Pondering the artistic response to Covid, I began to investigate the effect other pandemics or plagues first had on art and art movements of the past, and secondly, on social movements following plagues or pandemics.
Is there something we could learn from the past about how pandemics change and shape us, and perhaps help lead to quite large and often painful shifts in societal order and control of the individual? Was there a link between pandemics, artists responses and extremist ideas pervading culture? And was there any clear evidential links between plagues of the past and the growth of witch hunts? Because that feels like what is happening right now. Just how deeply is our society being shaken, first by illness, viral contagion, and death, and now with a contagion of thought which in some ways, could threaten our society and democracy more profoundly than lockdowns. Or is there a cause and effect- that by locking down and suspending normal society, that in itself gives rise to authoritarian practices, as the newly appointed ‘witch-finders’ employ the tactics of the medical staff in hazard suits to tracking down the wrong thinkers, the heretics and the non-believers? I have a horrible feeling it may be the latter.
Paulus Furst of Nuremberg, Doctor Schnabel von Rom, 1656, British Museum, London.
One striking aspect of art that comes from plagues times is the scarce number of paintings that directly portray plague victims. During the bubonic plague that started in the mid-14th century in Europe, very few artists tackle the subject matter directly, although clearly the art of the times becomes imbued with ideas of suffering, charity and religion portrayed on canvas, in sculpture and in literate.
Susan Sontag writes eloquently in ‘Illness as a metaphor’, describing how “any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious” and that illness can lead one to being shunned by relatives and friends, become an object of contamination, and how the individual can become an embodied violation of a taboo.
Sontag draws the parallels between the bubonic plague and its links to morality- that feelings of evil are projected onto a disease, and often result in a community seeking a collective scapegoat- from the massacre of Jews in unprecedented numbers following the plague in Europe 1347-48, illnesses have been ‘used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust’ she writes in 1978. She also points out that disease and extreme political movements often were keen to show how their movement; French Revolutionary, or modern Totalitarianism of the Left or Right in the 20th Century, were all to inclined to use the imagery of disease and infection to pursue their political aims.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Triumph of Death, c. 1562, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Sontag points out the near total historical amnesia of the influenza pandemic known also as The Spanish Flu 1918-19, our last major pandemic. This event again resulted in less direct artistic portrayals than would be expected. A population across the world rocked by World War One, and the horrors of the trenches, seemed to be unable to then artistically respond to the horrors of a new kind of plague inflicted upon the populace. One notable expectation is the artist Alfred Kubin; his black and white drawings exude an air of a medieval apocalypse, with titles such as Cholera (1898–99), and Epidemie (ca. 1900–01) skeletal figures evoking a dance macabre. Indeed, one of the most striking motifs that came from the Black Death, was the allegorical motif of works entitled the Danse Macabre. Dancing and instrument playing grotesque and comedic skeletons walk all members of society- from bishops to peasants to children to their early graves, a spectacle both humorous and terrifying.
Alfred Kubin, Epidemic, 1901
A bizarre phenonium that followed from a period of plague in Europe, was the ‘dancing plagues’, with the most famous being the drawing by of 1564 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, showing a group of women dancing, but their eyes glassy and disembodied, in deeply altered states. As J Waller reminds us in The Lancet, these vents are well worth remembering, as “they provide an object lesson in the power of our beliefs and expectations to shape the expression of psychological distress”. The fact that these women had experienced possibly horrific death and suffering, through famine, plagues and pestilence, shows that these dancing plagues were a reaction to extreme distress. We should never under-estimate the “extremes to which fear and supernaturalism can lead us”.
Pieter Brueghel, the Elder, The Dancing Mania. Pilgrimage of the Epileptics to the Church at Molenbeek, 1564
Early modern witch hunts can also be traced back to the era of the plague, again a period of extreme upheaval, a shortage of labour resulting in huge societal change and revolution, and a deep fear that the world was ending and a scapegoat was to be found. There is also some evidence to suggest that the witch hunters were partially inspired by the methods used by those in authority who had tried to control the spread of the disease. Much like Covid, populations had not known how the disease was spread, and so had many different techniques, from posies of flowers, to incense, as they thought bubonic plague was airborne (it was actually spread by fleas). As people saw how the ill and diseased had to be quarantined, ritually cleansed, or even dying and buried without due process as per normal times, the witch-hunter saw a way to use interrogation and torture to stop the ‘plague spreaders’ or in this case ‘the evil doers.’
Francisco Goya, Flying Witches, 1797-98, oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY)
The times of post-plague witch hunts often followed the breakdown of societal order, religious order and even scientific and intellectual certainties. Populations often fled to magical thinking, believing in spirits, demons, apparitions, witches and monsters- anything unnatural which could be to blame and could be attacked and controlled by any means, no justification of the method, the cruelty or the destruction. The other- the scapegoat, the witch, the outsider, become the vehicle of all control and cleansing; witch hunting was a movement to restore order in a time of profound crises.
There certainly are some ‘then and now’ thoughts on parallels to a post pandemic world, coupled with a social contagion of new ideology- often described as ‘woke’, which encompasses everything from critical race theory, gender ideology, queer theory and corporate advertising. In both times there is a sense of the corruption of institutions. During the Medieval era it was the church, the Papacy, the Monarchy which led to a rebellion of the peasants and the collapse of the feudal system. Today, we see the decay and perhaps the collapse of democratic institutions. Well trusted institutions now have concerns of reputational risk at the front of their minds rather than to the connection to the reason these institutions exist in the first place. We have widespread distrust of experts, the proliferation of conspiracy theory and alternative beliefs compared to official narrative, and a tearing down of other’s creativity and hard work, all seen in a sense of purity rituals and collective witch hunts, and cancellations.
And within all this post-plague chaos, we have a re-evaluation and re-statement of our principles of enlightenment. Studying the history of human rights over the past couple of years (in preparation for a work, or perhaps in preparation for my life), I sat recently with Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and feminist re-evaluations aside, I appreciated the straightforward and clear style of writing. ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ as he said, yet it is Olympe de Gourges who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Women who said “A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker's platform.” A French Revolutionary way of saying Let Women Speak, or very contemporarily, ‘Women Wont Wheest!’ De Gourges was tried and executed on the scaffold sadly, a playwright, a determined woman and a heroine.
Olympe de Gouges handing over her ‘Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens’ to Marie-Antoinette. Print published in 1790.
So here it is into this debate that the artist must wander. Not artist wants to, not all artists live in times when they and their ability to speak truth or to reflect society is quite as exciting and polarised as now. I had never expected my life or my work to ever become so politicised, in fact, I had taunted danger and enjoyed the risks of making work that others believed, for various reasons that I should not. I believe that one of the purposes of art is to shock- that shock is one of the beneficial social functions of art. The ability to shock an audience, be it the first Sacre de Printemps or the YBA exhibitions of the 90’s, artists bring a fresh vision, a quality which characterises a good artist and which helps protect society from inertia and paralysis.
The artist has long been subjected to censorship, but that definition of what is obscene, that which can be seen to corrupt a person or harm another person can also been seen shifting through times and currently through the lens of freedom of speech. What are the values that our arts institutions need to uphold to allow the artist to shock, to state their truth and to allow audiences to appreciate that this is a work of art, not propaganda? Through studying the rights of artists, I have looked at both how the object of the art itself becomes the locus of the protests to shut it down, and also how the individual artist is personally attacked.
I wish to state and embody my commitment to freedom of thought and freedom of conscious which is the underpinning of my art and my commitment to freedom of expression. We may need to rearticulate what those freedoms are and what they mean. As Virginia Woolf stated, along with a room of one’s own and some income, she asserted that one must practice the art of freedom; for me, as a dancer, it is a muscle that must be used, not kept in a jar and left to decay. “There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind” Woolf stated in a Room of One’s Own.
Art has a hugely important role in a free society and is the sign of a healthy or sick civilisation. A society which shuts down its artists is blind and unthinking in the extreme. One of the beneficial social functions of the arts is to shock, to produce a fresh vision, which characterises a good artist and which helps protect society from inertia. The role of the artist can be ambiguous; the artist can bring joy, bridge communities, and inspire, but the artist also can be shocking, the entertainer, a joker, the truth-teller. First and foremost, the artist must be free.
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I don't know if it's born out by statistics but I've heard Jordan Peterson advance the case that countries which have fallen under the sway of authoritarianism often do so in the wake of epidemics/pandemics and narratives of infection, hygiene and cleansing.