{"id":2083109,"date":"2026-08-07T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2083109"},"modified":"2026-08-07T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T06:00:00","slug":"new-humans-takes-a-disappointingly-old-approach-to-disability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2083109","title":{"rendered":"\u201cNew Humans\u201d Takes a Disappointingly Old Approach to Disability"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/New-Museum_New-Humans_0326_0278.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tWhen I picture cyborgs, I can\u2019t help but picture the ones I know\u2014all of them are disabled. Insulin pumps, cochlear implants, and pacemakers make human-machine hybrids out of people every day. So when I saw that New York\u2019s New Museum was reopening with a cyborg-centric show, \u201cNew Humans: Memories of the Future,\u201d I assumed it would account for the disability arts movement blossoming right there in the museum\u2019s backyard.<\/p>\n

\n\tI winced, then, when I read the artist list and spotted the omission of that cohort\u2014but hey, I\u2019ve been disappointed before. I\u2019m used to being told that disability is \u201cniche,\u201d even though it will come for just about everyone. It\u2019s a human experience as common as love and loss, even if there aren\u2019t really pop songs about it.<\/p>\n

\n\tQuickly, though, I found that the issue went much deeper than mere omission. The outpouring of Disability Studies scholarship around its central topic, cyborgs, appears unread, the field\u2019s requisite historical correctives omitted. Sadly, tired ableist tropes are here rehashed.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor instance, one video, by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, satirizes the antipsychotic pharmaceutical Seroquel\u00ae,<\/em> but it includes stroboscopic scenes that make it impossible for viewers like me to watch. The work may be about<\/em> disability, but it is hardly for<\/em> a disabled audience, since it is blatantly inaccessible. Most promising was a work by Donald Rodney, the trailblazing black British artist who died of sickle cell anemia at age 36. His Autoicon<\/em> (mid-1990s\u20132000) is a kind of digital tomb archiving his artworks, interviews, and more. It enlists a Web 1.0 proto-AI to approximate a Rodney chatbot: You can talk to a version of him right there in the museum. Still, it was disappointing that, among the show\u2019s some 200 artists, this is the only work clearly by a disabled person to address disability politically\u2014and it\u2019s about his death.<\/p>\n

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View of the 2026 exhibition \u201cNew Humans: Memories of the Future,\u201d at the New Museum, New York, with work by Donald Rodney on the left.
<\/span>Photo Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tTo top it all off, I spotted the term \u201cdifferently abled\u201d in a wall text: A simple Google search reveals that this is, at minimum, a controversial term. In fact, right there in Merriam-Webster Dictionary is a warning against its usage: \u201csometimes objected to as an awkward or condescending euphemism\u201d\u2014as if being \u201cdisabled\u201d were an unspeakably shameful thing to be.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe curators appear not to have done any Disability Studies homework. While I don\u2019t need or expect the museum to get everything \u201cright,\u201d finding a crumb of curiosity would have been nice. Instead, \u201cNew Humans,\u201d when it comes to disability discourse, is hardly new at all.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe show resorts, rather, to 20th-century ideas like the New Man, that optimized and rationalized creature, or to forms of rehabilitation\u2014prosthetics and plastic surgery\u2014that emerged after the mass disabling event that was World War II. In a section on that latter era, called \u201cProsthetic Gods,\u201d you\u2019d never know of the corporate agenda behind these rehab innovations\u2014to repurpose wounded veterans into a useful workforce\u2014nor its fraught frameworks, often attempting to restore bodies to \u201cnormal\u201d rather than equipping them with the tools to adapt. You\u2019d miss that too often, veterans are the only ones with the insurance to cover the latest prosthetics.<\/p>\n

\n\tInstead, works by Heinrich Hoerle and Berenice Olmedo occupy the \u201cProsthetic Gods\u201d room: Olmedo\u2019s sculpture Olga<\/em> (2018) tugs on heartstrings as child-sized orthotics tug on mechanized ceiling-strings. This exoskeleton tries to stand again and again but continually falls, pathetic and petite. Hoerle\u2019s \u201cKru\u0308ppel [Cripples]\u201d series, from 1920, excoriates the ways that disability is exacerbated by societal conditions, showing, for instance, a beggar-amputee trapped in a vicious poverty-impairment loop. It\u2019s a promising premise, but ultimately, both works portray a hypothetical disabled person who becomes a flat character, inviting pity and framing disability as a one-note tragedy, as if nothing good could come from it.<\/p>\n

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Work by Ryan Gander in the 2026 exhibition \u201cNew Humans: Memories of the Future,\u201d at the New Museum, New York.
<\/span>Photo Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tA subtle rejoinder appears in a wall text for Ryan Gander\u2019s mechanical mouse, which explains that his interest in animatronics was born not despite but because of a childhood spent immobile in a hospital bed. The British artist, who uses a wheelchair, has rejected the term \u201cdisabled\u201d\u2014an understandable choice given the baggage and stereotypes that clearly persist. But others, particularly in the US, have found the term crucial for forming solidarities across different conditions and mobilizing not against biomedical experiences but against societal exclusion.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNew Humans\u201d has a retro-futuristic bent, drawing largely on 20th-century speculations on the future of the body\u2014never mind that those ideas of optimization clearly failed, nor that impairment is inevitable. Despite the show\u2019s emphasis on corporeality, though, it is not centered on actual bodies\u2014their awkwardness, pus, and guts\u2014but on transcending bodily limitations. Idealized forms favor mythical, metaphoric, and speculative beings. Tishan Hsu\u2019s ambiguous orifices, Jena Sutela\u2019s breast milk from the Milky Way, and Wangechi Mutu\u2019s interpretation of Octavia Butler\u2019s sci-fi story \u201cBloodchild\u201d are all worthy, lovely projects. \u201cNew Humans\u201d is brimming, to be clear, with treasures galore. But cumulatively, given the show\u2019s sidestepping of its subject\u2019s inconvenient truths, one wonders: At what point does its storytelling become speculative, versus simply out of touch?<\/p>\n

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Work by Tishan Hsu in the 2026 exhibition \u201cNew Humans: Memories of the Future,\u201d at the New Museum, New York. <\/span>Photo Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tIt is only buried deep, in a wall text accompanying Franz Tschakert\u2019s work, that you will find any admission that \u201cthe notion of \u2018technically perfect\u2019 humans\u201d around which the show revolves \u201cproved compatible with Nazi interest in eugenics.\u201d For all the exciting ways the show imagines technology freeing bodies, there isn\u2019t a lot of acknowledging that it\u2019s brutalizing us at the same time. One needs to think only of the thousands of people working in disabling conditions to produce the laptop I am typing on, of the workers who have not been liberated by machines but rather asked to work in more machinelike ways, taking on injuries and illnesses in the process.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen it comes to cyborgs, disability isn\u2019t just part of the story. It\u2019s the heart of it. Our cyborgian future is already here; it\u2019s just not evenly distributed yet.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut don\u2019t take it from me. The art historian Jennifer Gonzalez has argued that the past century of cyborg imagery has \u201cfunction[ed] as evidence\u201d of the presence of \u201cdifferences, histories, stories, bodies, [and] places.\u201d The most famous cyborg text\u2014Donna Haraway\u2019s 1985 manifesto\u2014observes, with dated language, that \u201cperhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization.\u201d And Sara Hendren reminds how clunky cyborg life can be: Her latest book describes gee-whiz prosthetics gathering dust, amputees taking five years to learn to use a fork with sophisticated-seeming robo-arms, and disabled people devising low-tech alternatives in response.<\/p>\n

\n\tToo often, as the influential scholar Mara Mills has written, inventions and ideas spring from impairment, that generative force behind so many alternative ways of inhabiting the world. The telephone, for instance, was inadvertently concocted by Alexander Graham Bell as part of his quest to \u201chelp,\u201d however patronizingly, his deaf wife and mother \u201cspeak.\u201d (Bell, an avowed eugenicist, was intent on eradicating sign language). But when inventions like these, as Mills writes of keyboards and curb cuts and more, find applications in larger markets, their disability histories are too often forgotten. Still, acknowledged or otherwise, disability history is everywhere, and the recent outpouring of art and scholarship spelling it all out makes it a lot less forgivable to forget.<\/p>\n

\n\tCyborgian corporeality does not transcend human limitations\u2014it is born of them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/new-museum-new-humans-review-cyborg-disability-1234794351\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/New-Museum_New-Humans_0326_0278.jpg?w=1024″] When I picture cyborgs, I can\u2019t help but picture the ones I know\u2014all of them are disabled. Insulin pumps, cochlear implants, and pacemakers make human-machine hybrids out of people every day. So when I saw that New York\u2019s New Museum was reopening with a cyborg-centric show, \u201cNew Humans: Memories of the Future,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2083109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2083109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2083109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2083109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2083109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}