From Film Quarterly Dossier: The New Disability Media, Winter 2022

By Mara Mills and Neta Alexander

Captions are seemingly everywhere in the new world of remote work and pleasure. In the last decade, largely as a result of advocacy by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), captions have moved from such sites as the television converter box, the personal device at select movie theaters (like the Rear Window captioning system), or the temporary screen mounted beside a theater stage at “special” performances into a nearly ubiquitous option on digital screens. In the United States, the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA) ensured that digital interfaces and streaming protocols, from digital TV to Internet video on laptops and smartphones, can display closed captions; Internet distributors were required to provide closed captioning for many categories of video starting in 2012. ¹ Another spur was a lawsuit, National Association of the Deaf v. Netflix, filed in 2010 and judged in favor of the NAD by the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts in 2012, arguing that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to online businesses. ²

At the same time, the proliferation of user-generated video across online platforms escaped FCC regulation, creating new obstacles for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Although YouTube made human captioning possible in 2008 and machine captioning through the Google Voice algorithm in 2009, the former was rare and the latter was highly inaccurate; most other social media companies followed far behind. The massive turn to videoconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic placed new pressure on platforms like Zoom to offer automated captioning, actualizing the possibility for accessible remote work that disability activists have demanded for years. ³ AI-generated captions, imperfect but much improved, are now widely available across videoconferencing and social media platforms, including Zoom’s partnership with Otter.ai in 2020 and TikTok’s introduction of auto captions in 2021. Increased familiarity with captions has fed demand to such an extent that AMC Theatres announced in 2021 that they would regularly include open captions (which are “burned in,” not optional) at some screenings.

With new digital tools and rising attention, captioning has also become a medium in its own right. Captions are a defining feature in the work of Carolyn Lazard and others in the “New Disability Arts” movement—a phrase that marks the current “swell” of disability art while acknowledging the long history of work by disabled artists. ⁴ Lazard is a Philadelphia-based filmmaker, curator, writer, performer, and organizer who employs and reinvents captions across video, performance, and installation art, often in collaboration or conversation with other disability artists. Lazard’s works have been exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, and dozens of museums and galleries around the world, reshaping the discourse around captioning, living and working with chronic illness, and resisting the capitalist pursuit of endless productivity and formal displays of “normate ability.”⁵

Captioning is so prevalent in New Disability Arts that entire exhibitions have been organized around it. In 2021, Activating Captions, at the Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts in Brussels, curated by deaf artist Christine Sun Kim with Niels van Tomme, featured works by Lazard, Jordan Lord, Alison O’Daniel, Shannon Finnegan, Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos, and others who employ captions as medium rather than accessibility add-on. ⁶

These works range from poetically captioned video to “captions” on billboards to descriptions of city sounds written on the windows of the Argos building. ⁷ Set far afield from its televisual origins, captioning in disability art can take place anywhere. Freed from its status as a device for “mere” transcription of preexisting sound, this type of captioning now often references conjectural sound or acts as a spur to thought and performance. In disability art, captioning—whether literal or figurative, even calling the use of any text “captioning”—signifies disability and disability aesthetics, to use Tobin Siebers’s term, as opposed to “inclusion.” ⁸

Most discussions of captioning begin and end with access: what elements of a soundtrack to render into text, the best pace for reading on-screen, or, on platforms like TikTok, the aesthetics of font and text positioning. Unlike subtitles, which translate dialogue from one language to another, captions transcribe dialogue as well as information about sound effects and musical scores. One of Lazard’s better-known video works, A Recipe for Disaster (2018), starkly counterposes traditional open captioning with captions used as compositional tools. Taking an episode from 1972 of Julia Child’s cooking show The French Chef (PBS, 1962–73)—one of the first programs to be broadcast with open captions in the United States—Lazard adds their own verbal description of on-screen images as an audio track along with vertically scrolling text that covers the screen in yellow “captions” read aloud by their frequent collaborator, Constantina Zavitsanos. This narrated text (or transcribed narration) contrasts access with disability art as Zavitsanos reads:

A work made from the conditions of debility or difference, not translated for debility or difference…. Not an accommodation, where we have to be grateful for getting to join the party. Well your party sucks…. An infrastructure of segregation.

Lazard’s text also emphasizes the elemental materiality of captions as media, spelling out: “3 ingredients. Eggs. Salt. Butter. 3 materials. Image. Sound. Text.” At the same time, the cacophony of overlaid text and voices in the work quashes the assumption of transparent access that usually attends captioning.

Some captioning in New Disability Arts engages with the approach that Deaf theater director Jenny Sealey has termed “the aesthetics of access.” ⁹ Here, access tools and practices are creatively employed and integral to artworks from video to wall text. Other works refer less (or not at all) to access, using captioning not as a tool that points to another medium but as a technique in itself that centers artist, audience, or disability community. Intimacy, justice, or eventfulness supplant access as the intention of the captioning. Much of this work is minimalist, comprising mostly, or even entirely, captions or text designated as “captions”—in other words, disability text.

As a formal element of disability minimalism, captions become tools for composition. In their video, text, and installation pieces, Lazard has further advanced a style of captions that function as “scores”—open-ended scripts inviting audience members to activate the work, their bodies, and each other. As performance scores, these captions instruct or otherwise engage with readers/audiences, requesting their participation in the art-making process. Several recent projects have brought what Lazard calls a “Black krip ethic or methodology” to their captioning: scores addressing Black and brown audiences, captions that combine “access and opacity” and “visibility and invisibility.” ¹⁰

Support Systems and Collectives

Lazard has been singled out for accolades such as the inaugural Disability Futures Fellowship (funded by the Ford and Mellon Foundations) and the Phaidon juried list of artists making up “art’s next generation,” but their work is best understood within the ambit of the collectives and friendships that serve as their support systems. Their abundant collaborations have remade art space, art time, and art economies. Their insistence on recognizing the infrastructure of care, collaborative labor, and political economy that are the scaffolding for an artwork or event is a crucial aspect of their practice and of disability politics more generally.

In 2019, Lazard co-organized a three-day festival, titled “I wanna be with you everywhere,” with Zavitsanos, McArthur, Amalle Dublon, Jerron Herman, and Alice Sheppard, in conjunction with Performance Space New York, the Whitney Museum, and the political-arts organization Arika. This festival brought disability art and access techniques to wide attention while at heart remaining a disability party and “crip meet-up.” ¹¹ Three evenings of dance, performance, poetry readings, and film screenings unfolded with abundant time and space for hanging out. The spirit was avowedly opposed to “individuation and inclusion,” emphasizing instead disability community and “common capacity” for making access happen. ¹² Travel funds for attendees, quiet space, and a “relaxed environment” approach to audience etiquette were combined with provisions for ASL, audio description. and captioning. ¹³ That same year, Lazard produced “Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice,” an online resource guide for smaller arts organizations, grounded in the intersectional principles of disability justice as articulated by queer and trans activists of color. ¹⁴ Lazard’s art practice has thus penetrated and restructured the organizations it encounters, establishing crip milieus, however transient.

Early in their career, Lazard cofounded Canaries, a group of chronically ill cis and trans women and nonbinary people that functioned as an art collective as well as a peer knowledge-sharing and support group. In a recent interview for Frieze, Lazard described the nature of that collective work:

Canaries is still ongoing as a private listserv, but it no longer functions as a public-facing art collective. We made art together for a few years, and it was an amazing way to think through collaborative and collective labor. As a group of chronically ill people, each of us was moving through these cycles of wellness and unwellness, which meant we weren’t always able to work. Oftentimes, when one person didn’t feel well enough to work, another person would be able to. It was about maintaining this hydraulic system of labor that comes from collectivity. ¹⁵

In this “hydraulic system” of collective art making, structures for communal pacing are crucial: in order to ensure continuity one can, when faced with pain, fatigue, and uncertainty, slow down while another speeds up.

Lazard has consorted for years with Constantina (Tina) Zavitsanos and Park McArthur, two New York–area disability artists known for their work in installation, performance, text, and sound. Much of Lazard’s, Zavitsanos’s, and McArthur’s work with captioning and scores (including the strategy of turning captions into scores) has emerged from ongoing conversations among them. In 2016, a residency at Room & Board—an apartment in Brooklyn whose tenants invited artists to stay with them for a month—led to Lazard’s Support System (for Park, Tina, and Bob), a durational performance that references the legacy of collectives and care work as constituting disability art itself, not just a way of making that art possible. On a single day, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., a string of visitors was invited to spend thirty minutes at a time with Lazard, who mostly stayed in bed. Each visitor was asked to bring flowers, which were placed on a table and formed “a grand sculpture” and “performance relic that was itself fugitive.” ¹⁶ Lazard in turn supported the visitors, inviting them to sleep, talk, or stretch.

Support System (for Park, Tina, and Bob) was inspired by Bob Flanagan’s Visiting Hours (1992) and by the Care Collective, the group of people who participate in McArthur’s evening care routine, from massaging and toothbrushing to drawing and making videos. McArthur and Zavitsanos discuss their approach to care in “Other Forms of Conviviality,” noting how they reject reciprocity or anything that resembles a contractual relationship or capitalist exchange. ¹⁷ “Give-and-give, or take-and-take,” says Zavitsanos. ¹⁸ They also describe the Care Collective’s evolving art practice, especially its turn to writing care “scores” in 2012. These scores can variously be read as descriptions or transcriptions of care activities, as in “Score for Lift and Transfer,” “Shirt Score,” “Score for Backing Up.” As performance scores, they also function as instructions, hailing the reader into scenes of care labor, conviviality, and access intimacy. ¹⁹

SCORE FOR BACKING UP

Think about your first lift with your partner.

Know that your partner has done this one million times more than you and that in twelve point font, a list of names of people that have done these lifts with her is 38 inches long when printed and leaves a 14 inch block of space for all the names that will come after you.

Realize you don’t remember the occasion of your first time, despite never having done this before.

Realize that she probably does remember.

Consider this discrepancy.

Know that now feels like the first time precisely because the first time felt like you’ve done this forever.

Pull the manual wheelchair down the ramp backwards. ²⁰

The Care Collective’s attitude toward giving, taking, and instructing has profoundly influenced their work in video, installation, and performance, as well as their relationships to audiences and performers. They have spun off new “care collectives,” including the Crip Fund, a mutual-aid fund that Lazard, Zavitsanos, McArthur, and others launched in the early months of the pandemic. ²¹

The practice of creating performance scores has been taken up by Lazard, who amalgamates the function of scores with video captioning. In a joint presentation titled “Expanded Cinema” at the Center for the Humanities (Graduate Center, CUNY) in 2017, Lazard, Zavitsanos, and McArthur discussed “the use of instruction in each artist’s work, as they engage audiences in a relationship of dependency … and indefinite duration.” ²² Expanded cinema, in their practice, requires orienting the audience to everything that supports a work: technology, labor, money, and the “bodyminds” of artist/audience/performer. ²³ Open captioning, which is always present in their videos and not an optional feature like closed captions, might serve the function of access to audio (dialogue and film score) but also frequently serves as a performance score or set of instructions read aloud by a narrator. The caption/score might even be the entirety of the work. Like the print-based “Score for Backing Up,” these open-captioned video scores insist on a relationship with the audience distinct from merely or transparently providing access. Here “access” is used “as a primary material” for offering directions or care, for requesting performances or intimacy. ²⁴

Perhaps more than any other artist in the network, Lazard has iterated scores across diverse mediums: open-captioned video, wall text, dance and dance film, screen-printed linens. ²⁵ If film was their “first love” and the focus of their undergraduate studies, chronic illness brought a simultaneous abundance and contraction of methods. ²⁶ On the one hand, disability led them “to explore other media as [they] became increasingly interested in how artistic production was related to capacity and ability.” ²⁷ On the other hand, their film and video work has moved away from a focus on the image and toward an emphasis on audience:

The visual vocabulary of my work has become more and more reduced, and I think that change reflects a change in me as an artist; I’m less concerned with performing competency in an ableist world. It’s also an attempt to circumvent the ableist insistence of the visual in the realm of art. There are many ways to register and experience artworks. My practice has become more responsive to the audience and to the site of reception. ²⁸

This focus on the audience has also led Lazard to rethink the production process for microbudget video artworks. Instead of trying to fund their work via crowdfunding, grants, residencies, and other more familiar forms of survival in a profit-driven art scene, Lazard has embraced minimalism as an aesthetic and a means of crip filmmaking:

Usually my process for making a work begins with an idea of something that is in excess of what I am actually capable of doing, in terms of my energy or concentration, and then I kind of scale back the production. This relates to the experience of any disabled person negotiating ableism: the expectations of capacity that exceed the support that one has to create anything in an ableist world. ²⁹

Lazard’s video practice can be described as “disability minimalism,” especially those works composed primarily of captions that function as scores. Minimalism, they argue, “instead of being an unmarked engagement with ideas of light, space, volume, et cetera, is actually a materialist engagement that’s impossible to disentangle from life and living.” ³⁰ What disability brings to minimalism is not economy but rather necessity with regard to the practicability of materials and the energy of the artist.

Scores by Carolyn

In most art and media, the word score refers to the musical portion of a film soundtrack or to written music and notations of movement for a dance performance. ³¹ Other senses of score include a cut, a line, marking time; a tally of a debt or securing of drugs; an index of ability, such as a score on a test. To score: to steal or win something, to hook up with someone. If captions are disability text, when Lazard writes captions as scores these other meanings also come into play.

The captions that Lazard adds to The French Chef in A Recipe for Disaster are neither a score nor a set of instructions, but they resituate the episode’s original open captions into a performance score in that they transcribe a spoken recipe: “A meal is explained as it’s made. The most accessible content.”

Lazard’s captions for CRIP TIME (2018), made the same year, intersperse transcriptions of sound with descriptions of the visual action on-screen, serving both as typical captions and as score. CRIP TIME is a ten-minute video artwork that unfolds at a slow pace while a pair of brown hands with gold nail polish meticulously open and close a colorful set of daily pill organizers placed on an embroidered tablecloth. In a static frame, shot from a bird’s-eye view, the unidentified hands proceed to hold different bottles, count the pills, and eventually place them into compartments labeled “morning,” “noon,” “evening,” and “bedtime.” The work ends when the pill organizers are completely filled with medications. Some of the captions, all parenthetical white text located at the bottom of the screen, read:

(each plastic compartment is unclasped.)

(a pill bottle is emptied into a hand.)

(pill contents rattling occasionally)

(pill distribution continues)

(a breath is taken)

These captions convert on-screen sounds into text for deaf viewers, or for those with the sound turned off, but as a score they also either transcribe or dictate the action of the hands. The use of parentheses is noteworthy, as it differs from their common use in closed captioning: usually, captions will include square brackets for sound effects or music—as in [applause] or [flute solo].

In CRIP TIME, Lazard instead uses parentheses to describe the moving image as well as the sounds in this dialogue-free piece. By breaking with tradition, Lazard changes closed captions from a functional “accessibility tool” meant to comply with legal requirements into a more playful and open-ended component of the work. Inviting multiple interpretations, the uncommon use of parentheses might also be read as resisting the logic of side effects, which are often downplayed by pharmaceutical companies by using small fonts, parentheses, and other textual techniques meant to minimize and dismiss their potential harm.

CRIP TIME is part of a decade-long investigation of chronic illness, cinematic time, and the medical-industrial complex, exposing the invisible work that Lazard, who lives with multiple chronic illnesses, is required to perform in order to survive. Not much happens during the video’s ten minutes. To that extent, the video is an endurance test. It asks the viewer to patiently watch a long shot while letting go of any inherent desire for narrative, causality, or character development. Hands, pills, pillboxes, captions, breath—these are the elements that make up CRIP TIME. Unlike many durational works, which strategically increase the average shot length to invoke boredom and unease, CRIP TIME recasts slowness as a survival strategy. In Lazard’s words, “[S]lowness has a lot to do with the mundane in some ways because our lives are made up of myriad slow experiences that are the foundation of keeping us alive.” ³² As a medium, HD video is not only cheaper and more accessible for independent filmmakers than film but also associated as a medium with the real time of daily events. As such, it is invested in the “kind of duration that matches with our lived experience.” ³³

As a durational work, the video also forces viewers to acknowledge the repetitive, tasking nature of spectatorship, care labor, and engagement within the US medical system. The captions, by describing to a sighted reader that which can also be seen in the moving image, underscore this repetitiveness. Like the pillboxes and prescriptions, the score marks time and offers a set of instructions. Lazard responds to their prescription with slowness and by painstakingly depicting what is often a hidden experience and infrastructure of self-preservation. The medications themselves, while remaining unknown to all but those fellow patients who can identify the pharmaceutical products based on their own medical regimes, tell the story of endless waiting rooms, medical appointments, pharmacy visits, insurance claims, and hours lost to side effects, symptoms, and exhaustion. Instead of “chrononormativity,” with its reliance on a linear sense of progression and emphasis on productivity, the muscle memory guiding these hands is also the product of endless repetition. ³⁴

In other pieces, Lazard uses the genre of the score to instruct or otherwise directly engage with an audience. Score for “Feel It for Me,” installed in 2018 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum along with a shelf of books, was simply wall text addressing the reader as “Dear performer.” The instructions ask the museumgoer to take action “on behalf” of Lazard, who is isolating at home as a result of illness. The “performer” is instructed by the score to choose a book, touch it in particular ways, smell it, and otherwise become intimate with it as an object. “May the care you perform engender haptic relations between you, me, and the books,” Lazard writes. ³⁵ This score provides the disabled artist with access to the books and the museum; the instructions bind the artist to the audience member, who becomes a performer and collaborator.

In recent video works, Lazard uses scores to address particular audiences, invoking disability justice and Black disability politics. Notes from the Panorama, produced with Amber Rose Johnson for the Black Embodiments Studio in 2021, is a video comprising a sequence of historical photographs and archival footage of Black people playing and resting, with open captions that serve as “a score for touch, slowness, and meditation” specifically for Black and brown viewers. ³⁶ The faint yellow captions, sometimes barely legible at the bottom of the screen, are read aloud at a slow pace by Johnson and Lazard, one at a time or in unison. Statements such as “Consider the memories of touch that your body holds” and “Touch the underside of something in your environment…. Sense its texture through repetition” are interspersed with instructions for tapping in the mode of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) or acupressure. Johnson and Lazard explain that Notes from the Panorama is intended to “slow time and support embodied awareness during major transitions in the pandemic, which has only intensified the need for rest in Black and Brown communities.” ³⁷ Here the video captions depart from any universalized disability text to reference racialized inequality in the experience of illness, injury, and impairment.

At other times, Lazard employs video captions while dispensing with the moving image entirely. For Long Take (2022) Lazard drafted a dance score for friend and collaborator Jerron Herman. Rather than screening a film of the performance, the installation is made up of the sounds of Herman dancing, the narrated dance score, and an audio description of the event. In its announcement for the installation, the Walker Art Center notes:

Long Take intentionally blurs the boundaries between instruction, description, and translation…. By presenting this dance work sonically rather than visually, Lazard considers how a performance might be communicated beyond its image and questions why visuality has been the default vehicle for aesthetic experience. Using text and sound rather than moving image, Lazard encourages us to think about ways that artworks are made accessible as well as the often-unseen networks of care, labor, and friendship that make collaborative endeavors possible. ³⁸

Lazard connected Long Take to a “Black krip … methodology” in an opening-day talk with curator Pavel Py, describing access (captioning or audio description) as “a tool of fugitivity as a Black artist.” Captioning is here a technique for desired “opacity.” Scores in this case allow an improvisational response to “inhospitable” or “unaccommodating” settings like elite arts institutions. ³⁹

Lazard’s work calls into question the presumed objectivity of captions, further revealing that captioning is never innocent. Even as seemingly straightforward audio transcripts, captions can literalize, naturalize, underscore, reinforce, select, and hierarchize the world of sound. By contrast, Lazard’s opaque caption scores create alternate or multiple realities. In Notes from the Panorama, they draw out time, turning a still photo into a long take, guiding a viewer or listener into repose. In Long Take, the caption score manifests the collaboration between Lazard and Herman while granting both a measure of ambiguity or nontransparency. Access is grounded, Lazard reiterates, in relationships rather than a one-to-one translation:

There are so many incredible disabled artists who are thinking through definitions of accessibility that don’t necessarily evolve from Western frameworks of rationality or intelligibility, but are focused rather on the idea of being together, of collectivity and care, grappling with the real challenges of accessibility rather than this sanitized idea of transparency. ⁴⁰

As scores, captions do not center access to static content, nor do they, like early structural films, center the medium itself. When scores are not black-boxed, backstage, or otherwise hidden from the audience—when they are presented on-screen in the form of disability text (i.e., open captions)—they initiate new relationships between artist and audience; they become compositional tools for giving and requesting assistance, for obfuscation, and for the open-ended art making characteristic of the New Disability Arts.

Notes

1. Federal Communications Commission, “21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA),” last updated January 27, 2021, http://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/21st-century-communications-and-video-accessibility-act-cvaa.
2. Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF), “NAD v. Netflix,” October 10, 2012, https://dredf.org/legal-advocacy/nad-v-netflix/.
3. As Kate McWilliams posted on her Twitter feed: “We are all talking about how it feels to see ableds accommodating themselves,” @KateMcWilli, March 7, 2020, https://twitter.com/KateMcWilli/status/1236440655095689216?s=20&t=0wwO_hGv0M3zwLIygrg6hA.
4. The authors’ phrase “New Disability Arts” highlights the recent use of the phrase “disability art(s)” by funders, arts organizations, and artists themselves. Kevin Gotkin calls this moment a “swell,” warning that it might “recede.” Gotkin, “Artistry and Activism: Building a Movement for Disability Justice,” A Blade of Grass 28 (Fall 2019), https://abladeofgrass.org/articles/artistry-activism-building-movement-disability-justice/. See also Simi Linton, “Proclaiming Disability Arts,” Mellon Foundation, https://mellon.org/grants/grants-database/grants/new-york-university/2109-11491/.
5. “Normate” is a term coined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson to reference the normative ideals in a particular culture. See Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” NWSA Journal 14, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 10.
6. See Pooja Rangan’s essay on Jordan Lord, “Listening in Crip Time: Toward a Countertheory of Documentary Access,” in this dossier.
7. Shannon Finnegan is the artist who “captioned” the Argos building windows. See “Activating Captions: Shannon Finnegan,” ARGOS, 2021, http://www.argosarts.org/event/activating-captions-shannon-finnegan. See also Christine Sun Kim’s Captioning the City project: https://mif.co.uk/about/press/press-media-library/MIF21-media-library/captioning-the-city-christine-sun-kim/.
8. Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
9. Josephine Machon, “Graeae’s Jenny Sealey and Playwright Glyn Cannon: Seeing Words and (Dis)Comfort Zones—The Fusion of Bodies, Text and Technology in On Blindness,” (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 170.
10. Carolyn Lazard and Edna Bonhomme, “Carolyn Lazard on Illness, Intimacy, and the Aesthetics of Access,” Frieze, February 28, 2022, http://www.frieze.com/article/carolyn-lazard-edna-bonhomme-interview-2022.
11. Performance Space New York, “I wanna be with you everywhere,” 2019, https://performancespacenewyork.org/shows/i-wanna-be-with-you-everywhere/.
12. Performance Space New York.
13. Performance Space New York.
14. Carolyn Lazard, “Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice,” Recess, 2019, https://promiseandpractice.art/.
15. Lazard and Bonhomme, “Carolyn Lazard on Illness.”
16. Room & Board, “Carolyn Lazard: Support System,” October 2016, https://roomandboard.nyc/salons/carolyn-lazard-support-system/.
17. Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos, “Other Forms of Conviviality,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 23, no. 1, 126–32 (2013), http://www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/ampersand-articles/other-forms-of-conviviality.html.
18. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, “Giving It Away: Constantina Zavitsanos on Disability, Debt, Dependency,” Art Papers, Winter 2018/2019, http://www.artpapers.org/giving-it-away/.
19. Mia Mingus, “Access Intimacy, Interdependence, and Disability Justice,” Leaving Evidence (blog), April 12, 2017, https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/.
20. Mingus.
21. “Crip Fund,” GoFundMe, March 9, 2020, http://www.gofundme.com/f/crip-fund.
22. Center for the Humanities, “Dependency and Instruction, Expanded Cinema: Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos,” October 20, 2017, https://www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/dependency-and-instruction-expanded-cinema-carolyn-lazard-park-mcarthur-and-constantina-zavitsanos.
23. On “bodyminds,” see Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Hypatia 30, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 268–84.
24. Zavitsanos uses this phrase regarding collaborations with Park McArthur and Amalle Dublon. Mills and Sanchez, “Giving It Away.”
25. Lazard’s Scores for Convalescing 1, 2, and 3, an installation at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, was made up of a rack of folded and hanging hospital linens, printed with scores such as “be grateful for this disease which keeps you close to death which keeps you close to life.” See Jane Panetta, Rujeko Hockley, and Ramsay Kolber, Whitney Biennial 2019 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 41–42.
26. Lazard and Bonhomme, “Carolyn Lazard on Illness.” For this reason, Jordan Lord has described Lazard’s minimalist video work as also a form of “contracted cinema.” Lord, “Disability, Form, and Distribution,” Third Cinemas, 2018, http://thirdcinema.net/portfolio/disability-form-distribution/.
27. Lazard and Bonhomme, “Carolyn Lazard on Illness.”
28. Catherine Damman, “Carolyn Lazard,” BOMB, September 10, 2020, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/carolyn-lazard/.
29. Damman.
30. Damman.
31. The preceding heading is a reference to Scores for Carolyn (2019), a video work of “instructional scores for care” by Constantina Zavitsanos and Park McArthur. See https://vimeo.com/381343465.
32. Danielle A. Jackson, “Carolyn Lazard’s CRIP TIME,” MoMA, April 7, 2021, http://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/529.
33. Jackson.
34. Coined in 2010 by Elizabeth Freeman, the term “chrononormativity” critiques the temporal systems that govern invisibility by applying such medical categories as prognosis, remission, recurrence, chronicity, and terminality to determine one’s ability to be a productive citizen. For an overview of the term, see Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction: Crip Temporalities,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (April 2021): 245–52.
35. The text of Score for “Feel It for Me” is available at https://www.instagram.com/p/CDjboMbFzqE/.
36. Black Embodiments Studio, Notes from the Panorama, January 11, 2022, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbZaMlcqWs.
37. “Amber Rose Johnson + Carolyn Lazard: Notes from the Panorama,” University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design, August 5, 2021, https://art.washington.edu/news/2021/08/05/amber-rose-johnson-carolyn-lazard-notes-panorama.
38. Walker Art Center, “Carolyn Lazard: Long Take,” e-flux, February 10, 2022, http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/409365/carolyn-lazard-long-take/.
39. “Virtual Opening-Day Talk: Carolyn Lazard,” Walker Art Center, February 12, 2022, https://walkerart.org/calendar/2022/opening-day-talk-carolyn-lazard.
40. Damman, “Carolyn Lazard.”

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