Author explores how artists embrace disability and error as tools to transform their work

From the time we’re children, we’re inundated with the importance of listening. It’s one of the first commands we hear from parents and teachers: “Listen up!” The world preaches listening as the cornerstone of effective communication.

But what message does that send to people who can’t hear? When words are misheard or misspoken, does communication break down — or just transform?

Michael Davidson examines these questions and more in his book “Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error.”

Davidson himself lost his hearing as an adult, and misunderstandings became a daily occurrence. But as told The Show, what some would consider mistakes can instead be seen as opportunities.

Full conversation

MICHAEL DAVIDSON: I began to lose my hearing in the mid ’90s, and I noticed the hearing loss, especially in classes. When I was teaching, I was having more trouble understanding students. At the same time, since I’d been writing about disability issues and about deafness and learning American Sign Language, I was also learning about a new cultural relationship to hearing loss.

So rather than think of it as something that was a demerit of some kind, I began to think of it as actually an advantage, allowing me to understand a lot about how a classroom works and other ways of teaching besides standing at the lectern.

Because I was having trouble understanding students, I would walk out into the classroom and stand right next to the student and ask the person to repeat the question, which was a great advantage for me because I could hear it better, and also maybe for the rest of the students who hadn’t understood the question either.

SAM DINGMAN: I heard you tell one version of this story once where something that you realized in doing that is that this was a moment of realizing that all of a sudden the “loss” of one sense had actually created this enlarged sensitivity to what was happening in the classroom.

DAVIDSON: Yes. I think enlarged sensitivity is a good way to describe the condition of disability in general. You understand what the world anticipates as normal at the same time as you understand that you need to make modifications in the way that you approach things.

And that had a particular application for teaching, obviously, but also in thinking about what literature, poetry, art stood for and how they were conceptualized over thousands of years of course.

DINGMAN: Well, and that’s one of the things that, to me, is so provocative and, if I may, hopeful about your work, because one of my big takeaways from “Distressing Language” is this idea that we tend to view errors in cognition or traditional representation or expression as somehow interfering with meaning.

But it seems like you are arguing for a way of seeing and experiencing and embodying abnormality as a way of considering the idea that it makes us more human. One of the examples that you’ve cited is the work of the sculptor Marcel Duchamp and an experience that he had with one of his works, which is called “Large Glass.”

DAVIDSON: The reference to Duchamp comes at the beginning of my book, where I’m talking about a whole series of errors and mistakes that I have encountered as a person who doesn’t understand things very well. And it seemed to me that Duchamp’s “Large Glass” was a good place to begin.

He created this work, after all, in double panes of glass with many images from his artistic career embedded into the glass. And when it was being transferred from one exhibit to another, it fell over and cracked.

And so we would ordinarily think of this as being a tragic destruction of a work of art. But Duchamp characteristically saw the cracks as intentional aspects of the artwork. He saw it as being kind of a fulfillment of the work of art, rather than a tragic loss of a work of art.

So that’s a pretty good example, it seems to me, of how an artist — not necessarily disabled artist — makes use of error to say it was a productive and even a generative aspect of art.

DINGMAN: Yeah, I love the phrase he used to describe the fate of this piece, “Large Glass.” He called it, the destiny of things. And there are some other artists who you cite who are also interesting ways of getting at this idea, one of them being Chuck Close.

DAVIDSON: Well, he’s famous, of course, for these large portraits, but he was paralyzed at a certain point in his late career. And the texture of the portraits was transformed because he no longer had quite the ability to paint in a quasi-realist manner.

In the book, I talk about a number of artists for whom disability transformed the nature of their prior work. Or in the case of Larry Eigner, a poet who lived with cerebral palsy from birth, whose work didn’t change very much throughout his life. He was restricted in his mobility, and he only had the use of one finger in his right hand to type on a manual typewriter. And that — what we would call difficulty, but for Eigner was the way he wrote — his poems tend to drift from the left margin to the right, because it was difficult for him to move the platen back to the left margin.

So as a consequence, his poems were very characteristically drifting to the right, and the fact that he was somewhat restricted in where he lived throughout most of his life, in one room in Massachusetts, so what he saw at the window was pretty much the subject matter of his work.

So you could say, “Well, he has overcompensated for his limitations.” But I would say he has been able to perceive the world in a more granular fashion than most of us can, because he really paid attention to what was there in front of him.