OVERVIEW
by RH Lossin, Ph.D.

Fellow, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University

The word “care,” which is Germanic in origin, originally had two meanings. The first, similar to our own but shorn of any connotation of love or affection, designated concern, regard, or serious mental attention. The second referred to a burdened state of mind: anxieties, doubt, mental suffering, sorrow, grief, trouble, or concern. For a long time, “care” denoted mourning or lamentation. One might wear, for example, “the clothing of care” following the death of a loved one. The more familiar uses emerge in the sixteenth century, when people began to say that they “have a care” or that they are “taking care of” someone or something. The word came to denote not just mental attention, but attention with a view to protection or preservation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, care as a sort of burden or form of mourning is obsolete, but it maintained this meaning until the end of the nineteenth century. While it may no longer be acceptable to use care as synonym for grief, it is difficult to argue that it has entirely shed the associations of its origins.

In the late 1990s Mary Oestereicher Hamill’s aging mother began to rapidly decline both physically and mentally. It was discovered after several months that this was due to a simple mistake in her medication. During the period of intense rehabilitation that followed, Hamill took note of her mother’s surroundings, what she refers to as “the materials of illness and treatment”: vinyl, X-Rays, crutches, canes. These items collectively formed a sort of language of frailty. After her mother was sufficiently recovered, Hamill began to make work with and about these objects.

Frailty, like health, occurs along a continuum, and is never an absolute state. This is why Hamill’s language is important even as the lion’s share of the commentary is extra-linguistic. Frailty is precise in its designation of a state of vulnerability that is neither absolute nor disconnected from a body that is, at other times, robust. And this is what the objects allow us to see—that health, fragility, dependence, and independence are all contingent states mediated by an entanglement of institutions, people, and objects that we are constantly negotiating.

One of six children in her family, Hamill grew up in the Midwest in a religious household, which she credits with her abiding interest in social justice and collective work. But art is about sense and order—arranging objects and controlling spatial relations—and this space must have had an impact on her relationship to the physical world, as well. Sharing, after all, is not a metaphysical proposition but a material one. Sharing means that nothing is taken for granted—not in a moralizing way—but insofar as basic objects become the site of constant negotiation and careful attention.

Hamill’s social conscience was developed in the context of the violence of the 1960s. She protested the Vietnam War and was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the student-initiated organization that challenged draconian social and political hierarchies. She also participated in the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London. She studied George Eliot, psychology, and visual art. Hamill held several academic posts and worked for years as senior research scientist at the New York State Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Her advocacy work in this position was vital to the passage of a law guaranteeing accommodation and access to education for students with disabilities. The projects documented in this book reflect this activist and interdisciplinary background—an impulse to interview (psychology) and to display text for interpretation (literature)—as well as the recent turn (or return) towards participatory art. What distinguishes Hamill’s work from the relational aesthetics and performance-based museum shows that populated the artworld throughout the first two decades of the 2000s, is the emphasis on production rather than consumption. In other words, the interaction of the audience and the finished work is secondary to its collaborative production. This locates her practice solidly in activist work—organizing groups, incorporating voices, sharing cameras. Constructs of Frailty was an individually produced project but we can see how it prefigured the work that followed by tracing, in microcosm, the complexities of the material, institutional, and personal interactions that constitute social life. We can see also, how the distribution of these modalities of care contributes to the making of a person. In retrospect at least, regardisregard was a logical next step.

An extensive multimedia project, regardisregard began with Hamill’s collaboration with 33 homeless people. Each participant was given a camera and collectively, they produced hundreds of hours of footage. The work was eventually presented in number of formats: individual still frames, edited video, live feeds of spectators, protest signs, documentary evidence. Most important though, was the construction of a set of relationships between unhoused persons, artists, activists, undergraduate students, legislators, and the public. The myriad social possibilities produced through the production of images is the real content of the project. Final products are almost secondary and this is demonstrated in the constant reuse, reconstruction, (re)presentation, and reinterpretation by the artist and her collaborators. Occurring over many years, each iteration of regardisregard—even the museum show—was also a production of new material. The live feeds and remote interactions as well as the integration of unhoused artists into the rarefied realm of museums and private universities, produced new relationships and questioned existing ones. Anyone who has lived in a so-called “college town” knows how carefully the boundaries of the university are policed. Regardisregard draws our attention to modes of solidarity building as well as directing our gaze towards institutional exploitation and segregation that stand in the way of truly collaborative, cross-class efforts.

The integration of the formal with the political––or the marriage of the insular space of academic art practices with the expansive purview of social justice––structures the other major projects in this book. Hamill’s trip to Cambodia and her collaboration with painter Chath Pier Sath produced stunning cyanotypes made by war widows on pillowcases. The weight and meaning of mundane objects explored in Constructs of Frailty returns here: scissors, tree branches, and combs leave spectral traces on the delicate fabric. The real and intimate ways that things mediate our relationships with both the living and the dead are on display here as memories stored in everyday objects that are intimate precisely because they are unexceptional and domestic.

Regardregard: Project China/Chinatown returns to the photo and video-based methods of regardisregard to explore the spatial dimensions of aging, juxtaposing the limited mobility of elderly residents of the Hutongs of Beijing and their immigrant counterparts in New York City with the incredible distance between these two places. The documentary footage collected in China was projected onto significant surfaces in New York City. Gameboards, the graphic and symbolic basis for the grid-like layout of alleyways in the hutongs, play an important role as projection surface, suggesting the palimpsest-like formation of identities as they move in space and time. But this project introduces a concern that is not present in earlier pieces: the real difficulty of apprehending another’s subjectivity. The concern before was in facilitating the gaze and here she is actively engaged in blocking it. The final iteration of regardregard can only be viewed through peepholes.

As Hamill notes, regardregard can be read as a literal translation of the French, “look/look” but it can also be read as an act of consideration and valuation, as in “to hold you in high regard.” And, of course, these two meanings—like the dual meaning of “care”—are inseparable from each other. A part of care will always be mental suffering. The incorporation of an Other into our field of vision is a preliminary but necessary step towards a robust regard. The work that Hamill presents in this volume demonstrates the role of art in, not just looking or getting us to look, but in the transformative role of imaginative visual presentations in the construction and maintenance of social relationships. The collaborations in this book offer a way of looking that precludes the isolated voyeurism that can so often infect our regard for the suffering and suggests ways that we can intervene in the always political act of looking itself.