Very often we find in curatorial notes, art institutional manifestos and exhibitionary preambles, a signalling towards the etymological origins of curating in ideas of care since both ‘curation’ and ‘curative’ are drawn from the same source: ‘cura’ or care.
In a (non)conclusive note at the end of a ramble that I contributed to an edited anthology on the Politics of Curatorship, I linger on the ‘cura’ in curation and turn towards another word that stems from the same root: ‘curiosity’.1
It is at this opening and possibility that I decide to close off the piece with a proposition — if curation leans towards curiosity and wonder, perhaps that is when it can truly embrace the ethos of listening as care.
However, something that I completely miss in this detour is the relationship that care cultivates to time. This element of time or duration is where I suspect an incompatible splitting that takes place between curation and curiosity. A forking where one is either on the side of curiosity that unravels with duration or with the time-boundedness of curation that necessitates a limit on the principle of care. Care and the curatorial have an irreconcilable relation to one another vis a vis temporal spans and durations necessary for the emergence of radical thought.
After. Before.
Alongside.
After is a factor of time.
What then comes after care?
Is the after a beyond or a consequence?
In the after(math) of care, what becomes of duration?
How to think about care outside of time?
How to care within the limits of time?
How to care in time, for time?
How to time care?
In the blockage that has overcome me as I meander and detour while thinking through the after of care, I ask chatGPT, in a very reductive move, to show me what a manifesto speculating about the future of care in contemporary art would look like. The language for the manifesto has to be international art English.2 A fascinating swirl of words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs begins to emerge. Here is how it ridiculously, and yet very plausibly, opens with a grand preamble:
In an era marked by global interconnectedness and rapid transformation, art institutions recognize the imperative to embrace care as a guiding principle. This manifesto articulates our collective vision for embedding care into the fabric of our operations, relationships, and creations. By adopting a language of care that transcends borders, we commit to nurturing a world where empathy, compassion, and responsibility shape the future of art and society.
As a counterpoint to the vision of the future of care, there might just be time to cycle back to the before of it. The curious legality of care can be traced to the beginnings of ‘contracts’ and contractual relationships arising from private agreements and tortious obligations. In the Historical Foundations of the Duty of Care James Plunkett traces the movement in the language of duty, liability and care in common law.3 In the early nineteenth century, a significant increase was seen in the number of negligence claims brought before the courts. Many of these cases had to do with industrial machinery and situations of negligence.
The start of the 19th century saw a significant increase in the number of negligence claims brought before the courts. Winfield attributes the rise to ‘industrial machinery. Early railway trains, in particular, were notable neither for speed nor for safety. They killed any object from a Minister of State to a wandering cow, and this naturally reacted on the law’.4 Whatever the cause, the increase in claims forced the courts to offer further guidance as to the proper scope and limits of negligence actions.5
As negligence developed into a wrong in its own right, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the idea of duty was being used to explain liability in cases of negligence, which was to be followed by the language of care.
Now that the language of duty had become commonplace, it was only ‘a very short step from this to say that negligence is not actionable unless there is a duty to take care’.6
It was in the second half of the century that judges and courts of law began to insist that a duty of care was a necessary ingredient in cases of negligence.
Certain classes owed duties of care to certain other classes: road users to other road users; bailees to persons entrusting property to them; doctors and surgeons (and originally barbers) to persons entrusting their bodies to them; occupiers of premises to persons whom they invite or permit to come on the premises; and so on. These categories attracting the duty had been added to and subtracted from ... time to time. But no attempt had been made in the past to rationalize them; to find a common denominator between road users, bailees, surgeons, occupiers, and so on, which would explain why they should be bound to a duty of care and some other classes who might be expected equally to be so bound should be exempt.7
A century later, it does not take a lot to draw out the connections between the contractual notions of care and the sway of contemporary art towards language of care.
Who has the time to care?
Someone sharply retorted the other day, in the midst of a heated discussion about the obscenity of the Ambani wedding spanning months, continents, a carnival of celebrities, all in the midst of a brutally continuing genocide.
The time to care.
Herein lies the after of a moment, a milieu, a world that is forever falling short of time, a necessary constituent of care. The shift to care as a legal concept is a shift to the production of an environment where the time to care is not cultivated, rather only counted and made accountable. On one hand is the idea of care as an inexhaustible natural resource to be continually tapped into and reaped from bodies and beings, and on the other is the lack of time to care.
What we encounter now is a new form of cruel negligence that has supplanted (and actually grown from) the legal history (glimpsed above) that sought to minimise, foresee and preempt ‘negligence actions’. In the contemporary neocolonial, neodemocratic and technocapital order, where heightened productivity has to keep churning, the march of time has to go on, and even in the midst of a raging genocide, the language of care perpetuates the wanton cycle of crisis.8 This is what cruel negligence, as that which is instituted into care, looks like at the moment.
I wonder if the after care then must signal to a before time, a time of real duration — the duration to think in ‘our time’, to be critically indifferent to the time of the clock and to inaugurate a ‘we time’, a shared time and space of thought that inhabits, cultivates and listens, that resists the imposed and punctuating order of time. A carelessness and indifference to the time of perpetual production making way for a duration in which active listening can take place. The after, in this sense, is crucial, not as an uncaring, but a sense of care that stems from a critical indifference to the contractual notions of care, bound by time, ownership, legal claims and relational limits. This is a resistance in language to articulations of care as only that which is enlisted in a limited contract and not sensed or practised as a duration with its own folds, creases and encounters. After all, resistance arrives from its close cognate stasis, sharing many of its semantic tensions with its contradictory senses of immobility and upheaval.
Stasis, in Greek, has the ambiguity pertaining to all things “standing” (both resistance and stasis derive from histemi, from which came the Latin, stare, sistere, from which also came, eventually existere, to step out into being, to stand forth, to exist), a verb that pivots on the grammatical tension between its stative and its dynamic usage, between the condition of standing and the act of standing up, between situation and event—steadfastness, constancy, and stability, on the one hand; interruption, instigation, initiation, on the other.9
I read the repetitive invocation of the discourse of care is an exhaustion of it. An exhaustion of a language of care that is compelled to break out of its own loops.
Fatigue can, after all, only:
insist on its own repetition. This insistent form of repetition is met with its own form of resistance, but this time it is internal rather than external. Repetition gives rise to its own resistance, its own failure, insofar as it continuously produces a heterogeneous element – or ‘draws off a difference’ – it can only circle but not contain.10
The after as a time of the cut wherein duration and care can cohabit, can occupy an unsplit shared time and space. That is the impossibility of this inexhaustible dream, one that has to be carefully, dialectically, collectively, persistently dreamt until it folds in on itself and comes awake.
For now, it is back to the churning of time as if it were always too late to act or too soon to think.
One comes too late only to find that it’s all for the best. The other reading of “it’s too late,” which is closer to our sensibility, I suppose, closer to the bone, would be “everything is messed up and bungled.” It’s broken beyond repair, we are helplessly too late to mend it, it’s over. Which is it going to be? Do we have to choose? Can we? Is there a parallax, looking at the same state of affairs and seeing two different pictures?11
- [1] Suvani Suri, ‘Curating as Critical Listening’ in Politics of Curatorship: Collective and Affective Interventions, ed. Philipp Rhensius and Monia Acciari, Norient Books, 2023.
- [2] Alix Rule, David Levine, ‘International Art English’, Triple Canopy 16, July 2012, https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english
- [3] James C Plunkett, The Historical Foundations of the Duty of Care, Monash University, Journal contribution, 2019. ↩︎
- [4] Percy H Winfield, ‘The History of Negligence in the Law of Torts’, Volume 42, Law Quarterly Review, 1926. (as cited in Plunkett)
- [5] James C Plunkett, The Historical Foundations of the Duty of Care, Monash University, Journal contribution, 2019.
- [6] Ibid.
- [7] Ibid.
- [8] ‘What I call “the neodemocratic condition” is the normalization, even legalization, of this combustible, extrajudicial bond between constitution and cruelty, between civilizational hubris and extrajudicial war, cultured inside the petri dish of liberal democracy.’
Aishwary Kumar, ‘A Jurisprudence of Neglect | On the Logic of Political Cruelty’ in Faith in the World: Post-Secular Readings of Hannah Arendt, Campus Verlag and The University of Chicago Press, Berlin & Chicago, 2021. - [9] Rebecca Comay, ‘Resistance and Repetition: Freud and Hegel’, in Hegel and Resistance: History, Politics and Dialectics, Bloomsbury, 2017.
- [10] Joan Copjec, ‘Battle Fatigue: Kiarostami and Capitalism’, in Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics, eds. Nadia Bou Ali and Rohit Goel, Bloomsbury, 2018.
- [11] Mladen Dolar, ‘What’s the Time?: On Being Too Early or Too Late in Hegel’s Philosophy’, Problemi International, Volume 58, 2020.