ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that Gabriel Orozco's photographs evoke experiences of repose and suspended action that might be considered unsettling to the hyper-productivity endorsed by the neoliberal order. It focuses more intently on photographs by Orozco, relating them to Jacques Ranciere's thinking of aesthetics and neoliberal capital's drive to eliminate unproductive time and labor. As a chronometric device, the watch may bring to mind contemporary societies increasingly obsessed with time, and working lives stressed by demands to pack ever more productive outputs into all hours of day and night. In a nuanced engagement with Ranciere's thinking, Davide Panagia speaks of his project refusing "the social scientific and hermeneutic ideal that all labor, including intellectual labor, must be oriented to a specific instrumental ideal." Another aspect of the aesthetic regime formulation is the importance Ranciere assigns to artistic developments in 19th-century Romanticism and Realism.
