Artist Kristin McWharter's Instagram Prompts Meditate on What's Necessary in a Post-COVID World
05/20/20
by Micco Caporale
Kristin McWharter’s quarantine Instagram prompts on her profile (@kristinmcwharter).
As an anxious writer, my day-to-day hasn’t changed much since the pandemic hit. If anything, it’s been my time to shine: I feel less guilt about my inability to deal with the white noise of daily life most people can tune out, and my shame about not going places I “want” to be has evaporated. I can hear my thoughts with the same tingling clarity of the bird calls everyone on Twitter has begun noticing now that human life has slowed. My dirty secret: I love life at this pace.
It’s probably why I’m so intrigued by digital artist Kristin McWharter’s quarantine Instagram prompts. There are ten in total, each archived as stories on her profile (@kristinmcwharter). She calls them a Movement Workshop for a Post-COVID Reality. In number four, I watch a time lapse of her hunched over in an empty, unfinished basement methodically washing the floor with a rag and bucket. She describes this as, “A gentle washing. A tender massage. A backscratch.”
It’s her response to her own assignment for viewers: Find an object or place that goes overlooked, then create a new method of caring for it. In doing this, one should meditate on what new approaches, attitudes, or systems of care are possible or even necessary because of COVID-19. It reminds me of how often KonMari is treated as organizational advice (“store your pants this way, not that”). Actually, the Mari Kondo method is a physical expression of mindfulness, gratitude, and intention in daily life. In the video, McWharter looks like she’s just washing a concrete floor -- in the most agonizing way possible, no less. But actually, she’s being present, giving thanks, and tending to the literal foundation of a space that houses people’s most intimate moments. It’s a stark contrast to my first encounter with her art.
Conspire by Kristin McWharter
She fell on my radar with her piece Conspire, which I saw in December at a show called “Tête à Tête: Embodying Dialogues” at the Zhou B Art Center. The piece hangs like a six-armed creature with vinyl tentacles offering VR headsets. Onlookers press their faces into the goggles, then shift and tilt their bodies to chase digital paper planes and scrawl different colored lines around a pole across a virtual sky.
The experience feels like a competition, though it’s hard to say why -- that other people are doing it with you but your actions don’t complement one another’s? That there’s a disembodied Danny McBride-sounding voice aggressively cheering you on through the headset? That it’s so easy to accidentally invade someone else’s physical space while charting your own digital path? Whoops, my bad -- except maybe not really; I might be prioritizing my need to get this task done over respect for your area.
“Generally, I'm looking at the ways people interact and play with one another,” McWharter tells me over a Skype call about her work, which is often VR-based. “But it’s usually cynical. I'm interested in people's competitive spirits. People come together and participate with each other, but that reveals clearly defined roles -- like, that person wants to win and that person wants to pacify the person who wants to win.”
It’s work that requires being physically present while considering the ways that can drive us apart. “That work seems really painful to make right now,” she says. Enter her Movement Workshop.
For McWharter, one of the appeals of VR is worldbuilding. The VR headsets also bring the physical body into digital experience. Last August, McWharter moved to Chicago to become an Assistant Professor of Art and Technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and when lockdown began, she was about to start teaching a class called Breaking Reality that would expand on these themes.
She explains, “The idea for the class was to investigate the escapist impulse behind creating alternate realities. What is it you're trying to escape from? What's the difference between creating a narrative vs. narrative space? That's an escape from a certain reality vs. creating an intervention and trying to shift or change it.”
Under quarantine, the potential for world-building and escapism seems obvious, but she wrestled with how to encourage her students to bring physical experience and play into their imagined worlds. She also struggled with course logistics, since much of the class hinged on software or computers unavailable at home. And in her own creative practice, she wanted to venture into more optimistic territory, whatever that might look like.
The prompts were originally intended for her students -- one for each week of SAIC’s shortened semester. But as quarantine forced residences to become the site of all aspects of people’s lives (work, school, dating, therapy, sex), McWharter wanted students to feel okay exploring that collapse of boundaries. Could they find anything secure or empowering about this moment?
“What is for a class versus what is for your community versus what is for you doesn't matter right now,” she says. “So I decided to model that for my students and use Instagram to publish the prompts and invite a broader range of participants.”
When McWharter first shared the prompts, followers were still adjusting to the new terms of their lives. Friends and onlookers cautiously reached out asking permission to participate. But as the stay-at-home order continued, the Movement Workshop posts became a source of comfort and even amusement. One person sends her a delicate composition made from light refractions and shadows created by a pair of eyeglasses and a window. Another looks from the floor at a round light fixture on the ceiling, raising their hand and tweaking the dome that attaches it like a nipple. McWharter digitally inserts a lightsaber-like beam across a door frame and limbos beneath it.
“I’m into the failures of it all,” she laughs. “It's like, your friend's band is doing a Facebook Live concert. And, oh, you're gonna listen to their band through your shitty laptop speakers with the Internet cutting in and out and bad lighting. In so many ways, it doesn't work at all! I like that we all have this sort of collective permission to try new things and maybe fail right now.”Having permission to fail can be freeing, but failure can also offer lessons. She describes an online performance that did not go according to plan.
“It felt like I was just rolling around on the floor of the blue screen in front of an audience,” she says. “For a moment, I was really, really embarrassed by it, like it hadn't met some sort of standard of achievement. … But now I’m looking at things that fail and dealing with why they feel like failures. What standards am I using, and where are the standards coming from?”
In slowing down, she’s finding time to be generative, accept things as they come, and consider who she’s making work for and to what end. Her prompts suggest recalibrating towards work that requires physical distance but encourages intimate connections. In response to one, Diego Lechuga, a student, collects what seem like 50 or so video submissions of people holding hands in a succession. They create a convincing emotional facsimile of a hand-holding circle that captures an experience few of us will have soon but so many of us crave. It speaks as much to shared circumstance as shared desire. Appropriately, he calls it “#Together.”
Micco Caporale writes about subcultural fringe. Her work has appeared in outlets such as Pitchfork, Nylon, Vice, and In These Times. She also writes and produces a women's rock history podcast called Bad Reputation. Before quarantine, her favorite pastime was powerlifting. Now it’s watching powerlifting videos on Instagram.