Care Ethics and Art

Jacqueline Millner, Gretchen Coombs, Jacqueline Millner, Gretchen Coombs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000471359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

What would it mean to substitute care for economics as the central concern of politics? This anthology invites analysis, reflections and speculations on how contemporary artists and creative practitioners engage with, interpret, and enact care in practices which might forge an alternative ethics in the age of neoliberalism.

Interdisciplinary and innovative, it brings together contributions from artists, researchers and practitioners who creatively consider how care can be practised in a range of contexts, including environmental ethics, progressive pedagogies, cultures of work, alternative economic models, death literacy advocacy, parenting and mothering, deep listening, mental health, disability and craftivism.

Care Ethics and Art contributes new modes of understanding these fields, together with practical solutions and models of practice, while also offering new ways to think about recent contemporary art and its social function. The book will benefit scholars and postgraduate research students in the fields of art, art history and theory, visual cultures, philosophy and gender studies, as well as creative and arts practitioners.

Part I Caring relations Collaborating, parenting

1 Care, interrelatedness and creative practices The Care Project (2018–2022)

Jacqueline Millner

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167556-3

Introducing The Care Project

The Care Project crystallised at the meeting point of several long-term concerns, ideas and desires, the overarching one being how to counter the harms of neoliberalism to life on earth and unsettle the despair and powerlessness felt in the face of their apparent inevitability. Several companion questions emerged: how to move towards generative and creative ways of being-in-common beyond the limitations of identity politics and essentialism? How to re-imagine justice beyond rights-based approaches with their reliance on abstract, so-called universal principles? How to revitalise feminism for new generations? And how to foreground the power of art to facilitate new forms of solidarity, alternative economies, holistic and integrative thinking and practices, sustainability, refuge and joy? Big questions, no doubt, but for decades my enduring preoccupations as a writer, educator, academic, curator, mother and citizen, have been fuelled by what imaginings might be possible where art and politics intersect.

After taking a critical lens to concepts such as community, beauty and public space through feminist methodology and principles—openness, conversation and collaboration, generosity, situatedness and contingency—I eventually came to ‘care ethics’ as a way to think through the relation between art practices and politics. Informed by feminist philosophies and practices, care ethics foreground relatedness, align methods and outcomes, and ask that we revolutionise the values that govern our societies — from valuing the accumulation of capital to valuing life.¹ Changing values is an affective process that takes time and space. It demands the interweaving of material and conceptual incursions, and the creation of conditions where we feel safe to recognise our social relationality. Recognising that these processes are central to the practices of many artists and educators led to the formation of The Care Project to explore care ethics through an integration of art, curating, pedagogies and interdisciplinary academic research and engagement.²

In this chapter, I outline some of the theoretical insights that informed the project, including attempts to think through precarity, relationality and deep listening for their politically transformative potential. I then identify some principles The Care Project sought to embody, before focusing on one of the project’s manifestations: the 2019 Care Symposium in Melbourne, which over four days brought together dozens of artists, writers, activists and researchers from a broad range of fields, to exchange ideas and practices of care and support each other through the power of collectivising.

Figure 1.1 Claire Field and Caroline Phillips, Archiving Care (Claire Field with workshop participants), 2019, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne. Photograph: Caroline Phillips.

Care ethics: Precarity, relatedness, deep listening

In her astute analysis of the logic that drives neoliberal capitalism, German political theorist Isabell Lorey flips the script: the state of precarity, which dominant systems use to control the people, is transformed into a form of political activism.³ Lorey, following Judith Butler,⁴ posits ‘precariousness’ as an intersubjective condition that is shared by all beings and structured through the social enframing of bodily vulnerability. The related concept, ‘precarity’, she defines as the uneven distribution of precariousness by the state, while ‘precarisation’ is the process that ‘denaturalises’ the intersubjective constitution of life, substituting for it a cult of self-mastery that relegates subjecthood to the self-determined, self-powered and autonomous human. Lorey suggests that new forms of collectivism and social organisation, beyond the limitations of identitarian or representationalist politics, might emerge when the precarious recognise a social relationality in the process of becoming-common. Her analysis thus shifts the condition of politics from the ontological constitution of the common to the process of constituting what is common.⁵ Instead of searching for a common identity, such a politics looks to the commonality that comes from being vulnerable bodies.⁶ Focusing on Spanish feminist activist group Precarias a la Deriva⁷, which practises public acts of care, Lorey signals that care can create a novel, non-state-run public sphere. Belgian social theorist Isabelle Stengers redoubles on that idea: rather than be concerned with questions of identity and subjectivity, it is

more radical to focus on the care and concern demanded by that which is coming into existence, and by its milieu which can poison or nurture it…Poisoning is easy but nurturing is a craft, the neglect of which might be understood in relation to our vulnerability to capitalism.⁸

Lorey and Stengers evoke the power of relationality, that is, the transformative potential of embracing our interdependence rather than asserting our distinctive identity. The observation that as individuals we are entangled in a web of dynamic relationships within particular contexts and circumstances was the key contribution of one of the founding voices of care ethics, American ethicist Carol Gilligan. According to Gilligan, ethics is partly how we express and sustain these relationships, so that ‘emotion has a significant role in creating connection and motivating action’.⁹ In her clinical investigations in the early 1980s, Gilligan noted how feelings, rather than universalist abstract principles such as ‘justice’, helped facilitate women’s ethical responses in particular:

The moral imperative…[for] women is an injunction to care, a responsibility to discern and alleviate the ‘real and recognizable trouble’ of this world. For men, the moral imperative appears rather as an injunction to respect the rights of others and thus to protect from interference the rights to life and self-fulfillment…The standard of moral judgement that informs (women’s) assessment of the self is a standard of relationship, and ethic of nurturance, responsibility, and care.¹⁰

Gilligan contrasted women’s ‘conception of morality’ as ‘concerned with the activity of care…responsibility and relationships,’ with those abstract theories privileging atomistic ethics of justice, non-interference and self-realisation.¹¹ The women’s approach comprised a more situational, flexible and particularised ethic, aimed at ‘sustaining connection…keeping the web of relationships intact.’ Gilligan’s theories provoked heated debate in moral philosophy and feminist theory, in particular for their essentialising suggestion that ‘women care’ and men look to assert disembodied ‘rights’.¹² However, over time her research has been recognised for revealing the male-gendered nature of what was long held to be the ‘objective’ principles of justice. As ethicists Cannold et al. note:

The notion that moral reasoning engaged in by women might differ from that engaged in by men has raised the question whether virtually all of philosophical ethics is oriented toward the way in which men, rather than women, think about ethics.¹³

Feminist moral philosophy, political sociology and ethics¹⁴ have challenged the historical distinctions made in the West between justice and care—one defined by autonomy, certitude and moral judgement based on individual rights and universal values, the other on relational support.¹⁵ Gilligan and Noddings, for instance, later acknowledged that justice and care are not opposed, but rather that care is foundational to justice:¹⁶

Care is a feminist, not a ‘feminine’ ethic, and feminism, guided by an ethic of care, is arguably the most radical…liberation movement in human history. Released from the gender binary and hierarchy, feminism is neither a women’s issue nor a battle between women and men. It is the movement to free democracy from patriarchy.¹⁷

This position is now largely affirmed among feminist care ethicists. Dutch political theorist Selma Sevenhuijsen observes: ‘care is now recognised as an important part of our existence, and the idea that care does not necessarily have to be opposed to independence and self-realisation is becoming more widely accepted’.¹⁸ American ethicist Virginia Held adds, ‘What could be more revolutionary than upsetting the gender hierarchy of patriarchy in the most basic ways we think about how we ought to live and what we ought to do?’¹⁹ Emphasising the overarching relational aspect of the care ethic, Held notes that ‘Caring should not be understood as self-sacrifice. Egoism versus altruism is the wrong way to interpret the issues.’ Rather, ‘We want what will be good for both or all of us together.’²⁰ Care theorists hold that all living creatures have value and are embedded in an interdependent matrix. In keeping with its feminist roots, ‘care theory rejects hierarchical dominative dualisms, which establish the powerful…over the subordinate…’.²¹

At the heart of care ethics is a values revolution that might come from attending to differently, from allowing ourselves to hear and touch and taste what most matters rather than live by the priorities imposed on us by the neoliberal state and economy. This kind of attending to, with its implicit openness to the moment and its assurance that we can allow unthinking habits to safely fall away, is deeply embedded in Australian Indigenous cultures, notably the practice of dadirri, or inner deep listening and quiet still awareness. The word, concept and spiritual practice that is dadirri comes from the Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri languages of the Aboriginal peoples of the Daly River region (Northern Territory, Australia). As Aboriginal writer and senior elder Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr explains,

Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. This is the gift that Australia is thirsting for. It is something like what you call ‘contemplation’…When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There is no need of words. A big part of dadirri is listening…In our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn – not by asking questions. We learnt by watchi...