Disability Art is Dead, Long Live Disability Art!: The Sick Crip Disabled Avant-Garde

This article critically engages performances of the Disabled Avant-Garde (DAG), a live art collaboration of Aaron Williamson and the late Katherine Araniello, who advocate for sick and crip political subjectivity. Chiming with Robert McRuer's definitions of crip as 'excessive, flamboyant defiance' of the medical model of disability, DAG lampooned what they called 'juvenile forms of entertainment', patronising cultures of 'celebration', and disability arts funding structures of 'cheerleading for the Mayor'. Situating DAG historically within contexts of austerity (past, ongoing) and material infrastructures of disability art, this article argues that their legacy of crip humour and cultural unproduction is to demand disentanglement from the tyrannical binary of tragedy and celebration which frequently grips representations of disability. In performance interventions Stage Invasion (2011), Charity Stall (2007, 2008), and the film Amazing Art (2009), DAG appeared in turn as uninvited Grim Reapers, they ripped off unsuspecting publics through fake disability arts charity ventures, and they satirised empty rhetoric of inclusion and 'amazingness'. Their work speaks back sarcastically not only to sinister and hegemonic assessments of who is 'really' disabled, but also who is 'really' an artist in the face of austerity and disability 'inspiration porn'.