The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice

EIGHT Art Research and Practice as Deleuzoguattarian Embodiment

EIGHT ART RESEARCH AND PRACTICE AS DELEUZOGUATTARIAN EMBODIMENT (In collaboration with Joseph Julian Jr., MD) The genuinely utopian moments are not when you are doing okay . . . but when you are in a deadlock. Then, in order even to survive normally, you are forced to invent something. —Slavoj Žižek, Interview, 2009 Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! —Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus The word/experience of disabled/disabled gains extension. It intrudes and extrudes, shivers over other words. —Petra Kuppers, “Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability” INTRODUCTION Throughout the chapters in this book, I have explored and examined pros‑ thesis, the slippages and adjunctive characteristics of the trope, as it applies to creative and intellectual performance in the visual arts. I have focused my writing on the prosthetic pedagogy and epistemology of art research and practice, namely, its enabling of eccentric and ecstatic ways of making and knowing, and its resistance to synthetic closures, totalizing representations, and assumptions that constitute the body as enabled or disabled, normal or abnormal. To avoid confining the concept of prosthesis to a binary stricture, 135 136 THE PROSTHETIC PEDAGOGY OF ART between its originary, etymological function as a linguistic supplement and its subsequent reconstitution as a compensatory metaphor signifying lack and replacement in the body, I have assumed that all bodies are always already physically dislocated and fragmented based on the liminal, contingent, and ephemeral circumstances of living and learning in the world. Contrary to the dynamic, oppositional tension between thesis and antithesis, I have argued that the ambiguities and incompleteness of art research and practice, in resisting synthesis and totalization, enable an escape from dialectics toward extensive and expansive ways of experienc‑ ing and understanding alterity and otherness. In doing so, the research and practice of art as prosthesis corresponds with what Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 32–33) characterize as multiplicities, assemblages, rhizomes, and bodies without organs. In what follows I will conceptualize the creative and political agency that is enabled through the prosthetic pedagogy of art in terms of Deleuzoguattarian embodiment. I will invoke the writings of these two phi‑ losophers as well as those of disability scholars who, in theorizing the body, have challenged the institutionalization and exclusivity of disability politics by arguing for an inclusive politics based on impairment, which advocates for the creative agency of all bodies regardless of their differences. Furthermore, I will discuss the creative research and practice of artist Chuck Close and artist/scholar Petra Kuppers whose respective modes of addressing disability Figure 8.1. Bamboo patch, 2011 (Courtesy Charles Garoian). 137 ART RESEARCH AND PRACTICE and impairment correspond with the rhizomatic assemblage of Deleuzoguat‑ tarian embodiment. I will then end the chapter with excerpts of an interview with Joseph Julian Jr., MD (1986), whose creative teaching and rehabilita‑ tion accomplishments serve as an example of the rhizomatic assemblage of Deleuzoguattarian pedagogy. As a young neurologist, Dr. Julian spent one and a half years (1981–82) building and administering a comprehensive rehabilitation program for disabled Cambodian refugees at Khao I Dang, the largest of the Cambodian refugee camps on the Thai‑Cambodian border. So, the question is not whether bodies are lacking, but whether they are capable of living fully integrated and productive lives because of their differences and peculiarities. As I have indicated in the previous chapters, my concern has been that positioning art practice solely within a compen‑ satory framework risks underestimating and undervaluing the creative and political agency of all bodies regardless of their differences. My purpose in conceptualizing prosthesis in this way is not to suggest cultural relativism that simply diminishes and homogenizes difference, or cultural pragmatism that isolates, stereotypes, and maligns difference, but a contingent, critical pragmatism, which according to curriculum theorist Cleo H. Cherryholmes “is realistic because it begins with what is in place . . . and relativistic because it is relative to what is in place” (Cherryholmes 1988, 185–86). Cherryholmes’s conception of critical pragmatism constitutes a differential space that is both realistic and relative; where disjunctive bodies coexist in contiguity and through their interactivity, interconnectivity, and interdepen‑ dence challenge and resist socially and historically constructed assumptions, representations, and sedimentations that “shatter the integrity of the indi‑ vidual body, the social body, the corpus of human needs, and the corpus of knowledge” (Lefebvre 1991, 52). Hence, a contingent, critical pragmatism of impairment is realistic because it advocates for the removal of social barriers, as well...