by Jordan Lord
Introduction
For my final project, I wanted to think about disabled artists, activists and filmmakers who don’t just represent disability in their work but who also underscore disability as the means by which it appears and how it circulates in the world. This means considering conditions and relations of access as not just added onto films or videos but as intrinsic to them. It also means not considering access accommodations as direct or seamless translations from one form or medium of communication to another.
These artists use film and video as a means of communicating with disabled audiences within their own languages, social structures, and systems of (in)value. Their works all interrogate ableist assumptions about language, care, dependency, and support.
Some of the artists discussed are personal friends, and it is from them and their work that I learned to think about figures (people and things) as always entangled with the ground that holds them (on which they depend for support). It is also from them that I learned to think about dependency as not just relating to those figured as dependent but literally every person in this world. Within a system of global capital, the most seemingly independent person may, in fact, be the most dependent once we enumerate the lives and work on which they depend.
This research began before I started the Third Cinema class, has occurred mostly while recovering from open heart surgery––my most intimate encounter with dependency, care, and incapacity, to this point––and will continue beyond this class.
silentmiaow YouTube Channel:
In My Language, Being an Unperson, Happy Dance by Mel Baggs
Mel Baggs is a multiply disabled artist, poet, writer, and activist. In 2006 and 2007, they created and shared a series of Youtube videos that dealt with various structures of ableism that impact the lives of autistic people and people diagnosed with developmental disabilities. These videos were both addressed to non-autistic people, who might first encounter the video making many of the ableist presumptions Baggs’ work confronts, and to audiences who are autistic or have other developmental disabilities. (Please note: Baggs’ pronouns are nonstandard: sie and hir, but I’ve also tried to reduce my use of pronouns because of a post Baggs wrote about hir own difficulty with pronouns).
Mel Baggs, Still from In My Language, 2007.
Baggs’s most widely circulated video In My Language begins in what Baggs calls hir “native language.” Baggs is pictured from behind, shaking hir wrists and moving hir arms, feeling the space around hir, rocking back and forth. Throughout, there is a soundtrack of Baggs singing a series of low pitches that feel as if they reverberate in hir throat; the sounds make a kind of rubbing sensation on my ear drums. Other sounds in this first half of the video have haptic qualities of scraping, smoothing, clicking, coiling, tapping, flapping; Baggs’s hands are shown engaged in similarly tactile activities that produce the sounds.
The second half of the video is marked by a title card that reads: “A Translation.” Baggs explains that calling the first half of hir video a language is not to say that each action in the first half has a particular symbol or meaning but rather that Baggs is “in a constant conversation with every aspect of [hir] environment.” Baggs comments on the irony of being perceived as “being in a world of [hir] own,” when in fact sie is engaging all aspects of the world with all hir senses, whereas limiting hir interactions with the world is perceived as “opening” hirself up to “true interaction with the world.” Baggs makes it clear that what is at stake is being perceived as a “thinking being “or not and that hir means of engaging with the world, which includes using all five of hir senses to experience things, must be applied “correctly” in order to be perceived as thinking. Baggs also points out that autistic and cognitively disabled people are often viewed as non-communicative if they cannot speak languages spoken by non-disabled people, but non-disabled people are not considered non-communicative for neither trying to speak nor admitting the existence of languages used by autistic and cognitively disabled people.
Baggs does not make the translated video the definitive version; before Baggs posted it, Baggs also posted an “untranslated version.” What I want to underscore here is not only Baggs’s defense of hir language and hir confrontation of ableism but also the use of hir own language as a form of address to other disabled people.
Mel Baggs, Still from Being an Unperson, 2006.
Baggs’s work on Youtube ranges from educational self-advocacy––addressing care workers working with people with developmental disabilities––to social relation, creating and responding to memes. In Being an Unperson, the script is taken from a handout Baggs made for care workers. Baggs describes the feeling of being treated as an unperson in institutional settings by care workers and the various forms of abuse and violence inflicted by people in these institutions. This video makes a similar formal gesture to the two layers of Baggs’ language in In My Language. The camera is engaged in observing details like a hand moving tangram pieces and the camera rocking back and forth, aligning the camera’s gaze with Baggs’ body.
Meanwhile, the language that addresses how these activities and Baggs’s body are perceived are imposed over the images in captions and play as the soundtrack of the video. The “you” in Baggs’s text refers to being treated as an un-person: “If you communicate in writing, people will question your authorship. If you communicate with behavior, you will be punished, restrained, drugged, or put on a behavior program….” The speed of the camera’s rocking and the shakiness of the camera move from something neutral and haptic to feeling anxious; the sound of breathing behind the camera sounds like panting, as the conditions the voiceover describes refer to conditions of entrapment––not just physically but also in terms of outcome:
“If you do something real, important, or meaningful to you, people will think it’s cute. They have a special laugh reserved for it.”
After this sequence of fast movements, the camera resumes its attention on a detail of hands moving objects. The transformation of the earlier images into a kind of expression of distress seems to mirror the projections made by non-autistic people onto autistic people’s behavior. Later on in the video, when Baggs describes being twisted into compliance, it appears over the image of a notebook being twirled from a hook; the image can be read both in terms of what is projected on it through symbolism and the pleasure of repetition in the image itself. As Baggs points to in the last line of the video, “in the end, there are only real people, and the ghost of the unperson is projected on top of some of us.”
Mel Baggs, Still from Happy Dance, 2007.
Baggs has also used memes to contextualize hir experience. In hir video Happy Dance, Baggs does a happy dance, moving in and out of a static frame. In the second half, a text appears on the screen that says,
“This is my natural response to the kind of happiness that makes you want to dance all over the place […] It’s in response to shinymetalbrain’s great video ‘Exuberance,’ which seems to be about much the same idea.”
Baggs locates this video within the context of a community of other Youtube users. Then, Baggs unsettles the passivity with which a non-disabled viewer might watch hir video, as the next title screen comes up to say,
“I’ve made the mistake of doing this sort of display in front of a psychologist. He called it ‘an inappropriate emotional display.’ He wanted to get rid of it. He tried to get rid of it.”
The video ultimately continues in defiance of hir psychologist’s ableism; Baggs’ dance continues and then a smiley face appears on the screen.
Sociality as Distribution
Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos, and Carolyn Lazard
Park McArthur and Constantina (Tina) Zavitsanos both work primarily in sculpture; however, they have also collaborated on videos, writing, and performance scores. Their most recent video CARERSFOOLSCRONY (Scores for Carolyn) translates several of their performance scores into a video consisting of closed captions and a voiceover audio. Already in just the title, the work describes itself as a dedication, located in a space of sociality for and between Park, Tina, and Carolyn (the artist Carolyn Lazard).
Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos, Still from CARERSFOOLSCRONY (Scores for Carolyn), 2018.
In the video, as Tina reads the captions, the audio is slowed down to match the amount of time it takes to read them, imbricating access into the form of the work.
All of the scores describe various relationships of care between two or more people. They frequently communicate the feeling of being inside a body feeling particular sensations and needs. At stake in communicating these feelings is the question of whether access to care will be facilitated by communicating this feeling. For instance:
“SCORE FOR AN OPEN YIELD
Ask your partner if she knows what it is in one leg to know that the other is next and that both are on fire. Ask if she knows what it is to have the power in degrees of freedom from the body but not in it. Wait for her to answer. Keep waiting.”
Here, a possibly uncommunicable feeling is communicated, attending the possibility that it might be answered in being heard. It’s not just that there might not be an answer––that your partner might not know what it’s like––but that waiting for her to answer is part of this being on fire and part of the degrees of freedom from the body. The waiting is a kind of getting ready: a state that gets repeated and rearticulated throughout the video.
This score comes before:
“SCORE FROM THE MIDDLE
Don’t leave me tired. Make me try.”
The openness of this score apposite to the specificity of the previous one links these two states of instruction, where care might be felt by communicating need and hearing these needs. This need is want; Score from the Middle reads like lyrics from a love song. Unlike a lot of love songs, though, the want is not left wanting; it’s waiting to be answered through giving the instructions to be heard.
The instruction “don’t leave me tired,” on the one hand, means ‘don’t wear your partner out’ and, at the same time, asks not to be left alone. The next instruction, “Make me try” could be tiring for one or both people, but the two requests are not mutually exclusive: don’t leave me alone even if we both get tired, even as you make me try. These two instructions communicate a desire to be held, a form of support that goes every which way in a caring relationship and doesn’t just describe a disabled person being supported or asking to be supported by a non-disabled person. What this work performs is exactly the mutual holding that disabled people do for one another. Tina, Park, and Carolyn all hold one another, in and outside their work.
Their work is often a ground for this sociality, this care, to take place. The communicability of these scores shares something in common with the sense of contagion that communicability is synonymous with (those things that can be spread). The forms of dependency it asks for are contagious. If we don’t want to be left alone, this need for one another will only multiply. This is something Park and Tina have referred to elsewhere, after Fred Moten, after Edouard Glissant, as consent not to be a single being.
The communicability of the ensemble that is their need / want / care for one another is a channel in which their work is distributed. In addressing the audience with a set of instructions, they are asked to answer with their own participation as part of this ensemble, even if just entertaining the thought.
The you of the scores is usually not the person conventionally cast in the role of caregiver; it is more often a person receiving (and in receiving, giving) care; in SHIRT SCORE, you are the person who waits to have their shirt taken off,
“…Feel your stomach tighten as you continue to work to keep yourself stable against the motion and pull of fabric over your head. Give yourself a challenge; wear a turtleneck…”
The scores instruct their audience to be entangled in these bodily sensations that, if represented directly, would likely be rendered inaccessible by the bodily boundaries of figuration–– categorically separating disabled and nondisabled bodies, rather than blurring the space between care that makes its edges too close to see.
This blur is perhaps clearest in
“SCORE FOR LIFT AND TRANSFER
‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
Work to deliver your bodies safely from platform to platform, from surface to surface. Hold yourself; stand. Stand and hold yourself while holding someone else. Work our mutual instability together. Learn how the instability of holding while moving is a moment. Learn that to move is to hold a we.”
Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos, Still from Albatross.
In their video Albatross, they try to picture this space between bodies in a lift and transfer. A camera hangs around Park’s neck, filming as Park attempts to put a camera around Tina’s neck. There’s a tangle of rope between their two laps. It doesn’t reach the point of capturing the lift and transfer. The video ends before this. The footage is shaky.
As much as there are blurs between bodies, there’s a blur between works. In CARERSFOOLSCRONY, there’s a “SCORE FOR SUPPORT SYSTEM.”
Carolyn Lazard, Documentation of “Support System (After Park, Tina, and Bob,” performance.
Carolyn made a performance in 2016 called “Support System (After Park, Tina, and Bob),” in which she invited people to visit her in bed; they could do so for 30 minutes at a time, one on one, by bringing her flowers. The piece was made up of the social interactions that took place; the documentation was the flowers.
Carolyn Lazard, In Sickness and Study, site-specific installation on Instagram, 2015-2016.
Carolyn’s work also extends beyond the sociality indicated by the scores but into social media. In an ongoing series, In Sickness and Study, Carolyn posts photos on her Instagram of her arm attached to an IV and outstretched, holding a book, while the tubes from the IV continue outside the frame. These works are both a document of her experience navigating the medical-industrial complex while living with a chronic illness and a kind of invitation to the sociality of study; her friends might see that she is reading a certain book, which might be either the start of a conversation about this book or lead them to read the same book. Though a series of photos, one might also think about these Instagram photos as movie stills or as snapshots from a ‘contracted cinema.’ These works run parallel to the consent not to be a single being, where the being alone of being hooked up to an IV, can be rethought as a being connected to both the authors in the books and those who see and respond to the images in the series. All of this work offers counter-evidence to the notion that pain or illness are simply isolating or that they cannot be shared.
Carolyn Lazard, Still form A Recipe for Disaster, 2017.
In a recent video, Recipe for Disaster, Carolyn turns her attention directly to the formal qualities of film and video that deny access to disabled audiences. She re-presents the “first broadcasted content with captions on US television,” an episode of Julia Child’s The French Chef from 1972. Captioning the cooking show as well as producing descriptive audio of the images onscreen, the video builds an accretion of layers around accessibility that also expands to a reflection on the segregation of disabled and nondisabled audiences of audiovisual media. A text appears on the screen, reminiscent of video art from the 1970s by artists like Martha Rosler, which didactically unpacked the political dimension of their images. Lazard uses this form critically to interrogate the exclusion of access as a consideration in most media and why accessible media is rendered specific only to certain disabilities, while her work presents the difficulty and untranslatability of taking in content, form, and its translation into captions and description. The cooking show format extends the form of the instructional score or recipe, acting as a call for and demonstration of a form that takes accessibility as its means.
YouDescribe.org
While closed captions are widely recognized as an access accommodation for deaf and hard of hearing audiences, descriptive audio for blind and low vision audiences is less widely known and implemented (and as Carolyn’s video points out, a segregated form of accommodation that would normally be encountered only through watching media with a disabled person). Descriptive audio poses a particular challenge for the medium of film and video because it decenters its ontology as a primarily visual medium. Descriptive audio is said to be an audio track that describes the ‘relevant visual information,’ but of course the question of relevant information is subjective, which makes the art of description more difficult to standardize and requires special training to perform in its standardized format. Meanwhile, as blind scholar Georgina Kleege and her collaborator Scott Wallin have noted, descriptive audio is not a “detached, neutral object of translation” but rather is a rich format for expressing things like tone, context, and close reading of images.
As Carolyn’s work shows, it is possible to make accessibility a primary formal consideration of a film or video. But for the vast of majority of work that does not do so, especially in more informal arenas like artists cinema, this work is generally inaccessible to blind and low vision people.
YouDescribe.org is a platform that allows users to make their own audio descriptions directly onto any video currently on Youtube. They have the option of either inserting their captions within the pauses of the existing audio, creating pauses to extend the video for description, or eclipsing the audio from the original video entirely. Viewers watching the described videos have the option to use a tuner, which blends together the original audio track and the descriptive audio track, in order to choose which audio to emphasize.
Just one example of the possibilities of this format as a tool for new forms of making art and nuancing and producing more accessible versions of existing art is user JJ Hunt’s descriptive audio track for Childish Gambino’s This Is America. As he explains before the video, his description “contains commentary that seeks to explore the images and cultural references” in the widely discussed and analyzed music video. Citing his sources, the resulting video is a kind of aggregate of annotations made to the video in other publications.
Kleege and Wallin have proposed using tools like YouDescribe.org and audio description itself as a pedagogical tool. But I am equally interested in thinking about these media as providing new formal tools for artists and filmmakers.
Especially when thinking about the questions of and challenges to representation presented by both third cinema and these microcinemas that use disability as a form, there are questions about how descriptive audio might further blur figure and ground rather than re-instantiate the separation of figures from their supports.
Works Cited
Baggs, Mel. Being an Unperson. 2006, video, Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c5_3wqZ3Lk
Baggs, Mel. Happy Dance. 2007, video, Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfHxoUDBQ4w
Baggs, Mel. In My Language. 2007, video, Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc&t=420s
Kleege, G. and Walin, S. “Audio Description as a Pedagogical Tool,” Disability Studies Quarterly, 2015.
Lazard, Carolyn. In Sickness and Study, 2015-2016, site-specific installation on Instagram.
Lazard, Carolyn. A Recipe for Disaster, 2017, video.
Lazard, Carolyn, Support System (For Park, Tina, and Bob), performance.
McArthur, P. and Zavitsanos, C. “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things,” Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibiliity, New Museum / MIT Press, 2017.
McArthur, P. and Zavitsanos, C. CARERSFOOLSCRONY (Scores for Carolyn), 2018, video.
McArthur, P. and Zavitsanos, C. Albatross. Date unknown, video.