This book contains part of Sontag's collection of essays. It covers topics such as film, literature, politics, and art. One of them that was most useful to me was the "Aesthetics of silence". How art exists in silence, through self-cancellation. Her analysis of several major functions of silence is very interesting: Confirmation of the lack or abandonment of thoughts, the openness of time for the expansion of thoughts, the maintenance of the integrity and seriousness of language, and the artist's silence stems from "absolute" quality behaviour. And combined with the theory of relativity, he puts forward: "Without silence, the whole language system will collapse."

There is also an analysis of Bergman's "Persona", which analyzes the double meaning of the heroine's "silence": "As an absolute about her, refusing to speak is obviously a form of her seeking moral purification; but at the same time, In terms of behaviour, this is also a powerful and means she uses to manipulate and confuse her chattering nurse companions, an abuse, and a strong position that is virtually unchallengeable. "
There is also an article on "Dramas and Movies". I like it very much because I am very obsessed with movies and theatre. She analyzes the essential difference between drama and film, and whether movies can replace drama. And analyzes an important non-dramatic function of the film: making fantasy, virtual fantasy. There is also the issue of comparing places, that is, the difference between the audience's environment when watching a drama and watching a movie. In the theatre, "the space is static, and the space displayed on the stage is as unadjustable as the distance between eyes and glasses." "But in cinemas, the audience on the seats is physically fixed, but they serve as aesthetic The subject of the event is not fixed. "In the theatre, the audience cannot change the angle of their field of view; in the theatre," As the camera continuously switches between distance and direction, the aesthetic experience of the audience is also constantly changing. "
There is another article that I personally like very much, and Sontag talks about French director Godard. Godard is a film director I like very much. I have seen all his films. Compared with other directors, his films are very literary and poetic films. It is also mentioned here that Godal himself concisely defines the film as "the analysis of certain things through images and sounds". Godard used "thought" and "text" in his films, which is the point of view of the film gradually disappearing in the narrative process. Another feature is that Godard will arrange "sudden insertion" plots or voice-overs in the movie, directly explain to the audience what the character thinks, or comment on the story or remind the audience ironically: they are watch movie. And he sighed in his movie: "Movies are the most beautiful lie in the world." Godard has achieved a movie revolution in a certain sense, and he proved with his actual actions that "language can also be used as a movie Theme of."

I visited the exhibition of Chinese artist Cao Fei.

Cao Fei's work is underpinned by an ongoing exploration of virtuality, how it has radically altered our perception of self and changed the way we understand reality.

Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (July 23, 1973)

On July 22nd, 1973, visitors to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, encountered an unusual sight: the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, armed with buckets of water and cleaning supplies, washing the staircase at the museum’s entrance. Later that afternoon, she moved inside, using diapers in lieu of rags to scrub the marble floors on her hands and knees, buffing away visitors’ footprints as they walked by.

Carried out over the course of eight hours, corresponding to the typical span of a workday, Ukeles’s performances, Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance — Outside and Inside, respectively, made the invisible labor of maintaining the museum — typically performed by low-paid custodial workers away from the public eye — unavoidably present.

By simply scrubbing — dramatizing the difficult but unheralded work of keeping the museum clean — Ukeles brought debates around feminism, labor, and value directly into the institution.

Ukeles’s Hartford Wash performances belonged to a cycle of four “Maintenance Art Performances” highlighting activities that were essential to the museum’s operations, but rarely acknowledged as such, let alone celebrated. The work of cleaning the museum’s floors belonged to the category of labor Ukeles called “maintenance” — the behind-the-scenes work associated with upkeep and care — as opposed to “development,” the category of work that was publicly recognized as productive and worthy of praise, such as the individual creative efforts of an artist.

The performances were presented as part of “c. 7500,” an exhibition of conceptual art by women artists, organized by the pioneering feminist curator Lucy Lippard. While “c. 7500” was the fourth of Lippard’s “numbers shows” — travelling exhibitions of conceptual art staged at various institutions between 1969 and 1974 — it was the first to focus entirely on female artists; as Lippard noted in her catalogue essay, the exhibition was conceived as a response to claims that “there were no women conceptual artists.” Fittingly, Ukeles’ contributions touched on the connections between the struggle to have women’s work recognized and the undervaluation of “maintenance” in general.

In her 1969 “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” Ukeles identified a blind spot in the history of avant-garde art and culture: “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” Prompted by the birth of her first child the previous year, the manifesto considered the relationship between Ukeles’ role as an artist and as a mother, questioning why one form of work — art-making — was considered culturally significant and the other virtually without value. As Ukeles later described, the manifesto was written in “a quiet rage,” a response to the frustration she felt as she attempted to resolve what seemed like irreconcilable positions: upon learning of Ukeles’ pregnancy while she was an MFA student at Pratt, a male sculpture professor announced to the class that she would no longer be able to pursue a career as an artist. “I learned that [Jackson] Pollock, Marcel [Duchamp], and Mark [Rothko] didn’t change diapers…I fell into a crisis. I didn’t want to be two separate people — the maintenance worker and the free artist — living in one body.”

In the manifesto, Ukeles proclaimed that she would no longer separate the two, challenging the subordinate position assigned to “maintenance.” “I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order),” Ukeles wrote. “I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them as Art.”

From that point on, Ukeles devoted herself to what she called “Maintenance Art,” creating performances and art projects that highlighted the unseen labor required to keep society functioning. Ukeles’ series Private Performances of Personal Maintenance as Art (1970–73) involved meticulously documenting the household tasks and routines that consumed the majority of her time — such as folding laundry and bundling up her children to go outside in the winter — and exhibiting the resulting photographs and texts as artworks. Though Marcel Duchamp had never changed diapers, Ukeles drew on the example of his readymades — everyday found objects that he declared to be sculptures, shifting the definition of the modern artwork away from an object made by the artist’s hand to something that the artist decided was art — to recast the domestic work of caring for her family and maintaining their home as an artistic act.

 

With her performances, Ukeles established a crucial link between the concerns of the feminist art movement and those of artists exploring institutional critique, who challenged the idea that the museum was simply a neutral container for universally-recognized masterpieces, instead emphasizing their ideological character. She transformed the activities of the Wadsworth’s custodial and security staff into an artwork, pushing back against the perception that the work of artmaking was inherently more interesting or valuable than the work involved in maintaining it.

The image of the artist on her hands and knees, exhausted from hours of physical labor, reminded viewers that the invisible foundation of every institution — from the private sphere of the family to the public museum — was a maintenance worker cleaning up the mess.

Key excerpt from me:

It seems that the challenge of the epidemic is everywhere dissipating the intrinsic activity of Reason, obliging subjects to return to those sad effects – mysticism, fabulation, prayer, prophecy and malediction – that were customary in the Middle Ages when plague swept the land.

An epidemic is rendered complex by the fact that it is always a point of articulation between natural and social determinations. Its complete analysis is transversal: one must grasp the points at which the two determinations intersect and draw the consequences.

Consider a revealing detail of what I call the double articulation of an epidemic: today, SARS 2 has been stifled in Wuhan but there are very many cases in Shanghai, in the main due to people, generally Chinese nationals, coming from abroad. China is thus a site in which one can observe the link – first for an archaic reason, then a modern one – between a nature-society intersection in ill-kept markets that followed older customs, on the one hand, and a planetary diffusion of this point of origin borne by the capitalist world market and its reliance on rapid and incessant mobility, on the other.

The lesson to be drawn from this is clear: the ongoing epidemic will not have, qua epidemic, any noteworthy political consequences in a country like France. Even supposing that our bourgeoisie – in light of the inchoate grumbling and flimsy if widespread slogans – believes that the moment has come to get rid of Macron, that will in no way represent any change worthy of note. The ‘politically correct’ candidates are already waiting in the wings, as are the advocates of the most mildewed form of a ‘nationalism’ as obsolete as it is repugnant.

In passing, one will need to show publicly and dauntlessly that so-called ‘social media’ have once again demonstrated that they are above all – besides their role in fattening the pockets of billionaires – a place for the propagation of the mental paralysis of braggarts, uncontrolled rumours, the discovery of antediluvian ‘novelties’, or even fascistic obscurantism.