Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

At the heart of capitalist urbanisation is a demonstrable ‘crisis of care’. As it appears, this crisis is an urban-spatial extension of care’s general degradation and economic capture under capitalist production. The current socio-political landscape of neoliberal privatisation cuts, deregulation, competition, and self-interest has constructed a negligent urban milieu, which signals the extension of capitalism’s ‘crisis of care’ into the physical built environment. Within an urban Marxist context, this paper examines how contemporary art practitioners have responded to capitalist-urbanism’s poverty of care, serving the needs of deprived and diasporic communities via decolonising and non-paternalistic acts of solidarity. However, my overarching aim in this paper is to address examples of contemporary art practice, curation and institutionality that demonstrate, in their distinctive combination of caring and critical aspects, what I call a ‘politics of care’. Feminist scholar Fiona Robinson (1999) has suggested that affect (the personal) and criticality (the political) do not negate one another but are mutually reinforcing, and that social justice is served best by combining the two. Indeed, care/empathy and politicised acts of social justice should not be understood as existing in an opposed, dichotomous relationship, as politicising care radicalises it and sets it into action. Although ‘affective labour’ has been captured and absorbed into the logic of financialised capitalism, I contend in this paper that the examples addressed are able to overcome this co-optation, as they harness a ‘politics of care’, radically combining the antagonistic forces of ‘the political’ with care and empathy.