Disability, normality and absurdity: A reflection on stuckist disability art

Abstract

In this article, I take issue with the idea that impairment and disability (which are not the same) can only be experienced negatively and as ‘useless difference’ (Michalko, 2002). Reflecting on two of my paintings, currently on display at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London, particularly in terms of their absurdity, I suggest that the perspective and insight expressed in these is directly related to my experience as a disabled person. As Stuckist works, these paintings are intentionally scurrilous, provocative and ridiculous. They cock a snook at people’s preoccupations with self-presentation as normal and at the alienation normalcy involves. I doubt I would have come to look at these things in this way had I not been a disabled person. I suggest that in adding to our stock of representation and understanding of human experience, this insight – part of a disabled imagination - is far from useless.

Keywords:

• Disability
• Normality
• Absurdity
• Non-Disabled Intrusion
• Resistance

Introduction

Unexpectedly, to me at least, two of my paintings have been selected for display at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition being shown in autumn 2021 (delayed by Covid-19). The paintings are from a series I am currently producing of people with fingers up their olfactory organs. ‘Family, Picking Noses’ is based on an old photograph and depicts four grandparents, a mother and a small boy with his flies undone. In the foreground a dog is shitting, and at the window of a building to the rear a man is showing his behind. ‘Mourners, Picking Noses’ is based on a photo of a funeral service, and depicts six mourners and a vicar, all picking their noses, around a flower-laden coffin. These paintings were selected and nominated by Outside In, the Outsiders Artists’ organisation. I am still astonished, as I had had no aspirations to this when I painted these pictures a few months ago. I am a Stuckist artist, having been identified and named as such in 2016 by Charles Thomson, one of the founders of this figurative art movement. I have had no art training since getting an unclassified grade for art ‘O’ Level at school. I paint in acrylics on 30x40cm. canvases, up until recently principally for my own and friends’ amusement. My characters are slightly ridiculous and a bit grotesque – a bit like most people in real life.

Representations of normalcy

My paintings are based on old black and white photographs – mostly dating from the 1950s and 60 s – that I buy from a stall at the weekend flea market held at Tynemouth Metro Station in the North East of England. There are hundreds of old photos here, jumbled together, having been endlessly fingered and thumbed by rummaging strangers. Discarded photos collected from clearances of people’s houses after they have died. Superfluous, redundant memories. Family groupings, courting couples, just married brides and grooms, proud parents, lads on a day out, Gran and Grandad, all the girls together. With such pleasure these photos will have once been pored over. How pleased the people pictured will have once been to be regarded, gazed at, to have had their normalcy validated. Now they are forgotten.

They were at the time each saying “Look at me!” Celebrating their individuality. Viewed now, though, among all the other figures in the photos at Tynemouth Market, what stands out is their sameness. Their poses, their expressions, their ways of comporting themselves – each is doing more or less exactly the same as everybody else. What is absent is difference. Each displayed their normalcy, demonstrated how well they fitted in. I am reminded of Lefebvre’s (2008:152) comment about the way bourgeois individualism implies:

the dreary, ludicrous repetition of individuals who are curiously similar in their ways of being themselves and of keeping themselves to themselves, in their speech, their gestures, their everyday habits.

The ostentatious display of the self in photographs over the past 180 years has had much to do with people’s confirmation of their normalcy. The daguerreotype process was invented in 1839 and photographic studios began to appear in cities and towns. Daguerreotypes were regarded as accurate representations, and to be photographed involved individuals making choices and statements about how they wanted to be seen by others. The popularisation and commercialisation of photography coincided with the appearance of normalcy as a principle underpinning social organisation during the industrial revolution. The word ‘normal’, used to mean ‘conforming to, not deviating or differing from, the common type, standard, regular, usual’, only entered the English language around 1840 (Davis 2013:1). Previously the body had been represented in terms of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘grotesque’ (Davis 2013). The unprecedented growth in numbers of people living in close proximity to each other in the burgeoning industrial towns and cities meant each person was required to experience a new kind of relationship with their body; to become their own moral surveyors and to be endlessly preoccupied with their own strategic image presentation. In settings where economic and personal survival depended on the sale of one’s own labour, presentation of the self as normal became critical. As Ferguson (2006:106) notes:

appropriate dress, appearance, polite modes of eating and drinking, acceptable means of coughing, sneezing, urination and defecation, the proper restraint in gesture and forms of interaction, and the provision and protection of personal space all featured in the new corporeal pedagogy.

Being normal involves a process of learning to want to act in the ways that society requires one to act. Schmitt (2003:107) observes that ‘the market economy advances alienation by pushing us towards conformity.’ Conformity is paradoxical because simultaneously it limits people’s possibilities for who they might be and provides a sense of well-being. As they grow and are steered in pre-established directions, people find their potential as unique human beings progressively narrowed. But as long as there are light moments too, this is tolerated. While there is sensed a background awareness that things are not all they could be, there is a reluctance to give up the security that normalcy offers. Normalcy provides reassurance in the face of what Fromm (2001:91) has described as people’s ‘profound fear of being different’.

Laing (1990) points out that the alienation underlying normalcy usually passes unnoticed because the ‘normally’ alienated person, acting more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Existentialists talk about the dread people experience in the face of the knowledge that they have to make decisions to matter; and about the illusory reassurance many find instead by opting to be part of a ‘They’, whose ready-made assumptions and ideas stultify the need for independent thought. Being normal leaves people feeling both comfortable and uncomfortable. They sense there must be something better, yet for the sake of what they already have, they are reluctant to rock the boat. People may feel an underlying horror that their lives will amount to nothing, but in the meantime, they continue to watch crap TV or fiddle with their mobiles.

Absurd encounters

The ontological price for the relative security of identity of those who identify as normal is paid in part by disabled people in their everyday encounters with the non-disabled. Normalcy is made attractive because its alternative, abnormalcy, is represented as unattractive. In Goffman’s terms (1976:15):

By definition, of course, we (normals) believe the person with a stigma is not quite human… We construct a stigma theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority…’

Normalcy still holds currency as a powerful idea. This is evident, for example, in the disability definition in the 2010 Equality Act (GOV.UK 2021):

You’re disabled if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities.

Employing a medical model understanding, identifying disability as limitation arising from impairment, this definition suggests impairment is something which can only be experienced negatively, and disability is to be regarded as personal abnormalcy. It requires that disabled people are seen as personally deficient rather than simply as different. The impact of this understanding is felt in countless microinvalidations experienced by disabled people in encounters with the non-disabled on a daily basis – whether in encounters with officialdom or by chance in the midst of life - and in the epistemic injustice involved as oppressive narratives are imposed.

Emmeline, a wheelchair-user and Doctor of Philosophy who I interviewed a few years ago, spoke of the indignity she feels at being infantilised every time she goes into her local Accessorize shop and is greeted “Hello, Trouble!” by an assistant who seems to think she is playing some sort of game (Cameron 2015). Joanne, a colleague I have written with (Cameron, Molloy-Graham, and Cameron 2020) has described the bewildering experience as a disabled university student of being treated interchangeably as a problem and as an inspiration. Donald, a blind man I talked with during my PhD research, recalled waiting for a friend at Chalk Farm tube station and being told by a ‘helpful’ passer-by “You’re at Chalk Farm tube station” (Cameron 2010). As somebody with acquired brain injury resulting from a childhood road accident, I have lost count of the number of times over the years I have been judged as deficient and patronized by the non-disabled. Sometimes these incidents are merely irritating and laughable, as when I was told, aged 30, by the official from the Sports and Arts Foundation who I had directed to his next meeting, “Here’s a pound, Son. Buy yourself some chocolate.” Other times more lasting trauma is caused, as when aged 17 I was violently sexually assaulted on a train. Random memories, but indicative of the sort of nonsense disabled people have to put up with from the non-disabled every day.

This is not just academic. It is about people’s lives. As the social model expresses it, disability is a form of social oppression (Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS)), 1976). Disabled people know when they are being talked down to. What is sometimes more complicated is deciding how we will respond. Without the social model, it is easy to internalize this oppression: ‘It’s not just about being made to feel, but that you feel it…’ commented Rose, a wheelchair-user who was a participant in my PhD research (Cameron 2010), expressing the confusion, hurt and anger she feels when turned into an object of condescension or fun by passers-by in the street:

It’s the drip drip drip effect… it’s when you have had that negative input not five times in a week but several times in a morning… in an afternoon… in an evening… it is about finding the resources to go on… (Cameron 2010).

Donald, referred to above, who is a disabled activist, takes a more philosophical perspective. Reflecting on the incident at Chalk Farm, he concluded that:

Disabled people see the world at its most stupid (Cameron 2010).

I like to recall the words of Paula Greenwell, another activist from Newcastle:

People say to me wouldn’t you want to be normal and I say I wouldn’t want to lower my standards (Swain, French, and Cameron 2003:103).

Conclusion

It is about developing strategies of resistance – collectively and individually. While the Disabled People’s Movement and the friendship and company of other disabled people has sustained and nourished me over the past 30 years, each of us also need to find our own ways of dealing with the oppression imposed on us by the non-disabled. When I was young, I became angry and cynical. I internalised my experiences of disablism. Now, I am able to recognize the absurdity involved in disabling encounters and to see how these involve the non-disabled in trying to fulfil their own identity needs. Many of them too, undoubtedly, experience oppression in their own ways.

This is a perspective on normalcy that I do not think I would have developed had I not been a disabled person. Being disabled shapes the way I look at the world in what I consider an interesting way, and I can say with honesty that I would far rather be a disabled person with a creative, questioning mind than be otherwise. I find painting pictures of non-disabled people with their fingers up their noses liberating. It is a way of emphasising their grotesqueness. However absurd I might think my paintings are, the fact that two of them being exhibited at the Royal Academy suggests there must be something to all of this.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).