In 1786, linguist Valentin Haüy wrote disparagingly of blind musicians who roamed the streets of Paris: ‘It is probably a lack of principles that reduce some to rushing around the streets going from door-to-door, shattering ears with an out-of-tune instrument or a raucous voice, trying to obtain small change often given to them in return for quiet.’
A decade earlier, a similar sentiment — that lack of instruction was the root cause of the social and aural assaults by blind beggars and minstrels — had motivated Haüy to found the first school for blind children. His epiphany, mythologised in disability history, arrived in 1771, when Haüy chanced upon a lunchtime concert at the Café des Aveugles (Café of the Blind) in St Honore, performed by an ensemble of blind musicians from the Quinze-Vingts hospice:
Ten blind men scraped their bows in pantomime, drawing shattering discord from violins, cellos, basses and viols. They stared blankly at sheet music turned on the racks so that the notes were visible to the jeering audience. Their sightless eyes were ringed with huge pasteboard spectacles devoid of glass. They wore grotesque robes, with dunces’ caps and asses’ ears… Every day for two months they had scraped, fiddled and kept up a monotonous accompanying chant, while their audience jeered, banged tankards on the tables and screeched bawdy jokes.
Haüy was disturbed that the Quinze-Vingts performers would participate in such gross self-ridicule. He was determined to civilise the blind, by teaching blind children to read with elevated, tactile typography so they could study writing, geography, mathematics and scripture, and learn the mechanical arts of spinning, knitting, printing and bookbinding. Though Haüy was sure the blind children would never rise to compete with the sighted, he aspired to raise them to a little above mediocrity, and at the least, teach the skills and behaviours that would allow them to lead dignified and harmonious lives. With one blind boy as his inaugural test student, Haüy set forth. A year later, he formally launched the Institution des jeunes aveugles.
As the student body grew, Haüy organised concerts and exhibitions of the children’s feats to raise awareness — and funds — to sustain his intertwined missions of charity and social order. His success stirred a movement across Europe, and spread to the colonies. In Victoria, the colonists established the Victorian Asylum and School for the Blind, and staged grand concerts at the Town Hall to attract private ‘conscience’ donations. In 1874 the Argus reported that the blind children (‘with much feeling’) sang the rousing hymn ‘He wipes the tear from every eye,’ and performed sign language dialogues with deaf and ‘dumb’ children, exhorting the audience to pay as much as they were able.
In post-revolutionary Paris, however, the Quinze-Vingts musicians resisted, mounting a vigorous defense of their right to disrupt the status quo with their violins and raucous singing. The Committee of Public Assistance decried the blind performers’ lack of moral compass and unregulated behaviour, pointing to ‘the disturbances [that] had inevitably grown in recent times as a result of the spirit of independence, division and anarchy.’ They were accused of sexual deviance and revolutionary fraternising. A public campaign was announced to subordinate the blind and rein in their moral decay, with a suite of invasive regulations and steep fees for misbehaving. But the blind musicians were undeterred. They protested plans for their hospice to be absorbed into Huay’s school, complaining that it would subject them to eternal celibacy. They discarded the uniforms they had been instructed to wear, and took to the streets to make noise.
St Honore and the Quinze-Vingts performers flicker through many stories that deserve sharing; stories that have been suppressed from contemporary narratives of art history, stories that date to the earliest parades and participatory spectacles recorded in Europe, stories of blind maiming and blind death as entertainment, stories that might be better known if more raucous blind performers had been welcomed into institutions of art. For the moment, it is worth flagging the unseen, and pointing out that the dual impulses of the post-revolutionary Parisiens persist in our contemporary milieu. On the one hand — the dominant hand — are political and social structures that have been legitimised to train and civilise the blind, profiling blind achievements in their seasonal clarion calls for donations. Less visible, but resolutely inserting their presence regardless, are aberrant blind artists and performers. Often non-professional or barely-professional, their anarchic ways of moving and living disturb the mannered protocols of contemporary galleries.
We recognise one another: in the earsplitting sonar wayfinding and belligerent cane bashing performances of Andy Slater; or the paintings and image descriptions by Jennifer Justice that collide stand-up comedy and proud blind resistance politics; in the cackling and whooping of actress Janaleen Wolfe, abandoning her hot pink cane to flap damp rawhide over her head, trilling in an off-key operatic register, tumbling through accents and characters from her sideline hustle as a phone sex worker. Through jubilance, brashness, humour, or subversive touch, these flashes of blind defiance call out curatorial and architectural and behavioural protocols that pretend that 20:20 vision is universal and absolute. In its radical form, blindness seizes space for expressions and impulses and expertise beyond the perceptual and social limits arbitrarily condoned as normal.
In Tina Stefanou’s , the gallery reverberates with mechanical growls and hums, the soundtrack to a film of blind dirt bike rider Matthew Cassar, as he rides up and across uneven grass slopes. A stunt ramp, festooned with crystals and evil eyes, runs the length of the room. To one side, Cassar is repairing a motorcycle, spanners and wrenches at hand. He and Stefanou talk and hum, singing back and forth, trading stories too, about working class memories and the adrenaline of high-speed riding. They are preparing for the closing, a triumphant counterpoint to the Parisien efforts to cleanse the streets of the disruptive bodies of the Quinze-Vingts performers. Together, Cassar and Stefanou will lead a public gathering, pushing the restored motorcycle back outside, singing as collaborators and audience members hum in a discordant chorus; anticipating the moment if, or when, Cassar will start the engine, and with Stefanou as passenger, ride beyond sightlines.