Maria Walsh – författare

Therapeutic Aesthetics focuses on moving image artworks as expressive of social psychopathological symptoms that arise in a climate of neoliberal cognitive capitalism, such as anxiety, depression, post- traumatic stress disorder and burnout. The book is not about engaging with art as a therapy to express personal traumas and symptoms but proposes that a selective range of contemporary moving image artworks performatively mimic the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism in a conflictual manner. Engaging with a range of philosophers and theorists, including Bernard Stiegler, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Judith Butler, Félix Guattari, and Eva Illouz, Maria Walsh proposes that there is no cure, only provisional moments of reparation. To address this idea, she uses the concept of the pharmakon, the Greek term for drug which means both remedy and poison. Through this approach, she maintains the conflict between the curative and the harmful in relation to moving image artworks by artists such as Omer Fast, Liz Magic Laser, Leigh Ledare, Oriana Fox, Gillian Wearing and Rehana Zaman. As transitional spaces, these artworks can enable a toleration of anxiety and conflict that may offer another kind of aesthetic self-cultivation than the subjection to biopolitical governance in cognitive capitalism.

Therapeutic Aesthetics focuses on moving image artworks as expressive of social psychopathological symptoms that arise in a climate of neoliberal cognitive capitalism, such as anxiety, depression, post- traumatic stress disorder and burnout. The book is not about engaging with art as a therapy to express personal traumas and symptoms but proposes that a selective range of contemporary moving image artworks performatively mimic the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism in a conflictual manner. Engaging with a range of philosophers and theorists, including Bernard Stiegler, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Judith Butler, Félix Guattari, and Eva Illouz, Maria Walsh proposes that there is no cure, only provisional moments of reparation. To address this idea, she uses the concept of the pharmakon, the Greek term for drug which means both remedy and poison. Through this approach, she maintains the conflict between the curative and the harmful in relation to moving image artworks by artists such as Omer Fast, Liz Magic Laser, Leigh Ledare, Oriana Fox, Gillian Wearing and Rehana Zaman. As transitional spaces, these artworks can enable a toleration of anxiety and conflict that may offer another kind of aesthetic self-cultivation than the subjection to biopolitical governance in cognitive capitalism.

During the 1970s, adding 'women's' to 'art' was a powerfully political act. Fuelled by the momentum of the women's liberation movement, artists, art historians, critics and curators began to explore the women's art practice, as distinct from men's, and to challenge its invisibility in the established art world and historical canon. In the 1980s, they continued to creatively critique representations of female sexuality, and in the 1990s, some began to embrace the 'post-feminist' idea of difference and the performance of gender. Throughout this pivotal period, the MAKE magazine offered a unique platform for academics, artists and arts professionals to critically engage with women's art. Though the need to talk about 'women's art' seemed to lose some of its political urgency in the early 2000s, many artists, art historians and art students are now once again explicitly engaging with feminist art histories and art practices as possible models and precedents for resistance. Now is the time to revisit the past, in order to understand and galvanise the energy of the present.Gathering together the work of eminent writers such as Griselda Pollock and Marina Warner, on celebrated artists such as Helen Chadwick, Sarah Lucas and The Guerrilla Girls, this unparalleled anthology of material from the MAKE archive allows us to trace the lineages and links between then and now.