Disability Arts History Australia

Items

• “Creative Australia releases reports on arts participation, including d/Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent artists and audiences”
  A series of reports about arts and disability in Australia published in the mid-to-late-2010s are summarised on the Creative Australia website. Sources for the summary include Connecting Australians: Results of the National Arts Participation Survey (June 2017), Making Art Work: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia (2017), Creating Pathways: Insights on support for artists with disability (2018), and Arts and Disability in Australia: Meeting of Cultural Ministers (2018). The overview of this research series demonstrates that disabled Australians’ participation in the arts had increased as access had grown, though equity for disabled artists, especially those with intersecting marginalised identities, continued to face barriers. It reports that work by disabled artists is innovative and transformative.
• "Bree Hadley (2019) Disability arts in an age of austerity. In Hadley, B & McDonald, D (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of disability arts, culture, and media. Routledge, United Kingdom, pp. 347-361."
  "Is the current “age of austerity” (Summers 2009) impacting on art, culture, and media practices by and about people with disabilities, and, in particular, on art-based protest practices by people with disabilities? In recent years, much has been written about austerity as neo-liberal economic, political, social, and ideological agenda (Harvey 2005; Barnett 2010; Seymour 2014). Much has been written about the way groups effected by local and global governmental shifts towards austerity are protesting, presenting themselves, and being represented by others (Fritsch 2013; Goodley, Lawthom, & Runswick-Cole 2014; Runswick- Cole & Goodley 2015; della Porta 2015; Kokoli & Winter 2015; Beresford 2016; Dodd 2016; Giugni & Grasso 2016; Berry 2017). The question of whether disabled artists are adapting their practices to address these changing cultural circumstances has received less attention (Hadley 2017) and is thus the topic I focus on in this chapter."
• "Bree Hadley, Donna McDonald, Sarah Austin, Kath Duncan, Gerard Goggin, Lachlan MacDowall, Veronica Pardo, Eddie Paterson, with collaborators Dave Calvert, Jori De Coster, Shawn Goh, Alice Fox, Ann M. Fox, Andy Kempe, Petra Kuppers, Justin Lee, Alex Lubet, Sarah Meisch Lionetto, Ann Millett-Gallant, Laura Misener, Bronwyn Preece, Megan Strickfaden, Joanne Tay, Matthew Reason, Nancy Quinn, and Sarah Whatley (2019) Conclusion: practicing interdependency, sharing vulnerability, celebrating complexity - the future of disability arts, culture, and media research. In Hadley, B & McDonald, D (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of disability arts, culture, and media. Routledge, United Kingdom, pp. 362-372."
  "In this chapter, the authors conclude The Routledge Handbook of Disability Art, Culture, and Media studies by reflecting on the past, present, and potential future of disability art practice debated throughout the book. Based on research currently underway in the work of many of the Australian contributors, and including reflections from the global contributors, this concluding chapter reflects on what the disability arts, culture, and media practice and research of the future might look like, do, and achieve in the public sphere."
• "Mary Hutchison (2005) Making the Journey: Arts & Disability in Australia. Sydney: Arts Access Australia."
  Reads, in part "A collection of inspiring examples of how to include people with disabilities in the arts, as participants, creators and organisers"
• "Bree Hadley (2014) Disability, Public Space Performance, and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers. London: Palgrave Macmillan."
  "Why would disabled people want to re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the everyday encounters in public spaces and places that cast them as ugly, strange, stare-worthy? In Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley examines the performance practices of disabled artists in the US, UK, Europe and Australasia who do exactly this. Operating in a live or performance art paradigm, artists like James Cunningham (Australia), Noemi Lakmaier (UK/Austria), Alison Jones (UK), Aaron Williamson (UK), Katherine Araniello (UK), Bill Shannon (US), Back to Back Theatre (Australia), Rita Marcalo (UK), Liz Crow (UK) and Mat Fraser (UK) all use installation and public space performance practices to re-stage their disabled identities in risky, guerilla-style works that remind passersby of their own complicity in the daily social drama of disability. In doing so, they draw spectators' attention to their own role in constructing Western concepts of disability. This book investigates the way each of us can become unconscious performers in a daily social drama that positions disability people as figures of tragedy, stigma or pity, and the aesthetics, politics and ethics of performance practices that intervene very directly in this drama. It constructs a framework for understanding the way spectators are positioned in these practices, and how they contribute to public sphere debates about disability today."
• "Bree Hadley (2017) Disability, Sustainability, Austerity: The Bolshy Divas Arts-Based Protests Against Policy Paradoxes. Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts Journal 18 Spring. http://www.sustainablepractice.org."
  "In this short article, I want consider some of the ways theatrical artists, activists and advocates in Australia are tackling the paradoxical relationship between sustainability and austerity discourses, and, as a result, some changes this may be starting to produce in disabled people’s aesthetic prerogatives. For the last 30 years, artists, activists and scholars in Australia and beyond have avoided casting disability in terms of trauma, crisis, catastrophe and disaster. Accounts of the way disability theatre challenges stereotypes , as well as analysis of disability signifiers in screen, stage, and social performance , have expressed concern about deploying disability as a metaphor for disaster, or defining disabled people as monstrous, tragic, stoic, or inspirational, the way the medical model of disability traditionally defines us. Instead, modern disabled artists and the scholars who analyse them have advocated for work that deploys live art, performance art, and performative intervention in public space to challenge stereotypes, oppressive institutional systems, and other factors the social model of disability sees as the cause of disability oppression .In the last few years, though, there has been an increase in work that does associate disability with trauma, tragedy and disaster, in what seems to be a response to austerity, accountability and economic sustainability agendas that call for cuts to disability services spending to make our societies more sustainable going forward."
• "Amanda Cachia (2013) ‘Disabling’ the museum: Curator as infrastructural activist. J. 12.3. pp. 257–289"
  Reads, in part "This article will explore how I attempt to ‘disable’ the museum through my infrastructural curatorial practice, which is the basis for my scholarly research and writing. By infusing my curatorial projects with critical reflection and theoretical development, I hope to begin this process of building a new vocabulary and methodology around curating disability and access."
• "Amanda Cachia (2022) Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation. London: Routledge"
  Reads, in part "This book is an interdisciplinary collection of twenty-four essays which critically examine contemporary exhibitions and artistic practices that focus on conceptual and creative aspects of access."
• "Fayden D'Evie (2022) From Dust to Dust: Hallucinating the Absent Exhibition, in Amanda Cachia ed. Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation. London: Routledge, 87-98"
  Reads, in part "Over several months in 2018, I developed a hybrid artist-curatorial project for the Old Castlemaine Gaol, with the working title From Dust to Dust , which sought to invert the site’s association with the sensorial policing of bodies."
• "Boram Lee, Ruth Rentschler, and Shin-Eui Park (2022) Connect2Abilities: Staging Virtual Intercultural Collaboration during COVID-19 in Amanda Cachia ed. Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation. London: Routledge, 45-58"
  Reads, in part "As a pilot project, Restless Dance Theatre in Adelaide, Australia and SNU MUSIC in Seoul, Korea collaborated to create a digital performing arts piece entitled Dialogue for Six Strings."
• "Maree Roche, Ben Whitburn (2019) Mate, You’re Crippin’ Us Out: Biopolitics of the Arts Curriculum in Australia and the Swinging Identities of Dis/abilities. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies.13(3). https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2019.25"
  Reads, in part "The article explores arts curriculum in Australia as developed in the contexts of schooling, community organizations, and higher education for people with disabilities and mental health concerns. Motivated to explore whether or not students provided access to modified arts curriculum are engaging in education or receiving therapy, the aim is to address a dichotomy that is seemingly present in educational institutions, but extends well beyond the school gate and informs organizational responses to arts in the lives of people with disabilities. Resourced with the theoretical contributions of dis/ability studies for its concern for the biopolitics of disability, the authors weave personal experiences through the discussion of participation in arts throughout their lives. The article concludes with a theoretical discussion of how arts provision in the Australian context might develop the social and political value of art in the lives of people with dis/abilities and for all, on the basis that its educative value is emphasized over its therapeutic one."
• "SENSORIA: Access & Agency. ArtLink Magazine Issue 42.2, Spring 2022."
  Reads, in part "This issue platforms a range of contemporary art practices and debates written by and with artists who identify as part of the disabled, d/Deaf, vision impaired or neurodiverse communities. The commissioned essays, profiles and conversations offer diverse perspectives of lived experience and (in)visibility in the art worlds of Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the UK."
• DADAA
• Australian Network for Art and Technology
• Arts Access Australia
• Broughton Art Society
• Art From the Margins
• Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)
• The Other Film Festival
• Art Day South
• Australia Council for the Arts
• Weave Movement Theatre
• Art Gallery of New South Wales
• Dark Mofo
• Art Life Program