Michael Davidson's Concerto for the Left Hand, a wide-ranging and intelligent study of disability and art, spans poetry, deaf performance, blind photography, and film. It defines a critical perspective on disability that defamiliarizes aesthetics as usually conceived and translates the materiality of artworks into the materialities of different bodies. Davidson makes disability appear in another light, one that focuses not merely on suffering or difference but on a capacious vision of human variation. The book is a collection of essays, but the individual essays have a common methodology and point of view that lend them coherence. Some of these common viewpoints include an insistence on returning the body to aesthetics, a celebration of art's ability to defamiliarize experience and to broaden acceptance of difference, and a desire to define the impact of disability on the aesthetic at a formal rather than thematic level. Davidson makes a significant and crucial contribution to the growing discipline of disability studies by imbuing aesthetic questions with the awareness of new kinds of appearance, whether discussing bodies or aesthetic forms.
The heart of Davidson's argument reframes the Russian formalist ideal of ostranenie (translated usually as "defamiliarization" or "making-strange") as a corporeal and sensory principle of art making rather than defining it merely as artistic technique. The stress on the corporeal and sensory allows Davidson to discuss not only the technique of art but its reliance on bodies and the senses. The idea of the defamiliar body thus replaces the technical dimension of defamiliarization, launching Davidson's major question: What do different bodies and sensoria contribute to art? The usual reading of disability art, of course, asks how artists overcome their disabilities to make art, stigmatizing disabled artists as people who make art in spite of their disabilities. But Davidson asks how art grows out of disability, how art incorporates disability into the formal project of defamiliarization. This perspective guides the book as a whole, allowing Davidson to provide a dense articulation of disability art and to demonstrate its critical power to view the world in new and powerful ways.
Whether focusing on the queering of hemophilia produced when AIDS enters the blood supply used by "bleeders" (thereby showing the queering of identity made possible when two stigmatized groups intersect), the centrality of disability to film noir, or inspired readings of ASL and other poetry, Davidson demands that we witness the heights to which disability exercises the ability to make strange. I note but a few of the brilliant revisions of familiar ideas pursued by Davidson. We must look again at Laura Mulvey's theory of visual pleasure once Davidson makes us see that film noir as a genre offers up the disabled body as a viewing pleasure equal to women's bodies. Davidson's new readings of deaf performance are particularly stunning and have no match on the current scene. A fine example is the analysis of Aaron Williamson's Hearing Things, in which the artist uses voice recognition software to translate audience sounds and his own utterances into texts that are projected onto a central screen. The sounds, many times "meaningless," are given meaning by the software. As Davidson explains it, the performance creates a world where individuals speak first and then find out what they have said. This "nonsemantic roaring" produces "a speech act that challenges the ordinariness of ordinary language, making strange not only sounds but the discursive arena in which speech 'makes sense'" (99).
Always a superb reader of poetry, Davidson produces a major re-interpretation of the poetry of Larry Eigner, a significant but often ignored poet associated with the Black Mountain movement and language writing, by tracing how his poetry incorporates his cerebral palsy. Significantly, the treatment is not thematic but formal. Davidson shows that Eigner uses a mobile grammatical structure in which subjects and predicates occupy multiple positions, bringing a fresh perspective to his poems, remapping the meanings of his syntax and variable lineation, and representing disability where it had previously been invisible.
My favorite part of this lovely book is Davidson's return to modernism through the binoculars of blindness, first by rethinking the retinal basis of art in modernists like Duchamp and then by taking up the work of blind photographers. Davidson's small analysis of Kant's theory of the "perception" of the beautiful object is very original and worth the price of the book itself. The sections on Evgen Bavcar, the blind photographer, are superb and beautifully illustrated. Davidson arrays a series a small readings of the images that turn the idea of aesthetics on its head. He not only shows that the modernist discourses of ocularity and audism are striated with ableism, he makes a compelling argument for the significance of disability as an aesthetic value in itself, one in the case of Bavcar that produces an aesthetic vision of the world wholly its own, beautiful, and unforgettable.
Finally, Davidson offers the first disability perspective on Walter Benjamin's famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," substituting disability for mechanical reproduction in the production of art on the global stage. Just as mechanical reproduction supposedly transforms the modernist work, disability defamiliarizes the forms by which globalization is made known by art. In the process, Davidson also offers a valuable critique of Lennard Davis's idea of disability as the ur-identity (one that reveals the instability of all identity) by linking disability to poverty. Davidson shows the impact of disability on the global market at multiple sites, using films as his primary optic. To take two examples, Dirty Pretty Things instructs about the global market in body parts. Kandahar reveals how disability works as a narrative prosthesis to maintain the separation between the first and third worlds, propping up the exploitation of the third by first. Thus, companies market unsafe products in the third world in the name of fighting disability, and the World Bank uses persons with disabilities to calculate cost effective interventions in healthcare policy.
For anyone interested in the intersections among disability, aesthetics, globalization, and poverty, Davidson's book is mandatory reading. In this careful and beautifully written study, disability studies reaches a new level of sophistication and pertinence, claiming its place next to cultural studies, visual studies, and gender studies. Davidson enters with style and grace the major debates currently unfolding in modernism, poetry, and visual culture, and he makes the study of disability necessary to them.
