To start with I should declare that I am using the term ‘disability’ to refer to the social model of disability, i.e: that people are disabled not by impairment but by barriers to access and social inclusion. I am not using the term disability to refer to impairment. After all this time of my being involved with disability culture it still feels necessary for me to make this statement as a sort of ‘pledge of allegiance’.

Lennard J Davis in The Disability Studies Reader (Routledge 1997) shows how eugenicist statisticians would represent the concept of the ‘norm’ by means of a bell curve diagram formed by the characteristics which are considered to be ‘normal’ or average. On the slopes of the bell-curve are the not-normal characteristics but the apex of the curve represents the ideal, average normal person who manifests all of the desired characteristics. If you’re here could you stand up?

As an effect of the historic concept of normalcy, society continues to erect barriers to access by which the social exclusion of ‘not normal’ people can be made. Architects seem particularly proficient at being normal.

So it appears to be indisputable: disability is a category that intrinsically denotes one form or another of social marginalisation.

15mm is a collective of disabled people that are diverse in terms of impairment. However, there is one ‘barrier to access’ that we all share – that is, the perception of disabled people by those who consider themselves, in contrast, to be normal. The object of 15mm is to twist such normative perceptions by means of parody, artistic experimentation and black comedy.

The acknowledgement that disabled people are socially marginalised is currently more fully appreciated by larger institutions such as ACE, some Universities and other publicly accountable organisations. This may be an effect of their having to be seen to take the Disability Discrimination Act seriously or face losing public funding. After all, funding comes from the public as a whole and there are no grounds whatsoever for excluding certain groups of people. The DDA is said to lack any real teeth and that may be the case but there are signs that some organisations have actually read or heard of it. . .

Recently it has become obvious that institutions’ ‘tick box obligations’ have become increasingly compelling to them. Over the last year or two certain arts institutions have been threatened with loss of funding if they don’t take these obligations – particularly to the disability community – more seriously.

In part 15mm has been set up to answer or perhaps even exploit this situation. Many arts curators in the past have found ‘disability art’ too anodyne or derivative. Often, when something interesting appears in this category it does not seem to relate ostensibly to disability even if the artist is disabled.

So I thought, what if we formed a collective of interesting contemporary artists who are reasonably like-minded and in dialogue with innovative artistic practices? And then, as a collective, concentrate on disability-relevent themes. I thought maybe that would be irresistible to arts organisations.

ACE agreed with this strategy and provided Research & Development funding on the Staircase Miracles project. Part of R&D was to market the Miracles idea to every arts organisation in the UK. I put together a package that included clips of each of the 15mm artist’s solo work together with a proposal for the Staircase Miracles video film.

I received rejections from every major arts organisation in the UK except the Ikon Gallery and the Serpentine’s education department. This was a bit puzzling as all the places rejecting 15mm didn’t seem to have other options for commissioning ‘disability art’, so presumably they were not interested at all in this category or in fulfilling their social obligations.

All of the institutions that I contacted are publicly funded. I didn’t bother approaching grass-roots, artist-run initiatives. This is because, knowing that they do not have any ‘tick box obligations’ to worry about I knew they wouldn’t be responsive. This is a shame because a lot of the art that I really enjoy is made by artist-run organisations that often survive on commitment and enthusiasm.

To pick an example at random, there was recently an exhibition in Deptford titled ‘There Is Always an Alternative’ (curated by the artists Inter Alia) that purports to show art made in the early 1990’s from a supposedly politically radical perspective. Not only were there no disability artists in the show but there was also a total lack of concern for access – the building chosen to house the exhibition was incredibly inaccessible and inevitably there was no audiodescription or subtitling. It’s true that I liked most of the art in this show but I was appalled that it was supposed to represent a radical left-wing perspective and yet was reinforcing the marginalisation of a significant community of people.

The thing is: I encounter this type of inaccessibility and ignorance all the time and it’s a shame that I barely even register disappointment as I’m so totally used to it. It’s as if I want to fast forward 50 years and discover that the world IS concerned to include disabled people in society’s culture.

Recently I co-convened a conference with Henry Rogers at BIAD titled ‘Art Becomes You’ that was concerned with the art and experiences of people from traditionally marginalised subject positions. At the end of the day’s conference the chair, Sarat Maraj, commented that listening to papers by myself and Laurence Harvey on disability and art was like considering the position that black and gay arts were in 20 or more years ago.

In this sense: is disability art the ‘the lowest of the low’?

15mm Films was set up to address some of these issues. The artists in the collective are all experienced in and committed to ‘radical’ or ‘experimental’ forms of art making from a contemporary rather than traditional outlook. Whereas in their solo work the artists may not always emphasise the question of disability (by which I mean social forms of exclusion and not medical conditions); but within the collective of 15mm Films disability is the graphic theme of the work.

To do this 15mm have set out to discover and explore themes around disability that are common to each of us individually, and we address them not in an earnest well-meaning glass-ceiling kind of way. No – we are acidic acerbic and confrontational. We take the piss out of what we think that normal people think about us. And sometimes this will cause confusion – the documentary accompanying the Staircase Miracles for example, is seriously believed by some viewers to be actual which I find quite amazing. It seems that our fictional, OTT personas are not explicit enough for some people to read as parody.

Our first film was ‘The Electricians’ which explored the historic phenomenon of medical experimentation on disabled people. The fact that we did this through a film which is also a kind of deranged pantomime shows the extent of 15mm artists’ ambition and flexibility.

This current film ‘The Staircase Miracles’ began with a consideration of the historic phenomenon of miracle healing and its impact on disabled people. The idea was formulated some years ago when I was travelling in the west coast of Ireland and arrived in the town of Knock which has a large pilgrim centre, airport and ‘miraculous’ shrine. I was only looking for a good pint of Guinness but – having revealed myself as being deaf – the locals repeatedly provided me with directions to the shrine, the assumption being that I was looking for a miracle to ‘cure’ my deafness. So I began thinking about a film that would utterly ridicule this perception and would also provide an opportunity to depict Christ as a lesbian in a wheelchair sporting a Hitler/Chaplin moustache and other such ‘controversial’ felicities.

For our next film which is currently in very early scripting stages we will be telling the story of a group of ‘disability terrorists’ who want to ‘convert’ Cornwall to disability by means of mutilative letter bombs and nerve gas. The terrorists are holed up in the stately home of their aristocratic and diabolical leader and have an arts organisation – DABLE (which naturally is heavily funded by ACE) – that is a front for the real activities of the group (ie: terrorism). The group’s arts funding is currently in the balance after a series of bad reviews and a flunkey is promoted to be leading artist to make a piece of art commissioned by Colchester Arts Centre. (The film has the working title ‘The Colchester Commission’). The clock is ticking, the funding of DABLE is in the balance and therefore, also, the terrorist’s cover when: a coach load of Murder Night party people arrive at the stately home. . .

I’d like to conclude that, as far as I can see, 15mm Films is totally off the radar for mainstream culture. We haven’t yet garnered any in-depth critical responses. Perhaps the critical parameters by which a work like ‘The Staircase Miracles’ can be fully appreciated do not currently exist in the mainstream? What we work with in 15mm is possibly the biggest barrier to access that exists, namely, the perception that disabled people are somehow pre-conditioned to manifest certain stereotypical characteristics. By turning these around, playing up to them, we realise that we are working with a loaded gun and are sometimes rather callously flinging it around.

It is essential that the artistic and critical community beyond ‘disability art’ keeps up with us.

Aaron Williamson