A Diary of the Plague Year by Eise Engler
From the moment I opened the first pages of Elise Engler’s book, A Diary of the Plague Year (Metropolitan Books), I knew I was witnessing something very important in terms of chronicling our history. Both her artwork and her use of language offer testimony to the extraordinary events of 2020. Her vivid illustrations of how the world turned harrowing and toxic that year is a visceral account of what happened from when Covid-19 began. Schools closed, hospitals were overcrowded, people were dying, and still the year churned onward. There was more news that altered the world: the death of George Floyd, fires in California, the death of Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Biden’s declaration of victory.
I believe (having taught for over 20 years at a college level) that A Diary of the Plague Year is an ideal coursebook for several disciplines. The documentation is inviting and salient at once. We can rely on it — the book reminds us that the human spirit is undaunted. That is why we remain, here to fight another day.
Q&A with Elise Engler
Your book is a montage “of record,” preserving what happened in a very distinctive manner. How did you begin this project and what was the inspiration behind it? What was your intention when you began to chronicle events during 2020?
On November 22, 2015, I began making a small drawing or painting every single day based on that day’s “top of the hour” radio headlines, heard on public radio or Democracy Now. Just over four years later, coronavirus was reported in China, and then in the U.S., and a year like no other commenced. My book documents this year (1/20/20-1/21/21).
We lived through the rise of the plague and the ravage it brought; the police murder of George Floyd and resulting protests and reckonings; a U.S. presidential campaign/election; and the insurrection that followed. Those were just some of the stories I depicted.
I have been a radio addict my entire life, and, like so many artists, it is on constantly, in my studio. As my art often deals with the passage of time, I wanted to combine my radio habit with a timed project. (I had recently finished A Year on Broadway, where I had drawn an image of every block of Broadway in Manhattan in exactly one year: 2014.) I hadn’t set out to document drama, I was just going to make pictures from the headlines for a year. And then Trump was elected in 2016 with all that entailed, and then there was the global pandemic that radically changed our world.
In this book, there is your art and there is your copy — your language to accompany each picture. Is this an approach you’ve ever used before in your work? Or is this your first foray into accompanying your art with the written word? Why did you make the creative decision to use both?
I have used words in my work over the years. For these drawings and paintings, the chosen morning headlines were written in pencil and embedded within each image. (I would then Tweet the reporters whose headlines I quoted.) This ultimately became the text for each book page.
Previously I have incorporated text in a series of “timeline drawings” chronicling my experiences in Antarctica as a recipient of a National Science Foundation Antarctica Artist’s grant, and also in work documenting my recovery after a serious NYC bike crash. My earlier work consisted of lists of tiny colored-pencil objects about a particular subject, such as the content of women’s purses, or every object in a science laboratory. The images served as hieroglyphic-like text.
What was it like to be working on this daily during the first year of the pandemic? Was it a guiding force, a way to get through?
In response to the 2016 presidential election, many artists felt as though they had to change course. I just kept going. Similarly, the arrival of the virus ratcheted up the gravity of world events and brought the news literally to my doorstep. With NYC as the epicenter and the constant sound of ambulance sirens infiltrating my home and studio, I was in the middle, no longer just an observer.
My drawings became less gridded and organized, many took on the form of a vortex. The George Floyd murder and subsequent protests added to the intensity. Demonstrations brought many of us out of our sequestered state and into the streets. These stories made me want to make images that shout. I could no longer be a cool observer. At the same time, I continued to draw all the other events, local, national and international. There were our elections, Brexit, Me Too trials, a massive explosion in Beirut, and so much more.
There must have been some emotional times, listening to the news each morning, and then your art would follow. What news items were most challenging to render?
Listening to the news with such a focused attention for those five years brought on a range of emotions from grief to hopelessness to anger, punctuated by humor, empathy and sometimes, the absurdity of it all. The last year was challenging on a formal level as the virus became the lead story every day and the numbers of fatalities kept rising. I had to think how to depict that nasty spiky coronavirus, and images of masks and rubber gloves over and over again without it being overly repetitive and dull.
I also didn’t want to feed our feelings of despair and stasis. In addition, I was aware that, by making so many paintings and drawings of Trump, that I was fulfilling his narcissism and need to be center stage. I minimized his menacing presence by only showing a bit of his protruding coiffure or orange profile.
What artists have influenced your work and how so?
My muse, for many years, has been Florine Stettheimer. Her paintings celebrate life and NYC history (there are four great paintings permanently on display at the Metropolitan Museum) and are at the same time narrative, personal, full of information and gorgeously painted. I look forward to reading her newly published biography by Barbara Bloemink.
I love the work of Philip Guston, Marsden Hartley, and the Sienese painters Duccio and Sassetta. In addition, I have been influenced by the delicacy and the decorative qualities of Persian and Indian manuscript painting.
What writers have influenced your work and how so?
There are certain writers I return to regularly, including Virginia Woolf and Gustav Flaubert. They remind me that one can respond to the narrative in a multitude of ways. The same for Proust; I appreciate the way these writers go from the sensually evocative to the visually descriptive.
At the moment, I am reading War and Peace. I started it a couple of months ago, before it felt so much like history was repeating itself. I had read it as a teenager; back then I devoured the romantic and sped through the historical. Reading it now makes me want to slowly reread all the Russians. I also very much like the writing of Aleksander Hemon and WG Sebald.
We look forward to your next project. Is it in the works and can you share any details?
My subject matter incorporates the political and the personal. The current work bridges the two. I am exploring the images from family history as well the cultural, social and political history of my Baby Boomer generation. These are manifesting in small studies and large-scale oil paintings.
I have been researching the city of Czernovitz (now in the Ukraine), where the paternal side of my family originates. Through studying this part of Eastern Europe and reading Tolstoy at this pivotal moment, I feel the past and the present reverberating. I imagine this will coalesce in the new work as well.
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About Elise Engler:
Elise Engler is a visual artist who has shown in galleries across the United States and Europe. A Diary of the Plague Year is her first book. The recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in drawing and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant in painting, Engler has also received two MacDowell residencies and a fellowship at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy. Her work has been written about in Art in America, the New Yorker, and the New York Times, among other publications. Engler teaches at City College, City University of New York, and the School of Visual Arts and for the Battery Park City Authority. She lives in New York.
