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Ron Whyte's “Disemployment”: Prosthetic Performance and Theatrical Labor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2016

Patrick McKelvey
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Extract

Andy Warhol was being an asshole. At least Ron Whyte thought so when the two artists crossed paths at a Soho gallery opening in the early 1970s. It's unclear what offense Warhol committed, another incident whose details have been lost to the historical record. But if Warhol had not behaved badly that fateful evening, Whyte—a queer and disabled playwright—might never have removed the “cosmetic glove” covering his “withered” left arm and hurled it at the visual artist, enabling the glove to make its own “contribution to modern art.” The famed artist, Whyte claimed, would go on to copy this assault by prosthesis in Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973).

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 314 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2016 

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References

Endnotes

1. Ron Whyte's script for a lecture at the Fourth Annual Advanced Course on Lower Extremity Prosthetics (hereafter Prosthetics Lecture Script; cited parenthetically in the text as PLS; page numbers added by author) at SUNY Stony Brook, 12–14 September 1984, Box 70, Folder “Unsorted Writings,” Ron Whyte Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter Ron Whyte Papers).

2. Whyte's self-alleged prosthetic assault on Warhol was only one of many points of contact between these two artists’ lives. Whyte's friend, neighbor, and frequent collaborator, Gregory Battcock, was a usual suspect at Warhol's factory, even starring as “the recipient” in Eating Too Fast (1966), the sequel to Warhol's Blow Job (1965). Warhol and Whyte were both guest artists at the 1984 National Very Special Arts Festival, which celebrated the tenth anniversary of Jean Kennedy Smith's disability arts organization (formerly National Committee, Arts for the Handicapped). Program for National Very Special Arts Festival, May 1984, Box 135, Folder “Various Associations: 1 of 3,” Ron Whyte Papers.

3. Class journal entry for C. E. j 393, Union Theological Seminary, 7 January 1976, Box 42, Folder “Journal: C. E. j 393,” Ron Whyte Papers.

4. Whyte claimed to have assaulted Warhol approximately ten to twelve years before the delivery of the lecture, placing the event sometime between 1972 and 1974, approximately four to six years after Solanas shot Warhol. Prosthetics Lecture Script, 7.

5. Sara Warner, Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 69.

6. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” translated by Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, IEEE Spectrum, 12 June 2012, http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/the-uncanny-valley, accessed 4 June 2016.

7. In current usage, “disemployment” refers to the “absence or withdrawal of employment.” “disem’ployment, n.,” OED Online. June 2016, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com/view/Entry/54206?redirectedFrom=disemployment, accessed 12 June 2016.

8. See Robert McRuer, “Introduction,” in Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 1–32, esp. 7–8; Deborah Stone, “The Distributive Dilemma” and “The Origins of the Disability Category,” in The Disabled State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 15–28 and 29–89, respectively.

9. Richard Jerome Curry, “A Practical Philosophy of Theatre Education for the Disabled” (PhD diss., New York University, 1986); Rick Curry, “Life's Bread,” Santa Clara Lectures 7.3 (8 April 2001).

10. Ibid.

11. “Some Information about A.N.D. The National Task Force for Disability and the Arts,” Box 1, Folder “Correspondence,” Ron Whyte Papers; Ron Whyte to NTFDA Board of Directors, n.d., Box 5, Folder “Correspondence 1988–1989, N.D.,” Ron Whyte Papers. Some archival sources refer to the NTFDA with the prefatory abbreviation “A.N.D” (Arts Need the Disabled).

12. Thelma Schmones to Ron Whyte, 5 April 1978, Box 106, Folder “Department HEW—Thelma Schmones,” Ron Whyte Papers.

13. For a discussion of antiwork politics, see Kathi Weeks, “The Problem with Work” and “Marxism, Productivism, and the Refusal of Work,” in The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1–36 and 79–111, respectively.

14. “9 Playwrights Win Rockefeller Grants,” New York Times, 27 April 1980, Box 5, Folder “Correspondence 1976–1980,” Ron Whyte Papers.

15. Ron Whyte to Lee Strasberg, 16 December 1981, Box 93, Folder “Actors Studio,” Ron Whyte Papers; Ron Whyte to Jean Kennedy Smith, 14 April 1984, Box 110, Folder “First Annual Integrated Young Playwrights Festival,” Ron Whyte Papers.

16. Ron Whyte to Virginia Sanford, Connecticut Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, [?] October 1984, Box 11, Folder “Correspondence,” Ron Whyte Papers.

17. Ron Whyte to Zelda Fichandler, 8 August 1979, Box 6, Folder “Correspondence 1978–1985,” Ron Whyte Papers.

18. Harold C. Cannon to Ron Whyte, 17 May 1983, Box 11, Folder “Correspondence 1985–1986,” Ron Whyte Papers; “Proposal for a Sourcebook in American Theatrical History,” Box 10, Folder “Correspondence 1983–1985,” Ron Whyte Papers.

19. Paula Terry to Ron Whyte, 29 August 1983, Box 10, Folder “Correspondence 1981–1985,” Ron Whyte Papers.

20. Ibid.

21. List of Goals for 1983 by Ron Whyte and Paul William Bradley, Box 64, Folder “Unsorted Writings,” Ron Whyte Papers.

22. Ron Whyte to Virginia Sanford, Connecticut Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, [?] October 1984, Box 11, Folder “Correspondence,” Ron Whyte Papers.

23. As mentioned in note 1, Whyte's Prosthetics Lecture Script (PLS) is cited parenthetically in the text.

24. NTFDA Uncanny Valley document, n.d., Box 1, Folder “Correspondence 1970–1982, N.D.,” Ron Whyte Papers.

25. I borrow the phrasing “almost but not quite” from Homi Bhabha's theorization of “the ambivalence of mimicry.” Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 121–31, at 129.

26. Barbara Brotman, “Playwright Lends Insight into the Theater of the Disabled,” Chicago Tribune, 30 March 1979, Box 83, Folder “Reviews,” Ron Whyte Papers.

27. Katherine Ott, “The Sum of Its Parts: An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics,” in Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, ed. Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 1–42, at 1.

28. Ibid., 24.

29. Ibid.

30. Stephen Mihm, “‘A Limb Which Shall Be Presentable in Polite Society’: Prosthetic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century,” in Artificial Parts, Practical Lives, ed. Ott et al., 282–99, at 286–7.

31. Ibid., 284.

32. Ibid., 292.

33. Ott, 24–5.

34. Ibid., 25.

35. Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 98.

36. Ibid.

37. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 220.

38. Ibid.

39. Dr. Lawrence Friedman to Ron Whyte, 24 June 1983, Box 117, Folder “Personal Notes,” Ron Whyte Papers.

40. I have not discovered any other drafts in Whyte's extensive papers.

41. My interest in undecidable animacy is informed by Rebecca Schneider (following Fred Moten, following John Donne) on the “inter(in)animate.” See Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 7.

42. McRuer, 1–32; Julie Passanante Elman, Chronic Youth: Disability, Sexuality, and U.S. Media Cultures of Rehabilitation (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 1–28.

43. NTFDA Uncanny Valley document, n.d., Box 1, Folder “Correspondence 1970–1982, N.D.,” Ron Whyte Papers. Both sides of the document, which is printed on 8½ × 11 cardstock, feature a banner with contact information for the National Task Force for Disability and the Arts.

44. Illustrations occupying the first two of three columns include drawings of artificial limbs designed by Ambroise Paré in 1579: “artificial legs designed principally for knights on horseback,” an “iron hand,” and an “artificial arm with a mechanism for bending the elbow.” The third column features two additional images. The first of these, labeled “F. Lacroix et Fils, Paris, 1915,” represents a man manufacturing artificial limbs. The second is a “walking shell for paraplegics,” a “battery-powered … exoskeleton” capable of moving forward, backward, turning, and going up and down stairs with or without a human occupant, designed by mechanical engineers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1976.

45. Rhee, Jennifer, “Beyond the Uncanny Valley: Masahiro Mori and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” Configurations 21.3 (2013): 301–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 304–5.

46. Ibid., 302.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Mori, 98–9.

50. Ibid., 99.

51. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 17: 217–52, at 226.

52. Ibid., 227–30.

53. Ibid., 226.

54. Ibid., 220.

55. Rhee, 311.

56. NTFDA Uncanny Valley document, n.d., Box 1, Folder “Correspondence 1970–1982, N.D.,” Ron Whyte Papers.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid.

59. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 3.

60. Mori, 99.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 98.

64. Ibid., 99.

65. Rhee, 305.

66. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 20. States paraphrases Peter Handke: “In the theater light is brightness pretending to be other brightness, a chair is a chair pretending to be another chair.”

67. Available archival evidence is unable to account for what drove Whyte to reference Mori's theory in his organization's materials.

68. This information is not available in the archive.

69. Ridout, Nicholas and Schneider, Rebecca, “Precarity and Performance: An Introduction,” TDR 56.4 (2012): 5–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 6.

70. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow, “Introduction,” in Sex and Disability, ed. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–34, at 32.

71. Ibid.