Deconstruction or Reinforcement? How Modernist Disability Aesthetics Did or Did Not Challenge Historical Normates

Abstract

This paper aims to examine how disability as a trope has been a constant in Modern Art practices, and to what extent this presence constituted a challenge or a reinforcement of social representations and conceptions of disability. This analysis aims to assess how those tropes can be appropriated by contemporary Disability Justice-informed artistic practices that want to challenge historical normates as the only acceptable representation of beauty. These practices - such as Carmen Papalia, Nomy Lamm or Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi - advocate for Crip beauty and joy in the arts as a space for resistance that can lead to social changes that make space for Disabled bodyminds in the public sphere. First, we will provide some pragmatic characterization of the major concepts at play when connecting Modernisms, disability aesthetics, and contemporary Disability Justice artistic practice. This will take us back to the constructions of Classical Normates in the first century BC, with the Vitruvian man being an early manifestation of a Normate (Hamraie, 2017; Garland-Thomson, 1997, 2009), a construct that will serve as a paradigm to examine how such Normates are associated with a biopolitical impulse to trace a border between normalcy and otherness (Mitchell & Snyder, 2001), which is present in representations of the normative and the disabled body in all artistic forms - in the visual arts, but also literature and music (Straus, 2018), and in representations of the body in medical and technological disciplines.

Secondly, it will be argued that the primacy of Normates in such representations experiences a shift with the rise of Modernism, where there is a centrality of Disability Aesthetics, associated with a growing interest in the disabled bodymind by avant-garde artists (Siebers, 2010; Millet-Gallant, 2010) that is palpable when revisiting the period from the lens of Critical Disability Studies (Cachia, 2020). In parallel, it is worth contextualizing how this shift coincides with a transformation in the philosophical conception of the human condition towards a focus on embodiment and flesh which finds its most explicit formulation in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1945).

Finally, I will propose that the modernist tendency towards representations of the disabled bodymind culminates in contemporary artistic movements based on Disability Justice, which wield the final blow to classical Normates by transforming the locus of representation of the non-normative bodies in the artists from a first-person stance that celebrates beauty and joy (Berne et al., 2019). However, it is relevant to consider a fundamental difference between the organizational modes of Modernist isms and contemporary Disability Justice artistic practice - in terms of the ways of socializing, producing, and distributing the arts that emerge from these very different artistic systems. In the last part of the chapter, I argue for an intrinsic and systemic difference that enables us to regulate the proximities and distances among a lineage of modernist tropes to which we can trace back disability aesthetics, and its current forms of being.