Good morning,

This Fem Friday gives a lot of space to a talk I read about two months ago that I’m still thinking about and learning from. It's a long piece by the artist Jenny Odell – Medium guesses around twenty minutes to read, which feels about right – but well worth your time. Print it out and read it on the train home! Or PDF it and put it on your e-reading device. Whatever works for you. The core of this is about the political value of doing and expressing nothing, nicely summarised here:

I believe that having recourse to periods of and spaces for “doing nothing” are even more important, because those are times and places that we think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves. It’s a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. In this time of extreme overstimulation, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.

https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb

Here’s a close look at some of the artists referenced in the talk. I was particularly taken by Pauline Oliveros’ philosophy of Deep Listening, defined in this article as "Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening":

It’s impressive when an artwork doesn’t require specific conditions of reception in order to function well, when it can be that open, that permeable, that present. Her holistic approach to making music is a testament to the generative powers of listening, noticing, improvisation and responding to what is already here rather than seeking to overwrite it. Her work doesn’t shut out the world; it remains thoroughly connected to it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-the-recordings-of-pauline-oliveros.html?mwrsm=Facebook&_r=1

Also resonant for me was Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ art around “maintenance work” – not creating new things but making sure the things that are here are maintained and safe and clean. I love this view on “women’s work” that doesn’t just say “women's work happens” but also that “women's work is good” and why. Here is her manifesto for her first maintenance work:

Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition […] and do all these things as public Art activities:  I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls (i.e. “floor paintings, dust works, soap-sculpture, wall-paintings”) cook, invite people to eat, make agglomerations and dispositions of all functional refuse. The exhibition area might look “empty” of art, but it will be maintained in full public view.

MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK

https://www.arnolfini.org.uk/blog/manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969

Finally, to complete the set of artists, here’s a poem by Andre Lorde, who first proposed self care as a radical act and is pictured below:

Coping

It has rained for five days

running

the world is

a round puddle

of sunless water

where small islands

are only beginning

to cope

a young boy

in my garden

is bailing out water

from his flower patch

when I ask him why

he tells me

young seeds that have not seen sun

forget

and drown easily.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/coping/

Have a great Friday,

Alex.