We've memory-holed the madness of lockdown
Video work by Brooklyn-based artist Kat Chamberlin brings it all back
Whenever I talk to someone about the Covid era, or try and remember it myself, a kind of haze descends. It’s as though time stopped or congealed during lockdown. The mood was so far removed from everyday life that recalling it feels like trying to recapture a dream.
So something different this week: Viceroy, an experimental film created by Brooklyn-based video artist Kat Chamberlin, during Covid, and the centrepiece of Chamberlin’s current exhibition at Parent Company in Brooklyn.
Inspired by Millais’ iconic painting of Ophelia, and named for a type of tulip that became exceptionally valuable during the Dutch Golden Age, Viceroy is a single 13-minute shot featuring Chamberlin mopping the floor with her daughter’s hair, while they were shuttered indoors during the Covid lockdowns. It is both troubling and mesmerising: a single shot, over 13 minutes long, recorded in Chamberlain’s home. The camera circles round and round the same wooden floor, over the same objects, which take on ever stranger and more unsettling intensity. By the end, watching it (coincidentally) in a Brooklyn hotel room, I felt a desperate need to go outside - just to reassure myself that I still could.
Though my own Covid experience as a mother was with a younger child, and access to a garden, I instantly recognised the Covid-era sense of sultriness, claustrophobia, and time grown infinitely elastic and out of joint. The self-contained world, and that sense that life could slide into lunacy at any moment.
I have mixed feelings about involving children in performance pieces of this kind. Even so, for me Chamberlin’s video captures more completely than any more rationalistically-argued piece or string of statistics the bubbling madness of the lockdown era; the sense of a social fabric ingrowing, and the desperation of parents and children with no one to turn to but each other - whatever their circumstances. If comfortable, middle-class, well-situated families such as mine and Chamberlin’s struggled to cope, how much worse again was it for impoverished, chaotic or violent homes?
No wonder we find it so difficult to talk about now.
Never again.
Sorry to be contrarian but this was nonsense for all but a select few. I'm glad it was nostalgic and poignant and blah blah blah ...but it wasn't the reality for the vast majority of people on planet Earth during the pandemic.
The over-educated laptop class got to sit at home and have their needs delivered to them like some modern day Marie Antoinette or some pathetic, mentally challenged dependent while the rest of us got to eat cake. Let's not forget who kept the lights, water and sewar turned on at your house during that time. Let's keep in mind the millions of blue color workers that grew, slaughtered, packaged, transported and stocked and then sold you the food that you had delivered or maybe "bravely" went to the store to get. Let's not forget the first responders who tried to maintain order and save lives while bureaucrats partied at number 10 and then vilified and fired for not wanting the jab. We should be mindful of the hundreds of thousands of shop owners and daily wage earners that lost their jobs never to be employed again. The family businesses that were destroyed by The stroke of a government pen while the laptop class and their Boomer parents huddled in fear willing to sacrifice their own children over a civilizational boogeyman that only ever really existed for for their useless aged asses.
Remembering covid? ...well for the hundreds of thousands of people that have been vaccine-injured they remember it every day. That is the ones who are alive to remember. I guess their family still remember them after their dead which many of them are. The United Kingdom currently is experiencing between 10 and 15% increased all cause mortality that coincidentally showed up right after the rollout of the vaccines. By the way, millennials, You are the ones dropping dead on the pitch in disproportionate numbers... Primarily heart disease and vascular disease but all sorts of neurological diseases as well. That nightmare Will Go on ad infinitum until all of those who took the jam are dead ...maybe sooner rather than later...
Those of us less fortunate than the over-educated will never forget those years. We will never forget the loved ones we could not say goodbye to. We will never forget the cowardice and the tyranny of the over-educated. Even as we pay off the debt we won't forget that most of the money went to the top 10% and the enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class to the upper elites was of historic proportions in the trillions of dollars. Trust me we won't forget.
When the populace finally find their Pol Pot of the modern age and The guillotines are once again rolled into the streets the only thing we will forget is our humanity ...until the sewers are filled with blood and we all realize that this man-made disease cost us more than just our lives and our livelihoods. It cost us our souls... but maybe that was the purpose all along...
Yeah, I'm just going to be honest here... I watched it. I don't get it.
I find no connection between COVID lockdowns and mopping a floor with someone's hair.
That's OK. I think Marciel Duchamp's toilet seat is stupid and brutalism is architectural barbarism. Maybe I'm not the target audience.