Can you picture how we’ll remember this pandemic?
Start a COVID-19 diary, I advised readers some time ago. What a project. It would capture the rhythm of the pandemic and be therapeutic, or be collected for a national pandemic diary that museums must surely be assembling.
My diary lasted only three days. It turns out that lockdown is not just boring, but busy, packed with work, family, housecleaning long-postponed, financial freak-outs (“we are too menny” from Jude the Obscure), grocery ordering and dull things grown huge and magnificent.
For instance, we installed a new water filter in our illdesigned Samsung fridge, the icemaker for which is the subject of a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. It’s an RF23HCEDBSR if you’re interested and I hope you’re not.
I have a new idea. Why not get your cellphone, assemble household objects in the pandemic and create a lockdown still-life, a coronavirus work of art? Still-life is one of the most popular genres in art, what the critic Flaminio Gualdoni calls “the exact, indulgent representation of things of no importance, that do not set out to reveal anything but themselves, to the delight of the hand that has painted them and of the eye that relishes the sight of them.”
The Greeks and Romans admired still-lifes, which vanished and reappeared in 16thcentury Europe and remain fine and interesting to the present day. The late critic Tom Lubbock wrote about how still-lifes make vases and cups move from the ordinary to the mystical, the way Alfred Hitchcock had Cary Grant take a glass of milk upstairs to his wife.
Was it poisoned? Hitchcock put a light bulb inside the glass to alert us to the possibilities of this object, so mundane, so real. What is real now? Everything you yearn for now but to which you gave little thought before 2020 arrived with its long uncut toenails clicking on the floor.
Dutch still-lifes, often floral, hinted at the vanity and brevity of life, with candles, mirrors, dropping petals and rotting fruit making an obvious point. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is filled with still-lifes. I used to make my own at lunch there, a compact set of shapes — a toast plate with butter and a jam pot backed by wine and a lurking dessert — and then the waiter would destroy it by clearing the table, a lunch so brief, just like life. (Put a lawn chair in your stilllife and call it “Vita Brevis, Chaise Longue.”)
The Royal Academy offers a YouTube primer on creating still-lifes at home. At least four of the objects should be a) ephemeral, b) enduring, c) new and d) of personal value.
These days, that could be a bag of flour (ephemeral), your baby (enduring), an earring or a lung (personal value) and a ventilator (new). Throw in an orange or two on a rumpled silk drop cloth and you’ve got yourself a still-life that future generations will gaze at. “Was that her lung?” they will wonder. “No, that’s an orange,” says the future’s snarky companion.
Place a gilt frame around anything and it becomes art. So I gathered objects for a lockdown still-life, each signalling angst and illness. Study the photo appearing with this column.
The peonies (ephemeral), already dropping petals, are blood-coloured. They start out as small clots and when they explode, look like a SCAD heart attack caused by extreme stress, artery linings peeling off and blocking blood flow.
They sit on a green apple placemat by a German designer whose business may not survive the pandemic. I am reading the Jim Thompson pulp novel about grifters and psychopaths to repair my brain fractured by social media on the iPad beneath.
The white page in the photo is a map of the Toronto house where L.M. Montgomery killed herself (creepy lockdown car trip) and the David Hockney book was bought in delight after bookshops reopened. A thermometer (great personal value) lies under the flowers, temperature being the key to diagnosing COVID-19, and the pink shell has a pulse oximeter (new) poking its little face out.
There’s a glass of wine and a candlestick (ephemeral, very Dutch), and a Canadian face mask (ephemeral, one hopes). The ice water was excitingly drawn through the new filter. The peaches are hand-painted cement (enduring). Just behind the table is a design for a garden that couldn’t be planted because of lockdown, so I sorrowfully framed it and left it at that.
These objects are raw material. For a genuine still-life, objects might be shot at table level with a black background to add dread. There should be fewer of them, better placed.
The piece, which cries out for a bug eating the flowers or a rotting peach, speaks of a oncepleasurable life invaded by medical devices.
Here’s another idea: create a still-life of face masks, medical, cloth and paper.
Paint on leather with hand sanitizer; yes it evaporates but leaves some very Rothko-like staining. Video installations would be armies of Instacarters ringing the doorbell in vain.
Your still-life should sum up your own still life in lockdown. Decades from now, you’ll look at it and say “Yes, that’s how it was.”