分类： 书摘文摘

以下两段节选自 Olivia Laing 的 The Lonely City 的第五章 The Realms of the Unreal。

Lonely child vs. healthy child

在 20 世纪初的阶段里，为了照顾到婴儿的身体健康，人们忽视了婴儿的心理健康，这反倒让婴儿更脆弱。

这次新型冠状病毒（COVID-2019）在中国肆虐了一个月并逐步得到控制，却又在海外大肆蔓延。算到现在，病毒已经连续轰击我们的精神有两个月之久。在纽约亲历这次 COVID-2019 在席卷于美国大地的阶段，在家中努力做到 social-distancing，但读到这里不免会让我再一次想到关于身体和心理健康的有趣关系。

This sounds like common sense, but at the time of Darger’s childhood the consensus among health care providers of all kinds – from psychoanalysts to hospital doctors – was that all children required in the way of nourishment was a germ-free environment and a ready supply of food. The reigning belief was that tenderness and physical affection were actively detrimental to development and could in fact ruin a child.

To modern ears, this seems insane, but it was driven by a genuine desire to improve child survival. In the nineteenth century, child mortality had been enormously high, especially in institutions like hospitals and orphanages. Once germ transmission was understood, the preferred strategy of care was to maintain hygiene by minimising physical contact, moving beds apart and limiting interactions with parents, staff and other patients as much as possible. While this did indeed successfully reduce the spread of disease, it also had an unexpected consequence, which took decades to be properly understood.

In the newly sterile conditions, children failed to thrive. They were physically more healthy, and yet they wasted away, particularly the infants. Isolated and untouched, they went through paroxysms of grief, rage and despair, before eventually submitting passively to their state. Stiff, polite, apathetic and emotionally withdrawn, their behaviour made them easy to neglect, further entrenching them in acute, unspeakable loneliness and isolation.

The art of collage

拼贴（collage）是我一直以来难以抓住的艺术手法。这一段从「拼合修补精神分裂者的心灵碎片」的角度阐释了「拼贴」这种艺术手法的复杂的、符号化的、脆弱的美。

Loneliness here is a longing not just for acceptance but also for integration. It arises out of an understanding, however deeply buried or defended against, that the self has been broken into fragments, some of which are missing, cast out into the world. But how do you put the broken pieces back together? Isn’t that where art comes in (yes, says Klein), and in particular the art of collage, the repetitive task, day by day and year by year, of soldering torn or sundered images together?

I was thinking a lot at the time about glue, how it functions as a material. Glue is powerful. It holds fragile structures together and stops things getting lost. It allows the depiction of images that are illicit or hard to access, like the homemade pornography David Wojnarowicz used to make as a child from Archie cartoons, taking a razor and turning Jughead’s nose into a penis; that sort of thing. Later, he used to wheatpaste discarded supermarket ads on walls and hoardings in the East Village, on to which he’d spray-painted stencils of his own design, making his visions adhere to the skin of the city, its outward shell. Later still, he worked intensely with collage, bringing together disparate images – fragments of maps, pictures of animals and flowers, scenes from pornographic magazines, scraps of text, the haloed head of Jean Cocteau – to construct the complicated and densely symbolic paintings of his maturity.

Like Wojnarowicz, they understood the rebellious power of glue, the way it lets you reconstruct the world. […]

在英文语境之下，每每读到对抽象概念的精确的具象化描述的尝试总让令我折服，让我觉得抽象的概念其实原来也并不是那么无厘头的嘛。纽约 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 2019 年夏季新展 Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection 上一段介绍性文字将战后艺术（postwar art）描述为「一套因战后暴戾与破坏而生的实验性艺术语言」的文字仿佛直击这一类艺术作品的存在目的。

The term postwar art has most typically been used to describe art created in the aftermath of World War II within a North American or Western European context. The advent of the atomic age – initiated by the United States’ bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945-and the atrocities of the Holocaust, perpetuated by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, challenged artists and intellectuals to invent new languages and forms that could respond to the un-representable. The disjunction between Western ideologies and the realities of violence and devastation led many European and North American artists to embrace non-Western aesthetics and modes of thought.

In the visual arts, abstraction provided an experimental vocabulary with which to signify the magnitude of destruction caused by the war and the gravity of horrors unleashed by the nuclear bomb. It also offered artists an openended approach to envisioning other psychic or emotional states, as a respite and refuge from the harsh realities of the present. Simultaneously, figuration and performance art flourished, as artists sought to portray the radical fragmentation of the body-a result of the violence wrought against it and the environment, the cityscape, and the countryside. Art offered both a critique of and an escape from a war-weary world.

并不是因为创作于 1950–1970 它们才叫做战后艺术。

这样精炼表述之美，大概就是艺术史之美吧。

郁达夫在《春风沉醉的晚上》这样写春夏之交的季节：

天气好像变了。几日来我那独有的世界，黑暗的小房里的腐浊的空气，同蒸笼里的蒸气一样，蒸得人头昏欲晕。我每年在春夏之交要发的神经衰弱的重症，遇了这样的气候，就要使我变成半狂。所以我这几天来，到了晚上，等马路上人静之后，也常常想出去散步去。一个人在马路上从狭隘的深蓝天空里看看群星，慢慢地向前行走，一边做些漫无涯涘的空想，倒是于我的身体很有利益。当这样的无可奈何，春风沉醉的晚上，我每要在各处乱走，走到天将明的时候才回家里。我这样的走倦了回去就睡，一睡直可睡到第二天的日中，有几次竟要睡到二妹下工回来的前后方才起来。睡眠一足，我的健康状态也渐渐地回复起来了。

又到了快乐水的季节。

之前试着做维基百科类的网站词条的时候，就意识到：那种写完一个词条时的成就感，很大程度上与构建世界的成就感非常相似，只不过这个被构建的世界是个在虚拟空间的平行世界。在这个平行世界中的物件与我们所生活的现实世界的物体的子集有个映射的关系，而这虚拟世界中物体的关系由我们通过超链接编织而成。

今天读 Donald Preziosi 的《艺术史的艺术：批评读本》（The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology）的时候看到编者 1998 年撰写的开篇文章 Art History: Making the Visible Legible 中提到

Art history and museology traditionally fabricated histories of form as surrogates for or parallels to histories of persons or peoples: narrative stagings which served (on the model of forensic laboratory science) to illustrate, demonstrate, and delineate significant aspects of the character, level of civilization, or degree of social or cognitive advancement or decline of an individual or nation.

也意识到这种对于平行世界的构建同时也在博物馆学和艺术史学中存在，同样的，在百科构建中也会有类似于博物馆中「策展」（curation）过程的遴选所带来的对世界的一种「负责任」的支配感。

许多玩家在我的世界（Minecraft）等模拟类游戏中也能找到类似的乐趣。

对方法论的讨论实在是件有趣的事呢。