INTRODUCTION

In a recent article surveying the precarious conditions of labor, Sarah Jaffe writes, 

“Burnout is not a problem we can individually solve. It is a symptom of a world set up to exhaust us to the point where we cannot resist […] It is the gap between promise and reality, the feeling that your feelings themselves have gone on strike.” 

At CARE SYLLABUS, we are questioning the conditions that produce ableist allegiance to unchecked labor; to the feeling that we are not doing enough, that we need to do more, faster and better at that. We are interrogating the ideologies of individualism which fuel cultures of supremacy — and in doing so, we meet the limits of our capacity over and over again. Part of this practice is feeling through burdens of care and routinely facing our constraints. To care is to embrace an inherent failure that is also a form of belonging together to the quandaries of being human.  

“...We may fantasize about care as limitless,” Maggie Nelson, our keynote speaker for this module, writes in her recent book, On Freedom, yet  “...in our daily lives, most of us run up against the fact that care, too, is an economy, with limits and breaking points” (53). 

Even when our load is lightened by a division of labor and uniting of spirit, care often has us on edge: standing at the precipice of our depleted energies, calculating what more, if any, we have to give. 

In our fifth module, “I Can’t: Feeling Through Burdens of Care,” members of the CARE SYLLABUS advisory collective have assembled an array of contributions spanning multiple genres – essays, interviews, excerpts, photographs, film. Together, they touch upon various textures of refusal to illuminate tensions between care and constraint. If this abundance of offerings counters an admission of exhaustion, what we find in these pieces are the liberatory impulses of desire where sometimes saying “no” is a form of saying  “yes” to ourselves, to each other, and to the futures we dream of.  While the term “burnout”  evokes a sense of running too hot — desire may (or may not) have stroked an early flame – all too often, the untenable conditions of the present make little space for passion. We talk about “setting boundaries” as a method and means of self-preservation and collective care, but in practice, to say “I can’t” can be a dangerous or even impossible proclamation for people of color, femmes, poor, disabled, queer and trans folx. The world is not designed for most of us to stake claim to our desires and refusals alike, let alone for them to be heard, accepted, and honored. 

Guiding the contributions are considerations of art’s role in navigating our capacities and duties to care. As Nelson reminds us, “art has long served as a place for people to act out what they want and think about stuff they want to be thinking about” (62). In a moment when there is so much in need of repair – and to which most institutions have responded with renewed commitments to diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion – what responsibility, if any, does art and artistic engagement have to care? Care cannot merely be found in yet another program, project, or protocol governed by utilitarian logic, animated by virtue signaling and fueled by racial capitalism. Is art with its reserved space of experimentation, defiance, “freedom and fun,” to use Nelson’s terms, uniquely positioned to hold care in relation to repose and resistance? Perhaps it is not Art (with a capital A) but the art of the everyday – what artist and activist Tourmaline suggests, are “the small things, but really are the big things! The everyday acts of liberatory glamour, care, and openness that keep us alive”-- that contain the most fervent of freedom dreams. 

Throughout the pieces of the module, we see the contributors orienting care’s relation to refusal on a minor scale – these are forms of worldmaking negotiated moment by moment, breath by breath, no by no. In an interview for this module with Erica Wall, Director of Gallery51, artist Joshua AM Ross, locates the quotidian domain of care in the “willingness to understand the conditions that inform our lives in various ways, that have an effect on our ability to engage and be with one another.” Sussing out the module’s key term, “I can’t,” Ross quips, “you can’t not care.” Sometimes, however, it is the body that says no. When her deteriorating hips restricted physical movement, artist Melanie Mowinski found mobility in new forms of creative experience as shown in selections from her series, Long-Distance Drawing, a growth from her series, Wayfinding . Finding a way to move differently is less about pushing corporeal limits and more “about trusting the way and understanding that many paths get to the same destination, literally and figuratively.” Through his offering of a recipe for Cháo Trắng,  Tu Le – owner and operator of 328North, a sustainable and regenerative farm in the Berkshires – finds within ritualistic meal-making, and the memories and histories contained therein, sustenance for surviving intergenerational trauma. Writing of his Vietnamese-American-Queer identity, Le shares, “living in the Diaspora, straddling three cultures, can be a lot to carry and live up to.”

In an excerpt from her book, Spain (2018) – an experimental travelogue detailing a writer’s residency – author Caren Beilin is fed up with patriarchy’s drain on her creative energies. Talking with CARE SYLLABUS about the book, Beilin pointedly reflects on the nourishing potential of saying ‘no,’ what she finds in “the little gestures of refusal, or the little moments of repair that can happen on a daily level, that maybe will fortify me for some of the bigger refusals that I might need in the future…” In the performative, multimedia piece, “I Caint,” Lisa Arrastia attends to the everyday terror of whiteness as found in a seemingly mundane yet insidiously unrelenting force of the neoliberal institution: the email. With her declaration, Arrastia further sensitizes us to the way inclusive gestures are deeply linked to these institutions’ exclusionary mechanics. Finally, with a nod to Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto” (1965), the CARE SYLLABUS co-directors offer a work-in-progress that experiments in drawing lines within current interpretive paradigms.

In their aesthetic range and conceptual depth, political strategies and survival tactics, the collected contents of this module foreground the radical art of refusal  and the often messy, deeply felt exclamations of “I Can’t” that accompany it. Listen closely. 

-Victoria Papa, on behalf of the CARE SYLLABUS team