Home Truths
The recent focus on health and well-being in the arts, evident in exhibitions such as , and or museum mindfulness programmes, signifies a number of current conditions. At one level the demonstration of concern for art practitioners and their states of precarity is part of the art world’s co-option of ‘the politics of care’ that signals concern with concepts of health during a period in which the public sector is increasingly delegating health care to patients. More complex are the histories of social as well as economic disenfranchisement in the health sector which have erased non-heterosexual subjects. The neoliberal system that benefits from fuelling a compulsion to pursue physical fitness is also responsible for ‘debility’ or a depletion of some bodies more than others, as discussed by Jasbir K. Puar and recently noted by Giulia Smith in the UK . In this environment, writers such as Smith consider that artists are pursuing strategies of invisibility which is as much a politics of rebuking entitlement as a form of resisting the art world. Auckland-based artist Shannon Novak has also been working at the peripheries by necessity and by choice in work that activates a politics of debility in
