“It is still assumed that a work of art is its content” – Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag

The first thing that popped into my mind when I read this quote was the photograph of the bottles of urine that Patty Chang had collected in the final phase of her project, The Wandering Lake; a piece that we had all looked at as a group at the beginning of our trip. This quote goes hand in hand with this piece because, as the viewer, one doesn’t see the work of art as the photograph itself but the deeper meaning behind it and what it represents. Sure, one can appreciate the composition of the piece but the viewer almost always assumes that there’s more to it than a photograph of bottled urine.  In this case, this photograph chronicles Chang’s final phase of her project. These bottles of her urine  were collected and photographed to capture Chang’s  parallels between “controllable and uncontrollable ‘flow'” as she compares the human body to the infrastructures she has observed during her project, particularly the South-to-NOrth Water Diversion Project which is the longest aqueduct in the world that brings water from southern to northern China. Sontag goes on to further explain this quote by rephrasing it as: it is assumed that “a work of art by definition says something… ‘What X is saying is … ‘ .” In today’s modern times, the way we look and interpret art has changed in the way we try to explain to ourselves what something means; if the meaning can be discovered on the surface or if it requires digging beneath it.