Virus as metaphor: art and illness

“We have to fight that invisible enemy” (Donald Trump), “this enemy can be deadly” (Boris Johnson), “we are at war” (Emmanuel Macron), “a battle against epidemic” (a propaganda book forthcoming from the Communist Party of China). Recent political rhetoric in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic describes the virus as an outside threat, invading and attacking the collective body of a nation. When war is waged, we are invoked as citizens to mobilise in the efforts to fight back. In her 1989 essay AIDS and Its Metaphors, American writer Susan Sontag troubled this military language in relation to AIDS: cultural symbols denoting an unseen agent invading from the outside neatly falls into what Sontag calls “political paranoia, with its characteristic distrust of a pluralistic world.”

That pluralistic world belongs to artists, who have adopted and continue to adopt their own metaphors in a refusal of a singular view of society. There are many artists for whom patriarchal, capitalist and oppressive politics act as viruses themselves—invisible, omnipotent, catching. Yet, overt depictions of illness in art history tend to shun autobiography. In The Undying, poet and essayist Anne Boyer struggles with her decision to write in the first person about her breast cancer, noting the taboo of doing so for many women before her, Sontag included. (Sontag’s book-length essay Illness as Metaphor (1978), a precursor to AIDS and Its Metaphors, implicitly uses her own cancer for arms-length allegory.) Rare representations of the self during historic outbreaks include Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu (1919), in which the blanketed artist stares at the viewer from isolation, and Egon Schiele’s The Family (1918), unfinished when he, his wife and unborn child all perished from the so-called Spanish influenza. Instead, death as metaphor has been the stand-in, the memento mori of the hollow skull proliferating in European paintings after the Bubonic plague.

For artists who confront illness in their work, many speak from bodies that have already been marginalised by difference. American painter and sculptor Paul Thek, to whom AIDS and Its Metaphors is dedicated, was somewhat an outcast from the New York art scene upon his death in 1988. After the success of his early works, including lifelike wax sculptures of raw meat, dismembered human limbs and a to-scale effigy of his own body in The Tomb (1967), Thek left New York for Europe. When he returned a decade later in the late 1970s, his emotional state and poverty forced him into a kind of self-exile, and his work turned mostly to less grandiose paintings on newsprint and canvas board. His final exhibition in 1987, the year of his diagnosis, hung several of these paintings at waist-height to create the feeling of being in a pool. Drowning, perhaps, but also floating—suspended—in what time he had left. For an artist long preoccupied with his own death, Thek’s painted handwriting in one of these works proclaims, “While there is time, let’s go out and feel everything.” A painting I wish I’d seen three weeks ago.

In contemporary artist Linda Stupart’s work, time is treated as a central facet of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, where past trauma can linger in the cells of the body, allowing those bodies to literally time travel. Their most recent film, After the Ice, the Deluge (awakening), made on the Arctic island Svalbard last year, begins with a shot of the graveyard in the town Longyearbyen. Buried here are miners who died of Spanish flu in 1918, their bodies resisting decomposition due to the permafrost. Yet now, in a changing ecology, ancient bacteria and viruses embedded in soils and ice caps are melting and resurfacing within us. Stupart’s work is in line with early cyberfeminists like VNS Matrix, who in their 1991 manifesto proclaimed themselves “the virus of the new world disorder, rupturing the symbolic from within.” Like their 2016 science fiction novella-cum-book of spells Virus, Stupart’s latest work uses the virus as a force, a metaphor, for dismantling white male power structures, and to go further—to propose the traumatised body as the magic time-traveller at one with the landscape.

Difference and trauma are often seen as sickness in our society, conditions to protect ourselves from, to fight against, like the ‘otherness’ of the virus. Yet to take up home there, to embrace our exile in trauma, is to refuse the tropes of lazy metaphor and paranoia. These artists refuse to be mobilised against an unseen enemy, and instead view the virus as something inherent within, to be used to break down the inequities we can already see.