[Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states
assumes when our ego lets itself live,
when it refrains from separating its present state
from its former state.
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
Ten hours. Ten plus hours. And for what? To watch someone refuse separation, refuse the neat severing of this moment from the last one, this breath from the previous exhalation. That’s the whole savage beauty of it, isn’t it? The willful rejection of our mandatory amnesia, our cultural agreement to keep moving, keep consuming, keep forgetting.
Just the brutal, gorgeous insistence on staying, on making you confront the fact that time isn’t this clean digital readout but this messy, accumulating thing that changes you while you’re standing there trying not to notice.
Stanford. The Cummings Art Building. An academic temple where people theorize about disruption while sitting in ergonomic chairs. And here comes Raegan, planting herself there for half a goddamn day, turning her body into a living refutation of efficiency, of productivity, of all the silicon valley horseshit happening just outside those walls. Exchange, she called it. What are we exchanging? Discomfort for awareness? Boredom for presence? The tyranny of the schedule for something approaching actual human time?
Bergson got it, when you stop cleaving yourself into marketable increments, when you let one state bleed into the next without the surgery of distraction, something happens. The ego lives. Not performs, not produces… lives. And that’s terrifying to a culture built on the premise that every moment should justify its existence, should pay rent, should add value.
This is art as refusal. Ten hours of saying no to the phone, no to the next thing, no to the idea that meaning arrives in bite sized chunks. It’s physically demanding in the most unspectacular way, not the melodrama of pain or endurance stunts, but the grinding ache of just being when being isn’t supposed to be enough anymore.
You had to be there, marinating in it, feeling your own impatience become data, your resistance become the real performance.
Raw, necessary, probably insufferable to half the people who wandered in. Perfect.
a 10+ hour durational performance in Cummings Art Building, Stanford