The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (review)

There is little if any systematic work on the intersection between art history and disability studies. Occasionally, a work of art history will reference the theme of disability, as occasionally a work in disability studies will turn to art history to illustrate a point. Rare is the work capable of offering a theory about what disability means to the evolution of art, and when a theory is broached, it usually comes down to the accusation that art has participated in the history of discrimination against disabled people. In these readings, disability art represents advocacy, while nondisability art represents oppression. These two visions seem categorically distinct. One cannot conceive how the first evolves from the second.

Millet-Gallant's book is distinctive for two reasons. First, it ventures to merge art history and disability studies—and it does so very successfully. Second, it develops a theory about disability in art that resists reducing aesthetic representation to discrimination. Millet-Gallant is able to discuss troubling aspects concerning disability in the history of art, and yet she finds a way to describe how these same troubling aspects resist oppression. Hers is a complex idea of aesthetic representation, then, and her analysis does not fail to respect this complexity but, rather, dwells on it by providing a dense articulation of works of art, their allusions, and meanings.

The introduction lays out Millet-Gallant's central thesis about modern art—that its preoccupation with "disfiguration" (bodies that capture attention because of asymmetry, sizes, shapes, missing or extra features, and other qualities that produce social spectacle) scrambles concepts of the normal and abnormal, demanding focused acts of interpretation, if understanding is to happen. Bodies rendered spectacles require us to understand that art happens in visual society, where the stare and gaze follow social conventions and produce unstable differences. Millet-Gallant tends to focus on works that perform self-exhibition by offering themselves as spectacles. Disability art is not simply art where voyeurs behold subjects unaware. Rather, art relies on spectacle. Artists tend to foreground the spectacle in artworks, and individuals accustomed to being stared at incorporate their experience into art, staring back, blocking the stare, changing the terms of the spectacle by accenting its theatricality. Spectacles depend on stigmatization, then, but they offer as well sensational, dramatic, and visually inspiring experiences.

Millet-Gallant's reading is crucial because it disrupts the two clichés dominating the relation between art history and disability studies. Works by nondisabled artists interested in disability cannot be criticized merely for enacting oppression. Similarly, works by disabled artists cannot be reduced to the representation of suffering and forced into a marginal position. Millet-Gallant avoids categorizing images as positive or negative, as authentic or inauthentic. Rather, she understands art as an experience that prefers complexity to superficial and ideal images of the good or the bad. The book gives us close readings of individual works, embedded in dense contexts provided by other works, all demonstrating how disturbing and attractive is the aesthetic representation of disability.

Chapter one takes up the performance art of Mary Duffy, the Irish artist born without arms who performs the Venus de Milo, and places it in the context of related images of the female body in the history of art. Millet-Gallant's exploration of the "Venus tradition" allows us to see how disability connects to issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality. This dense interpretation also shows how recent disability performance differs from the feminist performances of the 1970s. Millet-Gallant discusses fragmentary classical statuary, Manet's Olympia, the Hottentot Venus, Renée Cox's remaking of it, freakshow performers, Sandie Yi, and other recent disability performers. Millet-Gallant saturates the work of Duffy with historical forebears and descendants, allowing its full meaning to arise. One does not have the impression, then, of looking at one work but at a broad array of works whose meanings are fused together.

Chapter two looks at the...