This paper briefly explores the problematic notion of the 'artist as a social worker' and aims to develop an (ethical) counterpoint to this position via Mouffe's concept of agonism. It begins by tracing some conceptual frameworks that have posited art as an ameliorative force within the public realm, discusses the complications of 'intention' embedded in language, as well as draws attention to the difference between these terms that are often interchangeably. It ends with an exploration of three agonistic artworks, the last being the author's own. It hopes to present a productive counterpoint to the notion of the 'artist as social worker, as well as provide insight to these discussions from a practitioners point of view.

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The following text explores performative art works commissioned within a specific “arts and health” cultural setting, namely that of a medical school within a British university. It examines the degree to which the professional autonomy of the artists (and curator) was “instrumentalized” and diminished as a result of having to fit into normative frames set by institutional agendas (in this case, that of “the neoliberal university”). We ask to what extent do such “entanglements,” feel more like “enstranglements,” suffocating the artist’s capacity to envision the world afresh or any differently? What kinds of pressures allow for certain kinds of “evidence” to be read and made visible, (and not others)? Are You Feeling Better? was a 2016 programme curated by Frances Williams, challenging simplistic expectations that the arts hold any automatic power of their own to make “things better” in healthcare. It included two performative projects – The Secret Society of Imperfect Nurses, by Anthony Schrag with student nurses at Kings College London, and Hiding in Plain Sight by Becky Shaw (plus film with Rose Butler) with doctoral researchers in nursing and midwifery. These projects were situated in a climate of United Kingdom National Health Service cuts and austerity measures where the advancement of social prescribing looks dangerously like the government abnegating responsibility and offering art as amelioration. The text therefore examines the critical “stage” on which these arts-health projects were performed and the extent to which critical reflection is welcomed within institutional contexts, how learning is framed, expressed aesthetically, as well as understood as art practice (as much as “education” or “learning”). It further examines how artistic projects might offer sites of resistance, rejection and mechanisms of support against constricting institutional norms and practices that seek to instrumentalise artistic works to their own ends.

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This reflective text considers the ‘failures of infrastructure’ from the perspective of a researcher involved in a participatory art project funded by Creative People and Places. It uses a single project to act as a microcosm of the practice in general, and encourage the field as a whole to take stock of how artists’ research is expected to occur. It has very consciously not discussed the methods or methodologies of the ‘what’ or ‘why’ of the artistic research undertaken, but rather focuses on the human element of doing artistic research, exploring this from a personal perspective. It has done so to give credence to the notions put forward by Howard S. Becker as long ago as 1984 regarding the interconnectedness of artistic processes to other elements of human existence, and the extent to which infrastructure affects artistic (or artistic research) production. Artists/artist-researchers cannot therefore operate as isolated islands, but rather must consider all the elements around them that impact their work: this includes an understanding of the ‘personal’. It is relevant to – and explores the intersection of – the fields of cultural policy (i.e., government/organisations), cultural management (arts organisations/institutions) and cultural production (i.e., artists/communities), as it concerns the infrastructure that links those fields together.