By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services.
ONE OF THE FIRST IMAGES that visitors see in “For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability” is of a hand. Projected high on the wall at large scale, Hand Movie is Yvonne Rainer’s first film, which the artist made in the hospital while she recovered from major surgery in 1966. With the rest of her body immobile, she danced the only way she could: by stretching her fingers one by one and rotating her palm to explore its full range of motion. “This moment,” curators Jill Dawsey and Isabel Casso write in the exhibition’s catalogue, “designates the hospital bed, and the experience of illness itself, as a generative space for art.”
That is, in brief, the core argument of this sprawling exhibition, which includes more than 120 works by eighty-five artists. Shown alongside photographs of Pope.L crawling down the streets of New York and a monumental watercolor of healing hands by Richard Yarde, Rainer’s hand invites us into an exhibition that is, at its most ambitious, a revisionist history of American art since the 1960s that centers mental and physical disability and the sociopolitical conditions that turn mere difference into vulnerability. “For Dear Life” builds on several recent exhibitions and more than a decade of rigorous scholarship by Tobin Siebers, Alison Kafer, and Amanda Cachia (who served as an adviser for this project), among others, while also expanding the range of artists and practices encompassed within the framework of disability studies to allow productive adjacencies and rereadings. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s haunting work about life-threatening pregnancy complications, for example, appears in proximity to Tee A. Corinne’s ghostly photographs of caressing lovers who use mobility aids.
For a show about disability, though, the body is in some places conspicuously absent. In lieu of the more obvious inclusion of Hannah Wilke’s affecting self-portraits made in the throes of cancer treatment is a flower study drawn on a pillowcase marked with hospital insignia. Nearby, David Wojnarowicz is represented not by his photographs of Peter Hujar’s hands after death, but by a cryptic photograph of buffalo falling off a cliff, explained in the label as a critique of US policy relating to the AIDS epidemic and to the forced displacement of Indigenous communities. These works imply that disability and its attendant social conditions are inscribed even where they’re invisible. But I couldn’t help wondering whether these choices were also about protecting artists from the voyeuristic gaze of visitors, or visitors from the potential discomfort of encountering what the curators call “unruly” bodies.
Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose’s installation Video Coffin, 1994, dramatizes and refuses these tensions. Inside an open casket covered in roses is a hidden camera, capturing the face of the viewer and transmitting it, in real time, to a monitor at the head of the coffin, literalizing memento mori and flipping voyeurism into self-contemplation. Elsewhere, Joseph Grigely’s brilliant work of Conceptual art United States of America v. GPH Management, LLC, 1996–2011—the archive of a disability access lawsuit he filed against a New York hotel that dragged on for fifteen years—withholds the body altogether but evokes its needs in intimate detail, giving form to the concept of “crip time” and making evident its unbearable cost.
As the rhetoric of election season has reminded us, we live in a culture dominated by a fear of otherness, a disgust for weakness, and a shocking tolerance for cruelty. The work in “For Dear Life” traces the outlines of an alternative: a culture that finds beauty in fragility and strength in interdependency, in which community is not a marketing buzzword but a vital part of life for the disabled and the able-bodied alike. What will it take to reshape our society into this image, into a society that replaces hurdles with ramps and handholds—not as an inconvenience or a concession, but because we all deserve the safety and support necessary to thrive? The image has never been clearer, and we’ve never felt farther from its realization.
“For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability” is on view through February 2.
By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services.
English 
Français