Language of art

As part of Tate Modern’s regular free BSL talks programme – which takes place at 7pm on the 1st Friday of every month, usually with a deaf gallery presenter - I led a tour of their Defining Constructivism exhibition with around 70 attendees. Conveying the social, cultural, historical and political framework that so inspired the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s in deaf-friendly terms proved a challenge.
This was not just due to the foreign names (which I chose to show on paper rather than finger-spell), but also the complexity of describing the mood of that time. How do you explain an artist working with emotional detachment to someone who understands only the highly expressive culture that saturates his life today?
The emphasis that Deaf Culture places on self-expression is what gives us our directness. The daily communication barriers within the mainstream that we face make conveying our feelings difficult, which subsequently make us all the more determined to get to the point when we can - and as quickly as possible.
I used to think that the language of visual art was universal and therefore amenable to this directness. Having attended the excellent three-part deaf gallery presenters’ course provided by Deafworks and the Wallace Collection that ended last month, I am no longer so sure.
While visual art does befit its title generally, sometimes what it visualises is not always clear to us, due to outside contributing factors that may either no longer exist or just don’t form part of our cultural sensibility. Far from failing to communicate its message, this makes the art all the richer in its comment on society – and all the more important a reflection of its time.
Back to the course. In the Wallace Collection’s Meeting Room, 12 deaf and hard-of-hearing gallery presenters, including myself, engaged in a discussion about being ‘conductors’ of the galleries we worked with, our audiences, and ourselves. It got us thinking about working with two or more languages and how we could bridge the cultural differences between our audiences and the art.
For us as deaf people, that discussion – one of several that peppered the course as a means of facilitating our professional development – was a turning point. Of course, before joining we already knew the value of research and preparation for gallery tours, but it also brought home the fact that our visual communication values didn’t necessarily bring us closer to understanding visual art.
However, it became clear that our own dedication to building on our knowledge – and the fact that we had few precedents in that respect - did make us specialists in the field. First-hand experience of being part of the Deaf Community gave us incentive to explore its intricacies from a deaf cultural perspective, enabling us to identify parallels to draw on and consider how best to explain artistic concepts that had none.
No BSL interpreter, however qualified and experienced s/he is, could undergo such deep-rooted thinking. Not that I am against BSL-interpreted gallery tours; they are invaluable in enabling deaf access to mainstream perspectives of visual art, especially when the commitment to clarity, skill, pace and accuracy is in evidence. But ultimately, BSL interpreters remain neutral channels through which BSL becomes spoken English and vice versa.
Aside from bringing deaf audiences closer to visual art in a way that BSL-interpreted tours don’t – on proviso, of course, that it is done well - another advantage of deaf-led tours is the opportunity it gives the deaf gallery presenter to stretch his or her intellect. What better way to develop an affinity with an art movement like Russian Constructivism than to swot up on it?

© Melissa Mostyn 2009