Labour of Love: Economies of Care in Contemporary Art
Glucksman, Cork
★★★★☆
The concept of care has been brought into focus in contemporary art over the past five years by the Covid-19 pandemic. In his short book The Philosophy of Care, from 2022, the philosopher and art critic Boris Groys explained how philosophers through history have accounted for the concept, paying particular attention to Martin Heidegger’s existential treatise Being and Time.
By understanding care as a cultivating mode of future-oriented engagement with one’s world, Groys leads the reader to reassess the 20th century avant-garde, whose activity is reconceived as a “reflection on and expansion of care”.
Though not explicitly referenced, the impact of Groys’s philosophy is evident throughout Labour of Love: Economies of Care in Contemporary Art. This group show at the Glucksman, curated by Fiona Kearney and Katie O’Grady, features 12 Irish and international artists across two floors of the architecturally impressive Cork gallery.
Liesel Burisch’s alluring Minutes of Silence sets the stage. A series of 15 silent vignettes involving protagonists standing still, this video work combines sincerity and tongue-in-cheek playfulness: we are transported from one unlikely venue for silence after another, including a school playground, a busy factory floor and a burlesque changing room. The tension between the utility of the space and the stillness and quiet of its inhabitants is arresting.
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A similar dynamic is at work in Dion Kitson‘s sculpture Ill Communication, featuring a telecoms engineer fixing a utility cabinet of fibre-optic wires. On first inspection I took this sculpture – its back to you, wearing a high-vis vest – to be a real-life technician in the gallery, realising my mistake only when I noticed the absence of movement.
Laura Fitzgerald’s work on the second floor exerts a strong influence, pulling everyone into its orbit. First is her The Visitors series of unusual comic-like panels, drawn with markers on cartridge paper. These works adopt a retro-video-game aesthetic – reminiscent of concept art for the Nintendo 64 – employing a Trojan-horse strategy to smuggle deeper emotional undertones in the guise of nostalgia.
A penetrating sense of melancholy, for instance, pervades works such as But I Do Still Care and More Weather, their waterlogged landscapes impregnated with loneliness and ruin, as spears of rain pierce the walls of farm buildings.
Fitzgerald grew up on a mountainous farm in rural Co Kerry, an experience that forms the core of her artistic practice. But she does not rely on one expressive palette; rather, her work displays a great deal of range, evidenced in her second contribution to the Glucksman show, Rural Stress (Landini). A brilliantly inventive and funny installation, this work centres on a metal frame shaped to resemble a life-size tractor.
The sculpture is accompanied by an “audio meditation” component that requires every participant to lie beneath the vehicle, listening to the wellness monologue that warns about the dangers of rural stress, which “can leave you feeling full and bloated, with your hydraulic lift linkage feeling lethargic ... You might have dark thoughts about your differential lock.”
Labour of Love: Economies of Care in Contemporary Art is at the Glucksman, Cork, until Sunday, July 6th
