Ambika Devi
I tend to write posts in those times when I'm ruminating on stuff as opposed to making things. During the time of covid I did a lot of ruminating and this post is left over from then. I still think it is relevant and even though the epidemic now feels as if it has passed, I suspect we have not seen the last of it, or similar outbreaks of infections. The covid pandemic has been a unique phenomena and artists in every part of the world had to respond to it. This was a marvellous opportunity to look at how different societies and the art cultures within them responded and it demonstrated the ubiquity of visual art and its ability to transcend borders and cultural boundaries, as well as it reaffirming for myself its relevance as an art form.
Ambika Devi is an artist from Rashidpur village in the northern Indian state of Bihar. She uses a folk art form called Madhubani, which takes its name from the geographical district she works in. This type of art-form is found on the walls of homes and on handmade paper. It is confined to a compact geographical area where the skills have been passed on over centuries; the style largely remaining the same. Ambika Devi's image shows people wearing face masks and maintaining social distancing at village markets. Traditionally many folk art forms in India were made on large scrolls or as murals to share information with the local community. Artists would hold up scrolls in village squares and combine these images with storytelling. Ambika Devi's images carry this tradition on, her images being used to alert villagers in the area to the continuing need to wear face masks.
Ambika Devi
The fact that electronic media is a world wide phenomena, is clearly illustrated by the fact that the Indian artist Apindra Swain, was commissioned by the BBC to draw the image below.
Apindra Swain
Apindra Swain: Mythological figures wearing face masks
Apindra Swain is a Pattachitra painter from Raghurajpur in the eastern state of Orissa. This art form dates back to the 5th Century and is famous for its bright hues and faces drawn in profile. The paints are hand made and still use natural colours such as ochres and iron oxides (hematite). Her paintings in response to the pandemic show mythological figures wearing face masks; age old entities demonstrate the vital need to combat an invisible threat.
I was reminded of my earlier post on drawing the corona virus, and how different cultures over the years have attempted to respond to the need to visualising invisible threats.
Nujuum Hashi
Nujuum Hashi
As I began looking at different parts of the world for artists responding to the corona virus, I also found individual stories of artists, some of which reflected the hard struggle they have had just to be able to have an art practice. Nujuum Hashi overcame traditional prejudice to become a respected artist in Somalia. She had been accused of being un-Islamic, as many Muslims believe that art depicting humans is forbidden. About the image of herself battling the virus, she says, "This shows me fighting the Covid virus. I was incredibly ill and was scared I would die like so many others around me. "After I painted this picture, people started calling me to ask for tips on how I managed to recover." Because Islamic artists are forbidden to make figurative images, unlike Apindra Swain or Ambika Devi, Nujuum Hashi has had no local tradition to draw upon, so her work reflects a wide range of visual sources, that are often experienced via electronic media or cheap print; from cartoons and information graphics to more traditional fine art imagery. Because of this some would argue that her work is superficial but I would suggest that it is as important in its context as any other artwork. The meaning is the use as Wittgenstein would say. This reflection on responses to the pandemic is deliberately not trying to set up a what is good or bad art dialogue. That would seem inappropriate in a post that is an attempt to get a feeling for a globally experienced situation, rather than a survey of the best in international art practice.
At the same time that artists who were still carrying on the folk art traditions of India were responding to the pandemic by creating images designed to make people aware of the need to wear masks, artists in the western hemisphere were attempting to visualise the problem as one of social isolation. Daniel Laredo for example wanted to show how we were all isolated by the virus, he stated, "The buildings represent a home and a boat, and they are upside down because the pandemic situation has the entire world upside down". This image is a hand made drawing which was then edited in PhotoShop.
"Sailing in the sea of uncertainty of a pandemic" by Daniel Laredo
In the Philippines artists responded critically to the heavily controlled flow of information from the government in response to covid, as this had echoes of historic artistic suppression, triggering memories of the violence and oppression of the Marcos era. In particular Neil Doloricon's images were powerful reminders of his long career as a socialist artist, however he sadly died before the pandemic was over.
Neil Doloricon, Lockdown, 2020.
Neil Doloricon, Pila
Neil Doloricon used wood cuts to create his stark images, a tradition that has a long association with socialist resistance to the sophisticated image production processes of capitalism.
Duyi Han: 'The Saints Wear White'
A more designed approach was taken by the Chinese American artist Duyi Han, in his work 'The Saints Wear White' there is a Chapel dedicated to medical workers saving lives during the coronavirus epidemic.
Fred Tomaselli, March 14, 2020
Back in the more traditional 'art world' of contemporary art, Fred Tomaselli a well known artist who has been at the forefront of the contemporary art scene since the 1980s, was also trying to respond to the pandemic. He has an international reputation within the contemporary art scene for meticulously crafted, richly detailed work. His hybrid images could almost be quilts or mosaics; their collaged components from printed sources, are usually suspended in layers of clear, polished, hard resin, that allow flat objects, photographic representations and paint to co-exist on the same surface. As a sort of sketchbook activity he has occasionally been reworking the front pages of the New York Times and in one of his responses to the pandemic he transformed a photograph of a medical worker taking a nasal swab, into a collage of the worker surrounded by suggestive, spiky spheres. “It’s both a refuge from, and a deep dive into, our new collective reality,” Tomaselli said of creating during the pandemic. “The refuge comes when I lose myself in the process.” He also says of these collages, “I think that maybe the Times collages are quietly political, in that I can riff on anything I want, while the horrors of the world become the background buzz. Maybe I’m saying that the world may be going to hell, but I still keep painting.” Tomaselli's reflections are those of a well established artist, who has a good steady income and who lives in a pretty stable environment and his views of what it is to be a responsive art practitioner reflect this.
A Californian based professor of computational biology and research, David Goodsell is also an artist. An image of this painting of the cross section of the coronavirus was released on Twitter and is now also available in a colouring book version for children.
Some artists work between cultures, Dhruvi Acharya in doing this can channel the anxieties of both Eastern and Western cultures.
Dhruvi Acharya works between studios based in the USA and India. She describes her work as, a visual diary of thoughts, observations, feelings and experiences and she stated that in relation to her covid focused work, “My current watercolours are in response to a world in the grips of a pandemic, when more apparent than ever are the repercussions of our misplaced priorities and our entitled attitudes towards our earth and all living things.” During lockdown, she made a series of images, designed to document her feelings as she was forced to work in isolation.
Drawing and image making is though limited in its appeal and you have to either seek images out, as I have been doing or you need to belong to a particular locality where an artist is still working within the community or you belong to a sub-group of people, whereby you are a targeted audience for the images. If you want to affect a mass audience, immersive installations are perhaps where the public have encountered responses to the pandemic at their most powerful.
Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, installation view of 'In America, 2021', at the National Mall, Washington, D.C., 2021
Firstenberg and a team of associates for the installation 'In America, 2021' planted masses of small, palm-sized white flags, each representing a life lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. The flags blanketed the north lawn around the Washington Monument. The sheer numbers of victims begins to resonate when we see graphically how much of the ground these small flags cover. Each one has a name on it, each one a personal surrender to the virus. The work was I'm sure inspired by an earlier response to the AIDS epidemic, when quilts were made to remember those who had died from AIDS complications. There is something very moving when people collectively work together to construct images designed to commemorate tragic events. See: The AIDS Memorial Quilt website, to get an idea of how this issue has been visualised on line.
Just one of thousands
Looking at these private and collective responses to the Covid epidemic proves to myself that art is still a powerful and needed form of cathartic communication. This tiny survey of responses is of course the tip of a huge iceberg, but I hope it can operate as a reminder that art has a emotional purpose and that it can fulfil both very personal as well as very public functions.
I also responded as an artist to the pandemic, and the emotional intensity pushed me into using colour again. Looking back at some of these images now, I see an affinity and link to all those thousands of other artists across the world who were also driven to visually externalise their feelings on being locked down.
Below are some of the images I made at the time, as well as responding to the nasty poking about of swabs on sticks that went into your mouth or up your nose, I found myself giving the virus a human head, I dreamt that it could see me and in size it became like a small planet or moon.
In my mind the virus became bigger and bigger, eventually taking over the whole city.
Once the pandemic was over, or at least it felt as it was, I made a stained glass image, a sort of memorial, whereby a mythic figure mentally attempts to bury the virus down a hole. As I made the image, I realised the virus could just as easily be emerging and floating up out of the hole, as being sent down into it. Time will tell.
We are of course now all injected.
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