In search of the “Big Takeaway”
In search of the “Big Takeaway”
Art interpreting Covid-19: Reality, meaning, and the quest for a big takeaway in “these unprecedented times.”
This week, I have a guest post from a long-time reader of The Charrette, William Collen. He writes Ruins, where much like myself, he explores the intersection of art, history and Christianity.
We don’t always realize the impact of historic moments when living through them, but as we wind back around to the “precendented” variety of times, we can see the irrefutable impact the pandemic left on us. One of the most obvious places it left its mark is in the arts. In this piece, William explores what stories got told, which ones did not and what future generations might learn from our artwork from this period.
Enjoy.
From the beginning, the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic was multifaceted and divergent — an experience incited by the same stimulus yet realized uniquely by each person. But not only is the experience varied; the meaning of the experience is as well. In this historic, fragmented political and ideological moment, how could it not be?
In our current age of Substack hot takes and Twitter punditry, an incisive meta-analysis is formulated almost as soon as reports from the field. As a culture, we’ve decided that a slow and careful consideration of the events is not as valuable as staking our claim to whatever the grand takeaway will be once they have finished unfolding. In this process, the lived reality of the Covid-19 pandemic becomes less important than what the experience means. But what does that experience mean?
Artists will decide the ultimate answer to that question. Percy Bysshe Shelley said that poets (and by extension all artists) were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Artists also function as curators of the collective memory of decisive events and experiences. We can see this principle at work in periods of stress and soul-searching throughout human history: Rosie the Riveter perched on her steel beam and eating her sandwich, George Washington standing up in a boat in the middle of an icy stream.
Art sometimes assumed the role of a propaganda tool, but in this instance, the propaganda was created at the grassroots level in support of the establishment narrative—an inversion of the conventional power dynamic of most propaganda campaigns.
What kind of art has been made so far in response to the Covid-19 pandemic? What stories are being told, what interpretations are being advanced, and what meanings are being established? And will any of these meanings become the received explanation of what the pandemic signified for global culture?
In the first months of the global response to the pandemic, as lockdowns were strictest and stay-at-home orders adopted, many people found they had an opportunity for creative expression which they had not been able to afford before — and since no one could do anything without encountering a discussion of the virus, that is as much of that year’s art was about. This period was flush with heavily symbolic art, frequently overlapping with the iconographic language of political cartoons.
Two images quickly became the dominant symbolic frame for artistic expression: the masks and the virus. These served as metaphors for solidarity and resolve; the virus as a shorthand for the feelings of confusion, fear, and anxiety that were prevalent in society at that time, and the mask as a sign that those feelings would be vanquished by the collective effort of those who were working to fight the disease.
The phrase “these trying times” became a common shorthand for the entire experience of pandemic-era life; contrast this phrase with “these troubled times” — the latter being more a reflection on the distress and the agent of troubling and the former emphasizing the process of overcoming that distress. The artistic sentiment of prominence was “we’re all in this together.” Online interactions enabling stories of pandemic life to circulate and influence with ease, despite physical isolation, was the norm.
Art sometimes assumed the role of a propaganda tool, but in this instance, the propaganda was created at the grassroots level in support of the establishment narrative—an inversion of the conventional power dynamic of most propaganda campaigns.
But the solidarity evidenced by depictions of masks and slogans of “we can get through this” did not last — the virus and the medical response to it were quickly drafted into the service of political ideology. Very quickly, the pandemic ceased being a metaphor for human resolve and determination in the face of an obstacle; it became, instead, a platform for the projection of one’s beliefs about the government, medical expertise, personal autonomy, the proper evaluation of risk — and the artists found themselves without a useful set of symbols to communicate these concepts. Their images of masks were now too weighted with political meaning on their own to be used as a conveyance for whatever other message the artists might want to say. Artistic depictions of the virus became easily weaponized as an indictment of “the other side” and what a bad job “they” were doing handling the situation.
Although medical workers are frequently depicted as brave heroes, I know of no art which tells their side of the story as people instead of as symbols—people who were unable to isolate at home, putting themselves at risk of infection. Neither do I see any art which treats as legitimate the bitterness and angst of people concerned more with governmental overreach and excessive reliance on experts' opinions.
A good example of the direction that artistic expression could take is Tatsuya Ishida’s Sinfest webcomic. The virus itself is almost never explicitly mentioned in Sinfest, but its subsidiary effects were acknowledged in Ishida’s politically charged tone. From the spring of 2020 to the fall of 2021, Ishida referenced masks, lockdowns, shortages, and vaccines in the strip’s daily installments, but their inconvenience was emphasized more than anything else. Instead of bolstering the official viewpoint, Sinfest fully embraced a contrarian interpretation of the pandemic, viewing its effects solely as instances of governmental overreach and ossification of expert opinion. The lives lost are never mentioned. But Ishida’s tone is notoriously curmudgeonly — consequently, his work is not often noticed outside the circle of those who agree with him already.
Kelly Yang’s middle-grade novel New From Here tells a story from another perspective. The book is a dense intersection of several pandemic experiences: families torn apart, layoffs, isolation, and, most forcibly, racism.
The book’s main characters are a Chinese-American family who leave Hong Kong for San Francisco in February 2020 to escape the pandemic. They struggle to find a place for themselves while encountering the anti-Asian hate which flared up during the early months of the pandemic. Ultimately they overcome their difficulties but with significant trials along the way.
The book is also valuable because it features children's experiences — and it is still too early to say what the pandemic will look like in the memories of children who lived through it, yet who might not have a full grasp of what was happening around them. What will they think about school closures, mask mandates, and the inability to socialize with their friends? Will the youngest children remember any of it 10, 20, or 50 years from now?
The reverse of the “we will get through this” mantra of early pandemic art is the very real psychological damage that some people encountered due to isolation. Bo Burnham’s Inside is a good record of what this damage could look like. The film focuses on Burnham’s desire to continue working as a comedian despite staying home in self-isolation. It chronicles his descent into paranoia and emotional collapse, finding that his self-imposed film project was unsupportable during his time alone. Indeed, what is the role of artistic practice in helping artists come to terms with the disaster around them, with the deaths of their relatives and friends?
Alissa Wilkinson of Vox compiled “Art During Coronavirus: A Syllabus for the End of the World,” a list of movies and books that spoke to her soul during the pandemic.
“We try to make sense of chaos and confusion by crafting fictions to comfort ourselves,” she writes, paraphrasing Joan Didion. “We trace lines between events, forcing them into arcs that make sense to us, that let us extract meaning from the world.”
Art frequently assumes the role of explainer and comforter during unprecedented times, but sometimes it fails at that task. Part of Bo Burnham’s Inside deals with whether there is even a valid purpose for comedy during times of overwhelming difficulty and tragedy. He concludes that for him, at least, his efforts to “Make ’em laugh” are not worthwhile.
The wrote story of pandemic life is one of staying at home/working from home and taking measures to prevent the spread of the virus. Although medical workers are frequently depicted as brave heroes, I know of no art which tells their side of the story as people instead of as symbols—people who were unable to isolate at home, putting themselves at risk of infection. Neither do I see any art which treats as legitimate the bitterness and angst of people concerned more with governmental overreach and excessive reliance on experts’ opinions.
Will their experience of the pandemic become part of the historical record? Because of the (sometimes incompatible) variety of opinions, takeaways, and responses to the pandemic experience, I doubt there will ever be an iconic image that defines the event for us—no “Death of Marat” or “Guernica.” No “Liberty at the Barricades” or “Europe After the Rain.”
But as time goes on, the sorting and re-evaluation will continue. As far as I know, there has not yet been any talk of a big Hollywood film adaptation of the events of the pandemic; perhaps we are still too emotionally close to the events to consider them with the proper detachment yet. But when we reach that point, what will our art be about?
Will films and novels be discussing the pandemic in Burnham-esque tones of emotional collapse and inadequacy? Will the Sinfest-inspired account of governmental overreach and political wrangling become the dominant narrative? Or will the Covid-19 experience be portrayed as another Contagion-style story of humanity versus insensate nature, struggling against a virus without feeling, sense, or meaning? At times like these, we must remember that viruses, like history itself, have no meaning other than what we decide to give them.
In Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten, Gary Gallagher recounts how the conventional perception of the meaning of the American Civil War changed from that of the preservation of the Union to the emancipation of the slaves, chiefly through artistic representations of the conflict from the immediate postwar years to the present day.
The same process will certainly occur regarding Covid-19 in the next several years, as events during the pandemic are given different weights by different artists and as the reality of people’s actual experiences is mediated through what is shown or told to them through artistic representation, the inevitable will happen: The collective cultural memory of what occurred in the past few years will be shaped and even distorted by our artistic representations of that time. The coronavirus experience will assume the form of whatever our art memories say it is, and nonconforming experiences will not have happened at all.
By the way…
In 2023, I want to do more guest posts like these. If you enjoyed this, reply or comment below and let me know. And if you have an idea you’d like to pitch, please send me an email at thecharrette@substack.com.
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