This essay reclaims December as a sharp critical lens rather than a festive afterthought, showing how three art works reveal the month’s entanglement of labour, ritual, and global inequity. It invites artists to treat year end as a site of clarity, responsibility, and renewed imagination.
December has always been a month of contradiction. In the northern hemisphere it is the point of greatest darkness, the slow ticking toward the winter solstice when the sun seems to hesitate in the sky. Yet it is also the month of festivity, surplus, ritual generosity and collective appetite. Literary and philosophical histories have long acknowledged this duality. In The Golden Bough James Frazer describes solstice rites as moments when communities collectively acknowledge the world’s fragility while staging small symbolic rebellions against cosmic uncertainty. These rituals do not resolve fear. They choreograph it. Nietzsche, writing in The Gay Science, calls winter a time when clarity sharpens because illusions freeze and crack in the cold. For him, the season exposes the scaffolding of belief that warmer months allow us to ignore. Virginia Woolf, in her diary, describes December as a pause in the year’s tempo, a time when society appears both suspended and frenzied, reflective and absurdly busy all at once. Taken together, these texts position December as a philosophical hinge. It is not simply a backdrop of snow and fairy lights. It is an experiment in how people live with endings that are also beginnings.
For artists, this experiment becomes a visual and conceptual resource. December is not merely a season but an intellectual prompt. It asks how communities live with scarcity and desire at the same time, how they continue to imagine futures in a month that feels like an ending, and how cultural rituals are never neutral but charged with history, politics and power.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow from 1565 is often reproduced as a quaint vision of European winter, yet the painting is far from a simple seasonal illustration. The hunters return with meagre spoils, their dogs lean and exhausted. In the middle and far distance, small figures skate, play, tend fires and go about daily work. The sky is a flat, persistent grey. Bruegel folds pleasure and hardship into the same pictorial field. Walter Benjamin’s writing on everyday life is helpful here, especially his attention to how images of the ordinary reveal the economic and political structures that make festivity possible. In Bruegel’s scene, the cheerful skaters are not a sign that winter is benign. They are an index of resilience in a system that asks rural communities to absorb the risks of climate, hunger and labour. The painting emerges from a moment of religious tension, early capitalist exchange and harsh agrarian economics in the Low Countries. It quietly exposes the classed realities of seasonal celebration. Those who hunt risk returning empty handed. Those who cut wood and tend fires do invisible work that sustains others. Those who feast later will depend on this unseen labour.
Read through a contemporary lens, Bruegel’s December feels unsettlingly familiar. In many economies today, hospitality, retail and service workers carry the strain of festive consumption, often on precarious contracts and low wages. The painting, long before the language of precarity existed, already hints at a structural imbalance. It invites a critical December reflection. Who is allowed to experience winter as picturesque or cosy. Whose bodies absorb the cold, the risk and the repetitive work that makes collective warmth possible. Bruegel stages winter as a social and economic relation, not a mood.
If Bruegel gives us an early vision of winter labour, Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project at Tate Modern in 2003 proposes a different kind of solstice. The installation flooded the Turbine Hall with a vast artificial sun made from a semicircle of light reflected in a mirrored ceiling. A fine mist and monochrome filter dissolved the architectural edges of the space. Visitors quickly developed an improvised ritual. They lay down on the floor, stared up at their reflections, waved at their double selves, or traced words and shapes with their bodies. The work became a kind of secular congregation. Bruno Latour’s writing on modernity and nature is useful here. He argues that Western cultures pretend to separate nature from society while constantly entangling them. Eliasson’s work foregrounds this entanglement. The weather is relocated indoors, manufactured and aestheticised, yet the affect is real. People adjust their behaviour as if the sun were present, as if they had found a temporary commons in which to rehearse collectivity.
The timing of The Weather Project is important. It arrived during the early years of the Iraq War and amid growing public anxiety about climate change. That political context saturates the work, even if it is not addressed directly. The artificial sun can be read as a symbol of both technological hubris and fragile hope. On one hand, it suggests a world where climate can be simulated for an elite audience inside a museum while real atmospheres elsewhere become increasingly unstable under extractive capitalism. On the other, it invites people to consider what kind of social formations might be possible in the face of planetary risk. The Turbine Hall is temporarily reimagined as a civic space rather than a site of individualised viewing. The work anticipates our current moment in which winter is no longer reliably cold, and seasons themselves become uncertain. It triggers a December question. What does it mean to celebrate light and warmth in a century where the climate system is out of balance. How can artists stage rituals that make this instability felt without lapsing into despair.
If Bruegel and Eliasson are anchored in European contexts, El Anatsui’s Gli (Wall) from 2010 extends the conversation southwards and sideways. The work is composed of thousands of aluminium bottle tops stitched together with copper wire to form vast, shimmering sheets that hang like textiles or falling walls. Anatsui’s practice is deeply rooted in West African histories of textile, trade and ritual. His materials come from the detritus of global consumption: liquor bottle caps and aluminium seals recycled from local distilleries and markets. The work speaks directly to the legacy of colonial trade routes, the circulation of alcohol as a commodity tied to exploitation, and the contemporary economies of waste that mark the Global South. Achille Mbembe’s writing on the afterlives of colonialism, particularly his notion of how power imprints itself into landscapes and bodies, helps frame Gli. The sculpture’s surface seems to carry that imprint in metallic form, glittering yet scarred, beautiful yet made from fragments of exploitative exchange.
Although Gli (Wall) does not reference winter explicitly, it can be read through the lens of December as a month of endings, rituals and thresholds. In Ghana and across parts of West Africa, the end of the year is marked by festivals that combine remembrance, cleansing and forward looking energy. Harmattan winds create a hazy, filtered light that sits somewhere between visibility and obscurity. Anatsui’s muted golds and silvers evoke that condition. The draped forms suggest both celebratory cloth and fragile architecture. The title, which translates as “wall,” hints at barriers that are also porous. The work operates as a membrane between past and present, local and global, material abundance and material ruin. Sylvia Wynter’s emphasis on the need to rethink the category of the human from the perspective of those relegated to the margins feels particularly relevant. Gli proposes an aesthetic grounded in repair rather than in the linear progress that European December narratives often promise. It visualises a different relation to time, one that recognises cycles of harm and renewal without romanticising them.
Placing these three works side by side expands the conceptual field of December. Bruegel shows us winter as a scene of stratified labour and ordinary endurance. Eliasson turns a contemporary museum into a speculative solstice, a public test site for new forms of gathering under a synthetic sun. Anatsui threads the debris of global capitalism into a monumental skin that shimmers like ceremonial cloth yet carries the weight of extractive histories. Philosophical and literary references help us understand these works not as illustrations of a season but as interventions in how we think about time, community and responsibility. Frazer’s description of solstice rites as responses to uncertainty hovers behind all three. The hunters, the museum visitors and the communities who live with the consequences of global trade all stage their own rituals, whether that is skating, lying on a concrete floor in London, or transforming discarded bottle tops into something that commands attention. Nietzsche’s winter clarity surfaces in the way each work strips away comforting illusions about who bears the cost of celebration. Woolf’s sense of December as both pause and frenzy feels close to the mood of contemporary life, where year end can feel like a sprint through economic anxiety, political volatility and ecological grief.
For artists entering December now, under conditions of inflation, widening inequality, ongoing wars and accelerating climate breakdown, this constellation of works offers a different script to the familiar seasonal imagery. December need not be treated as a sentimental afterthought to the year, nor as a purely commercial spectacle. It can be approached as a critical site in which to examine the structures that govern whose warmth is protected and whose is expendable. Bruegel encourages a renewed attention to the background workers, the people whose winter is labour rather than leisure. Eliasson prompts questions about institutional space and the possibilities of temporary communities that arise through shared attention. Anatsui insists on a planetary frame, where the cost of festive consumption in one part of the world is felt as waste and environmental pressure elsewhere.
This does not mean that artists should abandon joy or ritual. Instead, the invitation is to complicate them. To think of December not as a time that resolves the year into a coherent narrative but as a month that makes contradiction visible. A time when light and dark exist in close proximity. When care and harm are deeply entangled. When local traditions sit inside global systems that are anything but equitable. Critical practice in December might involve small acts of reorientation. Choosing to foreground overlooked labour. Situating winter imagery within climate realities rather than nostalgia. Connecting local celebrations to the wider ecologies and economies that make them possible. Asking, very simply, who gets to rest.
December is therefore not a soft epilogue but a sharp lens. A narrow aperture through which the conditions of the present can be seen with unusual clarity. The artworks of Bruegel, Eliasson and Anatsui demonstrate that this clarity has always been available to those willing to look beyond the glow of seasonal spectacle. For artists today, the challenge is to pick up that lens and turn it toward their own contexts. To recognise that in the darkest month, the work of seeing together and thinking together might matter most.
REFERENCES
Anatsui, E. 2010. Gli (Wall). Installation. Various exhibitions including Palazzo Fortuny, Venice.
Benjamin, W. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruegel, P. 1565. The Hunters in the Snow. Oil on wood. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Eliasson, O. 2003. The Weather Project. Installation. Tate Modern, London.
Frazer, J. 1890. The Golden Bough. London: Macmillan.
Latour, B. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mbembe, A. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15(1), pp. 11–40.
Nietzsche, F. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.
Woolf, V. 1953. A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth Press.
Wynter, S. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being: Power, Truth, Freedom.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3), pp. 257–337.
