Groundswell’s Add Art Show, “Our Fire and Our Tenderness” Goes Live

The current Add Art show, Our Fire and Our Tenderness, is curated by Groundswell and deals with questions about care.  This subject has been the center of many recent conversations I’ve been having, but is in no way a new one.  From the art historical take on early institutional critique and feminist art practice to contemporary service economies and why social practice can sometimes feel like customer service, ideas about care and the value of labor have recently received attention.

“The Working is the Work” by The Institute for Infinitely Small Things borrows its title from Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Art Manifesto.

In the theory that supports activist practice, too, there has been much discussion about the labor that capitalism requires outside of documented waged labor, in order to self-perpetuate.  The recently approved New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights is one particularly organized and visible struggle utilizing and informing this perspective.  It’s at this point, of wondering about caring labor in the context of social movements, where we begin our thinking about care.

Waste Stream Diversions disassembled and reconfigured discarded furniture for new purposes. The objects-made-new were displayed at Chicago’s Mess Hall in 2007.

Care is a way of asking questions about the longevity and influence of social movements. I’m interested in how we take care of one another, establish new social relations based around those values, and still maintain a culture that’s antagonistic. To say that in a more complicated way, maybe, it’s a way of addressing a set of concerns that focus mostly on the delineations of who is involved in the self-reproduction of social movements, but also involves some affective, and moral considerations.

Hideous Beast’s organize-it, clean-it, fix-it, paint-it, haul-it, build-it, install-it and generally get-it done project, ODDJOBS.

This show focuses on care as maintenance, a very practical question about production and perpetuation, and one that only slightly touches on the questions about affect and morality. Here, the art itself is maintenance labor, and/or makes this kind of caring labor visible.

Services United’s Sold (2009) was site-specific interrogation of energy, both human and electric, as a service.

While these actions look similar and even seem banal, they offer unique questions about caring labor. Services United interrogates human-cultivated energy, in the form of electricity, to find the value of the work, and to dig deeper into the possible historical contingencies of how we do caring labor. Material Exchange’s DIY Coat Check sets an expectation of care, and asks what might happen when it’s unmet; how far caring mechanisms can extend or be extended is at stake in the process. Other artists include Environmental Services, Natasha Wheat, Mike Wolf, Jane Palmer and Marianne Fairbanks, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, and Hideous Beast.

Material Exchange subverted expectations of care of personal property in Coat Check.

This theme is also the subject of a forthcoming journal edited by the Groundswell Collective. Stay tuned for our call for submissions.

Special thanks to Andi Sutton and Salem Collo-Julin whose artist suggestions were instrumental in putting together this show, and to Team Colors (via Pablo Neruda) for the title, which is borrowed from a wonderful piece they published in Baltimore’s Indypendent.  Paul Schmelzer is also owed a debt of gratitude for recommending that I curate the show.