The Spaces Between Us. Lockdown, FolkLore, Decompression

https://vimeo.com/40776116

Spaces between us
Keep getting deeper 
("Spaces" / One Direction)

Negative space, in art, is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or  relevant shape, and such space occasionally is used to artistic effect as the "real" subject of an image. 
( Wikipedia, but you knew that)

"Why so negative?"  (attrib President Trump, endlessly)

What will we make after Covid 19?  The response of the Government will be picked over and  condemned or excused; it'll  be dramatized I imagine, maybe like  David Hare's Stuff Happens which reconstructed the making of a bogus case - of - convenience that led to the Iraq war. Surely the Health Service  and Care Sector will be celebrated in song.

 Pop's response to political events is usually to personalize, to express the universal through the particular. Objectivity is something to be arrived at by the listener, through hearing a subjective account told through a character or a persona. Billy Bragg's Between The Wars is an example. Single songs work best, maybe because the 3-4 min pop song/single is the popular artform of our era, a uniquely happy collision between the needs of its audience and the capability of its manufacturing industry, or maybe because no-one likes to be lectured at length...

Exceptions...I can think of one: Robert Wyatt's editorially charged LP Old Rottenhat,  whose sound pallete  conveys an atmosphere of urgent pre-internet debate within and across caucuses and factions.  Maybe the finger-pointin' longish-form Masters Of War by Bob Dylan. 

But Covid 19 is not an invading enemy. It wants nothing from us, it does not know that we are here. So, It cant be sung about in secret defiance like an occupying army.  There is no Fuhrer's face to Heil-heil! into. No great dictators and propagandists..unless they are on "our side", in which case the language we ingest for use in day to day discussions reveals thier agenda, and  the ease with which it passes into our systems. The language also exposes thier paucity of imagination; the feeble wartime metaphors don't work.  Particularly when delivered by Sergeant Wilson.

Trump's and Johnson's attempts at anthropomorphosising the virus .. "...It's really smart..." "..Send It Packing.." are like responses made to a child who's banged its' head on a table edge..."bad table..."  Instead the virus becomes a stand-in for this month's enemies..the 

EU, the  World Health Organisation, China. We hear the vernacular of ignorance again...people are talking of boycotting takeaways.

There have been popular responses, and these at least are grounded in experience of a kind, rather than ideology. Costumes have appeared, drawing on a rich brew of folklore and chapbook engravery. Steampunks whose grab-bag of off-the- peg accessories  and cossies includes  the Venetian Plague Doctor mask  may find it has aquired an unwelcome edge. 
(I've got one too. Thanks Alex.) 

 Elsewhere, Lore is enlisted as part of the strategic response. In a time of crisis and distancing we are looking to surrogates, folk devils and holy fools.

In India a lurid relative of the South Queensferry Burry Man  walks Chennai's street, raising awareness of the ease of transmission, of being snagged on viral spike peplomers. 

In Indonesia,  volunteers dressed as ghosts try to scare people into social distancing. In Indonesian folklore, ghostly figures known as "pocong" are said to represent the trapped souls of the dead. 

Here in the UK if you want to hear Vernacular Celebration, open your window on a thursday night at 8. Hear and then join  the rough music of the people in thanks to the NHS: Ive heard - and recorded - applause, singing, ships hooters, train sirens, folk tunes,  rattling pots and pans..and if you want to see the  attempted (and failed) absorbtion and co-opting of popular ritual celebration, find the various Potemkin Facebook pages set up to to corral these popular outbursts of thanks into a generalised demonstration of consensus, to stock an image pool to be sourced by political strategists and campaign managers 

How we view what we make will impact on what we make, and vise versa. The next nature of public space and personal space alike will reflect the pressures brought to bear on relationships by a lack of space, or too much of it; on social life  by unwanted proximity in shops, currents of breath down the length of the bar, hugginess and reticence, and in what rattles around in the depths, amplified by  a surrounding silence and immersed within the breadth and depth of space.

Looking for a representation of space and it's effect on us, I collected  a rep company of empty shirts in high street colours and positioned them on canes in the woods and on the fells above Ulverston. Re-wilding laundry ,one friend speculated, Scarecrows, said another. Filled with associations of sacrifice, obligation and an animating wind, scarecrows have an agency capable of  echoing anguish and exhuberance,  So far, they underscore a 4 minute pop song about lockdown and decompression. 

Right ray of sunlight, me.

If lockdown continues, or even mutates into a gradated fade into normality, the legacy of our time sharing space with Covid 19 will be evident in the way we conduct relationships, and negotiate space and territory. We might begin with the life-room instruction to attempt to fuse the object of study with the air around it, to remove the notion of positive and negative, to present volume, mass and space as things equally present. 

After lockdown, what steps out again may not be what stepped in; we will emerge as more aware of our being assemblages of the human and nonhuman; products of our experience, but also of covid 19s experience of us and our accomodating action toward it. Previous viruses have acted in us, and modified us; so will this one.