From the Black Plague to HIV, artists evoke grace in face of death

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From the Black Plague to HIV, artists evoke grace in face of death

By Andrew Stephens

Some gallery visitors steered well clear of Svenja Kratz’s sculpted self-portrait when it was displayed last year in a Hobart exhibition called Pandemic. The exquisitely rendered wax sculpture resembles a goddess from antiquity, except her mouth gently emits a vapour containing the artist’s DNA.

Svenja Kratz, Self-portrait #2: Site of Infection, 2019. Mixed media: Wax, cold porcelain, stainless steel, water containing DNA of the artist and electrical components.

Svenja Kratz, Self-portrait #2: Site of Infection, 2019. Mixed media: Wax, cold porcelain, stainless steel, water containing DNA of the artist and electrical components. Credit: Remi Chauvin

Titled Self-Portrait: Site of Infection, it explored anxieties now being felt globally. Vapours in the air with invisible cargo can be dreadfully worrying in a world where, long before COVID-19, there is ceaseless surveillance of borders – national, political, domestic and personal.

Pandemic curator Toby Juliff, a University of Tasmania lecturer in critical practices, constructed the show to investigate pandemics as cultural phenomena rather than medical events. He observed that while some visitors seemed petrified of Kratz’s breathing sculpture, others went close and actively sucked in the mist.

Kratz, whose PhD examined the use of cell and tissue culture in contemporary art, says Site of Infection was more than safe: the vapour contained a small amount of DNA extracted from her saliva, but it was thoroughly autoclaved after being suspended in water. ‘‘Essentially it was more sterile than the water in a tap,’’ says Kratz, who is also a University of Tasmania art lecturer. ‘‘It was more about the fear people experience in response to the idea you are breathing in someone else’s genetic material. It is the idea of the infection via breath and coming into close contact with it – fears which are obviously being reiterated at the moment with COVID-19.’’

Through the many periods of human history when plague and pestilence have interrupted our (often illusory) sense of security, artists have chronicled and processed the experiences, channelling and reflecting the collective psyche of the day.

From the devastating plagues that rolled through Europe from the 14th century onwards, to more recent epidemics such as the HIV/AIDS crisis, artists have recorded the disruptions, horrors and deep griefs of these disasters with feeling, clarity and courage. But they have also considered the broader landscape, offering hope, consolation and that mysteriously intangible quality: grace.

Many of us are now being reminded of extraordinary pandemic statistics. Black Death figures are elastic – anywhere up to 200 million deaths across several centuries, and up to 50 million for Spanish flu (1918-20). It is easy to slip into a dark pit of fear, yet we might also turn to the visual arts to soothe anxieties. While we isolate, an artwork can reaffirm common human interests, the importance of connection and the need to nurture creativity.

Viral infections are frightening – and Kratz’s sculpture, while mainly inspired by a deep interest in reproduction of genes, was also fuelled by reading articles about how an estimated 8 per cent of our DNA comes from retroviruses. ‘‘I was interested in the idea that we are part virus and that this has had a profound evolutionary impact.’’

Before COVID-19, the most culturally influential virus in recent history was HIV, which led to a huge amount of art production. In the first decade of the epidemic, much ‘‘activist art’’ was produced with clear objectives. As writer and academic Dennis Altman wrote at the time, one of the crucial roles of the visual arts was to challenge dominant media images – mainly of the virus under a microscope, and of the ‘‘victims’’. This is echoed today in a welter of beautifully coloured images of the coronavirus, like some pretty sea creature; and of masked people in hospitals surrounded by Hazmat-suited medicos.

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David McDiarmid, 'Honey, Have you got it?', 1994. Digital print, 2019.

David McDiarmid, 'Honey, Have you got it?', 1994. Digital print, 2019. Credit: Reproduced with permission of the David McDiarmid Estate

During the first decades of HIV/AIDS, much more nuanced, less targeted art was also made. In 1994, Ted Gott, now senior curator of international art at the National Gallery of Victoria, created an exhibition for the National Gallery of Australia called Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS. It helped make him, he says, ‘‘something of a specialist in art and death’’.

Some of his favourite works in the show were by his friend, the late artist David McDiarmid, who died of the illness in 1995, shortly before life-saving drug regimes became available. McDiarmid’s vibrantly coloured works are likely to elicit a warm glow – even if the titles are double-edged (Honey, Have You Got It?, It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To, Sugar or Just This Once Won’t Kill Me).

‘‘Some of them are poignant, some of them are very confronting, or wicked – but he had that sort of humour,’’ Gott says. ‘‘He wanted to both confront people who were complacent in the crisis but also to bring comfort to those who were dealing with it.’’

This succour is something he sees strongly in art from earlier centuries, especially when the Black Death ripped through Europe in a series of outbreaks when it arrived in a trading vessel in October 1347, spreading rapidly and cruelly for three centuries, with the last outbreak in Marseilles (1720-1). Gott cites examples of work such as the famous Isenheim altarpiece (1512) or Sassoferrato’s Madonna in Prayer (1640s) both of which were used to offer hope during the extended crisis. While he does not relate to such imagery for its religious content, he delights in them ‘‘at a level of majestic beauty’’.

‘‘What we each take from art can be as much driven by aestheticism as by ideology,’’ he says. ‘‘We are fragile, but art is not so fragile – it can survive for hundreds, thousands of years, and therefore has the capacity to bring comfort and meaning to lives far beyond that of the creator. Maybe that is what gives art a slightly mystical aura.’’

Another tool of art – propaganda – is unpacked in the book Performing emotions in early Europe (2018), in which University of Sydney senior lecturer in art Louise Marshall writes of Renaissance plague images rousing and manipulating beholders’ emotions for a range of purposes, from consolation to prophylaxis.

‘‘Viewers were repelled and reassured, horrified and comforted, denounced for their sins and offered heavenly release, and urged to pass through a variety of psychodramas as part of the necessary process of reconciliation and redemption,’’ she writes. With ‘‘calculated emotional pyrotechnics’’, these images provided effective coping mechanisms for dealing with the ongoing presence of plague. The repeated onslaughts, she says, meant bubonic plague was experienced and memorialised as a collective assault, ‘‘death wholesale’’, rather than a matter of individual mortality.

Punishment by God was seen as a primary cause – a notion that has been remarkably persistent through to HIV/AIDS and even now. It was a topic of much controversy when the Australian government screened its infamous yet highly effective Grim Reaper ads in 1987 during the early days of HIV/AIDS.

Saint Jerome, Joos van Cleve (manner of), 1530-1540s (detail).

Saint Jerome, Joos van Cleve (manner of), 1530-1540s (detail). Credit: National Gallery of Victoria

Such dramatic images – apocalypse, death, devils – were abundant several years ago in an NGV exhibition titled The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster, with 120 artworks from the 15th-18th centuries that dealt with the enormous upheavals brought by plague, religious and social turmoil. In one of the works, the theologian St Jerome is shown with his finger on a skull that represents Death, a Bible in front of him. The inscription on the wall behind him (homo bulla) means ''man is a soap bubble''.

Jenny Spinks, the Hansen senior lecturer in history at the University of Melbourne, was one of four curators for the exhibition and through her many years of work on disasters, death and the emotions, she has studied various religious responses.

‘‘In terms of thinking about mortality and how you confront that, it is the image of Death itself that is so pervasive,’’ she says. One work she cites is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s magnificent The Triumph of Death, with its army of skeletons, some with scythes, rampaging through an apocalyptic landscape. People from all social backgrounds are depicted fleeing in terror or being corralled into a coffin-shaped contraption.

No comfort there – nor in the work of Italian artist Jacopo da Pontormo, who holed up in a Carthusian monastery in 1523-24 after an outbreak of plague in Florence. Jill Burke, professor of Renaissance cultures at the University of Edinburgh, recently wrote about Pontormo’s work on her blog, describing how the artist ran away to the monastery as soon as he could.

In what might well be a scene from today, Florence was sealed off by government decree, quarantines enforced and normal life ceased. Then came riots. Within months, 5 per cent of the population (about 3000 people) had died but in his monastery, Burke writes, Pontormo set to work drawing – his best coping mechanism. Burke sees in Pontormo’s nude self-portrait the result of ‘‘long periods of introspection in the face of existential panic’’ brought on by the epidemic. With his right finger pointing at the viewer, she says, there is a reminder that you never know who will be next.

Burke’s reverie is referred to by the University of Melbourne’s Dr Catherine Kovesi, a senior lecturer who only last week was teaching her history students about the Black Death in a subject titled Europe: From Black Death to New Worlds. Kovesi says she is no Black Death expert, but has in her 20 years of teaching the subject been fascinated by its many facets, including the period’s increased devotion to so-called ‘‘plague saints’’ St Sebastian and St Roch, who were prayed to in the hope of divine intervention.

David McDiarmid, Plague boy
(1994). NGV Melbourne. Gift from the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998

David McDiarmid, Plague boy (1994). NGV Melbourne. Gift from the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998 Credit: © David McDiarmid / Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia

Ignorance abounded – they might not have had Twitter or Facebook, but word of mouth spread fake news effectively. Even the popular view arising in the 19th century that the Black Death was solely due to bubonic plague has persisted – Kovesi, among many others, notes that contemporary research remains inconclusive.

‘‘There are many things that don’t add up,’’ she says. ‘‘But regardless of what caused it, we do know how people responded and how fragile civil society is in the face of fear and catastrophe.’’

One thing they had to deal with was the plethora of bodies, which were becoming difficult to dispose of – and these appear frequently in paintings from that period. ‘‘People became much more familiar with the gory details of bodily decay, so something you do see more depictions of in art are the gruesome aspects of death – worms coming out of bodies and so on – as well as the grim figure of Death.’’

This figure was especially potent in the danse macabre, an artistic allegory that became much more prevalent throughout the Black Death. In artworks it depicted people dancing towards the grave accompanied by Death. ‘‘In the Danse Macabre, what you have is everyone, of every social station, being affected. No one is protected.’’

That was certainly the case with the theory of ‘‘miasma’’, also discussed by Kovesi, in which plague was attributed to contaminated air, often from the large plague pits in which bodies were covered with lye and earth – Kovesi says one Florentine chronicler, Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, likened this to making lasagne (first meat, then the sprinkling of cheese). So to try and minimise ‘‘bad miasma’’, a new custom was adopted from German-speaking lands – placing bodies in sealed wooden coffins.

Likewise, Kovesi says, bad vapours were counterbalanced by sweet air – hence plague doctors appear in artworks wearing long-beaked masks, stuffed with aromatics. These images of strange bird-headed figures, though, seem more likely to inspire nightmares than reassurance.

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To find that comfort, an upside of our current social isolation is an opportunity to explore the many online digital collections of the world’s art museums. After all, the glorious history of art tells many stories of our endlessly creative species prevailing through crises. The jewel, though, is living within it with grace.

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