A SERIOUSLY HIP DUDE AND HIS HIP SEND-OFF

Thirty-five years ago, I had both of my hips replaced. It was a couple months before my 16^th birthday. While my friends were getting their drivers’ licenses, I got new hips.

It wasn't exactly a fun way to spend a summer, but my arthritis left me no choice. My hips had completely disintegrated. The bones were grinding against each other, sounding like my mom's 1968 Mustang when my sister first learned to drive stick shift. The pain that went with it stopped me dead in my tracks. Life was put on hold until my surgeon readied his bone saw -- along with other nasty implements -- and replaced what Mother Nature gave me with stainless steel and Teflon.

I don't know precisely what happened to my natural hip joints. But I'm guessing their fate and Jimmy Hoffa's were substantially similar. Ashes to ashes, and all that stuff.

I never got a chance to say goodbye to my hips. Not sure what I would have said, exactly. Perhaps "it's not you, it's me" or "let’s try again after I get my head together" or "don't let the door hit you where the Good Lord split you."

Because of my experience, I've always been curious how other folks deal with having parts of them torn asunder. Recently I stumbled upon an online article about Norwegian artist Alexander Selvik Wengshoel, who gave his own hip an interesting send-off.

A wheelchair user since childhood, Wengshoel had his hip replaced when he was 21. The performance artist wanted to take home the detached joint as a souvenir. He woke up after the procedure to find a vacuum plastic bag containing the hip, and a good-luck note from his surgeon attached to it.

But Wengshoel’s story doesn’t end there. He cooked the hip and dined on the meat, along with a side dish of potatoes au gratin and a glass of wine.

When I read this, I was stunned. The first thing that came to mind was "white or red?"

But then I saw Wengshoel's comment:

"It had this flavor of wild sheep, if you take a sheep that goes in the mountains and eats mushrooms."

That answered my question. Had to be a robust red. Perhaps Rocca Delle Macìe Riserva Chianti Classico 2008, from Tuscany, or Beronia Reserva 2008 from Rioja, Spain. Gotta love the way those aromas of succulent black fruit, earth, violets and spice complement meat.

Since I've already told you Wengshoel is a performance artist, you probably know what's next, and you would be right. He documented the entire cannibalistic feast in an exhibition that was featured at the Tromso Academy of Contemporary Art in Norway.

I was inclined to dismiss Wengshoel as a nut job, a kook driven mad by Scandinavian seasonal affect disorder.

But then he elaborated further.

"It had been so hard to have it in my body, and when I took it out, it turned into something else, something romantic. It was a natural process I felt I had to do to move on. I just work with my own body, that is my canvas.”

I sort of envy Wengshoel. At least he got the chance to emotionally work through such an experience.

As for me, I would like to have taken my hips home in a Big Lots bag, but I would have stopped short of ingesting them.

Perhaps I would have turned them into a flower vase.

To display rose hips in bone meal, of course.

ART AND DISABILITY IDENTITY, OR CRUSHING DUNG BEETLES BENEATH MY ORTHOPEDIC SHOE

Art Basel Miami 2014 is this week and naturally, art is on my mind. All year, I look forward to not only the main Basel show, but also the scores of satellite shows and gallery exhibits that have grown incredibly over the last dozen years. I always attend as many as my wallet and stamina allow.

 

Contemporary artworks most likely to draw me in address issues of identity: identity of an individual or a group or a nation. Art produced in Miami or by artists from the Magic City often deals with the identity of immigrants and refugees. At Basel, female identity or identity along the lines of sexual orientation are frequent themes.

 

But no matter where I go to view art – Miami, New York, Mexico City, London, Madrid and beyond – I find a dearth of works about disability identity. It’s not that it doesn’t exist. It simply isn’t anywhere near 20 percent of identity-themed art, 20 being the oft-cited percentage of people with disabilities in society.

 

It makes me a bit melancholy. It feels like one more confirmation of our lack of presence, of our lack of a voice. One more directive by society to either act/look/pass as non-disabled, or else go off to live in some mythical, isolated disability underworld.

 

Though I’m a writer rather than an artist, it seems like identity would be such a rich vein to mine for artists with disabilities. Just taking the stereotypes and roles that have been foisted on us and turning those back on themselves would make for provocative, edgy stuff indeed.

 

Want to disempower me with the label “wheelchair bound?” I’ll photograph myself in bondage gear, my ankles bound to this wheeled device that brings me power and freedom.

 

See me as a sorry little creature put on this Earth to make you feel better about your own troubles? I’ll paint you as dung beetle that I crush beneath my orthopedic shoe.

 

Think I sit at my window all day, looking at the world I cannot join and mourning my brokenness? I’ll make a movie that shows disability as the dominant culture, where so-called “normal” people hurl themselves down staircases in order to be accepted.