ART IN THE PANDEMIC
Selby Sohn
John Kelsey, an art critic, once wrote, “How much of a painting is already in the TIFF? And in the end, after the file has been selected and commanded to print, how much actually comes out of the Epson? Where does painting go when it’s sent and received like this—as a code? The work of art seems to go outside of itself when it decides to picture the weightless, groundless, dimensionless, and genderless qualities of information, in the cybernetic sense; or when the image itself assumes such qualities in order to experience how abstraction happens today. The first thing the work abandons is the act of painting, and with it, manual space… Now the space of the work is no longer either optical or manual, but communicational, extending itself along a network that links one apparatus to another.” 1
Before the pandemic, I wrote, “What is the point of going into a museum when you can see high resolution images of an art piece online.”
When the pandemic started, I said, “I am really starting to hate zoom and any sense of watching myself while I am talking to someone else. Have we really reached the point of self-reflexive, conversational surveillance? Was there not enough of this already?”
I am repeating these things because although I loved saying them in a previous life, I have now realized they are wrong. Wrong in the sense that they don’t fit the current moment. My depression has let me know that a painting is not just a TIFF, that zoom is more than self-reflexive conversational surveillance. I depend on zoom. I went from being cynical about it to having my camera on all the time. I have started doing a performance piece on zoom with my friend Sarah Borruso, every week, where we repeat, “I am watching you as you are watching me, watch myself.” I think this performance inaugurated me to the weirdness of zoom. Watching myself is so strange. I have thought a lot about how watching ourselves speak is not something Homo Sapiens are adapted to do, but I think I might have been wrong about that as well. In so many ways, we always perceive that others are watching us as we exist in the world, and until now we were denied access to that image too. Now we can control that image, and that control is incredible. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator.”2 I have realized how much I need spectators: to look at, and be looked at, and how much I need them in real time.
What kind of substitutes are we willing to accept? How far are we willing to trick ourselves? Is anyone actually tricked, or are we all performing satisfaction to reassure everyone that everything is okay? I am not okay. It is okay to not be okay.
To know of something is a far cry from knowing it. I watched the Truman Show last night with my husband. In the ending scene, Truman finds himself at the limit of the artificial world, breaking through the wall with his boat. For some reason, I feel like this is the perfect metaphor for the pandemic: we are constantly pushing our boats against artificial walls looking for realness and never quite getting there, because we can’t. The limits are real. We are left with so many semblances of the world, of our immediate past, without having the thing itself. Sometimes these semblances can be overwhelming. I have turned off social media for two weeks and have been feeling much better since. Watching people, I have learned, is not the same as being with them. Watching people without being with them, is excruciating. I have realized everything on social media is in the past. It is everyone that I used to know before this whole thing started. Every post immediately becomes the past. We have constantly enmeshed ourselves in instantaneous memorialization.
Since the pandemic started, I have barely seen anyone. Recently, I grabbed a drink with a friend of mine in a park. We admitted immediately that we were both terrible at socializing, so we said everything, interrupted each other, broke all the rules. I still found it hard to talk and listen, in the way I used to, in the previous definition of being human. We need to rehearse being human in order to be human.
1. Kelsey, John. Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art. Sternberg, 2012.
2. Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Secker & Warburg, 1978.