Commentary by Tobin Siebers, V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor, Professor of English Language and Literature, and Art & Design, University of Michigan
Mirroring Nature
Art is the mirror of nature, it has often been said, but what of disability reflected in the mirror of art? Supposedly, the fabled perfection of art began by mirroring the faultless beauty of nature. Greek and Roman art focuses almost always on the beautiful physique, and this focus, so difficult to shake, endures until the modern age. Johann Joachim Winckelmann claims in Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture that the beauty of Greek sculpture descends directly from the beautiful nature of the Greek body, beautiful nature and healthy bodies still being for him practically synonymous. Similarly, Alexander Baumgarten conceives beauty in his Reflections on Poetry as the mental harmony felt by the beholder before a body. The experience of aesthetic objects organizes in itself the internal consistency of the mind. Aesthetics begins implicitly, if not explicitly, as a mode designed to perfect human beings. Today, some thinkers continue to believe that images trap the psyche in the illusion of perfection, and although this perfection may prove to be a mirage, it has tenacious durability. Jacques Lacan speculates in “The Mirror Stage” (Ecrits 1966) that the human ego discovers at an early age the false image of its own perfection in the mirror. The small child, barely able to stand, nearly incapable of controlling its movements, looks into the mirror to discover the static but masterful image of a mature and able body—a narcissistic image of the ego that the child will never be able to live up to.
The Body in Pieces
Disability breaks the mirror of art as traditionally conceived by putting into question the art object’s relation to perfection, but the beauty reflected in the broken mirror grows more beautiful as a result. The more we enter the modern age, the stronger the equation between art and disability—and to the point where we sometimes perceive the presence of art itself in the image of disability. Disability, disease, and injury have become the figures by which aesthetic beauty is often recognized. Hal Foster associates wounding and injury with an aesthetic realism born of the trauma of modern existence (Return of the Real 1996), while Linda Nochlin claims that the modern in art is made out of the loss of wholeness, embracing the impression that fragmentation reigns, connections in life have been shattered, and permanent values have disintegrated (The Body in Pieces, 2001, 23-24). She traces the essence of modernism to the French Revolution as the historical moment when the body in pieces becomes for modernity a “positive rather than negative trope” (8). Leonard Barkan’s Unearthing the Past (1999) attributes the origin of modernity’s appreciation of the fragmentary, broken, and injured to an earlier period, in the unearthing of classical fragmentary statuary in Renaissance times, calling the modern idea that fragments have “value independent of any potential for being made whole again” “a category shift” (122), one that reorients the “whole project of making art in response to broken bodies” (209). In an increasingly global world, modern art moves away from cultural languages to the biological diversity of the body, and disability marks the outer boundaries of the body diversely conceived. In fact, so strong is the equation between art and disability that we begin to view past works of art in terms of the irrepressible image of disability given by the modern world.
Nevertheless, the force of specific historical arguments, such as those by Foster, Nochlin, Barkan, and others, seems compromised by the fact that art has a longstanding relationship with the human desire to understand the human differently. The making of any object, out of any substance, by a human being is also in some way a making and remaking of the human. The object of human craft is the human being, and the most immediate sign of the human and the material out of which we craft it is the human body. If art and the human are inseparable, it is because art is the process by which human beings attempt to modify themselves—and this process is a crucial factor in human history. Moreover, when art expresses the desire to perceive the human differently, it must consider human beauty differently as well, and if recent art shows anything, it is that beauty has become a radical concept by virtue of its preoccupation with the disabled body. Beauty is other today—and like no other time in human history.
Mirroring Disability
The usual effect of reflecting on disability finds disabled people looking into the mirror and dreaming of ability. Putting disability in the mirror of art, however, discovers a different mode of reflection. A brief look at two paintings may help to describe the effect of combining disability and aesthetic value. Both paintings engage disability in relation to self-reflection, asking how art works put disability in the place of the beholder’s mirror image. The first and earlier painting does not take disability as its explicit subject matter, although it is tricky, thanks to the centrality of disability to the ambition of art, not to read it that way. The second painting is the work of a disabled artist, and it takes her experience of disability as its theme. Nevertheless, the symbolism of the painting makes it difficult to reduce the content only to disability, suggesting that disability now claims a broader symbolic dimension touching on human imagination and self-transformation.
Two Bathers, or Dina, Back and Profile by Aristide Maillol has many typical features associated with his work (see Bernard Lorquin, Maillol Peintre, Paris: RMN, 2001, 166-67). The woman or women are fleshy, with round stomachs and heavy thighs; their breasts are small; and they wear their hair up in a twist. The nondisabled woman lies with her back to the beholder in the grass next to a pool. The armless and legless woman floating on the surface of the pool, whether the reflection of the nondisabled woman or her twin rendered limbless by immersion in water, faces the beholder. Thus, the painting unfolds a fundamental ambiguity that ends by confirming the importance of disability in modern art. The title asks the beholder to decide whether the painting represents one or two women, but the decision cannot be made absolutely without destroying the defining symbolism of the work. The conceit is to render the back and profile of Dina Vierny as an encounter between two bathers, providing the experience of volume given by sculpture, but the unity of the human body renders the conceit problematic in the absence of a mirror, explaining why the painting requires the presence of water as a possible reflective surface.
Reflection is the master trope of the painting, but this trope is anchored by the representation of disability, whether the work portrays one or two women. If the painting includes two women, it shows them reflecting on themselves in comparison to one another. Whether the encounter is erotic is not clear, but the image demands in any event to be read as a scene of desire. Either the women desire to possess one another or to be one another, producing the conundrum of modern identity recognized by feminist thinkers in which women are pitted against one another as they judge their bodies either superior or inferior. Here the fragmentary form of the woman in the pool signifies that crucial physical difference—the difference that demands to be read as either the superiority or inferiority of one figure. If the painting includes only one woman, it pictures a woman examining her reflection in a pool—the archetypical scene of narcissism. But here the archetype fails because the reflection is not more perfect than the original. Narcissus does not fall in love with his better. Or, perhaps, the reflected figure is the more perfect: disability in the mirror of art revolutionizes the idea of perfection to include the impairment of foreshortened limbs.
The riddle of Maillol’s painting is, at the very least, to move between these two interpretations, but one idea appears to be constant, whether the painting depicts two women or one: the work presents a confrontation between ability and disability. The figure in the foreground is able-bodied, but the figure in the background, because of the immersion in the water, appears as if her limbs are cut off, despite the fact that there is no reason why a reflection in water should automatically give the image of amputation. Rather, a more informed interpretation understands that the woman in the pool mirrors Maillol’s embrace of the tradition of fragmentary classical sculpture and its definition of beauty. In this tradition, the loss of limbs demands to be understood as the essence of beauty. Maillol copies the beauty of the Venus de Milo here, as he does elsewhere (see his last sculpture, Harmonie, 1940-44, a bronze statue of an armless woman), capitalizing on the modern tradition of representing beauty by incompleteness, breakage, and disability. If there are two women in the painting, the disabled one is named the more beautiful, as if Maillol wishes to contrast an aesthetic, fragmentary, and broken beauty to a lesser, intact beauty. If there is one woman in the painting, she appears to imagine her form more perfectly as incomplete or disabled, as if she aspires to the legendary beauty of the Venus de Milo. In both cases, disability represents the aesthetic value and the summit of what beauty might achieve. The equation between art and disability found throughout modern art is confirmed by the fact that there is really no way to interpret the incomplete figure as other than beautiful.
Reflecting on Disability
Susan Dupor’s Stream of Consciousness, shown above, shows a woman swimming downstream in a narrow river surrounded by lush vegetation, her reflection lightly visible and doubling her in the water around her. She is not, however, looking at the reflection. Her eyes are closed, and she seems to be sleeping, so relaxed and taken with the inner life of consciousness as in a dream. Only the appearance of nine hands rising out of the surface of the stream startles the tranquil scene. The hands mirror the hands of the swimmer, as if to mimic her future strokes as she advances downstream, but the painting is not an exercise in cubism, blurring, or trompe-l’oeil. Its goal is not to depict motion but thought, as the work’s title indicates, for Dupor is deaf, and this painting, like many others by her, includes multiple hands as a method for expressing the presence of sign language. The stream in which the swimmer courses represents a stream of consciousness expressed in hand signs.
Although disembodied hands may seem to eyes untutored by Dupor to have a chilling effect, as if severed hands or the hands of strange beings were reaching out around the primary figure of the painting (see also Courtship or Halcyon), the effect here is not macabre because the hands are neither surrealistic nor gothic. They clearly belong to the swimmer, and they express a world in which she is deeply absorbed. Nor does the mirroring of the swimmer elicit a potentially damaging encounter in which two women judge one another’s physical beauty as superior or inferior. The mirror image suggests self-reflection, but in the absence of narcissism, because sign language mediates the action of self-reflection. The swimmer is not self-absorbed but absorbed in language—a language at once natural to her and artificial: the language of hand signs is both a part of the river and its natural surroundings and a social artifact used for communication with other people. More important, the work represents sign language with multiple disembodied hands, invoking the idea of fragmentary statuary, as in Maillol, but pushing the tradition of broken beauty in a new direction. Rather than representing beauty by removing body parts, Dupor’s painting multiplies them, suggesting that disabled bodies possess a beauty and amplitude previously ignored. The swimmer flows through a world in which perfection does not provide the only standard for human ability and beauty. Spread out before her are the living symbols of a beautiful and expressive future defined by a radically different conception of the human body and mind.
Disability as an Aesthetic Value
Art’s desire to transform the human revolutionizes beauty by claiming disability as the form of biological diversity with the greatest potential for artistic representation. The figure of disability checks out of the asylum, the sick house, and the hospital to take up residence in the art gallery, the museum, and the public square. Disability is now and will be in the future an aesthetic value in itself.
译文:
艺术折射出的残缺之美
密西根大学V.L. 帕林顿学院教授、英语语言和文学及艺术和设计教授托宾.西伯斯的评论文章。
反映现实
我们常常说，艺术是反映现实的镜子，但是现实中的缺陷经过艺术这面镜子的反映后会是什么情况呢？我们猜想，艺术虚构的完美是对无暇的自然美的反映。希腊和罗马艺术集中表现了人的体魄之美，他们艺术创作的焦点始终如一，直到现代仍具魅力。约翰.乔基姆.温克尔曼在仿作希腊绘画和雕塑作品的思考这篇文章中认为古希腊雕塑的美感直接源自古希腊人体美的本质，对他而言，健康的体格实际上就是美的代名词。同样，亚历山大. 鲍姆加登在他的沉思诗歌一文中认为，美是观赏者面对人体时感受到的精神上的和谐。审美对象的经验本身就构建了头脑内部的一致性。美始于含蓄，而非直白。它是人类自我设计、自我完善的一种模式。直到今天，一些思想家仍然认为绘画使心灵进入了对“完美”的幻觉。尽管可以证实这种“完美”不过是一种幻觉，它仍然长盛不衰。雅克.拉康在 “镜子阶段”（Ecrits 1966)一书中推断道：人们小时候在镜子中有意识地发现了完美自身的虚假的影像。一个小孩子，刚刚能够站立，几乎还不能控制自己的行动，就能够通过照镜子发现自己成熟而有能力的体态，它在镜子中的影像是静止的，但强劲有力——孩子迷恋于这个影像，虽然他自己永远不能与之相比美。
破碎的人体
通过询问关于艺术对象和完美对象之间的关系的问题，残缺打碎了艺术之镜，但结果是破碎的艺术之镜折射的美感越发强烈了。越接近现代，残缺和艺术之间的等式越发成立——以至于到了这样一种程度：我们有时会在残缺的背景下理解艺术本身。残缺、疾病和伤害已经常常成为认识美学上的美的要素。哈尔.福斯特把受伤和伤害与现代生活方式带来的精神损伤产生的审美写实主义联系起来（回到真实 1996），而琳达.诺克林宣称艺术的现代性产生于：完整性的缺失、破碎主导的印象、与生活的联系以及永恒价值观的崩解（破碎的人体，2001, 23-24）. 她将现代派的精髓追溯到法国大革命时期，认为在这一历史时刻，破碎的人体成为现代派一个“正面的而不是反面的修辞符号”（8）。伦纳德.巴坎的挖掘历史 （1999）一书把现代主义对支离破碎和伤害题材的欣赏追溯到更早的时期，即文艺复兴时期那些经典的破碎的雕塑艺术，并且认为现代主义认为碎块拥有“超越于以各种方式将其重新拼凑成一个整体的价值”，对这一题材的塑造，是一种“类别上的转移”（122），它把“艺术创作的整个方案转移到了与破碎的人体有关的艺术上来”。在日趋全球化的世界上，现代艺术从文化语言转向了人体的生物多样性，而残缺标志着对人体多样化构想的外部轮廓。实际上，残缺和艺术之间的相等性越来越强烈，我们甚至会情不自禁地用现代社会赋予我们的残缺的视角来欣赏以前的艺术作品。
然而，有些历史上对此有过争论的人物，如:福斯特, 诺克林, 巴坎等人，似乎倾向于认可以下事实：艺术与人们渴望从多方面理解人类的欲望有长期的联系。人类以物造物，总是也以某种造人和重新造人的方式进行。人类手艺的产品就是人类本身，也即人类的最直接的符号，而我们用以制造手工产品的东西，就是人类的身体。如果说艺术和人体难以分割，就是因为艺术创作的过程是人类尝试改造自身的过程——而这一过程是人类历史的一个关键因素。再者，当艺术以不同的方式表达人类认识自身的欲望时，它也必定从不同的角度衡量人类之美，而如果近期的艺术表达了一些东西的话，那就是借对残缺人体的本质理解的表达而表现了美。美在现代变得另类了——而且不同于人类历史上的任何时期。
反映残疾
对残疾的思考发现：残疾人揽镜自照，梦想获得能力。然而，将残缺投射向艺术之镜得到了不同的思考模式。简单地观察两幅画能够帮助我们描述残缺与美学价值的完美结合。两幅画都加入了和自我反省有关的残缺元素，从而探究当用残缺替代观赏者在镜子中的影像时，艺术所起的作用。第一幅画也是较早期的画，它没有把缺陷作为其外在的元素，而是更为隐蔽。第二幅画是一位残疾人艺术家的作品，并且以她本人的残疾经历作为主题。然而，这幅画所用的符号体系使它并不局限于残疾，从而残疾有了更广泛的意义，帮助人们进行扩展想象和自我转型。
阿瑞斯蒂德.马约尔的两个沐浴者，或迪娜，背部和侧影展示了他作品的许多典型特征（见Bernard Lorquin:画家马约尔，巴黎：RMN,2001,1667)。画中的女人颇具肉感——有浑圆的小腹和健壮的大腿，胸部很小，头发卷曲地梳着。这个健康的女人背对观赏者躺着，静卧在一个水池旁边的草地上。那个无腿无臂的女人在水池面上飘浮着，健康女人的倒影和她的同伴都浸没在水中，渲染成没有手脚的样子，并且面向观众。这样，这幅画展示了一个晦涩的场景，其结果是强调了现代艺术中残缺的重要作用。画名提示观众判断这幅画到底是描绘了一个还是两个女人，但是这个判断不可能得到肯定的结果，假使观众不破坏该作品的符号定义体系的话。这个表现手法是把迪娜.维尔妮的背部和侧影渲染成像是两个相遇的沐浴者的形象，作者还使用了从雕塑创作中得到的运用体积的经验，但是当缺少镜子的时候，对人体结合部的处理，这个表现手法有一点问题，因此就可以解释为什么这幅画作需要用水来作一个潜在的反射面。
倒影是这幅画主要的隐喻，而对残疾的表达保证了这一隐喻的实现，无论这幅画描绘的是一个还是两个女人。如果这幅画里有两个女人，它表现的就是她们之间互相的映射和对比。这次相遇是否涉及情色并不清楚，但是这幅画要求观众在任何情况下都将之解读为欲望。两个女人都想拥有或者变成对方，结果造成了现代的认同谜题，女权主义思想家认为女人们在觉得自己的身体出众或不如对方时，将会互相争斗。这时，水池中女人的破碎形象表示了身体上的巨大差别——这个差别需要解读成某个人物的优势或劣势。如果这幅画描绘的只是一个女人——它就绘出了一个观察自身在水池中的倒影的女人——这就是一个典型的自恋场景。 但是这个典型失败了，因为倒影并不比本人更完美。纳西塞斯不会爱上比他更美的人。也许，倒影比本人更出色：艺术之镜折射出了残缺之美，利用透视画法缩短的四肢形成了身体上的残缺，对完美本来的概念进行了革命。
马约尔的这幅画的谜题是：最少可以有以上两种解释，但是其寓意不会变化，即，无论画的是一个女人还是两个女人，这幅画都表现了健康与残疾之间的对比。图中突出地位的人物是健全的，然而背景里的人物，由于浸没在水中，看上去她的四肢好像被砍掉了，无视水中的倒影不会无缘无故地造成四肢被切断的效果。 但是，一种合理的解释是可以把水池中的女人理解成为马约尔内心对于传统的残缺雕塑及其对于美的观念的维护。在传统中，缺少四肢应当理解为美的精髓。和他在别处的作品一样，马约尔在这幅画中复制了米洛的维纳斯所具有的美感（见他最后的雕塑作品，Harmonie，1940-44, 一座断臂的女人青铜像），利用了现代艺术在表现美时运用不完整、破裂和残缺的传统手法。如果这幅画中画的是两个女人，残缺的那个就是更美的代表，似乎马约尔希望对美学上残缺的、破裂的美和次级的、完整的美进行对比。如果画中只有一个女人，那她看上去是把不完整或残缺想象得更完美，似乎她渴望成为经典的米洛的维纳斯那样的美人。在两种情况下，残缺都表达了美学上的价值，并且达到了美所能达到的顶峰。在现代艺术中随处可见的艺术和残缺之间的对等关系得到了证实，因为实在无法把不完整的人物诠释成美以外的东西。
反思残疾
Susan Dupor的 意识流 ，见上图，描绘了一个女人，她正沿着一条狭窄的河流顺流而下，周围被翠绿而茂盛的植物围绕，她的倒影在水中隐约可见，与她的身体重叠。但是，她没看自己的倒影。她的眼睛紧闭，好像在睡眠，她深深地放松，似乎在享受睡梦中的内心世界。只是水面上露出的九只手打破了这个平和的景象。这些手是游泳者的手的镜像，它们描摹出了她向下游流去时将要作出的动作，但是这幅画并不是立体主义、模糊画派和错视画派的习作。它的目标不是描绘动作而是思想，正如画名暗示的那样，因为Dupor是失聪的，而这幅画作，和她其他的作品一样，用许多只手作为一种符号语言的表达方法。图中游泳者顺沿而下的河流中手的符号表示了意识流。
看到没有身体的手可能让那些没受过Dupor熏陶的人觉得恐怖，因为那些断手——或什么奇异生物的手，伸出水面，包围在画中主角的周围（参见 Courtship 或 Halcyon)。然而，此处的效果并不恐怖，因为这些手并没有超现实主义或哥特式的意味。它们显然是属于游泳者，而且它们表现了她深深沉入其中的世界。而游泳者的倒影也没有引申出可能的带有缺陷的相遇者，不会引发关于两个女人互相比较谁更美的联想。图中的镜像表示自我反省，但是没涉及到自恋，因为符号语言调和了自我反省的力度。游泳者没有沉浸于自我，而是沉浸于语言——这种语言对她非常自然，但是又有人工痕迹：多只手的符号表示的语言既表达了河流本身，又表达了周围的自然环境，还表达了人与人交流的社会信号。更重要的是，作品用多只离体的手作为符号语言，唤起了残缺雕塑艺术的感觉，就像马约尔的作品所表现的主题一样，但是Dupor将传统的残缺美推向了一个崭新的方向。Dupor的画作不是用身体部分残缺的方法表现美，而是采用增加身体部件的方法，从而暗示残疾的身体蕴含着美，而且具有以前为人们所忽略的强度。图中的游泳者所漂流的世界中，完美并不是人类能力和美的唯一标准。在她的前方，延伸着代表美而具有表现力的前景的栩栩如生的符号，而这一前景，是以完全不同的人体和思想的理念勾勒出来的。
残缺的审美价值
艺术试图改造人类的欲望，因而变革了对美的看法，其实现途径是主张残缺是一种生物多样性的表现形式，它具有巨大的艺术表现潜力。残疾的人物走出了避难所、病房和医院，进入了艺术画廊、博物馆和公共广场。残缺在现和将来都具有审美价值。