For the Edited Collection: Disability, Culture and Identity
(to be published in 2003)
Edited by Sheila Riddell & Nick Watson
7,905 Words
Now I Know Why Disability Art Is Drowning
in the River Lethe (thanks to Pierre Bourdieu)
by Dr
Paul A. Darke
'Shallow understanding from people of good will
is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.'
Martin Luther King
I had a shave this morning, which for a bearded man is
quite something. It made me
realise that the whole process was very much like the Disability Art movement:
a nice idea but one which would create soreness and resentment, need a lot of
maintenance and expensive up-keep (that is not going to happen), and would soon
lose its fresh appeal. Equally,
the motivation for it would be continually misinterpreted. Leaving the only way forward being a
step back. Just as I shall stop
shaving, those elements of any value within the Disability Art movement will
fade away. I say this as someone
who makes a living as a Disability Artist and as someone who fundamentally
believes in the worth of Disability Art as potentially the most significant art
movement of the late twentieth century.
Disability Art is far more significant than anything the Brit-Art
individuals or groups of the last ten years have produced either individually
or collectively – but which the British Government at the turn of the 21st
Century is keen to promote as the new face of contemporary creative
Britain.
I start this chapter by giving an overview of Disability
Arts as it is now from what it initially could have been, along the way making
a few points about the reality of funding and what funders’ actual aims
are for Disability Art. I then
move onto the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, linking them directly to Disability
Arts, to show how and why Disability Art has been negated as a potentially
significant art practice in contemporary art culture in the UK (and, most
likely, in all other cultures). I would argue that Disability Art has (had)
such significance because its potential, as we will see, is that it
deconstructs the constructions which society creates through its art and other
hegemonies of normality; hegemonies that legitimate a society’s own sense
of what is ‘good’ art, a ‘normal’ body and a
‘vibrant’ culture as the epitomisation of civilised culture.
Disability Art was first a significant item on the agenda
of disability politics between 1985 – 1987; a period during which the
London Disability Arts Forum was founded along with its seminal Disability Arts
magazine DAIL. A magazine followed
not too many years later by the even glossier Disability Arts Magazine
(DAM). Disability Arts had be
around before in the UK, and in the USA, but for Britain the mid-1980s was the
beginning of a Disability Arts culture linked to and coming from within the
Disability Politics movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Great hopes, combined with immense excitement, were held by
all involved; it would be a truly inclusive, accessible, revolutionary and
egalitarian cultural expression in a mainstream culture which excluded,
discriminated, used and abused disabled people both culturally and in its own
social and artistic fantasies (Campbell & Oliver, 1996; and Morrison,
1990). Disability Art used art to
identify and reveal how ‘cultural forms and practices do not simply
reflect an already given social world but, rather, play a constitutive role in
the construction of that world’ (Bowler, 1994). In this respect Disability Art saw, from its inception, the
art world and the art establishment, through its exclusion of disabled people,
as playing an important role in society’s, and its constituent cultures,
broader exclusion of disabled people and its continuing denial of disability as
a social issue
Thus, Disability Art philosophy is based upon legitimating
the experience of disabled people as equal within art and all other cultural
practices; not as an equal opportunities issue but as part of a process of
re-presenting a more accurate picture of society, life, disability and
impairment and art itself.
Disability Art is a challenge to, an undermining of (as a minimum),
traditional aesthetic and social values.
Disability Art is a virtually a sociology of the art of society, art
exploring its own disabling practices and processes – coming out of
post-1960s liberal ideas of social and material constructivism. Disability Art utilises the social
model of disability (and society) to explore disability (not impairment per se)
and society through arts practice and culture as a collective and individual
experience of socio-economic exclusion in a society that is marginalising,
demeaning and exploitative of the images and experience of disabled
people.
Disability Art is about the nature of the barbarism of
contemporary culture in relation to itself through exploration of the
construction of otherness and disability.
As most non-disability canonical art practice was, and still is,
structured around the culturally hegemonic of normality (the Medical Model of
life, let alone disability), Disability Art is nothing other than a threat to
the core values of the aesthetic values of contemporary cultures (art or any
other). Thus, Disability Art is,
perhaps, the last great revolutionary art at humanities disposal that is solely
humanitarian and non-ideological in intent.
The problem is that you will almost never see any actual Disability Art in a theatre, museum, gallery or even at a Disability Arts festival. Even if you do it is there because it has been mis- or re- interpreted. Mostly though what you will see is pseudo-therapy workshop products; impairment orientated works; usually it will be from a craft basis or developed in an empowerment course (superficially structured within the social model of disability but actual impairment specific): i.e., low level Community Arts. Or, you will see workshops being done to fulfil a Lottery application or other funding body’s equal opportunities prerequisite. Worse still, you will see works that are rooted in the conventional norms of society: ‘heroic works’ that assert the potential normality of disabled people to fit in (for example, Candoco, Chicken Shed Theatre, Heat and Soul and the like). Non-disabled people love this ‘overcoming their disabilities’ kind of performance – ‘activities’ which triumph the ideals of the ‘normal’ through parody or pastiche. Such art ‘activities’ have nothing to do with Disability Art, but they are to do with traditional preconceptions of art or therapy or, worse, as some form of inspirational role modelling with an overtly malevolent side to it. Sadly, the situation is only getting worse. It must be remembered that art participates fully in the production of the world as it is, it does not merely reflect it. Some great art (Disability Art, for example) may create new perceptions of the world but most art is not even neutral enough to simply reflect it. The aim of this chapter is to reveal the changing relationship between cultural ideas (Disability Art) and the processes and practices of cultural institutions – specifically, the art establishment. It is only in doing this that we can see where we actually set out from and, more significantly, why we did not get where we wanted to go.
If the function of culture (specifically that part of culture called art) is, as I believe, to encourage the cultural museums (galleries, art schools, venues and the like) to legitimate the hegemony of normality (Bourdieu, 1993) and reinforce the otherness of disabled people then a re-evaluation of Disability Art is overdue. A re-evaluation is particularly relevant, given the ever increasing cultural imperative of homogenisation of global capitalism, when one considers the increasing alienation and exclusion from the broader elements of cultural life (i.e., abortion / genetic screening / statementing in schools or sectioning in the community) for all but the few normalised disabled. The following quote from Bourdieu (1993) is apposite. He writes:
if it is love of art which really determines the choice that separates, as by an invisible and insuperable barrier, those to have from those who have not received this grace, it can be seen that museums betray, in the smallest details of their morphology and their organisation, their true function, which is to strengthen the feeling of belonging in some and the feeling of exclusion in others. (p.236)
The degree to which the medical model of life/disability is
presumed to be ‘natural’ has increased within society and arts
practice with the arrival of biotechnology (amongst many other elements of
culture). This has now even
permeated into the arts; the most significant art commissions now available are
through the likes of the Welcome Trust and Gemini Gap. Commissions that, by and large,
prescribe a supportive philosophy of such models of life, society and existence
that they get their money from (biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and
pseudo-scientific forms of human management). As if that were not bad enough, funding opportunities within
the public sector (the Arts Council of England (ACE), for example) now also set
their commissioning agendas either directly or indirectly to those of
commercial partners. This can be
either through direct partnership funding initiatives, such as ACE’s with
the Welcome Trust, or to legitimate their own funding as relevant to current
social issues and trends.
Since the initial period of hope for, and of, Disability
Art, most regions, linked to the English Regional Arts Board (RAB) funding
system, have developed and now run DAFs (Disability Arts Forums). The founding principles of DAFs are
that they are run and controlled by disabled people combined with a belief in
the Social Model of Disability which frames and structures the work that they
do (either supportively of artists or in their own project work). Yet this appearance of funding and
support masks a more insidious reality: the proactive assertion of cultural
assimilation at the expense of actual cultural diversity. The proposed centralisation of arts
funding taking place in 2001 in the UK – the abolition of the RABs and
the creation of a regionalised Arts Council representation – will make
little difference as almost all the same officers and cultural presumptions
will remain.
Superficially, a new cultural capital of Disability Art is
being created across the UK which if funded, valued and which is being welcomed
into the mainstream of contemporary art culture. Some would argue that Disability Art is now so fully a part
of our art culture that art historians, in order to re-evaluate the great art
works and philosophies of the past, have started to appropriate. In much the same way that some would
claim that Disability Theory has been taken on board by the mainstream; it now
being in its rightful place within academic institutions across the country (if
not the Western world). Others,
notably Disability Artists still working with the memory of the original
philosophy of Disability Art, are more sceptical about both Disability Theory
and, especially, about Disability Art.
Such people argue that all ‘equality’ has meant in reality
is that amongst the elite of the disabled community there is now a class of
disabled people themselves exploiting other disabled people for their own
career or financial benefit. No
disabled people’s culture has been created; what has resulted is the
strengthening of the normalised hegemonies that oppress and deny the validly of
disabled people per se which emanate from contemporary art (any other)
cultures.
Unfortunately, as with most ideas which threaten the status
quo, Disability Arts has been appropriated by the mainstream not merely in
order to neutralise its potential for socio-cultural disruption but also to
explicitly reinforce the original hegemony which Disability Arts was set-up in
opposition to: normality. This
appropriation, in order to reinforce the traditional, is the malevolent side of
the inspirational role model types of supposedly Disability Art practice
mentioned above. It is quite
logical that commercial partners would seek to validate their own commercial
practices or products through arts commissioning given the post-modern
indistinguishability between, for example, art and advertising. Thus, more and more, biotechnology
companies and other conglomerates, which have millions of pounds to spare on
PR, have used arts funding as a subtle way of gaining either public support for
their practices or their products.
It is no coincidence that, up-until-now, cigarette companies, such as
Gallagher, have used their wealth to fund almost an entire generation of modern
artists.
More significant, in relation to the commercialisation of
art funding, is the way in which the bourgeois cultural habitus, as Bourdieu
calls it (Bourdieu, 1993), of art appreciation secures the support of
appropriate elite groups (the ‘general public’ in questions of
‘art’ are fundamentally an irrelevance). One’s habitus - set of dispositions, thoughts and
actions of your own class/culture which you presume to be ‘virtually’
natural - is, through culture and various sub-cultures, falsely legitimised to
be universally applicable and moral, whereas it is purely a social construction
used to structure one’s life based upon class and ideology. Art culture, like all other
sub-cultures, is no different.
Thus, acceptance in the mainstream art’s culture means taking on,
or appropriating the habitus of that culture to pass or succeed in it. Current arts’ funding can be seen
as not about gaining public support for ‘art’ per se, but,
fundamentally, about gaining specific validation for significant social issues
(such as bioengineering, the legitimacy of smoking and such like) through arts
funding and practices which supports certain philosophies (though not
necessarily particular products).
Consequently, in a few years time, to get the ‘general
publics’ support for any number of issues, whereas we now have the Turner
Prize, Embassy
Snooker Championship
and Marlborough McLaren Formula One Motor Racing we will have the New Genes Art
Prize, Genome
Patent Company Snooker Championship and the Genetics ‘R’ Us Formula One Motor
Racing Teams. Equally, the pennies spent on what is
called Disability Arts funding merely gives the impression that we live in a
pluralistic and egalitarian society.
As such, Disability Art funding is the lie behind which the truth of
injustice flourishes with our consent.
Regional Arts Boards (RABs) and the Arts Council of
England, have used DAFs and Disability Art for a number of rather spurious
reasons which we as Disability Artists and DAF organisers have colluded
with. A collusion which has
undermined almost the entire worth of Disability Art. Firstly, we have undersold ourselves and, by extension been
sold out by the public art funding bodies such the RABs and ACE. Prior to explaining this I feel it is
important to note that RABs and ACE do exactly the same to other traditionally
culturally marginalised groups other than disabled people; the same practices
and processes are true for the working class, black and ethnic minority people
as well as gays and lesbians in contemporary art culture in the UK. A rather telling incident in the 2001
British General Election gives us some clue as to what I mean. The Labour Party (who won the election)
promised to dedicate £150 million of National Lottery money to a number
of especially poor and deprived town and cities in the first few years of the
new government. £150 million
is less than the National Opera House alone received in Lottery funding for its
rebuilding.
Post-structuralist and Cultural Studies have repeatedly
looked at the changing historical definitions of race, gender, masculinity and
gayness, producing studies which have revealed a striking change over time in
not simply identifying the barriers and policies to rectify inequality but also
the very definition of the terms themselves (Bowler, 1994). A similar analysis and shift in
significance, combined with any degree of intellectual rigour, has not happened
in relation to Disability Art. Consequently,
such a lack has participated in the apparently effortless appropriation of Disability
Art by the guardians of our art culture; it has allowed Disability Art to
quickly slip from the grasp (intellectually and practically) of disabled
people. Consequently, in a recent
‘biography’ of the Arts Council of England (ACE), one author could
argue that the Arts Council of England virtually claims to have
‘invented’ disability equality (Witts, 1998). A claim which, however unpleasant for
us all, in a broad cultural sense, is actually very true. Disability Art gave ACE the idea and
they ‘ran with it’; specifically for their own benefit: the
perpetuation of its own hegemony whilst also legitimating arts culture as
apparently relevant. By handing
over the ‘power’ of Disability Art, which Disabled People did in
the hope of funding from ACE, the actual meaning passed to them also. Consequently, ACE not only had control
and complete organisation of a significant social challenge to its own
legitimacy but, most importantly, they ensured almost zero ‘politicised
disability’ in-put in to its subsequent cultural spread (the degree to
which the social model of disability was fundamental to it). Simply put, ACE exploited it for their
own purposes; a purpose implicitly normalising in ideology and practical outcomes.
An example of such exploitation, specific to regional
Disability Arts, was the creation of the West Midlands Disability Arts Forum
(WMDAF), founded in 1996. The RAB,
West Midlands Arts, had previously funded – for 19 years - an Art Link (a
little like a DAF but not controlled and administered exclusively by disabled
people but which had a significant number of disabled board members and staff)
that it decided to stop funding to the tune of £70,000 per year in
1995. The process just described,
which was carried out overnight and notified to Art Link by fax, put four full
time staff out of work; two of which were disabled people. Equally, it was an action that then
meant that nothing existed in relation to disabled people and art for the next
year within that region. West
Midlands Arts subsequently supported disabled people, including people from the
Art Link organisation, to start-up and secure National Lottery Charities Board
funding of £40,000 per year for three years (1996-1999) for two
staff - one full, one part time:
WMDAF was founded. The reality, if
looked at more broadly, was that West Midlands Arts (the RAB) had saved itself
fours years of funding commitments to the total of £280,000 in relation
to disabled people and art and actually decreased disabled people’s
employment opportunities.
Tragically, we all played along.
I was a board member of Art Link and the first Director of WMDAF. It is important to note that West
Midlands Arts actions can be seen as being in line with, and promoted by, a
national Disability Arts agenda, set by ACE with its closure in 1995 (more
below) of its Disability Art department within its own Cultural Diversity
department.
In relation to WMDAF, and just to make matters worse, there
was almost no project funding from the RAB for WMDAF. In addition, WMDAF’s work was to be supporting and
enabling mainstream organisations within the region to attract and work with
disabled people (mainly so that they could tick equal opportunities boxes and
be seen to be working on audience development, not actually to make a
difference). The conscious change
was fundamentally about mainstreaming disabled artists, a practice that is very
different to Disability Art and the work of Disability Artists. Mainstreaming is about reinforcing the
existing structures, cultures and traditions of art practice; it is not about
validating alternatives or even attempting to ameliorate the mainstream.
I would argue that, as a result of the submission of
Disability Arts to ACE and its regional bodies, cultural diversity moved on to
be subsequently replaced by the far more marginalising practice of cultural
assimilation (though it was still to be labelled cultural diversity). Disability Art moved from being about
wanting to change the nature of art, and social culture, radically to being
used by many disabled people (at the insistence of funding remits) to say:
‘I want to be in your gang’ or ‘I want to be valued by
traditional art culture and history’. Disability Art took a direction that soon defeated all of
its own original aims and intentions, a direction that has meant that the
majority of disabled people, and Disability Artists, are in a worse situation
than they had been in before.
The move, which so successfully happened in the latter part
of the 1990s, was not the fault of any disabled people, or the result of
disabled people taking on funded opportunities which were financially very
attractive. Many disabled people,
talented or not, from the disability arts movement moved into the institutions
which had for so long excluded them; providing well paid jobs linked to equal
opportunities, issues of access, employment and training disabled people in the
traditions of the culture that had previously excluded disabled people. We all took our share of the 30 pieces
of silver and will have to continue doing so to maintain out status, lifestyle
and apparent high degree of normalised habitus and cultural capital. Consequently, current practices, and
processes, actually does nothing for disabled people per se but only serves to
create a situation where the more normalised disabled people will not be as
excluded as they were before, superficially. Most disabled people will increasingly be denied their basic
human right: the right to life.
The normalised disabled person will increasingly be used as a tool of
legitimacy to marginalise or dehumanise others within the disabled community
(in day centres, through abortion, genetic screening, et cetera). The parading of the assimilated disabled - people such as
paraolympians, ex or current-models, the sons and daughters of the rich and
educated and other televisual tokens – will increasingly be seen. That is so long as they de-politicise
disability and maintain a visable attempt to normalise. Such individual’s never complain
of being disabled but keenly discuss impairment; thereby ensuring the
individualisation of the social in order to further mystify the real
socio-political issues of disablement (Oliver, 1990). It is important to note that the attempt to normalise is
sufficient, not the actual achievement.
The denial of the mass of disabled people’s rights
has ended up being legitimated by so many disabled people’s collusion
with the institutions, for whatever reason, which uses its able disabled people
as role models in order to maintain control over the notion of normality
itself. Such role models paraded
by the media in order to exclude the majority of disabled people who do not
want or are unable to pass as normal of habitus or cultural capital. These supposed role models are
representatives of a normalised education, consumer, ambition, class and/or
morality or as the normalised acceptable face of difference. In fact, they negate the entire notion
of difference in the process of reinforcing the hegemony, the values, the
‘hope’, of conformity and normality (often in association with
consumerist fantasies and idealisations of youth and wealth).
This is not to question the sincerity of any individual or
groups motives, absolutely not, that is not the point of this chapter: given
the nature of a culture rooted in the hegemony of normality it is impossible
not to collude in it; if, that is, one is to achieve any degree of success in
its esablishment terms (be that in the primary or its sub-culture(s)). Consequently, collusion and
‘forgetfulness’ (betrayal) is unavoidable given the changes,
pressures and threat that Disability Art was to mainstream society and
culture. Success, even survival,
meant adaptation and a very long sip at the river of Lathe, where, as Plato
wrote, forgetfulness was the only nourishment possible for future life. Most disabled people who are
successful, by definition, have played the game and have been rewarded for
their complicity as a consequence; be that the supposedly disabled people who
are the radical holders of the social model of disability flame or the less or
non-politically aligned.
Assimilation was, it is, inescapable given the nature of the cultural
beast within which we live. A
culturally (and art culture) normalised habitus, open to a few disabled people,
is what has been developed amongst some disabled artists and
administrators. Disability Art has
been well and truly displaced in the name of a greater hegemonic good of
normality.
The Arts Council of England itself further demonstrated
such a displacement, or ‘reconfiguration of the meaning, of Disability
Art very clearly when it pre-empted West Midlands Arts actions, by its closure
in 1995 of what was in reality the Disability Arts Unit within ACE –
though it was actually called the Access Unit (it worked for ‘cultural
diversity’). ACE had decided
to go from a number of full time staff working to support Disability Art to one
part-timer. No matter how good
that worker could be, it was a bitter blow to Disability Arts; in retrospect it
was Disability Arts death-knell as a serious art form movement of any influence
or significance. The situation was
made worse by the fact that it happened just as arts funding received an annual
increase in funding, by 500%, with the introduction of National Lottery Arts
Funding through ACE. The National
Lottery created a level of arts funding which in five years after the demise of
the specialist Disability Arts team was to have been greater than the entire
Arts Council budget in the previous 50 years.
In addition, the commercialisation of funding, linked to
specific industries often, along with the undermining of Disability Art per se
(except as an equal opportunities and audience development tool) has meant that
Disability Art is now nothing more than jobs for the few and a return to art
therapy for the majority.
Individual Disability Artists, as is always the case in all movements,
wander from one small commission to another, filling the void with equal
opportunities training or audience development initiatives to legitimate the
big bucks – usually from the National Lottery - that go to the mainstream
organisations. How often have we
heard the phrsase: ‘the venue is now fully disabled accessible’? In addition DAFs, or their kind,
provide palliative project work for local authorities to relieve the boredom of
day centre attendees, or empire build with a view to job security by clinging
like barnacles to key strategic organisation and venues within their own and
neighbouring regions. All the
while national Disability Arts organisations hold conferences and seminars for
mainstream organisations, begging to be let in to the club of the big boys,
whilst they search for funding for survival of the organisation, let alone for
the promotion of Disability Art.
This is not a criticism of any individual or organisation;
such organisations and individual’s stamina for survival must be
commended. Such actions have been
what were necessary in order to continue: but the price was high! Such realities do not reflect badly on Disability
Art, Artists or Organisations at all, what it does show is the degree to which
the mainstream has completely castrated (to be overly male about it) by aim,
intent and practice what was the aim of Disability Art. Disability Art could have freed us all,
it was never solely about disabled people, from the chains of the mainstream
(including itself); freedom from an hegemony of normality so habitually
regurgitating its own fantasies of reality. Instead, the exploitation of Disability Art enables the
mainstream to bind itself within its own illusions ever more tightly.
Organisations
will go so far as to distort the facts in an attempt to deny the validity of
Disability Art when it impinges upon their own discriminatory practices in even
the most liberal of art organisations and forms. An example of this is the feedback from a project I set-up
recently. The feedback form from
the Internationally known organisation in the North East of the UK stated that
the project:
could have benefited with more communication between the partners, allowing a focus that wasn't really present. We also felt a lack of curatorial control, or critical debate, which was problematic for our audience, and us. A stronger sense of collaboration, rather than hosting would have worked better for us.
What is interesting is that the organisation would write this given that they wanted almost nothing what-so-ever to do with the project, they were un-helpful, obstructive and totally against the project elements that directly involved them, their venue, or ‘their audience’ at all. The idea that they wanted more ‘communication between the partners’ was equally striking given their inability to communicate with the organisers. In addition they wanted nothing to do with its content formulation or, ‘curatorial control’ (which was superior to most work they commission). What is interesting is not the content of what was written but that it was so aggressive, fanciful and had no degree of self-awareness about it. Also, it made no difference in the sense that no one was going to read it and it would make no difference. Yet, their sense of threatened ‘normality’ was, is, so fragile that it became an imperative to make clear that such an ‘affirmation’ of otherness (which the project was) was not to do with them and that it would have been different if they had controlled it. This trivial, pathetic, attack on an overtly Disability Arts project is almost a microcosm of the experience of what it is to be a Disability Artist today.
Another well known modern art gallery in the North of England, in response to the same project, stated that they thought the ‘information was incredibly valuable, but I would gear it really to community artists working with people with disabilities’. A view which, rather axiomatically, demonstrates almost all of what I have been arguing so far.
In trying to explain the difference between cultural diversity and cultural assimilation to arts professionals I often say: ‘It is the difference between you helping me (disabled) to be me or you (non-disabled) helping me to be like you’. Often they will reply that it is sure about the choice. ‘Absolutely’, I reply, ‘if you offer me the chance to be me, I may well choose to be like you but if you only offer me the chance to be like you, you have given me no choice’.
I now intend to use the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, largely extracted from his essay: A Sociological Theory of Art Perception (1993; pp.215-237) in an attempt to try and understand the need for culture to undermine, appropriate and distort Disability Art into something entirely different to what it is, or was, for so much of the disability movement and Disability Artists per se.
Art, its contemporary worth, value and social status – rooted in class, education and a particular view of history - requires that it be decipherable in order that it is comprehensible. Thus, most art (even the avant-guard and the like) comes out of a tradition; a tradition which in itself gives itself worth, value and history. Initially, Disability Art was a rupture in the apparently linear journey of cultural capital structured and framed, through art history, of a particular tradition that defines what is and is not art. Disability Art did not fit the codes (traditions, for a simpler word) of the past or the present art capital or art habitus of the mainstream, a fact which meant that it was, at least initially, culturally incomprehensible. On a simple level, one could say that to the non-disabled (establishment art) culture, when faced with a new culture that rejects the traditional and presupposes validity for itself, would understandably be shocked, bewildered and a little resistant. Disability Art – in potentially creating a culture of disabled people revelling in opposition to the dominant hegemonies of normality oppression - goes further than being a mere rupture; it undermines the core values of the traditions, it reveals the processes of the tradition, of mainstream (art) culture as constructions even to the most resistant to the de- illusionment of normalcy.
Consequently, art culture, its code-makers and its guardians, must make the message – which is both incomprehensible and totally threatening at the same time - use the codes available to them (their tools of understanding) to ‘fit’ what is invisible to them into a visible structure that will enables them to understand it. In the case of Disability Art, understanding is achieved by reconstructing it to be about issues comprehensible to those who hold and define contemporary art habitus and capital: access, equal opportunities and training. Such issues, often ‘practicalities’, do not challenge any individual’s or organisations own hold over art, and other cultural, hegemonies. Instead, Disability Art is distorted to reinforce and reinvigorate the traditions and values (the habitus and art capital) Disability Art was originally seeking to demolish; a constructed belief system which they, the guardians of ‘art’, assiduously defend.
Consequently, the Ethnocentrism – that
‘their’ view of what is, is ‘naturally’ superior - of
Western (Art) Culture (class, capitalist and medicalised) affected the
definition of what Disability Art is in order to make it more understandable
and codifiable. As such, culture,
through its agencies, layered the medical model of disability –
disability as a personal tragedy which merely seeks normalisation to be
reintegrated – on to Disability Art through state sanctioned initiatives
controlled through funding agencies and bodies: the Arts Council of England,
the RABs, the art schools to name but a few. Thus, what initial funding there was for Disability Art - as
it was originally created and envisaged to be - soon became (and vigorously
will remain) linked to issues of equal opportunities, audience development
and/or training. Thus, disabled
artists are now supported more than ever in getting in to art schools to train
in the traditions of art creation, understanding, history and appreciation. But, Disability Art is not taught at
all except in its distorted form linked to Community Arts. The way of seeing (to quote John
Berger’s famous phrase) has not changed at all; all that has happened is
that some disabled people are now allowed to experience the privileges of the
few in the appreciation of what is the current notion of art.
The art capital, a notion similar to cultural capital in
Bourdieu, for Disability Art as a radical new way of thinking that undermines
the superstructures of contemporary Western capitalist notions of art, is nil. It is nil not just for Disability Art
‘as was’ but also for as it is. Even the new, distorted and appropriated form of Disability
Art, has no value to a contemporary art establishment. The very process only linking it to
social issues and re-medicalising it, Disability Art has been displaced from
the mainstream of art culture in to being based on a simplistic and naive
ideology based upon the values art culture already gloriously extols in its
everyday traditions: normality.
Thus, it is almost impossible to get a Disability Art exhibition –
whatever form of art it is - in a mainstream venue because it will be compared
to mainstream art and, as such, only be found wanting. Why should the mainstream have art
works or artists seeking inclusion and access to the values of the mainstream
when they can have the real thing; either ‘normal’ artists or
‘artists with disabilities’ who reinforce the existing values that
the gallery and museum staff have been inculcated into.
As a result of the comparative nature of art hierarchies,
what Disability Art events, exhibitions and performances that are put on are
invariably marginalised as art per se or held purely as over-arching social
issue education based events.
There is almost never a single artist exhibition of a Disability Artist
for example, there are only ever collective exhibitions. The only disabled artists who get such
showcases, and there are more than one imagines, completely deny any relevance
to Disability Art or even the notion of a social model of disability. Instead, such artists are feted as
inspirational role models despite being, for example, ‘severely crippled
with arthritis’ or having overcome so ‘heroically’ the onset
of paralysis. Such is the
journalist’s lot!
For the art establishment, those with any degree of art
capital or an art habitus, art is not art if it is mere communication or
education – so argues Bourdieu.
Disability Art, given what I have said, seems to bear this out. As I have said, Disability Art has been
distorted to become a tool simply to address issues such as
‘disability’ access, training and audience development. The very notion of adding such issues
– linked to disability and impairment itself but not culture (art or not)
per se – to Disability Art has been the key to its undermining as a
serious art philosophy or as part of a process to develop a culture of disabled
people. The art establishment(s)
take any Disability Equality Training (DET) offered, which is almost compulsory
in any Lottery Arts funding application in order to ensures that Disability Art
is seen as nothing other than either education or as a means of communicating
an awareness of a social issue.
Thus, before Disability Arts has even begun it is defeated by its own
adherents. Again, this is an issue
of the nature of the culture not the individuals. All Disability Artists are fully aware that any art funding
available is largely, if not exclusively, linked to DET or disability
awareness. The quality DET is
irrelevant given the ability of the recipients of DET to do to exactly what art
culture’s individual’s and organisations do to Disability Art:
manipulate, distort and finally control it to fit its own medicalised view of
disability as fundamentally about issues of integration or normalised social valorisation. Art culture, and the various elements
of broader culture itself, is not about valuing disability as intrinsically
valid, in any degree of an absolute form.
What it is about is defining for its society, filtering through to the
broader culture, what are the parameters of normality and what, and who, are
the acceptable faces of otherness (i.e., the normalised other).
To increase Disability Art’s decipherability, as
Bourdieu states, one must either lower the level of emissions (codes being decipherable
by mainstream art culture) or conversely increase levels of perception (educate
the receiver into the nature, meaning and ‘politics’ of Disability
Art); or do both. I would argue
that Disability Art has done both these, and, as a result, completed the
process of its own negation which the mainstream establishment so aptly set-up
for Disability Art to grasp with both hands. Many Disability Artists, groups and partnerships, have
made work which is increasingly lower in emissions by being simplistic or
shallow in content (i.e., overtly political or propagandist in relation to the
social model of disability).
Equally, the proliferation of Disabled Artists who now do DET
(increasing the level of perceptions through specific education) linked to an exhibition/event
as part of a funding agreement is frightening and something which black, women
or gay artists ceased to do years ago and which ‘normal’ artists
have never done.
Unfortunately such a combination, as I have stated, reduces the art (any
art) to mere communication or education in content, meaning and theory. Bourdieu is very clear in demonstrating
that for art to be (bourgeois) art, art needs to be difficult. The notion of difficult is something
DET and the lowering of ‘emissions’ of the content of Disability
Art have secured it will not be.
If any particular art has any art capital, which is part of
the process of the hierarchisation of art that art culture (history) carries
out, then it is increasingly easy to differentiate between good and bad art for
the establishment(s) of art culture itself. Thus, the ‘artists with disabilities’ will
always have the upper-hand in relation to accessing venues and funding when it
comes to disability and art. Not
only due to their inculcation in to a art habitus but also by the way in which
that fact alone allows an individual artist to demonstrate that habitus within
their work. Often, and this is why
they are ‘successful’, their work is within the tradition of art
which makes it comprehensible and non-threatening to an establishment(s) who
control art economies and who, as such, define the nature of art capital.
By having an (art) language that allows access to the
mainstream arts culture, funders, venues, organisations, employment, et cetera,
the language is itself legitimated as a superior form of communication. Thus, its power, its wealth, its
economy is increasingly reinforced and legitimated to itself and the other
elements of culture per se which come into contact with it. Disabled artists’ appropriation
of such a cultural capital and the ability to demonstrate a traditional art
habitus, in itself, increases the sense of satisfaction the tradition has with
itself.
By allowing the ‘right type’ of artist entry to
the tradition (art culture); the tradition is only accessible to those who are
disposed or willing to try and appropriate it because, it is understood, they
can only do this if they have the means to appropriate it and are, as such, the
only ones worthy of entry to the art establishment. Consequently, Disability Art is reduced to an issue of
access or mere envy (‘we want to be like them’ / ‘we want
in’). Thus, the appropriation
of Disability Art is complete, negated and turned into the very thing it
originally set out to oppose. The
mainstreams privilege, the rightful holders of the flame of what is and is not
Art, is legitimated further by a certain type of disabled artist (not a
Disability Artist) wanting to be, and subsequently allowed, in to the
mainstream.
Any disabled artist’s denial of being or becoming a
Disability Artist (and all that implies) is part of the denial of Disability
Art as valid or even a threat to the mainstream. This can be explained by what Bourdieu (1993) calls the
consecration of the social order of an art hegemony when he writes that:
art fulfils a vital function by contributing to the consecration of the social order: to enable educated people to believe in barbarism and persuade the barbarians within the gates of their own barbarity, all they must and need to do is to manage to conceal themselves and to conceal the social conditions which render possible not only culture as a second nature in which society recognises human excellence or ‘good form’ as the ‘realisation’ in a habitus of the aesthetics of the ruling classes, but also the legitimised dominance (or, if you like, the legitimacy) of a particular definition of culture. (p. 236)
The ability to demonstrate that one has mastered art
classifications and incorporate them into one’s own work clearly demonstrates
that one’s own art competencies are demonstrated in work created in the
knowledge of accepted art capital.
Thus, such knowledge is the language that allows artists to
‘speak’ directly to an art establishment figure and/or venue
without ever having to speak a word.
It is a secret language that permits exclusion of those who challenge or
seek to access it; it is a language that never needs to be actually
spoken. The establishment
processes that have been set up, individuals or bodies from the art
establishment sitting in judgement on funding applications from artists or
organisations, merely serve to reinforce the negation of Disability Art and the
apparent mainstream success of ‘artists with disabilities’ within
culture per se. Artists as diverse,
for example, as Tacita Dean or Chuck Close, or some of the vast number of
individuals from the loosely title subculture of Outsider Art (Rhodes, 2000).
Disability Artists are, in reality, in a no-win
situation. Often they have no
education (or training in the traditions of the art habitus) and, if they do,
they are merely allowed within the inner sanctum of art production if they
reinforce those values. Thus, the
issue is not the morality of any individual artist but about the nature of the
culture of art and society itself (the original point of Disability Art). Though those individual ‘artists
with disabilities’ that have been allowed to practice within the
traditions of art culture will, and often do, take vociferous exception to
Disability Art and Disability Artists, on the basis of their own fragile sense
of themselves as masquerading as ‘normal’ in a non-normal
body. Consequently, much of their
work is often about their own bodies or, in extreme opposition, completely
avoids the body as an issue and takes flight in obsessions with facile beauty
and normality. What I call the
‘fugue of normal art’: a flight into artistic fantasies in order to
avoid the realities of their own knowledge of the limitations of the art
culture that they have been welcomed in to. Such artists, with insights that their difference gives them
but which their difference does not allow them to forget often leaves them
feeling trapped and alone. Thus,
all criticism of denying Disability Art are met by such artists with accusations
of envy, jealousy and bitterness when they are merely observations of fact too
difficult to bear witness to given the knowledge the artists’ themselves
have.
Bourdieu (1993) writes, somewhat appropriately in relation
to Disability Art but not about it, that it is important:
To remember that culture is not what one is but what one has, or rather, what one becomes; to remember the social conditions which render possible aesthetic experience of those beings – art lovers or ‘people of taste’ – for whom it is possible; to remember that the work of art is given only to those who have received the means to acquire the means to appropriate it and who could not seek to possess it if they did not already possess it, in and through the possession of means of possession as an actual possibility of effecting the taking of possession; to remember, finally, that only a few have the real possibility of benefiting from the theoretical possibility, generously offered to all, of taking advantage of the works exhibited in museums – all this is to bring to light the hidden force of the effects of the majority of culture’s social uses. (p. 234)
Consequently, in conclusion, I would argue that Disability
Art has been lost except in the activity of a few Disabled Artists who work at
the margins of not just art culture but at the margins of culture per se. Disability Art and Disability Artists
have forgotten, been made to forget due to having taken so many sips from the
river Lethe (increasingly irrigated across the UK by National Lottery
funding!), not only its core values, its core principles and its core aims but
also that it was never about wanting to be part of an hegemony of normality
(mainstream art culture) but about redefining for all what normality (primarily
within art culture) is: a fantasy.
All that is left now is the fantasy of Disability Art as Disability Art
and a fantasy that one day there may be a culture of disabled people. There may well be, but it will not be
because of or come out of Disability Art as it is now funded, practices and
theorised by either disabled people or the mainstream arts culture.
Disability Art was an art practice with a theoretical basis that was about revealing the ‘hidden force of the effects of the majority of culture’s social uses’, not just in relation to disabled people but all people. Too many of us have forgotten the theoretical basis (if we ever had it at all) in the face of the success of the few at the expense of the many. As a result Disability Art and Disability Artists have become, largely through no fault of their own other than through ignorance, a major tool of the ‘the hidden forces’ used against disabled people to legitimate their (our) continued en mass exclusion from not just art culture but culture per se.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the artist Ann Whitehurst for her assistance in the formulation of this chapter through general discussions, in making comments specific to Disability Art and in raising questions about the content and implications of this chapter. Without Ann Whitehurst’s assistance, her much greater knowledge of philosophy, meaning, art, Disability art and the culture of art, I would have not been able to do this chapter.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, P., 1993, A Sociology Theory of Art Perception in Pierre Bourdieu, 1993, The Field of Cultural Production, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp.
215-237
Bowler, A., 1994, Methodological Dilemmas in the
Sociology of Art
in Crane, D., (Editor), 1994, The
Sociology of Culture,
Blackwell, Oxford, (pp. 247 – 266)
Campbell, J. and Oliver, M., 1996, Disability Politics, Routledge, London
Crane, D., (Editor), 1994, The Sociology of Culture, Blackwell, Oxford
Crow, E., 1995, Disability
Arts The Business,
National Disability Arts Forum, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Morrison, E, 1990, Dail
Magazine: Anthology The First Five Years, LDAF, London
Oliver, M., 1990, The
Politics of Disablement,
Macmillan, Basingstoke
Rhodes, C., 2000, Outsider
Art, Spontaneous Alternatives, Thames and Hudson, London
Richard Witts, 1998, Artist
Unknown: AN Alternative history of the Arts Council, Little, Brown and Company, London
Spiel
about Dr Paul A. Darke
Disability Artist and disability theorist educated at Wolverhampton, Keele, Warwick and Birmingham Universities. Dr Darke is a cultural critic who has broadcast and written wildly on disability, cinema and culture for the BBC and Channel 4, amongst others. As an artist he works in film, digital media, sculpture, installation et cetera. Paul Darke is a founding member of Outside Centre (www.outside-centre.com), a leading innovative arts partnership, exploring difference and otherness across all academic disciplines. He has received a Wingate Scholarship (1996) and Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship (2000) and is currently working on a definitive catalogue of disability film for the British Film Institute that will hopefully soon be on-line.