1. Art in the Time of COVID-19

How can I make art when the world is upside down?

Dear QOC,

Now that we know everything has changed, how we continue as artists? I’m asking this aside from the requisite period of figuring out survival, and dealing with the grief that comes from understanding that the world has changed. When we are too strung out with stress and anxiety about our changing world, safety, the economy, our families’ health, etc. how do we create? But also how do we want and need to create in this new world?

We can’t all just keep growing vegetable gardens and baking bread the way we all are at the moment, not indefinitely; I mean we need to get back to work again, but how do we even consider this when we don’t really know what that work looks like, can look like, or indeed what it needs to look like…? What do artists do today and tomorrow and the next day and the next during a pandemic when it all feels so damn up in the air?

—Artist Adrift

Dear AA,

I write this as my child tears around the house, driven stir-crazy by two weeks of isolation and pouring rain, and with one eye half on the news. Every time I check Twitter it seems like the world has been realigned again, not carefully and judiciously, but in completely baffling and disorienting ways. The dog is unfazed—the basics of his life remain the same—but I understand the feeling of waking up utterly unprepared to plan for the future, let alone know what needs accomplished in the day.

The fall-out from COVID-19, a global pandemic, is unprecedented. At the same time it’s been bittersweet watching the wider world begin to grapple with issues that chronically ill people, disabled people, working parents, aged carers etc. have known forever. I’m surprised by how easy I’m finding self-isolation this time around; the last time I spent so many days indoors I was severely depressed, with a tiny child, and none of the state acknowledgement and assistance we’re seeing now.

I say this not to diminish the force of this question, but to remind us both that the framework in which it’s posed—one of limited movement, precarious income, and fear of the loss of health—is one that’s a reality for many people already. Part of the current task is to recalibrate our listening, and make sure not to invent the wheel at the expense of people who have done this for a while.

I drew three cards while thinking of this question: Strength (inverted), Justice, (inverted), The Magician. I don’t usually put much stock in whether cards are inverted or not, but it does seem notable that the first two cards were upside down. Strength has her attention elsewhere—Justice’s scales now float like balloons. These two should be guiding the Magician, but they’ve been temporarily unmoored.

The spread reflects the question much more directly when these errant cards are righted. Justice, her scales now hanging in balance, weighs the patience and endurance of Strength against the Magician’s tenacity and youth. To the left, indicating the past, is commitment to a particular mode of practice: to the right, the future, apprenticeship, and the possibility of once more feeling clumsy or imperfectly controlled.

One thing that’s striking is how much these cards are of a kind. The yellow ground is congruent between them, making a firm foundation, and they are surrounded simply by air, as-yet unfilled space. They are all heavily robed, and enormous hats shield their heads, indicating a kind of intellectual guardedness and desire for protection. Yet the robes are flowing—they aren’t armour, but provide comfort and warmth.

All three are cut off horizontally at the groin, suggesting blocked creativity, but none of the objects they stand with are immovably impeding them. All could simply move, or decide to walk away.

The idea of ‘get[ting] back to work again’ suggests a return to a status quo, but whatever does emerge from this moment will have to be something new. Those originally-inverted cards hint at ways of moving forward.

Strength, whose back was initially turned against the present, can only be righted by examining the weaknesses of past systems: you need to look at how you’ve moved within them, and discard what is no longer needed. She is a card that represents amongst other things self-control; but sometimes that self-control is better off loosened.

Likewise, Justice works best when her sword is pointing to the sky. Consider where it’s sliced too deeply—where critique (and self-critique) has been painful and where healing needs to take place—to make sure that she guides you dispassionately and doesn’t allow punitive habits. The big risk here is to over-intellectualise.

It feels like part of the anxiety of this moment, and of this question, comes from the fear that art is frivolous in the face of a crisis like this. But it isn’t wrong to want to make things, especially when it feels like the world is falling apart. Baking bread and planting vegetables are acts of long-term care and stability, and they come from the same place of creative compulsion that art does. You can do these things indefinitely, and let them sustain you as, like the Magician, you take up your tools, poised for transformation in ways you don’t yet know.

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