Aesthetics

Disability aesthetics is a critical approach to thinking and making of art through a disability perspective. It is an approach that revises and resists the ways in which mainstream society has marginalized the disabled person as well as disability art. In part, this work has centered on the efforts of arts scholars to critique traditional notions of aesthetics that emphasize an ideal body and simultaneously discount, minimize, or erase disability. Cultural assumptions about disability inform many artistic artifacts and performance, and [Page 63]the analysis of these assumptions helps us to understand how disability has been historically and socially construed as well as how these parameters on disability limit the possibilities for new artistic practices. Consequently, a disability perspective foregrounds the value and power of human variegation, and it challenges the ways in which disability has typically been viewed as a deficit.

It is important to grapple with how art reinscribes and helps maintain traditional societal frames for disability, work that has been undertaken by such scholars as Lennard Davis, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson. This work helps us understand how disability and its figures have worked as the hidden partners in supporting what are deemed important cultural messages that are disseminated through art. Davis's work on the deafened moment looks at “deafness as a critical modality”—more specifically at the sites and ways in which the emphasis on hearing and sound falls out and there is a reliance on nonverbal signs. There are, as he demonstrates, cultural and artistic practices that emphasize moments of deafness without fully acknowledging the ways in which the practice rests on deafness itself. Mitchell and Snyder show the ways in which disability is used as a narrative prosthesis in literature, how images of disability act to jumpstart engagement with the text through a problem or crisis. It sets in motion the storyline, but by the end of the narrative, the disability most often gives way to some triumph of the able-bodiedness or the normal. Thomson has addressed how freak shows, photographs of the disabled, and other cultural evidence rely on the audience response of staring and thus communicate a set of coded messages about disability and its place in society.

The representation of disability is, of course, not new. Historically, a number of performing artists, as a result of their investment in challenging traditional modes of representation, have incorporated the presence of the disabled in their works. These numerous approaches include disabled characters in plays, sensory frames of reference from a position of “as if” disabled (such as Robert Wilson's early work, Deafman Glance, with African American deaf-mute Raymond Andrews), the use of sign language in modern dance works, or an entire aesthetic of modernity based on what could be called a disability perspective, such as the work of Antonin Artaud. In fact modernist (as well as postmodernist) aesthetics has often drawn on the seemingly unstable and often unclassifiable bodies of the disabled to bring new life to art practices. While a number of these examples open up new aesthetic frames, they also have worked to reinscribe the abnormal phenomena back within the regime of normalcy.

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