Perilous Times of Uncertainty, flashback

I was inspired to flashback to this post--originally from January 19. 2023

Pandemic-Inspired Art

 . .  . Another piece I stumbled upon was at the Museum of Contemporary Art—WE ARE CLOSER THAN YOU EVER IMAGINED. Artist Shilpa Gupta works in the ever-changing transitory medium of flapboards, those old analog displays at train stations where passengers stand dead-eyed anticipating departure. The messages (as also the messages we were constantly bombarded with at the beginning of the outbreak) take on new context and meaning. The bigger picture of mass extinction, climate change, how we treat each other and the world were gently shuffled and reshuffled in an auditory and tactile rate as to lull the viewer in. We are, indeed, closer than we ever imagined to an end, a destination, to hell or a vacation, to finding solace—or limbo. Much how many of us have felt these past 3 years.

The flapboard features poetry, fed to the viewer, line by line, with the odd misspelling. Thirty-five minutes long, WEARECLOSERTHANYOUEVERIMAGINED (2020) goes on a free-associative journey through intimations of mortality and meditations on digital surveillance, isolation, fake news and bigotry.

Juxtaposition, surprising messages/announcements, context, out of isolation and boredom

The mind makes associations, projections, tries to fill the ghostly space, which remains blank and recalcitrant.

On a thirty-five-minute loop,WeAreCloserThanYou­EverImagined, 2020, presented headlines, turns of phrase, memories, events, and fragments of text at once all too familiar and not. A sampling: DO NOT PANIC / CARE FOR YOURSELF / FALSE NEGATIVE / YOU VOTED FOR THEM / DON’T LET THEM / ENTER YOUR SKIN. Unmoored from meaning or context, the statements careen from paranoid to amorous, fearful to obedient, cynical to poetic—the last a word the gallery used to describe Gupta’s work. Here, I took poetic to mean something like open-ended and nonprescriptive, full of space, impressions, fleeting emotions, images conjured and dispersed. Gupta’s politics, if she has any, were not discernible.

In these perilous times of uncertainty--that we are ALL feeling, even if we are trying to hide under a rock--please remember to make art.

Shilpa Gupta