Always Connect: Art in a Time of Quarantine

In this space, Pamela Allara, Susan Platt, and Mark Auslander hope to share art work that speaks to the COVID-19 induced crisis, and to engage in reflections and conversation on the importance of art, cultural production, and social responsibility in our current strange and disorienting historical moment.  We share the intuition that although we may be at the moment "locked down," "sheltering in place," or otherwise separated from one another physically, we remain united in our sense that art and aesthetic practice (including the work of curatorship and cultural interpretation) have the capacity to continue to lift each of us beyond the individuating conditions of confinement, to enter into and to explore broader terrains of community and social connectedness.  Significant art, past and present, holds up vital mirrors to ourselves, together and apart,  forcing us to confront difficult questions and challenging us to find new and creative pathways through uncharted terrains. Together, in conversation with artists and others, we look forward to exploring what lies just over an increasingly uncertain horizon.

To start things off, I am quite taken this morning with the Saul Steinberg drawing. "Looking Down" (1988) that opens Pace Gallery's lovely online Saul Steinberg exhibition, "Imagined Interiors," curated by Michaëla Mohrmann:

https://www.pacegallery.com/viewing-rooms/saul-steinberg/

A cat perched on the windowsill of a nearly empty New York monochromatic apartment looks down on a delightfully cacophonous street scene. People mill around on the sidewalks, as brightly colored cars drive by, and semi animate street lamps bend over.  We see on the ground floors the names of the shops, "Books" and "Drugs." The angles of the street scenes are wondrously altered, so that we see straight ahead of the streets as they would appear if viewed facing directly straight down.

Curator Michaëla Mohrmann notes Steinberg's citation of an Utagawa Hiroshige’s ukiyo-e print of cat peering out a window at a rural Japanese landscape. The image also reminds me a bit of Jacob Lawrence's delightful 1942 "Play Street"

http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~hist264a/visuals/playstreet.htm

in which street lamps raucously transmogrify into shower heads, raining cooling water on the dancing children below.

Steinberg of course created the drawing long before our current shared nightmare of quarantine, but the image does seem particularly compelling at the current moment. We may be confined in the smallest of spaces, but through art, we can glimpse together an entire universe, of irrepressible urban energy and ceaseless vitality.   All the more so when New York City is the new epicenter of the global crisis, The City, though beleaguered, is a place of millions of intersecting stories,  bound unexpectedly together in an endless, ricocheting choreography.  Through the eyes of the artist and his feline avatar, we see a whole world  in motion, a life-sustaining gift to all of us in whatever confined space we might find ourselves in at the moment!