Left-Right: Colouring Quarantine courtesy of Exile. Liv Fontaine, Some People Say 2020.Courtesy-of-the-artist and Glasgow international. Lee Mingwei, Sonic Blossom courtesy of Gropius Bau.
It’s 4pm on a Friday afternoon and a professional opera singer is serenading me from a small window on my laptop screen. The song is in a language I don’t speak, but as this kind-eyed stranger fixes his gaze on mine I start to well up anyway, momentarily overwhelmed by the intimacy contained in this small gesture. Once an anomaly, these types of encounters are now the norm. From viewing rooms to curated reading lists, downloadable drawings to Instagram takeovers, as the Covid-19 pandemic wages on exhibition programs have migrated online amid gallery and museum closures.
Conceived after the opening of his retrospective at Berlin’s Gropius Bau was postponed, the aforementioned performance, Invitation for Dawn (2020), is Lee Mingwei’s first virtual artwork. Adapted from the live performance Sonic Bloom, which would have taken place daily within the exhibition space, the decision to stage a digital iteration of the work was a challenge for the New York-based artist, whose 20-year-long career has been premised on creating face-to-face encounters with museum goers. “For a long while I’ve been very reluctant for my participatory work to have any online presence,” Lee tells me over the phone from Manhattan, “but because of this pandemic I’m putting myself in a new terrain.”
Lee Mingwei, Sonic Blossom, 2013/2020. Photo: Laura Fiorio. Courtesy of Gropius Bau.
Lee is not the only artist who has stepped out of his comfort zone in recent weeks. Faced with having to delay their opening until 2021, the team at Glasgow International decided to turn their homepage into a virtual exhibition, screening new digital commissions alongside a selection of artist videos that will be shown during next year’s biennale. “We don’t have lots of money to do additional projects so we knew it couldn’t be a big production,” says GI director Richard Parry, “but we just thought it would be tremendously sad to let the opening dates pass by and do nothing.” The resulting program is an eclectic mix of video and audio content from artists such as Alberta Whittle, Yuko Mohri, and Liv Fontaine, which Parry hopes will offer a “rounded view of what we were trying to accomplish.”
Of course, producing artworks for viewers to watch from their own homes comes with its fair share of problems. Liberated from the black box, artist video, which often demands a high level of attention from its audiences, has to compete with the pure entertainment offered by streaming services such as Netflix. Bad Internet connections and tinny laptop speakers can also cause issues. “It’s certainly a challenge,” explains Parry, “but that’s one of the wonderful things about working with artists—they’re creative and often think about things in new ways.”
Alberta Whittle, Business as usual, hostile environment, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Glasgow International.
One artist who’s excited about the possibility of creating work within these parameters is painter Vanessa Disler. Invited by the online magazine Conceptual Fine Arts to make a follow up to the exhibition Global Cows, which took placed at Brussel-based gallery Damien and the Love Guru last year, Disler has put down her brushes and is working collaboratively to create an interactive “digital fresco” with fellow artists, Nina Royale, Tiziana La Melia, Lucy Stein and Charlott Weise. “We wanted to rethink the form of what an online exhibition could be, says Disler of the project, which will incorporate music, sound, drawing and text. “There was no way we were going to do make an exhibition in a virtual white cube” she adds, “because it’s so detached from the materiality of the internet or from the interface of your computer.”
But not all galleries and museums have the time, money or inclination to create a digital program. After his current two-person show fittings closed the day after it opened, Christian Siekmeier, the director of Vienna-based gallery EXILE, decided not to start producing online content to promote the closed exhibition. Instead, he took a different route, putting out an open call for artists to send him black and white drawings, which he then uploaded to an open-access Dropbox for people to download, print and colour in. The response was astounding: 175 artists sent drawings, and Siekmeier received images of coloured-in pieces from all over Europe. He even managed to sell a work. “My Niece filled in a drawing and the artist liked it so much she wanted to have it,” he laughs. “It took a lot of convincing but she eventually agreed to trade it against another drawing and two packets of gummy bears!” Last week, after Austria relaxed its rules around social isolation, Siekmeier began to welcome visitors back into his gallery, but he won’t be forgetting his short moment of virality any time soon. “It was an incredibly inspiring project,” he admits. “I was quite humbled to be a part of it.”