Empathy / Empathie

The Art History Graduate Student Association Conference

Art History, Humanities, and Special Individualized Programs, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

The Subtle Affect of Grocery Lists: Researching the empathic charge of faceless portraits in times of distance. 

After months of grocery shopping on behalf of people most vulnerable to the current health crisis, I have assembled a discreet collection of handwritten, minutely categorised, described, even translated in multiple languages or illustrated grocery lists. These scraps of paper, envelopes, and post-its tell stories through their shapes, colours, hurriedness, or prolixity. They become accidental self-portraits of faceless strangers. Pen scribbles and doodles delineate physiognomies, justify guilty pleasures, explain pickiness, or elaborate on cultural culinary heritages. This paper engages with grocery lists as visual material of affective moments encouraging an empathic encounter between the serendipitous artists and the viewer. 

I reflect on theorist Irit Rogoff’s definition of the ‘Research Turn’ within art and curating and of how research has moved from being a contextual activity that grounds production and exhibition of art to a mode of inhabiting the art world in its own right. Originating as a form of working from ‘inherited knowledges,’ research is now thought of as a form of ‘working from conditions.’ Conditions are impacted by factors such as precariousness, sustainability, security, and financialisation, and these necessarily impact subjects, methodologies, and audiences of research.

This presentation engages thus with social reproduction theories (Federici, Fortunati) and their intersectional developments (Hills Collins, Bhattacharya), in order to locate the labour inherently represented by the grocery lists and delineating the conditions of this research. It challenges the capitalist, colonial and phallocentric system of meaning and of bestowing value onto certain objects and practices instead of others. The main worth of the grocery lists as objects of study does not lie within the accepted categories of artistic creation or art historical research (such as origin, skill, authorship, concept, etc.). Nevertheless, they represent a mean of expression in an extreme situation, which succeeds in weaving mental and physical associations, provoking emphatic responses, and suggesting narratives that map subjectivities and sketch intergenerational and intercultural affective connections.