Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Opioid Aesthetics: Expressive Culture in an Age of Addiction
Session Abstract or Summary
Claiming the lives of thousands of Americans each year, the opioid epidemic has been the subject of extensive public policy debate and legislative action at the local, state, and federal levels, and it has been cited as a leading factor in the decreasing mental, physical, and economic health of people throughout the United States and Canada. This panel, which features authors from the forthcoming collection Opioid Aesthetics: Expressive Culture in an Age of Addiction, brings together a multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners to consider the ways that people have mobilized their creativity to offer insights into the effects of the opioid crisis. In particular, the presenters assess the ways in which this national addiction to a drug class that promotes anesthesia might also be seen to have aesthetic impacts. Through this work, then, we hope to provide new ways of considering the opioid epidemic and its impacts in the hopes that a more aesthetically engaged understanding of it might lead to short- and long-term solutions to bring it to an end.
Presentation #1 Title
“Something too pure/ is killing us”: Opioid-Addiction Porn, Endurance, and the Neoliberal Appropriation of Resilience
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon defines resilience as “a system’s capacity to recover and maintain its integrity, identity, and continuity when subjected to forces of disturbance and change” (2). Folklorist Dorothy Noyes critiques the concept of resilience as a (reactionary, not preventative) tool of neoliberalism—continuing the cycle that causes the need for resilience in the first place: “Social policy and corporate governance seek to make us resilient . . . [and the concept’s] rise indexes the decline of institutional willingness to assume responsibility for the collective wellbeing. We might call it abdication” (420). This presentation focuses on two aesthetic creations about the opioid epidemic’s impact on West Virginia: Sean Dunn’s documentary-like film Oxyana and Isabelle Shepherd’s poem “Backtalking a Guy Who Tries to Get Your Number by Saying You’re Not What I Expected Out of a West Virginian, Not a Redneck at All” to explore the relationship among opioid-addiction porn, resilience, and endurance. Shifting our focus away from opioid-addiction porn like Dunn’s film and toward representations of complex life in places experiencing crisis like Shepherd’s poem, we can also shift our focus toward thinking critically about what people must first endure to finally be celebrated as resilient. By focusing on the epidemic in medias res, we might begin altering the very systems that cause resilience to even be necessary and allow ourselves to move beyond reaction, beyond the capitalization of the aesthetic dimensions of the opioid crisis, and beyond our tendency to celebrate a concept we’ve yet to fully reach.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Jordan Lovejoy is a graduate student in English and folklore at The Ohio State University. Her work focuses on environmental trauma narratives in West Virginia, Appalachian folklore and folklife projects, Appalachian environmental literature, and how locals and environmental groups might build stronger relationships in rural areas.
Presentation #2 Title
Displaying Crises: Opioid Addiction, Activism and Healing in Museums
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
This paper focuses on efforts to represent and address opioid addiction, addiction-related deaths and recovery in museums. It begins with a discussion of a tension that has emerged within museums, between efforts to make museums into “safe” places, where audiences receive authoritative presentations of information, and efforts to provoke audiences, by addressing uncomfortable topics. I point out that the forces that have created this tension within museums, including globalization, economic restructuring and innovations in entertainment and leisure, are deeply interconnected with the opioid crisis. The paper explores briefly protests led by the photographer Nan Goldin against Purdue Pharma in art museums in New York City and Washington DC, which are carefully orchestrated, artistic events that situate the opioid crisis amid uncertainty within museums and medical industries about their missions. The paper then to turns to an examination of locally curated exhibitions that addressed the opioid in the Central Appalachian region, at the University of Tennessee’s McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture and the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia. Drawing on my observations of the exhibitions, and conversations with curators and opioid recovery activists, I discuss the design, elements and coherence of the exhibitions. My main arguments are that both exhibitions—although they have different scopes, and there are significant gaps in their representational strategies—successfully balance competing demands in museums and help to foster empathy and solidarity, by intertwining explorations of the opioid crisis and the recovery movement with representations of Appalachian landscapes and cultural heritage.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Ethan Sharp received a PhD in folklore from Indiana University. He has conducted ethnographic research in recovery communities, and more recently, has developed a specialization in public culture and museum studies. He has taught at the University of Texas – Pan American, Georgia State University and the University of Kentucky. Currently, he works for the Living Arts and Science Center in Kentucky.
Presentation #3 Title
Queer Appalachia Recovery
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
In #Appalachia, we live at the mathematically precise point where the opioid crisis is the worst, the most fatal. Our politicians and our communities often approach addiction from a lens of moral failure and not a nuanced algorithm of capitalism, intergenerational poverty, and working class-blue-collar culture that emphasizes manual labor, brain drain, food & health care deserts, and geographic isolation. This past year, when we published the first issue of #electricdirt, there was one piece that explored the intersection of queer identity and the opioid epidemic. Two months later, we connected the dots that the majority of the feedback we got about the zine, had to do with this one article. It only increased as we sold more copies, this led to us reaching out to several nonprofits and educational institutions in the region, attempting to get data around queer addiction in Appalachia. We found there were no reliable statistics and that what was available was often lazy math of applying the queer 10% theory to regular statistics. We spent the late spring and early summer of 2018 conducting surveys with the people that reached out to us about the article. We spoke to 100 queers that follow us on multiple platforms daily, that are literally fighting for their life through their daily drug use. We learned that what resources that are available for the heterosexual community do not translate at all to the queer community. Our talk will present our findings and explore the community infrastructures we are building to meet this devastating need in our community.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Gina Mamone is Sound Engineer & Artist that lives in the coalfields of West Virginia and the Creative Director of the Queer Appalachia Project. Queer Appalachia makes Content • Community • Culture. Queer Appalachia defies easy categorization. “Queer Appalachia might be the most dynamic and diverse Appalachian media organization you’ve never heard of,” says Elizabeth Catte, author of What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia. Every day over 115,000 rural queers that call home below the Mason Dixon connect on QA’s digital platform. Mamone recently collaborated with artist Nan Goldin and her group PAIN / Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, to help hold Big Pharma accountable for its role in the opioid epidemic (specifically the Sackler family) & currently has a solo show up at Sheherazade Gallery in Louisville Kentucky that is an additional collaboration with Nan Goldin & PAIN. #whichsideareyouon2018
Presentation #4 Title
Better or Equal Use: Ecosystems of Extraction
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
In this paper, I expand on my recent body of photographs, Better or Equal Use, as a way of understanding the political ecosystem of extraction, detailing the ways that class, race, and gender have intertwined in the Appalachian region, such that body and land can no longer be separated. Building on previous projects, the series develops my ongoing approach to landscape as an intersection of governing bodies, institutions, identities, and environments. Better or Equal Use is a series of prints made of coal dust that depict detention facilities and other commercial developments built on former mining sites under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. The congressional act, which mandates that after mining, companies must either re-instate the façade of the original mountain or re-develop the site for “better or equal use,” directly weighs the value of a mountain against the value of other commercial-industrial activities of late capitalism, such as prisons, golf courses, and strip malls. My paper traces the intertwined histories of mining and the medical and prison industrial complexes around these sites; I propose that a visual strategy that takes up subject as material—in this case, coal—can reframe a landscape not as a neutral stage, but as a complex set of environmental, political, economic, and social relationships.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Jonas N.T. Becker is an artist working primarily in photography and video and an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work explores the intersection of belief, power, and landscape. Becker’s work was recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and published in the New Museum/MIT Press anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and Walls Turned Sideways which addressed the prison industrial complex. Becker was born in Morgantown, WV, and lives in Chicago, IL.
“Something too pure/ is killing us”: Opioid-Addiction Porn, Endurance, and the Neoliberal Appropriation of Resilience
Ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon defines resilience as “a system’s capacity to recover and maintain its integrity, identity, and continuity when subjected to forces of disturbance and change” (2). Folklorist Dorothy Noyes critiques the concept of resilience as a (reactionary, not preventative) tool of neoliberalism—continuing the cycle that causes the need for resilience in the first place: “Social policy and corporate governance seek to make us resilient . . . [and the concept’s] rise indexes the decline of institutional willingness to assume responsibility for the collective wellbeing. We might call it abdication” (420). This presentation focuses on two aesthetic creations about the opioid epidemic’s impact on West Virginia: Sean Dunn’s documentary-like film Oxyana and Isabelle Shepherd’s poem “Backtalking a Guy Who Tries to Get Your Number by Saying You’re Not What I Expected Out of a West Virginian, Not a Redneck at All” to explore the relationship among opioid-addiction porn, resilience, and endurance. Shifting our focus away from opioid-addiction porn like Dunn’s film and toward representations of complex life in places experiencing crisis like Shepherd’s poem, we can also shift our focus toward thinking critically about what people must first endure to finally be celebrated as resilient. By focusing on the epidemic in medias res, we might begin altering the very systems that cause resilience to even be necessary and allow ourselves to move beyond reaction, beyond the capitalization of the aesthetic dimensions of the opioid crisis, and beyond our tendency to celebrate a concept we’ve yet to fully reach.
