Installation Art…. & Disability too
I have been doing a lot of secondary research on installation art this week; looking at how it has grown as an artform and key artists working in site specific and video/audio multimedia installation.
I also watched BBC4’s Sound of Cinema to gain an understanding of the way sound can be used to stir emotions and create effects. I have collected various sounds over the past few months and then looped them before I pitch them down; including:
car noises (motorway) (doors slamming)
market noises
drill noises
washing machines, etc
Work is going well on my sound installation and I believe I am making process.
Most of my research has been focused on disability and sexuality this week, as it forms part of the research for my human zoo photo installation. Luckily I have even managed to find a paper that looks directly at Attitudes Toward the Sexuality of Persons With Physical Versus Psychiatric Disabilities by Hasson-Ohayon, I et al at Bar-Iiam University. I am really glad that I found this paper as one of the central themes of my work is the difference between how physical and mental illness/disability is treated. The paper makes sad reading as someone with disabilities; as its review of literature points to the work of Chan et al (2009) that stipulates that disabled people are viewed negatively by others due to among other reasons “a fear of death” (Hasson-Ohayon,I. 2014:236).
This is depressing as it is something you fear as a person with disabilities, that others see you as “other” and something to be avoided.
Of the few papers that deal with sexuality and disability many indicate that disabled people are viewed as “asexual”. There is no distinction made between the different levels of disability, including:
severity;
whether people were born disabled
whether they acquired disability
If the disability affects mental or physical attributes
Whether they are ill disabled
Whether they are fit disabled.
I find it very difficult to understand how disability can be looked at in this way. As such a huge area, with so many variables it seems very odd to me the way that sweeping generalisations are made that theorists and researchers would not make with other sections of society: why is this?