Completely white from head to foot, a troupe of haz-suited figures march in a column through an empty city. The city is lit up with flashing florescence, indicating a frenetic hive of energy, but the ghostly emptiness tells a different lie. The column are masked and anonymous and, reminiscent of Star Wars storm troopers, march in time to a clanging martial beat.
A dissonant soundtrack jars like the lyre of Orpheus, making the edges of this surreal landscape distort like an Andy Warhol. The whole contrivance of lurid light and an air of teeth bearing threat is hair-tingling like nails on a chalkboard.
Over the soundtrack Orwellian slogans issue from a megaphone
“Compliance is compassion”
“One small ask, wear a mask”
“Shelter in place, Masks cost nothing”
“bend the knee to the front line heroes”
“Conformity costs you nothing”
The Orwellian surveillance is only accentuated by the absurdity of the slogans. The loud hailer of the Ministry of Truth brooks no challenge of reason.
“Protect your loved ones leave them alone”
“Stay apart to come together”
“lockdowns are love”The faceless Big Brother simultaneously threatens and reassures.
“It’s your fault if you get sick”
“Communication is contagion”
“Lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world”The absurdity sometimes extends to dark humour.
“Protect the unborn, renounce procreation”
Looking closely at the figures, their heads are completely covered in a tightly cleaving white cloth. It covers the eyes but leaves the faces features in relief. The eyes are no more than two blank depressions and as the heads turn they seem to monitor without seeing; to be aware without a conscience. -A metaphor for the censorious, impersonal, and ubiquitous surveillance of the digital platforms.
The six figures present the paradox of Zersetzung – the psychological warfare technique used by the Stasi to repress political opponents in East Germany.
They are the shock troops of coercion and also the collective protection response to breakdown. The dissonant moments where the haz-suited column collectively spasm projects an inner physiological conflict. One where the individual accepts the brutalising of their own self to protect themselves from the brutalised ideology.
“Report misinformation”
“Trust the science”
“Be an ally”
The creator of this video, Ooana Trien, who studied experimental theatre at NYU is the only child of immigrants from soviet Romania. After escaping his native Hungary from the Nazis, her grandfather was killed by the communists in Romania; he died in Stalin’s gulags after ten years of hauling logs on the banks of the Danube.
The threat of totalitarian ideology is clear in her work, and New York frightens her right now. An only child, she says she can’t abandon her parents and flee the city even though the changes in her neighbourhood and city unnerve her. Her video captures a strange paradox where the oppressiveness of the column presents the threat of brutal order, while at the same time there is a menace of disorder about the streets.
New York, Ooana says, is empty. The protection of a busy city has disappeared and the only people on the streets are overtly dangerous. No longer the frenetic creative energy of the bustling city that never sleeps. There was safety in the busy streets, now it has been replaced by the threat of dysfunctional and desolate streets. The streets are empty except for a prowling homeless and prison release cohort, and now anyone on the streets presents a threat of harassment and violence. New Yorkers are very scared.
It is strange that a climate of fear and inaction has taken hold amongst artists. Where are the irrepressible rebels who never seem to stop declaring their desire to “stick it to the man”? In fairness the PUP was a well judged bribe from the government to the arts sector so that explains some of the silence in Ireland, but the short sightedness of artists who will be without a red cent or the means to earn it when the PUP dries up is perplexing.
When Van Morrison and Eric Clapton released Stand and Deliver last year -a song which was overtly critical of the lockdown- it looked like there might have been a movement in the making.
The opening lines are a provocative critique of the inaction of artists at this seminal time for them to prove their worth.
“Stand and deliver
You let them put the fear on you”
Unfortunately, the spirit of rebellion is weak amongst the young and the dependent. The arts, for the most part, have become self satiated and uninspired. Caution trumps creativity.
As Van say “and if there’s nothing you can say
There may be nothing you can do”
Van, in my opinion, is definitely The Man; and not the imagined “the man” that the arts have tactically not seen.
In Germany a group of 53 actors have come together to create a brilliant sardonic satire of lockdown mentality. It is like Orwell in a stand up cellar.
Smiling at the camera in full theatrical sincerity, they encourage the fans to engage in every sort of neurotic and destructive paranoia that has become so common place over the pandemic social experiment.
Martin Brambach in this video encourages people to “point fingers out of solidarity”. He admits to being insecure and needing to be told what to do. The unfettered satisfaction and dopamine jolt he describes getting from telling others “they are doing wrong” is gleefully funny.
Good morning! ☀️
Martin Brambach is one of the fifty-three German #actors who dared to speak up against the disproportionate #COVID measures yesterday. He is worried about increasingly applied denunciations.
Say no to the rebirth of the good old German block warden mentality.✋🏼 pic.twitter.com/usQXXwiIlG
— Dr. Simon Goddek (@goddeketal) April 23, 2021
Miriam Stein says “it’s not acceptable that people think they are healthy, just because they don’t show any symptoms”
Miriam is another actress and #hero who addresses the absurdity of testing asymptomatic people. I can only tip my hat to these brave actors for bringing up valid arguments in such a brilliant way. It's a shame that they are now facing a #shitstorm from the enraged #ZeroCovid mob. pic.twitter.com/xoNlJuymDC
— Dr. Simon Goddek (@goddeketal) April 23, 2021
They call themselves Alles Dicht Machen and their mottos are #CloseEverything #NeverOpenAgain and #LockdownForever. Their videos are so worth watching. If you liked Monty Python you will love them.
The spirit of revolution comes in many forms. It’s important that creative people who deal in ideas rather than statistics and numbers take part in exploring the dangers of radical lockdown policies. Artists have a special function to express the conceptual; and the possibilities and consequences of ideas. The full rebuttal of a lockdown mind-virus requires presenting the greater conceptual paradigm of policies and their effects on a level that isn’t centred on facts and figures, because most people can’t comprehend numbers and that sort of logistical comparisons, so they just give up. Unfortunately, the emotional and philosophical threats of something so radical as lockdown have just been ignored and that is a place where artists can and should step in.
The lines of Van Morrisson’s song (below) resonate with the artistic courage of another revolutionary artist.
“Do you want to be a free man, or do you want to be a slave
Do you want to wear these chains, until you’re lying in the grave.”
In 1915 from New York, Joseph Mary Plunkett wrote with the very same imagery when he was extolling the Irish people to cast off the chains of the mind, and take their place amongst the peoples of the Earth.
I have found a thing to do in the world,
It is to break chains
Not only the chains of the spirit
But the chains of the body also
Without whose freedom the spirit cannot be free
Everywhere I see chains
And slaves hugging them
For fear of freedom.
The unsensed to them is full of fear
How much more so the super sensible liberty
Therefore they cling to chains
Of the body and of the spirit
Holding the body back from bravery
The spirit from good
The soul from God
And the heart from seeking the beloved.
Slaves construct their own chain
Out of themselves-JMP New York, August 28th 1915
Lorcán Mac Mathúna