When Alison Lapper Pregnant was unveiled as the next sculpture to fill the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square the announcement blew up a whirlwind of controversy. Depending on which paper you read, Marc Quinn's depiction of a naked woman heavily pregnant, without arms and with shortened legs, was either a sublime hymn to motherhood or bonkers political correctness on the part of the Plinth Committee.
No one appears to deplore or feel moved to defend the presence of the other disabled figure represented in the Square, Nelson, who was sightless in one eye and had lost an arm in battle.
The contrasting reactions to these two statues neatly sums up our polarised attitudes to disability: shock and awe on the one hand, complete indifference on the other. Still, when Alison is installed next year, it means two out of the five public works of art in the Square will feature someone with a disability, which is a better ratio than in most museums at present.
Representations of disability and disabled people are largely absent from the walls and display cases of our treasure houses, a curious omission in an age that prides itself on striving to acknowledge the contributions to society of every discernible minority. There are six million disabled people in Britain: where are their stories?
This impression that disabled people are unrecorded in our cultural history isn't just the gut reaction of a politicised minority with an axe to grind. According to Buried in the Footnotes, a project by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) at the University of Leicester, objects and images testifying to the history of disabled people in Britain do exist.
But they're much less frequently displayed, often poorly interpreted and, apart from a few good examples, seldom used in a way that illuminates the role of people with disabilities in the nation's history.
'The crude finding is that there is lots of material which would support more rounded, varied representations of disabled people but it was rare to see it used in display,' says Richard Sandell, joint project manager with Jocelyn Dodd.
He adds that in most places, where it was obvious that the subject was to do with disability, disabled people were notbeing celebrated for work or achievements but represented in a patronising way, for example, as poor, passive, sexless and dependant or 'exotic'.
The research team sent out questionnaires to 200 museums inquiring about artefacts related to disability held in their collections. They followed up with ten detailed case studies of museums of different types and sizes, and the issues were explored further at a colloquium attended by museums directors, curators and people engaged with disability in art.
The range of material uncovered was rich. Most had never been displayed at all. In other cases the interpretation was crude - prosthetics in cases with no narrative attached, for example.
In some, the story of disabled people was dehumanised. In one museum, a box of surgical instruments with beautifully engraved handles had labelling highlighting how the tools were shaped (to minimise the risk of gristle sticking) but made no reference to the amputees on whom they were used.
'The instruments were works of art in themselves but they were totally depersonalised,' says Dodd. '[The labels] are about bones and muscle rather than arms and legs.'
Sometimes, one disability dimension had obscured another: examining a box of wooden and artificial limbs in a decorative arts collection it was only by chance that the researchers discovered the collector was himself disabled, a fact which sheds a new light on the entire collection.
Why museums have thus far failed to curate disability in any authentic way is a multi layered question, the research asserts, and one unlikely to be resolved by a couple of sessions of disability awareness training. Several issues could be categorised as 'display dilemmas', such as adherence to the terms of an accession or respect for an artist's wishes as to how he or she was portrayed.
There are few paintings of Alexander Pope, the 18th century poet whose growth was stunted by illness at age 12, for example, because he was reluctant to publicise his disability.
'There are portraits of him in which his disability is clearly visible,' says Dodd. 'Do you not present these images because perhaps he didn't want that to happen?' It's a similar issue with photographs of medical or therapeutic procedures in which patients are often nameless.
Anonymity objectifies them yet would they want to be named? It brings up the whole notion of whether you should 'out' those people or not, says Dodd. There's an added dimension with medical photographs in that the subjects seldom regard the experience as happy, whereas most of us associate snapshots as something taken for pleasure with our consent.
'It's a question of whether the interests of people in the past override the need for role models in the present day,' says Sandell. 'I think most people would say that they don't but museums are constantly thinking about issues of donorship and ownership and the rights of past and future generations.'
One of the most delicate and multi-faceted issues to emerge is how to deal with material which portrays disabled people as 'freaks', a term once widely used and now loaded with offence. The danger of letting inhibition dictate what is and isn't displayed is that through such editorialising, precious details about real lives are lost.
'The idea of the freakshow casts a long, powerful shadow,' Sandell says. 'Particularly as museums are the very places that people come to stare at pictures or objects anyway. The point we'd make is that there is more to say and show about such images.'
Two key issues need to be confronted if museums are to move forward, the research suggests. First, there is no fixed view about what duty museums have to disability representation.
'There's a lack of consensus among curators about whether or not museums should purposely engage with issues of representation of disability, with a view to influencing attitudes and promoting equal rights,' says Sandell. 'Some curators are all for it, some are sceptical, there are a lot in the middle.'
Second, the issues generate huge anxiety and concern among staff, worried about the conflicting charges of tokenism, prejudice or tastelessness. Annie Delin, the senior research associate on the project and a consultant on disability issues, points out that the words 'fear' and 'offence' came up repeatedly in questionnaires and interviews.
'I think people are so worried about not getting it right and giving offence that it immobilises them,' she says. 'Some of them seemed to be projecting the possibility of other people having negative thoughts or reactions and they were using that perception to inform whether or not they did anything.'
It's also far more straightforward for museums to take refuge in tackling physical access issues, she adds. 'When you say you want to talk disability, the first thing you often get is, "oh, you want to talk to our access officer". I look forward to the day when I say "disability" and someone assumes I'm there to talk about collections.'
The Leicester team will be exploring the issues further and hopes to develop tools to help museums tackle them.
Dodd believes the answers lie in greater collaboration with disabled people, not only on a formal basis through consultative groups, but in every aspect of museum activity.
'It's about trying to get people to be more subtle in their thinking and to think about disability being part of life so that when they are curating displays, they naturally think about how the experience of disabled people fits with what they are trying to do.
But the change needs to happen throughout access, outreach, collecting, employment issues and all these things run in parallel. It's not a sequential process, otherwise all you get is silos of change.' mj
Leicester University's RCMG team will present a session on Buried in the Footnotes at the MA conference on Wednesday, 15 September (conference runs 13-15 September) and there will be a summary of the research on the Leicester website (www.le.ac.uk/museumstudies) from the end of this month.
Royal Pump Rooms, Leamington
Since 1999 the Royal Pump Rooms in Leamington Spa has developed a programme of work looking at medical science and its interaction with art. It gives the gallery a broad appeal - everyone has experience of health issues - and attracts funding (the Pump Rooms has been well supported by the Wellcome Trust, the medical research charity).
The collection includes works such as I by Alexa Wright (above) and Signs - I Have Been Certified Mildly Insane by Gillian Wearing, as well as medical equipment, books, ephemera, prints and photographs.
'We have a well-documented collection with contextual information which does help, so if we have any artists with disabilities we tend to know about them and the impact it had on the artist's work,' says Alison Plumridge, senior curatorial officer. 'Our approach is to interpret the work so that people understand why it looks as it does and disability is as much a part of that as sexuality or environment or upbringing.'
The Pump Rooms was one of the last NHS-funded spa therapy centres and treated people with disabilities from 1814 until 1997. Recording their histories is regarded as vital but displaying personal medical ephemera raises difficult questions about ownership, power and the risks of objectification.
Plumridge says: 'A lot of the pictures we have were taken between the 1920s and the 1980s to publicise the baths and consequently it is rare to have any information about the people in them.
In certain cases we have identified patients and members of staff and there is a real possibility that if information is not recorded now it will be lost forever. But how can you reconcile patient confidentiality with the need to present patients not as curiosities of medical science, but as real people who stories should be told? It's not easily resolved.'
Colchester
Colchester museums have a history of good work on disability issues with representations of disabled people clearly integrated in displays. Virtual Roman Colchester features disabled beggars, the housewife in the 1950s home happens to be blind and a pram in the Childhood Gallery at Hollytrees Museum was bought by a man to help his daughter learn to walk as she recovered from polio.
'If you walked down a street in Roman Colchester you'd see people of different races and you'd see disabled people, whether they were beggars or soldiers injured in war,' says Peter Berridge, the general manager. 'If we don't display them it means we're editing them out.'
The Portal group, disabled people who are paid to advise the museums service on disability representation, has been instrumental in highlighting how political correctness, particularly in use of language, can be confronted. When Hollytrees wanted to display images of the 19th century painter John Vine (above left) being exhibited at a fairground because of his restricted stature and short limbs, the Portal group supported the use of the term 'freakshow' in the labelling (though the museum lost its nerve and went for 'fairground exhibition' instead).
Sophie Weaver, the Portal group's development officer, warns that over-sensitivity to language, however well-intentioned, can be detrimental to how disability is represented. 'On the whole, we don't like the idea of being too PC. The pictures of John Vine showed him in what would have been termed a freakshow at the time. We may not like the term today but it is historically accurate. There's a danger that we change things to suit ourselves rather than portraying what was done at the time. If no one used the term "freakshow" the knowledge that it had once been acceptable would be lost.'
No one appears to deplore or feel moved to defend the presence of the other disabled figure represented in the Square, Nelson, who was sightless in one eye and had lost an arm in battle.
The contrasting reactions to these two statues neatly sums up our polarised attitudes to disability: shock and awe on the one hand, complete indifference on the other. Still, when Alison is installed next year, it means two out of the five public works of art in the Square will feature someone with a disability, which is a better ratio than in most museums at present.
Representations of disability and disabled people are largely absent from the walls and display cases of our treasure houses, a curious omission in an age that prides itself on striving to acknowledge the contributions to society of every discernible minority. There are six million disabled people in Britain: where are their stories?
This impression that disabled people are unrecorded in our cultural history isn't just the gut reaction of a politicised minority with an axe to grind. According to Buried in the Footnotes, a project by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) at the University of Leicester, objects and images testifying to the history of disabled people in Britain do exist.
But they're much less frequently displayed, often poorly interpreted and, apart from a few good examples, seldom used in a way that illuminates the role of people with disabilities in the nation's history.
'The crude finding is that there is lots of material which would support more rounded, varied representations of disabled people but it was rare to see it used in display,' says Richard Sandell, joint project manager with Jocelyn Dodd.
He adds that in most places, where it was obvious that the subject was to do with disability, disabled people were notbeing celebrated for work or achievements but represented in a patronising way, for example, as poor, passive, sexless and dependant or 'exotic'.
The research team sent out questionnaires to 200 museums inquiring about artefacts related to disability held in their collections. They followed up with ten detailed case studies of museums of different types and sizes, and the issues were explored further at a colloquium attended by museums directors, curators and people engaged with disability in art.
The range of material uncovered was rich. Most had never been displayed at all. In other cases the interpretation was crude - prosthetics in cases with no narrative attached, for example.
In some, the story of disabled people was dehumanised. In one museum, a box of surgical instruments with beautifully engraved handles had labelling highlighting how the tools were shaped (to minimise the risk of gristle sticking) but made no reference to the amputees on whom they were used.
'The instruments were works of art in themselves but they were totally depersonalised,' says Dodd. '[The labels] are about bones and muscle rather than arms and legs.'
Sometimes, one disability dimension had obscured another: examining a box of wooden and artificial limbs in a decorative arts collection it was only by chance that the researchers discovered the collector was himself disabled, a fact which sheds a new light on the entire collection.
Why museums have thus far failed to curate disability in any authentic way is a multi layered question, the research asserts, and one unlikely to be resolved by a couple of sessions of disability awareness training. Several issues could be categorised as 'display dilemmas', such as adherence to the terms of an accession or respect for an artist's wishes as to how he or she was portrayed.
There are few paintings of Alexander Pope, the 18th century poet whose growth was stunted by illness at age 12, for example, because he was reluctant to publicise his disability.
'There are portraits of him in which his disability is clearly visible,' says Dodd. 'Do you not present these images because perhaps he didn't want that to happen?' It's a similar issue with photographs of medical or therapeutic procedures in which patients are often nameless.
Anonymity objectifies them yet would they want to be named? It brings up the whole notion of whether you should 'out' those people or not, says Dodd. There's an added dimension with medical photographs in that the subjects seldom regard the experience as happy, whereas most of us associate snapshots as something taken for pleasure with our consent.
'It's a question of whether the interests of people in the past override the need for role models in the present day,' says Sandell. 'I think most people would say that they don't but museums are constantly thinking about issues of donorship and ownership and the rights of past and future generations.'
One of the most delicate and multi-faceted issues to emerge is how to deal with material which portrays disabled people as 'freaks', a term once widely used and now loaded with offence. The danger of letting inhibition dictate what is and isn't displayed is that through such editorialising, precious details about real lives are lost.
'The idea of the freakshow casts a long, powerful shadow,' Sandell says. 'Particularly as museums are the very places that people come to stare at pictures or objects anyway. The point we'd make is that there is more to say and show about such images.'
Two key issues need to be confronted if museums are to move forward, the research suggests. First, there is no fixed view about what duty museums have to disability representation.
'There's a lack of consensus among curators about whether or not museums should purposely engage with issues of representation of disability, with a view to influencing attitudes and promoting equal rights,' says Sandell. 'Some curators are all for it, some are sceptical, there are a lot in the middle.'
Second, the issues generate huge anxiety and concern among staff, worried about the conflicting charges of tokenism, prejudice or tastelessness. Annie Delin, the senior research associate on the project and a consultant on disability issues, points out that the words 'fear' and 'offence' came up repeatedly in questionnaires and interviews.
'I think people are so worried about not getting it right and giving offence that it immobilises them,' she says. 'Some of them seemed to be projecting the possibility of other people having negative thoughts or reactions and they were using that perception to inform whether or not they did anything.'
It's also far more straightforward for museums to take refuge in tackling physical access issues, she adds. 'When you say you want to talk disability, the first thing you often get is, "oh, you want to talk to our access officer". I look forward to the day when I say "disability" and someone assumes I'm there to talk about collections.'
The Leicester team will be exploring the issues further and hopes to develop tools to help museums tackle them.
Dodd believes the answers lie in greater collaboration with disabled people, not only on a formal basis through consultative groups, but in every aspect of museum activity.
'It's about trying to get people to be more subtle in their thinking and to think about disability being part of life so that when they are curating displays, they naturally think about how the experience of disabled people fits with what they are trying to do.
But the change needs to happen throughout access, outreach, collecting, employment issues and all these things run in parallel. It's not a sequential process, otherwise all you get is silos of change.' mj
Leicester University's RCMG team will present a session on Buried in the Footnotes at the MA conference on Wednesday, 15 September (conference runs 13-15 September) and there will be a summary of the research on the Leicester website (www.le.ac.uk/museumstudies) from the end of this month.
Royal Pump Rooms, Leamington
Since 1999 the Royal Pump Rooms in Leamington Spa has developed a programme of work looking at medical science and its interaction with art. It gives the gallery a broad appeal - everyone has experience of health issues - and attracts funding (the Pump Rooms has been well supported by the Wellcome Trust, the medical research charity).
The collection includes works such as I by Alexa Wright (above) and Signs - I Have Been Certified Mildly Insane by Gillian Wearing, as well as medical equipment, books, ephemera, prints and photographs.
'We have a well-documented collection with contextual information which does help, so if we have any artists with disabilities we tend to know about them and the impact it had on the artist's work,' says Alison Plumridge, senior curatorial officer. 'Our approach is to interpret the work so that people understand why it looks as it does and disability is as much a part of that as sexuality or environment or upbringing.'
The Pump Rooms was one of the last NHS-funded spa therapy centres and treated people with disabilities from 1814 until 1997. Recording their histories is regarded as vital but displaying personal medical ephemera raises difficult questions about ownership, power and the risks of objectification.
Plumridge says: 'A lot of the pictures we have were taken between the 1920s and the 1980s to publicise the baths and consequently it is rare to have any information about the people in them.
In certain cases we have identified patients and members of staff and there is a real possibility that if information is not recorded now it will be lost forever. But how can you reconcile patient confidentiality with the need to present patients not as curiosities of medical science, but as real people who stories should be told? It's not easily resolved.'
Colchester
Colchester museums have a history of good work on disability issues with representations of disabled people clearly integrated in displays. Virtual Roman Colchester features disabled beggars, the housewife in the 1950s home happens to be blind and a pram in the Childhood Gallery at Hollytrees Museum was bought by a man to help his daughter learn to walk as she recovered from polio.
'If you walked down a street in Roman Colchester you'd see people of different races and you'd see disabled people, whether they were beggars or soldiers injured in war,' says Peter Berridge, the general manager. 'If we don't display them it means we're editing them out.'
The Portal group, disabled people who are paid to advise the museums service on disability representation, has been instrumental in highlighting how political correctness, particularly in use of language, can be confronted. When Hollytrees wanted to display images of the 19th century painter John Vine (above left) being exhibited at a fairground because of his restricted stature and short limbs, the Portal group supported the use of the term 'freakshow' in the labelling (though the museum lost its nerve and went for 'fairground exhibition' instead).
Sophie Weaver, the Portal group's development officer, warns that over-sensitivity to language, however well-intentioned, can be detrimental to how disability is represented. 'On the whole, we don't like the idea of being too PC. The pictures of John Vine showed him in what would have been termed a freakshow at the time. We may not like the term today but it is historically accurate. There's a danger that we change things to suit ourselves rather than portraying what was done at the time. If no one used the term "freakshow" the knowledge that it had once been acceptable would be lost.'
