It’s staggering that we ever believed galleries might be effective loci for social campaigning. The production of art lags so far behind theory, which, in turn, only slowly distorts political need, that by the time an exhibition speaks to the “poetics and aesthetics of illness”, its only language is cliché.
Whom does it help to find a secondary Felix Gonzalez-Torres (poetic, check) and hang it next to a tertiary Derek Jarman (crassly aesthetic, thumbs down)? These narratives were once productive but gave way to self-sabotage and self-pity. Avril Corron’s IV-bag water chandelier blames her landlord for something, while Bella Milroy’s welfare letters are no Daniel Blake when health claims have sunk the economy.
The social model of disability is that to be unwell is other people’s problem. In projects like this one, it takes on the Romantic notion that consumption makes the artist a truth-seer. A few works resist this: Angela de la Cruz’s sofa and wooden box assembly is art before it is anything else and even Christine Sun Kim has earned her place in the inaudible canon.
But to mix such work with the pseudo therapeutic, pseudo activist babble of the Freestylers is a put-on. The striking academics next door also ask for sympathy because their future “NHS therapists are training here”.
