Description as Distortion as Disruption
This figure is dressed as a boy scout, in an army-green, short-sleeved button up, shorts, hiking boots, grey athletic socks, and a neck kerchief. Let’s call them Boy Scout. Boy Scout is white, masculine-of-centre, and solidly built. They are restrained with black wrist cuffs attached to a chain. More chains are wrapped around Boy Scout’s waist. Boy Scout is being led toward the floor-bed by a sixth figure who is also white, lean, and muscular, and wears a pink tank top. Let’s call them Tank Top….
Excerpt and screen shot from Slumberparty by Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer, 2018. Original film, Slumberparty, by the Positive Pornographers, 1984.
How can audio description be used as artistic practice?
I reached out to Hazel Meyer after learning about Slumberparty 2018, a video work she did with Cait McKinney in 2018, that incorporates the audio description of a queer porn film from the 80s. The 25 min. video depicts a dark room with a film projector in the foreground and in the darkened background we see the projection of a very blurry version of the film Slumberparty, by the Positive Pornographers (1984). The video has no sound and we are unable to make out any forms in detail, just soft blurry erotic footage and shapes in warm red and yellow toned colours. We hear both the sound of the film projector as well as the description of the porn which is prefaced by some contextual information about the original film.
Typically - Description provides a translation of a work intended to be seen, for those who are blind or partially sighted. I was drawn to the way a method of access informed the basis of this work and its intended aesthetics, instead of a translation. I reached out to Hazel to learn more:
E. Tell me about Slumberparty 2018!
HAZEL In 2016 my partner and collaborator Cait McKinney and I developed a project about porn, community archives, VHS and digitization called Tape Condition: degraded. It was primarily based on the CLGA (Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives)/ARQUIVES collection which has a significant VHS porn collection for a North American community archive. The project developed into an installation that was exhibited in the 2nd floor gallery at the CLGA, a publication called Dream Tapes- which contained an essay and a collaborative with 11 trans and queer artists and activists (Anthea Black, Derek McCormack, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Guillermina Buzio, jes sachse, Jessica Karuhanga, Kiley May, Morgan M Page, Nica Ross, Nick Matte, and Syrus Marcus Ware) engaged with questions of media archives to write about or otherwise envision their dream tapes, and a working digitization station that was open to community members to have their VHS tapes digitized with the possibility to donate their materials to the archive. What originally got Cait and I to the archives, in particular the VHS room was to look for porn that Chris Bearchell had supposedly made... this is what Susan Cole had written in her obituary for Bearchell, so we were going on that piece of information. Through a pal that came to see Tape Condition: degraded we were gifted the Bearchell’s porn, except it wasn’t on VHS, it was a Super 8 reel that had been lost to the world since it’s last screening in the mid-80’s. The original Slumberparty had been made collectively in 1984 with the stipulation that all contributors had to sign off for it to be shown. For the last 3 years Cait and I have been in the process of finding the folks involved to see if there is a possibility of it being shown again.
Finding the folks involved has been somewhat drawn out, so as a way to keep the momentum up Cait and I started thinking about how to talk about the film, how to show the film while remaining respectful of the collective’s original wish. Enter audio-description! It was the answer to how to present the work in all its complexities while remaining ethically responsible to this archival material and the very real and living people that are in Slumberparty.
E. I love that description served so many new roles with this project. It became a way to provide a distortion to sighted audiences - a delicious flip on its usual intention. I‘m also drawn to the way description allowed you to work with the imagery instead of having to write about it. Have you used description in other works?
HAZEL This is the first time either of us have used audio-description.
I use text a lot in my practice and Cait is a media studies scholar (who just submitted their first book that I like to describe as a book about how lesbians invented the internet!) I mention this as a way to say audio-description made a lot of sense to us as a tool, but also politically. I’ve lived with a chronic disease since I was 13. While not all my work overtly deals with access, stigma and the social and psychic weight of my diseased body, it is always there, lurking, cowering, raging, and really, how can’t it be. This felt like an incredible opportunity to use an access tool for it’s intended use but also for an expanded use.
I love objects and things. Four years ago I spent 3 months in Geneva on an artist residency. I had a pretty rough time there for a variety of reasons and found comfort in my daily trips to the local thrift store Emmaus. I returned how with a suitcase of 100 or so things, and sent the following 2 weeks itemizing and describing this collection. Spending the time really looking and describing these things felt like it was my turn to take care of them, after they had taken care of me. There might be something in this process that had me particularly open to audio-description when Slumberparty came along.
Also, in the way that artworks find their way to you and sit dormant until they are called upon to inspire, Taryn Simon’s Playboy, Braille Edition Playboy Enterprises, Inc. New York, New York, 2007, figures prominently. It is a photograph of (what the title says) a Braille edition of a 1989 Playboy. I love how Simon’s work immediately asks us to think beyond normative access, especially with regard to sexuality and desire.
Back to Slumberparty the images in it are quite lush and surprising. This is partly the Kodachrome film stock, but also what was being shot, and how; there is a lot of gauzy, shimmery, sparkly fabric, and sequins, lots of leather, skin, hair, plants, and close-ups, there are some really wild close-ups that involve folds and chipped black nail polish.
Also worth noting is that the audiocassette for the film (the soundtrack) was lost years ago, so it is effectively a silent film.
E. Wow so interesting - You are exploring description as a method for consent, and as a method to honour that which is described. Its’s quite common now in Crip spaces and conferences that we all take some time to describe what we look like. Recently at Cripping the Arts, the Elder Mona Stonefish (Bear Clan) used the opportunity to talk about her history and herself through the description of her body - and it reminded us all that it wasn’t just an activity of vanity but it was also an opportunity for storytelling. I really started in Disability arts when I worked at the National Gallery as the accessibility educator, and I did a lot of training at MoMA and the Met in New York, on how to describe art works. It’s not easy! I think it works best when we work it out with experts with lived experiences in non-visual perception and we approach description as its own artistic practice - taking the opportunity to provide interpretation or context. But that is not the way professional describers work - and some want a more “objective” experience . How did you go about this description? Did you hire someone or did you both write or edit it?
HAZEL Originally we asked an acquaintance to write the script for the audio-description. This person is Crip identified, an artist, writer, and someone I have always had fantastic bowel-related conversations with. They were well versed in the mechanics and politics of audio-description. Cait and I were totally thrilled to have them on board, sadly it fell through at the last moment because of their other work obligations. Kind of in a pinch Cait and I took it on. Cait wrote it in a one-day porn-describing marathon! We edited it together, passing it back and forth a few times, struggling over words, associations and best practices in describing bodies engaged in various sexual practices.
My dream for this project is to have a few other folks (who move through the world differently than Cait and I do) to write a script, and to have versions of the film with these descriptions. There is so much of Cait and I in the Slumberparty 2018 audio-description, the humour, the adjectives, my keen eye for relatively obscure textile textures, Cait’s insistence of the likeness of one of the collaborators to a 1990’s Hugh Grant. Of course there can’t be an objective description of the film, I think that is why it feels so exciting and important to continue the project and have it exist with multiple narration/audio-description tracts. It is worth mentioning that originally we tried to get an audio-description service to write the script, but they refused on the grounds of the content! There is an amazing online service that gives audio-descriptions of Porn Hub previews, and I think Porn Hub started audio-describing some of their videos in the last few years.
E. Let’s just unpack that for moment right? If video describers refuse to describe porn this results in folks who require description, to not have access - or only have access to what Porn-Hub describes - which is going to be pretty heteronormative. To me this adds so much more richness to the project, as it also serves as a disruption to the stale narratives that Disabled people are not sexual beings, or don’t deserve access to sexuality and further disrupts, by providing access to collectively created queer porn.
HAZEL Right! While audio-description allowed Cait and I to present Slumberparty in keeping with the original wishes of the collaborators, it brought up so many more exciting questions beyond how to ethically engage in archives. A big one being who is porn for, who has access to it, and whose sexuality, kink and desires deserve to be satisfied and honoured.
E. It’s brilliant. So - last question - and perhaps most importantly - WHO IS THAT SEXY VOICE?
HAZEL Ah, YES, the voice! It's our pal Amy Fung. She has got the deepest, dustiest, sexiest voice ever. Her book Before I was a Critic I was a Human Being just came out, and as a gift to us all, she recorded the audiobook for it.
Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney are Canadian artists, currently living in LA.