Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks

Therapeutic Aesthetics: Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks focuses on moving image artworks as expressive of social psychopathological symptoms that arise in a climate of cognitive capitalism – for example, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and burnout. The book is not about engaging with art as a therapy to express personal traumas and symptoms but proposes that a selective range of contemporary moving image artworks performatively mimic the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism in a collective and conflictual manner. Moving through a range of philosophers and theorists (Bernard Stiegler, Steven Shaviro, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Judith Butler, Félix Guattari, Lauren Berlant, Eva Illouz, and D.W. Winnicott, etc.), I propose that there is no cure, only provisional moments of reparation. To address this idea, I use the concept of the pharmakon, the Greek term for drug which means both remedy and poison. In a pharmacological therapeutics, remedy and poison are not opposites but, as Stiegler determines, two poles in a passage between meanings. This approach enables me to maintain the conflict between the curative and the harmful in relation to moving image artworks by artists such as Omer Fast, Liz Magic Laser, Leigh Ledare, Oriana Fox, Gillian Wearing and Rehana Zaman. As transitional spaces, these artworks can enable a toleration of conflict that may offer another kind of self-determination than the subjection to biopolitical governance in cognitive capitalism.