On Art, Hopelessness, and Crisis, Part I
When Caesura was first founded back in 2015 by Laurie Rojas, Bret Schneider, Adam Rothbarth, and myself, we named it after the notational symbol (//) that marks a pause before the next thing. Just a couple months ago, a new generation — Austin Carder, Patrick Zapien, Gabriel Almeida, and David Faes — reached out to us long after we’d let our publication hibernate to spark a revival. When we started the publication in 2015, we did not know about the historical caesura that was to come later that year in the form of Trump’s election. Now — and I feel somewhat silly for only just recognizing this — Caesura is resurrected in a time of the most literal of historical caesuras, the global lockdowns in response to COVID-19. We cannot go to see art here in New York, concerts are canceled, movie theaters closed, public cultural life in general is paused. We are in a literal break before the next thing. And what a dismal caesura it seems to be.
I want to write about hopelessness because it is felt but rarely articulated. We are subjected to a daily regimen of desperate optimism, articles clawing for hope in ways I am not even convinced the authors fully believe. I have grown tired of pronouncements that “art schools play an essential role in supporting the medical industry” and that art is more important now than ever. This may well be true for the “commercial” arts of design, animation, and video production. Let’s be real, Netflix is a lifeline right now. But I have yet to see a convincing argument on the importance of canvas painting, installation, or performance art to our present moment.
The US economy is in freefall; 36 million Americans are now unemployed. Galleries are closing. Museums are laying off vast swaths of their staff. Many, if not most, of those museum staffers, educators, curatorial assistants and art handlers rely on that day-job income to sustain the art they make or criticism they write by nights and weekends. The impact on art production and reception caused by this pandemic is yet unknown but most likely extreme, reaching beyond the job losses and closures we know of into the very existence of artists themselves. The art world — and more importantly, the art — that comes out on the other side of this will look very, very different.
It’s not hard to despair. As an art critic and educator whose concerns and livelihood are inseparable from the continuation of contemporary art production and exhibitions (a state of affairs I never doubted would continue, until this moment), I am worried. I am worried that my chosen home, New York City, might no longer be the bustling art capital I chose it for. I am heartbroken by pictures of contemporary breadlines. I am desperate to walk into a gallery again, and I am depressed by the knowledge that, even when that becomes possible, it will not be as it once was. I remember complaining that the dense crowds at the Met’s Michelangelo exhibition last year made it difficult to see the artworks. That certainly will not be a problem for the foreseeable future. And even when things do slowly reopen, I am separated from my city’s galleries and museums by trains and busses rife with the risk of infection and haunted by death. Will it be worth it? I don’t know. I find my hope for the future of art worn thin.
My hopelessness has been an itch in my mind for some time, long before the whole world entered into this caesura. We live in an age of political rot. No, I’m not talking about Trump. I’m talking about that of which Trump is a symptom: the utter lack of politics and resultant lack of meaningful social existence. We have been a society in despair for quite some time. And without meaningful social existence, without the political possibility of imagining a better world, what possibilities are there for art? If beauty is the crack through which we might see the light of freedom, can it now only mock us in our inability to turn that crack into a doorway? The art of this century seems to agree, having abandoned the pursuit of beauty entirely rather than endure the challenge its mockery might pose. Beauty is to be tossed aside, condemned in a show trial as white, male, colonialist, bourgeois, antiquarian, to save us the embarrassment of facing it. But perhaps not; perhaps the blame is not wholly on us aesthetes. The light of freedom that once shone through that crack is now the faintest of flickers. It is not easy to see.
The institutions crumbling under the stress of lockdowns are institutions that were already on the precipice. COVID-19 intensifies existing problems rather than creating new ones. When the excellent anthology Museums in Crisis was published in 1972, its title was not hyperbolic. Museums were in crisis then (and before). They have been since. And now that crisis is visceral, just as it is visceral in galleries and artists’ studios. The crisis was already there. What was once a philosophical problem has become practical.
At this moment I often think about Ferdinand Hodler’s portraits of his mistress, Valentine Godé-Darel, on her deathbed. As she lay dying, he sat by her side and painted her portrait day after day, even going so far as to paint her corpse after she passed. The paintings mark one of the most visceral expressions of grief I have seen in art. But they also remind us that in the deepest of despair, there is hope, there remains the question of beauty. To paint is to believe in a future, to make the daring assumption that, despite all grief and despair, humanity will carry on. Because Hodler painted her, Valentine Godé-Darel’s corpse is still twitching. As is art, as is beauty, as is hope. //
Ferdinand Hodler, Valentine Godé Darel mit aufgelöstem Haar, 1913. From: Wikiart.
Ferdinand Hodler, Valentine Godé-Darel im Krankenbett, 1914. From: Wikimedia.
Ferdinand Hodler, Die tote Valentine Godé-Darel mit Rosen, 1915. From: Aargauer Kunsthaus.
Ferdinand Hodler, Valentine Godé-Darel on Her Deathbed, 1915. From: The Met.
