Includes bibliographical references (pages 228-231) and index.

Experience without qualities / Elizabeth S. Goodstein -- The Arcades Project / Walter Benjamin -- Boredom and art / Julian Jason Haladyn -- Boredom / Siefgried Kracauer -- Boredom and bedroom : the suppression of the habitual / Georges Teyssot -- Aftershocks of the new: feminism and film history Patrice Petro -- Formulary for a new urbanism / Ivan Chtcheglov -- The adventure / Situationist International -- Critique of everyday life / Henri Lefebvre -- Everyday speech / Maurice Blanchot -- Things : a story of the sixties / Georges Perec -- The revolution of everyday life / Raoul Vaneigem -- Now, the SI / Sadie Plant -- Silence / John Cage -- The aesthetic of indifference / Moira Roth -- Identification / Jonathan D. Katz -- Boredom and danger / Dick Higgins -- Boredom and oblivion / Ina Blom -- In conversation with Joseph Gelmis / Andy Warhol -- Notes after reseeing the movies of Andy Warhol / Jonas Mekas -- Warhol's aura and the language of writing / Tan Lin -- On parts of some sextets / Yvonne Rainer -- Three folds in the fabric and four autobiographical asides as allegories (or interruptions) / Robert Morris -- ABC art / Barbara Rose -- The aesthetics of silence / Susan Sontag -- The legacy of indifference / Nicolas Bourriaud -- Allegories of boredom / Jonathan Flatley -- No more boring art / John Miller -- The feminine mystique / Betty Friedan -- Les belles images / Simone de Beauvoir -- Manifesto! Maintenance art : proposal for an exhibition "Care" / Mierle Laderman Ukeles -- Waiting / Faith Wilding -- On Jeanne Dielmann / Ivone Margulies -- I must be boring someone / Jennifer Doyle -- S.C.U.M manifesto / Valerie Solanas -- Sigmar Polke -- a contemporary visionary : in conversation with Mark Godfrey / Peter Fischli -- England's dreaming : anarchy, Sex Pistols, punk rock and beyond / Jon Savage -- The producer as artist / Dan Graham -- The last Sex Pistols concert / Greil Marcus -- Bleached roots : punks and white ethnicity / Dick Hebdige -- CBGB as a physical space / Richard Hell -- On the politics of boredom (a Communist pastiche) / Geoff Waite -- Homo sovieticus / Aleksandr Zinoviev -- The aesthetics of boredom : Lithuanian photography 1980-1990 / Agne Narusyte -- Photographic ethics in the work of Boris Mikhailov / Alla Efimova -- On emptiness / Ilya Kabakov -- Negative emptiness / Mikhail Epstein -- Comrades of time / Boris Groys -- Case history and clinical report on the pastiche of boredom / Critical Art Ensemble -- The pale king / David Foster Wallace -- Stuplimity / Sianne Ngai -- The performance-management model of performative subjectivity / Christine Ross -- The cold world / Dominic Fox -- Bedrooms boredoms (short escapes in New York City) / Bernadette Corporation -- Dear R. / Claire Fontaine -- The coming insurrection / The Invisible Committee -- Lazy labour: chronopolitical remarks / Sven Lütticken -- Art time / Peter Osborne -- In conversation with Malcolm McLaren / Stefan Brüggemann -- Twelve words, nine days / Chris Kraus.

"Without boredom, arguably there is no modernity: the current sense of the word emerged simultaneously with industrialization, mass politics, and consumerism. From Manet onward, when art represents the everyday within modern life, encounters with tedium are inevitable. And from modernism's retreat into abstraction to subsequent demands placed on audiences from the late 1960s to the present, the viewer's endurance of repetition, slowness, or other forms of monotony has become an anticipated feature of gallery-going. In contemporary art, boredom is no longer viewed as a singular experience; rather, it is contingent on diverse social identifications and cultural positions, and extends from a malign condition to be struggled against, to an experience to be embraced or explored as a site of resistance. Here, the range of boredoms associated with our neoliberal moment is contextualized in a long view which encompasses the political critique of boredom in 1960s France; the simultaneous aesthetic embrace in the USA of silence, repetition, or indifference in Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism, and conceptual art; the development of feminist diagnoses of malaise in art, performance and film; Punk's social critique and its influence on theories of the postmodern; and the recognition from the end of the 1980s of a specific form of ennui experienced in former communist states. Today, with the emergence of new forms of labor alienation and personal intrusion, deadening forces extend even further into subjective experience, making the divide between a critical and an aesthetic use of boredom ever more tenuous." -- Back cover.