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    Caring arts

    From the university magazine Zett

    AI-generated visual: Grit Wolany

    Published on 03.03.2024

    Author Florence Borggrefe

    • Research
    • Campus

    What if we understood artistic action as caring? A philosophical approach.

    Contemporary artistic practices address the subject of care both explicitly and manifoldly. Examples include two recent exhibitions in Zurich: โ€œTake Care: Kunst und Medicineโ€ (Kunsthaus Zรผrich, 2022) and โ€œInterdependencies: Perspectives on Care and Resilienceโ€ (Migros Museum fรผr Gegenwartskunst, 2023โ€“2024). Various, partially overlapping constellations emerge at the intersection of the arts and care. First, artistic actions and projects that are pursued as part of professional or private (i.e. informal) care, education and nursing (Art in Care Settings). Second, care itself can become the subject of artistic works (Art about Care). This, however, involves more than the artistic representation of caregiving practices. Exploring care and negotiating it aesthetically can itself be understood as a form of care.

    Artistic action itself can be caring.

    Florence Borggrefe

    Even if it is not chiefly about engaging artistically with care, artistic action itself can be caring ( Art of Care or Care Aesthetics). This third dimension raises questions about caring for oneself, for others and for the world in a specific, aesthetic way. In โ€œArt as Experienceโ€ (1932), the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey observes that to be artistic an activity must ultimately be โ€œcaringโ€: it must care for the object that is treated by it and through it, or rather it must look after it. Would careful and philosophical theorizing in keeping with our times not also need to take the ubiquitous caring impulse of the arts seriously?

    My work at the Research Focus in Aesthetics (attached to the Department of Cultural Analysis) therefore seeks to develop a production aesthetics of caring artistic action. I am interested in the multi-layered, โ€œmore-than-human network of careโ€ (Marรญa Puig de la Bellacasa) that becomes visible and takes effect in artistic practices. I am also exploring the complex interrelations of (caring) and artistic forms of action, as well as specific know-how (i.e. practical knowledge) self-conceptions, strategies and spaces of action that are shaped by power relations, but also by media and materialities and lead to situated โ€œaesthetic situations of care.โ€ These aesthetics of care were the focus of ZHdKโ€™s 2023 Autumn Academy of Aesthetic Cultures, along with consoling, feeling bad, repairing, lingering, failing and listening. Our present times urge us to act, yet often feel like an impasse (Lauren Berlant), like a dead end lacking overarching narratives, plots, figures of thought or genres. These โ€œsmallโ€ forms of action might be an answer to this predicament.


    Research

    More about the Research Focus Aesthetics


    Florence Borggrefe
    Florence Borggrefe is a theory/aesthetics research assistant at the Department of Cultural Analysis.

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