Art Heals: Out of Step

As you probably have noticed by now, I think about art, and artists, a lot.  (I also think about Pringles a lot, but I am trying to stop that.)

I think about artists, nationally and internationally famous ones with studios and staff, locally famous ones working from home, and the vast majority, artists and makers just striving to create under these conditions of adversity and scarcity.  Historically, we know of great art that was created during or in response to pandemics.  Titian’s Pietà was finished just before he died of the plague in Venice in 1576.  Edvard Munch painted Self-Portrait After the Spanish Flu a year after he survived it.  But much great art never survived that epidemic, because the great artists who might have made it did not survive.  Egon Schiele never finished his portrait, The Family; he and his wife died from the flu in 1918 before he could.  The poet Apollinaire and artist Gustav Klimt are both said to have died of flu complications in 1918 as well.

How will the art world respond to today’s epidemic?  What will art look like post-Covid? There certainly will be changes in the way art is seen, and marketed, and sold.  Artists, gallerists and collectors are rethinking the damage that all that air travel to art fairs does to the environment, now that they are forced to consider art virtually.  Materials and process might change, as artists, coping with inaccessible studios or scarcity of materials, consider 60’s philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s dictum, “The medium is the message.”

IPhone art, Zoom interviews, repurposed materials, virtual viewing rooms; the internet is taken seriously now as a medium.  Blockbuster shows are, for the foreseeable future, a thing of the past, as large gatherings continue to be dangerous.

And what of subject matter?  Just like the rest of us, some artists respond politically, pouring outrage onto the canvas or the film.  Others respond narratively, producing artwork that tells the story of their own or others’ struggles.  Others respond humbly, creating beauty for its own sake, as solace and comfort.    Every response is a valid one, because every response is a human one.  Consider the response of the artist Giorgio Morandi, who during WWII, remained silently in his studio painting the ethereal ceramics for which he is famous.  I mention him because  of the comment the art critic Giuseppe Marchiori made about him, “Amid the clamor of war his silent and lonely steadfastness was a bulwark; it was a noble protest of the man the most ‘out of step’ in the world.”

I take this as a lesson to myself.  On days when I feel tired of coping, and guilty about not responding more vigorously to the present circumstances, I tell myself it is ok to be “out of step.”  Artists have much to teach us; the most important lesson may be that it is all right to just be human.

This is Mindful of Morandi, by Bud Hensgen.  Art Heals.