Artful Care, Careful Art. Women’s Art in times of Capitalism’s Care Crisis. : Barbara Raes’s Zon dag kind and Els Dietvorst’s Field Guide.

Abstract

Cultural approaches to burnout culture, as I will argue in this essay, have much to gain from these recent feminist critical theorisations and artistic imaginations of care. The suggestion is indeed to reframe the debate on the so-called ‘burn-out society’ as a debate on capitalism’s care crisis in order to bring into the discussion the valuable perspectives offered by feminist theorizations and artistic imaginations, which have thus far been largely sidelined, or not properly been considered.  This essay, then, signals the start of a proposition that explores how concepts of care can be developed, troubled and enhanced through an engagement with women’s art works and, simultaneously, how certain art works can be re-thought and re-imagined through a dialogue with care ethics as an alternative mode to the governing neoliberal technologies of self. It builds on recent feminist theorizations of care so as to explore these from the perspective of contemporary women’s art. In my analysis of two contemporary women’s imaginations of art as a matter of care, Zon dag kind by Barbara Raes and Fieldguide by Els Dietvorst, I hope to show, that in their own idiosyncratic way, Raes and Dietvorst explore different ways in which art can act as a matter of care that can bind together individuals and communities where larger institutions or governments fail to intervene. In so doing, Raes and Dietvorst break down conventional artistic boundaries and the conventions of the performing and visual arts respectively in order to carry out experiments in sociability which help us imagine caring subjects and a sense of community, which can arguably be seen as an important part of the answer to the self-sufficient entrepreneurial individual in our postmodern society, in particular, to his or her total exhaustion and other related mental and affective states.