new recruits as time to do whatever you needed to shift your thinking: draw, research, write code for a pet project, experiment. Innovation had to be product-related. The company still needed evidence of “work”. That said, everyone got paid while doing it, unlike in the arts.
The New Zealand-based entrepreneurs Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart, the founders of the 4 Day Week Global Community, are consistently asked: “With reduced hours, how do you measure productivity?” Their answer is: “How do you measure it currently?” Barnes quotes “Parkinson’s law”, that work expands to fill the time available; and the “80/20 Principle”, which claims 80 per cent of productivity is achieved in 20 per cent of our time. They are pushing for global adoption of a 32 rather than 40-hour work week “for the same pay and benefits”. This is crucial. Perhaps for artists, a universal basic income is the solution.
Thinking is working. Not thinking is also working, because sometimes when you stop looking directly at a problem your brain solves it while you are doing something else — like cleaning the kitchen floor. Imagine how we all might live if we changed the value of output, and how we measure and pay for time.
