Dr Zoë Mendelson will present new research into the virus as metaphor, considering applied uses for an examination of its spread, mutation and its ambitions. Drawing on expanded field art practice and the medical, this research uses models from art practice to reconsider the site of the pandemic home and body as host, referring to Susan Sontag’s work, Illness as Metaphor and Mary Douglas’ ‘Purity and Danger’

This is a presentation and text about the virus as, itself, a body and entity intent on spread and self-alteration - and somehow resolutely destined for metaphor. The forms of moral contagion applied to disease that would make its metaphors disquieting or subject to critical scrutiny are not felt by the virus, which is an agent or distributor.

To think of the viral as distibutor-messenger-producer (as opposed to illness) allows it to signify and reflect our behaviours as it moves among us, shifting or reinforcing bio-power, reflecting upon the social body and influencing global networks of communication. There are no zoom museum events without the virus, no conflicts over its vaccine distribution, no hyper- cartography of codes bringing endless packages to our doors, and no global movements of capital and education to the home. The virus itself has a reach and impact that for most is only associatively connected to ill-being.

Expanded field art practice - spatialised, event-like and already fluent in the metaphorical, alongside notions of connectivity, the breaking down of boundaried silos and of querying the architectures of production - provides valuable shared languages with the virus’ reach. This

exchange is useful in that it can provide critical forms of visualisation, beyond data exposing and iterating.

Zoë Mendelson shielded for 59 weeks from March 2020 and in this paper that combines visual practice, critical theory and auto-theoretical writing she will draw on her experience of the home-as-skin suggesting how wellbeing as a success narrative dissolves the values of productive vulnerability. Expanded field artworks discussed in this paper will include seminal works by Michael Landy and Fischli/Weiss as well as contemporary works by Mika Rotenberg and Karla Black.

This paper is one of two papers and a conversation with Dr Marita Fraser, entitled “Viral With”.