I’ve long been collecting and/or appreciating images of art pieces and snippets of poems and songs and such for a while of people left behind by those able to pretend the pandemic now affects no one.
People who lost their ill loved ones, people who lost their caretakers, the people still too sick to participate in social networks who could really have used a lot more help than anyone was ever prepared to give … now betrayed by things called “weekly bar quiz night” and “meetup at the museum” and “potluck at Ben’s” ENTIRELY replacing the once common “grilling outside” and “drinks on the patio” and “watch party on zoom,” as though we have not just passed through some great gate into the world of shared airspaces, but must remove all evidence that we once enjoyed such things regularly.
Everyone seems to want to claim that lockdown made great art to explore… what, yet more pieces framed around extraordinary privilege? Temporary brushes with an existence in which people now live INDEFINITELY but with their accommodations now freshly packed up like they never existed?
Framed as though people losing interest in masks and giving up was the end, but that wasn’t the end! The foundations of even close circles and families cracked when people started to do their normal activities again, but this time with a wall keeping the “vulnerable” people out. It was a SEVERING. Some went on and went back. Some are left behind, BEGGING them to act like human beings and make it safe for others to be in the room with them, to stop cordoning off access to the joys or even just the basic requirements of life, to not reduce human beings to the percentage that they won’t bother to accommodate, to the barrier to maximal ticket sales, to the ranks of “excess deaths” and “the uninsurable” and “dead from complications after a long battle.”
They beg you to care enough to ensure that someone who needs clean air, CLEAN AIR, a fundamental requirement, the most basic of basic needs… can actually access it under your leadership.
The wall people have thrown up to keep out the expendable is a forbidding one. THAT is where the meaningful art comes from. It bleeds out onto pages and into endlessly repetitive patterns (because it’s difficult to concentrate) on reclaimed scrap yarn (because it’s a risky outing to fetch more). Projects of weeks and months taking years. Songs written by people who still can’t push the air to sing them or sit up to play.
Solidarity until it’s inconvenient. Inclusivity as a fad.
I know someone who makes, privately, ransom note cutouts from the packing slips and labels from the endless shipment, demanding a life back with each. A furious little prayer to a hostile god. By her choice, her work will never reach the eyes of the unaffected … for this wall has two sides. The best art of these times, perhaps, we must now jealously horde away from those who make it necessary. Those who cannot be trusted with your safety certainly cannot be trusted with your pain.