https://archive.li/ob7uJ
"ON A SPRING afternoon in 1991, the artist Joseph Grigely wandered into a show
called “The Blind” at Luhring Augustine gallery in Lower Manhattan. The show
was by the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who would gain a cult
following for her intimate and voyeuristic work about encounters with
strangers, and the gallery included photographs of people who’d been born
blind, alongside their answers to her question “What is your image of beauty?”
Grigely initially found the exhibit seductive. He’d lost hearing in his right
ear as a baby; he became fully Deaf when he was 10, after a twig pierced his
left eardrum while he rolled down a hill. “Here was a show directly addressing
disability in a way I hadn’t seen up to that point,” he recalled over Zoom in
June. (Grigely’s longtime sign language interpreter joined us to translate my
questions.) Calle’s portraits and her subjects’ replies were accompanied by
images of places, textures and colors that they’d described (“What pleases me
aesthetically is a man’s body, strong and muscular”).
But as Grigely, now 68, drove back home to Washington, D.C., he felt
increasingly uneasy. Stuck in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, he started
scribbling notes to Calle on the scraps of paper he carries around so hearing
people can communicate with him. He went on to visit the show seven more times,
in the process writing 32 letters that became “Postcards to Sophie Calle”
(1991), an influential work in the history of disability art."
Original at <
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/t-magazine/disability-art.html>
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-denver-flourishing-food-forests/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
