It has become a commonplace to observe that the Covid-19 pandemic exposes some of the weaknesses inherent in the way we organize ourselves as social beings. For example, through the mechanisms of the capitalist labour market, we have collectively agreed that certain modes of work are not terribly important. We know this because we don’t pay a living wage to the people who do these jobs. Nevertheless, while we self-isolate, we discover that it serves us well that people continue to fill these roles, so we carve out exceptions to the rules governing self-isolation by designating these roles “essential services.”
It seems reasonable to designate the health care professions as essential services, but we’ve discovered that we likewise can’t live without cashiers at grocery stores and people to stock the shelves at our liquor stores. Baristas, of course, are the necessary enablers of our caffeine addictions. Let’s not forget about cleaning staff, taxi drivers, public transit workers, and the concierge in my building. I’d be lost without her. By exempting these roles from self-isolation requirements, we say to them, in effect, that we require them to assume the heightened risk of infection associated with their roles. Curiously, we don’t say to them that we are willing to compensate for this heightened risk. The reason we get away with this is that the people who fill these roles aren’t in a position to negotiate; they have to work.
Art as an Essential Service
But one task we omit from the list of essential services—perhaps because we are in the habit of omitting it from all lists all of the time—is the artist. This, notwithstanding the fact that we routinely turn to the poet, the novelist, musician, actor, singer, painter for an approach to the direst questions that rattle our spirits. We turn to them with greater urgency in the midst of a global pandemic. Nevertheless, as with our baristas, we stare with incredulity at the person who suggests we ought to help them—the people we beg to feed our souls—to pay their bills and to put food on their tables. As with our baristas, the reason we get away with this is that artists aren’t in a position to negotiate; not necessarily because economic exigencies compel them to work, but because the compulsion to create lies outside the (il)logic of the labour market. They have to work.
For the creative impulse, there is something paradoxically liberating about confinement. Perhaps the finest expression of this insight comes from Wordsworth more than 200 years ago when, in his sonnet “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,” he observes: “In truth the prison, unto which we doom/Ourselves, no prison is.” In Wordsworth, the prison is the sonnet whose strictures provide a discipline that balances the unruly impulses of the artist to more productive ends. It may prove that self-isolation furnishes an analogous discipline that allows creativity to flourish. The danger of too much health, happiness, and prosperity is that our creative and spiritual lives fall into a banal stagnation. The pressures of unprecedented experience may spur artists on to fresh modes of expression that resist this danger.
Perhaps the closest parallel we have to the current situation is the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City celebrates the creative foment that arose in response to this tragedy, especially in New York City. Published in 2016, Laing’s book could not have anticipated the relevance of her writing to our current situation. Art historian and queer theorist, John Paul Ricco, is more explicit in drawing a parallel between the artistic response to these two very different infectious diseases. In particular, he concerns himself with the conundrum facing all artists in these circumstances: how do you represent what is not there? How do you portray what has been erased? Ricco looks to interventions staged during the 1990’s which drew attention to this problem (e.g. Derek Jarman’s film Blue; Jarman had lost his vision because of AIDS-related complications and Blue is an extended meditation upon sight).
These interventions point to the further fact that an infectious disease, whether malaria or HIV/AIDS or a coronavirus, is not a neutral fact but has a political dimension. AIDS inflicted horror on the U.S. not simply because it killed people, but because its introduction into the U.S. population was through gay males at a time when Ronald Reagan was president and could see no benefit in supporting people who occupied no place on his moral landscape. The refusal to support victims of the HIV/AIDS virus persists as a geo-political fact even to this day. In 2019, there were 690,00 AIDS-related deaths. Two-thirds of those deaths occurred on the African continent. Those are not neutral facts but have a political dimension that can be traced to the foreign policies of industrialized countries. The same can be said for malaria deaths (405,000 in 2018; 67% children under 5; almost all on the African continent) or tuberculosis (1.5 million deaths in 2018; mostly in India, China, and Indonesia).
A Fortune Cookie Intervention
John Paul Ricco lives in our building and has been instrumental in fostering an art committee which, among other things, has developed a gallery to showcase the work of artists living in this vertical community. In May, through his connection with the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City, Ricco introduced an installation to our lobby, Untitled (Fortune Cookie Corner) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. People from 1,000 different locations throughout the world were invited to participate by creating a pile of anywhere from 240-1,000 fortune cookies in a high-traffic public location. This is reminiscent of an earlier installation Olivia Laing documents in her 2020 book, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. Roulof Louw’s 1967 Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges) was a stack of 5,800 oranges in the London Arts Lab where passersby were invited to pull an orange from the stack and eat it. Obviously, this predated both HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 and so engaged people with other concerns, like challenging the hallowed position of the artist in controlling the form of the work and interrogating the role of consumption in a capitalist society.
Untitled (Fortune Cookie Corner) elaborates upon these concerns simply by virtue of the fact that it appears in the context of a global pandemic. Yes, it challenges the hallowed position of the artist in controlling the form of the work because people who encounter it are free to change its shape and, more pointedly, because the artist has no say in the work’s current manifestation for the very practical reason that he died of AIDS-related complications in 1996. And yes, it interrogates the role of consumption in a capitalist society because it is composed of a consumable product and, more pointedly, because its current iteration situates it on the floor beside my mailbox where I daily pull advertising for sales on toothpaste and fried chicken while UberEats drivers arrive with orders of takeout Chinese food.
But, in a number of ways, because this installation appears in the context of Covid-19, it goes further. Like Covid-19, it is global in scope, appearing simultaneously in 1,000 different venues. In addition, it tempts passersby to engage in transgressive acts. Gonzalez-Torres was known for similar works that invited people to suck on hard candies. This was at the height of the AIDS pandemic when fear and uncertainty about modes of transmission joined hands to determine health policies around touching, interactions with strangers, and movement through public spaces. Policies in turn infected public mores. An invitation to suck on a candy left by a stranger in a public space was an invitation to violate the body politic through an unsanctioned touching.
Today, in the context of Covid-19, fear and uncertainty combine in precisely the same way, leading to public health edicts which, when examined years from now, may strike us as no less ridiculous than trying to protect ourselves from contracting HIV/AIDS by placing paper covers on toilet seats. Do we chance it? We don’t know where these fortune cookies come from. We don’t know how others before us have interacted with the pile of cookies.
Although Gonzalez-Torres couldn’t have anticipated it at the time of its first installation, his pile of fortune cookies has assumed another dimension in the context of Covid-19. Donald Trump’s patent racism has effectively given his base permission to vilify China and, by association, people who are ethnically Chinese. Covid-19 is the Wuhan flu or the China virus. The virus is China’s fault. From there, it’s a short leap to generalizations about what sort of people the Chinese are, about wet markets, and about the food they eat. Untitled (Fortune Cookie Corner) functions as an anti-racist intervention, inviting those who interact with it to validate Chinese identity through a symbolic gesture. It exemplifies what is possible with art and why art is an essential service. It cracks open the space we daily occupy and infects it with kindness and empathy.
Returning to Ricco’s question—how do we represent what is no longer there?—Untitled (Fortune Cookie Corner) provides a possible response: not all art aspires to be representational. Sometimes, rather than sitting in a static form, it enters into a more active relationship with the viewer. The outcome of the work is not an object we stare at, but a performance we enact. Even so, Ricco’s question has some urgency for me personally because I produce photographs and photographs rarely engage viewers in quite the way fortune cookies do.
Our building’s gallery put out a call for submissions, a pandemic showing, and two of my submissions were accepted. Both are photographs of abandoned spaces. One is the main building from the Camp Bison Prison Farm. The other is a hotel room at the Long Branch Hotel in Still River. Both locations are south of Sudbury in relatively isolated landscapes. I made both images long before the Covid-19 pandemic appeared, and so my intentions were coloured by more obvious concerns, like the life cycle of materials in our late capitalist economy and the irrelevance of humans in this process. What are obviously missing from these photographs are the human beings these buildings are supposed to serve. But in a fresh context, fresh meanings graft themselves to the images.
Taking Back our Space
Our experience of buildings has changed. Beginning in the late 20th century, a handful of cultural observers noted a trend in building design particularly as it concerns buildings whose purpose is to facilitate the movement of people around the globe. Airports. Hotels. Restaurants. It is possible to wake up in an airport and, based solely on the appearance of the built environment, have no idea where you are. Virtually every airport is interchangeable with every other. Business travel has created a demand for predictable experience. It is more efficient. When you arrive in Singapore, you don’t have to waste time asking directions for a taxi because the taxi queue is more or less where you’d find it in any airport. You check into the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and your room is the same as you’d find in any room anywhere in the world. You don’t waste time phoning the concierge with questions about how to operate your TV; you probably own the same model at home. And when you turn it on, you can watch the same police procedurals you watch while lounging in your own living room.
This flattening of global experience has only accelerated. AirBnb has influenced condominium design. Units once intended as homes are now prepared with the assumption that they will be used as short-term rental properties complete with all the features one would expect of a global hotel chain. And so our homes have become indistinguishable one from another. The same is true of our work environments. Few people occupy offices which they have made personal with paintings and photographs of children. Instead, office work is now more likely to happen in a generic environment, like a partitioned “cubicle”, which is in perpetual use. Instead of paintings and photographs of children, today’s office worker decorates their work space with a screen saver.
Covid-19 has disrupted late capitalist fantasies about the perfectly mobile unit of labour. Sudden constraints on travel and work have forced us to reclaim our personal spaces as our own. If I am to occupy a single space for most of every day, then I have to inject something of my self into that space. My mental health depends upon it. Fortunately, as Wordsworth observed, sudden constraints can foster creative responses.
The building where I live was constructed in 1982 at the height of Toronto’s flirtation with Brutalism. It is a concrete monstrosity. Not far from it stands another Brutalist building that used to serve as a student residence for the University of Toronto. Near its entrance sits a large bronze sculpture to memorialize the many students who killed themselves on this site. It turns out that Brutalism, as an approach to living space, is hostile to the human spirit. Shortly after we moved in to this building, our neighbour across the hall climbed to the roof and jumped. This underscored for us the fact that, while there are many advantages to living where we do, there are always the lurking dangers of alienation and loneliness. 2020 compounds these dangers by driving us deeper into our concrete cocoons.
We are fortunate to live in a community that is intentional and proactive in addressing the issues that affect it. To address the challenges of a Brutalist environment, the community has a library with comfy chairs where you can sit and gaze out over the trees of the neighbouring ravine. The concrete has been “warmed” with carpet and linen wallpaper. There are common terraces where residents can lounge outside and enjoy the sunshine. And, of course, there is the art gallery. Here, even (and perhaps especially) during our time of self-isolation, we can pause and gaze at the work of other residents. For a minute, we can see the world through the eyes of our neighbours and it reassures us. We feel less alone.
There is an irony in presenting photographs of abandoned spaces at precisely the moment when we are most likely to reclaim and humanize our built spaces. It is akin to the irony of designating our lowest paying jobs “essential services.” The disruptive nature of the Covid-19 pandemic raises questions about the unintended consequences of unfettered capitalism. We wonder if a better world is possible, one in which human concerns are drawn back into the frame.
