Sunday Reflections on the End of Time(s): How Looking Back Is Going Forward
06/22/20
From the Co-Prosperity Programming Council
Every Sunday since the beginning of Quarantine Times, we have been honored to feature a member of the Co-Prosperity Sphere Programming Council, or Co-Pro Pro-Co. Our council is made up of artists, curators, teachers, arts administrators, and everything in between from across the city and with a diversity in age, race, gender, stage in professional career, and artistic discipline. Since its founding in 2019, they have helped to program, curate, and facilitate exhibitions and performances at the Co-Prosperity Sphere and established the Co-Prosperity Peers solo window installation series through open proposals (apply here!) Public Media Institute's mission has always been to create, incubate, and sustain innovative and equitable cultural programming, and they are making that happen.
Over the last several months they have also brought us words, videos, drawings, poetry, paintings, and images to reflect on while we quarantined inside in the cold, early months of COVID, and now while we bravely risk our health in the streets to work toward social change that is essential.
Felicia Holman kicked us off with Princely advice in the confusing first weeks of quarantine. Manal Kara shared a poem in video form, looking to bees and bats for answers in the pandemic. David Nasca’s D. Gabriel Company offered essential art products to get us through the quarantine. Alex Chitty presented Korey Martin’s Broom School, a perfect sweeping practice for those trapped in the studio. Jesse Malmed challenged our soft, locked-in brains with his Sunday word puzzles. As spring began, Naomi Hawksley found inspiration in the backyard. Lise Haller Baggesen Ross worked in, and on, Revery Alone, but managed to inspire poems from students at the Rebirth Poetry Ensemble. Josh Rios watched the world happen outside his window, but found cinema and music there as well, and Ed Oh examined politics through a long-labored over painting. Nearing the end of quarantine Ahniya Butler found peace in nothingness and self-reflection. The revolution began again, and Nicole Marroquin said Fuck This, with good reason. And finally, Claire Pentecost and the Deep Time Chicago collective examined colonialism, racism, and capitalism as the cause for the current pandemic, ecological catastrophe, and political upheaval.
Today we share some final thoughts from council members that look forward with hope, rather than reflect in despair. Maybe the quarantine was really just a gestation period for our society to prepare itself for what could be wonderful changes if we keep working toward freedom and equity.
Photograph by Daniel Suarez, June 17, 2020
A Few Reflections from the End (of the) Times —
By Jesse Malmed
The end of The Quarantine Times is not the end of our quarantine time. I have long longed for a true Time Magazine, one that took seriously all things temporal—the specious present, the polyrhythms of being, imagination and memory, the ever-deepening always, the upon upon which it was or will have been; its publication cycle couldn’t be calendrical. 60 Minutes runs for 42 minutes, The Today Show doesn’t last all day, we can’t recall if television still exists but to blurrily extrapolate the fimbriated panels that turn TikTok portraits to flatscreen landscapes. I wake up late on the solstice—it’s going to be a very long day. Ekphrastic and euphemistic enthusiasm; things like that. That there used to be morning and evening newspapers. That 24-hour news cycles were once saved for war. That war time wasn’t constant.
I am thinking of the times—the types of times—those times over the last three months: shifting activities and rhythms, the commute across the room, the collapse of time and space through distance and omnipresence, acquiescing to virus time.
Virality, contact and contactless tracing. The ways we are watching ideas spread, texts as images, a kind of lateral pedagogy, the picket line of the stream. Our bodies, in protest, function physically and as images. You hold a sign for those near you, for the helicopters and drones, to give the uniforms something to practice reading and for history to see images and know the captions. We are each in those moments ourselves and some attempt at literalizing a mass, a body politic, filling space, being counted, a reconsideration of our bodies’ relationships with labor and capital. Where once I felt—mathemagically not mathematically—that every protestor represented another ten people in their lives that, because of access, scheduling, childcare, safety, ability, etc., etc. were unable to participate physically, now I believe that number to be 108. This is why we must socially distance, the auratic metaphysics require space to con-spire.
That George Floyd’s violent murder and final words were in the midst of a virulent pulmonary pandemic moving through shared air while breathing apps were reaching peak exposure is too much, too too much. Those who study breath and co-incidence know you cannot see wind, you can only see its effect. Trees and chimes shimmer and ring. Masks, buttons, signs, we hone in on our own permeabilities, the endless shifting membranes of zooming in and out to know where the we is.
Black lives matter. Abolish the police. Wear a mask. Build a wind chime. A better world is possible. And urgent. I miss you and I love you.
— Jesse
Ed Oh, On Moving Forward, 2020.
Mother of Detention
By Lise Haller Baggesen
Dear,
Congratulations Grad!
The Class of 2020 is one for the history books! Whether you’ll be graduating High School, 8th grade, or even Pre-K, you will, as they say, have one hell of a college essay. Except, if we’ve learned one thing from The Incredibles, it must be that “everyone is special means no one is special!”
The grades are in, and remote learning gets an F. Even if at first it had the ring of an F for Freedom, the end of this quarter reads like an F for WTF. Now you get to graduate via YouTube, Facebook, and a drive-by commencement.
This week, CPS parents got an email that those of you returning in the fall will be wearing masks in the classroom. I don’t know why this makes me sad—maybe it’s because your classmates will not get to see your beautiful smile, nor you theirs—maybe it’s because it feels like America has given up on this pandemic. Somehow, I was hoping we would be reopening to something more than business as usual + masks. CPD out of CPS would be a good place to start. Is that too much to ask?
Still, where we failed you, you never failed to educate us! Just when remote learning was about to fade into endless summer, streets all over the country erupted in protest. Whos Streets? Our Streets!
Despite our fear of crowds and what might lurk on the collective breath, your debate skills, backed up with deeds, convinced us that those of us who are still breathing freely can and must stand up for those who can’t breathe. I thank you for that.
That collective affirmative action was valuable and meaningful, but not all action is.
For all this talk lately, of “essential business,” your career may not be the most important thing about you. In the future, your ability to do nothing may be your most valuable skill. In the last three months that is exactly what we were told to do. This call to inaction puts the collective above the self. No one is special, means everyone is special. This is a beautiful idea(l), albeit one that is hard to rhyme with American exceptionalism and individualism.
Nothing is the hardest thing to do in America. I don’t know that a commencement speech was ever written with the message “Relax, don’t do it!”(1)
And yet, this is my message to you, Class of 2020.
Since it is from before your time, it feels important to tell you that the AIDS anthem “Relax” was lifted from an album with the title Welcome to the Pleasuredome! smash hit of 1984.
That Orwellian year I started high school and woke to the mainstream realization that we were in the midst of a world-wide pandemic, which would touch each and every life in my generation. Life would never be the same, and yet, the “Pleasuredome” beckoned.
Now, the “Pleasuredome” may be many things to many people (although I somehow never got the impression that this place of worship was in the workplace) but I think, essentially, it is the permission for yourself to be well and truly alive—in your skin, your body, your mind, and in your time.
When you think back to 2020, I hope you remember the stillness and the wilderness we also found while left to our own devices. There were a lot of those, yes, devices, and angsty navigating of social media, and digital interfaces and remoteness, and Frustration with a capital F, yes, but in between those moments, there were also great pauses, and great aliveness. The sky was never bluer than with commercial airlines grounded and local traffic stalled. The Apple store never looked better than when boarded up—like a giant Donald Judd in the sunset on North and Clybourn.
After this, “Mother of Detention” Chicago summer hits you like an armpit. I smell mine every morning to assure myself that I still can, smell, that is. Do you do the same?
I want you to go out into that muggy endless summer and do nothing with it—except perhaps to stop and smell the roses. When, if ever, in your life, will you get a permission slip to do that again? That is pretty special.
Love,
Mom
—————————————————————————————————————
1. “Relax,” Welcome to the Pleasuredome Frankie Goes to Hollywood (ZTT records, 1984.) Although fairly inauspicious upon its initial release in October 1983, “Relax” finally reached number one on the UK singles charts in January 1984 and the rest of Europe quickly followed suit.
Open This Letter In 50 Years: How Looking Back Is Going Forward
By Josh Rios
“It is often said that history is written by the victors. It might also be said that history is forgotten by the victors. They can afford to forget, while the losers are unable to accept what happened and are condemned to brood over it, relive it, and reflect how different it might have been.”
–Peter Burke in Varieties of Cultural History
Wrapped Columbus. Photograph by Emily Green, 2020
“Haunting doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop… For ghosts, the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved.”
–Eve Tuck and C. Ree in Handbook of Autoethnography
Photograph by Josh Rios, 2018.
“Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Thursday said she doesn’t want Christopher Columbus statues in Chicago that have been targeted for vandalism taken down, but instead used to help educate people about ‘the full history’ of the U.S.”
–John Byrne in Chicago Tribune (June 18, 2020)
Photograph by Josh Rios, 2018.
Two days ago, in preparation for a Juneteenth march and protest, the City of Chicago wrapped the Christopher Columbus statue located at the end of Grant Park near the north entrance of the Field Museum. As demonstrations continue to sweep the country bringing sharp demands for transformative racial justice and police free schools, the act of enveloping a racist monument in soft white plastic tells us everything. If the marchers asked for it to be covered, that tells us one story. If the state set out to prevent its vandalization, that tells us the same story another way. The striking image makes clear what needs protecting. It is not the dignity and lives of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. The authoritarian specters of settler colonialism and slavery are free to loom while the mayor rehearses tepid talking points further establishing power’s intransigence.
In the winter of 2018, I made a trip to Grant Park to see the statue up close, to study it and attempt to learn something, as so many level-headed defenders of racist monuments suggest can be done. I learned that in an effort to affect classical Roman authority, the engraved texts adorning the monument’s plinth substitute the V for the U. For example: “To Christopher Colvmbus Discoverer of America;” and on the other side, “Erected by the Italian-Americans of Illinois Vnder the Avspices of the Columbvs Monvment Committee.” It is a gesture that lays bare the line of epistemic violence starting in the here-and-now reaching all the way back to the Enlightenment-era founding of the country. I learned the refusal of those who consolidate power through policing is obstinate like granite, but also hollow as a lost-wax bronze that folds when toppled. Taking down a racist statue is not an act of making absent, but of making present, remembering, and re-collecting the deep reserves of knowledge and life that were pitilessly obliterated. Greet the returning ghost who asks: “Did the monuments come down? Were the police abolished? Are there still armed cops in public schools?”
How will we answer these questions? As a member of the Chicago arts community you can sign and share the letter below showing public solidarity with Chicago youth organizing in their schools. They have worked tirelessly to replace cops with the critical support needed to improve learning potentials. Let’s help them. Now is the time!
Established in 2019, the Co-Prosperity Programming Council is made up of a rotating group of artists, educators and arts administrators who help to program exhibitions, performances and partnerships for the Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Current members include Alex Chitty, Lise Haller Baggesen, Naomi Hawksley, Manal Kara, Nicole Marroquin, David Nasca, Claire Pentecost, Anthony Stepter, Ahniya Butler, Salem Collo-Julin, Regin Igloria, Jesse Malmed, Ed Oh, Josh Rios, Gloria Talamantes , Felicia Holman and Frank Peralta.
Stella Brown is the Quarantine Times Sunday editor. Every week, Stella selects a member of the Co-Prosperity Sphere Programming Council to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.