Access to us
A Case study: Mia + Eric
This essay was commissioned for inclusion in Mia + Eric’s forthcoming 2026 publication on Art School (title forthcoming)—a two-year project in which the artists critically and creatively reflected on their 17-year collaborative art practice through dialogue with four mentors. It is published here in advance of the print edition.
Access to what?
Despite an apparent embrace of disabled and neurodivergent practices in the arts, when it comes to access needs, so many artists I know, who identify as disabled, and/or neurodivergent, have experienced a pressure to centre the gallery, the institution, the organisation, (a.k.a. the incumbents, the barriers, the disabling structures themselves), in seeking ways to sustain and expand their practice.
Tasked with critiquing or reimagining institutions, artists getting recruited (“commissioned“) and having to do the necessary groundwork of ensuring that vital, hard won, and (hopefully) legally enshrined rights are enacted as standard; access riders & policies, workplace adjustments, accessible info, fair hiring practices, etc.
But when artists have to prioritise institutional change as a pre-requisite to artistic practice, the transformative power and value of an artistic practice then comes second.
This is a false economy that sucks energy from artistic livelihood,
but also rewards the performance of crip and disabled notoriety, without the actual risk, as a trade for institutional legitimacy.
As Morgan Quaintance observed in 2017:
“despite a passion for the vocabulary of change amongst those who populate the art world’s upper echelons, and a conceptual belief in ‘rupture’, ‘paradigm shift’, and ‘the turn’, radical alteration of the field, and the concrete and cognitive institutions that comprise it – galleries, museums, art criticism, notions of best practice, etc. – has not taken place.”
I am bored of the gig in which art organisations exist to find ways to absorb and extract the value of previously abject, excluded, and counter-systemic acts of artists within their systems of value production,
without adequately resourcing the artists and activists who created that value, and while resisting the transformative potential indicated in those acts.
So too, with the institutional performance of representational “diversity” as a form of reputation management.
A self-policing dance of fake it til you make it to seem right on, radical and relevant, where everyone can smell it on each other, but no one wants to admit it.
The recent increase in workplace adoption of ‘neurodiversity’ as a more widely palatable, de-politicised, de-pathologising catch-all alternative (to invoking the stigma and problematic paradigms associated with terms such as ‘Autistic’, ’ADHD’) might also be seen as a reflection of this pattern.
Changing the image, without having to address the underlying issue:
‘That I am at odds with this system, while also exclusively defined by this system as abnormal to it.’
We collectively plump for the echo of failed 1970s ‘diversity’ policy, remixed and prefixed with a linguistic association of (neuro)science as a universalist symbol of legitimacy.
Yes, neurodiversity is catchy. But it centres the same normalcy it seeks to diverge from, making a lifestyle out of a structural barrier.
For many artists (and art workers) who identify with the experiences these terms signpost to, the deeper question is:
‘How can I create the epistemic agency to self-determine beyond these limiting categories, while also navigating social systems that require these categories as tools of entry?’
As in: how can I operate my own (body) language, and have that work, without having to translate it for legibility in normalcy’s knowledge system.
Ways of Knowing
There are ways of knowing that the permissive role of “artist” presumes access to.
However, access to practicing that knowing is often subject to negotiation with the institutional gatekeeping of an art world, with pre-established roles, relationships, and resource flows that are designed to sustain the system, not the artist.
This cognitive injustice is replicated in the presumption that ‘access’ means ‘access to the institution’.
Artists
know things
because they are operating outside of
consensus reality.
So too do
the abnormals of ‘autistic’, ‘ADHD’ etc
know things
because they are operating outside of consensus reality.
(While having to become adept at translating themselves within it).
Since the goal of any system is to maintain itself, the insights that these outsider statuses offer are themselves inevitably subject to de-valuation.
The compounding effect is an unspoken pressure to comply, to bend, to conform, to fit in;
to compromise the ethical, psychic, and individuating power of trusting those insights; the inner knowings emerging from self-connection, above all else.
Legibility becomes the goal.
Art School
Semester One of Art School.
Art school is Mia + Eric’s mock-institutional process of self-reflexive review of 15 years of practice, to which I brought the mode of coaching, as their ‘Semester One’ in the Spring of 2024.
Our 16+ hours together, coaching over zoom, enabled a dialogical process of conscientisation of how these compounding effects were felt in them;
as tacit social limits on belonging, and as internal disconnects.
Confusion, self-negation, self-doubt, denial, pre-compromise, over-adaptation, self-suppression, performance, masking, code-switching, etc. and the resultant cycles of burnout,
are examples of consequences when self-connection has not been accessible in-relationship.
In this case, in relationship to ‘art world’.
Beyond Burnout
I think of burnout as: the long-term exposure to inner resistance.
Art School offered a space to sense and heed that resistance, and integrate its wisdom as a reliable or trustable reality.
Inner knowings, inviting new choices: to respond to institutional patterns in new ways.
What works. What doesn’t work.
Semester One was a courageous space to legitimise and foreground the inner knowings and uncommon sense-making that had lacked social, epistemic, and institutional validity, despite being central to the specificities of Mia + Eric’s artistic practice.
And to re-learn to trust that the expression of those knowings doesn’t always lead to social or existential (to their practice) threat.
Exploring the nuanced, subjective experiences of what is enabling and disabling to Mia and Eric individually and relationally,
and the relational safety-making of legitimising uncommon-sense, through the cognitive mirroring I was able to offer,
enabled a felt culture of access:
I get to be me, and have that work for me, and us.
New internal coordinates, patterned in the body, patterned into relationship, according to the specificities of their multi-layered co-creative existence.
This trans-individuating, access-validating experience is now one they get to invite others into experiencing, in relationship with them.
Good Enough
For Mia + Eric, the seemingly necessary institutional appeasement, economic resourcefulness, and the impact of a widespread scarcity pattern common among artists of withholding peer recognition, had also compounded a sense of not having “made it” yet.
Read: not good enough, yet.
Not good enough, yet, to relax into being artists. Not good enough, yet, to believe in our work. Not good enough, yet, to practice on our terms.
In addressing this misplaced delayed gratification,
I invited them into the idea that they were in charge of knowing the value of their work, and of their ways of working. To trust that self-valuation and, in doing so, invite others into knowing it too.
To set the terms.
That they could decide they had made it.
That they had created enough evidence, they only needed to see it.
Celebrating is something deeply uncomfortable for a lot of people because it touches on the self-blame of ‘not enough’. We brace against it.
Staying with it flushes the ‘not enough’ (or ‘too much’) to the surface.
Celebrating the outsized efforts required to maintain an artistic practice within harsh conditions, enabled Mia + Eric to enter into the self-valorisation of their own work:
What is their truth?
“We like our work, we value it, we believe in it.”
And to turn the question of access on its head:
“The definition of access is prioritising the things that only we can do.”
“Access means: access to us”
Access to Us
Access as relationship.
Mia + Eric are in several relationships at once; with each other as life partners, collaborators, and within the many roles of an artistic practice.
Access needs are not always compatible, consistent, predictable, or communicable.
(There is no magical, ultimate, one-size fits all arrival lounge of accessibility).
Mia + Eric’s culture of access is necessarily unique, nuanced, specific, situated, and evolving.
But now they can talk about it, and be about it, with a high degree of access intimacy.
Self-centred
Mia + Eric’s “Access to us” offers a model for centring artists, not institutions,
in a self-evolving set of principles, boundaries, and requirements that define the limits, terms, and intentions of being in relationship with Mia + Eric.
This approach means that ‘access’ is defined according to what enables Mia + Eric to access to their own internal emergent knowings and develop them as vital contributions to the collective.
Instead of centring institutions and thereby reproducing standardisation as a blunting of key nuances in what enables access for them.
For this cognitively just approach to feel available in practice, belief in the value of their work was paramount.
And this was the turning point;
undoing internalised systemic de-valuation
of their innate ways of being, their methods of practising, and the crystallised expressions of their un-categorisable practice.
Recognising the infinite life-giving value of the impact of their work on the communities, collaborators and the beyond-human lives they had touched,
and on their own lives.
Affordances
‘Artist’ might be one version of an ancient role that a sustaining community needs: the ‘inner-knowing outsider’.
A role granted special actions, rights, insight, and reflection in ways that benefit collective wellbeing.
Artists embody this type of personal and political power.
But that power can only be fully utilised when artists centre themselves in the question of access.
To assume that power, is to assume that the value of an artistic practice cannot be measured by its compatibility with an art world system.
And to assume that artists dictate the system’s relevance,
according to how much it values and affords artists the cognitive justice and agency to access that power within themselves.
Mia + Eric: https://miaanderic.ca/
References:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586171/full
https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/
https://www.lifeflowbalance.co.uk/conscientization/
https://www.acu.ac.uk/the-acu-review/the-search-for-cognitive-justice/
Cognitive Justice on youtube
https://www.dukeupress.edu/activist-affordances?utm_source=DUP&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=b-WorldAnthroDay-feb24
