Hospital Aesthetics : Disability, Medicine, Activism

In Disability Aesthetics, Amanda Cachia introduces a broad array of contemporary artists who are engaging in relational aesthetic activism and socially engaged art practice.

She analyzes practices in which artists are taking health and care into their own hands by making works that engage with the ever-subjective experience of being sick and ill. The first truly comprehensive monograph in critical disability studies to be grounded in a deep and scholarly understanding of modern and contemporary art practice, this work presents hospital aesthetics as a decolonizing gesture, wherein contemporary artists go against the tendency for the medical industrial complex to treat disabled bodies as specimens and, eventually, archives.

Cachia aims to codify “hospitable aesthetics” as a category or genre of disability art that is more relevant now than ever before, as increasing numbers of artists turn to the hospital or doctor’s office as a canvas, literally and symbolically. -- .