Mask Aesthetics: Prophylaxis, Post-Digital Arts, and Reimagining Vulnerable Selves

Abstract

Affirming masks’ proven efficacy in preventing the airborne transmission of COVID-19, this paper seeks to understand face covering during the pandemic from a different but complementary angle: that is, as a deeply relational and thoroughly multimodal practice. Drawing on concepts of automediality, crip and feminist theories of affect and embodiment, biopolitics, and pandemic temporalities, I analyze artists’ mask-themed projects created during the first two years of the pandemic across forms including sculpture, performance, digital photography, social media, online visual diaries, and mutual aid projects. Through theoretical, analytical, and self-reflexive writing, the discussion draws out the shifting, contingent meanings of masks; their relation to currents of power, affect, and memory; and their implications for selfhood, community, and solidarity. Artists’ automedial projects show how masks have become integral to the life of the body, the upheaval of our lives, the losses we are mourning, the overlapping injustices we must fight, and the stories we tell about what it was and is like to be in our situations and to be connected to one another during the pandemic.