For Chloë Bass, art begins where everyday life unfolds. In this conversation, the New York – based artist discusses ‘Soft Services’-her public artwork of sculptural benches installed throughout Seattle’s Volunteer Park – and the questions it asks about care, memory, democracy, and belonging. From the legacies of the AIDS and COVID pandemics to the politics of attention in an age of distraction, Bass explores how public art can create spaces for reflection without prescribing answers, inviting us to see shared landscapes – and one another – with renewed curiosity.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: What drew you to the public bench as the central vehicle for exploring such expansive social and political questions?
Chloë Bass: I think that expansive questions are, or should be, at the core of everyday political and personal life. If we’re lucky, we encounter other people in our lives with whom we can discuss complex topics or feelings. However, in the context of civic life, sometimes these questions are formally acknowledged, but most often they aren’t – they’re implied, or felt, but not stated. One of the ways in which complex questions are informally acknowledged is through the design, maintenance, and use of public space, including who has access and who does not, and in what ways, and when. It feels important to me to bring language, as well as aesthetically compelling or beautiful objects, to a site where I feel these questions are alive and at play both in the contemporary everyday, as well as historically and in an imagined future.
Maybe another, simpler way to say this is that I want to put my work where people already are, and to introduce that work, which bears complex ideas, in forms that people can relate to, or use.
How does reclaiming this history reshape contemporary conversations about care, particularly as societies still debate what counts as necessary?
I’m not sure what history I’m reclaiming with ‘Soft Services’. I do think there’s history that I’m acknowledging. The difference for me between acknowledgement and reclamation is that reclamation implies a kind of repair, whereas acknowledgement offers a chance for representation without necessarily making a claim that representation alone is sufficient for repair.
The history that I’m acknowledging is two-fold, perhaps three-fold. The two clear folds are the history of interpersonal care during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s; and then the history of interpersonal care during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Both AIDS and COVID are still producing devastating health effects on people all over the world, and these effects will continue to grow in harm due to the cuts in assistance produced through the dismantlement of USAID, as well as the shifts in research and funding outcomes for vaccination and other scientifically minded programs domestically due to government priorities for the U.S. Department of Health. It feels urgent to acknowledge past histories of medical care, both at governmental levels and direct personal levels, to remind us of what we have not done, but also what we have done and can do. “Soft services,” as a medical term, are aspects of support deemed assistive to patients, but not strictly necessary, and as such not covered by traditional healthcare – things like massages, meal trains, etc. During the early 90s, Seattle residents had the temporary opportunity to use funding provided by the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act to cover these soft services. This was a form of support, and an acknowledgement of different levels or forms of care, produced by the government! We must remember what is possible, while also recognising what we do not currently receive at a systemic level.
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Read full article at artafricamagazine.org.
