Reviewed by Chanika Svetvilas
See sound. Listen to images. Expand your senses beyond institutional ocularcentrism when you experience art.
Amanda Cachia offers you these recommendations and more in her book The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art & Institutional Critique. Cachia wants visitors to museums and galleries to experience art through mental faculties and physical sensations that are rarely used in such places. She argues that accessibility is something more than accommodating disabled visitors; more accurately, it is a generative aesthetic and strategy that reconfigures how art is conceived, structured, and experienced. This new understanding of accessibility challenges the status quo in museums and galleries.
Cachia describes herself as a crip curator with dwarfism who has been affected by the assumed “neutrality” of “average” art hanging heights. She affirms Robert McRuer’s crip theory to emphasize that art should not conform to rigid categories, but should be seen as fluid and expansive. By tracing lineages—such as touchable objects in the first museums, and art movements such as Surrealism and Fluxus—Cachia shows us that a perspective informed by Disability studies can provide historical knowledge. Fluxboxes that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged visitors to touch not only the box itself but the items within it. As this example suggests, some artists were interested in making art more accessible before discussions of “access” became common.
In her studies of contemporary art, Cachia shows that the concept and condition of disability resists easy definition. She includes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodiment to engage all sensibilities, subjectivities, and relationality of the museum visitor. Cachia wants artists and institutions to meet disabled bodies where they are and to provide access well beyond what is legally required. Such access expands the art experience for everyone. Moreover, greater access will entail collaboration not only with the directors, curators, staff, and audience, but also with the artists.
Cachia describes disability art as an heir to mainstream art history. Each chapter highlights contemporary artists who have questioned and transformed what is “standard” with multiple ways of knowing through their art. These artists are true innovators, who use accessibility in boldly creative ways.
Cachia profiles over eleven of these artists. Among others, we are introduced to Camille Paglia, who experiments with space navigation; Christine Sun Kim, who creates alternative poetic captions; Vanessa Dion Fletcher, whose quillwork practice intersects with Indigenous identity and language, which offers another layer of meaning; Pelenakeke Brown, an artist who explores her Oceanic identity through storytelling and movement; Corban Walker, whose dwarfism has led him to adopt his own scale of measurement in his artwork; and Park McArthur, whose sculptural installations questions the boundaries between accommodation and art.
Disability art has found its place in history, but Cachia makes clear that it has been around much longer than many people know. Disability arts not only stimulate thinking beyond the objects, but also builds community. As this last frontier of diversity, equity, and inclusion evolves, accessibility must be recognized as not only necessary but generative. It provides complexity and depth in ways that are seemingly inexhaustible.
Another virtue of this book is the author’s advice to curators on incorporating “access.” Still, readers are likely to ask how institutional transformation can take place within existing museum structures. If accessibility is both generative and collaborative, then the art world’s future might be radically transformed. Cachia’s book asks whether institutions are prepared for that development because she vividly shows how access reshapes how art is formed, curated, and seen.
Title: The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art & Institutional Critique
Author: Amanda Cachia
Publisher: Temple University Press
Year: 2024
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About the Reviewer
Chanika Svetvilas is an interdisciplinary artist. For more information about her work, visit chanikasvetvilas.com or follow her on Instagram @Chanika Svetvilas.