Art Metropole

#14899

Health: Whitechapel Documents Of Contemporary Art Series

Editor

Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz

Date

2020

Publisher

MIT Press

Format

Anthologies

ISBN

9780262539463

Size

14.6 × 21 cm

Length

240 pp

Genre

Contemporary Art, Health

In an era of diet pills, rising antidepressant usage, yoga, and health-management apps, wellness is one of the defining issues of contemporary life, affecting every intimate aspect of our lives. Historically, art has been entwined with the values of medicine, beauty, and the productive body that have defined Western scientific paradigms. Contemporary artists are increasingly confronting and reshaping these ideologies, drawing on the vexed experiences surrounding questions of health and identity. Health explores the ethical, aesthetic, and political significance of practices and theories connected to health and illness in contemporary art.

Raw, confrontational, and affective, these texts consider pressing discourses in artistic practices including care, shifting identities and community building. The featured artists, curators, writers, and thinkers engage with the ways the vulnerability of our bodies and the maladies that seize them also reveal structural aspects of our societies: how hegemonic narratives are connected with ideas of health, disability, and cure, and how sickness intersects with sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and class. By reclaiming other existences—beyond what is considered straight, healthy, neurotypical, or productive—this reader questions the myths, stigmas and cultural attitudes that shape people’s perceptions of illness and normativity.

Artists surveyed include:
Oreet Ashery, Lucy Beech, Lorenza Böttner, The Canaries and Taraneh Fazeli, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Andrea Crespo, Patricia Domínguez, Dora García, Felix González-Torres, Johanna Hedva, Rashid Johnson, Mahmoud Khaled, Carolyn Lazard, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Simone Leigh, Mujeres Creando, Park McArthur, Pedro Neves Marques Las Pekinesas, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Jo Spence, Patrick Staff, Christine Sun Kim, Pedro Reyes, Tabita Rezaire

Writers include:
Aimar Arriola & Nanci Garín, Khairani Barokka, Clare Barlow, Dodie Bellamy, Rizvana Bradley, Anne Boyer, Eli Clare, John Foot, bell hooks, Ted Kerr & Alexandra Juhasz, Tarmar Guimarāes, Sunil Gupta & Simon Watney, Bhanu Kapil, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Audre Lorde, Peter Pál Pelbart, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Susan Sontag, R.D. Laing, Catalina Lozano, Audre Lorde, Robert McRuer, Naomi Pearce, Paul B. Preciado, Sud Rodney, James T. Hong, Mary Walling Blackburn, Danielle Wu

In 2006 London’s famous Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press formed an editorial alliance to produce a new series of books. Documents of Contemporary Art combines several features that do not often coincide in publishing: affordable paperback prices, good design, and impeccable editorial content. Each volume in the series is a definitive anthology on a particular theme, practice, or concern that is of central significance to contemporary visual culture. The artists and writers included in these books, like the guest editors who conceive them, represent the diversity of perspectives, generations, and voices defining art today.