Abnormal: Towards a Scientific Model of Disability by Ju Gosling

Qvist Gallery, Hunterian Museum, London.
Until Sat 14 January 2012.

Stephen Lee Hodgkins

Ju’s Abnormal exhibition is strategically well placed at the Hunterian Museum. Within the vast collection of medical curiosities and obscure organic artifacts in jars of scientific jelly, several poignant pieces of radical disability art are presented with visual loudness and pride. These offer a much overdue view of disabled people’s experience in this context that counters the very long history of mapping and colonisation of the human body and mind. Such is the dominance of medical history upon the inevitable diversity of our bodies and mind that to suggest an alternative experience and knowledge of disability is disruptive to normal eyes and ears. Yet Gosling’s disability art projects, through a diverse loudhailer, an alternative vision of disabled people that is political, liberated, critical, social, cultural and everyday.

Within the main museum, in the thick of diverse bone structures and other remnants of body mapping, is Memory Jar Collection. Consisting of photos of animal and human body parts, Ju reflects on how science and medical knowing disregards human identity. This is immediately noticeable in the huge number of human remains displayed anonymously in the surrounding Crystal Gallery, from the 18th-century surgeon John Hunter's collection. In Ju’s jars I noticed photos of disability activist, the late David Morris (1958 – 2010) arranged in such a way that he has been facilitated to continue his personal and political protest.

Upstairs Ju’s main exhibit Helping the Handicapped strikes me. This is a great piece wherein Barbie dolls assert “I want to help the handicapped” through the charity, medical, administrative and social model of disability respectively. Each scene depicts the blinkered discourses of fundraisers, doctors and benefit assessors. In the final scene of this exhibit this is twisted by double amputee Zena Warrior Princess as she asserts amidst an organised demonstration her radical voice: “I fight against prejudice, discrimination and disabling environments. I fight for equal rights legislation and better health and social care provision. I also fight to eliminate the poverty, abuse, violence and war that cause the majority of impairments”.

Scattered near the entrance I found also the exhibition badges which I have seen before and which are most powerful for me. These consist of a small badge with the text “abnormal” on it, and a larger badge with the text “normal” on it but without a pin and a mirror on the back of it. During my visit I noticed other visitors happily labelling themselves with this subversive anti-human science device; I hoped that some of them were medical students. Whilst proudly wearing the “abnormal” badge I held up the “normal” pocket mirror and viewed myself. Having been labelled by psychiatry, psychology and other agents of the state, Ju’s piece reminded me how disability and impairment is constructed through, and linked to, a “fit and able” lens of interpretation. This I likened in my mind to the works of Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) such as The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and Madness and Civilisation (1961) that give a history of the development of structural conditions that made visible and oppressed the “abnormal” body and mind. The point he makes, like Gosling’s badges, is that abnormality only becomes visible through the gaze of normality. If we can trash that practice, the inevitable diversity of our bodies and minds will be revealed, and in turn we will be able to celebrate them for how and what they are.

My reading of “Abnormal” is that labels, categories and the pursuit of absolute knowledge are all problematic. Society makes it hard to just be yourself. Normality asserts that you must be named and known in a specific way, so you can fulfill a useful role and stabilize the social order. Gosling’s work displayed in the Hunterian Musuem critically reflects on this beautifully and suggests you don’t have to be named by anyone else, you can subvert and rename yourself in your own terms.

This exhibition is well worth a visit. There are a number of other great pieces including Abnormal 1, 2, 3, Out of the Flesh, Room 147, Men in White Coats and Shai, that requires you to manipulate a mechanical fairground game of grab to obtain a fortune telling micro tube. This was a big hit on my visit. Shai told me “all your work will soon pay off”.

• Additionally, a limited edition hardback of Ju's book Abnormal: How Britain became body dysphoric and the key to a cure (Bettany Press 2011) is now available in the museum shop priced £20 and signed by the author. See scientificmodelofdisability.co.uk

•• Stephen Lee Hodgkins – stephen@sidbaility.net