The inspiration for borrowing and displaying these ramps together came in part from John Knight’s Identity Capital, 1998, for which the artist secured loans of floral arrangements from Balthazar, Bowery Bar, and other scene-defining harbingers of downtown’s gentrification. Across the floor lay twenty wheelchair ramps McArthur herself had previously used to enter galleries and residencies, many of which had been bought, built, or hastily improvised specifically for her. The two fields diverge in how they arrive at these insights and, perhaps more importantly, in where they go next.Ĭonsider, for instance, McArthur’s handling of art institutions in “Ramps,” a solo exhibition at New York’s Essex Street in January 2014.

Likewise, disability studies contends that autonomy is always illusory, the result of norms and conventions that support certain bodies while sidelining others.

Whether through the shock tactics of Dada or the more sophisticated “neo-avant-garde” strategies of institutional critique, the avant-garde has challenged the presumption that individuals are self-sufficient, artworks self-contained, and museums set off from the rest of society. THE AVANT-GARDE and disability studies share a common objective: dispelling the myth of autonomy. No artistic practice is ever reducible to academic theory, but the parallels between McArthur’s work and disability studies that I will draw here begin to convey what she has brought about in the years since that seminar at the ISP: a change in the disposition to what we call the avant-garde. 4 A more recent phenomenon, present in the work of McArthur, Carolyn Lazard, Jesse Darling, and Christine Sun Kim, among others, is art that takes disability as praxis-as modes of thought, embodied knowledges, affective alliances. 3 Frida Kahlo’s portrait of herself in a wheelchair appears on the cover of Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies (1996). In Disability Aesthetics (2010), for instance, Tobin Siebers surveys the works on display in the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937, subverting the Third Reich’s derisive intent by instead celebrating modernism’s exploration of corporeal difference. The avant-garde and disability studies share a common objective: dispelling the myth of autonomy.Īrt that takes disability as subject matter runs through the twentieth century. The year I attended, during the 2011–12 academic term, a break in this pattern occurred in February, when it was announced that a fellow member of my cohort, Park McArthur, would lead a seminar on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” 1 The week before, McArthur had emailed the group an entry on disability from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as if anticipating that a roomful of people well versed in Marxism and psychoanalysis might not know the rudimentary distinction between “impairment” (i.e., physical, sensory, or cognitive limitation) and “disability” (the experience of structural or environmental barriers), the two halves of the so-called social model that has informed advocacy and activism since the 1970s. So goes the weekly rhythm of the Whitney Independent Study Program: seminars led by the program’s legendary founding director, Ron Clark, followed by sessions with visiting artists, curators, and scholars. Park McArthur, Ramps, 2010–2014, 20 access ramps from various art institutions, 5 aluminum signs, vinyl wall text, dimensions variable, detail.

Columbus illusion museum