The Pursuit Of Happiness
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
Experiments in Radical Leisure
Artists
R.J. Brooks | Jason Estudillo | Justin Hansch
David Humphrey | Richard Jackson | Kiersten Puusemp
Dave Pursue | Benjamin Weissman | James Krone
Is free time decadent? Leisure a privilege? The industrial revolution, automation and modernization all offered wild optimism for a future where every person’s free time would expand to allow engagement in the highest levels of intellectual and spiritual pursuits. Neoliberalism and new technology offer similar dreams of expanded freedom and fantasy life. If free time is not, however, conceived of as an absence but the location of meaningful existence by which all else is to be measured then we may propose it as paramount - an inalienable right whose relationship to contemporary political and economic models is problematic at the least. With these questions in mind, through the work of eight artists we look to explore experimental leisure - the ownership of one’s own time, body and hence being.
