Hospital Aesthetics
Subtitle
Disability, Medicine, Activism
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.
Bio
Amanda Cachia has an established career profile as a curator, consultant, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality. She 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. Cachia is the author of Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (forthcoming 2025), and The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024). She is also editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), which includes over 40 international contributors. She is currently working on her third book, Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art, which is under advance contract with Manchester University Press.
Praise for this book
"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
