Disordered Attention

Sarah Moroz in conversation with Claire Bishop.

Our understanding of attention today is that we never have enough of it. We scroll Twitter instead of reading full articles; we heart texts instead of responding to them. And when we apply this kind of half-hearted approach to art, we have trouble standing in front of a work or reading the wall text thoroughly, without phones interrupting.

What if all this was nothing to feel bad about, though? What if we accepted it as a new status quo that means we’re multitasking rather than shirking? Claire Bishop’s book Disordered Attention, forthcoming from Verso June 11th, has a forgiving approach to thinking about our ways of bestowing—or being unable to fully bestow—our attention. The British art historian, critic, and Professor of Art History at CUNY Graduate Center sees fragmented attention as a lens through which to view art.

“In this book, attention is understood not as a universal, deep-rooted faculty of the human mind, but as a capacity that is mutable,” Bishop writes. That mutability—“hybrid attention”—is something to accept, rather than feel sheepish about. Bishop notes that she switches rapidly between different modes of attention while at an exhibition: “I’ll get lost in long periods of focus and presence. But I’ll also scan the QR code to read the exhibition booklet later… I take installation shots and a few close-ups. I respond to my partner’s texts about childcare. I photograph the labels….This perpetual oscillation between here and elsewhere, consuming and commenting, is central to how we look at art and performance today.”

I chatted with Bishop about considering art you don't like, the cringe factor in museums, and being a pragmatist towards human behavior and society at large. —Sarah Moroz

Sarah Moroz: You write: “Modern spectatorship, premised on fully focused presence and deep attention, no longer seems appropriate or necessary” and, further: “We are present for the work, but we are also networked to many elsewheres.” There is, however, still a feeling of moralizing or guilt associated with hybrid looking, around the fact that we are not “reliable” or “invested” viewers. How did you first come to overthrow this guilt, and come to define hybrid attention as normal or acceptable?

Claire Bishop: Haha, I like this: throwing off the guilt! I think that the guilt is real (at least for some), but that we also don’t find it that hard to do hybrid spectatorship. It’s now our default. Increasingly we look with our phones in our hands, as prosthetic eyes. Part of my method in the book is to think about what I do, and what I see others doing—to look at practice. And to notice what a huge gap there is between this practice and how writers on attention think we look, or how they set up an ideal of full attention that is never really attainable.

I’m not someone who can meditate. My mind is going all over the place, even or especially when I’m reading or watching a performance or looking at an exhibition. And I’m an academic—someone who can supposedly “focus.”  So I want to be realistic about how the mind works today, which is on multiple streams. And this situation isn’t going to change. We can set up full attention as an ideal, but our digital devices are producing a different way of attending.

SM: You note that giving a work one’s attention is not always set up for complete viewership to be possible. The starkest example you cite is at Documenta 11 in 2002, which “famously included more than 600 hours of video, to watch all of which would have required the viewer to stay for the full duration of the 100-day exhibition.” What do we ‘owe’ to a work, in such a case?

CB: Between the work of art and the viewer is the curator. In this case, it was Okwui Enwezor, who I think wanted to introduce the viewer to a certain impossibility of mastery. You were never going to be able to see all of Documenta 11. The question for me is what the curator owes to the work —which is to present it the best way possible. I see so many examples of curators installing one-hour videos in passageways, or in rooms without comfortable seating. I appreciate it when artists like Steve McQueen think very precisely about the set-up of their videos, and consider the arrival, timing, entry, seating of the work so you can experience it at its best.

More often, though, an ambulatory audience is the norm. I think we should feel free about staying or going in such situations, just as we do when watching things on YouTube, or attending a blockbuster [scale] show: you don’t have to look at everything.

SM: How do you think attention and the qualitative nature of a show or performance hang together? As viewers of art, should we still pay attention to things we don't find compelling?

CB: Usually, I go on my gut instincts, but I’ve also learned to be more careful. Sometimes artists are being deliberately ambient and non-spectacular. And sometimes what seems appealing and fascinating turns out to be quite empty. So my assessment of a work tends not to be made in the moment, but after a few days, when I ask myself: what lingers?

This, by the way, is how I tackle reviews of mega-exhibitions like biennials. I don’t take any notes. I look, and then see what stays with me after a few weeks. But I am all for not [feeling] guilty about giving something a shot and then concluding that it’s boring. But you have to give something a fair shot.

SM: You address that there are all these lenses that exist when we look at art: the ‘male gaze’ in feminism, ‘surveillance’ in Black studies, ‘passing’ in queer and trans theory, ‘staring’ in disability studies. How do you tackle these shifts in visuality?

CB: I brought up all those terms (from other methodological frameworks) in order to make the point that attention, as a discourse, has historically been dominated by authors who are white and male and straight and able-bodied. When I was teaching, I wanted to find writers on attention from other subject positions. I realized that if you want other perspectives, you end up having to change the terms of the discourse. What those other methods made me realize was the degree to which attention discourse is invested in a clear “subject” looking at an “object”: a binary relation that many of those other methods have challenged.

I don’t write from any of those perspectives in a pure way, but their insights enabled me to push back on attention discourse, from the construction of attention in the 19th century through to contemporary laments about digital technology harming social cohesion and mental functioning.

Interview continues below

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SM: You write: “In classic neoliberal style, ADHD diagnoses shift the responsibility for distraction onto the ‘innocent’ neurobiological individual, rather than addressing an underfunded public education system, privatized healthcare, Big Pharma, unaffordable childcare, and the normalization of competitive individualism.” Do you think systemic change is possible, in terms of the way attention is contextualized in society?

CB: Ah, big question! The quick answer is no. Unless you foresee a revolution that overturns capitalism. Changing all those things is quite a task. But it will take systemic change in order to rethink how attention is constructed today. I’m a pragmatist, or at least a realist: technology isn’t going away, so we need to figure out how to live with it healthily, ethically, politically, environmentally. I admire people who can disconnect, but that’s a privilege not many have access to.

SM: You note that museums now frequently suggest hashtags and that some artists acknowledge organizing exhibitions with the installation shot in mind. Similarly, museum and biennial commissions override self-initiated interventions whose aim is to be disruptive. Do you think art institutions are ultimately being adaptable or are they tipping into problematic?

CB: Museums are trying to figure it out. Sometimes they get the balance right (for example, a QR code to access more information or an interview); sometimes they exacerbate a problem (for example, pandering to certain demographics through appeals to social media). You can usually feel, when you walk into a museum, what its priorities are. You can tell from the programming, the visibility of the sponsorship, the amount of signage, the way the wall texts and labels are written, QR codes on the walls, whether there are large educational groups in the space… and that’s before you get to branding and merchandising.

I get trying to make art more accessible, but I do cringe at some of the things Tate Modern has done over the years—largely as a result of Bloomberg sponsorship. I’m thinking of the whole “Bloomberg Connects” program, which pushes digital engagement (like Tate Draw) and interactive guides/gaming, and downloading their own app. These initiatives strike me as more about cultivating and reinforcing the public’s comfort with digital technologies (and Bloomberg as a brand) than they are about understanding art history. It’s all about metrics and marketing. On the whole, though, my sense is that museums have gotten more subtle in the last few years. It’s less intrusive than it was.

SM: You discuss the 19th-century ‘salon hang’ (works crowded in rows up to the ceiling) evolving into the modernist ‘white cube’ and the polite rapt dark theater with a frontal view starting in 1876 emerging from a more raucous social-leaning setup. Given these sharp shifts, do you anticipate new set-ups for attention in the 21st century?

CB: Museums are still drawn to the big photogenic installation model, but it’s noticeable that this impulse has now become its own offshoot industry with pop-up attractions (like the ‘Van Gogh experience’ and ‘the Chagall experience’).  I’m wondering how AI is going to change attention. It’s going to problematize the truth value of ‘photographic’ images and video. But we can’t predict what the artistic backlash to this will be, as it’s never straightforward—or, to be honest, that fast.

I think attention’s prioritization of the optical is already waning in favor of alternative modes of being-in-common, reflected in the rise of a discourse of ‘care’ in contemporary art and performance—I’m thinking of all the collective, experiential, sensorial, even spiritual practices that I’m seeing today. In New York, I see exhibitions and performances that invoke the ancestral, the ritual, and pre-modern forms of knowledge—sonic rituals, ancestral healing, shamanic reiki, tattoo rituals, sound baths, consecrations, performance liturgies, and ceremonial fire-lighting.

The fear that I had ten years ago, that museums would basically become selfie stadia, has not really happened because apps like Snapchat now offer so many great backdrops. Why would you pick a museum display when you can be shown appearing from a toilet bowl or riding a unicorn? 🖼️