In the face of precarity, unsustainability, and isolation, artists, activists, and revolutionaries are turning to care. Militant research collective Precarias a la Deriva asked in 2006, “why not begin to imagine and construct an organization of the social that prioritizes persons, that attends to our sustainability . . . that listens to our desires?”1 For this to be possible, the collective insists we must “place the truth of care in the center and politicize it.”
There is a long and growing tradition of artists centering self-care, caretakers, care work, and caring communities. Being that “curation comes from the Latin cura (to care),” as Amber Berson points out,2 it isn’t surprising that there have been multiple gatherings, exhibitions, and publications centering care within arts practice in recent years. In 2016, a collective of individuals and groups in Oakland, California, hosted Sick Fest, which the organizers described on Tumblr as “a radical and participatory approach to exploring what it means to be a sick person under capitalism.” Jeremy Wade organized and curated The Future Clinic for Critical Care in May 2017 at the Aquarium in Berlin, and six months later he hosted Take Care, a three-day symposium as part of the NO LIMITS theater festival at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, also in Berlin. Blackwood Gallery at University of Toronto Mississauga hosted performances, workshops, and an exhibition series as part of their own Take Care project from September 2017 through March 2018. Canadian Art’s 2018 Winter issue, Acts of Care, covered a breadth of work investigating “art, anxiety, and healing in a time of crisis.”
As witnessed by the sprawling nature of art’s intersection with care, the idea of performing care spans many different modalities. The spectrum includes performance enacting live care between artists, audience members, and communities, to performance about, within, and as a part of medical care, disability culture, and wellness. Many artists are asking: how do we perform care and enact resistance, healing, and change?
Simone Leigh’s Free People’s Medical Clinic (FPMC) is one such project. As a part of Creative Time’s 2014 exhibition Funk, God, Jazz & Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, Leigh converted the home of Dr. Josephine English, New York’s first African American woman to have an OB/GYN practice, “into a temporary space that explored the beauty, dignity and power of Black nurses and doctors, whose work is often hidden from view.”3 Walk-in Nurse’s Hour, Community Acupuncture, Black Folk Dance, and Affordable Healthcare Act Navigation were just a few of the free services provided at the FPMC.
Dramaturgically, the project is rooted in the histories of black medical care providers in America. In naming her project, Leigh references the Black Panther Party’s People’s Free Medical Clinics, which “created free health clinics in black neighborhoods where services were lacking and widespread distrust of the medical industry endured after a long history of medical discrimination,” as critic Samara Davis explains.4 Leigh chose to costume the FPMC’s facilitators and providers in “19th century-inspired dresses—black apron-like full skirts and tunics with black-and-white striped, puffy-sleeved blouses” inspired by the “United Order of Tents, a secret society of black nurses organized in 1867 by two former slaves, Annetta M. Lane and Harriett R. Taylor.”5
Hosting the project in Dr. English’s home not only supports Leigh’s efforts to honor black medical care providers, but also addresses the geographically specific lack of care services available in historically black Bedford–Stuyvesant. The mansion is situated within a mile of multiple defunct hospitals, including Saint Mary’s Hospital, which closed in 2005. Saint Mary’s served primarily uninsured populations who had little access to medical care and often had to turn to the emergency room for medical needs. Between the lack of insurance, minimal resources, and dismal support, the hospital had to bear the brunt of the economic precarity that ultimately led to St. Mary’s closing its doors. As Joseph Osmundson notes, “Leigh’s installation responds directly to both the historical lack of quality care in poor neighborhoods and to the increasing disparities in access driven by the structure of the neoliberal health care market, wherein hospitals must remain profitable to stay afloat.”6
Free People’s Medical Clinic is an artistic methodology for caring. Leigh roots her dramaturgical approach in medicine, the healthcare industry, and often undervalued care work; her performative actions engage in live care for audience members and embrace hospitality, and her artistic practice offers care as a response to economic precarity.
Many artists have been performing care across the different modalities centered in Leigh’s work, including artist Brian Lobel, who has been making work about “illness, cancer, and the changing body over time” since 2001.7 Lobel was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2001 and has since embarked on a “more-than-decade-long mission to try to understand these six letters, and how they are discussed, used, abused, silenced and shouted in today’s public discourse.”8
Since 2009, Lobel’s Fun with Cancer Patients has been “raising the intellectual understanding of the cancer experience without turning cancer into something inspiring, sweet or sombre.”9 Fun with Cancer Patients is a series of actions proposed by teenagers diagnosed with cancer and facilitated by Lobel. The proposals have included “pop-up kitchens, far-flung car trips, hacked infusion machines,”10 and more. Lobel builds each intervention in response to the patient’s request and, as a collection, these actions “sit somewhere between therapy, artistic intervention and teenage high jinx.”11 Lobel’s work enacts an alternative form of care and goes beyond the bounds of the medical industry; the events are “meant to provide a fantastical solution to a recognisable problem or issue facing current patients.”12 Lobel performs care in ways unfamiliar and unseen within institutionalized medicine and approaches healing from the artistic realms of fantasy, imagination, and play. Sickness, wellness, and disability are central to the practice and lived experiences of many of the artists performing care. In addition to the medical field, artists are also challenging, honoring, and exploring many different forms of care and often undervalued care work.
Hong Kong–born and Toronto-raised multidisciplinary artist Tings Chak questions “who provides care, who is deserving of and entitled to care, and who cares for the carers.”13 Chak’s Suitable Accommodation was part of the 2016 exhibition How to Make Space, presented at the Central Oasis Gallery in Hong Kong. Trained as an architect, Chak collaborated with migrant domestic workers to shed light on their living and working conditions. Because of the mandatory live-in policy in Hong Kong, domestic workers have no choice but to “sleep in living rooms, corridors, kitchens, storage rooms, in makeshift beds above washing machines and cupboards and even toilets.”14 For Suitable Accommodation, Chak marked out with tape the living and sleeping spaces of domestic workers and paired them with a “series of fictionalized real estate advertisements based on migrant domestic workers’ living situations (gathered from migrant worker surveys and interviews conducted by the artist).”15 Aligned with Leigh’s commentary on the economic realities of the American health care market, “Chak reveals the paradoxes of ‘suitable accommodation’ and how, under neoliberalism, caring and being cared for remains a precarious, if pervasive, negotiation of space and self,” as Amber Berson puts it.16 The embodied experience of physically navigating the blueprint of these spaces performatively asks observers to consider the difficult realities of those who care for others.
The care work crisis, of course, isn’t sequestered to just the labor force, but is also reflected in the way caring at home, within families and across communities, goes unrecognized and undervalued. In July 2017, artist Ryan Tacata paid tribute to his lola (the Filipino/Tagalog word for grandmother), honored her labor, and took care of her garden. For his performance installation Lolas, Tacata gathers objects from his late grandmother’s backyard and reconstructs it “in the Asian Art Museum as a site for live-tableaus, poetic readings pulled from her writings on faith, love, and death, as well as a stage for other Lolas or Lola figures to perform from the local Filipino community.”17
The 2.5-hour durational piece featured four performers including Tacata. Tacata and two other similarly aged performers wore patterned housedresses, black work boots, and graying curly wigs while the fourth performer, Tacata’s own father, wore only white briefs. The three performers in housedresses (the lolas perhaps) methodically get ready, repetitively sweep, and consistently garden amidst astroturf, painted rocks, plastic flowers, and a kiddie pool covered in floral print. On the blog Dance Matters, Julian Carter describes Lolas as enveloped in a “sobering endlessness of labor” hinged on a “movement vocabulary of gardening, as executed in old age. It featured the shuffling slow gait of bodies with bad knees, sore feet, and hips that don’t work right anymore.”18 Later in the performance, one of the lolas changes into a shiny green and silver evening dress and dons a new, much taller, wig with no gray hair in sight. Using the kiddie pool and their own bodies, the lolas construct a fountain and get Tacata’s father into the center of the pool. In a climactic moment of tenderness, the glamorously dressed lola chugs water from a two-liter Coke bottle only to spit it up all over Tacata’s father, baptizing him in the campiest and queerest fashion. Enacting the cyclical nature of care and destabilizing the normative gendered experience of care work, Lolas performs care as a tribute, a challenge, and seemingly a promise.
Tacata also performed in Erika Chong Shuch’s 2017 workshop premiere of For You, presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. On Shuch’s website, For You is described as a series of performance works created specifically for selected audiences of twelve people. “For each cycle we’ll select twelve audience members, create a performance based on our experiences of getting to know the selected twelve, and present the work exclusively for that audience. It’s an intimate adventure. Our culminating performance might take place in black box theater, or it might unravel over a three-day road trip to Las Vegas. It all depends on you.”19
Lily Janiak, the San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic, was selected as one of the twelve audience members from an application process created by Shuch and her collaborators. Once selected, the artistic team visits each audience member to learn about them. The artistic team then creates a piece highly tailored to each audience member’s experiences, desires, fears, and needs. Janiak notes that the artists gave her “the gift of their interest, and [she] must reciprocate with the gift of [her] candor.”20 An alternate economy of gifting seems to be at the crux of the work. In talking to Janiak, Shuch shared that she “was just curious around what happens when the performance isn’t something that you’re necessarily entitled to,” but instead “it takes commitment. It costs you something beyond $20. It costs you your time; it costs you your vulnerability. It costs you your stress, your energy, the risk that you’ve taken.” Similar to other examples of performing care, For You offers caring for one another as an alternate way of exchange.
For You is also part of a growing trend of what Janiak identifies as individualized theater. According to Janiak, Shuch cites one of Brian Lobel’s other pieces, You Have to Forgive Me, You Have to Forgive Me, You Have to Forgive Me, which involves one-on-one watching of a Sex and the City episode, as a reference point. Shuch also embraces another quintessential element of performing care by serving “a formal dinner, with each appetizer, libation and main dish springing from a story or favorite indulgence of one of the 12. (A highlight includes ‘self-care chicken.’)”
Food, hospitality, and communal breaking of bread is central to many examples of performing care. Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz started Enemy Kitchen in 2003, the first year of the Iraq War, to bring Baghdadi recipes (including his own mother’s) to audiences and through nourishment “[seized] the possibility of cultural visibility to produce an alternative discourse.”21 Starting in 2008, Pittsburgh-based artist Maritza Mosquera’s Series of Six Soups invited “Soup Artists to create Soup Magic, share family recipes, homeland secrets, special ingredients, and build community”22 at more than a dozen happenings spanning six years and multiple cities. In fall 2017, the Toronto-based Angry Asian Feminist Gang’s anti-oppression workshop Bring Soup Love “invited the public to collaboratively make a healing bone broth called sey mei tong” as a signal of “communal care toward the effects of historically unresolved grief and trauma.”23 The power of sharing a meal uniquely spans across discipline, identity, and geography. To invite, to host, to feed, to nourish is to take care of.
Another way to take care is to protect, which is exactly what artist Cannupa Hanska Luger did with his Mirror Shields project, which took place over the year that protesters gathered to oppose the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. As described on Luger’s website, “The Mirror Shields project was initiated for and at Oceti Sakowin camp near Standing Rock, ND in 2016. Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger created a tutorial video shared on social media inviting folks to create mirror shields for water protectors. People from across the Nation created and sent these shields to the water protectors onsite at camps in Standing Rock. The Mirror Shield project has since been formatted and used in various resistance movements across the Nation.”24 Not only do the shields enact care by protecting folks on the front lines of a protest, but they force the opposition to witness their own complicity in disregard for a community and for the land. In the same instant, Luger obscures and makes visible, protects and protests, cares and resists.
Amidst fascism, war, eco-crisis, and constant disregard of human rights, radical and rigorous resistance becomes more and more crucial. In Sick Woman Theory, artist and writer Johanna Hedva proposes that “The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, and caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability, fragility, and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it; to protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.”25 Care as a form of resistance and healing continues to be an important theme in the art world and will be crucial to our collective survival in the years to come.
______
Author’s note: This essay was originally written in 2018. Much has changed in performance and the world, especially concerning health, resistance, revolution, and care. The artists highlighted in this piece have a prophetic understanding of the need for care, and their work prefigures the world we find ourselves in today.
______
1. Precarias a la Deriva, “A Very Careful Strike—Four hypotheses,” trans. Franco Ingrassia and Nate Holdren, The Commoner 11 (2006): 42.
2. Amber Berson, “10 Artists Who Are Taking Care,” Canadian Art, 21 December 2017, https://canadianart.ca/features/taking-care.
3. “Medicine: Simone Leigh,” Creative Time, accessed 16 June 2020, http://creativetime.org/projects/black-radical-brooklyn/artists/simone-leigh.
4. Samara Davis, “Room for Care: Simone Leigh’s Free People’s Medical Clinic,” TDR/The Drama Review 59, no. 4 (2015): 169–76.
5. Davis, “Room for Care.”
6. Joseph Osmundson, “Performing Care: When and Why Art Becomes Medicine,” Public 4, no. 1 (2018), http://public.imaginingamerica.org/blog/article/performing-care-when-and-why-art-becomes-medicine.
7. Brian Lobel, “Cancer,” accessed 16 June 2020, https://www.blobelwarming.com/cancer-1.
8. Brian Lobel, “Fun with Cancer Patients—exhibition publication,” accessed 16 June 2020, https://issuu.com/livearthub/docs/exhibition_postcards.
9. Brian Lobel, “Cancer Index,” accessed 16 June 2020, https://www.blobelwarming.com/cancer-index.
10. Lobel, “Cancer Index.”
11. Vanessa Bartlett, “Brian Lobel: Fun with Cancer Patients,” thisistomorrow, 9 October 2013, http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/fierce-festival-brian-lobel-fun-with-cancer-patients.
12. Lobel, “Fun with Cancer Patients—exhibition publication.”
13. Berson, “10 Artists Who Are Taking Care.”
14. Tings Chak, “Suitable Accommodation,” accessed 16 June 2020, https://tingschak.com/suitable-accommodation.
15. Chak, “Suitable Accomodation.”
16. Berson, “10 Artists Who Are Taking Care.”
17. Ryan Tacata, “Lolas—Ryan Tacata,” accessed 16 June 2020, https://ryan-tacata.squarespace.com/lolas.
18. Julian Carter, “ ‘Lolas,’ Ryan Tacata,” Dance Matters, 9 August 2017, https://sfdancematters.com/2017/08/09/july-20-lolas-ryan-tacata.
19. Erika Chong Shuch, “For You,” accessed 16 June 2020, http://www.erikachongshuch.com/erika-chong-shuch-for-you.
20. Lily Janiak, “Performance Artist Creates Theatrical Experience Just ‘For You,’ ” SFGate, 3 April 2017, https://www.sfgate.com/performance/article/Theater-made-just-For-You-11047155.php#item-85307-tbla-25.
21. Michael Rakowitz, “Enemy Kitchen,” accessed 16 June 2020, http://www.michaelrakowitz.com/enemy-kitchen.
22. Maritza Mosquera, “Series of Six Soups: Pittsburgh #6,” 11 June 2012, https://maritzamosquera.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/series-of-six-soups-pittsburgh6/.
23. Berson, “10 Artists Who Are Taking Care.”
24. Cannupa Hanska Luger, “MIRROR SHIELD PROJECT,” accessed 16 June 2020, http://www.cannupahanska.com/mniwiconi.
25. Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine, January 2016, http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory.
