Overview

Hospital aesthetics: Disability, medicine, activism argues that contemporary disabled artists are offering a new hospital aesthetics, where health and care are being taken into their own hands and body-minds. Hospital aesthetics is defined as artwork that explores the ever-subjective experience of illness, set apart from and outside of a clinical or therapeutic setting, and in opposition to the medical model of disability. The author examines the work of nine contemporary disabled artists and four care collectives from the United States, Canada, and Europe across five chapters, utilising a range of mediums including drawing, sculpture, installation, painting, performance, video, and socially engaged art practice to illustrate ""hospital aesthetics."" The visual culture of medicine typically undermines and controls disabled bodies, often resulting in unfavourable physical and psychological outcomes. It is therefore imperative that disabled artists establish a hospital aesthetics to rescript medical images of disability, both past and present, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, contemporary disabled artists contribute to a form of disability activism that seeks to improve mainstream bioethics as well as ableist museum and gallery culture. Hospital aesthetics presents a different perspective on disabled bodies, aiming to undo the social and cultural impacts hospitals have had on disabled patients, both historically and today.

Full Product Details

9781526187864

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘In Hospital aesthetics, art historian and curator, Amanda Cachia, illuminates connections amongst disability, medicine, and activism, realms of culture seldom considered compatible. This innovative juxtaposition of art and artists shows us that the common, shared human experiences of disability, illness, and care are recorded in the aesthetic archive in elegant and surprising ways.’ —Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor Emerita of English and bioethics, Emory University, Hastings Center Fellow and Senior Advisor on Disability ‘Amanda Cachia builds on her leading role in disability art history with Hospital aesthetics, a field-defining book that brings a deep and scholarly understanding of modern and contemporary art to practices that are considered through the conceptual space of the hospital, a site introduced as a framework for discussions about pain, death, and disability experience, and a critical focus of institutional critique.’ —Lisa Cartwright, Professor of Visual Arts, University of California San Diego ‘In this beautifully written, compelling and extremely original book, Cachia focuses on outstanding artists whose works incorporate experiences of health impairments and long-term hospitalization. Their “rescripting” of medical affordances, she argues, is a powerful form of radical disability activism, decolonizing and transforming both the hospital and the gallery.’ —Faye Ginsburg, David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology, New York University ‘In Hospital aesthetics: Disability, medicine, activism Amanda Cachia analyzes the work of artists who incorporate experiences with hospitalization and illness while rejecting the medical model of disability. Organized into case studies, the cumulative effect is that of a manifesto for disability activism. Urgent and impassioned, it burns with writing theorized from the body out.’ —Suzanne Hudson, Professor of Art History and Fine Arts, University of Southern California -- .

'Amanda Cachia builds on her leading role in disability art history with Hospital Aesthetics, a field-defining book that brings a deep and scholarly understanding of modern and contemporary art to practices that are considered through the conceptual space of the hospital, a site introduced as a framework for discussions about pain, death, and disability experience, and a critical focus of institutional critique.' Professor Lisa Cartwright, University of California, San Diego -- .

Author Information

Amanda Cachia is Professor of Practice in Museum Studies in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. She is a curator, consultant, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism.

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