panel 17Artwork, Carework: Creative Acts of Support and Resistance
Painting a Photo: Care in the Practices of Anthony Cudahy and Ian Lewandowski
Brent Matheny
In this presentation, I use a care ethical framework to explore the work and practice of two Brooklyn-based artists – painter Anthony Cudahy and photographer Ian Lewandowski. Their practices, both independently and when they find themselves intertwined, embody the care aesthetic described by James Thompson which takes the viewing of their artworks as but one element in a “total, multifaceted unfolding of an action” in aesthetic experience. In the first part of the presentation, I look at each artist’s work in isolation, and in the second part of the presentation consider the interconnection between their practices, both in their content and form.
Forever casting back into the archive, both personal and art historical, Cudahy cultivates a dialogic relation with his subject matter to re-articulate specific relationships in a mythic and imaginative mode. Through elevating and recontextualizing found images of domesticity, often from the archive of his great uncle, the photographer Kenny Gardner, or simply of his husband (Lewandowski) and remixing them with historically disparate motifs from Bruegel, Bosch, to the Bayeux tapestry, Cudahy holds reverential space for the everyday relations of care that make up the fabric of our lives. Lewandowski’s practice also involves the remixing and reorienting of care relations. Working from live models picked from friends, lovers, and online acquaintances, Lewandowski’s photographs construct sites of queer community through the creation and circulation of erotic images. Beyond the photographs themselves, Lewandowski’s studio practice, often bringing together otherwise unconnected individuals into the same space enacts “an aesthetic of being with community.” What happens when we take these creative practices to inform our own practices and relations of care?
Brent Matheny (he/him) is a graduate student at Penn State University. He received his MA in philosophy from the CUNY, Graduate Center. He is interested in care ethics as a sui generis moral theory and how our understanding of the fine structure of care can be bolstered by attending to its interpretive dimensions. He is also interested in East Asian and world philosophy as a means of rethinking the dominant assumptions of mainstream Western philosophy.
Performance Art and the Politics of Care: Aesthetics, Identities, and Acts of Resistance
Alexandra Antoniadou
Several notions and forms of care, such as carework, have been negotiated in artistic practices, particularly in performance and other forms of participatory and collaborative forms of art, for many years now. This paper is going to examine care as an artistic and curatorial practice through the art project Women in a Car Wash – Archive Trouble directed by the Greek artist Anna Tzakou. Women in a Car Wash – Archive Trouble is a site-based performance that was presented in Athens in May 2019. The performance, structured within a male space, a former car wash, lasted 75 minutes and comprised several shorter performances that examine the female gender as a public discourse and a sociopolitical identity in contemporary Greece. Seven female artists in different art disciplines devised performances that evolved around the construction of female identity.
Through the analysis of the specific art project, this paper will consider conflicting concepts of care: care as women’s responsibility and as quality of the female identity but also care as a form of resistance against capitalist modes of art production. Tzakou activated a feminist politics of care as both a pedagogical process and performance methodology based on an anti-capitalist approach to time and production, the decentralization of power, and the rejection of authority. Drawing on the writings of feminist theorists such as Silvia Federici and art historians and theorists such as Amelia Jones, this paper will explore the concept of care as a feminist artistic and curatorial methodology.
Alexandra Antoniadou is an art historian and theorist. She is a faculty member of the Hellenic Open University where she teaches Greek art and architecture at the department of Greek Civilization. She has studied Archaeology and Art History at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, continued her studies at the University of Essex (Great Britain) in History and Theory of Modern Art, and completed her PhD on Performance Art in Greece at the University of Edinburgh. She has also completed her postdoctoral research “Performance Art and Feminism in Contemporary Greek Art: Social Reproduction, Labour and Affect,” funded by the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY), at the Department of Applied and Fine Arts at the University of Western Macedonia. Her research concerns performative and participatory practices in contemporary art with an emphasis on performance art in Greece. Her academic interests focus on feminist methodologies and the connections between art and social reproduction, public space, biopolitics, contemporary democracy, and fascism. He has taught art history and theory in Thessaloniki and Edinburgh. She has participated in international conferences and has published research papers on contemporary performative art practices in Greek and English.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
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