The Role of Care in Enviromental Aesthetics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v34i69.160657Keywords:
Care, Artifacts, Reproductive labor, CleaningAbstract
We manage everyday life with the help of artifacts, a major part of our environment. Although we are the ones who create and operate artifacts, their service for us can be characterized as their care for us, indicated by our frequent attribution of morally-charged aesthetic qualities to them. Their care for us suggests our reciprocal responsibility for caring for them not only by careful handling to avoid their breakage and destruction but also by a more proactive work of care and maintenance, such as cleaning. Considered ‘reproductive labor,’ care and maintenance work does not garner the recognition or appreciation accorded to ‘productive labor’ which requires creativity and imagination. However, care and maintenance work has surprisingly rich aesthetic potentials, as well as an existential significance
for encouraging our engagement with the world. We lose something important if we are completely liberated from such work, the direction promoted by technological advancement.
References
1 Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, available at https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeongeneral-social-connection-advisory.pdf.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1968), 429, emphasis added; Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (The Modern Library. 1968), 539; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1974), 241.
3 John Dewey, Art as Experience (Capricorn Press, 1958), 47.
4 The visual images of some examples in this paragraph can be found in my Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (Oxford University Press, 2017), 152-163.
5 The visual images of some examples in this paragraph can be found in my Aesthetics of the Familiar, 164-166, and Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, 2022), 94-98.
6 The visual images of some examples in this paragraph can be found in my Aesthetics of Care, 110-111. For more discussion of these examples, see Robert Rosenberger, Callous Objects: Designs against the Homeless (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and “On Hostile Design: Theoretical and Empirical Prospects,” Urban Studies 1, no. 11 (2019): 1-11. For Japanese examples and discussion, see Tarō Igarashi, Dare no tameno Haijo Āto? (For Whose Sake Is Exclusionary Art?) (Iwanami Shoten, 2022).
7 The visual images of some examples in this paragraph can be found in my Aesthetics of Care, 100-103.
8 Akiko Busch, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects: Essays on Design and the Everyday (Metropolis Books, 2004), 84.
9 Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (The Pennsylvania State University, 2005), 216.
10 The example of speed bumps and the notion of actant are from Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (MIT Press, 1992): 225-258. The example of the fence and the notion of commendable closure are from Robert Rosenberger, Callous Objects and “On Hostile Design.” The example of the urinal and the notion of libertarian paternalism is from Richard H. Thayer and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin Books, 2008).
11 Juhani Pallasmaa, “Toward an Architecture of Humility,” Harvard Design Magazine 7, 1999: 22-5. The quoted terms are scattered throughout this article.
12 David E. Cooper, “Human Landscapes, Virtue, and Beauty,” presented at a conference on Ethics and Aesthetics of Architecture and the Environment, New Castle University, July 11-13, 2012, retrieved from academia.edu., 3.
13 David E. Cooper, “Beautiful People, Beautiful Things,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 3 (2008): 258.
14 Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things, trans. Michael Brase (Penguin Classics, 2018), 35.
15 Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things, 36 for these passages and 37 for the next passage.
16 Pat Schneider, “The Patience of Ordinary Things,” in Another River: New and Collected Poems (Amherst Writers and Artists Press, 2005), 111.
17 Cited by María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human World (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 211.
18 Jonathan Chapman, Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences & Empathy (Earthscan, 2006), 72.
19 Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, et al (The MIT Press, 2014), 221-39.
20 Luce Giard, “Doing Cooking,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, eds. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, tr. Timothy J. Tomasik (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 199, 212.
21 See my Aesthetics of Care, 147-50.
22 Kenya Hara, Cleaning (Lars Müller Publishers, 2023).
23 Patricia C. Phillips, Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art (Queens Museum, 2016), 210. See this book for the visual image of Ukeles’ oeuvre, including her entire Manifesto.
24 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Cleaning the museum – maintenance art, Khan Academy (2019), accessed March 1, 2024, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/conceptual-and-performance-art/performanceart/v/ukeles-washingtracksmaintenance ().
25 For this group’s projects, see William Marotti’s “Creative Destruction: The Art of Akasegawa Genpei and Hi-Red Center,” Artforum 51: 6 (2013): 193-201.
26 Cited by Lucy Lippard, “Never Done: Women’s Work by Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” in Phillips, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 17.
27 Yi-Fu Tuan, Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture (Island Press, 1993), 101 and 100.
28 Cheryl Mendelson, Laundry: The Home Comforts Book of Caring for Clothes and Liens (Scribner, 2005), xiv.
29 Mendelson, Laundry, 99.
30 Mendelson, Laundry, xv.
31 Rick Marin, “A Scholar Tackles the Wash,” New York Times (Sept. 29, 2005), Mendelson, 99 and xiv-xv.
32 See Kevin Melchionne’s “Living in Glass House: Domesticity, Interior Decoration, and Environmental Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 2 (1998): 191-200.
33 Eric Abramson and David H. Freedman, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder (Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 78.
34 For a discussion of Badewanne in comparison with the Japanese aesthetics of wabi-sabi, see Eda Keskin’s “Wabi-Sabi Aesthetics and Joseph Beuys’s Badewanne (1960),” in Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life, ed. Peter Cheyne (Routledge, 2023): 131-141. For Damien Hirst’s installation, see “The Art of Rubbish” and “Cleaner Clears up Hirst’s Ashtray Art” in The Guardian (October 19, 2001).
35 Joan Iverson Nassauer, “Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames,” Landscape Journal 14, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 161.
36 Joan Iverson Nassauer, “Care and Stewardship: From Home to Panet,” Landscape and Urban Planning 100 (2011): 322.
37 Hara, Cleaning, 484.
38 Ezio Manzini, “Prometheus of the Everyday: The Ecology of the Artificial and the Designer’s Responsibility,” in Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies, ed. Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin (The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 239.
39 Lance Hosey, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (Island Press, 2012), 105.
40 Elisabeth V. Spelman, Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World (Beacon Press, 2002), 5.
41 The critique of this feminist strategy is developed by bell hooks in the chapter on “Rethinking the Nature of Work” in Feminist Theory (Routledge, 2014): 96-107.
42 I realize that I could be accused of ablism. Physical engagement involved in caring for the world that I have been discussing is not possible for those who are physically challenged. For them, the only means of taking care of the world will be pushing a button or issuing a voice command. My concern is that the able-bodied among us are also moving toward this kind of minimum engagement, wasting the gift of our ability to perform full physical engagement with the world.
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