You are sitting in a circle of chairs being asked what your intention is. A collective tarot reading is taking place. Before the cards are drawn, a group of students are setting the ‘intention’ of countering the far-right wholesale defunding of the arts in their country. It is easy for you to read this as a desperate act, indeed the return to magic, mysticism and symbolism makes you grit your materialist teeth to hold back your cynical tongue. Yet there is something in the knowing sincerity of the act which loosens your toothy grip and releases the mouth from pain. It is one of those points in time where it seems all solutions have failed, encounters like this which reframe a discursive space are cathartic. Modes of critique are passé, the issues analysed too bleeding obvious, you yawn at your own use of the term neoliberalism. You understand the impulse to offer care as the cultural space but there is something in the deficit of mediation that has to be reconciled.
In the past decade the ethics of care have been increasingly espoused by contemporary cultural institutions, a complex combination of factors such as awareness of decolonial theory, exposure of exploitative labour practices, access needs, wider austerity and constant threats of de-funding have led to advocating for art for the sake of physical and mental health. The idea is put forward that you need it for your body essentially, with metaphors of sustenance, growth and ‘social prescription’ used to argue for its (and your) continued existence.
Many things that affect our health can’t be treated by doctors or medicine alone. Like loneliness, debt, or stress due to financial pressures or poor housing. Social prescribing connects people to non-medical support to address these issues and other unmet needs.[1]
This quote could be taken from a great many contexts where the effects of austerity are mitigated, but is in this case accessed via the Arts Council England website. It seems familiar to you, given the various examples of late 20th century feminist healthcare literature which you have consulted in archives over the past year, and in its acknowledgement of material conditions affecting health, but with a crucial difference—the utilisation of art. Art and culture in the photocopied newsletters, screen-printed posters and zines from the 1980s was used alongside a political struggle, to aid communication. Art here in the contemporary is instrumentalised as a general remediation of a set of symptoms. The causes of these symptoms are presented as chronic, indeed they are presented as symptoms themselves of an unknown condition and apparently terminal. By emphasising the non-medical they conversely medicalise their ontology. They are as if a biologically occurring disease (even though we know achingly well by this point, this in itself cannot be natural). The use of the word ‘prescribe’ indicates a hierarchy of knowledge, there is a professional who can decide on your behalf what culture would make you better or more easily able to integrate. Although this is a small quangoesque example which could easily be presented as a straightforward furthering of art’s relevance in the community alongside genuine researched benefits, the concern is with the palliative framing and how that ripples outward to the general cultural landscape, arts policy, the institutions and smaller funded projects. It is notable as a marked shift from socially engaged community projects and notions of the value of culture. Usefulness here, rather than civic engagement, is brief relief from community structures seemingly beyond repair. In an examination of the limits of the universal terminology of ‘bodies’ Marina Vishmidt holds that there is a deadend of collective political action based on the above ‘unmet needs’ of a vulnerable mass:
If political actors are held to be acting politically insofar as they organise on the basis of their vulnerability, then no common horizon beyond pain management can be envisioned.[2]
You are standing in a corridor of a psychiatric institution, in a country whose state functions are further along in their degradation. The building is crumbling, decades old clinicality is barely visible, yet the asylum is propagating creative activity from its concrete spores. This place has a history of radical psychiatry stretching back to the 1970s. Giant papier mâché puppets sit behind bars, music is played by doctor and patient alike and our jetlagged Scottish subjectivities are cajoled into awkward gyration. The artist and art therapist Lygia Clark’s objects sit scattered in an adjacent room, non-precious, ready to be used in a psychotherapy session. In retrospect you see how urgent this use of culture and creativity was. It had an emancipatory joy which was aided by the general infrastructure’s close proximity to collapse, it was allowed autonomy, to survive with vitality, displaying their non-bodiness, what Jacqueline Rose writes as “a decision to imagine the world beyond the agonies of the hour”[3] rather than just making it (potentially) easier to survive. There was in a sense a difference in teleology, indeed a non-teleology at play. In this it had a closer relationship to the origins of radical self-care as a practice, where those that have been left to die, survive as a radical act. post-covid, some years after this experience, the civic landscape of the UK increasingly resembles a post-state desolation but—without the carnival.
You are in a theatre you have been in many times before, under the framework of a repeating event. It has happened in several iterations. An introduction is being given by the event organiser. In 2024 the organiser spends the same amount of time on the health and safety of those gathered as they do on the content of the forthcoming events. The audience is stratified by the organiser into categories of needs. Masks are encouraged. A special area in the theatre has been cordoned off with an air purifier for those with immunosuppression. Beyond this there is a quiet room with soft furnishings, to offer respite for those with neurodiversity. You are being told to be tender to those who are abolitionist, their needs will be prioritised.
As you listen you are thinking back to the same event framework, sitting in the same theatre not that much more than a decade previously. And without any introduction being blasted with industrial sized fans and bright light, in a seemingly accelerationist gesture to ascertain how much the audience can endure.
You use these two anecdotes not to critique recent efforts to attend to the intersecting needs of a fragile collective, in spaces that have always felt uncomfortable, nor to lament past avant-garde provocations but to offer an example of a seismic shift in social relations within art settings, and to ask what happens to the space of art itself when it is medicalised. What does the careful stratification of needs do in terms of Vishmidt’s identification of bodies as a ‘social abstraction’? A position which was itself conceived in relation to Judith Butler’s public performative assembly. You moved through years of ’all’ being identified as precarious as a strategy, into a time woven through intersecting oppressions. If the intersectional is paid close attention to not just in terms of access to the event by liberal markers of fixed identities but within it, as content in the act of service, it is worthy only to those who most deserve it, those most in need. Abolitionism here is being presented as an embodied identity rather than a theory to pursue collectively. In this context does delineating it as an identity which is pre-supposed rather than potentially prefigurative, shut off the ancient idea you find hard to shake that the event and its concepts will “enter our body and transform our subjectivity”?[4]
You are sitting in the back room of a pub in one of those moments when your subjectivity is being altered. In the renewal of political dissent after the financial crash, the early 2010s saw fresh hope in the idea of the avant-garde which had been discredited in the ambivalent swamp of post-modern post- ideology. In the collective uprisings, occupations, revolutions, there was brief hope again in a Marxist teleology of progress. Politics came back into art. The neoliberal condition was said to have fully co-opted modes of aesthetic intervention, permeating society to subject every facet of it to the economic directives of competition. One of the strategies put forward was to ‘overidentify’ with these conditions in order to force them beyond their logic into collapse, a sort of hyper-satire. You’re at a discussion event organised by Variant in the late 2000s, discussing a new book from the architect/artist duo BAVO[5]—later including their urban, corporate interventionist performance as part of an exhibition in the artist-run gallery Embassy in 2011. Leigh French writes you a characteristically long email, criticising their position ending with the question which was to be asked many times in the years following “why should anyone believe overidentification or accelerationism as a political strategy would result in socialism as opposed to fascism?”[6] The new rise of fascism in our contemporary moment has not come about through artists’ dalliances with mimetic excess, but the reactionary nihilism of contemporary capitalism certainly bears more relation to accelerationism than liberal stasis. The post-socialist dead end of neoliberal democracy that was assumed by BAVO has been broken. It is easy too to forget the previous simpler conceptions prevalent on the radical left of the dangers of ‘identity politics’ as “obfuscating the predominant features of class struggle”.[7] and the polite preserve of the reformist social democratic left, still being rehashed in the early 2010s. The term ‘political correctness’ has been replaced by ‘woke’, only to be weaponised so acutely by the right. And so identity has taken on a radical edge, the slippages of gender experimentation and decolonial thought at the vanguard of vital struggles to survive, in a situation where the non-teleology of the asylum carnival would now seem apt.
Please ask before touching someone, even in passing, and change your behaviour if someone lets you know that you are crossing their boundaries. You are encouraged to think about and communicate your own boundaries
Using eye contact you move through the gathering of participants playing patients who have come to engage in a performed staging of a clinic. You are attempting to alter their seating arrangements. The words you speak are both rhetorical and sincere, you hold both sentiments as you simultaneously, tentatively, coerce and impart the instruction to resist the coercion. I suppose you could be engaged in a dialectics if you felt entitled to hold what that meant. Your words also reiterate a scene of much feminist, autonomous touching, from a documentary film from the 1980s which features births and abortion in the same methodological warmth, where touch is used by those caring amongst themselves and towards those to whom they care, in a specifically non-medical space.
Languages of care are seen themselves as universal, yet the spaces they are employed within vary greatly in their composition. It is at this level, that of institutional practice, where they act as a leveller, class is ignored or used as a separate identity marker. They are directed at the body itself, a plethora of individuals, concerned with their access and emotional engagement, their intellectual capacities it must be assumed are fully formed and not of concern.
We are committed to creating equal and inclusive spaces […] the level to which you engage with the exhibition content is your choice and you are responsible for your self-care and wellbeing throughout your visit and after
This preamble to an externally commissioned guide from a city-centre gallery is seemingly an exercise in deep care. If we pick this statement apart it both cares yet absolves responsibility both from the caring act and the content of the exhibition. It cannot be anything other than the neoliberal form of self-care in this context, an integrative rather than liberatory practice. In its careful-ness it further distances itself from its implication in the systemic forms of racism the work in question addresses. The text functions as against criticism. Its goodness-as-intention reinforces a fortress already weaponised by the institution’s employment-giving potential. The institution is presented as caring itself, and a place of respite from the horrors of reality, indeed a space of healing, of warmth, but yet without any culpability. To be avant-garde was always to include a gesture towards the end of your individual artistic self. If aesthetic autonomy had been used to reproduce structures of inequality, it could be used self-reflexively “as a weapon against oneself, a kind of self-instrumentalisation as resistance.” [8] But if the end is presented as nigh on multiple levels of social reproduction then this can easily be presented as indulgent and for a reactionary end of art to be intoned––the post-art of the avant-garde left lacking, too close to life, replaced by a more desirable “civilised sanctuary from the barbarism of the world.”[9] This kind of humanism, which also reacts to a textual data-based extractive world, can involve a doubling down of conservatism through the back door, a retreat which forecloses possibilities of engaging in present conditions in order to undo them.
From our Front Room to yours, come together and enjoy a warm welcome, a hot drink and kind conversation.
You are dozing off in an airless meeting space of a New Labour cultural institution from the boom times. The rumour goes that the room’s condensed atmosphere is due to the fact that it has been foreshortened, its original performance pit filled in, to neutralise its design. This institution’s many post-industrial spaces have long been corporatised and marketed for non-cultural occasions. This further, most recent repurposing, is gentler, reflecting the energy crisis after the closure of many facilities, libraries, community centres. The gallery becomes a community space. You feel you are constantly one sleepy stumble from the apocalypse. An art space can only ever offer a marginal, symbolic gesture of a service, it can never fully cover the unmet needs of a population. Key to ensuring the avoidance of a purely palliative cultural institution which can house the “paradoxically unconsidered, immediate, potentially disruptive leap”[10] perhaps lies in conceptually undoing the abstraction of an artist’s being from their work. The supposed freedom and liberation of the avant-garde’s way of life was co-opted, the value extracted and sold back to the masses. You lambast the audience to decide there and then if this creative act is worth it, yay or nay, YAY OR NAY? should we collectively end its progress?
Arts Council England, ‘Social Prescribing,’ n.d. https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/developing-creativity-and-culture/health-and-wellbeing/social-prescribing ↑
Vishmidt, Marina. ‘Bodies in Space: On the Ends of Vulnerability’. Radical Philosophy, no. 208 (2020): 33–46. ↑
Rose, Jacqueline. ‘Pointing the Finger’. London Review of Books. May 7, 2020. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/jacqueline-rose/pointing-the-finger. ↑
Lonzi, Carla. ‘Afterword by Claire Fontaine’. Self-Portrait. Divided Publishing. (2021), 346– 7 ↑
Variant, ‘Over-identification and/or Bust?’ (2008) Accessed April 20th 2025 https://www.variant.org.uk/events/overident/overident.html ↑
Personal email to author (2011) ↑
Leger, Mark. Brave New Avant-Garde. Zero Books. (2012), 6 ↑
Ibid, 16 ↑
Roberts, John. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde. Verso (2015): 9 ↑
Walker, Adam. Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care. Routledge (2023) :13 ↑