Linking Care & Dependency

The inspiration for Femme Salée’s second art journal issue, Care & Dependency, comes from the collaborative work of New York-based artists and collaborators Park McArthur (b. 1984) and Constantina Zavitsanos (b. 1977). McArthur works in sculpture, video, and performance and uses the phenomenon of conceptual art from the perspective of dependency. She engages the history of institutional critique while at the same time asking what institutions other than art need critiquing. [1] Similarly, Zavitsanos works in performance, text, sound, and sculpture to explore the material re/production of debt, care, and dependency. [2] Together they view care as an infrastructural concern, meaning that care should not solely rely solely on individual responsibility but rather be a collective issue. Their work privileges art, objecthood, aesthetics, and social life. [3] Zavitsanos and McArthur are close friends, creative collaborators, and care partners. In 2011, they began Care Collective (2011-present), a performance art group of ten people who assist McArthur with her nightly care routine.

Together via art, writing, and performance—as with their project Care Collective—Zavitsanos and McArthur consider issues of care, dependency, and intersectionality, especially where the public sphere meets the private. Each artist also recognizes their own experience with illness and (dis)ability in their individual works and shares knowledge about themselves through their writings and artwork to connect with their audience. [4] As such, they reveal the invisible by exposing their (dis)abled bodyminds to an art audience that might be unaware of a complex embodiment different from their own. [5]

Zavitsanos and McArthur’s combined and individual work have greatly influenced my own work as a writer, artist, and (dis)ability advocate, since the two artists emphasize the importance of care, collectivity, and erasing the boundaries between the public and private. We—the Femme Salée (F&S) team—found the theme of Care & Dependency to be an appropriate topic to share and discuss because we believe that in order to survive, we must function as a community, acknowledge and celebrate our dependency on each other, and foster the importance of care within our society. 

Care and dependency are two concepts rarely discussed in the art world, let alone in the public sphere. “Care” can be defined in a multitude of ways. For example, the contributors of this art journal define care in the form of a verb (i.e., feeling concern for or interest in someone or something) and in the form of a noun (i.e., the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something). As McArthur and Zavitsanos explain in their 2014 essay “Sort of Like a Hug: Notes on Collectivity, Conviviality, and Care,” care is “a spectrum of dependency and labor different than childcare, different than elder care, and different than the heteropatriarchal configurations of an unwaged laborer reproducing a waged laborer for tomorrow’s workday.” [6] Care is about the consideration or stewardship of a bodymind who/that is not functioning, producing, or generating in cooperation with the capitalistic structure of “Western” heteropatriarchy. [7] It is about the labor required of individuals caring for adults who are not “functioning members of capitalistic society” as well as the labor required of (dis)abled individuals caring for themselves. [8]

Dependency—specifically in the case of (dis)ability—is an unwilling reliance on another bodymind, institution, nutrition, medication, and/or technology, etc. It goes hand in hand with care in that (dis)abled bodyminds are dependent on continuous care from the self and others. Dependency also recognizes the labor and care of those who came before us. For example, in acknowledging my dependency on Zavitsanos and McArthur in addition to their artwork and scholarship, I bring attention to the mutual care and dependency revealed in both their performances/writings and their relationship as close friends and collaborators. In other words, Zavitsanos’s and McArthur’s work reveals how we are all dependent on one another and in need of care. 

This journal issue, then, “reflects a radically ‘dependent’ understanding of cultural production.” [9] Just as F&S and I are dependent on Zavitsanos, McArthur, as well as other scholars and artists, so too are they on those who have come before them. Together, we all add to the past, present, and future of critical art conversations. 

In their essay “On the Constructions of Nature of Man: Designing Health and Settling Nature at Richardson and Olmsted’s Buffalo State Hospital,” Gray Golding explores how the architecture of care institutions conform to or create a structure of government-issued care, a dependency through which admitted persons are subject to physical, biobehavioral settler colonialism. Through the lens of the Buffalo State Hospital in Buffalo, New York, Golding demonstrates the ways in which architecture contains and curates natural and built space in a larger structure of  white supremacist settler colonialism. Jumping off from Michel Foucault’s theoretical model of bioethics, which links corporeal bodies to a nation’s body politic, Golding critiques care systems funded by the U.S. government and, inadvertently, the medical industrial complex, for their failure to care for bodyminds in need of (i.e., dependent upon) help for survival. Instead, as Golding explains, state hospitals, such as Buffalo State Hospital, redefine care as a motion “to control” rather than “to protect” due to the government’s aim to separate and dominate those deemed unworthy of participating in the public sphere. 

The established practice of “insane asylums” has always scared me. As a queer, (dis)abled woman who is already bound to the medical industrial complex, dependent on uncomfortable relationships of care and indentured to pain, the fear of losing absolute and total control over my bodymind to a structure that controls me and my choices is truly terrifying. Golding’s essay briefly describes medical history’s “erasure of asylum patient perspectives and the abuse to which institutional practitioners subjected patients,” which reminds me of the 1850s photographs taken of admitted persons (i.e., “psychiatric patients”) by Hugh W. Diamond (1809-1886) that force a physical boundary between the images’ viewers and their (dis)abled subjects. [10] As interdisciplinary disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thompson argues, photographs of (dis)abled people—particularly those hidden from the public at home, in hospitals, in asylums, etc.—promote a politics of staring that “registers the perception of difference and gives meaning to impairment by marking it as aberrant.” [11] What is more, Golding’s argument around “biobehavioral settler colonialism” speaks to the larger issues exemplified by the work of artists like Diamond, as in Patient, Surrey County Lunatic Asylum (1850-1855), by connecting them to similar, romantically-constructed photographs of Indigenous people by Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) (Fig. 1 and 2). [12] In other words, Diamond’s photographs and the Buffalo State Hospital both create the illusion of an all-but-truthful perspective of admitted persons existing in state sanctioned control. 

While Garland-Thompson’s stare/gaze theory may be out of date in today’s highly visual culture, as disability studies scholar Ann Millett-Gallant explains, “in which we are all pervasively gazing/staring at each other and forming notions of ourselves both in identifications with and against other bodies,” it does highlight how bodyminds consistently exist in relation to other bodyminds, a prime argument for how and why we are all dependent on one another and in need of care, and thereby an argument for removing the physical boundaries created by individualism, gazing, and shutting away. [13] Through their efforts of making the invisible visible, Zavitsanos and McArthur write and perform about their (dis)abled bodyminds to offer what literature and visual studies scholar Sophie Anne Oliver explains is “an ontological and structural model through which the concept of embodied ethical spectatorship might begin to be imagined.” [14] By visualizing and/or displaying complex embodiments in social constructions and institutions that choose to render them invisible, Zavitsanos and McArthur invite audience members to embody—or at the very least think about—an embodiment different from their own. Embodied ethical spectatorship, then, calls on viewers to care—acknowledge and provide for the needs of—for fellow humans. 

In “Collaged to Confront: Hannah Höch’s Photomontage as a Tool of Weimar and Anti-Imperial Critique,” Lauren Woolf argues that through her collages, Dada artist Hannah Höch (1889-1978) subverts the colonialist idea that female, queer, and colonized bodyminds are dependent on authoritative figures—such as the Weimar Republic—to survive. Rather, these bodyminds are not only independent but resistant to the domineering governing body. Höch displays a sense of care—or feeling concern—for herself and other marginalized bodyminds to the public through artistic rebellion. As Woolf states, Höch forms her collages “to show the dependency enforced by ruling systems and the lack of care given to the subjugated by hegemonic powers.” As a result, the artist’s works ask viewers to acknowledge and show concern via an embodied ethical spectatorship for the people beaten, conquered, and neglected by those in power. Similarly to Golding, Woolf discusses care and dependency in the hierarchical relationship between authoritative figure and a subjugated one (i.e., a political relationship between a government and its constituents, a medical relationship between a doctor and his patients, etc.).

By contrast, Zavitsanos and McArthur investigate care and dependency as a mutual relationship between peers within a collective system or community to break down the boundaries dividing the public and private. In their viewer-imagined performance visualized through text, Score for Lift and Transfer (2013), McArthur and Zavitsanos present the conversation and movements that occur when Zavitsanos helps McArthur from one location to another (i.e., her bed to her chair, her bath to her bed, etc.). Zavitsanos asks: “Ready?” McArthur replies: “Ready.” Together, they “work to deliver [their] bodies safely from platform to platform, surface to surface.” [15] Through text on a wall, screen, or paper, readers are prompted to conceptualize Zavitsanos’s bodymind bending over, holding out her hands and arms, and balancing herself to grab hold of McArthur. McArthur, then, squeezes her bodymind to balance herself with and on Zavitsanos in a tight and intimate hug. Together, the two move and communicate in a laborious but caring performance that is repeated multiple times a day. 

Just as Zavitsanos cares for McArthur, McArthur depends on Zavitsanos. McArthur’s nightly routine, along with Score for Lift and Transfer (2013), show how she is constantly dependent on her friends and loved ones to help her take a shower, get dressed, and get in bed. However, even though McArthur receives care from and is dependent on her loved ones, partners, and friends who expect nothing in exchange, she still returns care to those who take care of her and finds that they are just as dependent on her as she is on them. In fact, a few months after Zavitsanos and McArthur began using letters, text messages, and text-based art to explore ideas of care and intimacy, McArthur began a routine of brushing Zavitsanos’s teeth. [16] McArthur also provides care to her friends and loved ones via emotional support, conversation, and company. In Score from Before VII (2013), the two artists ask viewers to “share your feelings” and “ask someone to share their feelings with you” to reveal dependency as a reality of all bodyminds. [17]

In her photographic research essay, “The Decomposing Guava,” Niv Rajendra uses the decomposing guava as a metaphor for questioning the social constructs that tell us how our bodyminds must relate and interact with other bodyminds. By photographing and witnessing the fallen guavas rotting around her home in Colombia, Rajendra observes a complex ecosystem of collaboration and communication between guava trees, local and visiting birds, ants, mushrooms, fruit flies, and maggots: one that drives her to conclude “natural selection isn’t individual, but mutual.” [18] In other words, vibrant and healthy ecosystems can only survive when everyone and everything work together, care for each other, and acknowledge the importance of interdependence.

Like Zavitsanos and McArthur, F&S, Golding, Woolf, and Rajendra all write and make art to inform others of lived experiences that rely on care and dependency: experiences that typically remain in the private sphere and are thus unseen and unheard. As performance scholars Bree Hadley and Carrie Sandahl explain through their writings, in Western culture, “the dominant discourse insists on configuring disability as an individual problem detached from the sphere of identity politics. It casts illness, disease, and disability as a private catastrophe a person needs to deal with.” [19] When the dividing lines between public and private are no longer there, issues of care and dependency are no longer an individual problem but a collective problem. Via their collective performances, scores, and writings, Zavitsanos and McArthur highlight the importance of creating and communicating collaboratively as a form of mutual care and dependency—interdependency—which are universal concepts that not only work to visualize complex embodiment as a spectrum, but most importantly, recognize everyone’s need of care and dependency. Via this art journal issue, F&S hopes to erase the boundaries between the public and private while demanding that care should exist in all aspects of society. Care and dependency are two concepts that must be recognized, appreciated, and practiced more to insure our survival for the future.