In its particular lack of delineation between artistic and social practice, between ritual and action, live art seeks to engage directly in its landscape; during M21, the sites that became the context for the work created a rich mesh of discourse surrounding not only the public perception of disability, sports, the able body and aesthetic difference, but also surfaced the idea of public labour. The works engaged indirectly with social fears associated with the aesthetics, but didn’t always resort to a direct critique of such perceptions of disability. The public associations of the term disability create a barometer that is as constructed as any other political or social system, but so specifically bounded to an iconography which this work is not only trying to contest, but play with. In that way, Naomi Lakmaier’s O, in which she uses her body as a human baton, carried by men in elegant black suits in a relay race around town, specifically addresses body politics in her exploration of objectivization, and attempts to remove the immediate reading framework associated with disability art. Although she becomes the human baton in the piece, the weight which the men have to carry, she’s the athlete wearing the race number- and that aesthetic play makes for a gently subversive live act. It engraves itself into the rhythms of the town, disappearing as quickly as it emerges.
Sean Burn’s Psychosis Belly which opened and closed the event, welcomed a community in the town square, as Burn crawled under the depression hurdle and made his way across the square for the 100yard challenge in a t-shirt with the slogan “lower, slower, fatter”. Burn’s work is interested in reclaiming the language of mental illness, and in this piece, he pokes fun not only at the motivational language and problematic iconography surrounding professional sport, but also the NHS lifestyle rationing bill that can deny patients over a certain weight particular medical procedures. In Burn’s case, anti-depressants cause significant weight gain, and he questions the solutions offered to him. This impasse serves as the cue for the piece, in which he devises and performs several sports activities that are as subversive as they are humorous, residing in a constant ambiguous tone between sharp satire and playful action.
Sean Burn’s Psychosis Belly
His shot put is made up of scrunched up motivational speeches for athletes from psychologists, and there’s also a sport in which he climbs the DSM IV [Diagonstic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] and makes an ambitious jump. In the iconography he builds, his presence in the town’s main square, the language of his piece, Burn engages both in a public act and a political action. His critique is overt but that also gives it depth- by deliberately recreating context, he manages to create heightened encounters with satire that still remain grounded in the every day. Through the repetition of the piece- he aimed to beat his personal bes- this playful aesthetic sediments itself in the cultural history of the surrounding space, displacing dominant cultural narratives.
In a similar manner, Disabled Avant-Garde’s wayward mascots challenged the idea of the mascot as passive visual display. In their piece, they not only tackled the iconography of the Olympics with the design of their mascots, but also played with expectations associated with such characters- engaging with town’s visitors, interrupting the day to day rituals occurring in its public spaces, exploring the conditions of rural living and their politics, as well as resisting against any culture of patronage associated with their disability. They were mascots that turned bad, an accessible nomadic set of characters that embodied the scope of DAG’s work, referential to the town’s own lifestyle, a satirical promenade that subverts expectations and stereotypes of disability, but also fuel debate in its ambiguous and playful tone.
