Being Present: Art, Work and Wellness
Before the global pandemic struck in 2020, a spate of exhibitions thematising mental and physical health placed renewed emphasis on personal and collective wellbeing. Key survey-exhibitions such as Group Therapy at Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2018-19) and Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy at Somerset House, London (2020) presented work that looked beyond the neoliberal obsession with individual wellness towards alternative solutions that took account of structural inequalities and social injustice. This renewed focus on wellness and self-care was not only felt in curatorship, but also in public programmes, as museums hosted yoga and meditation classes, mindfulness workshops and other therapeutic activities to cushion the stresses of contemporary life. Yet what these developments lacked, whilst raising the question of wellbeing, was a deeper appraisal: both of the political structures instrumentalising wellness narratives in the production of art and its institutions, as well as a focus on how narratives of wellness play-out specifically in the workplace.
This session welcomes (but is not limited to) papers investigating how artists, curators, art historians and film makers respond to wellness as a complex, evolving political question. The primary aim of the session is twofold: (1) to reveal the ways in which wellness functions as a construct, institutionally, according to free-market agendas; (2) to locate where and how wellness initiatives instrumentalise physical and mental wellbeing in organisational settings. This session is particularly interested in papers that respond to any of the above by deploying methodologies that explore gender, race and class identity.
Session Convenor:
Simon Willems, University of Reading
Speakers:
Rachel Epp Buller, Bethel College (USA)
Understandings of Wellness in Higher Education through a Pedagogy of Walking
Recent decades have seen the rise of the “self-care” industry, a capitalist enterprise that includes beauty, rest, exercise, therapies, and more. This focus on the individual is no surprise in my US context, where maintenance of health and wellbeing are considered personal expenses of time and money, choices to be made, rather than systemic investments in the broader collective. In higher education, students are spread thin between coursework, paid work, activities, and family obligations, but the rhetoric among student success professionals leans again on the individual, teaching students strategies for better time management and for how to prioritize obligations. What could a systemic move toward wellness in higher education look like?
In this presentation, I highlight one attempt to shift understandings of health and wellness in academia by developing a pedagogy of walking. Using as a case study an undergraduate course I developed entitled Slow Art for Fast Times, I detail how an expectation of weekly walking as a course assignment offered students (un)expected benefits. While some wellness benefits of intentional slowness manifested individually, others yielded connections with classmates, neighbours, and more-than-human kin: walking the same path each week but with different instructional scores, students layered their embodied learnings and moved toward the attainment of ‘threshold knowledge’ (Meyer and Land 2003), gaining new understandings of what individual, collective, and planetary wellness might mean. They walked themselves into new knowledge(s) of health and wellbeing.
Paul O’Kane, Central Saint-Martins (UAL)
London or Falling Up – A Handbook for Class Migrants
For my presentation I will introduce my recent publication ‘Classanoia,or Falling UP – A Handbook for Class Migrants’. In this little book I use autobiography as well as psychological, political and philosophical reflections to explore ways in which Class can be a cause of unwellness. This is perhaps because it plays such a strong part in all of our lives and careers, yet without us having a shared, objective, and therefore ‘healthy’ understanding of just what it is and how it works. The result, in my view, is a form of paranoia, a world of doubt that is painful to negotiate, particularly if you feel necessary drawn into what I call ‘class migration’. This newly coined term, along with ‘Classanoia’, seeks to open a space of potential dialogue and shared vocabulary between economic, geographic and class migrants. The book also describes the strangely disoriented progress we make when migrating from class to class as ‘falling up’.
Zuzana Jakalová, Brno University of Technology (Czech Republic)
Weeds Grow Tall: Self-Care Culture and Aesthetics of Protest in the Work of Kata Mach
Throughout her short life and career, Slovakian visual artist and performer Katarína Morháčová (1986 – 2018) – performing under the pseudonym Kata Mach – has systematically dealt with topics of strength/vulnerability, im/perfection, awkwardness, desire, subjectivity, productivity and mental health. Through her installations, performative work and video-performances, Mach has often subjected these to double scrutiny: deconstructing, criticising and resisting established societal able-bodied and neuro-normative ideas of beauty, success and health on the one hand, while trying to emulate them, setting herself difficult or unrealistic tasks, willingly demonstrating the inevitability of failure, on the other. Fascinated by the ambiguity of this in-between space – understanding norms as structured tools of oppression, yet wanting to live up to them – she continuously challenged the aesthetics of self-care as a late-capitalist agenda, and proposed a turn to radical aesthetics and politics of poetic protest. The artist passed away at the age of 32 in 2018, just around the time when these topics as well as perspectives of disability studies were starting to resonate in contemporary art in the region, never receiving proper contextualization within these thematic frameworks. In this paper, I aim to analyse the political and aesthetic agendas of her work and position it within a larger discussion surrounding “turn to health“ in contemporary art (Rodríguez Muñoz).