The art of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

This article examines one strand of COVID art that encodes a heteroclitic cultural imaginary – and is irregular and unsettling. Banksy’s murals and paintings parody classical artworks, and are themselves parodied, so as to capture the new cultural realities of the COVID era. In the case of other artists, such as Chiara Grilli, the traditional heliotrope is parodied to convey a similar reality, like Banksy’s inversion of the superhero mythology. With the employment of conventional disease-vector images, such as those of rats, Banksy brings into the human 5dwelling a “postnatural wilderness” showing the reversal of the disruption of ecosystems that had rendered animals habitat-less in India, with animals once again entering human spaces. Hence, the pandemic’s inversion of spatialized distribution of life can be seen as a decolonial and decolonizing moment. Subsequently, the article highlights how COVID-19 art intervenes through its parodic, kitschy quality, in the discourses around the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• art
• Banksy
• Chiara Grilli
• parody
• cultural imaginary

Acknowledgments

This article originated in a small way in an essay “The Languages of Covid-19’s Cultural Imaginary”, that appeared in eSocial Sciences. I am grateful to Padma Prakash for her comments on that essay. It was subsequently delivered as a plenary at the Memory Studies Workshop, Humanities and Social Sciences, April 2021 – much gratitude to Avishek Parui and Merin Raj for inviting me to speak.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Numerous song-parodies also appeared during the pandemic. Jon Stratton (2021) has argued that we should not see them as parodies at all, but “they are better understood in the tradition of folk songs, broadly understood, where new lyrics would be created, and sometimes sold, to be sung to already existing well-known tunes” (413).

2. The parody of Banksy’s The Girl with the Pierced Eardrum can be viewed on the BBC News (2020a) item.

3. In a specifically Indian context of the pandemic, the heliotrope was not just a trope, of course, as thousands of migrant labourers walked from the metros back to their home towns and villages in the scorching heat of the March–April sun in 2020 when the nation went into a lockdown. It generated a form of extreme mobility that extended, as argued elsewhere, a carceral condition of the urban poor, with little or no provisions, shelter, or support (see Nayar 2020).

4. Notification of the March 23, 2021 sale of Banksy’s Game Changer, along with an image of the artwork, can be viewed on the website of the Auction House Christie’s (https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6309459).

5. Critiques of this state discourse have argued that these representations are often a substitute for real material recognition and facilities for the nursing and public health community, and even “undermine the professionalism of the nursing workforce, and [this] reinforces the perception that nursing is an innately feminine, nurturing role” (Stokes-Parish et al. 2020, 462). I am grateful to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing reviewer for pointing out such critiques.

6. The stereotyping of the woman as carer should not, however, escape comment. Banksy’s reiteration of this gendered role, despite his clear attempt to redefine the superhero genre, is troubling for this reason.

7. One only has to search for “nurses – heroes” in Shutterstock to see some of these (https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/not-all-heroes-wear-capes-some-1705644040).

8. Images of Banksy’s “Sneezing Woman” artwork (Aachoo!!) and the process of its removal can be viewed in the BBC News item from March 13, 2021, “Bristol Banksy: Sneezing Woman Artwork to be Auctioned” (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-56387254).

9. Images from Banksy’s My Wife Hates It When I Work from Home can be viewed in the BBC News item from April 16, 2021, “Coronavirus: Banksy Makes ‘Bathroom’ Lockdown Art” (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-52306748).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institution of Eminence Project, University of Hyderabad.

Notes on contributors

Pramod K. Nayar

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His most recent books include Alzheimer’s Disease Memoirs: Poetics of the Forgetting Self (2021), The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right (2021), Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire, 1830–1940 (2020), Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture (2019), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Ecological Uncanny (2017), and Human Rights and Literature: Writing Right (2016).