Art in Times of Plague
Torn Butterfly Wing 1
In the midst of Covid-19, artists and art-lovers may wonder about the proper response to the pandemic. Caution and dread aside, what are we to do in our art practice? There may be as many responses as there are types of people, but in general, the pose one sees ranges from complete self-isolation to attempts to build new types of community through what the digital media offer.
Artists most often work in isolation in any case. So the injunction to isolate is no special hardship. But the closure of galleries and museums and the breakdown of conventional art marketing venues does tend to squash not only the livelihood of artists but also the reaching out to spectators and art lovers.
Historically, artists have tended to portray how it is when the plague strikes. In other words, artists did not shy away from portraying the horrors of illness by painting only still life flowers or sedate landscapes. A major theme in the 14th and 15th century was “Vanitas” paintings (vanity) that often showed wealth and superficial beauty being destroyed by death and disease. Youth in a painting was juxtaposed with emblems of death (as in skeletons) or fleshly corruption. Another theme was the Danse Macabre, which showed a long line of corpses dancing off to Hell. Every great artist over a three hundred year period from the 13th to the 16th century had to deal with the Plague either directly or indirectly. Holbein (1543), Titian (1576), Giorgione (1510), Schiele (1918), among others, died of it.
Many people have suffered extraordinarily through the spread of Covid-19. But, so far, thankfully, all this pales in comparison to what people suffered through in the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century. WW1 killed twenty million people, and the “Spanish Flu” from 1919 to 1925 killed a further 50 million. People somehow carried on, and even art was made.
What art will Covid-19 produce? “Woe is me” art seems hopelessly inadequate and narcissistic in the circumstances. The most effective projects so far seem to have been those that attempt to reach out and create community while at the same time addressing themselves to the problems of environmental degradation, racism, isolation, and violence. Can this killer of a disease bring about in the art community some ideas about how to live in a new way? What do you think?