Eight Hours Labour, Eight Hours Recreation, Eight Hours Rest: What We Will Need Is More Time for What We Will (?)

Dear Colleagues,

The working-class claim “eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest” (8–8–8) was born with the Industrial Revolution. While projecting the right to balance work, rest and free time, this claim has engendered a way of life based on a purely utilitarian notion of time in relation to human life. The time of work and the time of leisure have become de-regulated within capitalism. Human beings have, as a consequence, become alienated from the temporalities and processes on which life itself depends. Industrialisation in parallel with capitalism, the economic system that still dominates the world today, relies on human beings consuming more and more within a globalised mono culture, a way of being that undermines the capacity for life to sustain itself by means of diversity.

Artists have increasingly turned towards such issues, re-awakening a sense of social commitment and urgency. They are seeking to bring to the foreground different temporalities and qualities of experience, spanning the private and intimate with the public, engaging with conflict or mere indifference. Many are seeking to re-instate notions of public interest and welfare of individuals, family and community as a critical counterpoint to neoliberalism, an extreme form of capitalism that has taken market rationality to its limits.

Artists are exploring new ways of imagining time, space and experience performatively often transgressing accepted norms in ways that enable us to come to terms with our entanglement within current circumstances and to open up to radical alternatives. They do so in different ways; by writing manifestos, engaging in new forms of pedagogy and generating forms of social and political action in everyday life.

At the beginning of 2021 and in the context of a global pandemic crisis, we therefore find it urgent to analyse how artists have reflected on the impacts of capitalism; on their forms of disruption in the routines of daily life, from working to eating, sleeping and leisure, and in our relationships with the natural environment. As Murray Edelmen says, art “supports a menu of models” (1995) that can produce “alternative scripts” for social, political and environmental transformation.

This Arts Special Issue welcomes proposals that inform our understanding of a range of practices and projects from various geographies and temporalities, as well as critical perspectives.  These may take a variety of forms including full research papers, accounts/reviews of particular works/projects/books either as experienced or as created by the author, manifestos or creative proposals. Our aim is to understand how art supports us in questioning the binary between nature and culture and value in public life through proposing alternative ways of being.  Submissions should address the following core question:

How do artistic practices and their dynamics embrace the complexity and contradictions of the current socio-political and environmental crisis and offer alternatives?

Authors are invited to address this question from different perspectives and in a range of historical and local contexts, from the intimacy of private life to public life, from human to non-human perspectives, from the urban to the rural, from desire to transgression. The proposed papers may cover the following areas of artistic practice and research:

• Art and society in crisis
• About, through and with: art and the environmental crisis
• Art and the political sphere
• Performance and performativity e.g. new rituals of daily live (work, leisure, sleep)

Prof. Dr. Helena Elias
Prof. Dr. Cláudia Madeira
Prof. Dr. Anne Douglas
Prof. Dr. Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro
Guest Editors

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