MALLORY  SHOTWELL

Maintenance Body emerges from the social demand that bodies remain legible as functional, coherent, and self-managing, regardless of the private labor required to sustain that appearance. Developed as an ongoing distributed performance, the work is activated by the artist and invited participants during periods of heightened pain, symptom escalation, recovery, bodily instability, or diminished physical capacity. While moving through ordinary public life, participants wear garments marked Maintenance Body or Under Maintenance, making visible a condition that is typically managed through concealment.

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The work takes seriously Erving Goffman’s account of social life as a continuous negotiation of self-presentation, particularly his analysis of stigma, passing, and information control. Invisible illness often requires precisely this kind of management. Symptoms are edited, softened, concealed, translated, or deferred in order to preserve social ease, institutional credibility, and interpersonal legibility. One does not simply inhabit a difficult body; one performs its acceptability.

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At the same time, the work resists reducing this performance to stigma alone. Following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, the body here is not an object one possesses, but the primary condition through which one encounters the world. Chronic illness destabilizes that relationship. The lived body becomes unpredictable, intrusive, unreliable, and hyper-present. Public functioning under such conditions requires continual recalibration: monitoring pain, rationing energy, adjusting posture, managing symptoms, anticipating collapse, and negotiating environmental demands in real time. These acts are not ancillary to daily life. They become daily life.

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The intervention also engages disability discourse surrounding compulsory able-bodiedness and public legibility. Contemporary public life is structured around assumptions of bodily stability, endurance, productivity, and coherence. Bodies that visibly deviate are often made hypervisible; bodies whose dysfunction remains invisible are frequently met with suspicion, dismissal, or demands for explanation. Maintenance Body occupies this unstable threshold. The marked garment declares bodily disruption while withholding diagnostic clarity. It offers visibility without confession.

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This refusal is central to the work’s politics. Illness is frequently made socially legible only through narrative disclosure, institutional validation, or visual evidence that confirms suffering in recognizable terms. Maintenance Body rejects the demand that illness must be visible to be accepted. Participants are not asked to explain what is wrong, justify their limitations, or translate embodied experience into clinically acceptable language. Instead, the work foregrounds opacity as a condition of autonomy.

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As the project expands across multiple participants, Maintenance Body shifts from autobiographical performance toward collective archive. The work becomes a distributed record of difficult embodiment, tracing the individualized but structurally shared labor required to remain socially present while inhabiting bodies under strain. In doing so, it asks not simply what illness looks like in public, but what kinds of bodies public life has been designed to accommodate in the first place.