There is a crack in everything
…that’s how the light gets in (Leonard Cohen)
In the future… when this is all over… we’ll look back and, what?
We will perhaps be amazed at the suddenness of the crash. One minute we were going along just nicely or at least going along; everything in its place or at least predictable; the landscape of our ambitions and struggles familiar, mapped, alive. And the next, silence as one by one the lights went out.
We will doubtless mourn the loss of many small and funky creative outlets, maybe some bedrock institutions and certainly some fine people. Maybe we will find that our lives have become divided into Before COVID and After. Maybe we will regret not having made better use of the old world.
It must just be that with an awful lot of borrowing and another round of austerity-so-tight-it-hurts things will gradually return to normal. Certainly, as soon as the pubs are open it’ll be standing-room only. The restaurants that can open will fill their tables and The Summer Exhibition at the RA will be hailed as a triumph. But it won’t be normal. When you’ve been away for a while and you come back to the old familiar you often find it strange. The colours are faded or the noise too loud, the floors are dirty and there are cracks in the walls. It won’t be normal because too many people have seen through the cracks and caught a glimpse of something else.
For now it’s only a glimpse, it doesn’t have coherence and it’s not The New Normal but there are changes coming.
Distance, proximity. Viewer and art object. Tactility, tangibility. The Virtual and the Real.
Loss, absence, presence. The Present.
‘Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened into the rose garden’. TS Eliot Four Quartets
During Lockdown, (enduring Lockdown) did you experience some things more intensely? Those first brief video-chats were exciting weren’t they? There was a surprise to some Instagram Live events that wasn’t there before. A new sensation, a sharper engagement.
But if you cannot stand beside a painting and smell it or run your finger over a ceramic bowl what can you do to find your way around it? How do you get into it?
If you cannot shake hands what conversation can you have? – that which is available.
Sometimes less is more. We have learned a lot about community.
When the world gets turned upside down new things crawl from the wreckage. The Diggers, The Ranters, The Levellers. There are opportunities here in all this chaos and artists are opportunists par excellence.
There is a crack in everything – that’s where the light gets in.
Patrick Semple, May 2020
