What does it mean to be critical, subversive, nonconformist, and free during a global pandemic? Subversion and resistance are so entwined in the history of art and critical theory—partly justifiably, partly as empty heroics—that even calls for communal solidarity in a public health emergency risk seeming, from that perspective, conformist and submissive. Against the background of that dilemma, influential artists and public intellectuals have struggled to take a coherent position on the crisis. Among them are an internationally famous Italian philosopher, a German theatre director, and a German novelist. But we’ll come to them. The difficulties experienced by artists were demonstrated by the pan-European museum confederation L’Internationale’s “Artists in Quarantine” project.
A shared Instagram account was the stage for 16 artists commissioned to channel, as a press release stated, “perspectives on public/private space, solidarity and critique that are intrinsically connected with the present time.” Running from April 21 to May 7, the project took for a springboard the historic example of Sanja Iveković’s performance work Trokut [Triangle]: when President Tito’s motorcade passed her apartment on a visit to Zagreb on 10 May 1979, the artist sat on her balcony, sipped whiskey, read a book, and gestured as if she were masturbating. The police observed her from a rooftop and ordered her to stop: even the intimation of a woman’s pleasure is enough to provoke state repression.