ENXI LIU:
ESSAY:
The Privilege of Slowness
I am standing in front of Antony Williams’ portrait, Emma. From a distance, the face seems calm; up close, it trembles. Williams has spent months building it with thousands of spider-web-thin strokes in egg tempera, a medium that dries instantly and cannot be blended. Look long enough, and the skin appears to break into a vibrating mesh of red, blue, green, and ochre lines. Step back, and those discordant hues miraculously resolve; the flesh re-ignites with life. It feels more real than real.
Outside the gallery, artificial intelligence can generate a “perfect” face in seconds: poreless, symmetrical, effortlessly pleasing, as precise as industrial reproduction. In half a second, our thumbs decide whether that face is worth another glance. In an attention economy where eight seconds can determine the life or death of an image, Williams’ painting feels almost aggressively slow. It asks a question that continues to trouble me: in the twenty-first century, who still has the privilege of being seen this slowly, this expensively?
“Slowness” today is a word that demands deconstruction. If it were merely a matter of duration—four thousand hours versus eight seconds—then we would be discussing nothing more than the logic of luxury craftsmanship: the production of scarcity through un-replicable labor time. But Emma feels different. There is an almost philosophical experience here, what Henri Bergson calls durée. Those spider-web strokes are not man-hours waiting to be filled, but creases left by time upon the surface. You cannot see those four thousand hours, but you feel them, in the moment you are pinned to the spot, in the second your gaze is arrested, in that brief interval where you forget to check the clock.
To be able to read “time” in these strokes is perhaps only possible because the museum has taught us a specific way of seeing: one that treats lingering as a prerequisite for understanding, and the sustained gaze as the inevitable path to encountering a work. We are living through a malady of social acceleration; as diagnosed by Hartmut Rosa, what is disappearing is precisely this thickness of experience filled by time. We have more units of time, yet fewer moments permeated by it.
The problem, however, is that this mode of seeing is itself the result of a filtering process. The “Distinction” defined by Pierre Bourdieu provides a clue: aesthetic disposition is the embodiment of class. To be able to pause before a painting for more than eight seconds, to discern the creases of time within Williams’ strokes, this is not a natural gift, but a bodily marker of cultural capital. The viewer’s eye has been trained by art history education, nourished by museum visits, and polished by countless implicit class filters. Williams paints Emma; Emma is painted; and the viewer stands before her, looking. The relation between these three positions begins to sketch a structure of class reproduction. This does not mean the viewer’s experience is “false,” but it carries an indelible social coordinate.
Portraiture has never been merely a storage device for time. Historically, it has played many ignoble roles in the distribution of time: whose time is worth recording? Whose time is worth gazing upon? In Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits of landed gentry, the tenant farmers tilling the land remain in the background. Behind that aristocratic smile lies a history of other people’s labor time being appropriated without compensation. Anthony van Dyck painted Charles I as a divine monarch, yet he could not hide the trajectory of a dynasty approaching its end within his brushwork. If we are moved by a portrait today, it is perhaps because the filter of time has sifted out these more complex elements. How was this work commissioned? On whose wall does it hang? Whose gaze does it serve?
This means that when we speak of “slowness,” we are never talking merely about aesthetics, but about the politics of time. Whose “slowness” is endowed with value? Whose “slowness” is deemed a waste? Who is entitled to be gazed upon for four thousand hours? Whose eyes are worthy of responding to such a gaze? These questions permeate the entire history of portraiture.
Within the white walls of the Mall Galleries, the portrait completes its sociological closed loop. It confirms whose face is worth recording for four thousand hours, while simultaneously confirming whose eyes are worthy of this labor. This mode of seeing is itself a kind of “time tax.” When we enjoy this privilege of slowness in the gallery, we are, in effect, exercising a right of amnesty, an exemption from being driven by an accelerated society. While this privilege objectively protects the depth of art, it also carries an elitist exclusivity. As predecessors have noted, a portrait is not merely an image, but a synthesis of context, interpretation, and art history.
Even more problematic is the discourse of labor. We are accustomed to praising the nine hundred hours of Lucian Freud or the four thousand hours of Antony Williams, calling these hours a “testament to labor”. But this labor is only seen, discussed, and imbued with meaning because it has already passed through the filters of the art market. The uncertified slowness—the slowness that never enters a museum, receives no critique, and commands no price—is the true silent majority of this system. To talk about slowness without talking about this mechanism of selection is to talk only about the slowness that is permitted to exist.
Yet, if we stop at “everything is a filter,” we miss something more vital. Because that moment did happen. The skin did break into lines of red, blue, green, and ochre; the discordant hues did resolve upon the retina, and the flesh did re-ignite with life. In that moment, class did not disappear and theory did not fall silent, but they receded into the background. In the foreground, there was only the eye, and the face before it.
Freud, Saville, and Williams produce, through slowness, an un-recuperable surplus, the lingering warmth left by the artist’s fingertips. Unlike the false lightness of digital imagery supported by sheer computing power, we find in Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping the carnal presence of Sue Tilley, neither “beautiful” nor “ugly,” neither “pitied” nor “objectified”. In Saville’s mounds of paint, we find the marks of constant revision, struggle, and uncertainty, the evidence of a battle. On the surface of Emma, we find the vibration of colored lines that can never be replicated, visible only to those standing before the original.
This surplus can only be received through a sustained, even coercive gaze, and only through the viewer’s own body. Once received, it plants within the viewer a permanent discomfort with everything that is faster, lighter, and easier to consume. The market has long learned to recuperate everything, but those who have experienced a true gaze can no longer be satisfied by substitutes. This is the defensive line of portraiture: a refusal to be reduced to consumable visual fast food, demanding that the viewer respond to the thickness of the image with an equal intensity of focus.
The viewer is invited to be like an unarmed soldier: to lay down one’s gaze as one might lay down a weapon.
Today, hundreds of millions of faces flow across our screens. Digital images are light, but the algorithms that generate these faces are backed by vast data systems and the labor of tens of thousands of labelers; by billions of images scraped without consent and a continuous infrastructure of computing power. Digital imagery has its own thickness, but this thickness exists not at the level of experience, but at the level of extraction. If the act of viewing on a screen feels light, it is because the weight has been shifted onto invisible infrastructures and low-wage labelers.
When we discuss the “slowness” of portraiture, if we focus only on aesthetics, we repeat the oldest mistake in art history: masking politics with aesthetics.
We must ask: who is excluded from this conversation on slowness? Is there any room to democratize this pinned-down gaze, rather than leaving it as the grace of a select few?
Emma hangs on the wall. It does not ask the viewer if they have read Bourdieu, nor does it ask if they have seen through the system. It poses a more fundamental interrogation: in the wilderness of acceleration, do you still possess the capacity to be “pinned”?
In that moment of being pinned, time changes its mode of existence. It is not eternity, it is merely eight seconds stretched to the length of a lifetime.
If this is a privilege, perhaps it is no longer merely a privilege of money or class, but a capacity to maintain the integrity of human subjectivity in an age of digital extraction. This capacity is becoming like the strokes of an egg tempera painting: both resilient and exceedingly rare.
Antony Williams RP, ‘Emma’
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