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Room of Idleness

Curated by Nika Dubrovsky

Let’s try to look at laziness as a political position, shall we?
As true slackers, we are not rushing to roll up our sleeves to work on the creation of this room. Rather, it will likely evolve as a collaboration with other rooms:
– AptArt exhibit Everything you wanted to know about laziness but were afraid to ask
– Reading Lazy: “An illustrated history of uprisings.”
Revolution as avoidance.

Curator: Nika Dubrovsky. Room is looking for the co/curators, speakers and partners to b

the pict by theslowburningfuse

Idlers of all nations – unite!

“Every mode of life has its conveniencies. The Idler, who habituates himself to be satisfied with what he can most easily obtain, not only escapes labours which are often fruitless, but sometimes succeeds better than those who despise all that is within their reach, and think every thing more valuable as it is harder to be acquired.”

from The Idler’s character The Idler (1758–1760)

Reading list

from our friends:

  1. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
  2. The Right To Be Lazy by Paul Lafargue
  3. David Graeber starting with Bullshits job and more
  4. The Idler was a series of 103 essays, all but twelve of them by Samuel Johnson, published in the London weekly the Universal Chronicle between 1758 and 1760.
  5. Laziness as a Real Truth of Mankind by Kazimir Malevich
  6. Subverting Capital’s Temporality: A Critical Reappraisal of Laziness — recommended by Yana Melkumova Reynolds:

    Pulcinella, or Punch, the famous Neapolitan puppet-buffoon of commedia
    dell’arte, has hanging on his bedroom wall a notice stating ‘Do it tomorrow’.
    It is the first thing he sees when he rises from bed each morning. When faced
    with a new days’ demands of successive ‘things to do’, simply reading this
    notice is enough to short-circuit any attempt at doing what Pulcinella has to
    do, is supposed to do, or has been asked to do, in an eternal postponement
    of his daily tasks.
  7. Oscar Wilde, Book of quote “Work is the curse of the drinking class!”

and this one is a reading list from our enemies:

  1. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
  2. The Dragonfly and the Ant by Ivan Krylov:
    “Did you sing?
    This is the thing!
    Now, you’ll have your chance
    To dance.”
  3. I am not sure about this book, but I leave it here for now The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
  4. Everything that has been published by traditional economists starting with Paul Krugman