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Abstract
Affirming masks’ proven efficacy in preventing the airborne transmission of COVID-19, this paper seeks to understand face covering during the pandemic from a different but complementary angle: that is, as a deeply relational and thoroughly multimodal practice. Drawing on concepts of automediality, crip and feminist theories of affect and embodiment, biopolitics, and pandemic temporalities, I analyze artists’ mask-themed projects created during the first two years of the pandemic across forms including sculpture, performance, digital photography, social media, online visual diaries, and mutual aid projects. Through theoretical, analytical, and self-reflexive writing, the discussion draws out the shifting, contingent meanings of masks; their relation to currents of power, affect, and memory; and their implications for selfhood, community, and solidarity. Artists’ automedial projects show how masks have become integral to the life of the body, the upheaval of our lives, the losses we are mourning, the overlapping injustices we must fight, and the stories we tell about what it was and is like to be in our situations and to be connected to one another during the pandemic.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Eva Karpinski and Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle for their caring support of this essay’s development, and Lorraine Brophy, Emily Goodwin, and Joanne Muzak for their generous and thoughtful feedback.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Tufekci, “Why the Science Is Clear.”
2 MASK exhibition website statement, quoted in Nelson, “Creative Face Masks”; Theophanidis, “Sua Cuique Persona,” 39.
3 Cheng et al., “Wearing Face Masks in the Community.”
4 Theophanidis, “Sua Cuique Persona,” 34, 37, 39.
5 Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal.”
6 Lewis, “Where Are the Photos?”
7 Jurgenson quoted in Dafoe, “How This Moment.”
8 Mirzoeff, “Whiteness.”
9 Zine, “Pandemic Imaginaries,” 23.
10 Ibid., 25; see also Huang, Surface Relations, 7.
11 See Redmond, “Pandemic of Creative Loneliness”; Goodwin and Brophy, “Asynchronous Encounters.”
12 Shotwell, “Virus.”
13 Poletti, Stories of the Self, 14–15; Rak, “Life Writing versus Automedia,” 156.
14 Poletti and Rak, “Introduction: Digital Dialogues,” 1–2. There is also important precedent for seeing masks as vehicles of identity transformation and healing in the anthropological, health humanities, and drama therapy literatures (see Pollock, “Masks and the Semiotics of Identity,” and Meineck, “Masks”).
15 Jurgenson quoted in Dafoe, “How This Moment.”
16 Chan, “Pandemic Temporalities,” 13.2.
17 De Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” 921–923.
18 On the ethical limitations of approaching autobiography as a play of tropes and on alternative feminist models, see Gilmore, Autobiographics; Kadar, “Coming to Terms”; Rak, “Marlene Kadar’s Life Writing”; Warley, “Mar and Me.”
19 Esposito, Third Person, 18.
20 Ibid., 16; see also Claire Fontaine, “Letters against Separation.”
21 Belting, Face and Mask, 6.
22 Ibid., 20.
23 Rak, “Life Writing versus Automedia,” 156; Poletti, Stories of the Self, 14–15.
24 Poletti, Stories of the Self, 14.
25 Ibid., 14.
26 Theophanidis, “Sua Cuique Persona,” 40, 38; emphasis added.
27 Butler and Yancy, “Interview.”
28 Wong, “I’m Disabled.”
29 Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession.
30 Kouri-Towe, “Solidarity,” 194–195.
31 Ibid., 193.
32 Berlant in Poletti and Rak, “Blog as Experimental Setting,” 270, 267.
33 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 86–87.
34 Butler and Yancy, “Interview.”
35 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 28.
36 Kouri-Towe, “Solidarity,” 195–196.
37 Zarzycka and Olivieri, “Affective Encounters,” 529.
38 McNeill and Zuern, “Reading Digital Lives Generously,” 136–138.
39 Lindsey Mendink (@lindseymendick), “The Face Mask,” Instagram post (public), October 8, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CGFHB9iFMjY/
40 Butler and Yancy, “Interview.”
41 Talk Art, “Lindsey Mendick”; see also Judah, “Hormones and Hairy Claws.”
42 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 85, 87.
43 Ibid., 96.
44 Simone Forti, The Masque-Culotte, ICI (Independent Curators International), #DoItHome project, Google Arts and Culture/Serpentine Galleries, April 4, 2020, https://g.co/arts/SrGqBuTahyTRaqN39.
45 Hans Ulrich Obrist (@hansulrichobrist), “Simone Forti—Do It Number 22,” Instagram post (public), April 4, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/B-j4a3Xg7-N/.
46 Redmond, “Pandemic of Creative Loneliness,” 186, 195.
47 Tatsuya Tanaka. Miniature Calendar (website). Accessed May 30, 2023. https://miniature-calendar.com/.
48 designboom, “Tatsuya Tanaka Creates.”
49 Tatsuya Tanaka, “Invisible Voyage,” September 1, 2020, Miniature Calendar, https://miniature-calendar.com/200901.
50 Chan, “Pandemic Temporalities,” 13.2.
51 Tanaka, “Invisible Voyage.”
52 Chan, “Pandemic Temporalities,” 13.6.
53 Connie Sun, “Pandemic Diary: Upside Down Face Masks,” May 20, 2020, https://www.conniewonnie.com/2020/05/pandemic-diary-upside-down-face-masks.html.
54 Sun, “Subway Sanity (Plus Crayon Cat),” February 23, 2022, https://www.conniewonnie.com/2022/02/subway-sanity-plus-crayon-cat.html.
55 Sun, “Illustration: Pandemic Fatigue,” October 21, 2020, https://www.conniewonnie.com/search?q=pandemic+fatigue.
56 Sun, “Forgot How My Face Works,” August 19, 2021, https://www.conniewonnie.com/2021/08/forgot-how-my-face-works.html.
57 Huang, Surface Relations, 7.
58 Berlant in Poletti and Rak, “Blog as Experimental Setting,” 268–69.
59 Kouri-Towe, “Solidarity,” 194.
60 Kopit and Yi, “Dialogue.”
61 Crip & Ally Care Exchange, @disabilityculture_cace. Accessed June 22, 2023. https://www.instagram.com/disabilityculture_cace/?hl=en.
62 Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future Is Disabled, 55.
63 Kopit and Yi, “Dialogue.”
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future is Disabled, 36–37.
68 While the website is no longer active, NDN X AZN (@ndnxazn) is a public account that remains accessible on Instagram at the time of writing. There is also ample coverage in online national news sources; see, e.g. Zingel, “Mask Project Centres.”
69 NDN X AZN (@ndnxazn), “Mask by @karmasbrain,” Instagram post (public), March 10, 2021, https://www.instagram.com/p/CMPTKCVlCcM/?hl=en.
70 NDN X AZN (@ndnxazn), “Mask by Sammy Lee @sammy_seungmin_lee,” Instagram post (public), December 14, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CIyqxD1lN16/?hl=en.
71 Huang, Surface Relations, 4–5.
72 Bolaki, Illness as Many Narratives, 214.
73 Ibid., 214–215.
74 Detailed reviews of the Denver show are available, for example, in Jobson, “Artists Explore Self-Expression” and Nelson, “Creative Face Masks.”
75 Grippe, “Project behind a Front Page.”
76 Duvall, Personal Correspondence.
77 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 85.
78 Butler and Yancy, “Interview.”
79 Duvall, Personal Correspondence.
80 Bowdish, “Ageism and the Pandemic.”
81 Karine Gibouleau, @karinegiboulo, Instagram page. Accessed June 22, 2023. https://www.instagram.com/karinegiboulo/?hl=en.
82 Kelland, “Wear Masks in Public”; WHO, “Advice on the Use of Masks.”
83 WHO, “Mask Use.”
84 Cheng et al., “Wearing Face Masks in the Community.”
85 For critical reflections on abandonment and hopelessness in Omicron’s wake, see Kopit and Yi, “Dialogue” and Picard, “Now Is Not the Time.”
86 Mirzoeff, “Whiteness.”
87 Poletti, Stories of the Self, 6; Belting, Face and Mask, 240–241.
88 Theophanidis, “Sua Cuique Persona,” 40.
89 Belting, Face and Mask, 6, 20.
90 Shotwell, “Virus.”
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Sarah Brophy
Sarah Brophy is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, located on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations. She is the author of the book Witnessing AIDS; coeditor of the collection Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography; and coeditor of “Postcolonial Intimacies,” a special issue of Interventions. Her SSHRC-funded research examining the nexus of visual self-portraiture, exhibition spaces, intimacy, digital labor, race, gender, disability, and health can be found in Cultural Critique, Research Methods for Auto/Biography Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Somatechnics.