Attention – a prolonged present sustained by the extended focus on a single object¹ – has today become the subject of increasing anxiety, accompanied by demands to manage, regulate and maintain it, perhaps most visible in the discourse around ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), or on the effects of our exposure to social media. Boredom, where no object holds our attention, and distraction, where our attention is diverted and dispersed among a number of objects, constitute two related, yet contrasting, threats to this ideal of attentiveness. As objects that demand different kinds of attention, artworks provide models of attention that inevitably intersect with these anxieties about a society becoming bored or distracted. Whilst the traditional (Kantian) ideal of contemplative immersion – a distanced, disinterested sustaining of attention before a work of art – maintains the ideal of attentiveness as an end, the avant-garde, with its investment in the temporality of the ‘new’ and its many estrangement-effects, has a much more complicated relationship to this problem. For the ‘new’ to be shocking, for instance, it must take the form of an instant where the audience cannot attend, or where their capacity for attention is strained². Or conversely, in the minimalism of Mac Low’s performances, the artwork deliberately removes those objects which would draw in and maintain our attention. Setting itself in opposition to the temporality of contemplative immersion, the artist of the avant-garde is thrown between the twin poles of shock and boredom.

This is why the use of the term ‘avant-garde’ is unavoidable here, despite all of its irritating complications. One way of articulating the investment in boredom against distraction is to say, first, as many have done before, that the avant-garde might be defined by its attempt at a withdrawal from art of the culture industry (‘to not be a commodity, to devise an aesthetic language incapable of offering commodity satisfaction’), which entails an attempt to break from the relationship of novelty to repetition in commodity production (‘to ‘make it new’, to produce something which resists and breaks through the force of gravity of repetition as a universal feature of commodity equivalence’)³. And second, that the deliberate production of boredom registers, at the level of the experience of an individual work, this attempt to negotiate the social position of art as it is taken up by ‘avant-garde’ artists. In other words, the contradictions of an avant-garde reaction to the ‘vapid ‘entertainment’ of popular culture’ (boredom against distraction) becomes the mode of temporal experience in these avant-garde works, as a relation between shock and tedium.

This is true even for the most boring artists of the 1960s. In a 1968 article, the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins describes the ‘super-boredom’ of his contemporaries as not only an investment in the tedious, but as experiments with a ‘dialectic of boredom and intensity’⁴. He is referring to John Cage in particular, and this principle is best summarised by one of Cage’s comments: ‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting’⁵. Mac Low, echoing Cage’s insistence, says something similar referring to his own pieces, ‘some works may first cause boredom but ultimately, for those who ‘stick with them,’ pleasure’⁶.

This conscious act of ‘sticking with it’ is the key; it constitutes a continued intention, despite a situation where attention is not absorbed – hence the paradoxical relation to Newman’s active ‘withdrawal of attachment’. Goldsmith, quite simply, refers to this as ‘unboring boring’: ‘unboring boring is a voluntary state; boring boring is a forced one’⁷. There is a hidden reserve of interest for those who choose to remain with the experience of boredom. So, the boring work of these artists did not really have its end in boredom. In fact, it was the promise of excitement – enjoyable and potentially transformative – motivated their tedium. Boredom is ‘a station on the way to other experiences’, as Higgins says, ‘a means of bringing emphasis to what it interrupts’⁸. To endure is to be met with some reward.

In Mac Low’s work, the reward is seeing ordinary words, spoken at random, totally anew, renewed by going through the abstract temporality of a performance generated by predetermined chance operations. ‘Sticking with’ this empty duration fills it with an anticipation for something, even if this something doesn’t have a specific content – the arrival of the bus, the conclusion to the narrative, or simply some clear sense of meaning to emerge from a string of disjointed words. The experience of waiting for something particular is turned into an experience of waiting for something unspecified, where meaning is lost and regained over and over. It is a suspended time of indeterminate waiting, of invariant longing, one that contains a mixture of exhaustion and renewal. As Eldritch Priest notes of more contemporary minimalist music, ‘to wait for no-thing is to risk waiting for nothing, a risk that is itself charged with an ambivalent mixture of wonder and contempt, fixation and flight’⁹. The instant at which boredom flips to intensity, the oscillation between astonishment and fatigue, is what Mac Low’s monotonous, repetitive experiments were paradoxically seeking. And it was this potential to transform the time of boredom – an abstract, measurable chunk of time – into something that could be otherwise that filled these works with a sense of possibility despite their exhausting austerity.