I said goodbye to Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts today and took one last look at the big peeking eye of its showcase building before making my way back into the city centre. As I looked at that building looking back at me, I remembered something I read a few nights ago. It was Tessa Hadley’s review of “The Woman Reader” by Belinda Jack (London Review of Books, Vol. 35, No. 18):
“As for secular images of women lost in their reading, who knows what’s in their books? There’s seductive power in a woman who neither returns nor avoids your gaze, because she’s absent even as she’s present; but there’s an envy as you look at her too, and longing for whatever hidden realm it is that she has access to, closed to those who can see only into the painting and not into the book…”
I find it difficult to imagine the picture of the “solitary reading woman” of the future. Unlike the pages of a book, a screen reflects: it is both mirror and eye, and as such does not offer a hidden realm. What is accessed on a screen will be read simultaneously by countless others, so that the “present absence” mentioned above morphs into shared, controlled distractedness rather than sustained private contemplation – and this applies equally to men and women. Perhaps this suggests a kind of equality, but what is lost in the transition?
