“The disabled body has historically invited, compelled, and incited a variety of responses in spite of whatever specific impairments may be at issue.”
-Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness (1)
Adleen Crapo
When I heard about jes sachse’s upcoming Mayworks project, I thought it would centre the relationship between the arts and disability. This was not entirely how sachse saw their installation, however. To sachse, so much of the piece centred on moments captured in Parkdale, which remains a locus of working-class and immigrant organizing despite a decade of attempted gentrification. The various elements of the work were paths all leading to Parkdale, but I couldn’t see them except through the prism of disability. Even when you ask a disabled woman to review a work by a disabled artist, the fact is that culture is sometimes stronger than your best intentions, even if you happen to be an activist, or disabled person, or academic working in disability studies. What follows below is a write-up of the piece.
jes sachse’s All or None was a melancholic installation, situated between tall condo buildings surrounding Lisgar Parkette in Toronto. An area where Queen West and the rapidly-gentrifying Parkdale neighborhoods meet, this couldn’t have been a more appropriate place to interrogate late capitalism and its relationship to disability. By imposing and staking a temporary claim at this particular site, sachse’s piece reminded us of the centrality of space, and particularly public space, to notions of disability, rest, and solidarity.
When I say “late capitalism”, a term which is everywhere but rarely defined, I am thinking about two things especially, emotional experience and inequality. If you want to understand what a late capitalist economy looks like, The Atlantic’s definition works pretty well—“a catchall phrase for the indignities and absurdities of our contemporary economy, with its yawning inequality and super-powered corporations and shrinking middle class” (2). When considering All or None, I am primarily interested in the emotional effects of late capitalism, and especially the “indignities and absurdities” which fuel a collective social fear of leisure and non-productivity. In a late capitalist economy, it’s cheaper for grocery stores to throw out imperfect or extra produce instead of donating it. Short-term thinking is king; governments and corporations think of the next economic quarter, and not the looming climate crisis. It’s easier and better to saddle students with thousands of dollars in loans than to ensure access to education and jobs. Closer to home, Toronto has a housing crisis not despite but because of the condo boom. Part of the massive waste of late capitalism includes the disposability of human beings, and in particular, disabled people, since they are seen as non-productive and thus non-citizens. Because disabled people are rarely considered important workers or consumers, they are shut out from these social roles, which are the only ones which everyone is obligated to hold. This system manufactures a compulsion to work that is associated with desired states of feeling such as accomplishment, satisfaction, victory, and ease; feelings we can’t have access to unless we are able to somehow ‘win’ against a constantly turning wheel of work. And these feelings are only granted to the lucky ones who don’t have to constantly justify their existence. Disabled people, and in particular their joy and pleasure in the world, becomes a slap in the face to this economic system.
In the park, passers-by gathered around an improvised screen made of mosquito netting, displaying a low-fi short film that sachse set to play on a continuous loop. An exploration of melancholy and solidarity in Toronto, the moments of the film showed sachse with others, seemingly in their downtime. sachse narrated a voiceover that was also captured by subtitles in neat, white font. “Sadness is poetic,” superimposed over a picture of mango sauce. “Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it” reads text laid over a shot of sachse and friends on a grocery-store escalator. Images of sachse with company recur throughout, often over the film’s most desolate statements, marked by urban scenes such as tunnels and rain seen through car windows. Viewing a scene that stated, “misery loves company,” I thought that perhaps it’d be best to say, “melancholy needs solidarity.” Whether disabled or not, no one can escape the melancholy of late capitalism.
Folding tables and chess boards held snacks and craft-making for the audience, seemingly alleviating some of the film’s seriousness. sachse had collected an assortment of found lounge chairs and other furniture from the curbs of Parkdale. In the easy chairs, the audience continued to sit, stretch out, taking space as we lounged in the upholstered chairs or casually flitted through the space. This seating was a contrast to the city benches permanently installed around us, with their anti-homeless features designed to make stretching out impossible. Silver plaques were affixed to the seats and backs of the freecycled furniture. Many were made with the cooperation of Butterfly, a collective of Asian and migrant sex workers, supported by the presence of fellow artist and activist Kelly Liu. These plaques, with expressions like “blow jobs are real jobs” were placed on chairs which remained in the parkette overnight. They claimed space for their makers in a way that migrant workers are usually denied.
These elements worked in tandem to present a vision of possible alternatives to the model of productivity propounded by late capitalism, driven by competition and dissatisfaction. The lounge chairs were not the typical hard benches that Toronto puts in its parks; instead they reinforced a focus on the audience’s comfort. While the short played and as viewers made use of the freecycled furniture, the focus became the audience’s collective ease, an ability to sit together, on a balmy night, while experiencing the film. Because the installation area was public and open, people could drop in and drop out at their leisure. The arrangement cut into the supposedly public space between the new condos. As some of the new locals stopped through, they admitted that developers had sold them their condos under the guise that the area was an up-and-coming arts district, with the promise that they would have easy access to ‘culture’. These sterile planned areas amongst condo buildings rarely function as the green, cultural spaces that planners claim they will. As we sat or stood or wandered through the parkette, the audience and passers-by inhabited a moment where we were all together experiencing the same work, without the pressure to perform or to produce.
Disabled people call into question mainstream ideas about ease, leisure, and time. In a culture where everyone is supposed to “earn” or “deserve” their time off, disability casts doubt on the belief that people must participate in the workplace to merit rest. How can you explain to a person who’s on ODSP that they haven’t ‘earned’ rest and enjoyment? Disability calls into question how much space everyone needs, how public spaces are set up and regulated, and how little space city inhabitants enjoy. The colonial closing off of some spaces coincides with the allocation of spaces elsewhere, to the privileged few who expect to stroll through life unhindered. Disabled people turn up in public spaces that were never designed or intended to accommodate them, and in so doing, remind us how frequently bodies can cross boundaries. Just as the audience called out to other passing dog walkers and local residents to join the installation, visible disability can command the attention of everyone in a public space and disrupt “business as usual.”
At the end of the event, chairs were being returned to the Parkdale streets where they were found, suggesting a kind of transience. sachse explained that though they would perhaps be reclaimed by people for their homes or other uses, the furniture was not going to be stolen; how was it possible to say that someone was ‘stealing’ a chair that itself was abandoned? And even more importantly, abandoned on stolen land? When I thought of the title for my write-up, my mind went to one of the video’s phrases, “Let it Hit You Like a Truck” because it’s violence contrasted with the look of the film. At the same time, the implied violence of this statement hints to the dangerous possibilities raised by disability. Disability does not exist to inspire, to be heartwarming, or to remind able-bodied people to be grateful for their privilege. Like the piece’s title “All or None” implies, disability impels everyone to accept all of its potential implications, including the challenge it poses for the economic status quo. Although able-bodied people wish to repress this fact, disability is also dangerous because anyone, at any moment, no matter how healthy, can become disabled. This is deeply unsettling to many able-bodied people, and triggers a powerful reaction.
Both my article title and the title of the piece itself are overwrought, and not by accident: capitalism wants to forcefully rid society of its least ‘productive’ members, and the best weapon is, as always, to erase ‘undesirable’ people from able-bodied and mainstream awareness. Erasure is an act of violence. All or None responds to the possibility of erasure through a title that demands attention; the piece itself, however, doesn’t need to make a strenuous effort to get its participants’ attention. While they are watching and sitting, it absorbs them into its atmosphere and contrasting sense of time.
Many people make the mistake of assuming that disability is useful mainly as inspiration porn, especially in viral videos or news clips in which a disabled athlete or child triumphs against the odds. Such propaganda dovetails with the kind of cruel, false hope capitalism tries to instill in everyone, that against the odds somehow you will be the lucky one who prospers. However instead of focusing on disability as a teaching experience that reinforces the myth of individual success, disability can remind us of the importance of rest. It can allow everyone to experience moments of leisure–together. Rest, ease, solidarity: sachse’s installation reminds us that disability can reclaim these ways of being from notions of productivity so crucial to late capitalism.
(1) Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness, (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) 4
Presented by Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts, in collaboration with Charles Street Video, Toronto Media Arts Centre, and CUPE 3902.