“The Flesh of the World

The only athletic event I attended at this past summer’s Pan Am/Parapan Am Games in Toronto was a gymnastics competition. I was accompanied by my 11-year-old daughter who competes in the sport provincially, and she provided a running commentary on the nuances of scoring for the various apparatuses scattered across the coliseum floor. Most of what she said went over my head, so I developed a better understanding of what it must be like for her at art galleries when I assess the merits of video installations in her presence. One thing I did grasp is the aspiration to a very particular instance of physical control. The body as a material entity to master as well as something that overcomes outside forces (like gravity) is what these events celebrate. Watching them, we share in the experience of coming close to the perfection of a series of specialized actions: balancing, bending, twisting, leaping.

The only artistic event I attended at this past summer’s extensive cultural programming for the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games was “The Flesh of the World,” a voluminous exhibition on the theme of the body spread across three venues—the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the University of Toronto Art Centre and the Doris McCarthy Gallery. However, this was no mere reflection on the wonders of our physical form. The title of the exhibition came from the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose study of phantom limb syndrome drove his thinking out of the Cartesian mind and into less calculable bodies. Curator Amanda Cachia, who spent three years as the director/curator of the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, has a well-established reputation for focusing on disability in her curatorial practice. Rather than highlighting the perfectionist tendencies and post-human ideals of hyper-athletic artists like Matthew Barney and Heather Cassils, she takes an empirical turn toward the “complex embodiment” of artists engaged with disabilities. This term, coined by disability studies scholar Tobin Siebers, reminds me of the short form I use to describe my eight-year-old son who has cerebral palsy. When I don’t want to go into the details of his impairments, I simply say, “He’s very involved.”

Involved or complex bodies present a different account of being in the world than what I witnessed that afternoon on the balance beam and parallel bars. Instead of mastery, Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, the community organization to support people with mental disabilities, proposes a vision of humanity as defined by imperfection. In doing so, he argues that people with disabilities help us understand ourselves—more so than any Olympian. Such a stance has me hesitating twice over. First, I imagine many people with disabilities would prefer not to be known primarily as exemplars of inadequacy (all of the Parapan Am Games participants would likely agree). Second, I don’t want my son to be reduced to someone else’s metaphor about human nature. I want his self included with his body. I approached this exhibition with similar concerns, wary of two possible interpretations that representations of disability risk: one that equates the person (usually the artist) with his or her disability, and the other that regards disability as an index of our shared humanness.

The variety of works, conditions and people in “The Flesh of the World” ensured that no one monolithic account of disability is possible. As a category it resists the uniformity of race, gender or sexuality because that which defines it as Other is so diverse in its origins, effects and degrees of impact. Ingrid Bachmann’s dancers dramatizing heart transplant donors and recipients have little in common with Darrin Martin’s bone-anchored hearing aid sculptures. Artur ˙ Zmijewski’s blind painters are only peripherally related to Alexa Wright’s stories of people with skin conditions. And Erin Gee’s physiologically triggered noise-making devices are a whole different kettle of fish than Martin Kersels’s spasmodic prosthetic leg. It is a testament to Cachia’s curation that the exhibition challenges the possibility of considering disability an inclusive category because the bodies that are on display lack any sense of uniformity. However, in the absence of a singular definition, she could be accused of ghettoizing her artists simply by their diagnostic identification. She evades this problem, endemic to most exhibitions that combine disability and art, by not programming it exclusively with art about disability.

The pivotal (pun intended) work in this collection of drawings, videos, performances, installations and sculptures was never intended for this particular context but captures in the simplest manner possible the proprioceptive shifts imposed on un-perfect bodies. Three variations of Mowry Baden’s untitled Seatbelt devices were installed at each of the three exhibition venues. They are visually bland, but once you strap yourself in and begin to circle the central anchor point, you soon grasp the experience of moving with a body that isn’t completely under your control. The effect is subtle, the disabling mild, but it is enough to disorient and, in doing so, draw the viewer into the equation alongside the artists, the community of those with disabilities and humanity in general. It, like the most memorable works in the exhibition, highlights our shared ability to adapt, not overcome.

I went into this exhibition hoping to avoid any banal summation like “we are all disabled.” That would only belittle the particular instances of disability that many of these artists bring from the real world. I’m willing to concede the more politically correct retort “we are all differently abled,” but even that feels like a condescending attempt for feel-good assessment under the all-embracing umbrella of adaptation. Instead, I’d like to propose visibility as the linking thread that doesn’t provide an easy conclusion. If there’s anything people with disabilities have to overcome, it is this. The crowds at the Pan Am events far exceeded those for the Parapan Am competitions. My daughter commands attention with her physical prowess while my son’s appearance elicits averted gazes. In his video White Cane, Amplified, blind performance artist Carmen Papalia walks without his cane down a city street while chanting through a megaphone, “I can’t see you. Hopefully you can see me.” The anxiety and optimism of those few words continue to resonate in respect to the individual artists, through the exhibition as a whole and in the world out there. ❚

“The Flesh of the World” was exhibited at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the University of Toronto Art Centre and the Doris McCarthy Gallery from June 25 to October 10.

Terence Dick is a writer and art critic. He is the Toronto correspondent and editor for the contemporary art review at <www.akimbo.ca>.