Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Art, BP Portrait Prize, Disability, Down Syndrome, Mieke Tierlinck, Portrait
Last week at BP Portrait Prize in London, I discovered an artist called at Mieke Tierlinck.
(As shown above) Her submission consisted of a close up image of a person that has Down Syndrome – Personally I would describes the image as essentially raw and certainly emotive. ”Honest prevails” but the question remains for who? The subject matter, painter, judges or the prize collection audience (mixture of London tourist and the culture people) The tight framing of the image disallows the viewer’s eye to wonder from man in question: no background to provide mindless distraction. This is person to engages with, but I feel that heighten sense of austerity somehow jar with me, the brutal honestly is gripping. I wanted to look away. The majority of the collection is aesthetically appealing with a few added subversive act. Therefore, its make me wonder if the painting in question has no choice but to fulfill the role as being the the subversive. That the hegemonic maintenance of aesthetic beauty has the ability to displace the alternative.
Supposing a new form of transport that runs on electricity could redefine pavement mobility as we know it. Surely analogue would become the past?
“Think of [Segway] as a digital solution to an analogue problem.”
Segway is a new digital product for the walkers, a leap for mankind; yet, mobility products such as electric wheelchairs have been around for a good thirty years. This product reclaims the name Puma (another wheelchair branding itself on the cutting edge of technologies); P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility). The keywords of Mobility and Accessibility are here reappropriated into a funky new prototype, representing that somehow meagre notion of walking and the imagery of sleek black panther roaming into an expanding urbane landscape.
The point I would like to raise in complying our futuristic imagery of an urban transporters, does this product transform walkers into non-walkers? Moving into the realm of deconstruction of the binary; does this dissolve boundaries or categories so in actual fact disabled and able bodies travel as one in harmony.
Introducing a new breed called the puma-ism? Somehow, I think not. I think my reaction against this lies within the fact that disabled people occupy the category of ‘the other’ in normative society. Until these boundaries between able and dis-abled bodies dissolve of their own doing and thus disabled people gain their autonomy, separate from the able bodied; this choice for a walker to step into the P.U.M.A denies disabled people their own choice about whether to integrate themselves into society.
