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This week, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, unveiled the latest in his ongoing series of civic-minded artworks: a monumental image illustrating the arc of his state’s journey through the COVID-19 pandemic, like a map of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” for 2020. The curve of infections is represented by a craggy mountain, whose peak is marked “Day 43,” with 18,825 people hospitalized. On the symbolic mountain, a nose gets swabbed for testing. A waterfall of dollar signs represents the crashing economy. An overly Asiatic-looking dragon (China?) blows the “Winds of Fear,” joined by an octopus carrying a cruise-ship harbinger. President Trump sits on a crescent moon labelled “It’s Only the Flu.” The narrative focus of this hysterical-realist tableau seems to be the group of well-masked people—New Yorkers, essential workers, and Cuomo’s daughters and dog—using “The Power of ‘We’ ” to pull down the curve with a golden rope arcing across the composition. (The “Boyfriend Cliff,” with its dangling figure, suggests a father’s vendetta rather than a P.S.A.)
The celebratory poster, dubbed “New York Tough,” is for sale on the governor’s Web site for eleven dollars and fifty cents. “Poster art is something they did in the early 1900s, late 1800s, when they had to communicate their whole platform on one piece of paper,” Cuomo writes of the project. His side gig as a vintage visual propagandist entered public consciousness this past January, when he collaborated with the Brooklyn-based artist Rusty Zimmerman to create a similarly feverish poster depicting New York as a ship navigating stormy seas (which was actually the sequel to two previous images, the first dating back to Cuomo’s initial run for governor, in 2010). The series was inspired by William Jennings Bryan’s intricate 1900 Presidential-campaign poster, which features an octopus as a symbol of trusts—Gilded Age business monopolies. Beyond posters, the governor has commissioned two more works of COVID-19 public art, which were broadcast via press conference: a tapestry of donated masks, in April, that he called “a self-portrait of America”; and, in late June, a moss-green sculptural landscape, of which, he explained, “This is the mountain that New Yorkers climbed.” The mountain, in particular, was notable for its sheer unexpectedness—a craft project in the midst of a pandemic?—and for its simplification of so much suffering into a mundane geographical feature.
Dozens of headlines and hundreds of bemused tweets later, the new poster has become a meme—perhaps the recent streaming release of “Hamilton” primed the public for its colonial-Americana aesthetics. But what’s most remarkable is the contrast between the work’s bright, cartoonish imagery and the reality that New York has seen the most coronavirus deaths of anywhere in the country, a rolling catastrophe that could intensify again at any moment. For Cuomo, whose daily press conferences made him an early hero of the pandemic—before an awareness of the state’s deficiencies in responding to the virus crept in—the politicking iconography seems to be something of a personal obsession. In an interview with Gothamist, Zimmerman described the process by which he and the governor came up with their posters’ elaborate metaphors, a flow from the subconscious: “Let’s see what this looks like with a staircase emerging from the sea, and what if that staircase was made of brick to symbolize building a new New York as our economic policy moving forward into the future.” It’s not surprising that it kicked off with a late-night epiphany, which, as Zimmerman recalled, had Cuomo scrawling sketches at the dining-room table.
The poster has already faced criticism from Jake Tapper and other commentators as a hollow victory lap, its triumphant optimism at odds with the virus’s increase in forty-one other states. The waterfall of the economy is still definitely flowing downward, and the poster makes no reference to, for instance, the recent end of the state’s moratorium on evictions. The poster might simply be Cuomo’s way of satisfying a creative itch. But if he shares the Renaissance patron’s goal of burnishing his image for the historical record, he may well have jumped the gun.
The Times labelled the latest poster “kitsch,” and it indeed has elements of cliché legibility, like the diagrams in a middle-school textbook. But the description isn’t quite correct. Walter Benjamin wrote that kitsch is “art with a one-hundred percent, absolute and instantaneous availability for consumption.” Cuomo’s work, by contrast, includes the expression of a kind of private visual symbology, which requires some effort to decode: the first-name labels of Cuomo’s caricatured colleagues, the apocalyptic shorthands like “111 Days of Hell.” In that way, the poster is reminiscent of medieval manuscript illuminations, those complicated scenes that integrate calligraphy and numerology to gesture at a truth beyond logic. The message of this latest from the atelier Cuomo is, ultimately, that we must have faith that salvation is with us. Someday we will reach “The Sun On The Other Side,” whose beatific, anthropomorphized face is blessedly mask-free.
Such leaps of faith have been central to this country’s modus operandi in confronting the pandemic. It hasn’t gone well for us, and visibility is at the core of the problem: we can’t see the virus itself; those of us quarantined at home often don’t see the essential workers risking their lives to keep the economy going, or the doctors and nurses tending to the sick in hospitals. Our understanding of the virus and its effects relies on the secondary symbols that we do encounter in our daily lives: the refrigerator trucks turned morgues, the emptied streets and storefronts. Masks, one of the most potent weapons against the pandemic and a barometer of public anxiety, are interpreted instead as signs of their wearers’ political allegiance. We’re left, on our own, to follow inconsistent rules for confronting a little-understood disease on a suprahuman scale.
That’s why Cuomo’s poster is poignant even in its absurdity: his illustrations are grasping to understand and depict reality, just as we all are. Of course, a governor’s magical thinking—nurtured among the “Clouds of Confusion,” perhaps—is more consequential than a civilian’s. If we take the poster’s composition literally, we might wonder why the giant nose of “Testing-Tracing” appears only on the left side of Pandemic Mountain, and connect it to the fact that tests are now taking up to seven to ten days to process in New York, long enough to make them next to useless for individuals. In the bottom right corner of the mountain, near arrows pointing to Arizona, Texas, and Florida, is the churning “Sea of Division” (also seen in Cuomo’s January poster). Is this a pessimistic prophecy of civil war? Are the workers with the rope falling into it? It’s possible that there’s more to the poster than the designer himself knows. Like the Book of Kells, it will be up to future exegetes to interpret.
In the meantime, the most effective representation of the pandemic is also the driest: a simple line on a graph. Often, the line is red, especially when it’s pointing upward. It may chart the number of COVID-19 infections or deaths, or the rate of unemployment as a result of the pandemic. The Financial Times is maintaining an infographic that allows users to compare the curves of various countries or U.S. states, based on a seven-day rolling average. NPR has its own selection of visualizations, showing states colored red, yellow, or blue based on the volume of new cases now as compared with two weeks ago; larger and smaller circles representing the total cases or deaths in a particular place; and the plain old line. Right now it shows that New York’s curve is only beginning its descent—there remains a long way to go. Cuomo’s surreal artworks are designed for posterity, whereas the brutal geometry of infographics informs us day by day. Our actions right now will determine whether the disinterested line will continue to angle up or down.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- The coronavirus vaccine is on track to be the fastest ever developed.
- What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine.
- Recommendations for maintaining social distancing as the U.S. reopens, from socializing and using public bathrooms to wearing masks.
- Why remote work is so hard—and how it can be fixed.
- Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. New York leaders did not.
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under quarantine.