Blind Blind People and Other Spurious Tales
The parable of the blind men and the elephant is used in various Eastern belief systems to explain that reality may be viewed differently depending on one’s perspective or to show how absolute truths may be relative. There are various versions of the tale, but it boils down to: a group of blind men (or men in the dark) touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one touches a different part, and then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement about what the elephant is like.
As part of Six Actions For New York City – in which artists and performers take over New York City’s streets utilizing a range of media and humor to suggest change through diverting the everyday flow and use of the city – artist Javier Tellez is bringing the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant to life via his action “Games Are Forbidden In The Labyrinth.” The press materials tell us that: “six visually impaired people will touch a different part of an elephant - just one part - such as the side or tusk and then describe the experience. Their responses illustrate how reality and understanding are shaped by perspective and the relativity of absolute truth. Tellez’ action will take place on a closed set to be filmed and screened at a later date.”
There are a number of questions that this work raises, in its premise, execution and conclusions. For one, it is premised, as is the fable, on the notion that blind people are more naïve and less likely to conceptualize one element as a part of a whole entity. Similar myths abound about blind people’s inability to understand abstract thought. Helen Keller wrote in an essay called “The World I Live In”: “Ideas make the world we live in, and impressions furnish ideas.” She instructs the sighted on how she gains access to such large and complex ideas as beauty, incongruity and power with her hands. “Remember,” she says, “that you, dependent on your sight, do not realize how many things are tangible.”
Definitions of the word “blind” found in my computer’s Thesaurus support the idea that blindness limits . The terms ignorant, imperceptive, insensitive, irrational, oblivious, obtuse, random, rash, stagger, unaware, unconscious, uncontrolled, unknowing, unplanned and violent came up on my screen. My Roget’s Thesaurus also provided inattentive and purposeless. These meanings lurk under the surface when the word “blind” is used whether on its own, or in pairings, in such phrases as “blind passion”, “blind rage”, “blind justice”, “blind drunk” and “blind faith”.
How can the culture get away with attaching such an absurd proliferations of meanings to a condition that affects, simply, visual acuity? Of all the impairments, blindness seems to call up the most fantastical of responses. These are used, uncritically and without apparent irony by many and often.
The artist Javier Téllez who created Games Are Forbidden In The Labyrinth was born in Venezuela and lives and works in New York. He is a respected figure in the contemporary art world and has exhibited in the Venice, Sydney and Prague. His previous works include “One Flew Over the Void” (2005) staged at the border between San Diego and Tijuana and consisting of a parade co-organized with psychiatric patients from the Baja California Mental Health Center in the Mexican border city of Mexicali.
It appears that he takes on ideas about disability in his work, but it is questionable whether he opens up those ideas and re-imagines them, or instead plays with them in their static (preordained) state.
