I have approached the following text from a very personal point of view. I really hope that I do not discourage potential readers in advance. I consider it necessary in view of the topic that has strongly shaped my professional and personal life so far. At the same time, I am trying to put the whole topic into the broader picture of contemporary culture, art and the role that the situation of such disabled people plays in it. Perhaps this will help to shed some light on a number of situations that are still incomprehensible to my surroundings, but it will also contribute to understanding aspects that are often ignored, especially in the local environment, or unilaterally distorted by various abusive strategies revolving around the fashionable notions of care or inclusion.
The text is a working version of a more detailed study…
It was a very long performative event, running for several hours during twilight until deep darkness. I very much enjoyed its progress as a spectator. It consisted of a series of events along a path through the park. Most of them were very physical, both in the sense of dance and the intimacy of the interaction between the actors and the audience. Towards the end of the piece, its authors led us to a small lake, on the banks of which we were made to sit down, and one of the actors began to engage us in a kind of verbal, ritualistic word play. I tried to engage for a while, but soon emotions rose up in me out of pure helplessness, there was no more “we”, I was just isolated helpless and lonely me. Any effort on my part to be active would only have meant a disruption of the atmosphere built up by the whole evening for all involved. Asking repeatedly about the rules already communicated or about the words repeated by the participants was de facto unthinkable in the given stream of communication. I sadly got up and walked with a tears on the edge through the dark park away down the hill towards the lights and sounds of the evening city. Somewhere where I would be just one figure among many, an anonymous part of the masses, without being required to hear, understand, and react accordingly, and without spoiling the rules of the game and the collective.
This seemingly trivial episode, however, was for me the culmination of a series of such situations in which I have been placed many times in the course of my “spectatorship” of contemporary art. Despite my overreaction due to my personal hypersensitivity, it was more painful because I was the curator of the event, even though the artists somehow did not consult with me this part. Certainly, I have been active as a curator and critic in the Czech art scene for over twenty years in varying degrees, and I could get used to or adapt to many of the specifics associated with my functioning as an “invisibly” disabled person. But perhaps this is the toll of the apparent normality of my image as a physically healthy* white male, who has always been willy-nilly placed in this category. It is no less due to my years of trying to cope with my handicap in an environment consisting of de facto only healthy – i.e. not analogously sensory impaired people, by denying and masking it, even though it always entailed a number of minor and major traumatic situations.
The constant insecurity, grotesqueness, stress and anxiety associated with the uncertainty of dwelling in that liminal zone between the everyday normality with which you fit well into everyday interpersonal interaction and the world of difference, in which completely different rules of perception and communication apply. With this comes a very fragile position of self-confidence, confidence of expression and self-assurance of position in a given social context. This is the flip side of this liminal dwelling of a severely hearing impaired, but thanks to technology not completely deaf person, in an active role in the midst of the majority society. At least if he does not settle for some isolated and therefore inferior role where his communication skills will not cause him such problems. For example, I once had an acquaintance extolling against me how some deaf assistant technicians in the theatre and gallery were supposedly managing in a comfortably calm manner.
In contemporary art, perhaps the most representative and also the most significant example of an approach to a similar problem, but in this case associated with absolute hearing loss, which moves the individual into a more socially clearly defined zone consisting of the other world mentioned above, is the work of the American, now Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim. It is these modes of communication, difference and their personal and social consequences that she systematically explores in her conceptually oriented work. Perhaps paradoxically at first glance, her frequent subject is the world of sounds that surrounds the hearing and deaf alike. For an author who grew up in the isolated social context of a signing family and often uses translators to communicate, this is a somewhat unusual topic. Her interest in sound issues therefore comes somewhat from the outside – she has entered it as an artist and researcher, as a completely unexplored territory for her. It gives her a whole new freedom, similar to an astronaut who has detached himself from the commonplace of Earth’s gravity. The sense she grew up without, and whose stimuli she had been taught to ignore, has become a field of creative exploration for her.
Certainly, the semantic level of thought and communication of people who have not primarily learned a given spoken and written language, but a completely differently structured sign language (which is typical of the American environment), can lead to a sense of language deprivation in relation to reading, writing, and other uses of words. Being, on the other hand, gives isolated communities of Deaf people communicating with each other a certain position of self-assured autonomy and inner freedom. In the case of Christine Sun Kim and her activities, surely a creative perspective on sound and its understanding can bring much that is new and refreshing even to fully hearing individuals. However, what is also very significant here is the way in which the disabled person plays a very active role in her society-wide emancipation through her work, and is not merely a manipulated object and creative material of able-bodied creators or theorists in their own power game, linked to contemporary notions of ‘care’ and ‘power’ in progressive cultural settings.
As someone who grew up with perfectly healthy hearing in early childhood, I am very grateful for this opportunity to learn to hear and speak. Even today, when my listening opportunities are qualitatively very limited, it allows me, for example, to compose, reconstruct, and “replay” in my head after many listenings even very complex musical compositions, the entirety of which I inevitably miss when I listen to them once. Not to mention my apparently better ability to decode what I hear and the noticeably weaker accent of my own voice (as its shifted tonality is typical for individuals who did not have this possibility before hearing loss). However, some people have asked me more than once where I am from and where I learned Czech.
Hearing and knowing when to speak and being heard is simply the unquestioned basis of a healthy social life in a majority society. It is linked not only to the purely physiological functionality of the sensory organs in question, but also to a number of psychological, psychosomatic and, in the longer term, neurological factors that strongly influence a given individual’s abilities, possibilities and skills to apply themselves in such a “healthy” way.
I don’t want to be such a negativist, however, there are bright, even joyful moments in the lives of people with such disabilities, oddly enough because of their difference. The deprivation of auditory stimuli and associated brain processes, however, inevitably leads to a sharpening of other senses. While the opposite is true for the visually impaired, in the absence of hearing, even in my own experience, sight and visual perception, as well as bodily stimuli felt through the skin, become the dominant sources of sensation. Where an approaching sound is otherwise a threatening stimulus for you, suddenly a nearby cast shadow or an unexpected flicker in peripheral vision plays a much greater role. This also has a significant effect on our overall perception of our own physicality and the mechanisms with which we react to environmental stimuli. Imagine how such a shift can affect, for example, the movement of a dancer, especially in improvisational forms. Suddenly space, light, shadow and the movement of others is a much more powerful driver than any music or rhythm defined by it. Also, the verbal narrative of the film – even if overwritten by subtitles – is suddenly much more suspended behind the power of the visual language of the camera, and a visit to an art museum without audio commentary becomes a much deeper experience of gesture, color, light, shape, and visual space.
In the course of my practice as a critic of visual art and contemporary dance, I became more and more aware of these aspects. They came to the fore even more when I started to discuss the artwork and my view of it with “healthy” people. In doing so, it often became apparent how much more emphasis I placed on moments related to the above than others, for whom narrative, musical accompaniment or, conversely, an institutional context that was also easier to verbalize, often played a greater role.
Perhaps for many artists in art history, who are known to have lost their ability to hear completely or at least significantly in the course of their lives, these aspects also played a role in their even more intense immersion in the visual medium. At the same time, however, it is clear that the social and especially psychological consequences of such deprivation certainly had a number of negative effects. While the eminent eighteenth-century British painter Joshua Reynolds, despite his prominent social and academic position, took his hearing loss with a certain exaggeration and humour, as we can see in his Self-Portrait as a Deaf Man, painted around 1775. The even more famous Francisco Goya, who, after a sudden loss of hearing caused by illness in late 1792-1793, spent the remaining half of his life “deaf as a stump”, clearly took the loss of the ability to communicate with the resulting isolation very hard and led him not only to his retirement from academic positions and social life, but also to depressive states, and seems to have played a major role in the significant change in his work, associated with darker themes and painterly expression, as is evident, for example, in his famous Pinturas negras series.
The traditional role of the visual artist as a solitary individual, working long days in the isolation of his studio, in its idealized form does not actually require him to hear. On the contrary, his hermitage and immersion in his own work, the depth of the canvas, the mass of the sculpture, etc., is itself a kind of deprivation in which only his subject and the medium into which he brings it to the fore. Similarly, an art critic or theorist could only reflect what he sees and transfer his thoughts and interpretations into the medium of the text. The distractions of social interaction, the banal situations of everyday life and other speech and hearing utilizing moments as if they were secondary and unnecessary uselessness in their lives. After all, I wrote the bulk of this text in an afternoon café full of mothers with strollers and screaming children, where only the turned-off hearing aids and the resulting total silence helped me to work in some peace.
But man is an essentially social creature, and especially in the context of contemporary art and culture you cannot do without constant interaction, often inspiringly informal or dialogically intense. Even my curatorial practice, with all its positive and weaker results, has always been strongly linked to collective work, community work and often very personal relationships with artists and co-curators. Without these impulses, the vast majority of my work would never have come into being. Of course, also due to the aforementioned issues, this intense social involvement has often been associated with many problems and hiccups in my case. It was a constant struggle in which I, as someone trying to play the role of an unaffected and equal player, tried with all my psychic powers and strained empathy to play that active position. Very often, however, it was precisely the tension and demands of “playing” a role in which my limitations were obstacles that could not be overcome, but at most bypassed or disguised, that led to very stressful situations. In spite of this, I am very grateful for the opportunities that the realisation of these projects has provided.
The most important positive factor for me has always been what I have already emphasized in the context of the artist’s position in Christine Sun Kim’s work. It is the emancipatory moment in which you, even as someone who is not only functionally but also qualitatively “different” from members of the mainstream society due to your disability, can say your own thing without being isolated in a niche set of specialised other and, in fact, unfulfilling citizens. To take the initiative and not be shackled by the various forms of not only the “hard” masculine power of the control society, but also the disguised “soft” power and domination of matriarchal “care”. I consider this to be an absolutely crucial moment for all creative and intellectual personalities burdened by sensory, physical or neurodiverse disabilities that affect their functioning in mainstream society. It is not without many mistakes, misunderstandings and conflicts. Just as the disabled have their limits in their ability to communicate their problems through the veil of difference, so too does the otherwise enlightened mainstream society have its own set of simplistic dogmatic concepts, moralising prejudices and false compassion. The aim should be above all to seek common paths where we can meet as equal partners in dialogue and not just as subjects, objects, curiosities, looked after children, etc.
I consider my biggest mistake, which I could not avoid thanks to the external pressure on my standardized masculine role, to be that for most of my “career” I did not fully acknowledge this very difference and the need to communicate it well and only struggled with its consequences. Maybe I trusted too much that the art environment should be the one most open to any kind of difference, not just the one that is currently part of fashionable topics, and more open to open discussion. But this is not true, which is not in itself a completely negative fact, but rather it shows how much the elitist artistic environment, and the academic one as well, reflects in its own specific way the stereotypes and problems of the average majority society. This could also be a way to help to discuss this issue in a broader context.
* I would like to emphasize that throughout the text I use the term “healthy” in its very narrow sense, which I also define several times above. That is, as persons who are not limited by sensory deprivation that would somehow alter their way of perceiving and interacting with the world around them
ART HAS NO HISTORY 