These are questions that were brought up, in a broader way, at the recent CAA conference, so I don't want to make it sound as if this is my idea entirely. But those became remarkably present to me recently, so hopefully this is a different variety of question.
I was recently brought to a greater, more directly seen, understanding of artists with physiological difference of the optical variety.
We already know that we are all embodied. And that the linkages between the material physiological perceptive self and the immaterial intellectual self are rather difficult to explain.
But where I'm really caught up here is that we have, as of late, in our more linguistically politically conscious existence, always spoken of "visual impairment" or "the visually impaired."
This seems to me to hierarchize the physiologies of vision. That there is some 20/20 perfectly centered binocular pinnacle and everyone else--us glasses wearers, the cross-eyed, the albino, the wall-eyed, etc.--are visual at a lesser degree of quality.
Notwithstanding the castes that such belief creates, the more interesting, and I think far more important, question is what one does with this valuative (given its mathematical usage, this may not be the right word here) language when applied to visual artists? Perhaps I need to widen this to include all varieties of artists, but I am, for the moment, concerned solely with visual artists.
Does their different physiology of vision offer them an entirely different process of inputting, processing, and outputting art?
Perhaps is this difference parallel?
How, then, do we overcome these essential differences so as to be able to speak collectively about art?
I can't even believe I just said "essential differences." I feel like I just killed 100,000 people.
But, if it's physiological and we are each of our own physiology, how can this not be a question of at least one difference of essence?
I just hit a wall. I'm so confused. Please help.
Posts
