Drive-By-Art

"When" by Toni Ross and Sara Salaway (photograph by Hallie Cohen)

The recent "Drive-By-Art: Public Art In this Moment of Social Distancing" event, organized by Warren Neidich, is an example of an ingenious way of accomodating to the limitations of living life in a pandemic. It’s the artistic version of the old drive-in theater—which by the way could very well make a comeback when and if filmgoers turn out to prefer the safety and comfort of their cars to actually being in multiplex. Legitimate theaters may also soon take advantage of a similar concept, though outdoor theater like Shakespeare in the Park already has a long and storied history. Drive-By-Art is in itself a work of conceptual art to the extent that it proposes an alternative to the very notion of the museum. Who knows what the cultural implications of such a piece of agit prop will be? It could hearken the end of galleries and museums or in a more likely scenario simply turn out to be a practical placeholder giving contemporary artists a venue until the world returns to a modicum of normalcy. On a recent evening Wainscott residents were able to walk down Main Street to see "Nighttime Video Installation," a kaleidoscopic work by Clifford Ross. During the day, Tony Ross and Sarah Salaway's "When," a conceptual piece comprised of a line of stenciled folding metal chairs following a chronology of dates leading to a pileup denotated simply “yesterday,” “today” and “tomorrow” was exhibited nearby on Beach Lane. Eric Fischl, Keith Sonnier, Suzanne Anker and Nina Yankowitz were among the around 50 artists exhibiting their work.

The Final Solution: Looking Back on the Pandemic of 2020

You will hopefully not contract the coronavirus but your grandchildren will no doubt remember back to the pandemic of 2020. There was a second wave of the Spanish flu of l918 which eventually ended-up lasting until 1920 perhaps because of a relaxing of precautions. Katherine Anne Porter's novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider dealt with the legacy of the disease. The sweep of the current pandemic is certainly the stuff of legend. How much of a teaching device it becomes remains to be seen. The Spanish flu affected 500 million people worldwide and is estimated to have caused 50 million deaths with 675, 000 in the US. But beyond the numbers what are the salient characteristics that will be pointed out? Will it be the fact that the illness apparently didn’t spread from China to the U.S but primarily from Europe to NY where it was brought by thousands of air travelers whose arrival went unmonitored until it was already too late. Will “social distancing” or “shelter-in-place” be some of the key words implored by posterity’s internet searches? Of course, getting back to remembrance, it may depend on your family tree? The tenth plague was the murder of all first-born sons and there are families who have experienced unimaginable losses, much like those suffered by victims of Holocaust, the firebombing of Dresden, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bombing of the world trade center on 9/11. Even though the pandemic would be looked at as an equal opportunity employer, not discriminating as a result of class or race, economic inequality still has been a factor, with the lower income demographic of many blacks and Hispanics making them more vulnerable by virtue of the inferior health care they receive. Or there's another possibility, that the coronavirus will turn out to pale in comparison to all the other diseases and catastrophes that were the result of global warming and that ended up imperiling the future of life on earth?

Sperm Count: Real Sex

Real Sex was the name of an HBO series, but never has real sex, at least between strangers, created such a bad vibe. Sites like Chaturbate, now offering the services of unemployed lap dancers, are probably doing a land office business. However, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the title of Gay Talese’s famous study of sexual infidelity, is definitely not on the table, either in fact, or as a permissible option, however bored one might be getting sheltering-in-place. Chekhov's three sisters dreamt of going to Moscow. Now Bangkok, is as slim an escape possibility as Siam once was in The King and I. How's one to maintain social distance in a massage parlor? Face masks are even more challenging than dental dams which became all the rage in the era when HIV rather than coronavirus was the great fear. Still when one thinks about it, there are still going to be those who ruled by passions, will not be able to follow the CDC guidelines, even with the stakes being so high. Let’s say an unhappily married woman falls for the now unemployed bartender who lives down the block. Will she sneak out from beside her snoring husband in the middle of the night, even with two children sleeping in the next room, to gratify her desires. Tune in next week. Leidenshaft is the German word for passion with its root “leiden” meaning suffering.

The Final Solution: Coronavirus and Socialization

Human beings are social animals, but how does one connect to humanity in the age of COVID-19? Can Zooming be regarded a substitute for socialization? And conversely what about road rage or getting in a fistfight on the street? Perhaps, looking at a possible silver lining, social distancing mandates will prevent people from having destructive interactions which could ultimately result in manslaughter charges. On a less salubrious note one is left with  Plato’s famed allegory in which elusive ideal forms are only perceivable as shadows on a wall. There's no doubt that the camera image from a computer or laptop only gives a highly abbreviated notion of the person you once knew and it’s debatable whether it contains the signature qualities of even say an old-fashioned hand written letter. In addition, seeing someone on a computer screen is a little like one of those enigmatic messages in a bottle, that washes up on the shore. Zooming is the technology du jour and its praises are routinely sung by the vast audience it now commands. But how can one talk about interaction without the perception of a human body moving along a trajectory in time? The Zoom screen is highly artificial and only a relatively minor advancement from the old-fashioned slide show on which business presentations and family albums were displayed. Encounters between human beings are, in actuality, complex events involving a variety of psychological, neurological (remember mirror neurons) and even spiritual elements. Further one wonders how human beings will acclimate themselves to each other after long periods of isolation in which human contact is limited to digitized forms of communication. There’s no doubt that being alone in a room with another person is far different from being alone with a pixelated image.

The Final Solution: Did #MeToo Presage Coronavirus?

The current pandemic is not the only event which has shaken up the world and left a universe that's vastly changed. Odysseus returns from his exploits unrecognized except by his faithful Argos, but Everyman is now facing a reverse crisis in which the perception of cherished verites is constantly challenged. In neurology there’s a condition called Capgras syndrome where a familiar looking countenance appears to be occupied by an imposter. There’s also prosopagnosia where faces themselves all elude identification. Even before coronavirus cut its path of destruction, sexual politics in the form of the #MeToo movement had produced watersheds in the history of culture, sweeping aside blatant monsters like Harvey Weinstein while at the same time leaving a legacy of destruction on the cultural landscape that blacklisted huge swathes of men whose work or behavior ran afoul of the thought police—among these Garrison Keillor and Ian Buruma of The New York Review of Books who lost his position simply because he allowed a shunned Canadian journalist a platform in which to speak his piece. Alas, social distancing may turn out to be a survival mechanism for those who march to the beat of a different drummer. The pathetic fallacy is a literary device in which nature mirrors the inner soul. The earth was shaking for some people whose careers were already destroyed when coronavirus struck. Without resorting to mysticism, can it be said that the Pandora's box unlocked by MeToo#, the problems of the environment (including green gas warming) and the generalized excesses of modern life all presaged a condition where the planet itself became totally diseased, leaving human society on the verge of collapse?

Diasporic Dining: The Hungry-Person Selects

Hungry-Man Fried Chicken Selects (photo: Francis Levy)

What's the ideal dish for a catastrophe or even pandemic? What combines the good old days with the innocence of childhood and the memory of a time when brand names were friendly. Remember the Jolly Green Giant and Johnny Roventini, the Philip Morris bellboy with his "call for Philip Morris" (in the days before cigarette smoking was deemed tantamount to suicide)? Remember when you associated Johnson & Johnson with babies (and before there was evidence that their baby powder may have contained asbestos "Johnson&Johnson knew for decades that asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder,"Reuters, 12/14/18)? Remember Esso’s “put a tiger in your tank!” Well sorry H. Rap Brown, but violence isn’t as American as cherry pie.” It’s as American as a TV dinner. If you not sure what the future holds, then there is nothing more comforting than the Hungry-Man Fried Chicken Selects--which also happens to be immune to the problems of meat processing plants closing down since it's frozen. With its little compartments devoted to the main dish, corn, potatoes and even a brownie dessert, you feel totally safe and protected. It's just one step away from the security of asking for separate checks when you go out for dinner with some free spenders. If you’ve ever seen one, you’ll understand that the very design is a like a medieval castle with its moat. It’s going to be exceedingly difficult for anyone to lean over and steal your food. Your piping hot portions sit right before you in  easily defensible spaces and you don’t have to worry about someone hogging the way they do when they keep the platter of meat or the bowl of mashed potatoes on their side of the table. Even the politically incorrect name is somehow reassuring—though watch out Hungry-Man is likely to be putting out a line of Hungry-Person meals aimed at the "affirmative consent" crowd. 

The Final Solution: REM Sleep

Whenever something untoward occurs, the first impulse is to think you’ve been caught in a nightmare from which you have yet to awaken. Dream time is in the eye of the beholder. While the REM sleep in which dreams occur may exist in a fairly circumscribed temporal space (say from l0 minutes to an hour), it can seem like a lifetime, depending on the dream. Certain dreams possess a kind of dimensionality which allows them to increase their oneiric demographic. They become like one of those satellite radio stations that can be picked up anywhere. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” Stephen Daedalus famously said. However, the present nightmare looks like it’s here to stay. No one ever said a dreamer would be spared the executioner’s sword—which may explain how some people die in their sleep. Imagine, however, that you have been trapped in a dream of a pandemic, which the rest of the world has either already awakened from or in fact never actually had. It’s like those carriers of coronavirus who're asymptomatic. You, in the meanwhile, have sheltered-in-place and are even more socially distant than you would normally be (which is saying something if you tend to be the self-isolating sort). “In your dreams," is a line that people use when they’re telling someone to wake up and face reality. But that’s a fait accompli for anyone who shares your perhaps jaundiced view that the world is about to spin off of its axis, taking the whole planet with it. “Wake up, wake up! You’re having a bad dream” is what your partner in likely to intone, when you cry out in the night. You should start to get suspicious, when it turns out they’ve been having the same dream.