Spanish flu was largely absent in mainstream culture. But like Aids, the grief and fury around Covid is ripe for channelling
I’ve been thinking a lot about David Wojnarowicz’s jacket, worn to a 1988 protest a year after the artist’s HIV diagnosis. Emblazoned on the back over the subverted pink triangle that came to be a symbol of the gay community’s fight for liberation were the words: “IF I DIE OF AIDS – FORGET BURIAL – JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA.”
These words have echoed through the decades, transmitted and mutating, cultural commentators have noted, like a virus: “IF I DIE IN POLICE CUSTODY …”; “IF I DIE IN A SCHOOL SHOOTING …” A year ago, the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, Act Up, the grassroots group dedicated to ending the Aids pandemic through political and artistic activism, and who put on a “political funeral” for Wojnarowicz when he died of Aids at the age of 37 in 1992, posted a new manifestation online: “IF I DIE OF COVID-19 – FORGET BURIAL DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF MAR-A-LAGO.”
We are a year in, but in terms of Covid’s artistic impact, it’s obviously early days. On the one hand, the potential for great art is huge: the grief and the fury is ripe for channelling. “No, #COVID19 isn’t AIDS but the parallels are clear as day,” Act Up NY tweeted in March last year. “Vulnerable communities are taking the brunt of this pandemic due to overwhelming neglect. All the barriers in place (healthcare, pharma greed, housing, stigma, etc) that have kept HIV alive will keep this virus alive.”
Yet there is also fatigue and an unwillingness to engage with any form of cultural response to the pandemic. Online, it has become fashionable to express dread about the slew of Covid novels, art, TV shows or films that will emerge. “I completely understand why the Spanish Flu was rarely if ever mentioned in 1920s literature and art. I do not want to watch any TV shows/movies or read a single novel about this fucking time,” tweeted the writer Rebecca Fishbein this week (340,000+ likes). She then added: “I can assure all of you that even if every single movie/film/book were exclusively about Covid going forward, humanity would still learn no lessons. See: Holocaust.”
Perhaps it is unfair for me to single out the sentiments of a lone writer, but her words are symptomatic of a view that I have now seen and heard expressed countless times, both online and off, and they raise some interesting questions. Is the purpose of art to teach us lessons? Did not the Holocaust provoke a major 20th-century artistic shift? In asking the question, “how do we make art after Auschwitz?” ways of moving forward were found. The rise of abstraction resulted. And what about Primo Levi, Charlotte Salomon or Gerhard Richter, among others? The art and literature of the second world war, and the Great War before it, were a necessary processing of the trauma of mass death and destruction.
Related: Fear, bigotry and misinformation – this reminds me of the 1980s Aids pandemic | Edmund White
