Crip curation and the aesthetics of the undeliverable

Introduction

In 1958, French artist Yves Klein unveiled his work, ‘The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility (The Void)’, from 1958, which was held at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris and dubbed a ‘manifesto of immateriality’ (Tillieux, 2018). In this work, Klein simply painted a small gallery monochromatic white, which was left empty except for a built-in display cabinet resting on one wall, and draped curtains that one had to pass through to enter and exit the space. Klein’s work was rooted in his belief in the concept of a ‘pure pictorial sensibility’ which was an immaterial substance (Tillieux, 2018). His practice engaged in a search for the immaterial in an attempt to move beyond painting and abstraction. He wanted to move beyond and outside the eye and to surprise the spectator by breaking with the frame of view. This installation helped him achieve some level of meeting those goals. Klein provides a precedent regarding the search for the immaterial and how exhibitions might express those ideas in novel ways. In this context, the idea of the immaterial is the physically imperceptible.

Following this auspicious beginning, in 1968 Lippard wrote with John Chandler the essay ‘The Dematerialization of Art’ which articulated and captured conceptual art of the time (Chandler and Lippard, 1968: 31–36). Central to their argument was a discussion of how the idea behind an object was more important and prescient than the object itself. These ideas were transformed and illustrated in Lippard’s landmark ‘numbers’ exhibitions, held between 1969 and 1972 in cities around the world. The ‘numbers’ reference in the titles of the exhibitions was the population of the cities in which the shows took place. So, in 1969, the first numbers show was held at the Seattle Art Museum Pavilion, Washington, which was titled ‘557,087’, followed by ‘955,000’ at the Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia in 1970, and ‘2,972,453’ at the Centro de Arte y Communicacion (CAYC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1971. Lippard’s fourth iteration of the numbers shows was held at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1974, ‘c.7,500’ in 1974. The show continued to tour throughout the US, and then London. In each iteration, Lippard experimented with a new methodology and conception of curatorial practice in alignment with contemporary art practices of the time, where artists were producing conceptual art which departed from an emphasis on the traditional aesthetic value attributed to objects. The exhibitions were sprawling and expansive, and she drew on the concept of numbers as an attempt to locate neutrality, given that numbers had a central role in conceptual art (Lippard, 2009). Lippard was open to everything extant, so the works ranged from the exploration of time and space, to the body and mapping, to daily life, time, definitions, measurements, and so on. Lippard approached curating with a similar open-minded sentiment, where she stripped exhibitions of literal art objects, and even made her own versions of objects in the absence of others. She teased and revealed to her audiences the inner workings of curatorial labor and the curator’s hand. These gestures might be reduced to a series of hand-written notes, exchanges with artists, and shipping notes.

What does iconic curator Lucy Lippard’s famed dematerialization of the art object have in common with contemporary disability art and, more pointedly, the ‘aesthetics of the undeliverable’? In this article, I argue that the aesthetics of the undeliverable is a form of institutional critique within disability arts and culture that has its roots in the proponents of conceptual art of the 1960s and Lippard, to which crip curating is aligned through its oppositional handling of curatorial norms. ‘Crip’ is a term that has historically been used to stigmatize and oppress disabled people, and it has been reclaimed by some disabled communities as a form of empowerment. Crip thus has a sensibility and an aesthetic aligned with institutional critique’s critiquing of the institution, and its debunking of the myth of a supposedly neutral gallery space that was implemented originally by artists such as Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, and Daniel Buren in the 1960s. They also challenged mimetic representation, iconography, and artist production according to a different regime and timeline. Some of the mechanisms of the art museum and gallery that institutional critique focused on for their subject matter included funding, curation, acquisitions, leadership, power, and knowledge – all vital for the aesthetics of the undeliverable, I will argue. Artists like Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Fred Wilson, and Andrea Fraser continued to embed institutional critique into their practices in the 1980s and 1990s. Lippard’s landmark ‘numbers’ exhibitions were an important curatorial predecessor in showcasing institutional critique, but they also revealed the curator’s hand, or the reality of the curatorial labor that goes into making an exhibition. At the time that Lippard’s work appeared, she admitted that artists and artworks were indeed the curator’s medium and, instead of being opaque about this fact, chose to be transparent. The compelling aspect to Lippard’s practice was how she displayed letters, notes, sketches, and a series of index cards regarding all the logistical planning for the shows – in other words, work that falls outside the frame of a conventional exhibition (Lippard, 2009). She even revealed to the audience that some of the work was missing owing to errors.

Thus, I argue how the conceptual curatorial work of Lippard imbued similar qualities to those embodied in the curatorial work of the ‘aesthetics of the undeliverable’. The ‘aesthetics of the undeliverable’ is part of a new genre of disability curating that centers the work of access within curatorial and artistic practice, alongside exhibition design. In the context of this article, access is based on a socio-emotional definition, relating to trust and relationships of respect and care, but it is also a conceptual definition that is entangled with world-making. In the world of disability arts and culture, access has great political and philosophical import as the desire to increase access is of foremost concern, given access is typically a barrier for disabled communities (Jarman and Kafer, 2014). The through-line that appears in both genres or styles of curatorial practice is political intent, where the behind-the-scenes work of the curator is revealed. While this may seem like an unlikely pairing, contemporary disability art seeks to be candid about the errors and gaps prevalent in exhibition spaces owing to a lack of access, but also as a meaningful way to challenge normative time-frames and expectations for what is professional and how an exhibition should conform (or not) to an ingrained standard. Specifically, errors, gaps, and professional time-frames were revealed in Lippard’s projects, whilst the aesthetics of the undeliverable points out inequities towards disabled artists and audiences, yet insisting on time-lines that defy normative frameworks. Thus, I also argue how the aesthetics of the undeliverable aids in transforming aesthetics and its ties to notions of pleasurable (or unpleasurable) looking to a political inventory of the lived experience of the disabled body. By dismantling these boundaries and hierarchies of what can be considered a visual art experience, conceptual artists were providing a pathway for contemporary disabled artists to claim a space in the field of aesthetics where the other senses – and other types of experiences and engagements with art in the museum – became entirely valid. This article will explicate how this transformation happens.

This article will also demonstrate how Lippard’s work, followed by crip curation and the aesthetics of the undeliverable, heeds a call by Disability Studies scholars for a crip-based approach to method and methodology. In their article, ‘Towards a crip methodology for critical Disability Studies’, Louise Hickman and David Serlin (2019) ask several important questions that entirely resonate with this article, namely: ‘how might scholars develop methodological tools that are not only specific to critical Disability Studies but also anchor and apply perceptual, sensorial and experiential dimensions of what it means to be a disabled subject in the first place?’ . . . In short, how might we embody both our knowledge and our methods? As crip scholars, how do we insist on being the ones who not only ‘talk back’ to researchers but who develop, or co-develop, the research questions that animate research methods?’ (p. 135). The argument in this article suggests that crip curation and the aesthetics of the undeliverable indeed embody both the knowledge and the methods of the lived experience of disability, so that visitors can experience the benefits and transformative effects of crip methodology first hand as they visit an exhibition. In other words, the aesthetics of the undeliverable is artistic and curatorial practices that espouse this crip methodology, in theory and praxis, and certainly in the walls and spaces of the art gallery. To break this down even further, I am suggesting that, while disabled artists effectively ‘talk back’ through their art-works, utilizing their own disabled knowledges and lived experiences, the disabled curator employs crip curation as method, i.e. as a political framework, strategy, and structure in which these knowledges and experiences can unfold. Crip curation therefore endows the disabled curator (artist, scholar, etc.) with the power to shape the spectatorial experience from the ground up.

It is also most generative to compare Lippard’s curatorial praxis with the aesthetics of the undeliverable because, whilst other scholars have attempted to resuscitate the embeddedness of curating and caring by suggesting that curators must shift their ethics of care to representing the urgent needs of marginalized bodies in the museum, including women and black and brown bodies, these studies have never considered how the politics of disability may enter the conversation, so that care explicitly extends to disabled bodies. They have never considered that disabled bodies, and the politics of disability, might offer, demand even, new terms and conditions of/for curation, and care, curation as care, and care as curation. I thus delve into comparisons between Lippard and aesthetics of the undeliverable by walking the reader through aspects of Lippard’s ‘numbers’ exhibitions first, followed by features of an exhibition entitled Undeliverable curated by non-visual learner and artist Carmen Papalia which was held at Tangled Art + Disability Gallery space in Toronto, followed by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada in 2021. The methodologies and politics to emerge from the Undeliverable exhibition at Tangled and at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery demonstrate a marked similarity to the work of Lippard and her curatorial work. There is agency in this work, and the inherent value is more about the process than the end result.

Lippard’s application of a conceptual style to curatorial work was also readily transported over to feminist politics and representation, which Lippard continued to rally for regularly throughout her career. While I do not go into more depth on this important aspect of Lippard’s work in this article, I do want to acknowledge how this key theoretical feminist framing is what propels and guides my thinking around how her practice fits well with that of crip curation and crip immateriality, given that there was mutual interest in representing marginalized communities in the artworld. This connection is also important because, within the field of Disability Studies, numerous theorizations around concepts of care have been generated by feminist activist scholars, particularly through the work of Eva Feder Kittay and her ground-breaking work in ‘ethics of care’, where she suggests that care-work is often cast as ‘feminine’ (Feder Kittay, 2011). Lippard’s challenge to conventional notions of the ‘caring curator’ – which is extended by new notions of care work from a disabled curatorial perspective – has also been enunciated through innovative scholarship by feminist curator and scholar Helena Reckitt. She argues that, while curators should focus their attention towards relationships and not simply objects, care should also be cast inward, towards a theory of self-care to avoid curatorial exploitation and burn-out (Reckitt, 2016). This article attempts to extend formulations of the ‘caring (disabled) curator’.

From institutional critique to the caring (disabled) curator

As mentioned, Lippard’s work provides a precedent and an earlier conceptualization that paved the way for the establishment of alliances for contemporary disabled artists for taking exclusionary practices into the museum. In providing a genealogy of this pathway, Lippard treated the numbers shows as a type of conceptual experiment (Lippard, 2009). Acknowledging the fluidity, hybridity, and evolution of the identity of the curator, critic, and writer that was also occurring at this time, Lippard wanted to make transparent the behind-the-scenes work of the curator to the audience, guiding them to focus on the concept of curating too, alongside the objects one experiences on the walls of a gallery. While an exhibition is the fruit and the end result of what can be up to years of curatorial research for a curator, Lippard wanted to document and display the administrative journey, and the relationship she developed with the artists instead.

Scholarship on Lippard’s numbers exhibitions typically focuses on the fact that the shows were titled based on the population of the cities in which the numbers exhibitions were being held. While the artifacts that resulted from the exhibitions have also been thoroughly documented and recorded, both in Lippard’s own book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, published in 1997, and an exhibition curated by Catherine Morris for the Brooklyn Museum entitled Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art in 2012–2013, which used a curatorial method as a premise for an exhibition and homage to Lippard’s contributions, less attention has been paid to the intervention that Lippard was making by revealing behind-the-scenes labor of the curator (Bonin and Morris, 2012). At the time, such transparency was more or less taken to be an equivalent to the experimentation of conceptual art praxis, wherein the journey is more important than the destination. But, in the context of this article, the messiness, errors, mistakes, and labor of curating work are critical because this information is now accessible to the public, and the so-called neutrality of an art object is in fact shown to be mitigated by the personal predilections of the curator and the over-arching bias of the museum. In this revelatory work, Lippard opens the flood-gates for conceptual curating, certainly, but I argue that this also provides a pathway for the future of crip curation, where curating is riddled with imperfection and can itself be a disabling and certainly unstable profession.

Drawing out the link between curation and conceptual practice, it is worth revisiting a foundational text by Benjamin Buchloh on the subject of process-based art. In his (1990) essay, ‘Conceptual art 1962–1969: From the aesthetic of administration to the critique of institutions’, Buchloh makes a case for how the work of conceptual artists had by that time moved well beyond what Duchamp was trying to do with the readymade and the negation of ‘figurative representation, authenticity, and authorship’. Instead, he argued that conceptual art not only prohibited visuality as the ‘inescapable aesthetic rule’ for experiencing works of art, but that artists were now offering ‘an aesthetic of administration and legal organization and institutional validation’ (p. 119). This attention to administration offers a point of entry to the curatorial practice at work in Lippard’s Numbers exhibitions. Another way of thinking about the definition of an ‘aesthetics of administration’ is where the boundaries of artistic categories and studio production are revised alongside how those works are produced and consumed. Buchloh says, ‘by ultimately dismantling both along with the conventions of visuality inherent in them, they firmly established an aesthetic of administration’ (p. 133). Aesthetic experience becomes about consuming linguistic and visual components in an object or artwork experience, so that the spectator helps to enliven and make concrete the object’s status as much as the context of the museum or gallery itself.

Buchloh’s discussion of the ‘aesthetics of administration’ in conceptual art is of course part of what Lucy Lippard was grappling with through her numbers exhibitions. Significantly, Buchloh also makes reference to these works in his essay. Buchloh’s philosophical investigations are important for showing how conceptual art helped to move audiences from the primacy of viewing to considering the idea in a visual art experience. While not a part of Buchloh’s discussion, he was more or less pointing to a characteristic of conceptual art that had critical implications for the contested role that the visual has within contemporary disability art, including its display in exhibitions. This implication is that the visual domain (and reign) of museum culture is mostly inaccessible to blind and low-vision individuals, and that the hierarchy of the senses (where vision is at the top) must be dismantled and certainly reorganized. As stated in my introduction, by dismantling these boundaries and hierarchies of what can be considered a visual art experience, conceptual artists were providing a pathway for contemporary disabled artists to claim a space in the field of aesthetics where the other senses – and other types of experiences and engagements with art in the museum – became entirely valid. In short, conceptual art’s attention to immateriality and process replaced the primacy of vision. Indeed, for Buchloh and Lippard, like conceptual artists, a support for concept over mimetic representation replaced ocularcentrism, and set concept up as a central artistic process. In these dismantling – or disabling – acts of the art historical past, disabled embodiment now has a space in which to operate, productively, although this has never been acknowledged as such. In other words, the historical turn to conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s offers an opening that invites disability. Conceptual art has been long acknowledged to offer an opening to the ways people engage with art, and this opening may actually bifurcate to support new directions in display that ultimately support disability and access.

Another interesting component to Buchloh’s terminology is how the word ‘administration’ is tied up in revealing not just the artist’s process, but the curator’s process, too. Given that Lippard aimed to reveal and make transparent her own process through the numbers shows, we might also imagine that she was enacting a literal aesthetics of administration by showing all her curatorial paperwork – the administration of her labor, and the labor of administration. Lippard, too, like the conceptual artists, saw value in revealing the production of curatorial work as an object worthy of consumption in the museum. These arts administration materials – or dematerials – clearly broke with mimetic representation and iconography, and also disrupted the hierarchy of media which Lippard explored in her expansive approach to perceptible and imperceptible objects and concepts.

All of these instances noted above, along with the genre of institutional critique which followed and also was a part of conceptual art, offered a clear pathway to the work of contemporary disabled artists, who similarly take on exclusionary practices in the museum. Contemporary disabled artists have been critiquing the institution since the 1990s and 2000s in the work of artists such as Joseph Grigely, Stephen Lapthisophon, and Aaron Williamson. They have pointed out how the artworld’s so-called non-biased practices of display are in fact consistently occluding disabled people. Other younger generation disabled artists to take up this work in the current moment include Park McArthur, Carolyn Lazard, Christine Sun Kim, Finnegan Shannon, and Carmen Papalia, who is curator of the Undeliverable exhibition. Papalia (2018) has even developed an Accessibility Manifesto where he encourages collaborative work amongst museum and cultural workers, where access is a creative and open force for disabled artists. Papalia’s next move has been to instill institutional critique by inhabiting the role of the curator, which is the first time he has done so. By taking on this role as curator (instead of artist), Papalia demonstrates an awareness of the leadership qualities that such a role entails, as well as the curator’s ability to shape political frameworks. Papalia can thus play a more direct role in transformative change within ableist museum culture. I discuss this more in the next section, to illustrate the critical connection between Lippard’s institutional critique of the 1960s and Papalia’s leadership in crip curation and the aesthetics of the undeliverable, and how Papalia’s work ultimately embodies crip methodology.

Numbers, followed by Undeliverables

In this section, I consider various components of Lippard’s ‘numbers’ exhibitions that are particularly germane to Papalia’s Undeliverable exhibition. Figure 1 shows a black and white photograph of the view from outside of the Seattle Art Museum’s Pavilion on the opening night of Lucy Lippard’s first numbers show, ‘557,087’, in 1969 (Explore: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74, nd). Three white men stand on the concrete pavement wearing winter clothing, and look as though they are discussing the work that is visible on the large glass panels of the pavilion which face out into the street. One man is wearing what is assumed to be a security uniform as he wears a policeman’s hat, and looks to have a gun holster around his waist, while holding a baton in one hand. The work on the glass panels shows two very large taped X crosses using masking tape, and they cut across the windowpane. This is a work by John Perreault entitled Tape Event, from 1969. Whilst Perreault’s earlier iterations of this work were performed live by the artist in a gallery setting, this particular iteration was not performed by the artist but installed by Lippard and gallery workers instead. Like also many artists from the conceptual art period, Perreault wanted to focus on ephemeral objects that were anti-commercial and anti-object-making. The crosses give the space the appearance of being closed, or literally taped off, for reasons unknown. The work passes as unfinished, which is fully embraced by Lippard.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Archival photo of Tape Piece, John Perreault, 557, 087 Exhibition, 5 September – 5 October 1969, Seattle Art Museum at the Seattle Center Pavilion, The Seattle Times. © Photo: Greg Gilbert. Image permission sent to Marquard Smith, Editor of JVC.

Lippard’s ‘numbers’ exhibitions also created opportunities for the public to reflect and engage with untraditional works of art, such as Figure 2, where nine books entitled Neurological Compilation: The Physical Mind Since 1945, 1961–1969, by Christina Kozlov were stacked in two rows on the table along with other artists’ books. Little information can be found about the contextual background to the work, but I am more interested in the presentation and display of the work, which I assume was conceived by the artist in collaboration with Lippard. While we may take this kind of installation for granted today, at the time this was presented, it was considered innovative for the way in which it sought to engage audiences with the text-heavy information the work offers. This work featured in several iterations of Lippard’s numbers exhibitions. While the work did not tackle ocularcentrism, or seek to critique the limits of visual culture, Lippard nonetheless encouraged the public to look differently at works of art presented outside of a frame, and not mounted up on the wall.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

c. 7,500 an exhibition organized by Lucy Lippard, Walker Art Center, 1973. Photo credit: Eric Sutherland for Walker Art Center. Image permission sent to Marquard Smith, Editor of JVC.

Another important component of Lippard’s ‘numbers’ exhibitions was the inclusion of a series of index cards which included all kinds of notes and instructions (Figure 3). These index cards were Lippard’s version of a catalogue, in her attempt at revising its traditional format as a bound book typically available for purchase in the gallery shop. Lippard’s curatorial strategy at upending the notion of a commodifiable take-away version of an exhibition, a type of memento, if you will, was clearly in line with the conceptual art experimentation of her artist peers, and in many ways, the index cards became a much more accessible form of documentation. This is because the index cards, which were filled with proposals, scores, and conceptual works provided by the invited artists participating in the exhibition, were sold for just three dollars each. (This is unlike the cost of the printed museum catalogue which is typically priced much higher.) The index cards also included an introduction text by Lippard and a bibliography.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

C. 7,500 exhibition catalog by Lucy Lippard (1973–1974). Reproduced courtesy of California Institute of the Arts Library & Archives. Photographer: Blake Jacobsen, CalArts Library. Catalog of an exhibition held May 1973 – February 1974 at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, and five other locations.

In several iterations of Lippard’s ‘numbers’ exhibition, she included work by the North Vancouver-based collective N.E. Thing Co., which was a fictional business run by co-presidents, Ingrid and Ian Baxter, and operated from 1966 to 1978. The duo were a key part of the conceptual art movement to emerge from Canada in the 1960s. Their body of work consisting of installation, photography, and information technology using a Xerox Telecopier and a CNCP Telex machine, aimed to interrogate art and its corporate strategies and domestic systems. Nancy Shaw (1993) wrote that, ‘NETCO’s reversals, reflections, inflatables, mappings, punnings, and measurements, disrupted unidimensional, unidirectional hegemonic annexations of space.’ This work offers an aesthetics that questions the nature of the production and creation of art, and the organization of thought attached to this (VOX, 2019). The exploitation of this means of working altered conventional notions of studio production and continued to build on Lippard’s notion of the dematerialization of the art object. N.E. Thing Co’s work was also important for ushering in the possibility of art to be reproduced remotely through the technologies of the time. This method is now considered an everyday practice that is particularly amenable to the needs of contemporary disabled artists, especially in our pandemic climate. The Baxters were influenced by media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his predictions that electronic and communications media would allow for the activation of all our senses, instead of simply relying on the singular circuit of visual and linear perception. By sending telex and telecopier messages to exhibitions such as the numbers exhibitions, the artists were also creating a new type of aesthetics based on distance, which allowed for artists all over the world in different geographic regions across time and space to participate. These early notions unwittingly offered a premonition of the change to come within technology writ large, but also how galleries and visitors would become dependent on these changes for generalized and specialized access needs.

By way of highlighting this new curatorial methodology in Lippard’s exhibitions, I can now move to (and make strong connections with) Papalia’s curatorial project, the Undeliverable exhibition, which was held at both the Tangled Art + Disability Gallery in Toronto, followed by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario in 2021. Papalia’s exhibition advocates for curation as care. This notion of the curator as a caretaker is nothing new of course, given that the etymology of the word ‘curator’ derives from the Latin ‘cura’, which means ‘care’. This definition of curators intertwined with caring is mostly tied to one of the curator’s more traditional functions, which is to care (conservation, preservation, etc.) for a museum’s permanent collection of images, objects, and artefacts. However, 20th- and 21st-century shifts in curatorial discourse and practice have meant that the care function of the curator has become eclipsed by other responsibilities, ranging from studio visits, research and writing, and developing thematic exhibitions. Papalia’s approach then, as a disabled artist who takes on the role of the curator is important, as he gets to define what access means whilst inhabiting a position of power, but he also gets to re-define curators-as-caretakers anew within the context of disability. Papalia is defining an art of crip curation. Through Papalia’s transformative curatorial work, he extends Buchloh’s notion of the aesthetics of administration whilst also cripping institutional critique and curation itself.

Such crip curating is illustrated in the statement that follows. It was submitted as a post in Fall 2021 through Tangled Art + Disability’s Instagram profile, alongside Figure 4, where Tangled Artistic Director Sean Lee is standing in front of one of Tangled Art Gallery’s white walls filled with a repeating pattern of black serif font vinyl lettering which simply states the name of their latest exhibition, Undeliverable. Lee is wearing a medical mask and giving the peace sign with his fingers on his right arm. He is an Asian man with long black straight hair, wearing spectacles. He also wears a black T-shirt, a long black coat, blue jeans ripped at the knees, and black sneakers. Despite the fact that we cannot see his nose and mouth, his eyes give an indication that he might be smiling.

Error 404: Artist exhibition statements not found . . . If you’ve visited Undeliverable & tangled_arts gallery, you’ve probably noticed that we opened the exhibition without the artist statements being ready and on the wall. Why? Well, we’re operating on COVID time, which is crip time; keeping with curator Carmen Papalia’s understanding of accessibility as a social practice, we are re-envisioning the museum around the demands and desires of the disabled body/mind. Things are allowed to be ‘late’, in-progress, and, well, Undeliverable, and still be worthy of professional, public consideration. Undeliverable was named by jes sachse and tethered to their piece of the same name. All the artists in the show – Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Chandra Melting Tallow, Jessica Karuhanga, jes sachse, Aislinn Thomas, and Carmen Papalia with Heather Kai-Smith – have their own take on this theme in their own statements, which are on the way. From the time disabled people were invited into museums, their access was imagined for them by non-disabled decision-makers, a trend that not only continues today but has shaped the access that disabled artists, curators and cultural workers have within the visual and performing arts. We know that together, we can change the culture. We can enact curation as care. (Tangled Art + Disability, 2021)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Sean Lee, Director of Programming at Tangled Art Gallery, stands in front of a gallery wall with the word ‘Undeliverable’ hand painted six times, as a placeholder for artist statements, 2021. Reproduced courtesy of Tangled Art Gallery Instagram account.

Lee looks comfortable with Tangled’s stance around the unusual nature of this exhibition in its unfinished state, which is not only clearly laid out for all to witness (indeed, the title of the exhibition aptly named, as the Undeliverable exhibition is incompletely undelivered due to the constraints of the Covid-19 context). However, this concept also aligns with the disability politics of the space itself. Tangled is the only dedicated gallery platform that advocates for, and presents, the work of contemporary disability art in Canada. The politics of crip time – that time necessarily slows down for disabled people owing to barriers in the built environment, and consequently should not be considered being out of sync with, or an inconvenience for able-bodied society – is one that is joyfully embraced as part of the methodology of this show. The quality of this longer duration of time within crip time is interesting to apply to crip curation because crip curation permits curatorial work to be in a so-called ‘unfinished’ state, and challenges normative definitions of a ‘complete’ and ‘executed’ exhibition. This comparison between crip time and crip curation is much like Lippard’s errors, gaps, and disruption of normative time-frames too (born of conceptual making/thinking for political ends) although, in this case, such errors, gaps, and disruptions are purposefully of disabled bodies/the politics of disability/the politicized terms and conditions and aesthetics of crip curation as a curation of crip care. Exhibitions within this context can therefore be enjoyed by the visitor in stages, where an audience member might be able to consume different artworks or didactics in an exhibition at different time intervals, like in a series.

Papalia’s curatorial premise of Undeliverable, explicated with the post on Instagram described above, connects with Lippard’s conceptual approach to curating. In particular, John Perrault’s Tape Event from the Seattle numbers show, intentionally instilled in the gallery visitor a sense of confusion around the nature of the work. Thus, both Perrault’s work, and the unfinished state of Papalia’s exhibition, share this quality of confusion regarding what is intentionally or unintentionally finished, and how this presentation changes the act of perceiving exhibitions in a whole or finished state. No doubt both these works, past and present, also encouraged visitors to pause and reflect on what the works were trying to communicate in their unfinished states.

One of the main works to inhabit the center of the gallery space at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario in its iteration of the Undeliverable exhibition, was an installation by Papalia entitled Reflection Circle (from Provisional Structure 1), 2021 (Figure 5). Papalia’s reflection circle is created through a series of tall mirrors shaped in a circular arrangement, with several benches in the middle which encourage visitors to sit, pause, and reflect. Papalia uses mirrors as a symbolic device. In the context of this installation, one can see their own reflection. Papalia’s mirrors also have an ironic quality, given that he identifies as a person with low vision and as a non-visual learner. By multiplying the numbers of the mirrors, Papalia intends to upset normative vision that typically occurs from one perspective and one angle; instead, the mirrors provide multiple reflections and refractions simultaneously, creating a dizzying set of possibilities which do not allow for any rational or logical order for representation. Papalia’s Reflection Circle intends to build on his work in socially engaged art practice and dialogical aesthetics, which is also inherited from institutional critique. What this work has in common with Lippard’s numbers project (or even Yves Klein’s installation discussed in the Introduction), is the notion of the physically imperceptible as an intangible object worthy of consideration by a museum audience (the ‘imperceptible’ or concept being the temporary reflection ones sees of oneself while looking in the mirror). While Klein, Lippard and Buchloh argued for the great benefits to be gained from experiencing dematerialized objects, in Papalia’s curatorial praxis, he suggests that access and barriers to it – which are equally imperceptible to the average non-disabled gallery visitor – must now make themselves urgently known. The reveal in Papalia’s curatorial hand conceptually textures access.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Carmen Papalia, Reflection Circle (from Provisional Structure I) in the Undeliverable exhibition at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2021. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. Reproduced courtesy of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Photo by Michelle Peek Photography and courtesy of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology & Access to Life, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art & Social Justice at the University of Guelph.

In another work in the Undeliverable exhibition, disabled artist Jess Sasche attempts to revise the praxis of indexing, by offering a work which is the namesake of the exhibition, Undeliverable, 2021 (Figure 6). The work consists of 1,000 metal plaques that are arranged in a grid-like formation in the shape of a column going up one length of a wall. The plaques are an index to donors who conventionally supply funds to a gallery (MacPhee-Pitcher, 2021). Depending on how much is donated, they may be given certain status and perhaps even naming rights to particular galleries in the museum. In this appropriation by Sasche, the plaques are engraved with the word ‘permission’ and are accompanied by aluminum shower grab bars. The work is ironic because while they are suggestive of giving permission – access even – through the recognizable grab bars, they become a decorative accessory, as they don’t ultimately function well to support the weight of a body – any body – that desires to climb them to get a view from up top. sasche does a good job of critiquing the institution that is often more interested in the funds and donations it will receive from wealthy patrons than they are in thinking about the needs of their disabled audiences. In short, sachse’s project highlights the unfortunate truth that access is also frequently treated with tokenizing gestures rather than with the care it requires (Papalia, 2013). Is the climb to the top of the donation ladder all that it’s cracked up to be if the climb is arduous and elitist? As Sam MacPhee-Pitcher (2021) says in their review of the exhibition, ‘Accessibility should be community-building, life-affirming, and expansive, but what is the cost of insisting upon it?’ Access, then, in this instance, is obscured and dismissed, as it is commonly considered too complicated by the museum world. Museum and gallery administrators stereotypically complain of feeling weighed down by the administrative and material hurdles they must meet in order to comply with state and federal regulations, and provisions for disabled audiences.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 6.

jes sachse, Undeliverable, in the Undeliverable exhibition at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2021. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Photo by Michelle Peek Photography and courtesy of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology & Access to Life, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art & Social Justice at the University of Guelph.

This work by sasche connects to Lippard’s practice of indexing within her ‘numbers’ exhibitions. Of course the presentation of their indexing is quite different, but nevertheless, they share an affinity with the notions of indexing as a form of path-making, access-giving, even meaning-making and meaning-producing. But they also critically share an orientation towards indexing as a political practice: while Lippard used indexing to revise the practice around how information is shared within museum culture (banning the traditional catalogue format), sasche is indexing how some bodies are prioritized over others within the spaces of museum culture (rich abled bodies of benefactors versus disabled bodies); sasche’s work then embodies a crip approach to institutional critique given the disability politics that she brings to the installation.

In another work in the exhibition, entitled ongoing, collective effort [. . .] by Aislinn Thomas, featuring Deaf artist and ASL interpreter Sage Lovell, the artist also adds the words ‘The Possibilities of Care as a Sculpture’ in upper-case black gouache wall text, positioned above the flat screen monitor showing the interpreter (Figure 7). The interpreter on the screen is a white woman who is wearing a black shirt. Thomas’s work actually has two longer, more descriptive titles, as follows: ‘Ongoing, collective effort and learning in appreciation and humble recognition of bodily complexity, permeability, and vulnerability, as well as the interdependent nature of our survival, our thrival’, OR ‘Fragrance-free sculpture piece (in which we imagine and co-create toxicant-free access and fragrance-freedom as a fragile, dynamic, invisible sculpture co-created by the efforts of everyone who is present and everyone who maintains this space)’ (Thomas, 2021). Thomas believes that, while institutions mandate fragrance-free policies in museums, they rarely enact these policies in ways that are meaningful. The artist created the following statement that was displayed alongside the monitor:

I have been imagining the creation of fragrance-free access as the creation of a dynamic, fragile, invisible sculpture, that is as interdependent as our bodies and possible only through collective effort. For Ongoing, collective effort I invite others to think of it in this way as well, and to reach out if they have questions, need support, or are experiencing a barrier. I sincerely appreciate all the many contributions to this work.

The work is offering a dematerialization of the object by frankly asking the audience to collectively help to imagine and build a fragrance-free environment in the gallery. Thomas’s work has centered around her access needs for fragrance-free spaces for many years, acknowledging the toxicity of our environment, particularly for disabled individuals. In this piece, the artist is suggesting that an immaterial access need can become paradoxically solidified into an imaginary sculpture as a way to make these needs concrete and valid and real. Thomas’s work then both references conceptual and curatorial practices from Lippard and her artist peers, whilst cripping this approach as an individualized response to institutional critique that explicitly meets the demands of people with disabilities or who are in need of accommodations. Another way in which the work connects with Lippard’s praxis is how sculpture – no matter how imaginary – is what Lippard sought to galvanize over other more popular and traditional forms of art, particularly painting and works on paper. Curator Cornelia Butler (2012) has written about how Lippard defied classifications and contested notions of practice, especially within art institutions that reinforced these hierarchies. For these reasons, Lippard’s curatorial work had a radical anti-institutional bent. Lippard’s ‘caring’ activist convictions intertwined with that of Thomas’s (and Papalia’s) activism around caring and careful curating as a collaborative mutually-sustaining sculptural practice, where disability is at the forefront, endows the medium of sculpture with generative meanings and possibilities.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 7.

Aislinn Thomas, Ongoing, collective effort and learning in appreciation and humble recognition of bodily complexity, permeability, and vulnerability, as well as the interdependent nature of our survival, our thrival OR Fragrance-free sculpture piece (in which we imagine and co-create toxicant-free access and fragrance-freedom as a fragile, dynamic, invisible sculpture made possible by the efforts of everyone who is present and everyone who maintains this space), 2021. Courtesy of Tangled Art Gallery. Photo by Michelle Peek Photography and courtesy of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology & Access to Life, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art & Social Justice at the University of Guelph.

The last component of the Undeliverable exhibition at Tangled that I wish to discuss is captured in Figure 8, where an iPad can be seen mounted to a wheel-able tripod in one corner of the gallery. There are separate drawings in red pastel hung up on the walls in the background by Heather Kai Smith, entitled Open Access: Claiming Visibility. The iPad has become a permanent fixture to the gallery installation as it is ever-ready to give virtual tours to visitors who request this within the digital sphere. Visitors also had the option to request Deaf interpretation, audio description, and to connect with a Tangled staff member who could take them through a personal guided tour of the show. (As an off-shoot to this, Tangled Gallery is also experimenting with a self-driven remote option where a robot replaces a person as a guide through their exhibitions, and the robot can be controlled from the gallery visitor’s home to virtually walk one through the exhibition over Zoom) (Bunch et al., 2022). The iPad is a reminder of the current condition of the pandemic condition whilst also enforcing a new normal around the needs of disabled folks who have been demanding this type of access for far longer than the timeline of COVID-19. The iPad also becomes a part of the installation itself, offering a multi-pronged mode of representation that is now firmly rooted in both real time and digital time, and where we can no longer necessarily accord a definitive ‘value’ status between one medium over another. This breakdown of hierarchies also recalls Lippard’s own preferences for breaking down the hierarchy of media in art praxis and curatorial praxis itself, where she was very open to what work was included in her exhibitions.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 8.

A Tangled staff member gives a remote tour of #CripRitual at Tangled Art Gallery, 2021. Photo by Michelle Peek Photography and courtesy of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology & Access to Life, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art & Social Justice at the University of Guelph.

As the reader already understands, Lippard’s overarching stance towards her curatorial praxis has been towards making it accessible – from challenging the hierarchies of artistic categories and mediums, to forecasting the role of technology to curatorial praxis, the format of exhibition documentation, to even the random neutral titles of her shows. Lippard also tried to curate outside and in public spaces that were more wide-reaching and expansive than established and elite art venues in order to reach a much broader and unconventional audience. In this way, Lippard’s more inclusive curatorial practice signals how her numbers shows were also a landmark for opening up more expansive approaches towards accessible curatorial praxis in the future for disabled artists and audiences, including exhibitions such as Papalia’s Undeliverable. We can therefore trace a discernible connection between contemporary disability art and curatorial practice with conceptual art from the 1960s, namely where errors, gaps, and professional time-frames were revealed in Lippard’s projects, whilst the aesthetics of the undeliverable points out inequities towards disabled artists and audiences, while insisting on time-lines that defy normative frameworks, and ultimately presents (critiques of institutions, administration, and logistical) elements, and aspects and qualities aesthetically that affirm the undeliverable as critically crip curation. This cements disability art production as an heir to early art movements that also take up radical activism as their mantel. What this all amounts to is not only establishing for the first time a clear trajectory and genealogy between radical curatorial practice of the past with crip curation of the present, therefore inserting (and insisting that) disabled representation be part of the canon, but it also demonstrates that the aesthetics of the undeliverable is radical, too, like earlier predecessors. Similar to Lippard’s curatorial work and her interventions within institutional critique, the aesthetics of the undeliverable inhabits radical and agential qualities that aim to disrupt and challenge sensorial and administrative hierarchies, and definitions of display and execution. This matters because curators and museum and gallery culture at large need to recognize the power in crip curation, and its capacity to affect the regulatory framework of curating. Museums can commission crip curators to intentionally carry out radical activism and advocacy in their spaces in order to break down ableist practices and therefore improve the quality of the visitor experience for a greater diversity of bodies.

Conclusion

Ultimately, crip curation of the aesthetics of the undeliverable interweaves aspects of conceptual art, experimentation, politics, and advocacy, and takes its cue from work by Lucy Lippard and other progressive thinkers of her generation within the conceptual art movement. Like Lippard and her interest in creatively revealing the behind-the-scenes work of the curator, in line with the conceptual art experiments of her artist peers, Papalia too takes on the hybrid role of artist/curator, curating access whilst simultaneously revealing its inescapable inability to be complete, to fully deliver. Papalia’s role as curator in this instance is one that reveals how curating is a collaborative exercise that hones in on caring, awash with disabled needs first and foremost. In museums’ efforts to reveal what goes on behind closed doors, from utilizing glass walls that show us racks of multi-million-dollar artwork hung in storage such as the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, to revised labels that acknowledge the histories of colonization and the erasure of black and brown bodies, these practices are ones that actually in fact espouse crip methodology. By this, I mean to suggest that museums have already begun doing the work of making bare the realities of behind-the-scenes work, or the realities of a lived experience that previously remained invisible behind a problematic veneer of so-called normality. The work in Undeliverable also offers an expansion of Buchloh’s aesthetics of administration so that it has now evolved into an aesthetics of the undeliverable, which then aligns with Disability Studies scholarship and its call to embrace crip methodology and the lived experience of disability – an experience that is lived in crip time in which the behind-the-scenes process, and the exposing visibly and curatorially of the mechanisms of the process, is a route to the future that is always already actively (and activist-ly) undeliverable. The aesthetics of the undeliverable is a crip methodology that is useful in both theoretical and practical applications, so that visitors to disability texts and disability spaces are exposed to what it means to function as a disabled person and how exhibitions, displays, and the architectures of galleries are inherently ableist. Contemporary disabled artists show that fragrance-free environments, intangible practices of equal access, and the modes in which to reflect on both these issues and more, become the very dematerial of an exhibition. Cripping institutional critique is then paramount for the institution to consider and embrace, as the language of conceptual art adopted by contemporary disabled artists such as those who appear in Undeliverable espouse the agential politics of inclusion, diversity, and difference, as well as equal participation. This article has attempted to provide a map connecting disparate worlds through an in-depth analysis of numerous exhibitions across time so that disability can find a permanent and more accessible home in the museum, and so that visual culture and art history can perceive how a still marginalized art category can be treated and considered differently. I do all this because what is at stake here is a more equitable experience for a greater diversity of bodies, especially disabled bodies, visiting the art museum.