art smarts

Chapter 4. Art, Identity and the Disability Movement

I don’t think people are really interested in that, to tell you the truth. What they want to do is they want to be entertained. And if I start grinding the political axe up there, I might find a lot fewer gigs than I actually get. That’s what I would be concerned about.
joe

to give permission to the artist within your disabled body is an outrageous act of defiance

It’s only been recently that I’ve kind of wanted to separate myself from the blind jokes. When I’m working on new material, I find myself almost exclusively trying to say “OK, that’s a blind joke, scratch it, let’s try to make this a ‘normal’ joke that any comic would do.” I’ve reached a comfort zone, and I want to go beyond that again and test myself a little bit further. It’s a general dissatisfaction with where I am at the moment, a desire to push on a little bit further and see where the next level is, and where I can take it.
gord

In fact, there is currently a growing movement in the art world, away from the conceptual to the aesthetically “beautiful.” However, it could be argued that by the very act of exposing our work to the public eye, we’re challenging stereotypes about what people with disabilities can and should do, and about what can be beautiful – and that’s a political statement.

My art is political in this way: people are always wondering about my wheelchair. When I go down the street in my wheelchair, people see me and think something like, “OK, I will try to help this person – I will open the door,” or “How does this woman get between her house and the university? What transportation does she take? The Metro is not accessible; the bus is not accessible.” You know? It’s political in this way. And my dance is political when they think, “This woman is supposed to be paralyzed. OK, she is, and yet she dances. She does something that she’s not supposed to do.”

If you think about this issue of my wheelchair, you can find many, many reasons to say that my work is political. Political because I go down the street in my wheelchair and I go on stage and everyone asks themselves, “What is the place of the wheelchair in society? What is the right place, the good place?”
france

It’s almost impossible for a person with a disability not to develop some degree of political consciousness. So it may only be a question, for artists with disabilities, of how much that consciousness is separated from – or connected to – their art.

We at S4DAC believe that the pursuit of equality and inclusion is a cultural task as much as a political one, and that artists can have a powerful role to play. Whether there is a message perceived in the content of the art or not, and whether there is any conscious effort to deliver that message, artists with disabilities are taking up space and speaking out in a world that has sought to hide and silence us.

Sometimes we consciously use our art to educate and advocate.

I’ve discovered that I have a role as an advocate for people with disabilities. There are all kinds of situations that are negative for them, that they have to fight against and don’t know how to fight, have no voice for themselves. There are a lot of things, prejudices and so on, in society. I’m fortunate that I have a voice through the newspapers and I do a lot of after-dinner speaking. And what I find myself doing now, in my speaking, is really concentrating on the disability thing. People expect me to be humorous, unless they have something specific they want me to talk about. But if they say, “Just do what you want to do,” then that’s what I’ll do. I’ll talk about the funny side of being quadriplegic and the sorts of things that can happen to you. But I’ll also make sure at the end of it that these people will know what people who travel by wheelchairs have to do to get places, what some of the prejudices are that they have to overcome in the public, and all these little things. I make sure they understand them so that at least I’m doing my little bit to make the public more aware of what persons with disabilities have to cope with on a daily basis. I do an awful lot of that, and I am becoming more of an advocate, more and more, with writing and speaking.

The other thing is I’m a humorist, at least I’m supposed to be, so I like having fun with things. As I say this, I remember I had a friend who was in a wheelchair, and she said to me one day, “Ed, why don’t you ever write columns about people in wheelchairs?” And I said, “My God, Gail, I’m a humorist, I can’t have fun with people in wheelchairs.” She said, “Certainly you can, that’s how we survive, is with the humour of it.” I never thought I had the right to do that. But now that I am a person with a disability, I do. I have all kinds of fun with that. And hopefully lighten it up a little bit for people who do respond rather negatively to having a broken neck, you know?

Humour is a marvelous vehicle for getting any message across, and strangely enough, I guess, a serious message as well. You can use humour to make it acceptable, to make it palatable – just a little bit of sugar that makes the medicine go down. I’ve been doing that for so long now that it becomes second nature for me. And hopefully there are people who hear me and read me and who say, “My gosh you know, the man is right, and maybe we should be a little more careful in how we treat people with disabilities.”
ed

humour is a marvelous vehicle for getting any message across, and strangely enough, I guess, a serious message as well

There’s infighting within the disability movement, and I think one camp is saying, “Embrace disability, talk about it, tell the stories, get it out there” and the other camp is saying, “Ignore disability and just do your work.” I think both of them have strong arguments. For me, I want to be able to take from both. I want to be able to talk about it, but I don’t want it to be the driving force.

I wrote a piece and acted in it; that was the first time I approached disability in my work. Because up to that point I was trying to keep disability under the rug, thinking “Well it doesn’t matter that I have this injury, I’m still an actor, I’m still James Sanders.” I tried to believe that I was an actor who happens to have a disability, and I’ve discovered that there’s a conflict in that. Yes, I am an actor, but the stories that I want to tell will have disability in them, there’s no choice. I have a disability, so why not embrace that and identify myself as an artist with a disability?

I think it’s better to acknowledge disability as a part of my existence, a part of my life, a part of my personality, but not to let disability be the sole driving force of every argument and every impulse or choice that I go on to present in my work.

Some of the roles I’ve gone out for were where casting directors called me specifically because I am an actor who uses a wheelchair – they’d call me in to play these disabled characters. I obviously don’t have any interest in playing them, because I’ve never made a good reading for any of them, and I have yet to get any of those jobs. That’s my own issue. I need to smarten up my act and go in there and get the role and say, “OK, let’s do this a little differently. Let’s get your message across, but let’s also get mine.” I think that’s a major area for me to work in as well – being able to take this crap that’s out there and make it meaningful.
james

Artists with disabilites share more ideas about identity.....