Disability Iconography

THESIS POST X

A tidy room tells no stories

I spoke in my previous post about disability aesthetics, and my struggle to visualize an invisible disability. I also mentioned that my aesthetic is maximalist, detail-focused. One of the great struggles in my work is getting myself to do the basic requirements of a project before I allow myself to get lost in the details. Even further back in some of my blog posts, I tried to figure out why I liked certain things, things I called the “feminine grotesque” but couldn’t quite articulate what the grotesque was. I’ve mentioned Pipilotti Rist’s Ever is Over All here many times, and it’s become a fascination for me. I thought the fascination was her body, seeing a feminine woman with lipstick and a dress cheerfully cause destruction- an action typically ascribed to masculinity. But I realize what I like about this piece has nothing to do with what she is wearing, or what she looks like, it’s that she’s a woman being allowed to make a mess.

When I saw this piece at the Hirschhorn museum at 16 years old, it felt like me to the core. The entire exhibit was on destruction and I remember so many of the hundreds of pieces. That’s where I saw Yoko Ono’s cut piece for the first time as well, which I drew much inspiration from in my thesis experimentation as well. I loved this exhibit. I think about it daily. I would give anything to walk through it once again. I know now why it meant so much to me, why I dwelled on the concept of destruction when coming up with a thesis project. The work I saw there was beautiful, and it was a mess.

ake this piece for example. Jeff Wall, The Destroyed Room, 1978. It was an otherwise unassuming photograph amongst much bigger and more eye catching things like a piano smashed into a million little pieces and scattered across the floor. But this piece, I remembered so vividly. I hadn’t seen it for 8 years and I could have described it to you exactly. I first visited the destruction exhibit on a trip to DC for Spring break with my best friend. A month later I was coincidentally back in DC for my cousin’s wedding, and I dragged my family back to the museum so I could see it again. The first time seeing the photo above with just my friend, I loved it, and was drawn to it. The second time, with my family, as soon as they saw it they started joking “Hey Zo it looks like your room hahahah.” Which, especially as a sensitive 16 year old made me defensive and embarrassed. Even as an adult it probably wouldn’t feel much better. To an outsider, it wouldn’t look like I feel ashamed of the state of disarray my room has always been in, because if I cared it would be easy enough for me to do something about it, right? WRONGGGG!!!

It’s an invisible disability, it is invisible even to myself. It is hard for me to understand why I can’t just pick up my clothes, hang up my laundry, put my makeup away in one of the 30 tiny plastic organizers my mom purchased for me in the hopes that I’d use one of them. I can’t explain it, there’s technically nothing stopping me, but I cannot get my body to do it. I don’t even know what to tell my body to do.

When I look at The Destroyed Room, I see the aftermath of how I’d react when my mom would “clean” my room. She would sweep everything on the surfaces into the drawers, push everything on the floor into a pile. To her, it looked better. The visual clutter was gone. To me, it made the chaos in my head so much worse. Spread out in one layer across my room, I could see all of it, and I knew where to find what I needed from it’s spot on the floor. As soon as anything was swept into a drawer, in a pile of other unrelated things, I was incapable of finding it. My response as a teenager when she would do that? When I’d come home from school and realize I couldn’t find something I wanted to use because my delicate ecosystem was destroyed? I would take everything from all of my drawers and completely dump the entire contents onto the floor, spread it out into a single layer. I’m sure it appeared as though I did it in anger, it certainly looked like anger. I realize now that just because I was angry while I did it doesn’t mean what I did was illogical or unreasonable. I was trying to exist in a structure that didn’t work for me and when what I did to survive was messed up, I had to restore it. The Destroyed Room embodies the tornado of chaos, tearing everything apart, and putting my cute things back where they belonged: on the ground.

The silly thing is that the consequence of this “cleaning” was much worse than it was originally. The ecosystem of mess in my room, if left undisturbed, meant that all of the things I used regularly were out, and the things I didn’t use would stay in the drawer. When these reckonings happened, all of the objects were ultimately regurgitated on the floor, useful or not. When everything that was previously on the floor was swept into a giant pile, my options were either excavate it and spread it out again, or forget every object in the pile even existed.
My mom and I went back and forth through this cycle for years, no peace ever to be reached.

My mom documented some of the mess at its worst. I’m not sure why. It definitely wasn’t for posterity, and who could have known then that years later, when the disaster child managed to get herself into grad school at NYU, those images would be reclaimed as inspiration, and the basis of something beautiful instead.

Am I ready to share these images? I don’t feel ashamed of myself when I look at them. Some I look back on fondly in a strange way. But I know an outside eye would not be so kind. I don’t feel ashamed of it internally, but I hide it because I know that the facade of functionality I try so hard to maintain would collapse if an outside viewer were to see. This is why I’m reluctant to call it shame, but I must admit that trying so hard to hide something essential to my identity looks a lot like shame.

Here’s one of the floor piles. A forensic analysis would reveal that I probably tried on every bra I owned, and threw them all on the floor. I obviously went shopping, as someone with heaps of clothes on their floor ought to, and kept the receipts safely where I could find them again (under my bed). And my mom evidently used a Swiffer to literally sweep it all up into a pile. A tidy room tells no stories.

Perhaps this is my disability aesthetic. My goal is to help others understand that this is not laziness. And to help the people like me benefit from what I’ve learned that helps me no longer live like this.

I would like to use these images for my thesis project.