Contemporary Art and Disability Studies

Alice Wexler, John Derby, Alice Wexler, John Derby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429536496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

This book presents interdisciplinary scholarship on art and visual culture that explores disability in terms of lived experience. It will expand critical disability studies scholarship on representation and embodiment, which is theoretically rich, but lacking in attention to art.

It is organized in five thematic parts: methodologies of access, agency, and ethics in cultural institutions; the politics and ethics of collaboration; embodied representations of artists with disabilities in the visual and performing arts; negotiating the outsider art label; and first-person reflections on disability and artmaking.

This volume will be of interest to scholars who study disability studies, art history, art education, gender studies, museum studies, and visual culture.

Part I
Methodologies of Access, Agency, and Ethics in Cultural Institutions

1
Accessibility in and Beyond the Quagmire of the Present

Taraneh Fazeli

As the new year broke, I began to write this chapter from a familiar place: my bed. Most people spend a good chunk of their life there. However, due to chronic illnesses that I’ve experienced since childhood, for me—like many people with disabilities—it is not just a private site for sleep, rest, reading, television watching, sex, care, and occasional recuperation but necessarily a primary site of life’s myriad activities. I often can’t help but experience FOMO (fear of missing out) as I imagine the world outside marching on to a different beat without me.¹ Furthermore, the vicissitudes of relapse and rebound that characterize chronic illness demarcate time just as much as the temporal units of year or day do. I feel it is important to start off by recognizing the position that my reflections on accessibility come from. I am someone who has had a non-apparent disability for much of her life and the attendant privilege (and challenges) of passing as both “well” and white in various institutional spaces, although I am neither.

Until I became politicized regarding my illnesses, I essentially lived two separate lives. Then I came to understand how grappling with the material condition of my own corporeality in curatorial work might help institutional structures change to support this duality and other complex embodiments these structures deny. Since contemporary art supposedly provides an experimental space in which the hierarchy of senses can be challenged and the relationships and power dynamics between bodies and objects within various systems can be reconfigured, I’ve recently begun exploring with others what it would mean to use art to creatively reimagine access. I’ve done this primarily through a traveling exhibition entitled Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying that addresses the politics of health by bringing together artists and community groups to examine the temporalities of debility and disability, the effect of life/work balances on well-being, and alternative structures of support and repair via radical kinship and collective forms of care.² At its core are collaborations between artists and communities of care that take the form of listening investigations, movement exercises, the sharing of community healing histories, and more.

In order to reflect on what I’ve learned through these recent curatorial attempts (and, too often, failures) to change institutional structures long term, or just to make the institutions temporarily accessible during the space of my programming, I will first examine what access is. Then I examine how artists Park McArthur and Carmen Papalia, using different methods, have approached access as concept and material in their respective art practices.³ Operating alongside the realm of institutional critique, earlier in their careers they drew upon their own need-based access negotiations so as to create awareness about accessibility more broadly. More recently, specifically addressing the public site of the art museum, McArthur focuses on a radically imaginative long view embedded in the circuitous and layered processes of access that exist in the present, while Papalia employs a directly interventionist activist approach. McArthur and Papalia’s artworks highlight problems attendant with a recent rise of art programs addressing disability. Artists with disabilities may be invited when the host (organization or curator) has not thought about access so that the artist often must first create an accessible space for themselves. Alternately, artists are increasingly invited to create accessible spaces through artworks and related programs, but they find an inadequate budget or infrastructure, which often requires uncompensated labor. Additionally, approaching disability as a theme can instrumentalize an artist’s identity, and after the circumscribed invitation ends, the arts organization ceases support of accessibility. Considering these caveats, and in relation to Papalia’s activist framework, I discuss my recent curatorial work to create accessible structures in and around art institutions and the barriers I’ve encountered.

Defining Access

By understanding access (and exclusion) to be social and economic as well as physical, I approach it not as a movement toward compliance via a checklist but as an ongoing and interrogative relational process. While access must be rooted in disability justice, it is also inextricable from a sense of belonging determined by other identity markers. As disability scholar Tanya Titchkosky (2011) wrote in The Question of Access:

Access is a way people have of relating to the ways they are embodied as beings in the particular places they find themselves. By “embodied” I mean all the ways we have to sense, feel, and move through the world, as these are mediated by the interests of social environments, including race, class, gender and sexual orientation.

(3)

That said, there are pitfalls in defining access so expansively, such as when changes address the needs of an abstract set of diverse people at the expense of providing assistive aids standardly accepted as useful for various disabled corporealities (of which I myself have been guilty). Another is that while there is a general acceptance of the need for all-inclusive structures, people throw their hands up at the perceived impossibility of tackling barriers to access in cultural institutions all at once—and the resulting quagmire of conflicting interests. But needs are often interconnected and overlapping, and a change that gives greater access for one person, in turn, benefits another. While a ramp might be necessary for wheelchair users, it might also be used by mothers with strollers or artists moving artworks. There’s also often a general lack of seating, specifically for people with complex embodiments. Imagine if arts galleries had ample seating designed for people with disabilities, children, or elders—for example, sturdy chairs without arms that are not fat-phobic, or high cushioned benches that are easier to get off. Perhaps, then—if eschewing the too-common minimalist designs in favor of diverse aesthetics—this might also welcome those who feel excluded in spaces coded as white through design and social etiquette.

Furthermore, while incremental change can make valuable improvements and allow expanded levels of access for some, realizing spaces where power dynamics are truly reorganized is an impossibility without a radical restructuring of societies. Increasingly, I believe that institutions, unless they are built anew, can all too often only be retrofitted to “accommodate” through incremental policy change or tokenizing gestures. To address these problems, institutional action on access must go further and include systemic reform of the art that is commissioned and shown, reconsider what type of funding is accepted considering the “strings attached,” and change the temporal expectations of production and hierarchical working structures.

Groups and organizations that center under-resourced communities and specific interest groups are necessarily structured differently, so I consider them the best existing sites to form collectively organized mutable spaces where agency and dependencies can be reorganized; these are the sites where access is already practiced, experienced, and understood. In an interview, McArthur addressed this tension by highlighting the importance of “access shared by disabled people, constitutive of what we want and need, rather than mediated by an image that provides none” (Dublon et al. 2018, para. 9). This understanding of access complicates notions of who has, gives, takes, or makes access. With this notion in mind, I move to an examination of how McArthur’s artwork opens up spaces for crip solidarity and access in institutional spaces while also critically addressing the limits of the institution’s formulation of access.

Removal’s Inevitability—What Happens Inside?

McArthur’s exhibition Projects 195 took place at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, from October 27, 2018, to January 27, 2019. As witnessed in her solo show at this venerable arts museum, McArthur’s artwork and writing on issues of care, intimacy, and dependency have been influential to recent attempts in the US to represent and/or address disability through the arts.⁴ For McArthur, accessibility is not centered solely around physical adaptions (the “ramp model”) nor achieved by increased visibility and lobbying for policy shifts.⁵ McArthur stated in a 2015 interview:

I want to articulate why accommodation is such an insufficient concept. So much of structural access, be that an elevator, or a ramp, or signage in braille, or affirmative action, or a loan, is a minimal relational proposition: a ramp can get a person in and out of a place, but what about what happens inside? I don’t want to be accommodated, I want to help change the very systems and structures that view my presence as an act of accommodation.

(McArthur and Palmer 2015, para. 22)

In Ramps—McArthur’s earlier 2014 solo exhibition at ESSEX STREET, New York—20 makeshift ramps were displayed that had been acquired between 2010 and 2013 at her request. McArthur, who had recently moved to New York, needed stairs-free access to private residencies, public galleries, municipal sidewalks, and other sites. Many ramps were constructed after she called art organizations to inquire about existing ramp access and found they had none. Building on precedents in feminist art, in Ramps and McArthur’s overall process, life and need comes first, and from there artworks emerge.

Removed from their original contexts of use at ESSEX STREET, which were mostly arts organizations such as galleries, residencies, non-profit exhibition spaces, and studios, the ramps were laid in a careful grid across the gallery’s floor. The checklist detailed each ramp’s year of construction or purchase, material, and the original location’s street address. The artwork’s tiles were either basic identifying information (for those identified only by address) or the name of the “lending” site so that visitors could match the ramp to the corresponding establishment. Made in varying sizes, with different technical specifications and materials, the ramps all bore traces of use, but their conditions varied widely.

In accordance with a 2012 New York City law stipulating that inaccessible building entrances, public toilets, and elevators must provide directions to the nearest available accessible entrance or facility, a sign was distributed at each of the locations where the ramps were removed. The signs invited people to call ESSEX STREET to request the ramp. Present in the gallery were five blank sign variations indicating this network of relation. As a viewer, it was unclear why lenders originally procured the ramps. Was it because McArthur personally held sway, or maybe they feared the ramifications of not being ADA-compliant? The fact that the art organizations were then willing to temporarily remove the provisional architectures for use as material in an artwork, which would slow the process of entrance for others, prompted further thoughts on priorities and motivations.

McArthur’s lending library setup was a proposition to investigate if disabled people felt they could make use of these types of spaces. While the intention was to have the ramps going in and out, this didn’t occur. Instead, the static taxonomical mapping in the gallery set up a calculation where visitors could assess the resources each organization offered in response to McArthur’s request by comparing the conditions of the ramps and making guesses as to how well they might function. The ramps became an illustration of the level of care these organizations afforded McArthur and, by proxy, the attention to accessibility at the organization in general. Material fact became an indirect and gentle shaming mechanism as critics and visitors alike participated publicly in this assessment. For example, critic David Everitt Howe (2014) wrote, “Tattered and DIY, ESSEX STREET’s two ramps make a failing grade, while the Whitney ISP’s, by comparison, makes the case that ‘a Marxist boot camp’ only want(s) the best” (para. 3). It’s worth noting that “the best” might not actually be the shiniest prefabricated ramp; a ramp’s quality does not indicate other factors that determine use such as whether there will be someone present who knows how to assemble it. The ramp pile-up not only illustrated both the slow process of fighting for access for oneself and others, but it also simultaneously affirmed the highly social and creative nature of access by celebrating the work of McArthur and her friends.

Furthermore, all these ramps were notably portable and temporary, ad hoc fixes retrofitted to structures that already existed. While such constructions can make a real difference, they illuminate how access remains provisional and contingent. On the artwork’s gesture of removal and its inevitability, which adeptly illustrates how organizations continually perform the optics of justice while maintaining systems of injustice, McArthur (2014) stated: “‘The ramps’ presence at ESSEX STREET is unavoidable, their absence from their initially intended sites conforms to the general absence of access at every other cultural and physical institution we attend” (para. 3).

The final element in the gallery was a vinyl wall text of a link to a Wikipedia page, created by McArthur, for writer and activist Marta Russell who wrote the 1998 book Beyond Ramps.⁶ Quoting the show’s press release, McArthur wrote: “Russell … was one of the many disability activists who knew the fetish of structural access can ignore larger questions of social justice. To think access is to think health care and affordability, language and translation, documentation and identity, social convention and code” (para 4).

PARA-SITES

I emerged from the bedrest necessitated by a flare-up of chronic pain symptoms I mentioned at the start of this chapter, just in time to visit Projects 195 at MoMA in its final hours. In Projects 195, with a socio-economic understanding of what it takes to get inside the door of an institution, McArthur took into account how difficult it might be for people to leave their homes to attend the museum for any number of reasons: from the challenges of operating on crip time, to having children who require tending, to experiencing exhaustion from working multiple jobs, to not feeling welcome in an institution that has traditionally shown a majority of artwork by white male artists.⁷ She addressed this problem by making an exhibition that could be experienced online without leaving one’s bed. The form and content of the exhibition was an embedding of a multitude of ways to experience the project’s elements, with the possibility of using different senses in a variety of places and times. McArthur described Projects 195 as “a museum exhibition that did not isolate the museum as the single site of reception” (Dublon et al. 2018, para. 9). By constructing the work in a ma...