Health. The Poetics of Health

Health has featured in the social, political and economic debate in recent months to an unprecedented degree, both nationally and globally. Behind the statistics and the numbers we read in daily reports are speculations around the future dynamics of the face-masks, social distancing and asepsis of our ‘new normal’. But the virus has also revealed that health is something far broader than the name of a disease. It raises awareness about the communities we live in: the larger body that contains us all and whose health we have to look after. The current circumstances remind us that health includes personal, family and community care: not just medical diagnoses but the need to share emotions, a sense of protection, contact with nature, a feeling of freedom, the practice of work and many other things besides. By understanding health like this in a broader sense – closer to a search for well-being, harmony and deep connection with our bodies, others and our environment, and for the amplification of our perceptions – different ‘care strategies’ emerge which many contemporary artists are investigating and make use of in their works.

In a movement back to the days when there were no differences between disciplines and knowledge travelled back and forth between art, science and spirituality, these artists have a comprehensive interest in the health of the mind and body in every condition and at every stage of life. Driven on by this idea, they propose spiritual journeys of meditation, devise palliative care projects where art is made by the patients themselves, or mental health group therapies that go beyond the physical body to imagine spaces for social contact, reclaiming old age as a vital stage of life where new horizons continue to open up. This set of works transcends the boundaries that have traditionally defined the ‘Work of Art’ to fuse completely with comprehensive health practices towards a new kind of well-being. Such works nurture self-discovery as the best conduit for promoting collective care and so contribute to the actual construction of a healthy, sustainable future. These artists and their works ask how we can strengthen our organisms not just physically and psychically, but emotionally and relationally. They therefore turn their attention to the exchanges encouraged by art rather than the objects it produces, reigniting the historical avant-gardes’ concern to alter at a single stroke the art we know and the social life that sustains it. This profile of contemporary art thus encompasses a broad idea of health and demands a transformative reading of the community we belong to.

By concentrating less on the biological certainties of modern science and more on the immeasurable wealth of sensitive approaches, art can go beyond the materiality of the body and try to remedy the ailments that undermine our health on various fronts. In the current context, when we are even more conscious of the complex regime of unhealth that reigns over inner and outer lives, we ask ourselves whether art and artistic strategies may provide a way, through innovative new profiles, to strengthen our fragile existence.