Pandemic-Inspired Art

In my last post I wrote about visiting the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art. At both I took in NEW exhibits. Of course, we ask ourselves: What is new?

I’d venture to say it is art that speaks to us today and hopefully to those in the future.

There’s nothing like a plague to drive people into the hands of God and into outpouring of their soul. I mean if you thought the end was near wouldn’t you want to express your innermost longings, desires—or to leave a message for the survivors? Kilroy was here.

Medieval art is full of representations of the Black Death: corpses and skeletons. Along with interpretations of the Devil and demons. The macabre was a big draw. Like today: shock jocks pull in an audience and ratings. The church used such depictions to warn congregants against rough living and the vices. The seven deadly sins. Indeed, much of religion was a warning against instead of for living/life. Not a lot has changed.

Fast forward to the worldwide pandemic of Covid. I hear in the midst of it that publishers were not looking for manuscripts about it. Except now I am seeing/reading all kinds of books that reference it or somehow include the impact it had on them. An example of nonfiction was a chapter in AdaCalhoun’s Also a Poet (see LINK for a review) where she mentions visiting her elderly parents in upstate NY and how with their fragile health and cancer prognosis EVERYTHING felt tentative, as if life, dreams, all hope could easily slip through the fingers. In fiction I read Olive Kitteridge author Elizabeth Strout’s latest Lucy Barton offering, Lucy by the Sea, about how she and her estranged husband William make a plan, a way to re-do life in a new place. There are no dramatic turns or twists in this novel. It reads like memoir.

So many of us made mid-pandemic decisions to either reinvent ourselves or at least change direction. How could we not with the huge disruption of lockdown.

Several art installations reminded me of this. At the Art Institute I came upon David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020. Indeed, this was super appealing. The colors, The feel—was it hope? Springing eternal!

From the exhibit material:
Two years ago—at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic—the ever-versatile and inventive artist David Hockney traveled to France with the express intention of capturing the emergence of spring.

When Hockney left for Normandy a lockdown hadn’t been announced, but once there he turned his sights/insights to what may come—certainly spring. I tried to imagine while viewing the exhibit how it must’ve felt to be creating and at the same time considering an END.

He used an iPad. The technology suited his challenge to be outside, plein air, which went along with social distancing and clean air. It was as if the art of creating was also keeping him alive. Hockney wasn’t new to landscapes or in the subject of spring, having explored the subject in 2011 and 2013. But this time must have felt different, as if it might be the last time. Indeed, the artist is 85.

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.

So despite what I heard about publishers or that people want to move on beyond the pandemic, we still need artists/poets to help us interpret and measure the impact a world-wide virus has had upon our lives. We will be studying this for generations.

live in Hope!