Institutional Model: A Modest Proposal
In their introduction to the 2014 collection Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the U.S. and Canada, editors Chris Chapman, Allison C. Carey, and Liat Ben-Moshe refer to Michel Foucault’s “carceral continuum,” a historic range of spaces used for penal imprisonment. They call on his idea to frame their term, “the institutional archipelago,” which they define as a, “mish-mash… made up of diverse services and spaces that all trace back to undifferentiated confinement and its ongoing reform—in which penalty is no more or less central than medical care or the right to education.” The editors define institutions, citing the disability rights coalition Self Advocates Becoming Empowered (SABE), as “any place, facility, or program where people don’t have control over their lives.”[1] While these institutions can be identified with buildings designed for specific institutional purposes, such as prisons, schools, and hospitals, the editors also emphasize that the sorts of programs that have come to be called “community-based services” would also fit under this definition. Institutions, while clearly serving the traditional architectural functions of containing, restricting, enabling, and directing movement and other activities, can at least partially be distinguished from the physical space of buildings.
Figure 1. Karrie Higgins, Photograph from Parallel Stress: The Beginning is Also The End, 2016. Photo by photographer Alan Murdock, Reproduced with permission of Karrie Higgins.
Image Description: The artist who is young, pale-skinned, and femme-presenting, with dyed-pink hair lies at the bottom of steep, concrete stairs as though she has fallen backward. Her feet are partially on the stairs, and her body is twisted. In her right hand, she grips a NASCAR racing flag; in her left hand, an empty prescription bottle. Her red walking cane appears to have fallen down the stairs with her. She is wearing a skirt printed with her brother's police booking photograph.
Figure 2. Shannon Finnegan, Anti-Stairs Club Lounge at the Vessel, 2019. Photo by Maria Baranova, Reproduced with permission of Shannon Finnegan.
Image Description: An outdoor gathering of fifty disabled and non-disabled people to protest Vessel at Hudson Yards in New York City. Vessel is a building-sized, basket-like structure made of 154 interconnected stairways created by designer Thomas Heatherwick.
Work by disabled artists has the potential to blur distinctions between tangible and symbolic spaces of disabling. In recent years, many disabled artists have attempted to draw attention to the disabling aspects of the built environment. These include Karrie Higgins’ photos of herself being unable to navigate steps, Shannon Finnegan’s anti-stairs interventions, Park McArthur’s exhibition of wheelchair ramps, and Christopher Samuel’s design for a hotel room that disables otherwise able-bodied visitors (figures 1, 2, 3, 4). Of course, these images, performances, and objects make statements that can apply to a range of disabling circumstances. But these works don’t necessarily challenge the most obvious metaphor suggested by a handicapped access ramp, which is a patch-style reform, a Band-Aid on only one of a multiplicity of everyday wounds. It primarily benefits those who are orthopedically disabled, rather than psychologically, sensorially, or multiply disabled, and have access to other forms of transportation and social capital.
Figure 3. Park McArthur, Ramps, 2010-2014, 20 access ramps from various art institutions, 5 aluminum signs, vinyl wall text, Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Essex Street / Maxwell Graham, New York.
Image Description: Inside of a room with bright fluorescent lighting and white walls a loose grid of seventeen portable ramps cover the majority of the room's black concrete floor. All of the ramps lie flat on the ground except for one which leans against a wall. On the wall opposite, two parking signs hang high on the wall's top edge. The signs are blue and carry no lettering or textual information.
Figure 4. Christopher Samuel, Welcome Inn, 2019. Photo by Claire-Griffiths, Reproduced with permission of Christopher Samuel.
Image Description: Inside of a hotel room, in which there is a bed with high raised sides, a very low-hanging lamp, narrow shelving, and other features that make it difficult for able-bodied people to navigate.
For decades, however, artists identifying with feminist, queer, antiracist, and anticolonial critiques have addressed a more elusive environment: the political architecture of law, custom, and property, including the architecture of the art world itself. With the collectively organized 1968 protest piece Tucumán Arde, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ 1969 Maintenance Art Manifesto, and the late 1960s work of the Art Workers’ Coalition, artists connected with other vectors of struggle have helped to suggest new ways of engaging conflict. Recently, the acclaimed and prominent African American artist Cameron Rowland has created legal instruments related to reparations, gentrification, and incarceration. The British artist Christopher Samuel, mentioned earlier, has created works such as Housing Crisis (2018) that directly address policy austerity toward disabled people (figure 5). As suggested by these interventions, as well as by the “disability justice primer” created by disabled performance group Sins Invalid, there may be new ways for disabled artists to approach critique.
Figure 5. Christopher Samuel, Housing Crisis 6, 2018. Reproduced with permission of Christopher Samuel.
Image Description: An image of a heavily redacted email, with white text on black background. The topic of the email deals with an eviction of a person with chronic illness.
In 1985, the pioneering disability scholar Harlan Hahn identified three “definitions” for disability: the medical, the economic, and the sociopolitical. The medical definition, which he also calls the functional-limitations paradigm, describes disability using a clinical discourse of pathology, impairment, and deficiency. The economic definition stresses the vocational preparation and inclusion of disabled employees into the workforce, as well as the establishment of state forms of rehabilitation and income support. The sociopolitical definition, which may be Hahn’s most enduring legacy, identifies the disabling of a person by their physical, cultural, and social environment, rather than by intrinsic characteristics of any individual.
“Disability is defined by difference, and thus challenges the assumptions of identification.”
In the ensuing decades, disability activists have embraced this sociopolitical definition, or what has come to be termed the “social model” of disability. They want to focus on the conventions of technology and the built environment in making tangible the deficit-based assumptions of the “medical model.” But in his 1985 article, Hahn also referred to his sociopolitical definition as a “‘minority-group’ model” of disability, in which disabled individuals are recognized as politically aggrieved subjects, and he emphasized this political element throughout the remainder of his career. This aspect has been developed in recent years by disability justice advocates, who have distinguished this agonistic perspective as a separate “identity model” of disability.
In terms of art, this identity model may connect with provocative depictions of disabled bodies, depictions that psychologically confront viewers in the register of fantasy and repulsion. But perhaps the clearest distinction between proponents of an identity model and proponents of a social model can be found in language. While “person-first” language directly denotes the phrase “person with a disability,” it also is associated with clinically anodyne terms frequently perceived as condescending, terms such as “special needs,” “differently abled,” and “person who uses a wheelchair.” “Identity-first” advocates, by contrast, refer to themselves as “disabled people,” rejecting person-first vocabulary.
“Work by disabled artists has the potential to blur distinctions between tangible and symbolic spaces of disabling.”
While I personally use identity-first language in describing myself, and find the concept of a political disability identity to be inspiring, I believe there is more work to do in regard to framing this concept. In particular, I want to look more deeply into Hahn’s economic definition of disability. While he focuses on labor, the general topic of state infrastructure that he addresses could easily be extended to encompass the educational, carceral, or legal aspects of disability. In the U.S., for example, the state-backed inclusion of disabled people into the workforce has been explicitly segregated and financially devalued, following rules set forth in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. In short, this economic model could be rechristened as an “institutional model,” and can, perhaps, offer vital support to the idea of disability as a political identity. In artistic terms, this “institutional model” resonates with the institutional definition of art developed by George Dickie, following Arthur Danto’s definition of the “artworld.” Dickie cites Maurice Mandelbaum’s notion that art, like games, may be primarily defined by “nonexhibited properties.”[2] In some sense, all disabilities may at some level be described as invisible, made legible by institutions.
Unlike forms of political identity based around shared linguistic or cultural affiliation, and/or physical phenotype, disabled people are defined solely by their simultaneous exclusion and hyper-surveillance. While these forms of repression apply to all marginalized groups, disabled people, much like queer people, often have little in common with each other outside of their shared ostracism. In and beyond the U.S., for example, Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color have been structurally targeted by forms of state-controlled violence, theft, deprivation, and neglect. In response, these communities have responded through varied forms of bottom-up mutual support and solidarity, forming and inspiring countless movements of political and cultural resistance. By contrast, organizing on the basis of shared grievance has been more challenging for disabled and queer people, both within and between other identity-based communities. Within the disabled community, there is a distinction between those who are solely disabled by built structures, and those with less obvious and more stigmatizing forms of disability.
The faces of disability in the western media tend to be wealthy, white, healthy, cisgendered, attractive, and neurotypical, which egregiously distorts the largely neurodivergent, chronically ill, nonwhite, impoverished, queer, and elderly disabled population, both in the U.S. and worldwide. At the same time, with the exception of poor people, there is no single group more overrepresented than the disabled in U.S. jails and prisons, a generality which also almost certainly applies globally in “sacrifice zones” of war, toxic dumping, and resource extraction.[3] Throughout modern history disabled people have been warehoused in horrific conditions, chronically abused, and deliberately killed (before, during, and since the Holocaust). Lacking unifying forms of association, and disproportionately deprived of mobility and communication, disabled activists have chosen institutions of law and education as their terrain of struggle. But these institutions have also traditionally been the key elements of regulating disabled life and death, biopower, and necropolitics. International NGOs, state agencies, and public and private police and security forces identify, define, and often punish and exacerbate forms of disability, just as surely as health care institutions and pharmaceutical interests.
“In some sense, all disabilities may at some level be described as invisible, made legible by institutions.”
I believe in the not yet fully realized potential of critical artists as well as critical legal theorists to describe the institutionalization of disability, in and beyond the physically built environment. Disability advocates and disabled artists have accomplished an enormous amount, although often under the radar, since many have made art or pursued organizing work without an explicit focus on disability. Through making institutions legible as a site of struggle, through appreciating the aesthetic authority of institutions and the aesthetic potential of disability, and through engaging with the legacy of feminist, antiracist, queer, and anti-colonialist approaches within global conceptualism and institutional critique, there may be a way forward for disabled activists and disability movements that doesn’t rely exclusively on other identity intersections. Disability is defined by difference, and thus challenges the assumptions of identification. And in the wake of COVID-19, which has been devastating for disabled populations as well as for many others, widespread presumptions of health and vitality may start to change. I can imagine a critical disability art movement, as well as a disability justice movement, that advances through working to identify, analyze, redirect, infiltrate, and resist the barriers, physical and otherwise, that have forced them into disabled visibility.
NOTES
[1] Chris Chapman, Allison Carey, and Liat Ben-Moshe, “Reconsidering Confinement: Interlocking Locations and Logics of Incarceration,” in Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the U.S and Canada, ed. L. Chapman, A. C. Carey, and A.C. Ben-Moshe (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 14.
[2] George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 427.
[3] Bureau of Justice Statistics, Disabilities Among Prison and Jail Inmates 2011-2012, (U.S. Department of Justice, 2015); Seth J. Prins, “The Prevalence of Mental Illnesses in U.S. State Prisons: A Systematic Review,” Psychiatric Services 65 (7), 862-872; E. Fuller Torrey, Mary T. Zdanowicz, Aaron D. Kennard, et al., “The Treatment of Persons with Mental Illness in Prisons and Jails: A State Survey,” Arlington, VA, Treatment Advocacy Center, April 8, 2014.
