New Sites for Slowness: Speed and Nineteenth-Century Stereoscopy

Velocity and Images

Somebody once asked Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, “How can you tell good art from bad?” He answered, “With a bad work you immediately say ‘Wow!’ but afterwards you think, ‘Hum? Maybe not.’ With a good work, the opposite happens.”¹ As Ruscha suggests, most visual art worthy of the name does not reveal itself in a flash. Yet the average American spends between six and ten seconds looking at a picture in a museum or a gallery.² So how can we create conditions for richer and more meaningful aesthetic experiences?

To address this problem I have formulated a new aesthetic category that I call “slow art.”³ It is not a collection of objects, as you might suppose; rather, slow art names a dynamic relationship. It transpires in the space between observer and object. Rather than thinking conventionally, in terms of aesthetic works, we must think in terms of reciprocal experiences—encounters between the beheld and the beholders, who register their perceptions in historically specific instances. As a set of experiences, slow art will be different for everybody. And as in quantum physics, changing the way we look changes what we look at.

In this tacit contract between observer and observed, the division of labor can shift. Some works draw us in or seduce us, while others require our pursuit. Seductive works are impossible to specify, because they depend on individual taste and experience. Demanding works might include Ad Reinhardt’s “black” paintings (ca. 1954–67), which at first look like solid black squares, five feet on a side. Over time, as the rods and cones in our eyes adjust, we come to perceive that these canvases are composed of interlocking squares in barely differentiated hues. In a 1960 review, Dore Ashton wrote, “It takes a good ten minutes for the first impression to register, and there is pleasure in the attentive effort to ‘see.’. . . How much more inexplicably moving the hue [is] when it is magically coaxed out after long contemplation.”⁴

The sequence of a slow-art experience can shift as well. “For a thing to be interesting one need only look at it long enough,” observed the novelist Gustave Flaubert; in this case, the beholder initiates the encounter.⁵ By contrast, Monet’s paintings of the Rouen cathedral spark the experience for many museumgoers. The enormous popularity of this series results not only from the intensity of their daring colors and bold brush strokes but also from their markedly temporal character. Monet recorded his experience of the cathedral facade as it changed over the course of a day, inviting us to compare a morning scene with an evening one. But even with a single canvas, we already register the time of viewing. When we approach the surface, the image decomposes into tiny blots of contrasting hues; when we back away, the image recomposes. As Harry Berger said about Renaissance Venetian painting, Monet’s Rouen series “constructs a viewer who is . . . set in motion on a perpendicular shuttle, moving forward and backward before the painting.”⁶

To test my sense of a crisis in beholding—that ten-second glance—we need a case study of the pressures on attentiveness in a culture of speed, a culture that includes ever faster visual technologies of representation. To demonstrate that speed and distraction don’t simply pose contemporary challenges, I will return to the nineteenth century, which was similarly vulnerable to distraction and hungry for faster ways to record the fleeting present. In response to this hunger, there arose photography (ca. 1839), stereoscopy (ca. 1839/51), and film (ca. 1892). I will focus on stereoscopy, which, although the least well known today, became tremendously popular after 1850. After examining this means of reproduction, I will examine the content of stereoscopy by synecdoche, concentrating on pictures of tableaux vivants. Mounting these tableaux generally involved the replication of famous artworks by people wearing costumes and posing on stage sets. The vulgar or kitschy aspects of this pastime, which I do not seek to deny, have led cultural and art historians...