Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care

by Adam Walker

Overview

Through developing an ethical-methodological approach of ‘radical care', this book explores how critical artistic practice might contribute to the materialisation of more equal, more collectively fulfilling, possibilities of being.

The chapters trace a set of interweaving lineages perpetuating inequalities: through labour, the body, and onto-epistemology. Art’s all too frequent a-criticality, cooption, or even complicity amidst these lineages is observed, and radical care and the disruptive arttext are developed as twin aspects of an alternative, resistant framework. The book contributes to the critical understanding of inequitable, abstracting processes’ growing determination of increasing parts of our world, and foregrounds art’s position amidst these. It also functions as an interface, both extending the fertile current discourse around care to a contemporary art focus, and at the same time exploring how radical art practices might contribute to a politics rooted in an ethics of care.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, studio art, philosophy and politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032370484
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/26/2025
Series:	Routledge Research in Art and Politics
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Adam Walker is an artist and writer. They are a Lecturer in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Towards a Disruptive Radical Care PART A: The Way Things Are 1. Work 2. Bodies 3. Being PART B: Disruptive Possibilities 4. Text 5. Care Ana-Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

Astute, thoughtful, and engagingly written, this book invites us to think about what care, and caring about care, might mean. Grounded in a deep understanding and appreciation of artistic practice, it is considered and self-reflexive, but also ambitious and novel. It is, in other words, a meditation on radical care that manages to be both careful and radical.”

—Helen Hester, University of West London, UK

 

 

“Neoliberal logic demands a constant investment in human capital, yet it is fundamentally uncaring when our investments inevitably fail. Against this algorithmically imposed technosphere, Walker pits an artistic practice grounded in radical care. Rejecting participation as panacea, the horizon of this important work is the dissolution of the individuated self.”

—Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Royal College of Art and University of the Arts London, UK

From the Publisher