“My Practice is Staying Alive”

Anthropology in Action, 2014

This article will bring together two strands of anthropological theories on art and artefacts, the disability arts movement and the phenomenological approach to the study of material things. All three of these different perspectives have one thing in common: they seek to understand entities-be they human or nonhuman-as defined by their agency and their intentionality. Looking at the disability arts movement, I will examine how the anthropology of art and agency, following Alfred Gell's theorem, is indeed the 'mobilisation of aesthetic principles in the course of social interaction', as Gell argued in Art and Agency. Art, thus, should be studied as a space in which agency, intention, causation, result and transformation are enacted and imagined. This has a striking resonance with debates within the disability arts movement, which suggests an affirmative model of disability and impairment, and in which art is seen as a tool to affirm, celebrate and transform rather than a way of expressing pain and sorrow. I will use case studies of Tanya Raabe-Webber's work and of artistic representations of the wheelchair in order to further explore these striking similarities and their potential to redefine the role of art in imagining the relationship between technology and personhood. I will finish by looking at Martin Heidegger's conceptualisation of the intentionality of things, as opposed to objects, and will apply this to some artwork rooted in the disability arts movement.

International Research Journal Persons with Special Needs and Rehabilitation Management, 2018

The perceptions about disabilities have encountered several shifts over the decades due to the various disability rights movements and the introduction of different models of disability over time. The disability rights movements, particularly those of the 1990s in the US, raised many slogans and used the existing ones to convey the perspectives of the disabled community. One notable among them was "Nothing about us without us". In this paper, I have attempted to explore the interaction between art and disability using the slogan as the basis for the paper structure where I have discussed, through examples, the three aspects of it - art for the disabled, art about the disabled and art by the disabled. In the first section of the paper, I have examined the subculture of Braille graffiti and how it can be seen as an initiative which seeks to entertain the visually impaired and acts as a new medium of social and public display of inclusive and accessible art along with analysing the underlying politics of the field. The paper examines some examples of Braille graffiti art in Nantes, Budapest and Venice and later, a similar initiative by a Russian NGO called Belaya Trost. In the second part of the paper, I have discussed the implications of the dissemination of art by the disabled and about the disabled and used the example of nineteenth-century Expressionist painter Edvard Munch's artwork The Scream. Edvard Munch's agoraphobia and some psychiatric disorders had influenced much of his painting style and themes. The Scream is often seen as a depiction of a disability (as some scholars have pointed out, and have been discussed in the paper) by a mentally disabled artist who suffered from a form of schizophrenia with complications. Additionally, the paper has discussed how certain artworks sometimes tend to edge towards inspiration porn and, at times, the disability of the artist becomes a marker of inspiration for the content or for its shock value. The paper has endeavoured to paint a coherent picture of how art intersects with the theme of disability and its dependence on the lived experiences of the disabled along with the often (mis)conceived images that the society indulges in. ISSN: 2321-9254

Canadian Journal of Disability Studies

Graduate student scholar/artists Sydney Erlikh, Maggie Bridger, and Sandie Yi reflect on their experiences of having attended VIBE: Challenging Ableism and Audism Through the Arts. The three were struck by the diversity and range of unique experiences reflected in the work of the presenting artists. Each author takes the lead on one of three themes they collectively identified: what constitutes disability art, how community shapes artistic and scholarly practice, and how boundaries of the field are evolving. The article explores the ways in which disabled artists are defining creative processes and aesthetic approaches outside of the mainstream art world and its ableist productivity demands. They also take note of how artists with non- apparent disabilities are actively moving the field in new directions. Finally, they examine the ethical dimensions of artistic “ownership” in the collaboration between artists with and without disabilities, particularly around those with intellectual...

As someone who finds reading and writing arduous, over-rated and shamefully overvalourized in western academia, I am so deeply grateful for all of the support I have had and for the enriching and meaningful moments I have had with my mentors, be it through lectures and presentations or better yet through long rambling conversations that wind into the night. I have been driven by the remarkable contributions of Catherine Frazee, be it scholarly, political, legal or poetic. I will forever cherish our friendship, our Nova Scotia sessions and our heartening time working together. I am thankful for the work and support of Richard Sandell and the significant contributions on the topic of representing disability made by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries. Richard, I look forward to sharing that pint I still owe you. For your inspiration, mentorship and meaningful conversations I would like to thank my supervisor

The essay addresses the politics of biography in the interpretation and reception of “outsider artist” Judith Scott’s work. Drawing from feminism, disability studies, and Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and Obstinacy (1981) and its political economy of labor power, the essay proposes a new method of analysis which would foreground Scott’s work as a mode of institutional critique. Kluge and Negt ask “Can capital say ‘I’?.” The essay argues that Scott’s work compels a concomitant questioning of this “I” and the very terms of biography, authorship, and ownership that undergird the myths – and the institutions – of the “outsider” and her “art.” https://women-performance.squarespace.com/ampersand/category/soyoungyoon

ALTER - European Journal of Disability Research / Revue Européenne de Recherche sur le Handicap, 2012

Art has gained an important position in the identity politics of the disability movement. The article sheds light on how disabled artists enact their positions as disabled and as artists. In a qualitative survey, a total of 30 artists affiliated with the disability arts movement in the United Kingdom and United States were interviewed. Most believe that disability art has developed in two phases. The first phase is closely related to the emerging disability rights movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The idea of the present situation as a second phase of disability art is characterized by artists wanting to perform and to exhibit for a mainstream audience, and by a combination of disability issues and non-disability issues. These changes in the social field of disability art seem to be structured by the disputed identity politics of the disability movement.

Shannon Jackson’s critical work in performance studies has led her to a vital connection between the professional “inter-dependence” exhibited by those who make theatrical productions successful and a similar ethic that drives much of the participatory social practice art that is on the rise in the visual artworld. Post-studio visual art practices that enlist non-artist participants in performance-oriented statements aimed at social change have emerged in earnest since the de-materialization experiments of the 1960s when visual art’s autonomy and commodification, and its tendency to reinforce art’s insular history, would be challenged by artists looking for alternatives to modernism. As visual art has become increasingly conceptual over the twentieth century, and as much conceptual art is also political in its intent, such questions of art’s nature are hardly unusual. However, Jackson’s inclination as a critic interested in the social efficacy of participatory visual art practices tilts this question away from art’s ontology in the direction of its efficacy in realizing social change. This paper situates Jackson’s interest in participatory art as a backdrop – a theatrical set, of sorts – for a discussion of the ways in which art and theater reveal the inherent sociality of human association beyond the context of the arts. Foregrounding the idea that interdependence drives human association -- as this claim is contextualized in performance-oriented art -- is a compelling way to situate a more fundamental discussion of the relationship between the individual’s autonomy and the inevitable limits to that autonomy in regard to the individual’s dependence on the social group. Just as Jackson sees the individual to need the support of its wider social network, and just as performance studies serves an illuminating supporting mechanism for social practice art, I claim that the strength of Jackson’s claims can be bolstered if her ideas are brought into greater contact with feminist philosophy that functions at the intersection of epistemology and political thought. I contend that Iris Marion Young and Shannon Sullivan’s framing of situatedness in the context of inclusion politics and pragmatist transactional epistemology can further foreground the idea that social limitations are actually generative contingencies that drive social cooperation. In order to contextualize Jackson’s understanding that human limitations are generative, I look to Young and Sullivan because their work intersects with each other in challenging a primary assumption of feminist standpoint theory that sees marginalization to engender privileged standpoints. Taken together, these thinkers take a positive view of the notion of limited standpoints. Rather than rehearse as association between marginalization and privilege, all agents are understood to necessarily dependent because they are limited in what they can fully know. Feminist epistemology is helpful in strengthening Jackson’s claim, but only if the notion that an agent’s limited points of view is not seen as a something that provides greater insight than other points of view. I make the claim that Iris Marion Young’s conception of the value of limited standpoints in the process of developing stronger publics through deliberative democratic processes and Shannon Sullivan’s pragmatist feminist epistemology both show how uncertainty and limitations bear out positively in social groups. Young and Sullivan help advance Jackson’s interest in reframing disability as a vehicle for social interdependence when Jackson’s claim for already existing systemic support is understood in a political-epistemological context. The intersection of disability studies and standpoint theory foreground an ethic of care circulating through art and wider social configurations.