I used to teach a class to 11th graders on the theme of modernity seen through the lens of modern art, particularly focusing on the modern art movements that emerged in Paris in the early 20th century.
Modern art, I would tell my students, reflected the accelerated rate of change impacting society in that period. In a few short years, new technological advancements had produced the steam engine, electric lights, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, and cinema, affecting how people lived, traveled, and communicated. Most of all, I would say, modern art embodied an emerging shift in consciousness, as new thinking about science, religion, traditional societal values, and the nature of the universe itself shattered previously held beliefs.
It was an exhilarating time, a time of new inventions, new discoveries, and boundless creativity, but it also ushered in an age of anxiety: The meaningless slaughter of World War I debunked the idea of heroism, and Nietzsche’s declarations that God is dead and that there is no truth, only interpretations, expressed the existential angst of the age. I would tell my students that if Cubism, the art form that depicted shifting, multiple perspectives, was an apt reflection of the frenzy of the time, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” might, perhaps, be seen as its emblem.
The class I taught was an integrated art class, which meant I collaborated with the history, English, and science faculty members to teach a unit on modernity. The contributions of pivotal figures like Albert Einstein, Henri Poincaré, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud, and Marcel Duchamp were discussed, and uncertainty was our overarching theme.
When I first taught the class, it was in the 1990s and Clinton was president. My students were primarily privileged and, at least I felt at the time, relatively carefree. (My own early school days were during the Cold War, with the fear of nuclear war omnipresent in my consciousness.) What did my students have to worry about?
To try to convey to them how uncertainty was experienced back in the time period we were studying, I spoke of how unsettling it must have been to have all one’s formerly held beliefs upended — “the shock of the new” was how Robert Hughes defined it. It was then that I told them about my earthquake experience.
When I was in my 20s, I used to take the winter quarter off from the University of Minnesota, where I was studying to get my B.F.A., and I’d travel with a boyfriend in a VW bus through Mexico and Central America, camping along the way.
On Feb. 4, 1976, we were in Guatemala, outside Guatemala City, parked in a field next to an inactive volcano, asleep in the VW bus. Earlier, we had dropped two hitchhikers off at a boarding house in Guatemala City and promised to return to pick them up the next day. Our plan had been to travel together to Tikal to see the Mayan ruins.
At 3:01 a.m., my boyfriend and I were awakened by the rushing of a horrible, deep, guttural sound erupting beneath us — like a monstrous train from hell. The van was being viciously shaken back and forth, as if teams of giants on each side were trying to upend it. It went on for a terrifying 39 seconds, then, suddenly, everything stopped.
“Uncertainty,” I’d say to my students, “is when you can’t trust the ground under your feet.”
I went on to tell them what happened after the terrible sound and the shaking had ceased — we didn’t know what to do. Had the whole world experienced it, or just the region we were in? Was it a normal thing or a major disaster? No way to know; we had no radio, no means of communication. We uneasily tried to go back to sleep, but kept feeling aftershocks for the next few hours (and wondered, what if the volcano erupted?). Early in the morning we started to drive, but found most roads were impassable because of landslides.
Eventually we inched our way back to Guatemala City and found the boarding house where we had left our hitchhiker friends. It had partially collapsed, but our friends were alive and in the street with their backpacks, along with many other people too scared to go back inside the cracked adobe dwellings. Everyone was looking shellshocked, some were cooking in the street, and downed power lines and rubble were everywhere. Knowing there was no water or electricity, we worried about staying, so with our friends in tow we snaked our way outside the city limits, leaving behind what looked like a bomb zone.
We did make it to Tikal in the jungle; we stayed camping there for 10 days. But I had no way to reach my parents, who, I later learned, thought I was dead. The earthquake had been international news, and the TV was showing people being tossed into mass graves. My frantic mother told me she would look for my blond hair as the bodies tumbled in. She had contacted Senator Hubert Humphrey to see if the State Department would find us.
Finally, my boyfriend and I traveled to Belize and found a cafe owned by an expat American who had a phone. I was able to call my folks to say I was alive. Later we learned the extent of the earthquake — 27,000 people killed, 77,000 injured. Most people died because they were in adobe dwellings.
Over the years as I continued to teach the class on modernity, I’d tell my earthquake story, but I am not sure of its impact on students. They couldn’t quite imagine traveling and camping for months at a time without GPS, A.T.M.s, or cellphones, but they didn’t have to be told what uncertainty feels like.
After the Clinton years came the shock wave of 9/11, then two prolonged wars, catastrophic weather events fueled by climate change, countless mass shootings, the Covid pandemic. As smart and gifted and capable as my students often were, you could sense they increasingly suffered the anxiety of living in uncertain times.
I’ve retired from teaching and now paint full time. The ground continues to shake — what with threats posed by A.I., the rise in right-wing ideologies, the rescinding of hard-won reproductive rights, the assault on democracy, the raging wildfires, the new regime.
I used to suggest to students that art had the power to not just reflect the times, but to help shape them by critiquing the status quo and establishing new cultural values. Toni Morrison wrote that times of upheaval are “precisely when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.”
So perhaps right now is precisely the time to be making art.
James Baldwin put it another way: “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”
Jennifer Cross is a painter living in Springs, online at jennifercross-artist.com.