Artists are highly sensitive to shifts in society. For this reason, USFCAM has asked a select company of international creators to respond to the overwhelming realities of the pandemic. Life During Wartime takes full advantage of one of the few outlets artists still have—the virtual space of the Internet—to mobilize sentiment, thought and activity around the quarantine. The exhibition will address both intimacy and isolation, the communal obligation we all have to engage in “social distancing” with the absolute need humans have to maintain relationships around work, love, loss, friendship, mental health, etc. In this way, Life During Wartime will tap into the concentrated ability art has to serve as physical and virtual catalyst to trigger ideas, stories, conversations, emotions, feelings and mental states that allow us to continue to reflect on our internal and external realities.

In consideration of the fact that all artistic expression has been significantly recontextualized by the current pandemic, Life During Wartime will present artworks made before as well as contributions made during the period of the quarantine, which we can say began globally on March 5, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus to be a global pandemic. The exhibition will feature artist contributions that are not limited exclusively to finished artworks, but also include interviews, personal reflections, observations, texts, social media posts, and even playlists.

 

Curator’s Essay

May you live in interesting times.

An English expression that has long masqueraded as the translation of a Chinese curse, the phrase—in its fully apocryphal and colonialist formulation—encapsulates our present condition like few other sayings.

Despite being widely considered Confucian knowledge, this particular proto-globalist construction can be first attributed to the memoirs of Hughe Knatchbull-Hughesen, the British Ambassador to China between 1936 and 1937, but also to Frederic René Coudert, Jr., a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1959. In 1936, Coudert, Jr., wrote a letter to his friend Austen Chamberlain, brother of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, to express his view that the world was living through what he called “an interesting age.” Chamberlain’s response included the enduring and wholly creolized phrase.

“Many years ago,” he wrote, “I learned from one of our diplomats in China that one of the principal Chinese curses heaped upon an enemy is, ‘May you live in an interesting age.’” “Surely,” he continued in Coudert, Jr.’s retelling, “no age has been more fraught with insecurity than our own present time.”

Equipped though he was with powerful contacts, Coudert, Jr., couldn’t have known the half of it. The 20th century, which had already suffered through World War I—the so-called “war to end all wars”—marched ineluctably on its destructive path. Among the major conflicts that brought death and misery to millions were the Chinese Civil War, World War II, the Holocaust, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the conflagrations and coups engendered by the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, the Balkan Wars and the Rwandan Genocide. The 21st century, alas, has brought more of the same. Our era’s incarnation of “interesting times” consists of globalized civil unrest and political volatility that threatens the security of two of the world’s wealthiest territories, the U.S. and Western Europe, regions that have since the 1970s remained largely immune to epidemics of chronic political instability. Until now.

Enter the COVID-19 pandemic. A worldwide plague that has quarantined 2.6 billion people, or more than a third of the world’s population, the current global health crisis has thrown the world’s interdependence, interconnectedness and vulnerability into stark relief. Borders have been shut down like metal gates, international travel has been stopped in its tracks, lives have been turned upside down, generations have readjusted their most basic expectations as entire societies have ground to a halt. Currently, the virus spreads while the world’s scientists try desperately to catch up with its deadly effects and the equally virulent spread of alternative facts, misinformation and outright lies. In the U.S. the price of the lockdown (the only proven way to partially halt the spread of the coronavirus) is intolerably high and climbing. As of this writing 109,533 people have died from COVID-19 since February, 42.6 million are out of work, and millions more have been left to wonder anxiously when a working vaccine will arrive and, just as urgently, where their next paycheck will come from.

Heaped atop this planetary emergency, like insult upon injury, is a second U.S.-centric pandemic: this one manifests as state-sanctioned police violence against black and brown bodies. If that plague’s original source can be traced back to the founding of the republic, its newest outbreak has found its most recent expression in the wanton murder of George Floyd by four policemen in Minnesota—but also in the slow response of the state to bring his killers to justice and an agonizing nine-minute video of his killing that throws into relief not just Mr. Floyd’s cruel murder, but the complete lack of accountability that accompanies the deaths of black and brown citizens at the hands of police in this country. At issue here, of course, is a second public health crisis, this one of longer standing. The anger at economic, social and health disparities that fuels the protests that have roiled the U.S. since George Floyd’s death speaks for itself: it directly reflects the much higher rates of COVID-19 deaths and illness among African-Americans and people of color, such as Latino and Latina meat processing plant laborers and immigrant farm workers.

One public health expert, Eleanor Murray, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Boston School of Public Health, recently put America’s unavoidable dual-pandemic reality in a nutshell: “Last week, all the news was about COVID; this week, all the news is about the protests. Really, these are two pieces of the same conversation.”

So what does all of this have to do with art, some of you may ask? The answer, as provided by USFCAM’s current online exhibition, Life During Wartime: Art in the age of Coronavirus, is succinct—everything. The world is changing, and art is changing with it. Even if we acknowledge that the highest achievements of art cannot stem the rise of authoritarian governments, alleviate the fate of displaced people, safely relieve the constraints of a worldwide quarantine, or aid in discovering a new vaccine, art can, in its myriad manifestations, serve as an important guide for how to think, how to innovate and, most substantially, live fully human lives during “interesting times.” As illustrated by the drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, collages, sculptures, videos and performances featured on this dedicated platform, visual art proves once again—as it has countless times throughout history—that it can and will serve as a rallying cry, as a symbol of openness, as an evolving model for critical thought during periods in which dialogue and critical thought themselves are under attack.

An online exhibition expressly designed for a time in which human contact is curtailed and physical exhibition-making is nearly impossible, Life During Wartime provides a template for one way to carry on the work of an art museum during “interesting times.” As such, this exhibition is devoted not just to making, sharing, promoting and enabling discourse around visual culture on a computer screen, but to reconsidering, reorganizing, and maximizing those same possibilities. Among the things we at USFCAM have realized about online exhibitions is the following: besides displaying images of important artworks, they can also take us inside the lives, thoughts and respective practices of artists. This, in turn, provides opportunities for artists to make themselves heard while dialoguing with each other and with newly engaged audiences.

Which brings me, by way of closing, to the words of the late Toni Morrison. In 2015, after despairing at the state of America and the world, the Nobel Laureate wrote about the need for artists of all kinds to muscle through catastrophe: "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."

To Morrison's words I'll add just two things: artists also do visual art; that, and Life During Wartime was inspired in no small part by her example.

— Christian Viveros-Fauné, Curator-at-Large, USFCAM