The Portal

Access as Creative Methodology

No legibility for some. Illegibility for all. —Carolyn Lazard

I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. —Fred Moten

Access as Creative Methodology is a project I organized in collaboration with artist Jordan Lord and Abrons Art Center Director of Programming Ali Rosa-Salas. This course invites second-year graduate students to consider the ways in which access shapes the ground of practices of curating, gathering, and living. In Spring 2021, students will collaborate with Abrons Art Center to develop and produce a curatorial project that integrates access (and its interference) into their means and material.

This project grew out of a study group co-led with Jordan Lord, whose work involves access as both form and an ongoing inquiry into the means by which dependency, disability, and risk are framed. This initiative asks how our work fundamentally changes when we start with access, rather than treating it as an afterthought. Likewise, the group has focused on the ways in which many disabled artists utilize access to interfere with existing structures, standards, and status quos. Refracting accessibility and disability studies through the lens of creative interference, we explore the ways access is a continual process of learning what it takes for us to get together.