Contemporary artistic practices address the subject of care both explicitly and manifoldly. Examples include two recent exhibitions in Zurich: “Take Care: Kunst und Medicine” (Kunsthaus Zürich, 2022) and “Interdependencies: Perspectives on Care and Resilience” (Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2023–2024). 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.
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 “Art as Experience” (1932), the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey observes that to be artistic an activity must ultimately be “caring”: 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, “more-than-human network of care” (María 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 “aesthetic situations of care.” These aesthetics of care were the focus of ZHdK’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 “small” forms of action might be an answer to this predicament.