Groundhog Year
Has the pandemic locked us into a repetitive cycle of experiences? Or has it just revealed how much we already were under the illusion of constant change? Thoughts about seriality in a Pandemic.
Groundhog Year
(Singular experiences, always repeated)
When faced by surprising world-changing events, we tend to retain very clear memories of where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news or lived them in real time. For instance, most of us who were in New York City on 9/11 recall that day with great clarity, hour by hour. The Covid pandemic has been different: instead of a single day event, it has been a slow-rolling cataclysm with no particularly defining moment. For me, when I look back at it, it will likely be a collection of indelible vignettes.
The first image in my mind is of myself sitting on an empty Amtrak train coming from Providence to New York, on Friday, March 13, 2020 before most public institutions and schools went into lockdown. Then there is the anguishing dream I had that night: I was about to perform live at the public park near the house where I grew up in Mexico City, along with Chavela Vargas and Mexican curator Cuauhtémoc Medina. I had a 19-string guitar that I had no idea how to play. When I described the dream to my friends in social media, it was Cuauhtémoc himself who pointed out to me, in my total obliviousness, that the guitar symbolized Covid-19.
There was the day in late March when I learned that curator Maurice Berger had passed away from Covid. He was the first person I personally knew that had been fatally affected by the virus, saddening news which also gave great tangibility to something that up to that moment still felt very abstract. There’s the day, that same week, when I myself fell sick with the virus, spending a week at home with almost hallucinatory visions in high fever. There is the hallway outside our apartment when I took calls (in privacy in order not to alarm my daughter) to discuss the news about other friends and family members who had passed away. And there were the days of lockdown, where finding out that a pharmacy in Red Hook was open felt like an incredibly exciting experience. I bought a cinnamon-flavored toothpaste that I have kept as a reminder of that fervent desire to return to some semblance of normalcy one day.
But then afterward, something started happening with our perception of time. As weeks and months went by, as the new normal simply became normal, as seasons came and went, that unusual life turned into daily routine. As exhibition projects were postponed or canceled, as travel became impossible, everything centered around those simple domestic rituals. As of today, we are reaching a year of cycles of spikes and curve flattenings, of living and working in Zoom, of mask-wearing being second nature, of regularly doing things that once we thought unthinkable (like having dinner outdoors during winter nights under frigid temperatures). Easter, Memorial Day, back to school, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, all came and went, and the cycle will now repeat again, as in a permanent Groundhog Day loop. More than the 1993 Bill Murray movie that gave that popular cliché association between Groundhog Day and nightmarish repetition of events, I have more often thought of the protagonist of the novella La Invención de Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares: a fugitive who arrives in an island where he discovers a party of people talking and walking around in what turns out to be a three-dimensional film projection that is repeated over and over again every week for eternity. I also think of my late brother’s short story, Rotations, with some magical realist flavors, about a office worker who is hired to do a research project in his employer’s home, and slowly realizes that the furniture of the house is being rearranged every single day for no apparent reason. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Everything has started to look and feel the same. Or is it that we had to go through this experience to realize that life is simply not that changeable as time goes by?
While the pandemic upended the usual rhythms of the art world (art fairs and biennials canceled, etc.) it also illustrated how much art making is determined by the calendar schedule. For a sphere that is theoretically fueled by innovation, it is subjected to highly preordained and structured events. Thus, the pandemic presents an opportunity to ask ourselves to what extent the predictability of the international exhibition system, and the power centers that govern it, influence the kind of work that ultimately gets presented, written about and reflected on.
Furthermore, the unusual stalling of the hurricane of global art activity that is ridden by most of the art world intelligentsia, also offers us the opportunity to reflect about what have we lost by this obsession with international interconnectivity, lack of attention to the local, and, perhaps most importantly, our never-ending search for the new.
During the pandemic, a number of authors and influencers have emerged in the mainstream media to teach those who are bored, frustrated or depressed by the pandemic to find new meaning in their lives through small actions. Harvard Divinity School fellow and author Casper ter Kuile is an example of those who have recently published books that help us cope with the search for meaning of life during lockdown — perhaps a new, less Bourdieu and Kant- engaged version of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Every Day Life.
But more importantly, the flattening of experience might also become an opportunity for two ways of reflecting about art making.
First, this experience might better teach us to better appreciate, and perhaps draw inspiration, from the work of artists who thrive in repetition. By this category I don’t necessarily nor only refer to the seriality of Minimalism or post-Minimalism, but also by those artists whose ritualized practice became a meaningful form of creativity — those for whom their entire lives have been dedicated not only to make something over and over again, but also fully integrate their ritualistic lives into their work, as part perhaps of a performative practice. This was the quality of one of my favorite exhibitions ever, made more than 15 years ago and very fitting to eccentric practices: Obsessive Drawing at the American Folk Art museum, curated by Brooke Davis Anderson.
And last, but not least, this pandemic episode of our lives might allow us to reimagine the relationship between art making and innovation. This is not to say that we might want to revert to a conservative pattern of repeating old practices, but rather, coming to terms with the fact that art is not about a progression toward a transcendental or ideal future, but a daily encounter with the present and the challenge of making meaning of it. The renewed attention to this type of art making might also, somehow, help attenuate the art market’s obsession with the notion of the new, or at least help us re-envision what terms like “different” and “transformative” can mean.
We can reasonably expect that the pandemic will one day be over, and with it this overwhelming sense of entrapment into repetitive cycles that we find ourselves in. But in future years we will see a rich array of art that will likely reflect the degree to which this experience has impacted our generation’s relationship with time, with the meaning of our practice, and more specifically our relationship with time, personal rituals, and the return to some repetition. More important — and I acknowledge that this is the socially engaged artist in me speaking— the larger challenge is how to think of this ritualistic practice as something that does not become exclusively inward-looking but that allows us to strengthen our connections with others.
But for the time being, as for myself, am now going back to an old practice: writing palindromes. Again.
Taking about the importance of memories, I find a great coincidence in Pablo Helguera’s moving note on memory with and Biden’s words at the memorial for victims of the COVID on Jan 19, 2021: “To heal, we must remember. It’s hard sometimes to remember, but that’s how we heal. It’s important to do that as a nation. That’s why we’re here today.”