Margaret Gorman Critical Disability Studies Prof. Kristin Lindgren Final Project May 10, 2017 Disability Aesthetics: Un-Intact People Making Un-Intact Art CW: injury, ableism, institutionalization, gore, nudity, death, ableist slurs When disabled people, who have been silenced for so long, are given the opportunity to make art, their art typically stands in opposition to the conventions and traditions of art and society that have silenced them. The artwork, like the bodies and minds of the artists, comes out “strange and twisted,” defying expectations of what finished pieces of art can and should be (Kuppers 1). Disabled playwright Charles Mee discusses his personal experience with this phenomenon in his introduction to A Summer Evening in Des Moines: I find, when I write, I don’t want to write well-made scenes, narratives that flow, structures that give a sense of wholeness and balance, plays that feel intact. Intact people should write intact plays…I like a play that feels as if a crystal goblet has been thrown on the floor and shattered, so that its pieces...still describe a whole glass, but the glass itself is in shards. (Kuppers 6) This quality of “un-intactness” pervades the art of people with disabilities. It is what many people describe as “disability aesthetics.” The philosophical concept of “aesthetics” refers to the judgements humans place on the value and beauty of a different stimuli (Siebers 542; “Aesthetics”). To Petra Kuppers, author of Disability Culture and Community Performance,
the genres of comic and prose, refusing to commit to one solid form. Pilkey peppers his comics with “imperfections” that are in sharp contrast to the clean, “finished” style of most modern graphic novels. Shaky lines, misspellings, irregularly formed letters, and crossed-out mistakes are all integral parts of the design of Pilkey’s books. Even though these stylistic choices are most apparent in the sections of Pilkey’s books meant to be in the voice of his two young characters George and Harold, some carry over to comics that are in Pilkey’s own voice. The comic “George and Harold’s College O’ Art” below is noticeably cleaner, but the borders of the panels are still shaky, and the lettering contains a mixture of capital and lowercase letters. () () Another example of work that embodies this quality of “un-intactness” is a self-portrait that I created during my junior year of high school. The piece is called “The Poster Child for ADHD.” Even as I was drawing this piece, I recognized that all the different elements in it did not make sense together. The phrase “poster child” means someone who exemplifies a trait -- often a disease or disorder -- so well that they could be on a poster for it (“Poster Child”). However, the poster depicted here is a mix between a wanted poster, a missing child poster, and the kind of “awareness poster” from which a “poster child” smiles. The mugshot placard that I hold in the poster is blank. The poster is also drawn as if it were on a crumpled piece of paper, although the drawing itself is not literally crumpled. There are a multitude of incomplete elements, themes, and ideas in this drawing, none of them fitting together entirely. However, they all relate to my identity as a person with ADHD: as Charles Mee describes, my work is a
24. Solveng, Per Koren. “From identity politics to dismodernism? Changes in the social meaning of disability art,” ALTER European Journal of Disability Research, Vol. 6 Iss. 3. Association ALTER, 2012. Web. May 10, 2017. .