Call You in the Morning | Aubree Penney and Riet Timmerman
Presented at the Association of Academic Museum and Galleries Conference | 2021
Wellness constitutes a fiction of controllable, optimizable bodies. It is a fiction for well people, predicated by a deep denial: if we cannot tell something is wrong, then nothing must be wrong. Wellness is feigning that we know the ins and outs of our bodies and can control and optimize them accordingly.
In truth, anyone can become sick at any time. Anyone can become disabled at any time. Hidden illness can manifest without warning. Accidents happen. Wellness is not an optimal state of being but a precipice on which we continually teeter. If it is a pinnacle of existence, it is a precarious one at best.
To confront our collective potential for illness, for unwellness, is to have an existential crisis, to remember that we are sacks of meat and goo, operating on spurts of electrical current, ever vulnerable and ever mortal.
Sick bodies are just further along in this process, having already teetered off the precipice of presumed wellness and into a valley of need.
The upholding of wellness as the ideal of human existence, further exacerbated by this pandemic, ostracizes those without healthy bodies and minds. To prioritize the health of an institution upholds the myth of health not only as a gauge of success but also as an attainable goal, reachable via particular choices. It is to celebrate health and wellness as the epitome of being, even as we are here at this conference to question what wellness means in an age of pandemic. This paper advocates for care as an aesthetic—encouraging institutions to prioritize illness and equity instead of health and equity in both content and structure, centering unwellness as a primary mode of human experience.
As a collective dedicated to reimagining curatorial practice as care work and operating with a chronically ill member, we frequently find ourselves dismayed at the institutional prioritization of wellness and healthiness. The precarious nature of the human body and mind makes illness and disability inevitable, and yet we fixate on the idea of wellness, aiming to optimize and maintain a body in an ideal state, or at the very least guide it in that direction.
Equity has far less to do with healing or embedding wellness into the institution and far more with recognizing the many needs of bodies, and construing them as needs that exist on par with the aesthetics of an exhibition or project. Our paper We want a sick museum makes the case for conceptualizing institutions as spaces for and of the ill, where bodies are inevitably intertwined with unwellness. How might the conceiving of care as an aesthetic transform institutional policy and praxis? How might we anticipate the ill body architecturally, socially, programmatically, spatially, and temporally, instead of construing it as an outlier? Dismantling the illusion of a ‘healthy’ institution, this vision takes the form of a list of demands for addressing the specific needs of unwell and disabled bodies.
We want a sick museum.
We want a museum that offers seating, not as an aesthetically suitable convenience from which to view a few carefully selected artworks, but as an acknowledgment that all works have the potential to have extended time spent with them, including by those who may not be able to stand very long. We want plentiful seating. Comfortable seating.
We want a museum that doesn't treat stairs as the epitome of architectural centerpieces, with elevators furtively nestled in inconvenient corners. We want a museum that acknowledges such layouts celebrating grand staircases are grounded in the days when disabled people often could not venture forth into such spaces and are thus monuments to a lack of access.
We want a museum that treats bathrooms and elevators as experiential spaces, that acknowledges the extra time sick bodies may need in those areas of a museum.
We want a museum that hangs works at heights conducive to wheelchair users and small bodies. We want a museum where curators sit in a chair to check how a work looks when seated.
We want museum gift shops that allow for easy wheelchair access without risking knocking over a postcard display or an overpriced puzzle.
We want a museum with flexible ticketing that allows for illness and rainchecks.
We want a museum that recognizes that capacity to pay for entry is an issue of disability, given the restrictions often placed on the finances of disabled people.
We want a museum that pays people fairly and offers its staff good health insurance, sufficient vacation, and plenty of sick days. We want institutions that provide the option to work from home whenever possible. We want a museum that advocates for healthcare for all.
We want a museum that develops online events, not as a translation of in person events, but as a separate animal. A museum that knows we may be in our beds as we watch, that encourages comfort.
We want museum websites that presume users may need to utilize screen readers and Alt Text or to vary color, size of text or font. We want websites that offer a variety of languages.
We want a museum that displays wall texts in accessible spaces. We want a museum with dyslexia-friendly fonts. We want small words and short sentences.
We want a museum that finds potential in audio description for an extension of artists’ creative practice, a museum that commissions living artists to write audio descriptions for their own works and supports them through that process.
We want a museum that recognizes that marriage equality in the US has not been and will not be achieved until disabled people can marry without risking their benefits.
We want a museum that does not relegate the AIDS crisis to the vacuum of history. We want a museum that resists the glorification of narratives of overcoming illness.
We want an empathetic museum, not a sympathetic museum. A museum that knows it is sick, made of and for sick bodies. A museum that recognizes care as an aesthetic principle, as well as a catalyst for creativity.
We want a museum that recognizes that these are not actually wants but needs.
We want to be unwell together. We are unwell now. The least the institution can do is be unwell with us.