In late April, as the coronavirus outbreak continued its inexorable spread, a museum in Los Angeles put out a remarkable call. It asked communities in the western United States – the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains and the west coast – to help "identify and preserve items of historical and cultural significance during the Covid-19 pandemic".
The Autry Museum explained that it saw history as “ever-present” and wanted to preserve “this moment”. Meanwhile, similar initiatives were launched by several other museums and historical societies across America. From New York city, badly hit by the virus, to Bozeman in Montana, which is not, curators have begun to try and record an unprecedented event and its impact on the human psyche, creativity and connectedness.
It is a worthy endeavour, but there are some questions about the timing. How valid is it to capture a moment in time even as we live through it? Is it not premature to seek to depict an event while it is under way? Does distance – in time – provide necessary perspective? If history is the study of the past and a museum an institution that conserves artefacts that illuminate the past, should pandemic-era collections not wait for the pandemic to be over? Really, can one even begin to tell a story before it has ended?
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Students of Al-Haramain secondary school attend a class on their first day of re-opened school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. AFP -
A woman walks past a restaurant with social distancing markings in Portobello Market in west London, following the easing of the lockdown restrictions during the novel coronavirus pandemic. AFP -
A hairdresser wearing a face mask gives a haircut to a customer at a beauty salon in Beijing. AFP -
Portraits of congregation members are displayed on the benches of San Miguel Arcangel Catholic temple after priest Jorge Echegollen decided to use them to motivate himself during online masses in Tijuana, Mexico. AFP -
A man visits the Grigore Antipa National Natural History Museum in Bucharest after its reopening. AFP -
Paramedic Nadezhda Konanava, 65, wearing a protective suit rides her electric bike at the village of Novaya Obol, some 70km outside Vitebsk. AFP -
A member of staff at the Geneva Mosque installs markings on the floor as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus. EPA -
Visitors admire the Gallery of Maps as Vatican Museums reopened, Vatican City. EPA -
Customers walk through a disinfection cabin at entrance of the Evropeyskiy shopping Ñenter in Moscow, Russia. EPA -
Indian workers prepare beds at the Nesco Centre Hall in Mumbai. EPA -
Young Ukrainian gymnasts wearing protective face masks and gloves seen during a training session in central Kiev. EPA -
Customers receive foot massage from Thai masseuses in Bangkok, Thailand. EPA
Some of these concerns are already being raised by scholars. Stanford University’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Kennedy stresses that the goal of Covid-themed museums and collections should be to inform people, “not just tickling their fancy”. To be successful, he says, they need to “provide context and enable future visitors to understand the tenor and temper of the times, including inequities, racial and otherwise”.
Fair enough, but is that even possible right now? The effects of the twin burdens of disease and bigotry are yet to be wholly understood in relation to certain groups, such as native Americans and east Asians in the US and poor migrant workers in India. With museums seeking everyone's memories (and everyday objects), there is a risk that everything becomes an artefact and the largest group of contributors are the usual suspects, people who are not "documentarily inarticulate", in the words of American cultural studies professor Thomas J Schlereth.
At this point in the coronavirus crisis, we do not even know why Covid-19 appears deadlier in the US and Europe than in Asia and Africa, so it is a moot point that any museum collection would be able to properly explore the intersection of material culture from the pandemic and its larger constellations of meaning for humankind.
It could be argued that the decade it took to put together different perspectives for the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York provided the depth required for such an emotionally freighted exercise. So too the very many decades before the first Holocaust Museum came into being. But it may be perilous too, as Mr Kennedy warns, in “waiting too long” to memorialise the past.
The Partition Museum in Amritsar is a case in point. It opened its doors in 2016, nearly 70 years after the partition of India, the birth of Pakistan and the largest mass migration in human history. Established as a result of an initiative driven by British Indian author Kishwar Desai, it brought together family objects, tales of separation across the border and personal accounts of trauma and tremendous resolve, as well as art defined by partition.
The museum, the first of its kind, fills as it says, “a void”. It calls itself a “people’s museum” and while it is considered a success and a template for other such collections, the gap between its establishment and the event it memorialises is rather too long. In the intervening period, many storytellers we should have heard may have passed and countless artefacts lost, all of which would help shine a light on one of the defining moments in the history of the subcontinent.
The fact that Indian and Pakistani official institutions were unable or unwilling, for the best part of a century, to preserve material relics in order to tell a meaningful story of partition is lamentable. But the rush in the US to build pandemic-era collections is also troubling, albeit in a different way.
The precipitate move to preserve every bit of life during the pandemic may point to a worrying tendency diagnosed by the renowned historian David Lowenthal some 30 years ago.
Writing in Perspecta, the peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Yale School of Architecture, he lamented "the mania for memorabilia…the rampant cult of preservation…[the] wider modern preoccupation with the past". New films continually reprise older ones, he wrote, the search for roots swamps the genealogical archives and reverence is lavished on oral histories. It all comes down to "disappointed expectations of progress and looming fears of decline and impending catastrophe", the professor added, and this perennial nostalgia means that unlike our ancestors, who saved "only grand heroic treasures; today everything…is saved".
Also read: Art that captures the pandemic
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By artist @tanaka_tatsuya, whose work is part of a Miniature Life exhibition in Fukushima, Japan. Via @tanaka_tatsuya / Instagram -
In a work reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting, Johanna Tordjman depicts a lonesome figure looking out to an image of an empty street. Via @j.tordjman / Instagram -
Dave Pollot's still life series includes cleaning materials that are in demand during the coronavirus pandemic. Via @davepollotart / Instagram -
Ertan Atay's work often involves reimagining well-known images and paintings. Via @failunfailunmefailun / Instagram -
Artist and photographer Marius Sperlich produced this image as a way to share health and safety guidelines for Covid-19. Via @mariussperlich / Instagram -
Catherine White, a director, writer and art director based in Montreal, launched #Coronartbalance, “a kinder, gentler virus that awakens creative minds”, which is an invitation to compose sculptures with what surrounds us at home. Via @cathwhitecath / Instagram -
Photographer Jeremy 'Jerm' Cohen, who lives and works in Brooklyn, captures this moment of rooftop sport. Via @jermcohen / Instagram -
'Infected Childhood', by AOS, commentingon the impact of Covid-19 on the psyche of children. Via @aos.art / Instagram -
Social distancing on the beach. Artwork by Santi P. Seoane. Via @santi_p.seoane / Instagram -
Part of a series of portraits by Danae Savage depicting life in quarantine. Via @dnicolephotog / Instagram -
A digital artwork by Icy and Sot, with a caption that says: "These days are reminding us that we are all equal, regardless of our race, culture, religion or gender." Via @icyandsot / Instagram -
Toilet paper is a recurring motif in current pandemic art. Via @luisamariabenito / Instagram -
"No gloves were harmed in the making of this picture," writes Paola de Grenet, a photographer living in Barcelona. Via @paola_de_grenet / Instagram -
Florence's cityscape, with people busy cooking in their homes. Created by painter Pierpaolo Rovero. Via @pierpaolorovero / Instagram -
Fantasy features highly in artist Indigo's digital creations. Via @indg0 / Instagram -
Contained at home: a digital work by photographer Zamurovic. Via @zamurovic.photography / Instagram -
Artist CJ Lee (@cheoljoolee) said of this work, "I was planning to do simple sketch when beginning, but changed my mind because I saw some of nurse's face. Truly respect the front-line healthcare workers. Thank you all for your dedication and sacrifice". Via @cheoljoolee / Instagram -
By Emily Kask (@ek_the_pj): "I’m way too paranoid to touch my phone while I’m out grocery shopping and don’t want to cross contaminate. I wanted a way to write my list down without creating any extra trash." Via @ek_the_pj / Instagram -
A coronavirus spread: wipes, disinfectant, toilet paper, gloves and a worrying news story. Created by Jessica Walsh. Via @jessicavwalsh / Instagram -
The artist Ammi creates a dark portrait of media consumption in time of Covid-19. Via @eyesofammi / Instagram
The argument is clear. Lowenthal, who wrote the groundbreaking book The Past is a Foreign Country in 1985, led a strand of cultural-historical thought that believed in liberating the present from obsessively salvaged – and saleable – relics of the past. The implication is that the modern cult of preservation may sometimes actually prevent us from contemplating the imperishable, non-physical elements of our shared experience.
So, the pandemic era may best be considered as a museum piece in the post-pandemic moment. That will be the time when uniquely patterned masks, Zoom invitations, toilet paper mark-ups, wildlife in city spaces, quarantine poems, lockdown love stories and other such curiosities can become objects for contemplation.
